(Nonviolent protest in Bil’in, West Bank 2007)
Boycott for No Reason? Reply to The Economist article: “Boycotting Israel: New Pariah on the Block” is the title of an article published on the Alternative Information Center, a joint Palestinian-Israeli website that seeks to provide alternative news and analysis about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from Israel. Its topic is obvious. It is a parody on protests like those above, against the 40 year military occupation and colonialism of Palestinian lands, their human right to self-determination.
Boycotting Israel: New Pariah on the Block,” the 13 September article in The Economist, is ostensibly a balanced piece that presents the positions of those who support and those who oppose sanctions against Israel:
The campaign for sanctions against Israel is growing. But it faces resistance and is less effective than it looks.
FOR once, Israel’s critics and cheerleaders agree on something: the Jewish state risks greater international isolation. Pro-Israel groups such as NGO Monitor and the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs say a new assault is on the way. In the other camp, Shir Hever of the Alternative Information Centre, an Israeli-Palestinian activist group in Jerusalem, says that advocating a boycott is no longer always treated as anti-Semitism. Both sides have a motive to exaggerate such claims. But “boycotts, divestments and sanctions” (known in the activist world as “BDS”) do seem to be growing.
For the full The Economist article, New pariah on the block, Sep 13th 2007, click here.
The Economist, by the way, is a leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs published in the United Kingdom and five other countries.
The introductory paragraphs from The Economist article puts it this way:
Pro-Israel lobbyists see this as part of what they call the “Durban strategy”, devised by activists at a United Nations anti-racism conference there in 2001, which marked a new high point for Israel-bashing. The real trigger, though, seems to have been a call two years ago by a coalition of Palestinian outfits to boycott products made in Israel or in its West Bank settlements, and to divest from (ie, sell shares in) Israeli firms, or foreign ones seen as profiting from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and (then) Gaza. Caterpillar, whose earth-movers are used for demolishing Palestinian homes and building on settlements, and Motorola, whose clients for communications equipment include the Israeli army, are popular targets.
This year two big British trade unions and the much smaller National Union of Journalists (NUJ) called on their members to boycott Israeli products. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions backed divestment. The public-sector union in the Canadian province of Ontario voted to support BDS last year; local activists are campaigning against Indigo, a retail chain that sells books and music. Its majority owners run a charity for Israeli veterans. In February an “Israeli Apartheid Week” was held on North American and British campuses for the third year running. Motions to boycott Israeli universities have passed at the conferences of two British teaching unions. A handful of American churches and the ecumenical World Council of Churches have considered divestment from companies like Caterpillar, as has the Church of England, Britain’s established church.
Many more minor events–from a protest against Israeli products outside a German food store to the Dutch government’s warning to a company that was helping to build the separation barrier in the West Bank–show how hostility to Israel, or at least to its treatment of the Palestinians, is finding expression.
However, the article gives the impression that the sanctions taken by various organizations throughout the world against Israel and in protest of its 40 year occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights, is a form of `picking on’ Israel, a sort of new fashion to criticize Israel. The article even suggests that the churches in the United States that decided to divest from Israel did this “really” as part of the internal struggle amongst the churches themselves.
What the author neglects to note is that there are significant reasons that voices calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions from Israel are multiplying throughout the world: the utter disregard of the Israeli government and military to criticism; the continued illegal building of settlements, the blatant violations of Palestinian human rights; building of the Separation Wall (in violation of the ruling of the International Court of Justice); and a continuation of the deadly attacks against unarmed Palestinian civilians, including children; are the reason that Israel is gradually being disowned by the international community.
Israel continues to enjoy broad support from the United States (and the oil and weapons industries working with the American Congress have a budget several times larger than that of the Jewish and evangelical lobbies mentioned in the article) while world leaders tow the line in accordance with American demands (and in accordance with their own economic interests in Israel), but the voices demanding clear answers from Israel are increasing.
The comparison to South Africa is indeed apt. Concerning the question of the effectiveness of boycott, there is no lack of proof that a boycott against Israel can be more effective than the boycott against the apartheid regime (and The Economist article does not argue with this). However, the contention in the article, that Israel is a democracy, in contrast to apartheid South Africa, is highly problematic. In Israel, there is a 100% right for Jews to vote, but only 25% of the Palestinians under Israeli rule possess this fundamental democratic right. So, while Israel is formally an electoral democracy, it is highly partial and obscures the lack of substantial democracy or equality of rights.
Moreover, Israel, having declared itself to be in a “state of emergency” since its inception, conducts extrajudicial executions, allows its military to function with no real judicial oversight and awards extra legal rights and privileges to the Jews. Much of the discussion of Israel as a “democracy” is intended for public relations, and has little basis in reality. While Israel may not call what it does “separate development,” its socio-economic policies identify “national priority areas”–which include settlements and their industries in the West Bank–but neglect Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Israeli occupation policies suppress Palestinian industries in the occupied Palestinian territories, and distort economic development there to the advantage of Israel.
The Economist article further notes that the Palestinian leadership objects to boycott, but does not mention that a majority of Palestinian civil society organizations, political movements and non-violent protest groups widely support the boycott, and that more than 200 organisations signed a petition calling on the international community to boycott Israel.
The economic boycott of Israel is not a step intended solely to promote Palestinian interests. It requires great naiveté to believe that the Palestinians will agree to live under Israeli military occupation without resisting. The boycott opens the option for non-violent resistance, and it does not kill anyone. Thus, it represents an alternative form of struggle, which forces Israel to take responsibility for its actions and also forces it, in non-violent ways, to bring an end to its continuing occupation.
The difficulty Israel faces, of course, is that it has taken the path of South African Apartheid, obviously in the West Bank, where it continues its occupation/colonialism, Gaza where it continues a siege, and more subtly, in Israel itself. What we see here is an ethnocentrism gone awry, the long time blossoming of one ethnic group gaining legal rights above another, whether that is based on ethnicity itself, or on race or religion.
And where does America come down in this situation? Reportedly, there are some mainstream churches and more than 30 American campuses which have active divestment and boycott campaigns against Israel? But we don’t hear about them and we just don’t care that much otherwise. Why?
Gatekeepers in the American media ensure that political Zionism is not questioned. The only debate allowed in pages of The New York Times or on major television broadcasts is between different brands and strategies of Zionism. On the other hand, we see literally millions of people in America and around the world, using the internet, reading between the lines, and questioning the Zionist narrative. We see thousands of Jews reach the same conclusion as Gilad Atzmon, the musican and writer, Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, and Jeff Halper, an Israeli anthopologist: that political Zionism is the problem. They articulate an optimistic post-Zionist discourse based on universal justice and human rights. They pose the question: If apartheid was the problem in South Africa, why is it a solution in Israel/Palestine?
Those who advocate political Zionism cannot defend it on its own merits so they focus instead on diverting attention and distorting reality. The best example of this is ignoring the cause of the disease and focusing attention to one of its many symptoms: violence of the natives against the colonial settlers (but not the vastly more deadly violence of the colonizers on native people). The idea is that if we vilify the natives and make them look subhuman, we will not be criticized for killing them and taking their lands.
This is an old strategy to justify the pillaging. It was used by the French government in Algeria, by European colonizers in the Americas, by apartheid South Africa, by the Americans in Vietnam, and in hundreds of other places were Western economic and colonial interests came in conflict with the rights of indigenous people.
(In memory of Beit Hanoun, Gaza, 2006)
Does anything more need to be said. Our democracy has been corrupted in degree that we are now, as a government, supporting antidemocratic, apartheid principles in our foreign policy that would not be permitted to stand were it evident inside of America. What have we become?
