Boycot Israel 113

Antony Loewenstein

May 25th, 2012 in Israel

Boycotting Israeli apartheid is both moral and necessary

Of course, if you’re a self-de­scribed Left­ist Zion­ist like Philip Mendes in Aus­tralia you write for Mur­doch’s Aus­tralian and tell Pales­tini­ans to grow up and em­brace their oc­cu­piers:

The in­ter­na­tional boy­cott, di­vest­ment and sanc­tions cam­paign against Is­rael is a by-prod­uct of the sec­ond Pales­tin­ian in­tifada and the col­lapse of the Oslo peace process. It is es­sen­tially war by other means – a non-vi­o­lent, but nev­er­the­less ex­trem­ist strat­egy – al­lied with the prac­tice of sui­cide bomb­ings and rocket at­tacks, and in­tended to co­erce Is­rael into sur­ren­der­ing to Pales­tin­ian de­mands.

The first major man­i­fes­ta­tions of the BDS oc­curred in April and May 2002 when aca­d­e­mics in Eu­rope and Aus­tralia urged a boy­cott of Is­raeli aca­d­e­mics and aca­d­e­mic in­sti­tu­tions.

The cam­paign was for­malised in July 2004 when 60 Pales­tin­ian aca­d­e­mic and other non-gov­ern­ment or­gan­i­sa­tions called for an aca­d­e­mic and cul­tural boy­cott of Is­rael. It has three key aims: to end the Is­raeli oc­cu­pa­tion of lands oc­cu­pied in the 1967 war, in­clud­ing East Jerusalem, and dis­man­tle the se­cu­rity bar­rier; to achieve equal­ity for the Arab-Pales­tin­ian cit­i­zens of Is­rael; and to sup­port the rights of Pales­tin­ian refugees, in­clud­ing their de­mand for a right of re­turn to Is­rael as im­plied by UN Res­o­lu­tion 194.

The lead­ing Pales­tin­ian BDS ad­vo­cate, Omar Bargh­outi, in his 2011 book BDS: the Global Strug­gle for Pales­tin­ian Rights, op­poses a bi-na­tional state based on par­ity be­tween the two na­tional groups. He re­turns to the long-dated Pales­tine Lib­er­a­tion Or­gan­i­sa­tion pro­posal for a sec­u­lar de­mo­c­ra­tic state that recog­nises Jews only as a re­li­gious, not na­tional, com­mu­nity.

The BDS cam­paign has had lim­ited suc­cess. Its major draw­back is that it of­fers no strat­egy for pro­mot­ing Is­raeli-Pales­tin­ian peace and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Rather, it is a neg­a­tive and one-sided cam­paign aimed at de­mon­is­ing Is­raeli Jews ir­re­spec­tive of their po­lit­i­cal views on the Pales­tin­ian ques­tion.

The ob­vi­ous an­swer to the BDS is a two-state so­lu­tion. The Is­raeli gov­ern­ment says it wants to ne­go­ti­ate a two-state so­lu­tion, and is wait­ing for a suit­able Pales­tin­ian part­ner will­ing to ac­com­mo­date Is­raeli se­cu­rity re­quire­ments.

Back in the real world, away from Mel­bourne acad­e­mia where being loved by the Zion­ist com­mu­nity is your high­est pri­or­ity, Gideon Levy ex­plains inHaaretz why BDS is vital:

I don’t buy mer­chan­dise that comes from the set­tle­ments and I never will. To my way of think­ing, those are stolen goods and, like any other goods that have been stolen, I try not to buy them. Now per­haps the South Africans and the Danes also will not buy them; mean­while their gov­ern­ments have merely re­quested that prod­ucts from the set­tle­ments be marked so as not to de­ceive their cus­tomers. Just as there was no need in the past to label mer­chan­dise from the British colonies as British prod­ucts, so there is no need to mark prod­ucts from Is­rael’s colonies as Is­raeli. Any­one who wants to sup­port the Is­raeli colo­nial en­ter­prise can buy them; those who are op­posed can boy­cott them. As sim­ple as that, and as nec­es­sary.

Is­rael, which boy­cotts Turkey’s beaches and Hamas, should have been the first to un­der­stand that. In­stead we have heard heart-rend­ing cries and angry re­bukes. Not yet to the Danes, who are nice, but to the South Africans, who are less nice in our eyes. The de­ci­sion was la­beled “a step with racist char­ac­ter­is­tics” by the For­eign Min­istry spokesman, re­fer­ring to the coun­try that waged the most coura­geous war against racism in the his­tory of mankind.

Yes, the new South Africa can teach Is­rael a les­son in the war against racism; and yes, Is­rael can teach the world a les­son in racism. It has once again been proven that Is­rael’s chutz­pah knows no bounds: Is­rael, of all coun­tries, ac­cuses South Africa, of all coun­tries, of being racist. Is there any­thing more ridicu­lous?

It was not by chance that the South African am­bas­sador to Is­rael, Is­mail Coova­dia, seemed both amused and em­bar­rassed at a re­cep­tion for Cameroon’s in­de­pen­dence day, when the for­eign min­istry launched a ridicu­lous search for him, ac­cord­ing to re­ports, after he failed to re­spond to its sum­mons for what was de­scribed in ad­vance as a re­buke. It is not dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how many such rep­ri­mands Is­raeli am­bas­sadors in dif­fer­ent parts of the world de­serve to be sum­moned to, if la­bel­ing pro­duce from the set­tle­ments is a rea­son for re­buke and ac­cu­sa­tions of racism on the part of the Is­raeli gov­ern­ment, which is so purely non-racist.

La­bel­ing prod­ucts from the set­tle­ments should have been an ob­vi­ous move a long time ago, as a guide to the in­tel­li­gent and in­volved con­sumer. A boy­cott of set­tle­ment prod­ucts should also have taken place a long time ago, as a com­pass for law-abid­ing cit­i­zens. We are not re­fer­ring only to a po­lit­i­cal or moral po­si­tion; this is a ques­tion of up­hold­ing in­ter­na­tional law. A prod­uct pro­duced in the set­tle­ments is an il­le­gal prod­uct, just like the set­tle­ments them­selves. Just as there is a grow­ing pub­lic of con­sumers in the world who will not buy prod­ucts made in sweat­shops in south­east Asia nor “blood di­a­monds” from Africa be­cause of their source and the con­di­tions under which they are pro­duced, so it can be an­tic­i­pated that there are con­sumers who will boy­cott prod­ucts pro­duced in oc­cu­pied ter­ri­tory through the ex­ploita­tion of cheap Pales­tin­ian man­power whose op­por­tu­ni­ties to work are in the set­tle­ments.

The self-right­eous, sanc­ti­mo­nious protests of Is­raeli fac­tory-own­ers and farm­ers in the oc­cu­pied ter­ri­to­ries who say they care so much about their Pales­tin­ian work­ers, who claim a boy­cott could en­dan­ger their em­ploy­ees’ sources of in­come, are a cyn­i­cal at­tempt to mis­lead peo­ple. Had the set­tle­ments and the oc­cu­py­ing forces been re­moved, and the lands on which these en­ter­prises arose been re­turned to their own­ers, they would have had much more dig­ni­fied sources of in­come.

A boy­cott of goods from the set­tle­ments is a jus­ti­fied boy­cott, and there is no other way to de­fine it. La­bel­ing these prod­ucts is the min­i­mum de­mand that every gov­ern­ment in the world should make, as a ser­vice to its cit­i­zens.

http://antonyloewenstein.com/tag/haaretz/