Virginia Tilley
Counterpunch, 5 August 2005
It is finally time.
After years of internal arguments, confusion, and dithering, the time has come
for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel. Good cause for a boycott has,
of course, been in place for decades, as a raft of initiatives already attests.
But Israel’s war crimes are
now so shocking, its extremism so clear, the suffering so great, the UN so
helpless, and the international community’s need to contain Israel’s behaviour
so urgent and compelling, that the time for global action has matured. A
coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel’s aggressive acts and crimes against
humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding racist
logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem.
That second goal of
the boycott campaign is indeed the primary one. Calls for a boycott have long
cited specific crimes: Israel’s continual attacks on Palestinian civilians; its
casual disdain for the Palestinian civilian lives “accidentally” destroyed in
its assassinations and bombings; its deliberate ruin of the Palestinians’
economic and social conditions; its continuing annexation and dismemberment of
Palestinian land; its torture of prisoners; its contempt for UN resolutions and
international law; and especially, its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to
return to their homeland. But the boycott cannot target these practices alone.
It must target their ideological source.
The true offence to
the international community is the racist motivation for these practices, which
violates fundamental values and norms of the post-World War II order. That
racial ideology isn’t subtle or obscure. Mr. Olmert himself has repeatedly
thumped the public podium about the “demographic threat” facing Israel: the “threat” that too many non-Jews will
— the horror — someday become citizens of Israel. It is the “demographic
threat” that, in Israeli doctrine, justifies sealing off the West
Bank and Gaza Strip as open-air prisons for millions of people
whose only real crime is that they are not Jewish. It is the “demographic
threat,” not security (Mr. Olmert has clarified), that requires the dreadful
Wall to separate Arab and Jewish communities, now juxtaposed in a fragmented
landscape, who might otherwise mingle.
“Demographic
threat” is the most disgustingly racist phrase still openly deployed in
international parlance. It has been mysteriously tolerated by a perplexed
international community. But it can be tolerated no longer. Zionist fear of the
demographic threat launched the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population in
1948 and 1967, created and perpetuates Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, inspires its terrible human rights abuses against Palestinians,
spins into regional unrest like the 1982 attack on Lebanon (that gave rise to
Hezbollah), and continues to drive Israeli militarism and aggression.
This open official
racism, with its attendant violence, casts Israel into the ranks of pariah
states, of which South Africa was the former banner emblem. In both countries,
racist nationalist logic tormented and humiliated the native people. It also
regularly spilled over to destabilize their surrounding regions (choc-a-block
with “demographic threats”), leading both regimes to cruel and reckless
attacks. Driven by a sense of perennial victimhood, they assumed the moral
authority to crush the native hordes that threatened to dilute the organic Afrikaner/Jewish
nations and the white/western civilization they believed they so nobly
represented.
A humiliated white
society in South Africa finally gave up that myth. Israel still clings to it. It has
now brought Israel to
pulverize Lebanon, trying to
eliminate Hezbollah and, perhaps, to clear the way for an attack on Iran. Peace
offers from the entire Arab world are cast aside like so much garbage. Yet
again, the Middle East is plunged into chaos and turmoil, because a normal
existence — peace, full democracy — is anathema to a regime that must see and
treat its neighbours as an existential threat in order to justify the
rejectionism that preserves its ethnic/racial character and enables its
continuing annexations of Palestinian land.
Why has this
outrageously racist doctrine survived so long, rewarded by billions of dollars
in US aid every year? We know the reasons. For too many Westerners, Israel’s Jewish character conflates with the
Holocaust legacy to make intuitive sense of Israel’s claim to be under continual
assault. Deep-seated Judeo-Christian bias against Islam demonizes Israel’s mostly
Muslim victims. European racist prejudice against Arabs (brown-skinned natives)
casts their material dispossession as less humanly significant. Naïve Christian
visions of the “Holy Land” naturalize Jewish
governance in biblical landscapes. Idiot Christian evangelistic notions of the
Rapture and the End Times posit Jewish governance as essential to the return of
the Messiah and the final Millennium (even though, in that repellent narrative,
Jews will roast afterwards).
All those notions
and prejudices, long confounding international action, must now be set aside.
The raw logic of Israel’s distorted self-image and racist doctrines is
expressed beyond confusion by the now-stark reality: the moonscape rubble of
once-lovely Lebanese villages; a million desperate people trying to survive
Israeli aerial attacks as they carry children and wheel disabled grandparents
down cratered roads; the limp bodies of children pulled from the dusty
basements of crushed buildings. This is the reality of Israel’s
national doctrine, the direct outcome of its racist worldview. It is
endangering everyone, and it must stop.
Designing the
Campaign
Much debate has
circulated about a boycott campaign, but hitherto it has not moved beyond some
ardent but isolated groups. Efforts have stalled on the usual difficult
questions: e.g., whether a boycott is morally compulsory to reject Israel’s
rampant human rights violations or would impede vital engagement with Israeli
forums, or whether principled defence of international law must be tempered by
(bogus) calls for “balance”. Especially, recent debate has foundered on calls
for an academic boycott. Concerns here are reasonable, if rather narrow.
Universities offer vital connections and arenas for collaboration, debate, and
new thinking. Without such forums and their intellectual exchange, some argue,
work toward a different future is arguably impeded.
But this argument
has exploded along with the southern Lebanese villages, as Israeli university
faculties roundly endorse the present war. As Ilan Pappé has repeatedly argued,
Israel’s
universities are not forums for enlightened thought. They are crucibles for
reproducing racist Zionist logics and practice, monitoring and filtering
admissible ideas. They produce the lawyers who defend the occupation regime and
run its kangaroo “courts”; the civil planners and engineers who design and
build the settlements on Palestinian land; the economists and financiers who design
and implement the grants that subsidize those settlements; the geologists who
facilitate seizure of Palestinian aquifers; the doctors who treat the tortured
so that they can be tortured again; the historians and sociologists who make
sense of a national society while preserving official lies about its own past;
and the poets, playwrights, and novelists who compose the nationalist opus that
glorifies and makes moralistic sense (internally, at least) of Jewish
statehood.
Those of us who
have met with Jewish Israeli academics in Israeli universities find the vast
majority of them, including well-meaning liberals, operating in a strange and
unique bubble of enabling fictions. Most of them know nothing about Palestinian
life, culture, or experience. They know strangely little about the occupation
and its realities, which are crushing people just over the next hill. They have
absorbed simplistic notions about rejectionist Arafat, terrorist Hamas, and
urbane Abbas. In this special insulated world of illusions, they say
nonsense things about unreal factors and fictionalized events. Trying to make
sense of their assumptions is no more productive than conversing about the Middle East with the Bush administration’s neo-cons, who
also live in a strange bubble of ignorance and fantasy. Aside from a few brave
and beleaguered souls, this is the world of Israel’s universities. It will not
change until it has to — when the conditions of its self-reproduction are
impaired and its self-deceptions too glaring.
The Real Goal:
Changing Minds
The universities
represent and reproduce the bubble world of the Israeli Jewish population as a
whole. And no people abandons its bubble willingly. In South Africa,
Afrikaners clung to their own bubble — their self-exonerating myths about
history, civilization, and race —until they were forced by external sanctions
and the collapsing national economy to rethink those myths. Their resistance to
doing so, while racist, was not purely vicious. Many kind and well-meaning
Afrikaners simply didn’t believe they had to rethink ideas that manifested to
them as givens and that shaped their reality. (One valued Afrikaner friend here
recalls her life during apartheid South Africa as being like The Truman Show,
a film in which a man unknowingly grows up in a television show, set in an
artificial dome world designed to look like a small town.) When their reality
fell apart, suddenly no one would admit to ever having believed or supported
it.
The Zionist
worldview is an even more complete system. All historical and geographic
details are provided to create a total mythical world, in which Jews have
rights to the land and Palestinians have none. It is a fully realized
construction, like those Hebraized maps carefully drawn by the Zionist movement
in the 1930s to erase the ancient Arabic landscape and substitute Hebrew
biblical references. It is also very resilient. The “new historians” have
exposed the cherished national historical narrative of 1948 and 1967 as a load
of fictions, but the same fictions are still reproduced by other academics to
reassure Israeli and diaspora Jews of their innocence and the righteousness of
their cause. The vast majority of Israelis therefore remain comfortable in
their Truman Show and even see any external pressure or criticism as
substantiating it. We need no more graphic evidence of that campaign’s success
than the overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for the present catastrophic
assault on Lebanon,
reflecting their sincere beliefs that nuclear-power Israel is actually under
existential threat by a guerrilla group lobbing katushas across the border.
Staggering to observers, that belief is both sobering and instructive.
To force people
steeped in such a worldview to rethink their notions, their historical myths,
and their own best interests requires two efforts:
(1) Serious
external pressure: here, a full boycott that undermines Israel’s
capacity to sustain the economic standards its citizens and corporations
expect, and which they associate with their own progressive self-image; and
(2) Clear and
unwavering commitment to the boycott’s goal, which — in Israel as in South
Africa — must be full equality, dignity, safety, and welfare of everyone in the
land, including Palestinians, whose ancestral culture arose there, and the Jewish
population, which has built a national society there.
That combination is
essential. Nothing else will work. Diplomacy, threats, pleading, the “peace
process,” mediation, all will be useless until external pressure brings Israel’s entire
Jewish population to undertake the very difficult task of rethinking their
world. This pressure requires the full range of boycotts, sanctions, and
divestment that the world can employ. (South African intellectual Steven
Friedman has observed wryly that the way to bring down any established
settler-colonial regime is to make it choose between profits and identity.
Profits, he says, will win every time.)
What to Target
Fortunately, from
the South African experience, we know how to go forward, and strategies are
proliferating. The basic methods of an international boycott campaign are
familiar. First, each person works in his or her own immediate orbit. People
might urge divestment from companies investing in Israel by their colleges and
universities, corporations, clubs, and churches. Boycott any sports event that
hosts an Israeli team, and work with planners to exclude them. Participate in,
and visit, no Israeli cultural events — films, plays, music, art exhibits.
Avoid collaborating with Israeli professional colleagues, except on anti-racist
activism. Don’t invite any Israeli academic or writer to contribute to any
conference or research and don’t attend their panels or buy their books, unless
their work is engaged directly in anti-racist activism. Don’t visit Israel except
for purposes of anti-racist activism. Buy nothing made in Israel: start
looking at labels on olive oil, oranges, and clothing. Tell people what you are
doing and why. Set up discussion groups everywhere to explain why.
For ideas and
allies, try Googling the “boycott Israel”
and “sanctions against Israel”
campaigns springing up around the world. Know those allies, such as the major US and UK churches and unions, and tell
people about them. For more ideas, read about the history of the boycott of South Africa.
Second, don’t be
confused by liberal Zionist voices that argue against a boycott in favour of
“dialogue”. If we can draw any conclusion from the last half-century, it is
that, without the boycott, dialogue will go nowhere. And don’t be confused by liberal-Zionist
arguments that Israel
will allow Palestinians a state if they only do this or that. Israel is already the only sovereign power in Palestine: what fragments
are left to Palestinians cannot make a state. The question now is not whether
there is one state, but what kind of state it comprises. The present
version is apartheid, and it must change. However difficult to achieve, and
however frightening to Jewish Israelis, the only just and stable solution is
full democracy
Third, be prepared
for the boycott’s opposition, which will be much louder, more vicious, and more
dangerous than it was in the boycott of South Africa. Read and assemble
solid documentable facts. Support each other loudly and publicly against the
inevitable charges of anti-Semitism. And support your media against the same
charges. Write to news media and explain just who the “Israel media
teams” actually are. Most pro-Israeli activism draws directly from the Israeli
government’s propaganda outreach programs. Spotlight this fact. Team up to
counter their pressure on newspapers, radio stations, and television news
forums. Don’t let them capture or intimidate public debate. By insisting loudly
(and it must be sincere) that the goal is the full equality of dignity and
rights of everyone in Israel-Palestine, including the millions of Jewish
citizens of Israel,
demolish their specious claims of anti-Semitism.
Fourth, hold true
to the principles that drive the boycott’s mission. Don’t tolerate the
slightest whiff of anti-Semitism in your own group or movement. Anti-Jewish
racists are certainly out there, and they are attracted to these campaigns like
roaches. They will distract and absorb your energies, while undermining,
degrading, and destroying the boycott movement. Some are Zionist plants, who
will do so deliberately. If you can’t change their minds (and don’t spend much
time trying, because they will use your efforts to drain your time and distract
your energies), denounce them, expel them, ignore them, have no truck with
them. They are the enemy of a peaceful future, not its allies — part of the
problem, not the solution.
... Finally, always, always, remember the goal
and vision. Anger and hatred, arising from the Lebanon debacle, must be channelled
not into retaliation and vengeance but into principled action. Armed struggle
against occupation remains legitimate and, if properly handled (no killing of
civilians), is a key tool. But the goal of all efforts, of every stamp, must be
security for everyone, toward building a new peaceful future. It’s very hard,
in the midst of our moral outrage, to stay on the high road. That challenge is,
however, well-known to human rights campaigns as it is to all three
monotheistic faiths. It is what Islam knows as the “great jihad” – the struggle
of the heart. It must remain the guiding torch of this effort, which we must
defend together.
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