Recently Omar Barghouti, an eloquent and keen critic of the Israeli occupation and colonialism, argued in an article published in Znet for imposing a boycott against Israel. His arguments focused on cultural and academic boycotts. Barghouti is an effective writer, and very knowledgeable about Israel’s policies, but after reading his article—“Why Boycott Israelâ€â€”one can still (and should, I would say) ask: “Why boycott Israel, indeed?â€
Certainly the Palestinians, like any other people faced with a colonial power that denies them independence, cannot alone impose their will on the government that oppresses them. The Israel/Palestine conflict is a contest of wills, as Edward Said wrote. Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon has said that the army must “sear into the Palestinian consciousness that they are a defeated people.†Israel has besieged Palestinian cities and villages, and encircled Gaza and the West Bank behind electronic fences and walls. Palestinian leaders are marked for assassination, and every Palestinian, elderly and young, is marked for a life of depravation, humiliation and hardship, so long as Palestinians continue to defy Israel’s diktat. For fifty-seven years, Israel has stopped at nothing to break the Palestinian will to live as a free people.
We do not have the force of arms, or the support of the super power that matters, to impose our will on Israel. We do, however, have a just cause, for what we demand is nothing more than affirming that humans have a right to live free and to decide their own fate.
Israel will not cede to us that right until it finds itself encircled behind an iron wall of international opprobrium and shame. Our strategy must look to how we can construct this wall, and we should choose our tactics for their utility to achieve this end.
I say wall as a metaphor, but we can never forget that the injustice that we battle is real, and the justice we propose as a remedy must necessarily be real. There is no such thing as a “justified strategyâ€, or a “justified tacticâ€, that does not remedy the injustice or contribute to that end. The injustice of Israel’s policies cannot be separated from the real consequences of these policies. How, then, can we separate the justice of our tactics from their real consequences?
Barghouti argues that international support is necessary for the Palestinian liberation. He elucidates Israel’s policies of colonialism, and offers the tactic of academic boycotts as a response to these policies. What is missing, however, in a call for adopting a certain tactic, is an explanation of why we should adopt this tactic. Barghouti writes that failing to support an academic, cultural and economic boycott signals the abandoning of the “moral obligation to stand up for right, for justice, for equality and for a chance to validate the prevalence of universal ethical principles.†A boycott, writes Barghouti, is an “imperative.†If we are to adopt a tactic, it is because it would bring us closer to our goals, which are justice, equality and the validation of universal ethical principles. How will an academic boycott bring us closer to these goals, and why is it an “imperative�
Nowhere in Barghouti’s article is this question—the only important question in a discussion on means to an end—answered. He shows that, in Israel, there is consensus among Israeli academics—and the vast majority in Israel—against the return of Palestinian refugees. Moreover, Israeli universities are complicit in the occupation of Palestinian lands, and some cases have directly expropriated occupied Palestinian lands and lands that formerly housed Palestinians who were expelled from Israel. The number of Israeli academics who have clearly called for an end to the occupation are “a depressing minorityâ€, and there is not one academic body that has called for an end to the occupation.
Thus, Barghouti writes, they are complicit. I have no argument with this judgment. At the same time, I do no think that we should be looking for ways, as it were, “to punish the bastards.†If there was anything else in Barghouti’s argument, aside from the complicity of Israeli academics, I am sorry to have missed it. My reading of the article left me with the impression that Barghouti argues for an academic boycott against Israel because Israeli academics are “complicit†in the oppression we seek to end, and not because a boycott will contribute to ending this oppression. From experience, we have no reason to believe that there is any utility in an academic boycott against Israeli academics. So far, academic boycotts have only served to bring very boring discussions on academic freedom out from the philosophy classes and into spotlight.
One can argue, and I am sympathetic to this argument, that we cannot judge a tactic by its immediate outcomes, that effects may not immediately be obvious. That is true, but in this case, we have no reason to believe that continuing this tactic will not strengthen the negative effects that we saw in the case of Mona Baker in the University of Manchester. If there is any reason to argue otherwise, I am unaware of it, and I didn’t see it mentioned in Barghouti’s article, or anywhere else for that matter.
What else supports Barghouti’s case for an academic boycott? He argues that there is “sufficient family resemblance between Israel and South Africa exists to grant advocating South Africa style remedies.†Barghouti draws an intelligent comparison, and warns of simplifying the two cases. I agree with that, and would only add that what Israel is subjecting the Palestinians to is worse than the Apartheid government at its lowest ebb, and that it is not certain which apartheid regime is more tainted by the comparison.
But to argue, with caveats, that the commonalities of the two regimes justify the same tactic of resistance—which I understand as an antidote to injustice—is like offering a prescription for two different patients who share one set of symptoms, and nothing else. Boycotts proved effective against South African apartheid, but we must ask ourselves why they were effective, and cannot take it for granted that the boycott is intrinsically useful, a panacea for racist states, because it was useful in one case.
The commonalities between the two regimes are obvious enough. The differences, however, cannot be ignored as minor, or irrelevant to this debate. The majority of South Africans affected by the boycott were people who had already made up their minds to put an end to apartheid (the majority were Apartheid’s “non-whitesâ€). The international campaign strengthened their hand, inspired them and gave them hope. The majority who will be affected in Israel (taking the highly implausible scenario that it would ever get to the point of boycotting Israel) will be people who are opposed to the boycott, and many will see it as a confirmation that the world hates them because Israel is a Jewish state. If the idea is to collectively punish these people into enlightenment, one should consider that collective punishment seldom works, especially when it is popularly seen as motivated by the same prejudice that led six million Jews into the gas chambers.
This is all speculation, and founded on the premise that we would in the first place succeed in getting countries in Europe and North America (which matter in the scheme more than Papa New Guinea and Mauritania) to impose an academic and economic boycott against Israel. How this is to take place is beyond me. We should not get ahead of ourselves and assume that we have done the groundwork, in raising awareness in the publics that would call on their governments to boycott Israel. Does this awareness exist (say) in the United States, where orthodoxy tells us that the Palestinians turned down a state in 2000, and much of their problems stem from an inflammatory public education system and the decadence of a national leader’s wife? Or in the UK, where polls suggest that Britons view the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through an Alice In Wonderland looking glass?
Before a boycott can be seriously contemplated, there needs to be a bloc of public opinion that would support that tactic, and lobby the government, universities and councils to implement it. First, understanding, and then action. I am afraid that taking action at this point, in the absence of understanding, not only would not get us very far, but also may complicate our efforts to inform about the oppression we are fighting against. We may be giving our opponents an opportunity to do their own “informingâ€, to say that these tactics only go to show that Israel is being singled out because it is the Jewish state, to be boycotted as the Jew of the nations, just as individual Jews and Jewish businesses were boycotted not so long ago. That people make this argument, and others believe it, shows that we have much work to do. But I am not sure that this work, which all agree is necessary, can, or should, be done while we invite diversions by our own doings. If calling for boycotts were an effective means of raising awareness, if there were a chance that boycotts would be implemented in any meaningful way, then by all means, lets adopt boycotts. But from what we have seen, and from what we can reasonably predict, boycotts do not raise awareness (academic boycotts, however, will ensure that who ever has not heard of John Stuart Mill will hear of him), they cannot replace methods that do raise awareness, and nor should they, so long as they keep the debate away from Israel’s crimes.
Even if, throwing nuance to the wind, one were to say that Israel and South Africa are one and the same, the anti-apartheid movement and the Palestine solidarity movement are not. They had Mandela, we have Matanzimas’ posing as Mandela. We have prime ministers, information ministers, and an entire cabinet of ministers (which has more ministers than the Canadian government) scurrying about their Bantustans, in which they travel freely only because Israel gives them passes, and the Israeli at the checkpoint allows them through. Yet they insist that bantustanization is the “peace of the brave.†Matanzima used to argue that the Bantustans were a great victory against apartheid, a stepping-stone to liberation. You had to be in his shoes to understand. Recently, I asked a very smart official with the PLO: why do they insist on citing the roadmap, and the Oslo accords, when they can refer to the Geneva Convention, which Israel flouts daily, and which most governments are obliged to implement and to see to it that other countries implement it? He responded that, in his time working with the PA, he has come to appreciate the pressures they face, and all the thinking that goes into their decisions. That was what Mantanzima would have said.
I mention this because our Mantanzimas’ are seen as “symbols of the causeâ€, they win elections when elections are held, and insisted in the last decade that the process of our demise was a “peace processâ€, and now, four years after the Palestinian revolt, they insist that they be allowed to again partake in the process. When Israel expands settlements in the West Bank, they denounce that as a “violation of the roadmapâ€â€”which is premised on the disarming of Palestinian factions– or a blow to the peace process. If we are trying to inform people that Israel is in violation of international law, that the settlements are a war crime according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, one of obstacles is that our “leaders†have adopted as a reference, in their public relations and diplomacy, a framework that is illegal under international law, and which strengthens the legitimacy of Israel’s settlements. A friend of mine recently attended a conference in the US, which Yassir Abd Rabbo, the PA’s Information Minister, also attended. He ran into Abd Rabbo, and asked him why the PA remained silent about Israeli settlement expansion during the 1990’s. To his incredulity, Abd Rabbo answered that, under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, there were no settlement expansions. Those were the years when the settlements expanded. Our information minister is Israel’s piper, something that we can never forget, and must learn to overcome in solidarity work.
We cannot ignore these aspects, and pretend they do not exist, or have no bearing on solidarity work. This is part of the reality we are working within, and wish to change. The question of Palestine is exceedingly simple, yet it has been complicated to the point of mystification. We need to simplify it, to capture people’s imagination, and above all not clutter the field with further diversions.
Our tactics should emphasize that there is an occupation, and that Israel, and the US, have rejected a just solution. At this time, I think that this should be our emphasis. If we wish to unite a majority of public opinion behind our demands, then our tactics should not shout down our message, which can get lost in the medium. I believe that calls for an arms embargo against Israel, or the banning of settlement products, would be effective, and realistic. There is little that can be argued against these demands, and most governments are actually legally obliged to implement them. But those who argue for a boycott, especially an academic boycott, must demonstrate why a boycott should be adopted. So far, I have heard only that a boycott is a justified and moral tactic. But to say that a tactic is justified and moral, without demonstrating its utility, is meaningless. Whatever other criteria for morality and justness are out there, I confess that I am not privy to them, no more, I suspect, than an Israeli checkpoint can be blown up by an Idea.
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