Where is the Israeli left? Gone, right? No, we are in the midst of a great awakening and shift, and just as the American landscape is going to yield strange and important embraces (Anne Coulter and Dennis Kucinich, against a war on Iran), self-described radicalism in Israel will come to seem logical and reasonable, the only just response to a crisis. Here are members of a radical feminist group, Coalition of Women for Peace, arguing for BDS. Dalit Baum and Merav Amir at Palestine Note, saying it can’t be limited to just the occupation:
Three years later, in November 2009, the general body of CWP reconvened to review the BDS discussion. Strikingly, this time support for the general call for BDS was unanimous. Throughout those three years we witnessed the attacks and the siege on Gaza; the occupation in the West Bank has further entrenched itself as a form of apartheid regime; this was all done with the support of Israeli public opinion. At the same time, the BDS movement has grown globally, and CWP has played an important part in it through its three-year research project entitled Who Profits from the Occupation. Through the project we have studied new facets of the economy of the occupation, and the results of our three year study have played an important part in showing how the use of boycott, divestment and sanctions is justified, necessary, and potentially very effective in our work for a just peace in Israel/Palestine….
As we complete our mapping, one fact becomes very clear: any clear-cut distinction between the Israeli economy as a whole and the economy of the occupation can no longer be justified. The Green Line border has all but disappeared from the corporate activity map. Even if we only look at the Israeli settlements, and then again only focus on settlement construction, we will discover that the major players in the Israeli economy are deeply complicit. For instance, our findings show that all major Israeli banks have funded and supervised construction projects in the settlements…
Thus, we can safely say that most of the Israeli economy is involved in the economy of the occupation and, from an economic perspective; the Green Line is long gone. Choosing to call for economic activism against Israeli corporations directly complicit in the Israeli occupation, rather than calling for economic activism against all significant Israeli corporations, should be regarded as a strategic decision, since this distinction is almost only a semantic one. However, tracing the occupation involvement of corporations broadens our perspective, since, as our database shows, many of the culprit companies are international corporations.
