Jewish Voice for Peace’s campaign to support 60 leading Israeli actors and playwrights who are refusing to play a new theater in Ariel continues to grow. New notable figures are joining by the day. Ed Asner explains his support, "It is always amazing when actors turn down jobs.To have the actors of Israel say they will not work in those venues is truly an act of courage.. I applaud them and would live to instill the actors of America with that courage." And Corey Fischer, co-founder of the Traveling Jewish Theater (now Jewish Theater San Francisco), expressed his admiration in the spirit of the season, “It seems to me that, as often happens in our times, these artists are taking on what was traditionally the task of the Hebrew Prophets: speaking truth to power. I hope someone is listening.”
But some questions are being raised in Palestine about the Israeli actors’ protest. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has issued a statement in response the Israeli actors’ boycott [Editor’s note: Just to clarify this statement is in response to just the Israeli actors’ boycott, not the letter from US artists]. While PACBI is clear they "welcome acts of protest against any manifestation of Israel’s regime of colonialism and apartheid," they do raise some important questions about the boycott, and what the protesters might be ignoring.
From the PACBI statement Boycotting Ariel: Missing the Forest for the Trees.
First, we believe that the exclusive focus on settlement institutions ignores and obscures the complicity of all Israeli academic and cultural institutions in upholding the system of colonial control and apartheid under which Palestinians suffer. PACBI believes there is firm evidence of the collusion of the Israeli academic and cultural establishment with the major oppressive organs of the Israeli state. Focusing solely on obviously complicit institutions, such as cultural centers in a West Bank colony, serves to shield mainstream Israeli institutions from opprobrium or, ultimately, from the growing global boycott movement that consistently targets all complicit institutions.
Furthermore, the cherry-picking approach behind targeting a notorious colonial settlement in the heart of the occupied West Bank diverts attention from other institutions built on occupied land. Supporters of this peculiarly selective boycott must be asked: Is lecturing or performing at the Hebrew University, whose Mount Scopus campus sits on occupied Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, acceptable?
If opposition to Israel’s military occupation is driving this movement, then why has the deplorable stifling of cultural institutions in occupied Jerusalem, for example, been ignored? In 2009, the Arab League with support from UNESCO declared Jerusalem the Arab Cultural Capital for that year. Celebrations that were to be held across the city throughout the year highlighting the historical and cultural role of Jerusalem in Palestinian society and beyond were shut down and at times physically attacked by Israeli security forces in their ongoing attempt to stifle expressions of Palestinian identity in the occupied city. In scenes worthy of Kafka’s novels, organized activities throughout East Jerusalem were summarily cancelled as Palestinian artists, writers and cultural figures resorted to underground techniques to celebrate their city’s cultural and popular heritage [2].
If the artists’ and intellectuals’ role as voices of moral reason is behind this most recent call to boycott Ariel, where were these voices when academic and cultural institutions were wantonly destroyed in Israel’s war of aggression on Gaza in 2008-2009?
It has not gone without notice in Israel that BDS is gaining momentum internationally as an effective means of resisting Israeli colonial oppression. Given this context, one may be excused to assert that these recent efforts to narrow the focus of the boycott against Israel may be deliberately missing the forest for the trees.. It is important to reiterate the morally-consistent rationale and principles of the Palestinian boycott campaign against Israel.
