It was an Arab legislator who made the most telling comment to the Israeli parliament last week as it passed the boycott law, which outlaws calls to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied territories. Ahmed Tibi asked: “What is a peace activist or Palestinian allowed to do to oppose the occupation? Is there anything you agree to?”
The boycott law is the latest in a series of ever-more draconian laws being introduced by the far-right. The legislation's goal is to intimidate those Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians, who have yet to bow down before the majority-rule mob.
Look out in the coming days and weeks for a bill to block the work of Israeli human rights organisations trying to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories from abuses by the Israeli army and settlers; and a draft law investing a parliamentary committee, headed by the far-right, with the power to veto appointments to the supreme court. The court is the only, and already enfeebled, bulwark against the right's absolute ascendancy.
The boycott law, backed by Benjamin Netanyahu's government, marks a watershed in this legislative assault in two respects.
First, it knocks out the keystone of any democratic system: the right to free speech. The new law makes it illegal for Israelis and Palestinians to advocate a non-violent political programme -- boycott -- to counter the ever-growing power of the half a million Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land.
As the Israeli commentator Gideon Levy observed, the floodgates are now open: "Tomorrow it will be forbidden to call for an end to the occupation [or for] brotherhood between Jews and Arabs."
Equally of concern is that the law creates a new type of civil, rather than criminal, offence. The state will not be initiating prosecutions. Instead, the job of enforcing the boycott law is being outsourced to the settlers and their lawyers. Anyone backing a boycott can be sued for compensation by the settlers themselves, who -- again uniquely -- need not prove they suffered actual harm.
Under this law, opponents of the occupation will not even be dignified with jail sentences and the chance to become prisoners of conscience. Rather, they will be quietly bankrupted in private actions, their assets seized either to cover legal costs or as punitive damages.
Human rights lawyers point out that there is no law like this anywhere in the democratic world. Even Eyal Yinon, the naturally conservative legal adviser to the parliament, assessed the law’s aim as stopping a “discussion that has been at the heart of political debate in Israel for more than 40 years”. But more than half of Israelis back it, with only 31 per cent opposed.
The delusional, self-pitying worldview that spawned the boycott law was neatly illustrated this month in a short video "ad" that is supported, and possibly financed, by Israel's hasbara, or propaganda, ministry. Fittingly, it is set in a psychiatrist's office.
A young, traumatised woman deciphers the images concealed in the famous Rorschach test. As she is shown the ink-splodges, her panic and anger grow. Gradually, we come to realise, she represents vulnerable modern Israel, abandoned by friends and still in profound shock at the attack on her navy's commandos by the "terrorist" passengers aboard last year's aid flotilla to Gaza.
Immune to reality -- that the ships were trying to break Israel's punitive siege of Gaza, that the commandos illegally boarded the ships in international waters, and that they shot dead nine activists execution-style -- Miss Israel tearfully recounts that the world is "forever trying to torment and harm [us] for no reason". Finally she storms out, saying: "What do you want - for [Israel] to disappear off the map?"
The video -- released under the banner "Stop the provocation against Israel" -- was part of a campaign to discredit the recent follow-up flotilla from Greece. The aid mission was abandoned after Greek authorities, under Israeli pressure, refused to let the convoy sail for Gaza.
Israel's siege mentality asserted itself again days later as international activists staged another show of solidarity -- this one nicknamed the "flytilla". Hundreds tried to fly to Israel on the same day, declaring their intention to travel to the West Bank. The goal was to highlight that Israel both controls and severely restricts access to the occupied territories and to Palestinians.
Proving precisely the protesters’ point, Israel threatened airlines with retaliation if they carried the activists and it massed hundreds of soldiers at Ben Gurion airport to greet arrivals. Some 150 peaceful protesters who reached Israel were arrested moments after landing.
Echoing the deranged sentiments of the woman in the video, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, denounced the various flotillas as "denying Israel's right to exist" and a threat to its security.
In reality, however, the surge in flotilla activity reflects not an attack on Israel but a growing appreciation by international groups that Israel is successfully sealing off from the world the small areas of the occupied territories left to Palestinians. The flotillas are a rebellion against the Palestinians’ rapid ghettoisation.
Although Netanyahu's comments sound delusional, there may be a method to the madness of measures like the boycott law and the hysterical overreaction to the flotillas.
These initiatives, as Tibi points out, leave no room for non-violent opposition to the occupation. Arundhati Roy, the award-winning Indian writer, has noted that non-violence is essentially "a piece of theatre. [It] needs an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?"
Netanyahu and the Israeli right understand this point. They are carefully dismantling every platform on which dissident Israelis, Palestinians and international activists hope to stage their protests. They are making it impossible to organise joint peaceful and non-violent resistance, whether in the form of boycotts or solidarity visits. The only way being left open is violence.
Is this what the Israeli right wants, believing both that it will confirm to Israelis’ their paranoid fantasies as well as offering a justification to the world for entrenching the occupation?
Netanyahu appears to believe that, by generating the very terror he claims to be trying to defeat, he can safeguard the legitimacy of the Jewish state -- and destroy any hope of a Palestinian state being created.
Jonathan Cook won this year's Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
And yet, expect witty to come along and insist that it is the Palestinians who have to prove they are sincere about peace and remove any ambiguity about teh 1967 border.
At least one cannot argue that Israel is ambiguous about borders. There is no doubt that it rejects any such idea.
Oh, and it’s all Hamas’ fault.
Shingo, you nailed it. This is EXACTLY the kind of essay that demands a few scripted Wittyisms, carefully gleaned from the Hasbara playbook. White is black, and day is night.
lol… expect silence from the resident zionists… you have covered it all in your post!
what a pathetic place israel finds itself in…
This law is the first time the poison from YESHA threatens cosy Israel’s support system.
Cosy Israel needs to wake up before it is too late.
It is also increasingly obvious that the settlers are outside the pale of respect for the basic tenets of democracy. They really remind me of Francos falangista’s.
>> Ahmed Tibi asked: “What is a peace activist or Palestinian allowed to do to oppose the occupation? Is there anything you agree to?”
The Zio-supremacist response is clear: Palestinians must lie perfectly still while “enough Israel” is taken from them. Once this has been accomplished, Israel and the Palestinians can proceed to discuss “peace, not ‘justice’.”
This is a lucidly, and beautifully, written article. It’s at the same time very depressing. This is most likely the plan: extinguish all forms of non-violent protest, in order to force a violent showndown, and then take command of the situation and scream out: I told you so! They cannot be trusted!
What have we done, what made us the blind enablers to this madness?
“What have we done, what made us the blind enablers to this madness?”
Political bribery, intimidation, and blackmail.
Need you ask?
Equally of concern is that the law creates a new type of civil, rather than criminal, offence.
Not really, it creates a new civil duty that in-turn allows the existing criminal conspiracy laws to be used against previously legal behaviors. So, you get a double whammy. There is both criminal liability and civil liability for damages.
The WTO, EU, and US each have rules permitting or requiring country of origin marking. Prior to the adoption of the boycott bill, consumers could demand that products from the West Bank be labeled to indicate the country of origin without breaking any law. Now we have an MK filing criminal complaints, using the conspiracy laws, against people labeling products from the settlements because this supposedly is a call to boycott them. See With Israel boycott law passed, rightist MK fires first salvo at Meretz
The Palestinians aren’t going to turn to violence again.
The most effective weapons against Israel are sarcasm, ridicule and sanctions.
Bibi’s sharp turn fascist is no show of strength but rather a sign of how desperate the settlers are. They are totally out of touch with the outside world.
“The Palestinians aren’t going to turn to violence again”
Actually, “Palestinian violence” WILL be the justification for further Israeli intransigence and military oppression, and our complicity. But whether or not the Palestinans actually institute, or carry out the violence is another matter entirely.
Obviously, it does not work in Israel’s favor for the Palestinian’s to cast aside violent protest. For this reason, whats the problem with sacrificing a few Israeli Jews to justify further expansion? Besides, Jews don’t actually have to be sacrificed if the “rocket attacks” all land in empty fields, except when the Israelis are in need of an exclamation point behind one of their never ending proclamations of victimhood that invariably lead to an “act of defense”.
I once saw a picture of one of these Israeli households that had the misfortune of being hit by one of the Palestinian bottle rockets. The photograph was taken from a room that adjoined the damaged room. Of note was the china cabinet in the undamaged adjoining room. Really a nice piece, as furniture goes. Glass doors intact, and the enclosed tchotchke undisturbed; a real testament to the deadly nature of these rocket attacks.
I also recall a photograph of a Palestinan youth, terribly curled and charred, only recognized as human because of the photo’s caption. A victim of an Israeli white phosphorous munition, rained on the Palestinians as an act of the Israelis “defending themselves” against these deadly rock throwers and bottle rocket launching heathens.
So, you really need to define “violence” when making the statement that “The Palestinians aren’t going to turn to violence again”. Considering that throwing a rock at an IDF soldier may provide the rational behind another “Operation Cast Lead”, such predictions may indeed be somewhat feckless.
Smart non violent action leverages the world opinion that supports the Palestinians. Israel only has the US. Ultimately the only ones who will stand by Israel are the Jews. Nobody else cares that much especially if Israel goes fascist.
The action neutralises hasbara. It exposes the vacuum of leadership in Israel. It shows the Likud to be run by the type of people who run news international. It is the thing the IDF is most afraid of.
Actually, things were better when Israel was under regular attack. US Jews were afraid to send their children there–it was too dangerous. Economic life was disrupted. Damage was done to Israeli property and the Israeli people were scared. They couldn’t carry out their daily routines without any consideration for the mess they had made in Palestine.
Today, the Israelis feel absolutely zero pressure of any sort. They are entirely oblivious, because the movement has allowed them to become oblivious. Most are completely unaware of the non-violent protests taking place. Perhaps these protests are having some subterranean effect but in terms of any tangible gains for Palestinians, the effect has been nil.
“Bibi’s sharp turn fascist is no show of strength but rather a sign of how desperate the settlers are. They are totally out of touch with the outside world”
Hmmmmm. It occurs to me that we might say the same about our own leaders, and the desperation of those who are enriching themselves by discarding the basic tenets that the Founding Fathers sought to instill.
All the crocodile tears over yet another variation of, “We support justice, but this is not the right way to go about it.”
This new “not the right way” is because it might be A) effective, and B) not give Zionists the “moral high ground.”
What is the reach of this law? Can I (an American) be sued in an Israeli court (by settlers, showing no injury) because they don’t like my stance on boycotts? or the shape of my nose (for that matter)? What if I were an Israeli citizen, but my speech occurred in USA? On internet on an “American” website?
What if I say, publicly in Israel, that “Since the law forbids me to recommend boycotts of the XYZ Company, which, in my opinion, profits from the occupation, I shall certainly not recommend a boycott of the XYZ company, even though, in my opinion, it profits from the occupation.” Will the courts allow a punitive lawsuit against me by any or all settlers?