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Why I’m for boycott

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Qalandiya checkpoint, West Bank, Occupied Palestine (photo Activestills.org)

This is a great week in New York because the idea of boycotting Israel is in the news, and many people will become informed about the issues. The usual grip of the Israel lobby over the conversation has been loosened, and two boycott advocates will be speaking at Brooklyn College on Thursday. Shades of the anti-apartheid movement re South Africa.

I am for boycott because I have many times observed conditions under military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza that reflect apartheid policies effected by Israel. I have seen ethnic cleansing, village demolitions, collective punishment, suppression of demonstrations, confiscation of land, hateful checkpoint systems fit for livestock, and violent targeting of civilians, and all these policies carried out on an ethnic basis. If you were Jewish, it wouldn’t be happening to you. If you were Jewish, you would be able to go to the Mediterranean Sea that you can see from your rooftop. But you’re not Jewish, so you can’t get out of the West Bank. Noam Sheizaf and Henry Siegman have both stated that Palestinians have no rights in the West Bank; and they are two Jewish writers. Palestinians who experience these conditions go further. Whenever I visit Palestine, I spend a lot of my time weeping; and I reflect that I have supported boycott in conditions that were less oppressive– California migrant harvests, for instance.

The conditions I’ve observed are revolutionary conditions: they are the tinder of violent uprising and annihilationist dreams. Any people subject to these conditions would take up arms. I know that New Yorkers would. And Palestinians have taken up arms many times, and violence has never served them. And that is why I am for boycott. Boycott is painful but it is nonviolent. And we need a nonviolent solution to the tyranny that exists in Palestine. A nonviolent solution is highly unlikely, but it is the best hope; and boycott has the potential to isolate and punish the Israeli regime in such a way that it might begin to transform itself, and that international human-rights norms will at last apply.

But I am American, and I am for boycott because of the American paralysis over the issue, best demonstrated by the Chuck Hagel hearing last week. Our political parties have an inability to talk about Palestinian conditions frankly. Hagel’s words about Palestinians being treated like caged animals were stuffed down his throat, and no Democrat could speak up for those views. Our politics are broken on this issue. Four years ago I was in Cairo and sat in the audience as Obama spoke of Palestinian humiliations and declared, The settlements must end. The young people in the audience cheered him, their faces were lit with smiles. Four years on that policy is a shambles; Obama has walked away from his words, the settlements go on unabated. When liberal Zionists say that Obama must pressure Israel, they ignore this political wreckage. Why is he going to change now and pressure Israel when the lobby has handed his head to him (and Netanyahu) over the last four years? When governments fail to act on crying injustices, the people must act, people of conscience, like us. When the United States government was controlled by the slave power in the 1840s and 50s, abolitionists pushed the country forward, they changed the American discourse. I do not seek the violence that ended slavery, but I am a fellow traveler today to the abolitionists of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I think BDS is a popular movement, and it can force governments to act. I don’t believe that Israel can continue to be a Jewish state when 20 percent of its citizens are non-Jews. I don’t believe that the two-state solution is still viable; I want to see a peaceful transition to a democracy, perhaps involving binationalism, or federation as initial steps.  

I have avoided all discussion here of cultural and academic boycott, anti-normalization measures, and the desire some have expressed to transform Israel with a flood of returning refugees, to revolutionize 1948. I am sometimes troubled by the rhetoric of the camp I follow, but I am a fellow traveler, and I know as Tony Judt knew 10 years ago (and as Charles Dickens knew in 1842, when he republished abolitionist tracts) these people are on the right side of history; and as to the right of return, it is very difficult to visit an ethnically-cleansed land, Israel, and see it market itself as a European high tech country and also a fantasy of Jewish power, and know that it does so on the ruined villages of people who live a few miles away, even as it invites Jews from around the world to “return” there. That is the return that most disturbs me as a Jew, the injustice I see before my eyes.

Omar Barghouti once said to me, If you want to boycott an egg, we want you to boycott that egg. That is now my slogan. I welcome all who would seek to punish Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories by doing something. Governments have failed to do anything. Boycott is my way of taking action about a human-rights calamity that is perpetrated in my name, as an American and a Jew.

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Great post, Phil.

Your passion jumps off the page (screen) ,Phil!!
I am in tears .
What you say touches the depth of my being. Thank you.
And as to the abuse and recrimination you are about to receive, I pray my heartfelt,irreligious sincere prayer to the Unknown ,for you, and yours, to be protected from calumny and insult.

Grrrrrrrrreat essay, Phil!

At this point in time, a boycott seems like the only logical option. Israeli leaders know they are abusing their political power, having a sub-class of people that they treat like animals in Gaza or the West Bank. And Palestinians have had to deal with the loss of their towns, neighbors and family for decades – so, ask yourself who we should be siding with.

And at this point in history, the world is seeing that the US government representatives can be hired to work for the state of Israel. Just watch the Hagel hearing to understand how scurrilous and craven the lot of United States Senators are.

The U.N. decision to recognize Palestine in November 2012 overwhelmingly voted to reject settlements by recognising Palestine as a state (138-9 vote, with 41 abstentions). World opinion is clearly against this systematic destruction of Palestinian statehood by the state of Israel. The vote symbolised a positive direction that no Israeli lobby could interfere with.

The fascist-like sympathizers for Israel , many in AIPAC’s portfolio, have the bully pulpit now, but why shouldn’t they be challenged on a boycott? In the end the boycott will strike fear into the heart of the Jewish state, ultimately causing them to hasten a solution to the ongoing criminal action of settlements and human rights abuses.

Thanks, Phil.

A word about why I am for boycott of all things Israeli (and not merely things somehow directly related to occupation).

I am for boycott in order to create a countervailing force to Israel’s power to act criminally and with impunity. I see civil society BDS as a preparation for nation-state BDS, without which I don’t see how Israel can be brought to heel.

I want the most powerful possible sanctions against Israel to be defined and promised by as many nations as possible, and as near simultaneously as possible, but only to be employed in the event that Israel fails to comply with international law and conventions and agreements in a manner and on a time-table set forth in advance by those nations which define and promise the sanctions. I talk about this in here at Option Two.

I don’t know of anything that Israeli Jews can do in Israel (or Palestine) that they cannot do anywhere else (say NYC) but two: visit or reside in the actual land (to which in my view they have no other claim than the power that emanates from the barrel of a gun) and the VERY IMPORTANT POWER TO ACT CRIMINALLY WITH IMPUNITY.

Jews can act “European” in NYC or in Europe. Jews can “do” high-tech in these places. Jews can be religious in these places (and the really religious, or, that is to say, the really Talmud respecting, find the gathering of Jews in The Land to be an abomination). Jews can write books and poetry and music anywhere. Jewish musicians can play concerts anywhere. Jews are safe nowadays and the old argument of a need for a safe haven is preposterous today. Ask any of those fanatics trying to unhorse the Brooklyn College BDS meeting if they want to move to Israel “to be safe”. The Dersh, bless him and keep him, prefers life in Cambridge.

The oboist Josef Marx, who is not well known to non-oboists, played in the Palestine Symphony when it was a (presumably) mostly Jewish orchestra during the Mandate, but moved to and stayed in NYC. Einstein (better known) did not want to live in Israel and lived his life out in Princeton, NJ. The almost unknown local NYC politician Dov Hikind prefers NYC. It is really safe here for Jews.

But Jews cannot run around firing Uzis at people here in NYC, or in Europe. The power to act criminally and with impunity is only available to Jews in Israel.

It should not be available there or anywhere.

So, about that power to act criminally and with impunity.

I don’t say that anyone should have LESS power to act criminally and with impunity than anyone else: Jews, or any group of Jews, should have as much of this power as Al-Qaida or Ba’athists or Christians or professional orchestra musicians — BUT NO-ONE SHOULD HAVE THESE POWERS. And no-one should act to bestow or to continue these powers. Not on Jews in Israel. Nowhere.

Why whole-Israel BDS? First, because Israel as a whole, and all its Jewish people, profit from its crimes and participate in them. When Israelis drink water from the West Bank aquifer, they are drinking stolen water (and participating in the process of starving the Palestinians for water). When the IOF fails to prevent crimes by settlers (and fails to prevent the crime of settlement), all Israel is guilty. If all Israeli businesses now operating in the West Bank and Golan went out of business tomorrow, BDS against mere occupation-business would cease, but the occupations would continue.

Second, because Israel is a democracy and unless the entire electorate suffers from BDS, there will be no electoral opposition to the establishment’s take-no-prisoners approach to peacemaking and law-abiding. So, in my view, BDS against Israel is intended to cause discomfort, and later to cause suffering, widely among all the people. Until Israel does what the authors of the BDS action demand. Which — I am persuaded — is merely to comply with international legal and human rights standards applicable to all countries.