Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has become the savior of those trying to stave off the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Much like how his comments rejecting the Palestinian right of return earned him praise from liberal Zionists, anti-BDS writers and activists are now looking to Abbas to help kill the appeal of boycotting Israel.
Last week, Abbas made headlines when he said that he doesn’t support the BDS movement. Speaking to reporters while in South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral, Abbas said:
We do not support the boycott of Israel. But we ask everyone to boycott the products of the settlements. Because the settlements are in our territories. It is illegal. … But we don’t ask anyone to boycott Israel itself. We have relations with Israel, we have mutual recognition of Israel.
The comments were immediately supported by liberals in the U.S.:
““No, we do not support the boycott of Israel,” Go to it, dipshits. http://t.co/r9JoYeQuJw
— Eric Alterman (@Eric_Alterman) December 14, 2013
@MaxBlumenthal@CoreyRobin I oppose the ASA boycotting Israeli universities and support the same boycott as Abbas.
— mkazin (@mkazin) December 14, 2013
Jeffrey Goldberg crystallized the liberal Zionist consensus in a column yesterday opposing the academic boycott of Israel endorsed by the American Studies Association:
The ASA is also facing an unlikely opponent in its anti-Israel campaign: Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, supports the boycott of settlement-made goods, but he has come out against broad anti-Israel boycotts. The ASA is more Palestinian, in other words, than the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier also got in on the action.
Abbas has become the wedge liberal Zionists are using to drive a split between the BDS movement and liberals, fed up with Israel’s behavior, who might otherwise be supportive of boycott efforts.
The problem with pointing to Abbas as “more Palestinian” than the Palestine Liberation Organization is that it ignores the widespread appeal of BDS in Palestinian civil society— and the fact that his mandate to run the PA has run out.
“There is no Palestinian political party, trade union, NGO [nongovernmental organization] network or mass organization that does not strongly support BDS,” Omar Barghouti, one of the most prominent Palestinian voices for BDS, told the Electronic Intifada‘s Ali Abunimah. “Any Palestinian official who lacks a democratic mandate and any real public support, therefore, cannot claim to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people when it comes to deciding our strategies of resistance to Israel’s regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid.”
This is good. Shows how the people of Palestine are ahead of the (necessarily) corrupted Oslo-created “government”, the PA, and what’s left of the PLO.
Of course, things were far better when the PLO was “outside” the zone of actual occupation and in real opposition to Israel, rather than co-opted.
The Fourth Geneva Convention has a wonderful provision — namely, that no agreement between the occupier and the government of the occupied people is good in any provision which purports to weaken the protections of Civilian Persons offered by the Convention. The obvious reason for this so-necessary provision (which should void many of the agreements between PA and Israel) is its implied recognition that the occupied has coercive power over the occupied.
Abbas is so corrupted that you could not make jello out of his (publicly apparent) backbone. Abbas is no Mandela. But the PLO has long “answered” to whichever countries gave it money. How could it be otherwise?
I think he is being forced to say this. Israel has tremendous leverage over him and can make or break him. Yes, he is corrupt, but I believe Israel is actively forcing him to state things like this or else they will make life very difficult for him.
/Omar Barghouti, one of the most prominent Palestinian voices for BDS, told the Electronic Intifada‘s Ali Abunimah./
Two guys feeding each others buzz and relying on libral western progressives are
not “Palestinian Civil Society”
“There is no Palestinian political party, trade union, NGO [nongovernmental organization] network or mass organization that does not strongly support BDS,”
This statement indicates ignorance and detachment from the reality on the ground unless those parties, unions and NGO’s represent less than one percent of the population. The reality is that the Palestinians living in the WB and EJ don’t boycott Israel and Israelis goods. Actually, many of them prefer to do their shopping in Israeli commercial centers rather than Palestinians centers. Please, don’t respond “they have no other options” because they have options since the markets of Ramallah, Nablus, Bet-Lehem and others are close, available and sell Palestinian goods. The BDS campaign against the state of Israel will fall like the former falls of other campaigns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoQEFybrGj4
This will be a setback, to some degree. It means an additional layer of explanation is required in a defense of BDS: why Abbas is on very shaky ground as a representative of the Palestinians. People who already avoid the Palestinian-Israeli conflict because it’s allegedly so complicated aren’t going to be up on the conflicts between Palestinian factions, the revelations about Abbas from the Palestine Papers, etc.
(Side note: Eric Alterman sure turned out to be a nasty piece of work.)