In their New York Times piece today advising Palestinians on how to achieve freedom, Jeffrey Goldberg and Hussein Ibish ignore the civil society movement that is transforming the struggle and warn the Palestinians not to make Israel uncomfortable.
[S]everal Latin American states have recognized the Palestinians and upgraded the diplomatic status of their missions. Many Israelis are discomfited by this. The P.L.O. should be as clear as possible that these efforts do not constitute an end-run around an American-brokered negotiated agreement, but are an adjunct to both negotiations and the state-building program….
There are… Palestinian initiatives that are completely counterproductive. Continued threats to unilaterally declare independence are pointless and provocative. Support for boycotts against all Israeli products and companies also serve only to convince Israel and its supporters that the Palestinians seek its elimination. Israel is a member of the United Nations and must not be delegitimized.
Rob Malley and Hussein Agha’s piece in the New York Review of Books also ignores the civil society movement and boycott movement that are transforming the struggle– and they too warn the Palestinians against discomfiting the Israelis in international forums. Their verb is discomfort:
[The] temptation has grown to increase international pressure on Israel and heighten its discomfort. If it is delegitimization Israelis fear, then it must be delegitimization that will make them budge. Faced with the prospect of isolation, Israel might be persuaded to end its occupation. But pressure is a double-edged sword requiring skillful handling, especially when exercised on a people convinced by the calamities of their own history of the inveterate hostility of much of the outside world. Those who wield it often only confirm in Israeli eyes how unreliable their avowed friendship was in the first place. One should not be surprised if the Israeli people, their sense of vulnerability enhanced, opt to hunker down rather than reach out.
Did I hear that right? Palestinians must be friends with and “reach out” to the Israelis? Whoever won their rights by trying to be friends to an oppressor? I remind you of Michael Walzer’s wisdom from the desegregation struggle in 1960 in North Carolina:
“If we negotiate,” the editor of a Negro college paper told me, “my grandchildren will still be worrying about that cup of coffee.”
Walzer saluted the campaign of lunch-counter protests as a “resistance” movement. Resist doesn’t mean kiss ass.
How far would Zionism have gotten without boycotts? It used them all the time; Herzl relished the use of boycott. “They [Zionists] paraded, demonstrated, shouted and boycotted–embracing what their enemies called the politics of noise” (writes Ezra Mendelsohn). How far would a union get in negotiations if you took away its right to strike? Nowhere; management and labor are not equal parties; and the strike is one way of trying to level the playing field. But keeping the playing field tilted seems to be the aim of both Malley-Agha and Goldberg-Ibish.
