The Sydney Festival is a dazzling, annual summer celebration of the arts in Australia’s glittering beachside city. Last month a pro-Palestinian boycott by Festival artists created political shockwaves, as artists took foreign policy into their own hands. Around 35 percent of the Festival’s participants withdrew, objecting to Israel’s $20,000 sponsorship of a dance created by an Israeli choreographer but performed by an Australian dance company. Over 1,000 artists also signed a letter supporting the boycott. The boycott was remarkably successful compared to previous efforts in Australia and overseas, including in the U.S. where 33 states have anti-boycott laws.
The heat on Israel follows alleged war crimes in last year’s Gaza war, accusations of apartheid by Human Rights Watch and now Amnesty International, evictions and home demolitions in East Jerusalem, and the ever-expanding colonial settlements in the West Bank.
The boycott caused uproar. The conservative federal, and New South Wales state, arts ministers condemned it, as did a conservative former Australian ambassador to Israel, conservative Australian Jewish groups, and some artists. Israel was apoplectic.
Caught like a deer in headlights, the Festival organizers belatedly acknowledged the moral objections of artists by pledging to review their policy on donations by foreign governments, but refused to return Israel’s money. The Israeli dancers still danced, to rapturous reviews.
Opponents of the boycott have mounted some surprisingly weak objections, when there are more serious questions to be asked. They say it censors art for political reasons. This ignores that artists themselves chose not to perform, persuaded, in the free marketplace of ideas, by boycott campaigners. Artists who still wished to perform were free to do so, and audiences were free to attend. There were no union-style pickets. This was a relatively ‘smart’ boycott.
As the European Court of Human Rights, ruling over 47 European countries, found in 2020, advocacy of boycotting Israel is protected free speech – the opposite of censorship. Democracies only function if citizens are free to voice their opinions, hoping to convince others. It is absurd for government ministers to condemn such advocacy as censorship. It also patronizes artists as unqualified to make up their own minds.
Opponents also say it politicizes art. Yet political critique has long been a function of art and artists, from Shakespeare to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Art is not just elevator music. The same arguments are often made not to politicize sport. Yet Australia is willing to diplomatically boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics, but dismisses a citizen boycott of Israel.
Critics further argue that Israel is antisemitically singled out for a boycott when other states have worse human rights records. But it is not the responsibility of campaigners for Palestine to crusade for victims in every other bad country. It is to their credit that they have mobilized an effective boycott, which campaigners elsewhere might learn from. It is not antisemitic to criticize Israel for violating international law or to take peaceful action to urge it to stop.
Opponents claim that Israel is a democracy, as if that self-evidently defeats the call for a boycott. Yet democracies violate rights too and should not be immune from sanctions.
In any case, Israel is not a democracy for five million Palestinians living under Israeli military control. They have never been allowed to vote in Israeli elections for over 50 years. For them, Israel is a military dictatorship and, through its settlements, a colonizer.
Opponents warn that Hamas has endorsed the boycott, as if invoking the specter of terrorism automatically discredits it. Hamas supports COVID vaccines too, which hardly makes them a bad thing. Smearing boycotters by association with Hamas is pitifully cheap.
Critics also claim that struggling artists need to perform because their incomes plummeted during COVID. Again, the artists themselves chose to boycott. They know better than arts ministers whether they are willing to forgo income to stand up for human rights.
There are three genuine questions that should be asked of any boycott. Are the offender’s violations serious enough to justify it? Is the collateral damage to innocents, if any, proportionate? Could the boycott potentially improve the wrongdoer’s behavior?
First, Israeli violations of international law have been exhaustively documented. It denies Palestinians their rights to self-determination and statehood, has committed war crimes and human rights violations, and denies justice to victims. Its sponsorship of illegal Israeli settlements proves its agenda is to colonize Palestine, not free it or bring it peace. It has constantly defied the international community, including the Security Council and the International Court. Palestinian violations do not excuse Israel’s violations. That other countries may be worse does not diminish the case of a boycott of Israel, but draws attention to the need to boycott others as well.
Secondly, the boycott has caused limited collateral damage. It certainly targeted Israeli support for a blameless Israeli dance performed by blameless Sydney dancers, and inconvenienced audiences. The calculus of the boycott is that these are small sacrifices if stigmatizing cooperation with Israel may pressure it to change. Sanctions imposed by governments and the UN routinely inflict far greater harm, as the dire humanitarian situation in Afghanistan currently shows.
Thirdly, a boycott inflicts pointless vengeance if it has no prospect of success. Critics cry that shunning a tiny amount of Israeli money for a harmless dance in faraway Sydney will hardly bring peace to the Middle East, when decades of violence and diplomacy have not.
Yet, Israel is hyper sensitive about its perception by western allies, particularly those like Australia, which often shields Israel from legitimate criticism in the UN votes. The spread of sympathy to the Palestinian cause among the Australian community has rattled Israel’s cage, and increases its international isolation.
Citizen boycotts are growing precisely because western governments like Australia and the U.S. have so spectacularly failed to hold Israel to account for systematic violations over half a century. We should not only apply our new Magnitsky Act human rights sanctions to security adversaries like Russia or China, but also to our “friends” when they badly misbehave.
We know that China will not stop its repression of Uighurs just because Australia doesn’t send officials to watch the Olympics, but we boycott anyway, to stigmatize terrible behavior. Who knows what might happen when the butterfly of citizen boycotts flaps its wings in the desert of Middle Eastern politics? There is so little left to lose, and so much to gain.
Australians must exercise their own conscience about different types of boycotts. But the case for boycotts is plausible and should be taken seriously – not sledged by specious or misleading criticisms.
“Critics cry that shunning a tiny amount of Israeli money for a harmless dance in faraway Sydney will hardly bring peace to the Middle East, when decades of violence and diplomacy have not.”
Actually, by 2000 Israel gave up on diplomacy – one of the takeaways from Patrick Tyler’s “Fortress Israel” (and every other serious history) is that Barak could have had a peace agreement with Arafat, they were one millimeter apart on issues, but the military – not the security establishment, which wanted peace – put pressure on Barak not to do anything that would have led to a Palestinian state. Here’s a telling paragraph from page 441:
“The flaw in the Israeli military analysis was that the army could not admit that its own actions since Oslo had contributed to the violence; it could not acknowledge that Netanyahu had worked to dismantle Rabin’s legacy or that the army had protected and enabled the settler movement. In short, it could not admit that Israel’s political leaders had made a peace deal that the military state had no intention of keeping….Sharon’s approach was similar to Shamir’s a decade earlier: to give up nothing, to buy time, to make life miserable for the Palestinians so that they might be submissive or, better still, migrate to other lands.”
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The times are now most certainly ‘a’changing!!’
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/nyregion/synagogues-israel-opinion.html#:~:text=Jessie%20Sander%20had%20just%20started,she%20had%20written%20was%20found.&text=Last%20summer%2C%20Jessie%20Sander%20had,boss%20took%20an%20unexpected%20turn.
“A Jewish Teacher Criticized Israel. She Was Fired.”EXCERPT:
“Jessie Sander had just started a job at a synagogue in Scarsdale. But then a blog post she had written was found.” New York Times, Feb. 3/22
“Last summer, Jessie Sander had been on the job at a Jewish school in Westchester County for less than a month when a meeting with her boss took an unexpected turn. Was she comfortable working at a Zionist institution? he asked.
“Her boss, Rabbi David E. Levy of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., had come across a recent blog post she had written that renounced Zionism & sharply criticized Israel, Ms. Sander, 26, said in a lawsuit filed on Jan. 25. The rabbi had questions: Did she support Hamas? When she called herself ‘anti-Zionist,’ what did that mean?
“Ms. Sander, who is Jewish, explained her beliefs to the rabbi & said she would not discuss politics in her classes. The rabbi said he agreed with much of what she said & later praised her as a good role model for their students, Ms. Sander said.
“Then, one week later, Rabbi Levy & Eli Kornreich, the temple’s executive director, fired her.
“When she asked why, Mr. Kornreich said ‘it’s just not a good fit,’ she recalled. ‘In the earlier meeting, I was like, ‘Wow, here’s a manager who gets it & says, ‘No one should fire you for your political beliefs,’ then at the next meeting it was, ‘Oh, except for me.’”
“Rabbi Levy & Mr. Kornreich declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement to the community, Warren Haber, the synagogue president, said it ‘made this termination decision after much consideration and in accordance with WRT’s religious mission.’
“Mr. Haber said the synagogue’s work was based on the religious principle of Clal Yisrael, which calls for ‘strengthening our commitment to Israel & the Jewish people of all lands & working to establish understanding & commonality among the various expressions of Judaism.'” (cont’d)
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“The firing of Ms. Sander drew rebukes from left-wing Jewish groups & highlighted a generational divide over Israel among American Jews that is driving some of Judaism’s most delicate internal debates: What is the relationship between Zionism & Jewish identity? When it comes to Israel, should there be limits to what employees or members of Jewish institutions can believe or say?
“Ms. Sander began her job at the school last July & was fired 15 days later. Since then, she said, she has worked four part-time jobs to support herself, none of which provide health insurance or other benefits.
“Her lawsuit, which was filed before New York State Supreme Court in Westchester, accuses the school of violating labor law by firing her ‘because of her uncompensated lawful recreational activity, outside of work hours, off the employer’s premises & without use of the employer’s equipment or other property.’ It seeks her reinstatement to her old job, plus compensatory damages.
“Debate over Israel, including sometimes strong criticism of its policies, is not unusual at synagogues in the United States, especially those that follow the Reform movement. The Union of Reform Judaism, an umbrella group of Reform congregations, describes itself as a movement that ‘accepts & supports the foundational aim of Zionism: the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people.’
“At Westchester Reform Temple, rabbis have criticized Israel in the past. In his Rosh Hashana sermon in September, Rabbi Jonathan Blake criticized ‘extremists, cynical political officials & wealthy patrons’ in Israel for promoting ‘a grandiose vision of Jewish totalitarianism in the biblical Holy Land.’ But their critiques never challenge the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, as opposed to a state whose structure favors no ethnic or religious group.
“In the blog post, published on May 20 during last year’s conflict between Israel & Hamas militants in Gaza, Ms. Sander & a co-author, Elana Lipkin, wrote that they embraced a position that ‘rejects the Zionist claim to the land of Palestine.’
“The post continued, ‘Zionism is not equivalent to, or a necessary component of, Jewish identity.’
‘They also described Israeli actions against the Palestinians as genocide and accused Jewish institutions in the United States of spreading ‘one-sided narratives & propaganda’ about the conflict.”
Now independent states are no longer seen as viable, BDS will gain adherents as it is perceived as consistent with a secular state.
This is an excellent presentation of the case for the boycott. It systematically addresses the various points, and gives a simple, clear explanation of each. It’s a great reference for others who find themselves making the case. Well done!