Answering critics of the boycott movement

Sami Hermez, The Electronic Intifada, 1 October 2009

The boycott call invites Israelis to stand alongside in solidarity with

Palestinians. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Over the last three years, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against
Israel has been gaining stride. Individuals around the world have been joining this call, from
organizing actions in supermarkets in France and Great Britain protesting Israeli products
made in settlements, to filmmakers withdrawing movies from film festivals, to prominent
Israelis making a public stand with the BDS movement. Only recently, a multi-billion dollar
Norwegian wealth fund divested from the Israeli arms company Elbit, while other companies,
like Veolia, a French conglomerate involved in building and managing the Jerusalem light-
rail, have suffered setbacks due to the bad publicity the boycott movement has generated.

The list of successful BDS actions has now become too long to list, yet, there are still many
out there who do not believe in this movement and have reservations on a number of grounds,
offering two main concerns that are rarely tackled, and when they are it is only cursory. The
first is the criticism of why a boycott movement against Israel and not countries like China,
Sudan or the US. This claim often gets tagged on with the idea that this is due to an inherent
anti-Semitism. The second concerns the argument that boycott is against dialogue, which
often comes along with accusations that it promotes censorship and is a form of collective
punishment.

Boycotting other countries

Two recent open statements on boycott over the summer, by Naomi Klein and Neve Gordon,
both anticipated the first criticism, but neither went far enough in explaining why it is
necessary to boycott Israel and why we don't boycott other countries. Gordon asked the
question only to almost completely ignore it, while Klein has provided two explanations that
when combined begin to form a coherent response. In her article published by The Nation on
8 January 2009, in response to the question of why we do not boycott other western countries
that are also human rights abusers, Klein wrote that "Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The
reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and
trade-dependent, it could actually work." While this is true it does not fully respond to the
critics.

There are several other reasons why we do not boycott some of the other countries mentioned
above. By far the most important of these, outlined by Klein in an interview with Cecille
Surasky for Alternet on 1 September 2009, is that individuals around the world are not
boycotting, but rather, they are responding to a call for boycott coming from Palestinian civil
society. Klein is not the first to say this; veterans of the South Africa anti-apartheid campaign
who led a successful boycott have also stressed the need to stand with indigenous
communities. Boycott is a move to heed the voice of an oppressed group and follow its lead.
The idea is that there are no movements out of Tibet, in the case of Chinese oppression, or
Iraq in the case of the American occupation, that are calling for boycott and for the
international community to respond to that call. This is important! The BDS movement comes
from within Palestinian society and it is this factor that makes it so powerful and effective. If
there were calls for the boycott of places like the US, China or North Korea coming from
those the governments oppress, then it would be worthwhile to listen to such calls.

Naomi Klein's original comment that BDS is not dogmatic but tactical is crucial, in that the
movement does not claim that BDS can successfully be used in fighting all oppression
wherever it is, but that in certain cases of apartheid and colonial oppression, this tool is highly
effective. The case of Israel proves very salient here because it receives an almost surreal
amount of aid and foreign investment from around the world, most notably the US, with
which it enjoys a special status. This makes the daily operations of the Israeli state and its
institutions far more accountable to the international community than a place like Sudan,
frequently brought up by boycott critics because of the violence in Darfur. It also means, in
the case of economic boycott and divestment, that the international community is withdrawing
its gifts and support, rather than allowing it to enjoy its special status -- hardly a punishment.
It is the high level of support that Israel enjoys that makes it susceptible to BDS, whereas in
some of the other countries that are often promoted in debates for boycott, as Klein says,
"there are [already] very clear state sanctions against these countries."

In the same September article, Yael Lerer, an Israeli publisher interviewed alongside Klein,
echoed this position: "these countries don't have these film festivals and Madonna is not going
to have a concert in North Korea. The problem here is that the international community treats
Israel like it was a normal, European, Western state. And this is the basis of the boycott call:
the special relationship that Israeli universities have with European universities and with
universities in the United States, which universities in Zimbabwe don't have. I do believe that
Israel could not continue the occupation for one single day without the support of the United
States and the European Union."

Critics of BDS must keep in mind the tactical aspect of the movement. We cannot boycott all
countries in the world, but this does not mean that BDS against Israel cannot be applied as a
tool to force a restructuring of relations between Palestinians and Israelis. This leads into the
next criticism regarding boycott as being anti-dialogue.

Boycott is dialogue

Since the signing of the Oslo accords in 1994, many have walked down the path of dialogue --
I tried it for several years -- and found this to be a strategy to stall for time while the Israeli
government was building facts on the ground. We saw dialogue become the slogan for former
criminals to clean their bloody hands and appear as peaceful while they continued their
strategies of oppression; Israeli President Shimon Peres has been the master of such tactics. I
found on college campuses in the US where I studied that dialogue was a way to neutralize
confrontation and sanitize a dirty conflict. But avoiding confrontation favors the status quo,
and the status quo has been, until BDS, in favor of occupation.

The boycott movement is, to be sure, against this dialogue, but not dialogue in an absolute
sense. In fact, at its very core, BDS is a movement that is premised on dialogue and of re-
appropriating the meaning of dialogue to its rightful place -- one that sees a communication
between two equal partners and not one where the occupier can force demands and dictate
terms to the occupied. BDS is supposed to foster dialogue by locating those who are
committed to real and consistent struggle against Zionism -- and this is most appropriately
seen not in economic forms of boycott but in cultural and academic boycott where artists,
musicians, filmmakers, academics and other cultural figures are able to come together,
converse and build networks in the face of oppressive institutions that are the real target of
these boycotts. Where economic boycott creates economic pressure, cultural boycott fosters
dialogue and communication precisely because it shames and shuns those that directly
collaborate with the Israeli government and its institutions.

The power of all these forms of BDS is in their recognition that true justice can only be
achieved when Israelis and Palestinians work together for a common cause, when they realize
that their struggle is shared, and when Israelis understand that they must sacrifice alongside
Palestinians if they want true peace. The power of BDS is that it offers an alternative to the
national struggles of Hamas and Fatah, and calls on Israelis to join Palestinians in their
struggle, and to move beyond the comfort zone of preaching peace, and into the realm of
action that requires a "no business as usual" attitude. Indeed, BDS provides the means to
generate a new movement that can respond to the main Palestinian political parties that have
made a mockery of a people's right to resist, despite their achievements of the past. A
significant part of this is that BDS enables a discourse that moves beyond "ending the
occupation" to place demands for the right of return and equal rights for Palestinians in Israel
as top priorities.

If Israelis and Palestinians can build a movement together, can struggle together, then this
movement will embody the world they wish to create, one that is shared. Thus, BDS is not a
tactic for a national movement; as it gains strength it will prove to have foes on both sides of
the nationalist divide. Its power as a tactic lies in its ability to foster a movement that
challenges nationalist discourse. It can create the conditions to make possible a movement
that recognizes that while national self-determination remains a central element in a world
ruled by antagonistic nationalisms, it should not be constrained by traditional notions of
nationalism based on superiority and ethnic exclusion, or by the force of current political
parties. In this way, BDS is not anti-dialogue, on the contrary, it is a call out to Israelis to be
partners in struggle. It is a call out to Israelis to take a step forward towards envisioning
collectively an alternative relationship in the land of Israel-Palestine.

It is time to step out of our comfort zones, to confront, to not be satisfied in talking about
tolerance and dialogue for the sake of dialogue. It is time to realize that people already
recognize the humanity of the other, but that politics intervene to ensure "we" do not grant
"them" this humanity. It is time to realize that it is not the Israeli who is targeted by BDS, but
the Israeli government and Israeli institutions that collaborate in the occupation of the
Palestinians, and degrade and demonize them. Finally, it is time to realize that BDS is a
winnable, nonviolent strategy precisely because it works on slowly changing attitudes and
building bridges towards a common vision of justice and equality, and because it creates a
real feeling of loss, therefore real pressure, on Israeli governments and institutions, that go
beyond the lip service of the "peace process."

Sami Hermez is a doctoral candidate of anthropology at Princeton University working on

questions of violence and nonviolence.

Quelle:

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10805.shtml