Enough. It's time for a
boycott
The best way to end the
bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended
apartheid in South Africa
It's time. Long past time. The
best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel
to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to
apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian
groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of
conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement
divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South
Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions was born.Every day that Israel pounds Gaza
brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the
midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known
artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel.
It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and
sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle.
"The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with
kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."Yet even in
the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The
reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply
aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in
the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity.
Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by
counter-arguments.Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade
Israelis. The
world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It
has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its
criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against
Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal
blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive
measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the
US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period,
Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural
and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in
2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a
free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of
2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is
set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December
European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a
reward long sought by Jerusalem.It is in this context that
Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no
meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime
trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up
10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.Israel is not South Africa. Of
course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it
proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests,
petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing
echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs
and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the
settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African
politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West
Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007,
before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that
is Gaza.Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries
do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?Boycott
is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried
is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could
actually work.Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.This
one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have
been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I
published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the
advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I
contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist
press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only
Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing
into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go
to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy
but not Israelis.Our modest publishing plan required dozens of
phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv,
Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as
you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument
that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious
given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We
are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries.
No boycott can stop us.Just about now, many a proud Zionist is
gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these
very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in
infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's
Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom
specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the
Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government
action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to
consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."Ramsey
says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose
customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains,
"so it was purely commercially defensive."It was this kind of
cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South
Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that
is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to
Palestine.
