The Case for Boycotting Israel - Boycott Now!

http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley08052006.html

Weekend Edition
August 5 / 6, 2006

The Case for Boycotting Israel
Boycott Now!
By VIRGINIA TILLEY

Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is finally time. After years of internal arguments, confusion, and
dithering, the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of
Israel. Good cause for a boycott has, of course, been in place for decades,
as a raft of initiatives already attests. But Israel's war crimes are now so
shocking, its extremism so clear, the suffering so great, the UN so
helpless, and the international community's need to contain Israel's
behavior so urgent and compelling, that the time for global action has
matured. A coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts
against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel's aggressive acts and
crimes against humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding
racist logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem.

That second goal of the boycott campaign is indeed the primary one. Calls
for a boycott have long cited specific crimes: Israel's continual attacks on
Palestinian civilians; its casual disdain for the Palestinian civilian lives
"accidentally" destroyed in its assassinations and bombings; its deliberate
ruin of the Palestinians' economic and social conditions; its continuing
annexation and dismemberment of Palestinian land; its torture of prisoners;
its contempt for UN resolutions and international law; and especially, its
refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. But the
boycott cannot target these practices alone. It must target their
ideological source.

The true offence to the international community is the racist motivation for
these practices, which violates fundamental values and norms of the
post-World War II order. That racial ideology isn't subtle or obscure. Mr.
Olmert himself has repeatedly thumped the public podium about the
"demographic threat" facing Israel: the "threat" that too many non-Jews
will - the horror - someday become citizens of Israel. It is the
"demographic threat" that, in Israeli doctrine, justifies sealing off the
West Bank and Gaza Strip as open-air prisons for millions of people whose
only real crime is that they are not Jewish. It is the "demographic threat,"
not security (Mr. Olmert has clarified), that requires the dreadful Wall to
separate Arab and Jewish communities, now juxtaposed in a fragmented
landscape, who might otherwise mingle.

"Demographic threat" is the most disgustingly racist phrase still openly
deployed in international parlance. It has been mysteriously tolerated by a
perplexed international community. But it can be tolerated no longer.
Zionist fear of the demographic threat launched the expulsion of the
indigenous Arab population in 1948 and 1967, created and perpetuates
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, inspires its terrible
human rights abuses against Palestinians, spins into regional unrest like
the 1982 attack on Lebanon (that gave rise to Hezbollah), and continues to
drive Israeli militarism and aggression.

This open official racism and its attendant violence casts Israel into the
ranks of pariah states, of which South Africa was the former banner emblem.
In both countries, racist nationalist logic tormented and humiliated the
native people. It also regularly spilled over to destabilize their
surrounding regions (choc-a-block with "demographic threats"), leading both
regimes to cruel and reckless attacks. Driven by a sense of perennial
victimhood, they assumed the moral authority to crush the native hordes that
threatened to dilute the organic Afrikaner/Jewish nations and the
white/western civilization they believed they so nobly represented.

A humiliated white society in South Africa finally gave that myth up. Israel
still clings to it. It has now brought Israel to pulverize Lebanon, trying

to eliminate Hezbollah and, perhaps, to clear the way for an attack on Iran.
Peace offers from the entire Arab world are cast aside like so much garbage.
Yet again, the Middle East is plunged into chaos and turmoil, because a
normal existence -- peace, full democracy -- is anathema to a regime that
must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to
justify the rejectionism that preserves its ethnic/racial character and
enables its continuing annexations of land.

Why has this outrageously racist doctrine survived so long, rewarded by
billions of dollars in US aid every year? We know the reasons. For too many
Westerners, Israel's Jewish character conflates with the Holocaust legacy to
make intuitive sense of Israel's claim to be under continual assault.
Deep-seated Judeo-Christian bias against Islam demonizes Israel's mostly
Muslim victims. European racist prejudice against Arabs (brown-skinned
natives) casts their material dispossession as less humanly significant.
Naïve Christian visions of the "Holy Land" naturalize Jewish governance in
biblical landscapes. Idiot Christian evangelistic notions of the Rapture and
the End Times posit Jewish governance as essential to the return of the
Messiah and the final Millennium (even though, in that repellent narrative,
Jews will roast afterwards).

All those notions and prejudices, long confounding international action,
must now be set aside. The raw logic of Israel's distorted self-image and
racist doctrines is expressed beyond confusion by the now-stark reality: the
moonscape rubble of once-lovely Lebanese villages; a million desperate
people trying to survive Israeli aerial attacks as they carry children and
wheel disabled grandparents down cratered roads; the limp bodies of children
pulled from the dusty basements of crushed buildings. This is the reality of
Israel's national doctrine, the direct outcome of its racist worldview. It
is endangering everyone, and it must stop.

Designing the Campaign

Much debate has circulated about a boycott campaign, but hitherto it has not
moved beyond some ardent but isolated groups. Efforts have stalled on the
usual difficult questions: e.g., whether a boycott is morally compulsory to
reject Israel's rampant human rights violations or would impede vital
engagement with Israeli forums, or whether principled defense of
international law must be tempered by (bogus) calls for "balance".
Especially, recent debate has foundered on calls for an academic boycott.
Concerns here are reasonable, if rather narrow. Universities offer vital
connections and arenas for collaboration, debate, and new thinking. Without
such forums and their intellectual exchange, some argue, work toward a
different future is arguably impeded.

But this argument has exploded along with the southern Lebanese villages, as
Israeli university faculties roundly endorse the present war. As Ilan Pappé
has repeatedly argued, Israel's universities are not forums for enlightened
thought. They are crucibles of reproduction for racist Zionist logics and
practice, monitoring and filtering admissible ideas. They produce the
lawyers who defend the occupation regime and run its kangaroo "courts"; the
civil planners and engineers who design and build the settlements on
Palestinian land; the economists and financiers who design and implement the
grants that subsidize those settlements; the geologists who facilitate
seizure of Palestinian aquifers; the doctors who treat the tortured so that
they can be tortured again; the historians and sociologists who make sense
of a national society while preserving official lies about its own past; and
the poets, playwrights, and novelists who compose the nationalist opus that
glorifies and makes (internally, at least) moralistic sense of it all.

Those of us who have met with Jewish Israeli academics in Israeli
universities find the vast majority of them, including well-meaning
liberals, operating in a strange and unique bubble of enabling fictions.
Most of them know nothing about Palestinian life, culture, or experience.
They know strangely little about the occupation and its realities, which are

crushing people just over the next hill. They have absorbed simplistic
notions about rejectionist Arafat, terrorist Hamas, and urbane Abbas. In
this special insulated world of illusions, they say nonsense things about
unreal factors and fictionalized events. Trying to make sense of their
assumptions is no more productive that conversing about the Middle East with
the Bush administration's neo-cons, who also live in a strange bubble of
ignorance and fantasy. Aside from a few brave and beleaguered souls, this is
the world of Israel's universities. It will not change until it has to -
when the conditions of its self-reproduction are impaired and its
self-deceptions too glaring.

The Real Goal: Changing Minds

The universities represent and reproduce the bubble world of the Israeli
Jewish population as a whole. And no people abandons its bubble willingly.
In South Africa, Afrikaners clung to their own bubble - their
self-exonerating myths about history, civilization, and race -- until they
were forced by external sanctions and the collapsing national economy to
rethink those myths. Their resistance to doing so, while racist, was not
purely vicious. Many kind and well-meaning Afrikaners simply didn't believe
they had to rethink ideas that manifested to them as givens and that shaped
their reality. (One valued Afrikaner friend here recalls her life during
apartheid South Africa as being like The Truman Show, a film in which a man
unknowingly grows up in a television show, set in an artificial dome world
designed to look like a small town.) When their reality fell apart, suddenly
no one would admit to ever having believed or supported it.

The Zionist worldview is an even more complete system. All historical and
geographic details are provided to create a total mythical world, in which
Jews have rights to the land and Palestinians have none. It is a fully
realized construction, like those Hebraized maps carefully drawn by the
Zionist movement in the 1930s to erase the ancient Arabic landscape and
substitute Hebrew biblical references. It is also very resilient. The "new
historians" have exposed the cherished national historical narrative of 1948
and 1967 as a load of fictions, but the same fictions are still reproduced
by state agencies to assure Israeli and diaspora Jews of their innocence and
the righteousness of their cause. The vast majority of Israelis therefore
remain comfortable in their Truman Show and even see any external pressure
or criticism as substantiating it. We need no more graphic evidence of that
campaign's success than the overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for the
present catastrophic assault on Lebanon, reflecting their sincere beliefs
that nuclear-power Israel is actually under existential threat by a
guerrilla group lobbing katyushas across the border. Staggering to
observers, that belief is both sobering and instructive.

To force people steeped in such a worldview to rethink their notions, their
historical myths, and their own best interests requires two efforts:

(1) Serious external pressure: here, a full boycott that undermines Israel's
capacity to sustain the economic standards its citizens and corporations
expect, and which they associate with their own progressive self-image; and

(2) clear and unwavering commitment to the boycott's goal, which - in Israel
as in South Africa - must be full equality, dignity, safety, and welfare of
everyone in the land, including Palestinians, whose ancestral culture arose
there, and the Jewish population, which has built a national society there.

That combination is essential. Nothing else will work. Diplomacy, threats,
pleading, the "peace process," mediation, all will be useless until external
pressure brings Israel's entire Jewish population to undertake the very
difficult task of rethinking their world. This pressure requires the full
range of boycotts, sanctions, and divestment that the world can employ.
(South African intellectual Steven Friedman has observed wryly that the way
to bring down any established settler-colonial regime is to make it choose

between profits and identity. Profits, he says, will win every time.)

What to Target

Fortunately, from the South African experience, we know how to go forward,
and strategies are proliferating. The basic methods of an international
boycott campaign are familiar. First, each person works in his or her own
immediate orbit. People might urge divestment from companies investing in
Israel by their colleges and universities, corporations, clubs, and
churches. Boycott any sports event that hosts an Israeli team, and work with
planners to exclude them. Participate in, and visit, no Israeli cultural
events - films, plays, music, art exhibits. Avoid collaborating with Israeli
professional colleagues, except on anti-racist activism. Don't invite any
Israeli academic or writer to contribute to any conference or research and
don't attend their panels or buy their books, unless their work is engaged
directly in anti-racist activism. Don't visit Israel except for purposes of
anti-racist activism. Buy nothing made in Israel: start looking at labels on
olive oil, oranges, and clothing. Tell people what you are doing and why.
Set up discussion groups everywhere to explain why.

For ideas and allies, try Googling the "boycott Israel" and "sanctions
against Israel" campaigns springing up around the world. Know those allies,
like the major churches, and tell people about them. For more ideas, read
about the history of the boycott of South Africa.

Second, don't be confused by liberal Zionist alternatives that argue against
a boycott in favor of "dialogue". If we can draw any conclusion from the
last half-century, it is that, without the boycott, dialogue will go
nowhere. And don't be confused by liberal-Zionist arguments that Israel will
allow Palestinians a state if they only do this or that. Israel is already
the only sovereign power in Palestine: what fragments are left to
Palestinians cannot make a state. The question now is not whether there is
one state, but what kind of state it comprises. The present version is
apartheid, and it must change. However difficult to achieve, and however
frightening to Jewish Israelis, the only just and stable solution is full
democracy.

Third, be prepared for the boycott's opposition, which will be much louder,
more vicious, and more dangerous than it was in the boycott of South Africa.
Read and assemble solid documentable facts. Support each other loudly and
publicly against the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism. And support your
media against the same charges. Write to news media and explain just who the
"Israel media teams" actually are. Most pro-Israeli activism draws directly
from the Israeli government's propaganda outreach programs. Spotlight this
fact. Team up to counter their pressure on newspapers, radio stations, and
television news forums. Don't let them capture or intimidate public debate.
By insisting loudly (and it must be sincere) that the goal is the full
equality of dignity and rights of everyone in Israel-Palestine, including
the millions of Jewish citizens of Israel, demolish their specious claims of
anti-Semitism.

Finally, hold true to the principles that drive the boycott's mission. Don't
tolerate the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism in your own group or movement.
Anti-Jewish racists are certainly out there, and they are attracted to these
campaigns like roaches. They will distract and absorb your energies, while
undermining, degrading, and destroying the boycott movement. Some are
Zionist plants, who will do so deliberately. If you can't change their minds
(and don't spend much time trying, because they will use your efforts to
drain your time and distract your energies), denounce them, expel them,
ignore them, have no truck with them. They are the enemy of a peaceful
future, not its allies - part of the problem, not the solution.

Boycott the Hegemon

This is the moment to turn international pressure on the complicit US, too.
It's impossible, today, to exert an effective boycott on the United States,
as its products are far too ubiquitous in our lives. But it's quick and easy

to launch a boycott of emblematic US products, upsetting its major
corporations. It's especially easy to boycott the great global consumables,
like Coca-Cola, MacDonald's, Burger King, and KFC, whose leverage has
brought anti-democratic pressures on governments the world over. (Through
ugly monopoly practices, Coke is a nasty player in developing countries
anyway: see, for example, MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.killercoke.org." claiming to be http://www.killercoke.org.) Think you'll miss
these foods too much? Is consuming something else for a while too much of a
sacrifice, given what is happening to people in Lebanon? And think of the
local products you'll be supporting! (And how healthy you will get).

In the US, the impact of these measures may be small. But in Africa, Latin
America, Europe, and the Arab and Muslim worlds, boycotting these famous
brands can gain national scope and the impact on corporate profits will be
enormous. Never underestimate the power of US corporations to leverage US
foreign policy. They are the one force that consistently does so.

But always, always, remember the goal and vision. Anger and hatred, arising
from the Lebanon debacle, must be channelled not into retaliation and
vengeance but into principled action. Armed struggle against occupation
remains legitimate and, if properly handled (no killing of civilians), is a
key tool. But the goal of all efforts, of every stamp, must be to secure
security for everyone, toward building a new peaceful future. It's very
hard, in the midst of our moral outrage, to stay on the high road. That
challenge is, however, well-known to human rights campaigns as it is to all
three monotheistic faiths. It is what Islam knows as the "great jihad" - the
struggle of the heart. It must remain the guiding torch of this effort,
which we must defend together.

Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in
South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace
in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and
Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.