Israel:
Boycott,
Divest, Sanction
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--BDS for short--was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to
the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to
slow the momentum. Support is even emerging 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 stationed in Israel. It
calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures
and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the
antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was
effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.... This
international backing must stop."
Yet many still can't go there. The reasons are complex,
emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good
enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in
the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active
complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS
strategy, followed by counterarguments.
1. 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 $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends
to Israel is 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 non-Latin
American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In
the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada
went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union
is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on
December 8, 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 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are
needed.
2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it
isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it
proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker
measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have
failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing
echoes: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the
bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only
roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician,
said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the
West Bank and Gaza in 2007 was "infinitely
worse than apartheid."
3. Why single out Israel when the United
States, 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 BDS strategy should be tried
against Israel is practical: in a country so small and
trade-dependent, it could actually work.
4. 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, 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. In other
words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not
Israelis.
Coming up with this plan required dozens of phone calls,
e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to
Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this:
as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy,
dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it?
Building a movement requires endless communicating, as many
in the antiapartheid struggle well recall. The argument that
supporting 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 one another 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 those very
high-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, the
managing director of a British telecom company, sent an
e-mail 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."
When contacted, Ramsey said his decision wasn't
political. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients, 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.
Further Reading: Disengagement
and the Frontiers of Zionism
____
* On January 14, 2009 in response to
Israel's aggression in Gaza, the EU called off its plans to
upgrade the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a sign of
growing understanding that political sanctions can be
brought to bear to bring an end to the war.
