Naomi Klein Using Boycott Israel to End Apartheid
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
by Naomi Klein, Guardian UK
Credit Image: Palestine Solidarity Activists Occupy London Government Building
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 specializing 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.
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