Naomi Klein: Boycott, divestment, sanctions key to ending Israeli occupation

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      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 even in the face of these clear calls, many of us 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 U.S. 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 of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: 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 was “infinitely worse than apartheid.” That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

      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, 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. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

      Coming up with our modest publishing 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 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 that 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.

      This column was first published in The Nation. Read more by Naomi Klein at www.naomiklein.org.

      Comments

      7 Comments

      Lou

      Jan 10, 2009 at 11:16pm

      What the hell does she expect Israel to do when Hamas keeps firing rockets at innocent citizens on a daily basis - sit back and do nothing?

      Israel has never attacked anyone who hasn't asked for it over and over again...

      Lou

      Jan 10, 2009 at 11:29pm

      Why doesn't Naomi implore Hamas to stop SENDING ROCKETS at innocent civilians in Israel.

      I guess this hasn't occurred to her....

      ShiFty186

      Jan 13, 2009 at 11:04am

      I would read this article before I decided who the victims of this tragedy are.
      "The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children."
      http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine

      ToroLatino

      Jan 13, 2009 at 10:39pm

      Comparing Israel with the apartheid white racist South African regime is just part of a strong pro Palestinian apparatus. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. There are 1,200.000 Arab Israelis who share the same rights as any Israeli citizen. Actually the irony is that Muslims in Israel have more liberties then in any Muslim country. Naomi Kleins article is nothing more then a piece of Hamas propaganda.

      See with your heart

      Jan 15, 2009 at 7:36pm

      is killing more than 300 children & woman a part of democracy ? no it is demoCRAZY. Israel has no intention of granting a palestinian state
      even if hamas did not exist. Read history of Israel nation, you will see the truth.

      hzchan

      Jan 28, 2009 at 1:37pm

      Israel needs to answer for all the injustice it has caused on the Palestinians.

      The South African comparison doesn't work because SA's right to exist as a nation state was never threatened or called into question. Israel finds itself amongst neighbouring states that question it's existence or clandestinely fund terrorist attacks to undermine it. Israel's response to this reality has been excessive and often an excuse for unlawful behaviour that ought to be tried in an international court.

      Nonetheless, a global trade sanction on Israel does little to address it's legitimate security issues.

      We all need to move beyond the balance sheet of who suffered more or who caused the most violence between Israel or Palestine. It's very simple, we need to:
      1 achieve security for Israel
      2. kick them out of the occupied territories
      3. create a legitimate and honest Palestinian state
      4. commit massive social and economic investment in Palestine
      5. stop states from using Palestine as a surrogate to get at Israel or the US.
      6. initiate a reconciliation initiative to bring justice to this 30 yr conflict.

      That's where we should focus our energy on rather than a misguided boycott that doesn't nothing to address Israel's (and every one's) most primordial need - security.