[A-List] t's time. Long past time... to boycott Israel - Naomi Klein

[Leighm]

Enough. It's time for a boycott
Naomi Klein
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009

The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the 
kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/naomi-klein-boycott-israel/print

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.

A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)

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