[R-G] Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction

[Anthony Fenton]

Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction
Lookout
By Naomi Klein

This article appeared in the January 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.
January 7, 2009
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/klein/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--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 by The Nation, 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

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About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist  
and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The  
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an  
earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand  
Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the  
Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). more...