Will Gordimer Shun Apartheid?
April 26, 2008
‘Facing widespread pressure, Nadine Gordimer may pull out of Israel writers meet,’ Haaretz reports. Also check out the BRICUP letter to Gordimer from Hilary and Steven Rose, and a moving one from Palestinian academic Haidar Eid.
South African writer Nadine Gordimer may pull out of her appearance next month at Jerusalem’s International Writers Festival in the face of a widespread campaign pressuring her to cancel.
The 84-year-old Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, is scheduled to make three appearances at the festival, which runs at Mishkenot Sha’ananim May 11-15.
Other writers slated to attend include Americans Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer and Russell Banks, as well as Israelis David Grossman and Amos Oz, the latter of whom is scheduled to share the stage with Gordimer on May 12.
“I am dealing with the issue now,” Gordimer told Haaretz in a telephone conversation from her home in Johannesburg on Friday. She refused to comment further on the controversy, except to say she would soon make a public statement on her decision.
Circling the Boycott Wagons
April 7, 2008
I hope that the UCU boycott campaign has circled the wagons as pro-Israel groups launch an attack. I don’t think this is a very sound argument it suggests three things that science should be universal, that it should be above politics and that the UCU boycott is descriminating on the basis of “ethnicity, religion…etc”. Is it just me or are they none too subtily suggesting anti-semitism again?
Anyway Science has never been above politics - we could never imagine an argument of the Universality of Science being used to prevent a boycott of Nazi scientists for example. This doesn’t even address the point of the boycott which is, as far as I’m aware, that Israeli educational institutions should be boycotted because Israel itself hinders and stops Palestinian education. In fact the attack against the boycott argues for the very same just treatment of Israelis that the boycott argues Israel should give Palestinians. No discrimination on ethnicity etc and all the freedoms required of academics such as freedom of movement etc. It seems they’re suffering a bad case of double think. Until the restrictions are removed from Palestinians Israeli academics should suffer too - due to their responsibility in the situation.
Personally I think intellectuals have a greater responsibility in society to speak out against crimes such as those of the Israeli Apartheid State. Indeed this view was held by survivers of the Holocaust such Victor Klemperer, a Jew living under Nazi rule who avoided the gas chambers by a near miracle, he wrote about a German Professor friend whom he had admired, but who had finally joined the pack:
If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.
With this greater responsibility in mind, I think its correct to boycott intellectuals to raise awareness of their complicity in crimes and also that Israelis should suffer similar restrictions as Palestinian academics - a more appropritate use of the ‘Universality of Science’ argument.
Four Int’l Academic Organizations Slam British Boycott
Four international academic organizations signed a joint declaration denouncing British academics for attempting to impose a boycott on Israeli research institutions.
Prof. Shlomo Sasson, who heads the Institute for Diabetes Research at the Hebrew University, was one of the people who initiated the declaration. He said: “This declaration reflects the opinions of four organizations that represent thousands of researchers, physicians and health system employees in the field of diabetes and endocrinology.” He added: “I hope that this declaration helps prevent attempts to organize scientific boycotts in the future.”
Viva the Boycott!
April 4, 2008
It looks like the boycott of Israel continues to be on the agenda of the Unions - much to the annoyance of Zionists. I wish them every success! The following from the Jewish Chronicle:
A communal activist has warned of a concerted effort to get the Trades Union Congress to overturn its anti-boycott stance towards Israel.
After boycott motions appeared on the conference agendas of a number of smaller unions, and a week after it was revealed that the University and College Union was trying to reactivate its academic boycott, Steve Scott of Trade Union Friends of Israel said he believed this was the start of a bigger campaign.
“In the long term, a proper boycott with a campaign of sanctions and disinvestment would be our fear,” said Mr Scott. “The unions want to goad the TUC into a major change of its position. But this would not be without its problems for the TUC. We believe our opponents are being taken down a very dangerous path that could bring difficulties with the world trade union.”
Support the UCU Boycott
March 29, 2008
I hope the UCU takes the boycott even further forward this time - eventually, with support, they will succeed. This article by Ilan Pappe is good on the reasons for a boycott. The following artilce in the Jewish Chronicle describes actions against the boycott underway already.
A thinly veiled attempt by the University and College Union national executive to reintroduce an academic boycott of Israel by the back door has brought a swift communal response.
The Stop The Boycott campaign, launched to defeat last year’s proposal — successfully — has been reactivated, and communal leaders have spoken out strongly against the UCU executive.
A motion called “Palestine and the Occupation” by Tom Hickey of the Socialist Workers Party, and seconded by UCU president Linda Newman, who made anti-boycott statements prior to her election last year, will be tabled at the union’s conference, due to be held in Manchester in May.
Boycott Eden Springs
November 27, 2007
I notice that the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign is kicking necessary ass. “Israeli water firm faces boycott call in Capital”, reports The Scotsman. (For more on Eden Springs’ exploitation of stolen Arab assets, check out SPSC’s website)
AN Israeli water firm could lose its £117,000 contract with the city council after claims it is “pillaging” Syrian natural resources to create profit.
Various groups are calling for a boycott of Eden Springs. It operates in the Golan Heights, a border plateau captured by Israel from Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967.
Unite Against the Gag
October 4, 2007
Alex Callinicos comments on the authoritarian suppression of dissent by the UCU leadership. (Thanks Keith)
Very unusually, this is the second column of mine running on the same subject – the controversy caused by the UCU lecturers’ union decision to discuss a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
My suggestion that the left in UCU should not propose a boycott at next year’s union congress caused some anger among Palestinian solidarity activists. I regret this, but believe our disagreement was essentially over tactics, not principle.
I support boycotting Israel, but believed that we needed to head off the danger of a big defeat for the left if UCU general secretary Sally Hunt went ahead with a membership ballot on the issue. But now Hunt has gone even further than I expected.
On Friday of last week the union’s strategy and finance committee declared a ballot would be “unlawful” and cancelled the planned series of meetings around the country to implement the congress decision to hold a debate on the boycott.
This decision was based on legal advice that “it would be beyond the union’s powers and unlawful, directly or indirectly to call for or to implement a boycott by the union and its members of any kind of Israeli universities and other academic institutions”.
The lawyers also say, “to ensure that the union acts lawfully meetings should not be held to ascertain the level of support for such a boycott”.
This amounts to the most astonishing and self-imposed gagging order on a trade union. We’ve grown too used to the scope of trade union action becoming heavily restricted thanks to the Tory legislation that New Labour has kept in force.
But now we’re being told that we can’t even debate a boycott. As a UCU member, the first thing I want to know is who provided this legal advice.
I was astonished to learn that over the summer UCU head office had consulted the solicitor Anthony Julius, Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer.
He has equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, denounced the UCU decision to discuss a boycott as “truly appalling”, and offered to act for academics or students affected by any boycott.
What on earth is Sally Hunt doing using UCU members’ subscriptions on consulting someone so clearly associated with one side of the argument?
The strategy and finance committee’s decision follows the most massive international campaign by supporters of the state of Israel against the UCU decision. The Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz threatened legal action to “devastate and bankrupt” anyone acting against Israeli universities.
Witch-hunted
Dershowitz is an arch-hypocrite. He claims to be a civil liberties lawyer but has defended the use of torture and the destruction of Palestinian villages in the fight against terrorism.
He has witch-hunted US academic critics of Israel, helping to block the award of tenure to the anti-Zionist historian Norman Finkelstein. That’s how much he cares for freedom of speech.
But the UCU’s leadership’s caving in under pressure goes way beyond the debate over Israel and the boycott. This is a fundamental attack on the right of trade unions even to discuss, let alone to engage in, international solidarity.
As Amjad Barham of the Palestinian academics’ union points out in a letter to Sally Hunt, “during the struggle against the odious apartheid regime in South Africa, British academics were at the forefront of the academic and other boycotts of the racist state. We do not see why considering ways of fighting Israeli oppression of Palestinians should be subject to different considerations.”
It’s bitterly ironic that this decision should have come the week there were widespread calls in the Western media for tougher international sanctions on Burma. Why is it OK to boycott Burma but we can’t even discuss boycotting Israel?
This issue now transcends the question of the boycott. Whatever our views on that subject, lecturers – and all trade unionists – should unite to condemn and to demand the reversal of last week’s decision.
We won’t stand for being gagged on the say-so of anonymous lawyers. The debates on the boycott should be reinstated. And the next UCU congress should have high on its agenda how to deepen our solidarity with the Palestinian people.
UCU, and the Academic Shock and Awe
October 1, 2007
I have for some time been conflicted about my decision not to join the UCU (or its predecessors). I am generally sceptical of rigidly heirarchical structures, and the leadership of unions generally is notoriously corrupt. The handling of the strike last year was so quite pathetic, and if I were an undergrad, I would have turned against the teachers like so many of them did, despite initial support from the equally ineffectual NUS. No attempt was made to reach out to the students and bring them on board (although I was not associated with any union, when I explained to them the rationales for the strike, I found them invariably sympathetic). The unions pretend to democratic ideals, but in fact remain rigidly top down. So here we have the latest: only months after the excutives of NUJ reversed the wishes of the majority of its member for a boycott of Israeli goods, the UCU’s leadership does the same. But as if this unprincipled action were not enough, it has even cancelled the tour of Palestinian academics who intended to meet their colleagues at campuses around the country to argue for the necessity of a boycott.
In a microcosm, what happened with the NUJ and UCU is symbolic of everything that is wrong with Western style democracy. So long as the opinion of the electorate reflects the interest of the elites, they are allowed a voice. Should it ever come in conflict, as it did in this instance, it can be simply ignored.
Here is the letter sent to the head of UCU Sally Hunt by the President of Federation of Union of Palestinian Universities’ Professors & Employees.
Open Letter to Ms. Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the University and College Union
PFUUPE | | September 29, 2007
Dear Ms. Hunt,
We have received with dismay, although not entirely with surprise, your letter of September 28, 2007 to members of the delegation of Palestinian academic trade union members informing them of the decision by the University and College Union’s leadership to cancel their speaking tour to the UK to discuss the academic boycott of Israel with their colleagues at universities there. We wish to state clearly that we believe that our British colleagues have been deprived of an opportunity to better inform themselves about an issue which is of concern to conscientious academics and intellectuals the world over. Moreover, we are disappointed to see that the leadership of a prominent organization of academics such as yours has not defended the right of its members to engage in debate on this matter. Open debate and discussion are the foundations of academic freedom, and thus we cannot understand why the door to open consideration of controversial ideas has been so abruptly closed.We shall continue to pursue other avenues to make our case heard in the academic community in the UK, and shall not be deterred by the cancellation of the invitation extended to us by the UCU. While we do not have the resources of the Israel lobby in the UK, we do think that fair-minded British academics will be willing to listen to our case and give it thoughtful consideration. Truth is stronger than power, and we trust in the integrity of British academics to know that instinctively.
We do not think that your members are unaware of the significant role played by the UCU’s predecessor, the AUT, in upholding academics’ commitment to justice. During the struggle against the odious apartheid regime in South Africa, British academics were at the forefront of the academic and other boycotts of the racist state. We do not see why considering ways of fighting Israeli oppression of Palestinians should be subject to different considerations.
We appreciate the sentiments expressed in your letter about “finding a way of opening a dialogue with the Palestinian academic community on building solidarity.” The best form of solidarity with Palestinians, whether they are academics or ordinary people, is direct action aimed at bringing an end to the occupation and the regime of apartheid in Palestine. Isolating Israel in the international arena through various forms of boycott and sanctions and forcing it to obey international law and respect Palestinian rights is one of the strategies open to international civil society, including members of the academy. We are confident that our British colleagues will begin to realize that true solidarity with Palestinian academics requires a political commitment to bringing about an end to oppression and injustice.
Sincerely,
Dr. Amjad Barham
The President of Federation of Union of Palestinian Universities’ Professors & Employees
The decision has also been condemned by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP).
BRICUP (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine) today condemned the decision of the University and College Union (UCU) to cancel the tour of UK campuses by Palestinian academics. UCU was specifically instructed to organise this tour by the UCU Congress last May. The tour was intended to raise debate within the union about an academic boycott of Israeli universities. The UCU leadership under General Secretary Sally Hunt is hiding behind ‘legal advice’ which they have not disclosed to their members in order to sabotage a decision with which they disagree.
In May 2007 in Bournemouth, UCU Annual Congress voted by 158 to 99 in favour of a resolution which instructed the National Executive Committee to
circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion; encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;
organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists; issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action.
actively encourage and support branches to create direct links with Palestinian educational institutions and to help set up nationally sponsored programmes for teacher exchanges, sabbatical placements, and researchThe UCU senior office holders led by General Secretary Sally Hunt argued fiercely against this motion. The motion’s effect was to initiate a year-long debate about boycotting Israeli universities. Having lost the argument they are now finding other means to subvert the democratic vote of the union’s highest decision-making body.
This use of the law to interfere with democratic freedoms is a deeply worrying tendency – witness the 2005 Serious and Organized Crimes Act preventing protests around Parliament and Downing Street, and the decision last week to ban the march in Central London planned by the Stop the War Coalition.
BRICUP has the deepest doubts about the validity of the ‘legal advice’ which UCU is claiming as the reason for its cancellation of the tour by Palestinians, and the effective banning of discussion of the boycott topic in union branches. BRICUP demands answers to the following questions:
- who provided the legal advice?
- what was the verbatim advice received? It needs to be published so that it can be open to critical scrutiny
- was any previous advice sought from other sources, and if so what was its content?
According to BRICUP co-chair Professor Jonathan Rosenhead “It is all too common for governments and other bodies to go to a lawyer who will give them the advice they want to hear. This is how the then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith got the advice that the invasion of Iraq was ‘legal’”.
Further information: Mike Cushman 07736 705294
www.bricup.org.uk
info@bricup.org.uk
As for how this reversal was brought about, Sharif Elmusa’s article on the Israel lobby’s “Academic Shock and Awe” campaign sheds some important light.
The Israeli emperor now wears only the clothes of apartheid. Many people are noticing and are speaking up. Some have taken steps to boycott this, perhaps the last, apartheid state. The wave includes a wide range of participants, from academic and labour unions to writers, artists, church and student groups and others. Together they speak of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Some of those in the forefront of the campaign are Jewish, including the art critic Peter Berger, Steven Rose at the Open University, and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who labelled the Israeli system as worse than his country’s former apartheid regime, endorsed divestment. What drew the ire of Israel and the Israel lobby the most, however, is a resolution by the British University and College Union (UCU) at its congress 30 May. The UCU resolution encourages its members to “consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israel academic institutions,” and to forge closer relations with Palestinian universities.
The Israel lobby has reacted to the UCU’s move in Britain with an academic “shock and awe” operation. What I am referring to is the one-page advertisement in The New York Times 8 August, paid for by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The AJC assembled for the ad the signatures of more than 300 American college and university presidents endorsing a statement by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, that pronounces an identity of interests between US and Israeli universities: “for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you [the UCU] are seeking to punish.” It then menacingly takes the logical step: “Add Columbia to the boycott list.” This way the battle is shifted to the enemy’s turf: if you boycott Israeli universities, we will boycott you — a British eye (and a Palestinian one as collateral damage) for an Israeli eye.
The ad places Bollinger’s statement inside a frame at the centre of the page, flanked by presidential names on all sides. The design, together with the first person form Bollinger uses in the statement, intensify the power of the message and give it a sense of urgency. The text is short, terse and declarative. It does not indicate the reasons that led the UCU to pass the resolution after a long and open exchange, making those who backed it sound like extremist airheads. Contestation is the lifeblood of democracy and intellectual advancement, but the big guns do not seem to feel they owe anyone a rational counter-argument. Worse, they do not mention the Palestinians at all; unlike the UCU that frames its resolution in the light of “Israel’s 40-year occupation [which] has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society,” the “denial of educational rights for Palestinians,” and “the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation.” So while the ad is visually framed, it deliberately and callously lacks context. And while it evokes high-minded principles, it takes, behind the reader’s back, the side of the powerful against the wronged. Who then deserves to be called “shoddy intellectually and politically biased,” the UCU, as Bollinger alleges, or he and his colleagues?
The UCU debated the motion over a period of two years. Its resolution in fact was a call for further debate on the boycott, a key point omitted by Bollinger. The union tackled questions like: Why single out Israel when there are so many other bad states in the world? What is the role of Israeli academics in their state’s practices? Does a boycott impinge on the human rights of those subject to the boycott? In contrast, the 300 academic CEOs, like autocratic rulers, have circumvented discussion of the issue on their campuses. That the Israel lobby felt it must respond with such force and without deliberation, in fact, belies moral weakness instead of strength. Like any totalitarian system, the lobby fears that any cracks engendered by free conversation would lead to the crumbling of the edifice of falsehoods it has constructed about Israel and the Palestinians. Rigid structures collapse suddenly.
At stake for the academy is not just the question of the boycott; it is also matter of who has “voice”. Organised British educators are saying that they, too, not just the heads of their institutions, can take initiative in shaping relations with others. They, not the heads, after all are the teachers, trainers, researchers and collaborators. Will members of faculty and students at American universities — even those opposed to the boycott — demand that the issue be tabled for deliberation and that all concerned get a chance to freely express their opinion? Or will they accept the decree of their presidents in silence?
British academics that objected to the resolution felt at least obligated to express, in a message to the UCU, their sympathy with the Palestinian plight and the chronic stranglehold Israel has over their educational development. It is doubtful that many of the signatories of the US ad are even aware of this dark side of Israel’s conduct. How much does, for example, Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, my alma mater, and a neuroscientist, know about the issue? Shouldn’t she have consulted, before signing such an important policy position, members of her own faculty, among them Noam Chomsky? Had she talked to him or other region scholars she would have learned a great deal about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians; about the numerous and extended closures of Palestinian universities; about the thousands of students who were imprisoned and banished into exile; about the ban in the last couple of years against academics with dual nationalities from entering into the West Bank and Gaza to resume teaching. She could have been informed of this, and much more. Fortunately, it is not too late for Hockfield to educate herself. She can venture into the West Bank and Gaza and discover the truth first hand. If pressed for time, she can visit websites such as those of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel ( www.pacbi.org ) and the UCU ( www.ucu.org.uk ).
Still, lack of knowledge alone does not sufficiently explain the mobilisation of 300 academic presidents. Bollinger himself must understand something about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He handled several fabricated charges by pro-Israeli media and activists against Palestinian and other Arab professors at Columbia, including the late Edward Said, Joseph Massad and George Saliba. We can only conclude, especially since the cost of the ad was defrayed by the AJC, that Bollinger and at least some of his colleagues fell under the influence of the Israeli lobby. In The London Review of Books, Spring 2007, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt — who have written a book on the lobby due for release this month — cite the testimony of several highly knowledgeable Washingtonians on the lobby’s reach. One of them, former Senator Ernest Hollings, said on leaving office that “you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby group in Washington) gives you around here.” Could the 300 presidents forge no other policy on the UCU’s resolution other than what American Jewish lobbyists dictate to them?
Their stance carries a moral burden. By siding with power, and by trying to abort the boycott effort, they abet in depriving the Palestinians of the only viable non- violent course of resistance to the Israeli occupation of their land. The international boycott of white South Africa’s apartheid system eventually led to the collapse of that system. Equally salient, but often forgotten, is that the boycott strengthened the hand of Nelson Mandela and others in the African National Congress who advocated peaceful means for achieving majority rule. Otherwise, there would have been much more bloodshed, and perhaps no reconciliation between blacks and whites. The US government was one of the very last to join the boycott against South Africa, after a prolonged pursuit of hypocritical “constructive engagement”. (Israel never joined and maintained its strong historic links with apartheid South Africa.) When the boycott took hold, however, American academics and others were rightly proud to take part and to engage in civil disobedience in front of South Africa’s diplomatic missions and offices. What is the difference between South Africa and Israel? The Israel lobby? Perhaps. But in the end, Bollinger and his peers must accept responsibility for their unilateral, politically biased attempt to pre-empt debate. The start of the new academic year is a good time for concerned faculty and students to demand a voice.
* The writer is an associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo.
A Double Standard on Academic Freedom in the Middle East
September 17, 2007
Today’s excellent guest editorial comes from Prof. George Bisharat of Hastings College. (Thanks IMEU)
Two hundred thousand Palestinian children began school in the Gaza Strip this month without a full complement of textbooks. Why? Because Israel, which maintains a stranglehold over this small strip of land along the Mediterranean even after withdrawing its settlers from there in 2005, considers paper, ink and binding materials not to be “fundamental humanitarian needs.”
Israel, attempting to throttle the democratically elected Hamas government, generally permits only food, medicine and fuel to enter Gaza, and allows virtually no Palestinian exports to leave. Lately, it held up delivery of materials needed for printing textbooks. As a result, Gaza students began the year facing a 30 percent shortage of texts.
No full-page advertisements in major American newspapers have publicized Israel’s violations of Palestinian children’s right to an education. No editors, syndicated columnists or presidents of major universities in this country have denounced this callous measure. Our politicians have demanded no remedial action. Instead, they continue, verbally and materially, to support Israel in its near-total blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians, kids and all.
Israel’s trampling of Palestinian students’ right to education - the key to a lifetime of opportunity - has rarely evoked official protest from American leaders. The Israeli army has closed Palestinian universities for years at a time. Israeli military authorities have barred Palestinian occupational therapy students from traveling from Gaza to the West Bank to obtain vital clinical training.
Hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks can turn a routine trip to a local school into a harrowing ordeal. Israeli gunfire has even killed Palestinian schoolchildren sitting in their classrooms. None of these offenses has merited so much as a congressional resolution, let alone more serious efforts to curb Israeli behavior, such as government-imposed sanctions.
In response to this policy double standard - complete indulgence of Israel on the one hand, and indifference to violations of Palestinian rights on the other hand - a movement has emerged for a citizens’ boycott of Israel. Churches, unions and professional associations in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa have urged a variety of nonviolent measures to compel Israel’s compliance with international law.
American Presbyterians have studied divesting church funds from firms that profit from continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Unison, the United Kingdom’s 1.3 million-member union of public servants, voted in June to boycott Israeli goods. In May, a British union of professors opened a yearlong debate over a possible boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
The latter action provoked particularly indignant protest by Israel’s U.S. supporters as an offense against “academic freedom.” Yet many Israeli academic institutions either benefit from or participate in Israeli government actions that violate Palestinian rights.
Tel Aviv University sits in part over land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in fear in March 1948. These and other Palestinian refugees have been denied their right to return to their homes or to receive compensation for their seized properties.
Hebrew University in Jerusalem uses more than 800 acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Bar-Ilan University has established a branch in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
The threatened boycott would target Israeli institutions, not individuals. Thus, formal research and other agreements with Israeli universities would be suspended. But invitations to Israeli professors to join conferences or to publish in foreign journals would continue.
Nonetheless, it is likely that the boycott would impose limitations on freedom for some Israeli academics. Is this fair?
Boycotts are always somewhat blunt tools, and they inevitably impose costs on some who are undeserving of them. That was true of the boycott of apartheid South Africa, which applied to all academics - as well as athletes, businesspeople, artists and others. At the time, the international community weighed the cost to academic freedom against the advancement of justice and equal rights for black South Africans, and the choice was clear.
Two hundred thousand Palestinian schoolchildren are wondering how the world will respond faced with a similar choice today.
George Bisharat, a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, writes frequently on the Middle East. His e-mail is bisharat@uchastings.edu.
Israel: An Important Marker Has Been Passed
August 26, 2007
There are already enough reasons why no one should susbscribe to the New Statesman, but the publication has just added another. With its current issue it is offering to subscribers a copy of zionut Melanie Phillips’s favorite book, The Islamist, by extremist Muslim-turned-extremist Neocon Ed Husain (next issue will offer Jordan’s biography I presume). The idea no doubt comes from the little turd Martin Bright, its political editor, whose disdain for Muslims is only matched by his admiration for neoconservatives (his anti-Muslim screed was published by Michael Gove’s hardline Policy Exchange). John Pilger, Mark Thomas and Ziauddin Sardar (and a few occasional others) are the New Labour rag’s only saving graces, but fortunately you can access all their articles online.
Here Pilger, a true hero for our times, returns to question of Palestine, and draws attention to civil society’s response to the inaction and complicity of governments: boycott, divestment, sanctions.
In a column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes his first encounter with a Palestinian refugee camp and what Neldon Mandela has called “the greatest moral issue of our age” - justice for the Palestinians. ‘Something has changed’, he writes, referring to the world view of sanctions and a boycott against Israel.From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can see Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his son holding the tail of his long tattered coat. He extended his hand and did not let go. “I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer,” he said in measured English. “Over there, I played many musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks. When we lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, “Show me how a Palestinian picks up his food rations!” So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was not right; I was an artist, not a beggar . . . I am not even a peasant now.”
“How do you feel about all that?” I asked him.
“Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They can’t win. Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after them . . .”.
That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long, I was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At the United Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been “taken away . . . very ill”. No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness now. Outside, another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust.
And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called “the greatest moral issue of the age” refuses to be buried in the dust. For every BBC voice that strains to equate occupier with occupied, thief with victim, for every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli state’s commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more powerful now than ever. Documentation of the violent expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is voluminous. Re-examination of the historical record has put paid to the fable of heroic David in the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and his family were driven from their home. The alleged threat of Arab leaders to “throw the Jews into the sea”, used to justify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and since repeated relentlessly, is highly questionable.
In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud. The building of their “settlements” has accelerated on the West Bank, along with the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers from their crops, children from their schools, families from each other. We now know that Israel’s destruction of much of Lebanon last year was pre-planned. As the former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has written, the recent “civil war” in Gaza was actually a coup against the elected Hamas-led government, engineered by Elliott Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy on Israel and a convicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America’s crusade as Israel’s. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military “aid package” for Israel, the world’s fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world’s tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.
But something is changing. Perhaps last summer’s panoramic horror beamed from Lebanon on to the world’s TV screens provided the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism of Bush and Blair and the incessant use of the inanity, “terror”, together with the day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our lives, has finally brought the attention of the international community outside the rogue states, Britain and the US, back to one of its principal sources, Israel.
I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times had the distinct odour of panic. There have been many “friends of Israel” advertisements in the Times, demanding the usual favours, rationalising the usual outrages. This one was different. “Boycott a cure for cancer?” was its main headline, followed by “Stop drip irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific co-operation between nations?” Who would want to do such things? “Some British academics want to boycott Israelis,” was the self-serving answer. It referred to the University and College Union’s (UCU) inaugural conference motion in May, calling for discussion within its branches for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As John Chalcraft of the London School of Economics pointed out, “the Israeli academy has long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for an occupation in direct violation of international law [against which] no Israeli academic institution has ever taken a public stand”.The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so has South African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish members of the liberation struggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led academic campaign against Israel’s “methodical destruction of [the Palestinian] education system” can be translated by those of us who have reported from the occupied territories into the arbitrary closure of Palestinian universities, the harassment and humiliation of students at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of Palestinian children on their way to school.
These initiatives have been backed by a British group, Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories include Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm. The country’s biggest union, Unison, has called for an “economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott” and the right of return for Palestinian families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the Commons’ international development committee has made a similar stand. In April, the membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted for a boycott only to see it hastily overturned by the national executive council. In the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment from Israeli companies: a campaign aimed at the European Union, which accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s exports under an EU-Israel Association Agreement. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights conditions in the agreement should be invoked and Israel’s trading preferences suspended.
This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And that such grave discussion of a boycott has “gone global” was unforeseen in official Israel, long comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great power sponsorship, and confident that the mere threat of anti-Semitism would ensure silence. When the British lecturers’ decision was announced, the US Congress passed an absurd resolution describing the UCU as “anti-Semitic”. (Eighty congressmen have gone on junkets to Israel this summer.)
This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of American academics has denied them promotion, even tenure. The late Edward Said kept an emergency button in his New York apartment connected to the local police station; his offices at Columbia University were once burned down. Following my 2002 film, Palestine is Still the Issue, I received death threats and slanderous abuse, most of it coming from the US where the film was never shown. When the BBC’s Independent Panel recently examined the corporation’s coverage of the Middle East, it was inundated with emails, “many from abroad, mostly from North America”, said its report. Some individuals “sent multiple missives, some were duplicates and there was clear evidence of pressure group mobilisation”. The panel’s conclusion was that BBC reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not “full and fair” and “in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture”. This was neutralised in BBC press releases.
The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a single democratic state, to which the Palestinian refugees are given the right of return, is the only feasible and just solution, and that a sanctions and boycott campaign is critical in achieving this. Would the Israeli population be moved by a worldwide boycott? Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa’s whites were moved enough to support an historic change. A boycott of Israeli institutions, goods and services, says Pappé, “will not change the [Israeli] position in a day, but it will send a clear message that [the premises of Zionism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21st century . . . They would have to choose.”
And so would the rest of us.
The Lobby Makes the Case for Boycott
August 17, 2007
Is it not amusing that the same people who have been stifling free speech of academics even mildly critical of the US should cry ‘censorship’ when British academics propose a highly nuanced boycott of Israel? Only months after the disgraced charlatan Alan Dershowitz who has been accused of plagiarism both on the Left and the Right, leading a campaign to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein, we have a new campaign by the Israel Lobby to destroy the career of another academic, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who was unwise enough to write research critical of Israel.
Perhaps the lobby forgets that the days where this kind of intimidation would work are numbered. If they feel empowered enough to deny others their academic freedom, then they forfeit the right to bandy it about as a defence. As George Bisharat argues in the following, the boycott campaign continues apace:
When does a citizen-led boycott of a state become morally justified?
That question is raised by an expanding academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel. The movement joins churches, unions, professional societies and other groups based in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa. It has elicited dramatic reactions from Israel’s supporters. U.S. labor leaders have condemned British unions, representing millions of workers, for supporting the Israel boycott. American academics have been frantically gathering signatures against the boycott, and have mounted a prominent advertising campaign in American newspapers - unwittingly elevating the controversy further in the public eye.
Israel’s defenders have protested that Israel is not the worst human-rights offender in the world, and singling it out is hypocrisy, or even anti-Semitism. Rhetorically, this shifts focus from Israel’s human rights record to the imagined motives of its critics.
But “the worst first” has never been the rule for whom to boycott. Had it been, the Pol Pot regime, not apartheid South Africa, would have been targeted in the past. It was not - Cambodia’s ties to the West were insufficient to make any embargo effective. Boycotting North Korea today would be similarly futile. Should every other quest for justice be put on hold as a result?
In contrast, the boycott of South Africa had grip. The opprobrium suffered by white South Africans unquestionably helped persuade them to yield to the just demands of the black majority. Israel, too, assiduously guards its public image. A dense web of economic and cultural relations also ties it to the West. That - and its irrefutably documented human-rights violations - render it ripe for boycott.
What state actions should trigger a boycott? Expelling or intimidating into flight a country’s majority population, then denying them internationally recognized rights to return to their homes? Israel has done that.
Seizing, without compensation, the properties of hundreds of thousands of refugees? Israel has done that.
Systematically torturing detainees, many held without trial? Israel has done that.
Assassinating its opponents, including those living in territories it occupies? Israel has done that.
Demolishing thousands of homes belonging to one national group, and settling its own people in another nation’s land? Israel has done that. No country with such a record, whether first or 50th worst in the world, can credibly protest a boycott.
Apartheid South Africa provides another useful standard. How does Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians compare to former South Africa’s treatment of blacks? It is similar or worse, say a number of South Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, U.N. special rapporteur in the occupied territories John Dugard, and African National Congress member and government minister Ronnie Kasrils. The latter observed recently that apartheid South Africa never used fighter jets to attack ANC activists, and judged Israel’s violent control of Palestinians as “10 times worse.” Dual laws for Jewish settlers and Palestinians, segregated roads and housing, and restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement strongly recall apartheid South Africa. If boycotting apartheid South Africa was appropriate, it is equally fair to boycott Israel on a similar record.
Israel has been singled out, but not as its defenders complain. Instead, Israel has been enveloped in a cocoon of impunity. Our government has vetoed 41 U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli actions - half of the total U.S. vetoes since the birth of the United Nations - thus enabling Israel’s continuing abuses. The Bush administration has announced an increase in military aid to Israel to $30 billion for the coming decade.
Other military occupations and human-rights abusers have faced considerably rougher treatment. Just recall Iraq’s 1990 takeover of Kuwait. Perhaps the United Nations should have long ago issued Israel the ultimatum it gave Iraq - and enforced it. Israel’s occupation of Arab lands has now exceeded 40 years.
Iran, Sudan and Syria have all been targeted for federal and state-level sanctions. Even the City of Beverly Hills is contemplating Iran divestment actions, following the lead of Los Angeles, which approved Iran divestment legislation in June. Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran has never attacked its neighbors nor occupied their territories. It is merely suspected of aspiring to the same nuclear weapons Israel already possesses.
Politicians worldwide, and American ones especially, have failed us. Our leaders, from the executive branch to Congress, have dithered, or cheered Israel on, as it devoured the land base for a Palestinian state. Their collective irresponsibility dooms both Palestinians and Israelis to a future of strife and insecurity, and undermines our global stature. If politicians cannot lead the way, then citizens must. That is why boycotting Israel has become both necessary and justified.
George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.
