Why the Boycott Movement Scares Israel di OMAR BARGHOUTI
JERUSALEM
— If Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to revive talks between
Israel and the Palestinian Authority fail because of Israel’s continuing
construction of illegal settlements, the Israeli government will likely
face an international boycott ‘‘on steroids" as Mr. Kerry warned last August.
These days, Israel seems as terrified by the ‘‘exponential’’
growth of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or
B.D.S.) movement as it is by Iran’s rising clout in the region. Last
June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu effectively declared B.D.S. a
strategic threat. Calling it the “delegitimization” movement, he
assigned the overall responsibility for fighting it to his Strategic
Affairs Ministry. But B.D.S. doesn’t pose an existential threat to
Israel; it poses a serious challenge to Israel’s system of oppression of
the Palestinian people, which is the root cause of its growing
worldwide isolation.
Launched
in 2005 by the largest trade union federations and organizations in
Palestinian society, B.D.S. calls for ending Israel’s 1967 occupation,
“recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of
Israel to full equality,” and the right of Palestinian refugees to
return to their homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced
and dispossessed in 1948.
Why should Israel, a nuclear power with a strong economy, feel so vulnerable to a nonviolent human rights movement?
Israel
is deeply apprehensive about the increasing number of American Jews who
vocally oppose its policies — especially those who are joining or leading B.D.S. campaigns. It also perceives as a profound threat the rising dissent among prominent Jewish figures who reject its tendency to speak on their behalf, challenge its claim to be the “national home” of all Jews, or raise the inherent conflict between its ethno-religious self-definition and its claim to democracy. What I.F. Stone prophetically wrote
about Israel back in 1967, that it is “creating a kind of moral
schizophrenia in world Jewry” because of its “racial and exclusionist”
ideal, is no longer beyond the pale.
Israel is also threatened by the effectiveness of the nonviolent strategies used by the B.D.S. movement, including its Israeli component, and by the negative impact they have had on Israel’s standing in world public opinion. As one Israeli military commander said in the context of suppressing Palestinian popular resistance to the occupation, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”
The landslide vote
by the American Studies Association in December to endorse an academic
boycott of Israel, coming on the heels of a similar decision by the Association for Asian-American Studies, among others, as well as divestment votes by several university student councils, proves that B.D.S. is no longer a taboo in the United States.
The B.D.S. movement’s economic impact is also becoming evident. The recent decision by the $200 billion Dutch pension fund, PGGM,
to divest from the five largest Israeli banks due to their involvement
in occupied Palestinian territory has sent shock waves through the
Israeli establishmentTo
underscore the “existential” danger that B.D.S. poses, Israel and its
lobby groups often invoke the smear of anti-Semitism, despite the
unequivocal, consistent position of the movement against all forms of
racism, including anti-Semitism.
This unfounded allegation is intended to intimidate into silence those
who criticize Israel and to conflate such criticism with anti-Jewish
racism.
Arguing
that boycotting Israel is intrinsically anti-Semitic is not only false,
it also presumes that Israel and “the Jews” are one and the same. This
is as absurd and bigoted as claiming that a boycott of a self-defined
Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, say, because of its horrific human
rights record, would of necessity be Islamophobic.
The
B.D.S. movement’s call for full equality in law and policies for the
Palestinian citizens of Israel is particularly troubling for Israel
because it raises questions about its self-definition as an exclusionary
Jewish state. Israel considers any challenge to what even the
Department of State has criticized
as its system of “institutional, legal, and societal discrimination”
against its Palestinian citizens as an “existential threat,” partially
because of the apartheid image that this challenge evokes.
Tellingly,
a recent attempt by Israeli liberals to have their civic national
identity as “Israelis” recognized by the state was squarely rejected
by Israel’s Supreme Court on the grounds that it posed a serious threat
to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish
people. Israel remains the only country on earth that does not recognize
its own nationality, as that would theoretically avail equal rights to
all its citizens, undermining its “ethnocratic”
identity. The claim that B.D.S., a nonviolent movement anchored in
universal principles of human rights, aims to “destroy” Israel must be
understood in this context.
Would
justice and equal rights for all really destroy Israel? Did equality
destroy the American South? Or South Africa? Certainly, it destroyed the
discriminatory racial order that prevailed in both places, but it did
not destroy the people or the country.
Likewise, only Israel’s unjust order is threatened by boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
Omar Barghouti
is a Palestinian human rights activist and the author of “Boycott,
Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.”
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