To boycott or not - the new Israeli question
Pressure for sanctions on Israeli goods is widening. Forty years after the Six-Day War, unions, academics and journalists are locked in furious debate about the tactic.Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor, reports
Sunday June 10, 2007
Every Friday Gila Svirsky is to be found dressed in black jeans and T-shirt at one of Israel's major road junctions, in a silent vigil, carrying a placard that says simply: 'Stop the occupation.'
Those in her group - Women in Black - have been abused, sometimes violently, since they began their protests almost 20 years ago. Her activism against the occupation touches all areas of her life. She does not drink wine or buy food or other goods produced by Jewish settlers on land under Israeli occupation.
'I went to buy a sofa recently,' she says. 'I didn't think about it at first. But then when I had my credit card out, I thought, maybe there is possibility that it was made in the Territories. So I thought, I better ask. And the salesman said: "Oh! It was made in this wonderful settlement called Barkan." I said: "No sale". He looked really shocked.'
Svirsky believes in boycotting the Israeli occupation. But she cannot support proposed boycotts of Israeli academics by Britain's University and College Teachers' Union, or of Israeli goods by the National Union of Journalists.
'I have my own position on this, but I think the proposed boycott by the teachers' union is useless and counterproductive and only has the impact of alienating Israelis and Jews more generally. I believe the whole thing shifts the attention away from the real point of focus - the occupation - towards the idea that Israel is an outlaw nation. I agree that my country has done some terrible things - but a boycott that is useful is a boycott of the occupation itself.'
But, as last week saw the 40th anniversary of the occupation, the failure of initiative after initiative to bring about a settlement has allowed the idea of boycotts and disinvestment to gain traction in the UK and internationally.
Driven by daily images of violence and destruction of Palestinian society, and fed by the enormous disparity in the fatality figures (in 2006, 27 Israelis were killed while more than 650 Palestinians, 120 of them children, died) the question being posed to unions, churches and individuals has become: boycott or not?
It is here in Britain that the issue is being most loudly debated. And the passionate nature of that debate inevitably has brought back recollections of other boycotts: in particular of South Africa under apartheid, a campaign built from small beginnings in the 1950s.
It is not only unions who are debating it. In Britain's churches too it has become an increasingly important issue. A survey for the Catholic weekly The Tablet last year showed 70 per cent of respondents backed disinvestment.
Last year the Church of England's General Synod debated removing investments from the US company Caterpillar, because its bulldozers were used to level Palestinian houses. And next month the Methodist conference in the UK will consider whether or not its £1bn funds can be invested in companies operating in the occupied territories.
The widening arc of protest against the Israeli occupation in British society emerged in the run-up to the UCU conference in Bournemouth that voted for the boycott, when a group of Britain's leading architects, including Terry Farrell, Will Alsop and the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), Jack Pringle, signed a petition condemning Israel's continuing building of settlements and its separation wall.
In South Africa, the trades union congress - with four million members - has also backed calls for an academic and cultural boycott, supported, too, by Canada's public service. Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands have also seen boycotts debated and applied by different groups. There are even those on Israel's left who back the boycott.
'There are people in the radical left here,' says Svirsky, 'who do support the British trade union boycotts. I was at a conference recently where one Israeli activist stood up and said: "Boycott me!" And it did have a very powerful effect.'
But others on the Israeli left say they are saddened or outraged. 'I feel as though I am in mourning,' says Yaron Izrahi, a professor of political science and a well-known Israeli author and commentator. 'British intellectuals and columnists were for years a great resource for the Israeli peace movement to attack Israel's right. Their critique - as well as those from France and the US - was a critique we were able to use. What has happened now with this excommunication is that it threatens to destroy that resource.
'Some of my students are linked to right-wing leaders like Binyamin Netanyahu. And they are very pleased with this. It strengthens the right. They have always argued that there is no valid critique of Israel, only anti-Semitism. Now they are saying we were right all along.'
Amid all the column inches expended in newspapers in Israel and on both sides of the Atlantic over the issue of the boycott, one voice has been unrepresented: that of Palestinians.
Omar Barg-houti, a political analyst, is one of the founding members of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the Palestinian organisation that first called for an international academic boycott to mirror the conditions of exclusion confronting Palestinian academics.
'The group was established in the spring of 2004,' says Barghouti, 'in response to a serious academic boycott effort launched earlier in the UK that year, initiated by Steven and Hilary Rose.'
'Our call for boycott came out in April of that year and it has now won endorsement from unions, associations, NGOs, political parties and intellectuals in all three sectors of the Palestinian people: Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory; Palestinian citizens of Israel; and Palestinian refugees in exile.'
But what is clear is that the boycott is only part of the planned trajectory - to mirror the pressure that was exerted on South Africa. Boycotts and disinvestment will first shape the political space, if necessary, for a campaign for sanctions on Israel.
While Barghouti concedes that there has been opposition by some in the Palestinian academic community - most notably from the president of al-Quds university in Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh soon after the first boycott call was issued - most Palestinian academics back the call.
He also dismisses claims by the Israeli left that its academics have been in the forefront of the fight against the occupation, citing a survey carried out by Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav that demonstrated, he says, that between 2002 and 2004 - in the midst of the worst violence of the second intifada - only eight out of the 133 sociologists in the five largest universities in Israel took a moral stand against the occupation, a ratio that was found among other social scientists.
Now the boycott document drawn up by Barghouti and his colleagues will be sent to all branches of Britain's college lecturers' union to be debated at branch level.
Tom Hickey, for one, has already read it. The philosophy lecturer at Brighton University and the proposer of the motion at the Bournemouth conference calling for the academic boycott, has already seen himself branded 'as an anti-Semite' for backing a boycott over the last two years. A member of UCU Left, an activist group within the union that his opponents have charged with being a front for the Socialist Workers' Party, Hickey insists he is as opposed to anti-Semitism as he is to Islamophobia or any other form of racism.
While the union's leadership, including its president, Sally Hunt, remains convinced that the vote by the delegates in favour of the boycott does not reflect the view of its wider membership, Hickey is not convinced, arguing that support is building for punitive measures aimed at isolating Israel in international opinion.
'I think the reason that calls for a boycott are gaining traction is because of what people are seeing every day on television and reading in their papers. And there is a new and greater intensity to what Israel has been doing. 'There is a feeling that all the opportunities for peace have gone and the road map for peace has been foreclosed. There is a general feeling that after 40 years things are only getting worse and there is no prospect of change.
'The thing that impressed me most in the debate was people who spoke later: who said please show us something alternative that can be done?'
Not all of those who have become involved in the recent wave of activism against Israel are the deeply political animals that Hickey is. Architect and Riba president Jack Pringle says he cannot remember the last time he signed a political petition. 'When you look at the names of those who have signed, you have to say they are not the usual suspects. Terry Farrell, for instance is not a political activist. He is a planner. This is not some bunch of rabid activists. I am not in the least anti-Israel or against its foundation. Nevertheless there is a string of UN resolutions about these bits of land. Palestinian villages are being bulldozed and Israeli settlements are being built. And as someone interested in the impact of building on the environment I believe Israel should stop these acts of aggression.'
But if Hickey was hoping to open a debate, the response has instead been a ferocious counter-attack from Israel, pro-Israeli lobby groups and defenders of Israel in the US. It has not only angered those exclusively in the pro-Israel camp. The proposed boycotts have also outraged many journalists and academics - among them those with deep sympathies for the Palestinians - for what they argue is an attack on both journalistic impartiality and academic freedom.
Already Israel's Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, has called to complain to Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett that the UCU vote threatens to strain relations between the two countries. A boycott of British goods has been suggested in Israel. Further afield, academics like Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer, have begun circulating a petition declaring themselves - for the purposes of any boycott - to be 'Israeli academics'.
The US Anti-Defamation League has been equally vigorous in its response, taking a half page advert in the Financial Times last week reading: '38 journalists arrested in Iran; 700 activists detained and tortured in Zimbabwe, 400,000 murdered in Darfur - but British unions have singled out Israel for boycott. That's anti-Semitism.'
It is a comparison that - for all her reservations about the British boycotts - Gila Svirsky emphatically rejects. 'I think that because of Israel's special symbolism in the world that it should be held to higher standards and account than Zimbabwe or Sudan. If I was a religious person I would say that God should hold us to a higher standard.'
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