Trondheim academic boycott motion thrown out

Some days ago I wondered whether a Norwegian university was going to force its employees to boycott Israelis. The answer turned out to be a no from the board, none of whom objected to a proposal to throw out the motion.

Ha’aretz:

“Some of the people in attendance spoke in favor of scrapping the vote,”Alsberg told Haaretz. “The main arguments raised were that Norwegian universities should not [make] their own foreign policies, and that a boycott would be harmful to NTNU.”

According to Alsberg, who collected signatures from over 100 NTNU scholars against the boycott, the move was prevented due to “a combination of factors.” He said these included media attention; opposition to the boycott by the Norwegian Ministry for Higher Education; and petitions, including his own.

But Erez Uriely, director of the Oslo-based Center against Anti-Semitism, said the boycott was prevented largely thanks to Alsberg’s petition.

“Norwegian politicians often take anti-Israeli positions and then renege when this creates an outcry,” he said. “The petition against a boycott of Israel at NTNU is an unusual event which tipped the scale.”

Norway, Israel and the Jews note the disappointment of boycotters and predicts that they will return:

“For anyone in doubt, please observe that Mr.Lysestøl and his comrades are dedicated, hard working people who honestly believe they are engaged in a battle against ultimate evil. They will regroup and recover. If it had not been for the tremendous effort of people from around the globe in general and professor Bjørn Alsgaard* at NTNU in particular, the motion for boycott might have passed.”

Kudos to the academics at Trondheim who spoke out against the boycott by signing Bjørn Alsberg’s* petition.

*Strange mingled references to Bjørn Alsberg/Alsgaard – not sure why.

 

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign – smashing Israeli growers and pickers

Here are some boycotters of Israel after a successful campaign to rid Sussex University Student Union’s shelves of all those mounds of Israeli produce which were there before. But what is this? The feet of our international conscience appear to be clad in Nike. Haven’t these people read Naomi Klein from back when she was good?

And here’s a plan, by the Socialist Action-pwned Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to smash Israeli growers and pickers on pretext of justice for Palestinians (who probably don’t want that kind of help).

Anybody who decides to participate in this boycott should understand that they are hurting modestly-remunerated Israeli growers and pickers.

The boycott can’t touch this Israel – the one with the population of 7m which attracts more venture capital than France and Germany combined. The very young country whose economically successful innovation and entrepreneurialism has, in these authors’ assessment, been largely motivated by adversity. The authors pass over it, but I’m guessing they mean the denial of Israel’s right to exist, the terrorism, constant threat of war, and the boycotting of Palestine’s Jews which hardly missed a beat in 1948 when it turned into a boycott of Israel.

They aren’t repeating Naomi Klein’s slanted and made-up doctrine that Israel manufactures adversity in order to profit from it; rather they are confirming the age-old proverb about necessity being the mother of invention.

How can this boycott, an act of aggression, change the international policy – or any policy for that matter – of a country so well equipped to thrive (economically) on adversity?

From an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg with one of the aforementioned authors:

“JG: Go to one final thing, something that struck me when I was reading this book.  You have a boycott movement in Europe, but in the U.S., too, you have forces that want to delegitimize Israel. I realized in reading this that it would be quite something to go tell Intel or Google or IBM to divest from Israel.

DS: They’ll never do it. I mean, it’s impossible. What various companies told us is that if they had to shut down operations in India tomorrow, they could survive because it’s basically a lot of outsourcing and a lot of call centers. They said if we had to shut down our operations in Ireland, we could survive. But what one person after another told us is that the one place in the world that would devastating for them to have shut down would be Israel, because they put so much of their mission-critical work  and R&D in Israel.  The Intel story we tell is amazing, this key chip that was central to Intel taking off was designed and then manufactured in Israel, so it would be devastating to these companies to lose Israel. And one more thing — the most interesting data point on all of this is that European venture capitalists invest more in Israel than they do in any single European economy.

JG: Is that true?

DS: Yes and, to me, that says it all. For all the ranting from Europe about boycotts and attempts at boycotts, that’s not what European capital is doing. In terms of the U.S., this is even more true. I don’t want to oversimplify, but who do think is more important to Barack Obama: The head of J Street or Eric Schmidt at Google? And if Eric Schmidt said that his company would be devastated if Israel came off-line — and we interviewed Schmidt and he talked about the importance of Israel — then I think I know the answer.”

This boycott is blatantly destined to fail – not only in its stated aims of liberating the Palestinians, but in its unstated aims of crippling Israel and ending its existence. So why would somebody persist in turning their back on ordinary Israelis, far from power, with produce to sell? The only plausible reason I can think of is visceral animosity towards Israel.

If you hate the world’s only Jewish state then you’ll get a certain amount of personal satisfaction out of boycotting and calling for boycott. But if you want a real result, have a read of the rest of the Atlantic piece linked above, which tells you all you need to know. Basically, you need to send your pennies to Ahmadinejad and get that Iranian nuke off the ground.

Or if this makes you pause, then how about sending some money to one of the many organisations in Israel trying to bring about an end to hostilities, hold their government to account and protect the rights of Palestinians and Israelis. Gisha, B’Tselem, Machsom Watch. Help OneVoice fund youth leaders in Palestine and Israel. Contact the International Labour Movement and find out how you can strengthen the agreement between Israeli and Palestinian trade union movements. Send some money to Shatil, which supports Israeli social change activists (they need it!) and teaches strategies to grow their networks and stop them burning out. Write to your elected representatives insisting that they maintain efforts to facilitate the parties to the conflict from their self-serving conflict management routine into sincere conflict resolution activity. Don’t allow the Israeli right to marshall existential fear into votes for themselves – reinforce Daniel Gavron’s sense of Israeli self-confidence and vision for peace

Just do something constructive, and relevant. Don’t boycott Israeli herb farmers and their labourers.

Meanwhile I suppose I’d better develop a taste for thyme.

Palestinian workers, unions don’t support BDS campaign

At TULIP:

“In an extraordinary series of blog postings, British trade unionists visiting Israel and Palestine have learned that Palestinian workers and their unions are not enthusiastic supporters of the campaign for boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) targetting Israel.

In fact, they were told bluntly that the BDS campaign is bad news for Palestinians.

USDAW National Executive member Mike Dixon wrote:

“There was a discussion about the boycott and it is clear that Palestinians don’t want it – all they want is equal pay and a living.”

The communications director for the Advance union added:

“Listening to people from both communities on the subject of the proposed international trade union boycott, it is evident that all parties oppose this action.  In a meeting with the Jerusalem Municipality workers, one view from the Palestinian contingent was that a boycott would be more detrimental to the Arab workforce than any other. The reason for this was that in the event of economic sanctions, it would cause a detrimental impact on the employment levels of their community.”

The entire blog should be required reading for trade unionists in Britain and elsewhere.”

Read it all, and wonder why British boycotting union activists (because theirs is an activist-led boycott, not a membership-led one) are so incredibly attached to the boycott idea. However, since there is a groundswell of support for Palestinians, it would be good to have a better understanding of the kind of support Palestinian trade unionists hope for from their international community of advocates.

HT Ben

Will Norwegian universities force their employees to boycott Israel?

If “the Board of Governors of the University of Trondheim and University College of Sør-Trøndelag [were] to declare at their upcoming meeting that Israeli universities and academic institutions cannot be normal partners of any self-respecting Norwegian institution”, they would be committing an act of discrimination against fellow academics on grounds of nationality, without any prospect of affecting the conflict. As employers, they would be intervening in the scholarly work of their employees. I wonder what a trade union would make of that.

Sue Blackwell was the inspiration, it turns out. Israel unites employers and trade unionists – how beautiful is that?

Seriously though, surely these board members will throw it out. Unless, of course, they’re convinced otherwise by an Israeli academic lecturer, most recent of an series of boycotting lecturers, who will visit the institution a couple of days prior to the vote to discuss Israel’s use of antisemitism as a political tool.

(When wasn’t antisemitism a political tool?)

There’s a petition against the boycott from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

If Trondheim’s Rector is building opposition to the boycott on the board, it’s not public.

A piece in the Jerusalem Post.

Here’s some typical support for the boycott containing many inadvertent ironies and ending paradoxically with a call for “freedom from fear”.

Meanwhile OneVoice is starting its universities tour – more on Facebook. These events are very good because in my experience you get to see how principled peace-makers – peacemakers who are out to build something – take the trouble to respond to boycotters (among other polarising tendencies) with patient but firm refutation, for the sake of peace in their own homelands.

• EXETER! Monday, 9th November, Queens Building Lecture Theatre 2, 6.30pm
• SOUTHAMPTON! Tuesday, 10th November, Nightingale Lecture Theatre, 6pm
• MANCHESTER! Wednesday, 11th November, Student Union Common Room/Club Academy, 1pm
• BIRMINGHAM! Thursday, 12th November, The Arts Building, 5pm
• SURREY! Monday, 16th November, School of Management Main Lecture Theatre, 5.15pm
• LONDON! (LSE, UCL, SOAS, KING’S COLLEGE) Tuesday, 17th November, University of London Union, Malet Street, WC1E 7HY, 5pm
• OXFORD! Wednesday, 18th November, Catholic Chaplaincy, 8pm
• GLASGOW! Thursday, 19th November, the Debates Chamber, 6pm

Update: Should have said at the time: this is typical of what anti-Israel boycott campaigns are like – Jews under scrutiny.

Update 2: Another Observer, in the comments below, says:

“The old SUS laws (stop and serach) were universal (i.e. they applied to everyone), but, when examined in practice, was only being used by the Police against the Black population. In other words, whilst all the population of the UK could have been pulled under the laws, the vast, vast, majority of those affected were Black, In that instance, as in the case of the boycott, that “something more” was and is racism. As such, it was part of the anti-racist agenda to end the SUS laws on the gorunds of their racist application (as well as the general abuse of civil liberties).

Nowadays, of course, many, but not all, of the anti-racists openly support what is, in effect, and in practice, a policy of racist exclusion against Jews.”

Update 3: Ben Cohen at Z-Word blog has examined the Trondheim boycott campaign in more detail. At Harry’s Place Gene reminds us: “Trondheim, the city where the NTNU is located, is in the county of Sør-Trøndelag. The county council voted in 2005 to boycott Israel.”

EXETER! Monday, 9^th November, Queens Building Lecture Theatre 2, 6.30pm

SOUTHAMPTON! Tuesday, 10^th November, Nightingale Lecture Theatre, 6pm

MANCHESTER! Wednesday, 11th November, Student Union Common Room/Club Academy, 1pm

BIRMINGHAM! Thursday, 12^th November, The Arts Building, 5pm

SURREY! Monday, 16th November, School of Management Main Lecture Theatre, 5.15pm

LONDON! (LSE, UCL, SOAS, KING’S COLLEGE) Tuesday, 17^th November, University of London Union, Malet Street, WC1E 7HY, 5pm

OXFORD! Wednesday, 18th November, Catholic Chaplaincy, 8pm

GLASGOW! Thursday, 19^th November, the Debates Chamber, 6pm

The vanity and cluelessness of boycotting Israel

Just a sample from the Web.

In Ha’aretz, Bradley Burston has Yom Kippur and the new film Ajami, the Israel-Palestine conflict in microcosm jointly directed by Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, on his mind:

“This week we observe the ancient boycott known as Yom Kippur. We ask forgiveness for sins of a hardened heart, of judgmentalism and hatred, of a willful deceit of others and an unknowing deceit of ourselves.

For the sin of demanding that only others search their souls and repent. And for the sin of finding others guilty and passing sentence, without having the courage to allow the accused to face their accusers.

To the BDS people and their spiritual kin in Toronto, let me say just this: When you criticize Israel, for God’s sake – if only for the Palestinians’ sake – tell the truth. The whole truth. Not just your carefully composed cardboard cutout, the cartoon of the Jewish villain and the Arab martyr. And not from a distance.

Come here. Do the work. Take the risks. Put your slogans and your posters and your buttons and signs and t-shirts and open letters to the test. Put your life where your sloganeering is.

You despise Israel, we get that. You dismiss the capacity of Israelis for good faith and humanism. We get that too. But if you talk struggle in Toronto and San Francisco and Irvine, it’s no more than talk, and wasted breath at that. You can boycott away, all you like. In the end, you’re only drumming up more business for Israel.

Alternatively, as a first step, you might go see Ajami. If it’s hard as hell for you to understand, then you’ve made a beginning. See it again.

It’s Yom Kippur. It’s time to get rattled. Just as in the cartoons, when you run off a cliff, it’s only when you look down, that you begin to plummet.

Look down. We’re all falling here. We’re all trying to keep our families and friends, our children and our elders, from the cliff. Until you understand that, you understand nothing.”

The Forward had a recent editorial on the boycott campaign against Israel.

“While the stated goal of the BDS movement is to isolate and discomfit Israel and support human rights for the Palestinians, it is clear that many followers are not trying to change Israel. They’re trying to eliminate it.

The argument that pushing Israel into economic, academic and cultural purgatory will somehow persuade its government to dismantle the security barrier, evacuate the West Bank and embrace its sworn enemy is misguided. And that’s being generous. Whatever the flaws of the Netanyahu administration — and there are many — it is clearly responding to (and, true, at times stoking) real fears and anxieties among the Israeli population.

The boycotters are either grossly ignorant about the Israeli psyche, or don’t care to understand it. The attempt to isolate and delegitimize “is counter productive because of the nature of who we are. It confirms our worst fears,” says the noted South African journalist Benjamin Pogrund, who now lives in Israel and writes extensively about boycotts, having lived through the apartheid era in his native land.”

Read it all.

From last week’s The Forward, a piece on how the boycott is taking hold.

“The BDS movement is highly decentralized, with each group in the coalition allowed to choose its own targets as it sees fit. It has no articulated political vision. such as a one- or two-state solution to the conflict. The principles that guide the movement — as set out in a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions issued in June 2005 by a wide group of Palestinian civil society organizations — demand instead that Israel adhere to international and human rights law. The amorphous structure and broad goals appear to be responsible for many of the group’s appeal. But some who watch this movement closely contend that, in the end, even a “targetted” boycott is ultimately aimed at all of Israel.

The actual monetary impact of the movement is often unclear. But for activists seeking as much to affect Israel’s image in the public’s mind, money is not always the bottom line.”

And in response, an expression of Jewish solidarity: buycott.

The TUC boycott conflict, Carter and Obama

I haven’t been able to give due attention to recent boycott events, including Jane Fonda’s apology for signing a boycott petition, anti-Israel policy passed by Canadian Christians, and Samuel Maoz’s anti-boycott statement on the occasion of his Venice Film Festival win. Many more links slide through my fingers, but I managed to grab hold of the TUC.

Boycotting activists have forced the Trade Union Congress to dedicate mind-boggling amounts of time, energy and aggression to debating punitive sanctions against Israel. The TUC should be ashamed to even be considering abandoning Israeli workers – the ‘Global Solidarity’ section of its Final Agenda is misnamed and even more miniscule than the Green Party’s Autumn Conference international business with its perennial and hostile attention to the tiny state of Israel. Why always and only Israel? is an unavoidable question without any reassuring answer, and the weird singularity of boycott activism against Israel makes most Jews feel rightly insecure. And yet it’s the only aspect of the conference I heard about on the News today, and most of the country must now think the TUC is fiddling while Rome is burnt to a crisp.

A policy of boycotting Israel is a badge of conflict for an organisation, a flat denial of the needs of Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers, nothing to do with solidarity, nothing to do with the labour movement. The TUC should vote it down and ponder instead why the Israeli workers movement might have supported action against Gaza, why it is so important to boycotters to minimise the role of Palestinians in the conflict, and what is to be done to get Israeli and Palestinian workers to recognise their shared interests in ending it.

Walking over London Bridge today, I heard the following BBC Radio 4 6 o’Clock News analysis by North America editor Mark Mardell – which I transcribe from about 19:54 – of the vitriol directed at Barack Obama ostensibly for his incendiary proposed health care reforms. I thought that what was said about this is also true for the zombie-like boycott campaign against Israel.

Preamble:

“Here in South Carolina less than a decade ago the Confederate battle flag fluttered above the state capitol building, and Congressman Joe Wilson was one of a handful of politicians who voted to keep it flying. It’s perhaps why his heckling of the president with the battle cry “You lie” has echoed across the nation, allowing a usually subterranean debate to bubble to the surface. Some feel the vitriolic contempt to President Obama in many public meetings organised by his opponents is because he’s black. Former president Jimmy Carter says it’s abominable.

[Excerpt of Carter's speech in Atlanta] “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African American ought not be President and ought not be given the same respect as if he were white, and this has permeated politics ever since I have been involved in it back to the 1960s”.

The part of Mark Mardell’s piece which resonated with the boycott campaign and its context in the history of the world’s relationship with its Jews was this:

“But many Conservatives feel that kind of talk is a smear used to stifle legitimate debate and smother heart-felt anger. It is of course very difficult to pin down the precise reasons for the fury that President Obama evokes in his opponents, and naive to think it has only one cause, but the relationship between the white majority and the black minority has been a huge factor in American politics from Civil War to civil rights and it would be extraordinary if it played no part in perceptions of America’s first black president.”

This is right, and it’s also the responsible way to view the furious hostility directed at Israel, and its attendant antisemitism.

On Mark Mardell’s blog there are already 417 responses to his question:

“So I am describing and inviting debate, not passing comment. The relationship between black and white has been such an important driving factor in American political history that it would be strange if it now mattered not a jot. The allegation is that many of those who are calling their president “un-American” mean he is not white. Democratic propaganda, over-sensitivity or truth? Tell me…”

Definitely worth a look.

Obama is resolved to take all criticism of his incendiary health care reform proposals at face value, which is very thought-provoking, but not for this post.

Update: We should congratulate the trade unionists who succeeded in reasoning boycotters away from their moribund position of total boycott. TUC statement; Brendan Barber’s speech on the subject; Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine point to the good aspects of the statement (the fostering of PGFTU-Histadrut projects); Michael Leahy speaks at the Trade Union Friends of Israel fringe meeting; Histadrut calls for peace and cooperation.

In support of the Jerusalem Quartet performance

After reading Gene’s reminder “Equally, boycott opponents have a right, and a duty, to express themselves as well”, I just sent this (which I’ve tweaked a bit since sending) to BBC and Cadogan Hall addresses listed on PACBI’s ‘call to action against the Jerusalem Quartet’s Proms Appearance’. I hope the links make it through their spam filter.

***

info at cadoganhall dot com
proms at bbc dot co dot uk
and the Quartet.

Hello,

I understand you are coming under pressure from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel to cancel the performance of the Jerusalem Quartet on August 29th.

Hopefully cancellation is out of the question, but given the intensity of PACBI’s campaign, I thought I should contact you with some reasons to go ahead.

If you look at the boycott, divestment and sanction calls PACBI references, it is clear that PACBI and other boycott campaigners such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign are not interested in establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Rather, they are interested in eliminating Israel. This was made clear when PACBI successfully cancelled joint simultaneous peace concerts in Israel and the West Bank. PACBI and the PSC cannot tolerate peace work and move to sabotage it.

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1479
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1547

Some Israeli political groups and human rights and peace-making NGOs draw a distinction between boycotting the occupation on the one hand, which they view as appropriate, and boycotting Israel in its entirety on the other hand, which they recognise as eliminationist. PACBI and other groups pursue the latter – the entire social, cultural and economic exclusion of Israel. PACBI seeks, indiscriminately, to break links between medical institutions and cultural ones alike. Nothing less than the total pariahdom of Israel will suffice. PACBI is attempting to end Israel’s existence.

Unlike the boycott of South Africa, to which the boycott of Israel is frequently compared, hardly any Israelis call for a boycott. Those who oppose boycott include the Israeli socialist party Hadash and peace-making NGOs such as Gisha (legal centre for freedom of movement), the Abraham Fund for coexistence, and Peace Now (for an end to the occupation). The boycott is widely seen by peace-makers on the ground as counterproductive to peace. It is inarticulate, it causes more of the difference and division which are exascerbating the conflict, and it abandons Israeli peace activists.

http://links.org.au/node/968
http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/peace.asp?pi=69&docid=3303&pos=0
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1715
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/a-cringe-making-boycott-letter/

Israeli authorities have attempted to disrupt Palestinian cultural and academic affairs; I and other anti-boycotters have spoken out against these politically-motivated acts, as I do here.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/protesting-the-israeli-security-forces-disruption-of-palfest/
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1940
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1029
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/student-protester-arrested-on-israeli-campus/

Meanwhile even joint anti-war Jewish and Palestinian Israeli productions such as Plonter are prevented from staging performances in Israel’s neighbouring states; performances are held to ransom as if they could lever peace. And even joint Israeli and Palestinian Israeli relationships are the focus of PACBI’s ongoing attempts to drive a wedge into co-existence between Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Wafa Younis’s life was in danger after she took her youth orchestra, Strings of Freedom, to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/pacbi-drives-a-wedge-into-coexistence-inside-israel/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/good-things/

This is the nature of the cultural boycott.

Israel is unlike South Africa in a crucial way: its neighbours have only recently formally accepted its existence, this acceptance cannot be taken for granted, and there are enduring armed movements which hope to eliminate Israel. In South Africa anti-apartheid activists sought majority rule. In Israel there is majority rule. Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, which came into existence after the attempted genocide of the world’s Jews. Hamas, Hesbollah and other factions continually preach hatred of Jews, and call this resistance to Israel. Beyond Israel antisemitism is a regional norm.

A total boycott of Israel – the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions of which PACBI’s cultural boycott is part – assists Hamas and other eliminationists by posing an obstacle to peace-making. In short, Israel is not and never has been the sole aggressor in this conflict, nor does it act capriciously or sadistically, as you might think if you were to read only PACBI’s, or only the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s, narrative of the conflict. The settlers must leave the occupied land, reparations must be made to refugees, occupation must end, resources must be equitably distributed, infrastructure must not be used to control and subdue, and Israel’s neighbours must permit Israel to live in peace. In Israel and the occupied territories violence feeds on violence, extremism on extremism. The reason the conflict is intractable is because the causes endure, not because Israel is a brutal state.

Anti-Israel politics are frequently expressed as hostility to Jews. PACBI has been complicit in this, and seeks to diminish concerns about this.

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/hamas-threatens-to-kill-jewish-children-anywhere-in-the-world/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/gaza-jewish-community

Boycotters will insist otherwise, but hosting an Israeli orchestra does not amount to acceptance of the decisions and actions of the Israeli government. Nor does it amount to a solution to the conflict.

But societies in conflict are vulnerable to the prejudice, demonisation, dehumanisation and despair which haunts conflicts, and without cultural and social exchange there can be no coexistence. And yet cultural exchanges are under attack not from peace-makers but from those who wish to prolong division.

The last time the Jerusalem Quartet was targeted in the name of Palestine solidarity, the protesters were charged with a racially aggravated offence. Separately, protest leader Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign uses far right antisemitic materials in his arguments on behalf of Palestinians. He is part of a current of thinking that perceives anti-Jewish words and acts as a legitimate part of Palestine solidarity.

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1752

The attempt he led to disrupt the concert was met with boos from the large audience at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh.

http://www.edinburghguide.com/festival/2008/edinburghinternationalfestival/jerusalemquartet

I could think of many more reasons not to cancel the Jerusalem Quartet. Some of them would be to do with cultural exchange and some of them would be to do with art.  None of them would be to do with discrediting solidarity with Palestinians under occupation. Israel is engaged in a violent occupation and ongoing settlement of Palestinian lands beyond its own borders. Israel has demonstrated it is willing to turn large parts of Gaza to rubble and make security for ordinary Gazans meaningless in the name of protecting its own security. But the cultural boycott of Israel will not help end the occupation nor the violence – if anything it will exacerbate the division. Additionally I think (unlike boycotters) that the best way for international community to end the occupation is to learn about the conflict, represent it accurately, and demand and take action which addresses the causes of the conflict. The best way for artistic bodies in Britain to reach out to Palestinians living under occupation is to invite Palestinian artists and performers to this country and pursue their travel permits with the Israeli authorities. I would be more than happy to play a part here, should such an initiative arise.

Thanks for reading and best wishes,

Mira

PS.
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/tali-shalom-ezer-won’t-do-ken-loach’s-work-for-him/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/msu-jewish-studies-welcomes-honour-to-tutu-but-calls-on-him-to-renounce-israel-boycott/
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/boycotters-target-leonard-cohen-as-a-bhuddist-jonathan-freedland/

Organization sets up Google ad campaign to counter Israel boycott calls

Jonny Paul writes in The Jerusalem Post :

A movement set up to fight “boycott Israel” initiatives has launched an audacious advertising campaign on Google.

Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine (TULIP), which unites trade unions and nongovernmental organizations fighting the boycott of Israel, has initiated a series of keyword-based advertisements on the Internet search engine.

Someone searching for terms such as “boycott Israel” will see a link to the TULIP Web site appear above the campaigns for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the Jewish state.

Read the full article Here.

How dare you, Ken Loach

We had a recent post on Ken Loach and his prominent role in the storm opportunistically whipped up round Israeli director Tali Shalom Ezer over a paltry £300 donated by the Israeli Embassy to cover her travel and subsistence costs at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Via Modernity, Gary Sinyor, director of Leon the Pig Farmer, among other works, protests:

“…today, I am writing to the Edinburgh Film Festival and asking for my name to be taken off their records. I am removing Winner, Best British Film, Edinburgh 1992 from my CV. If I could cut the award in half and send half back I would. And here’s why.”

In the Independent, How dare you, Ken Loach and an accompanying report. See also a Scotland on Sunday report.

For the role of officials in supporting boycotts, see also our earlier piece on the Israeli Davis Cup match and the officials of Malmo.

Update: see also Unison refusing a Trade Union Friends of Israel a stall at its conference “for our own safety”.

Predictably Ken Loach is refusing to engage, this time on the pretext of “I don’t respond to personal attacks”. He surely realises that this protest is his due; before his personal intervention, EIFF had refused to bow to pressure.

The Militant: boycott and divestment a cover for antisemitism

The Militant is a socialist periodical connected to the US SWP and based in New York. This week you can read a piece by Paul Pederson reflecting on the boycott campaigning around Israel Apartheid Week, and the sacking of Starbucks in London. Dreaming of Israel subsumed into a “democratic, secular Palestine in which both Palestinians and Jews can live without state-supported religious restrictions”, he rejects boycott and divestment outright because they empower Palestinian groups whose values are antithetical to those of socialism, and because they are welcomed by workers’ class enemies as a diversion:

“Starbucks, whose owner is Jewish, has become a target of this campaign internationally. On January 10 some 200 protesters looted a Starbucks coffee shop near the Israeli embassy in London and attacked a number of businesses in the area. One proud participant posted a video of the looting on YouTube under the header “How to really boycott Israeli products.”

Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism, a centuries old form of racism, has been used by ruling classes throughout history when their system faced a crisis. Modern anti-Semitism often comes draped in an anticapitalist and even socialist cloak. The real exploiters—the billionaire ruling families, whose great majority is non-Jewish—are replaced by a racist conspiracy that paints the Jews as the source of society’s problems.”

and

“Support for the anti-Israel boycott effort among radicals – like the members of the Workers World Party and the ISO – often goes along with increasingly open support for Hamas. As ISO leader D’Amelio said of Khaled Meshal, the Hamas political bureau leader in Damascus, “There is little in what he says that I disagree with.”

The Hamas covenant, written in 1988, outlines the aims of that organization.

Speaking of the Jewish people, the document states, “With their money, they took control of the world media… . [T]hey stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution… . With their money they formed secret societies… . They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources.”

Fatah likewise has renounced its former revolutionary democratic demand for a democratic, secular Palestine. Its leadership reflects the wealthy layer of Palestinians increasingly seeking an accommodation with imperialism and with Tel Aviv.

In the absence of any revolutionary perspective, campaigns such as the anti-Israel boycott can appear to be a radical substitute. But, as the crisis of capitalism deepens, the “anti-Israel” character of these campaigns is simply a modern form of Jew-hatred. All who genuinely support the battle for Palestinian national rights must oppose it.”

Pederson sets out solidly socialist reasons not to boycott Israel.

But for ISO leader Lichi D’Amelio, the piece is an affront. She responds in the Socialist Worker, casting aspersion on Pederson’s socialist credentials and asking “whose side is he on”. She refers to her movement in revealingly self-centred terms as “perhaps the most exciting and positive development pro-Palestine activists have seen in a long time”. She also correctly refers to support for the boycott as a “no-brainer”, justifying it only with reference to other boycott examples, spurious authority figures and their decades-old writing. She is tolerant of Hamas’ antisemitic Charter, as charged by Pederson. There is no political vision in her self-defence – or rather it is a vision for, as an end in itself, bonding the workers of the world with Israel as the pretext:

“a movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel can play such an important role. It can help to build international working class solidarity–which we caught a glimpse of, thanks to the brave dockworkers in Durban.

How’s that for “charting a revolutionary course forward”?”

In other words, uniting against a scapegoat. Pederson was right.

For most others, it’s clear that that BDS is part of a movement to force the dismantlement of the state of Israel through total isolation and exclusion and that (unless you favour simply swapping an occupation for an all-out conflict) this is a moribund strategy. It’s significant that the pro-SWP organ has given Pederson a voice – it suggests that the antisemitism of the Palestine solidarity campaign has reached levels impossible for the SWP to ignore, and that it continues to finds antisemitism unhelpful to its movement.