Is BDS too blind and blunt?


June 14, 2015
Sarah Benton

First,a journalist’s account from CS Monitor; second, a harsh critique from Dmitry Shumsky who thinks BDS obscures Israel’s unique colonialism.


Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS campaign

BDS: Is growth of anti-Israel boycott all good news for Palestinians?

As the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement gathers steam – rattling Israelis – many Palestinian activists feel empowered. But others see it as counterproductive.

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer, Christian Science Monitor
June 12, 2015

JERUSALEM — Palestinian activists are revelling in the anti-Israel boycott’s momentum as it approaches its 10th anniversary in July.

From Stanford’s student senate to the Presbyterian Church to the chief executive of French telecom giant Orange, a broad spectrum of foreigners are pressuring Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories. (Orange’s CEO said Friday, however, that he opposed the boycott movement and wouldn’t pull out of Israel.)

Israeli leaders and supporters appear increasingly rattled, holding debates in parliament, organizing conferences on anti-boycott strategies and fundraising efforts, and launching websites against the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Some critics of the movement say it targets Israel’s very existence, not just the occupation.

“The BDS movement has triggered unprecedented debate within Israeli society about Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, showing Israeli society that there is a fast-rising price to be paid for maintaining this regime of oppression,” says Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the movement.

But there’s also a cost for some Palestinians: Those engaging with Israelis – in business, sports, culture, and dialogue to address the conflict – are increasingly pressured to quit. They are branded negatively as “normalizers” – appearing to endorse the Israeli occupation as normal or sustainable – or even traitors, and some have received death threats.

At issue are two different perspectives on the Israeli-Arab [sic]conflict. One portrays it as one-sided colonial oppression that can be overcome via financial, legal, and social pressure. The other sees it as an asymmetrical conflict fueled by hatred and fear that perpetuates a cycle of violence and cannot be solved by power alone.

Building trust to resolve conflict

As Israeli and Palestinian societies become increasingly segregated, those seeking engagement with the other side say such activities are not only legitimate but a crucial means to ending the occupation – and the conflict.

“If we don’t have this trust, we will never have any kind of solution for this conflict,” says Wisam Mousa Seder of Minds for Peace, which organizes peace congresses of Israeli and Palestinian citizens that draft grass-roots peace agreements and push their leaders to follow suit.

Last year, their congress in Ramallah was disrupted by protesters, and the participants were whisked away under Palestinian Authority police escort. Mr. Seder, a boxer and coach who has competed at more than 20 international competitions, was suspended from the Palestine Olympic Federation.

“We understand the desire of Palestinian activists to avoid programs that can be exploited to make the status quo – which is untenable for Palestinians – appear comfortable,” says Leslie Ordeman, press attaché for the US Consulate in Jerusalem.

“However, the anti-normalization movement feels almost Orwellian,” he says. “It effectively cuts off any type of interaction between average Palestinians and average Israelis, which makes it very easy for each side to dehumanize the other…. There is no room to engage with anyone who might actually need to be convinced.”

Meeting the ‘other’ – through music

On a recent evening, half a dozen Israeli and Palestinian teenagers sat with their instruments on a balcony overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. As the iconic Dome of the Rock lit up with sunset colors, their voices mingled with the evening call to prayer, singing a song they co-wrote based on one member’s experience growing up in a refugee camp.

For some, this band was their first introduction to the “other,” and the first time anyone challenged their national narrative. It’s an initiative run by Heartbeat, which brings together young musicians to build critical understanding, and provides field trips and facilitated dialog in addition to music.

Last year, the BDS movement targeted Heartbeat for not identifying the Israeli occupation as the root cause of the conflict. The group has taken a year to formulate a response to such criticism and what they say is broader misunderstanding of their work – a process that they say has strengthened them and helped them to more clearly communicate their mission. The statement is due to be released next week.

“In my eyes, those kinds of pressures are good to re-evaluate what we do and put everything we do under a critical lens,” says Tamer Omari, a Palestinian facilitator with Heartbeat in Jerusalem.

How the BDS movement started

Supporters of BDS say the movement was created to redress a fundamental imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians.

Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with Israel, recalls Israeli negotiators in Taba, Egypt, in 2001 discussing redrawing the map so that a Jewish settlement deep in the West Bank would be part of Israel. She asked on what basis of law they were doing so.

“‘Look, we will respect the law when we’re forced to respect the law,’” she recalls the negotiator saying. “‘And until then, it’s just you and me in a room.’”

She concluded that the conflict is fundamentally about power, and credits BDS with empowering Palestinians to hold Israel accountable under international law after years of “futile, closed-door” negotiations.

The BDS movement was established in July 2005, and was endorsed by 170 Palestinian organizations encompassing academia, trade unions, refugee groups, and religious figures.

Today it is a loose network of activists and organizations worldwide that share three key goals – ending the occupation, ending Israeli racial discrimination, and granting the right of return for Palestinian refugees – but are free to make their own decisions about whom to target, and how.

‘When you go down, you get up again’

When the environmental group Friends of the Earth International decided to join the BDS movement, it presented a quandary for their Middle East branch. While it wanted to see an end to the conflict, it was also engaged in many joint Israeli-Arab initiatives for a sustainable future, such as building essential wastewater treatment plants in Palestinian communities.

So Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) cut ties with their parent organization and reverted to their original name, EcoPeace.

“We left Friends of the Earth International because of our great disappointment in the organization over a decade – the growing strength of what we think is an extremist voice,” says Israeli director Gidon Bromberg. “The decision of Friends of the Earth International to support BDS is an example in point.”

Some Palestinian members of EcoPeace have received death threats. Others criticize BDS for playing out mainly on social media, instead of through direct engagement.

Mr. Barghouti counters that, however.

BDS engages with groups that seem confused and are slipping into normalization without a premeditated political agenda, usually under the lure of money, prestige, and selfish gains. We try to privately convince them not to be part of undermining the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. When private communication fails, we go public to apply moral pressure on them to stop their damaging activities that provide Israel with Palestinian and/or Arab fig leaves to cover its regime of oppression with.

The pressure has led some Palestinians to abandon their work or go silent.

But others have been strengthened, such as Seder of Minds for Peace, who says he has brought the mentality of a fighter to his work. After a year of reasoning with his adversaries, he finally was able to reassume his various posts, including with the Palestinian Olympic federation.

“When you go down, you get up again, and you will fight with more power,” he says.


How BDS is actually perpetuating the occupation

By obscuring the uniqueness of the Israeli colonialist regime, BDS is giving Israel an escape hatch; instead, boycott movement must focus on occupation and settlements, stop blurring lines between Israel and Territories.

By Dmitry Shumsky, Haaretz
June 11, 2015

If the BDS movement didn’t exist, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of occupation and settlement would have had to invent it. For contrary to the popular notion in Israel, on the international scene BDS is serving as one of the most effective factors in perpetuating the Palestinians’ national enslavement.

Both the boycott movement and the present Israeli government – as made clear in Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely’s fundamentalist speech to Israeli diplomats – are striving to imprint in international consciousness the inherent identification between the State of Israel and the Israeli military regime in the occupied territories, a single organic Israeli unit. Put another way: There is basic consent between the BDS movement and the Israeli government regarding the conception of the geopolitical space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, as a single state called Israel.

The dispute between the boycott movement and the occupation and settlement government has to do with the moral character of that single “Israel” between the river and the sea. While BDS describes it as a criminal colonialist entity whose international legitimacy is in doubt, the Israeli government sees it as a legitimate partner in the family of nations that gives just expression to the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

In this battle, BDS will never have the upper hand, for two main reasons: First, despite any cries about stolen land, to the vast majority of the international community, Israelis’ right to self-determination is a given. Ever since the PLO’s historic recognition of Israel in 1988, this right is also recognized by the oldest key segments of the Palestinian national movement.

Second, as a result of the Israelization of the occupation, to which the boycott movement is lending a hand, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are repeatedly likened to second- or third-class Israeli citizens. This makes it possible for the cleverest and most demagogic propagandists of the Israeli whitewashers of the occupation – such as in Ben-Dror Yemini’s recent articles in Yedioth Ahronoth – to evade confronting the occupation and settlements and escape into the type of comparative apologetics they’re so fond of, in which they contrast Israel to a number of “ordinary” countries like Iran or North Korea, which systematically violate their citizens’ rights without anyone threatening them with a boycott.

But the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza are not second- or third- or even fourth-class citizens. They are deprived of civil rights in the deepest sense of the word; they are non-citizens subject to the good graces of a foreign military regime, which directly or indirectly controls every aspect of their daily lives and faithfully serves the privileged settler citizens. This is the intolerable uniqueness of the Israeli colonialist regime, which has no match in this early 21st-century post-colonial world.

For this anomalous regime to be overcome, its uniqueness must not be obscured. Blurring it will provide the financer of this regime from Las Vegas and his protégé on Balfour Street a coveted escape hatch to avoid responsibility for denying the Palestinians’ civil and national rights. This is what will allow them and their supporters to channel the discussion onto matters such as the Jews’ just right to self-determination, and Israel’s internal character, whose future is in the hands of its citizens.

Thus, the international boycott weapon should be aimed in a careful and focused way against the occupation and the settlements. Of course, some people will find it hard to clearly differentiate between the “territories” and “Israel,” when the institutional, economic and cultural connections between the occupying State of Israel and its colonialist enterprise in the post-1967 territories are unequivocal. But whether it’s a naïve question, or one that winks at annexation, the answer is that is certainly possible. The Israeli organizations and institutions and companies that operate in sovereign Israeli territory that is recognized under international law should not be subjected to a boycott, even if they have branches in the occupied territories, just as there should be no thought of boycotting foreign countries and institutions that have cooperation and economic or cultural ties with the settlements.

Like the institutions and businesses inside Israel, they should be continually called upon to join a boycott of the occupation and settlement project. An effort should be made to persuade them to cut off all ties with the international criminal enterprise that is enslaving the Palestinian people contrary to “the law of nations” and gnawing away at the existential infrastructure of the State of Israel, which arose and continues to exist thanks to that same “law of nations.”

As for organizations, institutions and companies that operate from within the military-messianic colonialist enterprise – these should be subject to a comprehensive and uncompromising economic and cultural boycott. This must continue until the settlement enterprise disappears off the face of the earth – either by evacuation of all the settlements, or by territorial exchange and agreed-upon borders between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine, or whether – and this is the most desirable solution – by having the settlers who wish to do so remain in and become citizens of the Palestinian state with the approval of the sovereign Palestinian entity. For after all, this small piece of land between the Jordan River and the sea is cherished by both peoples, by Palestinians and Jews both.

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