Two Reflections on Israeli Apartheid Week

By John Ballard

Midway through Israeli Apartheid Week (March 1-13) Haaretz carries a number of related news and opinion pieces. Two caught my attention with thoughtful reflections of the importance, meaning and impact of the BDS movement to which this "week" aims to give higher profile. That Judith Butler and Yoni Eshpar are new names for me is more a reflection of my ignorance than either of them, but I know nuanced thinking and honesty when I see it and both deserve careful attention to their comments, especially about the notion of sanctions and boycotts. Approaching BDS from different angles, both point to a two-edged quality of the movement that can be counterproductive, although both are supportive of the goals to some degree.

In Judith Butler: As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up Udi Aloni (another name unfamiliar to me, an Israeli-American writer and film maker) interviews Judith Baker who is described in the opening paragraph.

Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel.

The string of topics -- gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and Jewish values-- seems odd at first glance, but the three subjects are integrated seamlessly into a compelling, thought-provoking theme larger than any of those three individual topics, a good example of a whole which is bigger than its parts. 

Apparently the name "Judith Baker" is familiar in some Israeli circles as verb, in the same way that some use expressions like Borked or Swiftboated. In her case the meaning is conflated with her outspoken identity as a feminist who also happens to be an in-you-face lesbian, to which she responds...

..."to Judith Butler someone" meant to say something very negative about men and to identify with a form of feminism that was against men. And I've never been identified with that form of feminism. That's not my mode...my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.

A few exchanges later she ties together gender identity, Jewish identity and the importance of grieving following the death of someone in ones group, whether it be family or group identity.

...I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn't trust anybody outside. You'd bring someone home and the first question was "Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?" Then I entered into a lesbian community in college, late college, graduate school, and the first thing they asked was, "Are you a feminist, are you not a feminist?" "Are you a lesbian, are you not a lesbian?" and I thought "Enough with the separatism!"

It felt like the same kind of policing of the community. You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. Is that person really Jewish, maybe they're not so Jewish. I don't know if they're really Jewish. Maybe they're self-hating. Is that person lesbian? I think maybe they had a relationship with a man. What does that say about how true their identity was? I thought I can't live in a world in which identity is being policed in this way.

...In the 70s and 80s, in the gay and lesbian community, it became clear to me that very often, when a relationship would break up, a gay person wouldn't be able to tell their parents, his or her parents. So here, people were going through all kinds of emotional losses that were publicly unacknowledged and that became very acute during the AIDS crisis. In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, "I have just lost the love of my life."

This was extremely important to my thinking throughout the 80s and 90s. But it also became important to me as I started to think about war. After 9/11, I was shocked by the fact that there was public mourning for many of the people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, less public mourning for those who died in the attack on the Pentagon, no public mourning for the illegal workers of the WTC, and, for a very long time, no public acknowledgment of the gay and lesbian families and relationships that had been destroyed by the loss of one of the partners in the bombings. Then we went to war very quickly, Bush having decided that the time for grieving is over. I think he said that after ten days, that the time for grieving is over and now is time for action....

So we come to the importance of grief and grieving. Here she poses the question of the ages...

[U]nder what conditions certain lives are grievable and certain lives not grievable or ungrievable?

The unspoken, unnoticed corollary to any attempt to rush or deny grief is two-fold.
It plants a toxic abscess in the grief-stricken survivor while denying the humanity of the one who has died.

Moving to events in Gaza we now see through a different lens...

...even the children were instruments of the war effort; that the Palestinians put them out there, in the targets, to show that Israelis would kill children, and this was actually part of a war effort. At this point, every single living being who is Palestinian becomes a war instrument...they are artillery. The bodies themselves are artillery....So when a people who believes that another people is out to destroy them sees all the means of destruction killed, or some extraordinary number of the means of destruction destroyed, they are thrilled, because they think their safety and well-being and happiness are being purchased, are being achieved through this destruction.

Thrilled to see the death of enemies.

That is the core motivation for war. In order to win it is necessary to kill as many of them as possible, including those once regarded as "innocent."

This has been the dynamic throughout history, from Biblical accounts to the present. The Rwandan genocide moved rapidly with Hutus learning to regard Tutsi's as "insects" or other non-humans. How many times have we heard stories from Vietnam about women and children who were Viet Cong collaborators? (How else to explain My Lai?) And following last year's IDF Operation Cast Lead why else would the warriors want teeshirts depicting pregnant Palestinian women with the caption "One shot, two kills"?

Here is where the headline of the piece is chosen.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps. There were those who would and could speak out against state racism and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able to speak out. Not just for Jews, but for any number of people. There was an entire idea of social justice that emerged for me from the consideration of the Nazi genocide.

I would also say that what became really hard for me is that if one wanted to criticize Israeli state violence - precisely because that as a Jew one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism - then one is in a bind, because one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism. And yet for me, it comes out of a certain Jewish value of social justice. So how can I fulfill my obligation as a Jew to speak out against an injustice when, in speaking out against Israeli state and military injustice, I am accused of not being a good enough Jew or of being a self-hating Jew? This is the bind of my current situation.

Next, a closer look at the importance of ritual mourning (Sitting Shiva) and the Diaspora as an inverted shtetl (Aloni:The Diaspora, when it was static, became separatist, became the shtetl. And when the emancipation was realized, it became an ethnocratic state; it also became separatist, a re-construction of the ghetto....Butler:...any effort to retain the idea of emancipation when you don't have a state that extends equal rights of citizenship to Jews and non-Jews alike is, for me, bankrupt. It's bankrupt.).

They move next to the notion of "bi-nationalism" broaching (but not concluding) what I would call a one-state solution, and a contemporary illustration of the old saying that where there are two Jews there are three opinions.
The reader can go to the link for the flesh, but rather than parsing the rest (three of six pages printed out) I leave you with these bones.

?...there has to be a cultural movement that overcomes hatred and paranoia and that actually draws on questions of cohabitation. Living in mixity and in diversity, accepting your neighbor, finding modes of living together. And no political solution, at a purely procedural level, is going to be successful if there is no bilingual education, if there are no ways of reorganizing neighborhoods, if there are no ways of reorganizing territory, bringing down the wall, accepting the neighbors you have, and accepting that there are profound obligations that emerge from being adjacent to another people in this way.

?I believe that people have reasonable fears that a one-state solution would ratify the existing marginalization and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. That Palestine would be forced to accept a kind of Bantustan existence.

?[Aloni]...over three years ago, at the beginning of the Second Lebanon war, that Slavoj �i�ek came to Israel to give a speech on my film Forgiveness. The Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asked him not to come to the Jerusalem Film Festival. They said that I should show my film - as Israelis shouldn't boycott Israel, but they asked international figures to boycott the festival....I wonder what do you think about this movement now, the full Boycott, Diversion and Sanction movement (BDS), three years after that confusing event?

[Butler]... the BDS movement has always been focused on the occupation. It is not a referendum on Zionism, and it does not take an explicit position on the one-state or two-state solution. And then there were those who sought to distinguish boycotting individual Israelis from boycotting the Israeli institutions. But it is not always easy to know how to make the distinction between who is an individual and who is an institution.

?...affirming the status quo means affirming the occupation. One cannot "set aside" the radical impoverishment, the malnutrition, the limits on mobility, the intimidation and harassment at the borders, and the exercise of state violence in both Gaza and the West Bank and talk about other matters in public?

? The point of the boycott is to produce and enact an international consensus that calls for the state of Israel to comply with international law.

?Surely it has always been the best part of the Jewish intellectual tradition to insist upon the ethical relation to the non-Jew, the extension of equality and justice, and the refusal to keep silent in the face of egregrious wrongs.

? ...one can imagine a bumper sticker: "what part of 'justice' do you fail to understand?"

?000?

The second reading by Yoni Eshpar, IN PICTURES / Are boycotts and sanctions really effective?, is equally long but less convoluted because it is the work of one writer rather than an impromptu conversation between two people.

I leave it to the reader to go to the link for the whole picture, but my impression is that the writer is somewhere between lukewarm and cold with the idea of sanctions and/or boycotts because historically they have been ineffective and in some cases counterproductive. The point is mathematically correct, but overlooks two points. The first, obviously, is that such efforts do not always end in failure (South Africa, Indian independence, he mentions Libya). But the second, which is more important, is the simple reality that nearly all national resources, from journalism and political grandstanding to the lion's share of the national treasure, are overwhelmingly directed at waging or preparing for military conflict, with little or no meaningful attempts to wage peace or examine the dynamics of nonviolent conflict resolution. 

Here are a couple of snips I liked.

?"The problem with pressure," he adds, illustrating his point by squeezing an imaginary balloon, "is that you never know where it will be released, and therefore you cannot predict the outcome. For example, we now know that during periods when we imposed a closure on the territories, it brought about a significant strengthening of the Palestinian economy. Up to then, they'd mainly provided a workforce, but under the closure they were forced to introduce more diversification into their economy and make it more autonomous."

Paradoxically, then, a boycott can be transformed from a punitive measure to an incentive for economic development in the targeted country. For example, the naval blockade of Britain in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century and in both world wars compelled the British to improve local food manufacturing so as to reduce dependence on imports. But one needn't look that far afield; in the long run, the nearly 50-year Arab boycott of Israel did the country more good than harm.

?In the future, Operation Cast Lead may come to be viewed as the moment when Israel realized that the policy of boycotting and isolating Hamas exhausted its usefulness. In recent months, reports of a secret channel of negotiations between the parties have proliferated, and Mahmoud Abbas has even claimed that talks have been going on with respect to an interim agreement. Hamas denies the reports, of course. There is little doubt, however, that the military operation in Gaza led many nations to conclude that it is Israel that should be the target of a boycott and sanctions.

The international Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement began operating five years ago, at the initiative of dozens of civilian Palestinian organizations. Unlike other initiatives which call for a selective boycott - e.g., of the settlements - it calls for an economic, cultural and academic boycott, for divestment and for sanctions on Israel, irrespective of the Green Line. Furthermore, the document lists three conditions for repealing these measures: ending "the occupation and colonization of all the Arab lands," granting full equal rights to Israel's Arab citizens, and promoting the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and property.

The BDS movement has enjoyed two waves of success - one following the Second Lebanon War, and again after the war in Gaza. In the past year, it has also gained momentum in countries where criticism of Israel was once much less vocal.

Holland is one such place. After the Holocaust, its Protestant church adopted a firm official stance of eternal solidarity with the Jewish people and unqualified support for the State of Israel. Even though only about a sixth of Dutch citizens are affiliated with the church, its theological position carried much sway in public discourse and government policy-making.

All this is beginning to change, however. Two days before last Christmas, at the large and impressive cathedral in Utrecht, a group of Christian Palestinian leaders presented Dutch church representatives with the Kairos Palestine Document (kairos is ancient Greek for "the moment of truth"), which was first published two weeks prior to that in Bethlehem and calls on Christians around the world to reject theological arguments for supporting Israel and to join the boycott against it. A growing number of clergy and religious organizations are adopting the document, and adding to the increasing pressure on Dutch companies to cut their ties with Israel.

In North America, too, the BDS campaign has found supporters - in universities, church organizations, labor unions and other social movements. The number of voices supporting sanctions is also multiplying among Jews, and includes several influential figures, like philosopher Judith Butler and activist-author Naomi Klein.

A boycott and sanctions that originate in a popular movement are different than those imposed by countries upon other countries. Their influence derives from public opinion and from the international solidarity they inspire. The older generation may be reminded of the days of the civil rights struggles in the United States, while younger people feel motivated to be act on behalf of a big cause.

Finally, he ends on a down note.

Political activists Uri Avnery and Prof. Noam Chomsky, persistent critics of the BDS movement, assert that herein lies the critical difference between the South African and Israeli cases. In a 2008 interview, Chomsky warned that calls for a boycott against Israel under the present conditions would "almost invariably backfire, reinforcing the harshest and most brutal policies towards Palestinians." Hufbauer concurs: "From what I know about Israel," he says, "this will provoke a very strong counter spirit among the Israeli people."

In 1998, Serbian journalist Zoran Cirjakovic published an article in Newsweek detailing the effects of the sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. He said the international ostracism had deeply wounded the pride of the Serbs, who were once the West's darlings and heroes of the world wars, and now suddenly found themselves reviled, and unjustly so, they believed. One after the other, his old friends were now becoming avid nationalists - convinced that the entire world had it wrong, and that the Serbs were the victims of one-sided media propaganda and of NATO's belligerent policy. Support for their leader Milosevic only grew, and with it, hatred for the Albanians of Kosovo. Whatever democratic elements still remained in the country were gradually eroded, and Cirjakovic, known for his criticism of the regime, was given the kind of treatment reserved for traitors whenever he walked into a Belgrade cafe. About six months after the article's publication, the NATO bombings of Serbia commenced.

This description helps to illustrate how, rather than preventing wars, boycotts and international isolation can actually lay the groundwork for them. Perhaps it also explains why many of the most enthusiastic supporters of sanctions and boycotts are people who have never lived in a boycotted society - and probably never will.

My personal take on the BDS effort is uncomplicated.
I don't agree with arguments for the downside.
How could it make the situation worse for the people of Gaza?