Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions

The most important point is that we don’t have to prove that Israel is identical to apartheid South Africa in order to deserve the label apartheid. Apartheid is a generalized crime according to UN conventions, and there are certain criteria that may or may not apply in a given situation—so we judge a situation of institutionalized discrimination in a state on its own merits regarding whether it fulfills the conditions to be called an apartheid state. According to the basic conventions of the UN defining the crime of apartheid,¹ Israel satisfies the conditions to be assigned the label apartheid.

South African apartheid was rudimentary, petty, primitive, so to speak—literally black and white, clear separation, no rights. Israel’s apartheid is more hidden and covered up with a deceptive image of “democracy.” Palestinian citizens of Israel (the indigenous population that survived the massive ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948 and remained put) have the right to vote, and that is a huge difference from South Africa; however, in every other vital domain they are discriminated against by law—not only by policy but by law. In addition, they are only allowed to vote for a system that enshrines apartheid! Any party that calls for dismantling Israel’s racist laws, instituting unmitigated equality, and transforming the state into a real democracy as a state of all its citizens, cannot run for the Knesset.

There is racism in Canada and other Western democracies as well, one may argue, but the difference is that it’s not institutionalized and legalized, at least not any longer. The United States did have an apartheid situation in the Jim Crow South when there were different laws governing whites and nonwhites, but today we cannot say that about the United States in the legal sense, despite the prevalence of racism there in other, indirect forms.

There are basic laws, equivalent to constitutional laws in other countries (as Israel does not have a constitution), where there is clearcut discrimination between Jews and non-Jews. The most important rights that are given to Jewish citizens and not to non-Jewish citizens are the rights to automatic citizenship and nationality for any Jewish immigrant who comes from abroad to Israel. By contrast, Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias and later Israel in 1948, and ever since, are not entitled to go back to their homes of origin, as stipulated in international law, simply because they are not Jewish. There is no officially recognized “Israeli” nationality, but there is “Jewish nationality”—Palestinians as citizens can never get nationality in Israel, because the Israeli establishment, including the High Court, does not recognize an Israeli nationality. This is the kind of apartheid we have in Israel.³

Another very important point is that almost all the land in Israel is by law off limits to the state’s so-called non-Jewish citizens. As Chris McGreal writes in the Guardian: “Israeli governments reserved 93% of the land—often expropriated from Arabs without compensation—for Jews through state ownership, the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Lands Authority. In colonial and then apartheid South Africa, 87% of the land was reserved for whites.”⁴ This is worse than South Africa—93 percent of land is for the benefit of Jewish citizens of the state of Israel and Jews around the world, and them alone. If this is not apartheid, I don’t know what is.

Indeed many analysts would argue that Israel’s occupation, colonization, and denial of refugee rights is much worse than anything South Africa had, and that is true. South Africa, unlike Israel, did not employ ethnic cleansing to expel most of the indigenous population out of the country, although they did transfer populations as a form of social engineering apartheid. In South Africa the overall plan was to exploit blacks not throw them out of the whole country. Israel’s highest policy priority since its creation is getting rid of as many Palestinians as possible and grabbing as much of their land as practical, without inviting the full wrath of the world. South African apartheid force also never bombed bantustans with F-16s; they never reached Israel’s level of sustained, massive, outright violence, medieval siege, and massacres. Of course there was Sharpeville, there were massacres in Soweto and so on, but it all pales in comparison to what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians, and this is according to testimonies from Desmond Tutu, former ANC leader and government minister Ronnie Kasrils, and other South African leaders.

The academic boycott, which was called for by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in July 2004, is an institutional boycott—so it’s a call to every conscientious academic and academic institution to boycott all Israeli academic institutions because of their ongoing deep complicity in perpetuating Israel’s occupation and other forms of oppression.⁵ What do we mean by “complicity”? That’s a very fluid term. Complicity of the academy in the case of Israel is different from academic complicity elsewhere. In Canada, for example, your biggest universities are certainly complicit in Canadian policy, especially because they’re all state-funded institutions, exactly as in Israel (all universities in Israel are state funded). What’s different is that in Israel they are in full, organic partnership with the security-military establishment, implicating them in war crimes and other grave violations of international law. Many weapons for the Israeli army are developed through the universities; most of the research used in planning, justifying, and whitewashing the oppression of the Palestinians and denial of Palestinian rights is done by academics in university programs; and major colonization projects that under international law are classified as war crimes have been produced by universities. There are many specific examples. The idea of the Israeli wall to be built on occupied Palestinian territory was produced in an academic environment, as was the wall’s design. An academic at Haifa University claims that this is his brainchild—and there is no reason not to believe him, as he has produced other projects that were terribly involved in ethnic cleansing Palestinians even inside Israel. So at every level there is a very deep, entrenched complicity of the Israeli academia in the security-military establishment.

Also, nearly all Israeli academics, like other adult Israelis in a defined age group, serve in the occupation reserve army—that is, they serve as occupying soldiers—for three months each year. They leave academia, research, everything else, and serve at a military roadblock or a post that is even worse. During that service period, they’re either participating in the commission of human rights violations and war crimes or watching them in apathy and silence. In either case they are complicit. The universities not only tolerate this reserve duty but promote it—it is part of the system. Omnipresent on campuses, the military-security establishment goes almost unnoticed, like any normal part of the academy.⁶

Despite this, we are not calling for boycotting individual academics but institutions. If our boycott is were focused on individuals, it would be McCarthyist—it would involve some form of McCarthyism or political testing: who is a good Israeli academic, who is bad, and, crucially, who decides and according to what criteria? We are opposed to that on principle. It’s a very troubling prospect to impose political tests; that’s why we have chosen an unambiguously institutional boycott.

That’s a false argument, factually and logically. Factually, there have been so many attempts at “dialogue” since 1993 when the so-called peace process was launched at Oslo. Many grassroots dialogue organizations and initiatives were established; it became an industry—we call it the “peace industry.” You could get rich and/or famous rather quickly by getting involved in one of those dialogue groups, plus you get to travel to Europe and stay in fancy hotels and get some other benefits as well. But otherwise it produces absolutely nothing on the ground in terms of advancing the cause of a just peace and ending oppression. The main reason is because this peace industry is morally flawed and based on a false premise: that this “conflict” is mainly due to mutual hatred and implies mutual responsibility, and thus you need some kind of therapy or dialogue between those two equivalent, symmetric, conflicting parties. Put them in a room, entice them—or force them—to talk to one another, and then they will fall in love, the hatred will go away, and you will have a Romeo and Juliet story. Of course, this is deceitful and morally corrupt because the conflict is a colonial conflict—it’s not a domestic dispute between a husband and a wife in a culture of social equals. It’s a colonial conflict based on ethnic cleansing, racism, settler colonialism, and apartheid. Without removing the root causes of the conflict, you cannot have any coexistence, at least not ethical coexistence.

There are many other issues related to this dialogue industry. Within it you don’t have dialogue between asymmetric parties, you have lopsided negotiations. To have a dialogue you have to have a certain minimal-level common denominator, or a common vision for the ultimate solution based on freedom, equality, democracy, and ending injustice. If you don’t have that common denominator, then it’s negotiation between the stronger and weaker party. In such a situation, as I’ve written elsewhere, you can’t have a bridge between them but only a ladder where you go up or down not across—because there is no across. I call this the master-slave type of coexistence. It’s also a form of “peace”: a master and a slave can reach an agreement where the enslavement is accepted as reality and the slave cannot challenge it but only make the best out of it. There is no war—no conflict, nobody is killing anybody—but the master remains master and the slave remains slave.

Boycotts, on the other hand, work in reality and in principle, as was shown in the South African anti-apartheid struggle. There is absolutely no reason why they cannot work in our case too. Israel’s total impunity, perpetuated through the official support it receives from the West in all fields (diplomatic, economic, cultural, academic, and so on), means that unless the price of its system of oppression is sufficiently raised through concerted civil-society pressure campaigns, it will never give it up; it will never concede on any of our inalienable, UN-sanctioned rights.

Yes, we draw our inspiration and experience primarily from our rich Palestinian history of nonviolent, or civil, resistance. For a hundred years, well before the South African resistance movement’s inspiration, our own history has had fertile roots of civil resistance against the settler-colonial conquest of Palestine. We have resisted mostly with civil resistance, not armed resistance, contra the common myth that Palestinian resistance is only armed. Palestinians from all segments of society have always resisted with social, political, cultural, and artistic popular resistance, strikes, demonstrations, tax boycotts, women’s and trade union organizing, and so on. ... The majority of our people have always been involved in nonviolent resistance even before the inspiration of Gandhi, King, and Mandela.⁷

The conception of academic freedom implied in the question is used primarily to muzzle serious debate about the complicity of the Israeli academy in planning, executing, and whitewashing Israel’s occupation, colonization, and apartheid. It seems to be restricted to the suppression of the “free exchange of ideas among academics,” leaving out the situation of academics in contexts of colonialism, military occupation, and other forms of national oppression, where “material and institutional foreclosures . . . make it impossible for certain historical subjects to lay claim to the discourse of rights itself,” as Judith Butler eloquently argues.⁹ Academic freedom, from this perspective, becomes the exclusive privilege of some academics but not others.

Those who care about academic freedom only when it pertains to Jewish Israelis—perceived as “white,” “European,” “civilized”—and not when it pertains to us brown Palestinians are hypocritical, to put it mildly. Moreover, the academic boycott that PACBI is calling for and that all our partners are adopting is institutional, targeting academic institutions due to their entrenched complicity. It does not infringe on the rights and privileges of Israeli academics to go out and participate in conferences and so on, so long as this is not the product of an institutional link. We are calling for cutting all institutional links, not for cutting off visits by individual academics, artists, or cultural figures to participate in events. It is, then, quite inaccurate and politically motivated to call the institutional academic boycott of Israel a form of infringement on academic freedom.

Yes. Professor Oren Ben-Dor, for instance, who is an Israeli British philosopher supporting the boycott, argued this in an article a few years ago.¹⁰ He wrote that one of the purposes of the proposed academic boycott is to “provide a means to transcend the publicly sanctioned limits of debate,” adding, “Such freedom is precisely what is absent in Israel.” The academic boycott, from this viewpoint, is credited for “generating,” not repressing, academic freedom. “The Zionist ideology which stipulates that Israel must retain its Jewish majority,” Ben-Dor says, “is a non-debatable given in the country—and the bedrock of opposition to allowing the return of Palestinian refugees. The very few intellectuals who dare to question this sacred cow are labeled ‘extremists.’ ”

OK, where do I start? Well, let’s start with the occupied West Bank. In the West Bank you have a largely obedient Palestinian Authority (PA) that acts mainly as a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation, serving its “security” needs and relieving it of its civic burdens of running the education, health, sanitation, and other systems for the Palestinian population in most of the occupied territory. Israel gets indispensable support from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which lacks any democratic mandate from the Palestinian people under occupation. The PA has not succeeded in stopping Israel’s construction of the wall (which is illegal according to the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice at The Hague), or the construction of colonial settlements (which are also illegal—fitting the definition of war crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention), or the checkpoints (there are more than six hundred roadblocks and checkpoints that severely curtail Palestinian freedom of movement), or the confiscation of land, or the indiscriminate killings (including of children), or house demolitions (the collective punishment of choice in occupied Jerusalem), or the incarceration of political prisoners, or any of the other repressive occupation measures that are designed to ethnically cleanse the indigenous Palestinians in a very slow and gradual, but persistent, manner, especially in and around Jerusalem. We have not seen any difference between Israel’s repression in the West Bank and its repression in Gaza, prior to the siege and the latest war of aggression of course. In other words, with or without Hamas, Israel’s multifaceted colonial oppression hardly changes. Its master plan is to get rid of us or as many of us as politically possible, no matter who “rules” us. In the West Bank there is no Hamas in power—it’s the US- and Israel-backed PA—but still Israel continues with its policies of colonization and racism. It’s irrelevant whether or not Hamas accepts Israel’s so-called right to exist as a Jewish state (read: an apartheid state)¹¹ or accepts the’67 borders—totally irrelevant. Israel will never accept our rights as a people unless it is compelled to.

No colonial settler regime, from Northern Ireland to Algeria to South Africa, ever gave up power voluntarily or through persuasion, history teaches us, without effective, persistent, and ever-evolving resistance, coupled with massive and sustained international solidarity, the oppressed have little hope in ending injustice and achieving real peace. Our sixty-two years of experience with Zionist colonial oppression and apartheid have shown us that unless we resist by all means that are harmonious with international law—particularly civil resistance—in order to force Israel into a pariah status in the world, like that of South Africa in the 1980s, there is no chance of advancing the prospects for a just peace.

On a personal level, not as a representative of the BDS movement, I have for over twenty-five years consistently supported the secular democratic unitary state solution in historic Palestine, based on justice and full equality. I am categorically against binationalism as a solution for the question of Palestine, for several moral and logical reasons that would take me too long to explain.¹² Let me just give a primary reason. The binational model assumes that there are two nations with equal and competing moral claims to the land, and therefore we have to accommodate both national rights.

I prefer to stick to the model I support, which is a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote—regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on and so forth—full equality under the law with the inclusion of the refugees (this must be based on the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes of origin, per UN resolutions). In other words, I am calling for a secular, democratic state that can reconcile our inalienable rights as indigenous Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as colonial settlers, once they’ve shed their colonial character and privileges and accepted justice and international law.

Why do I see this as the most moral and sustainable solution? It’s ethically superior, in my view, because it treats people as equal humans. The two-state solution is not only impossible to achieve now— Israel has made it an absolute pipe dream that cannot happen—but also, crucially, an immoral solution. At best, it would address some of the rights of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, a mere one-third of the Palestinan people, while ignoring the majority of Palestinians—those in exile, the refugees, as well as the Palestinian citizens of Israel. There are three segments of the Palestinian people; unless the basic requirements of justice for all three segments are guaranteed, as the BDS Call and entire campaign insists, we shall not have exercised our right to self-determination. The only way that we can exercise our right to self-determination, without imposing unnecessary injustice on our oppressors, is to have a secular, democratic state where nobody is thrown into the sea, nobody is sent back to Poland, and nobody is left suffering in refugee camps. We can coexist ethically with our inalienable rights given back to us, and everyone’s and every community’s rights are safeguarded and promoted.

Two polls in 2007 showed two-thirds majority support for a singlestate solution in all flavors—some of them think of a purely Palestinian state without Israelis, for example. In exile, the percentage of support for one state is much higher, because the main issue is that refugees in particular, and people fighting for refugee rights as I am, know that you cannot practically reconcile the right of return for refugees with a negotiated two-state solution, as Israel will never accede to it. It must be compelled to accept applying international law in this regard, as apartheid South Africa was. That is the big elephant in the room, and people are ignoring it. Realizing the UN-stipulated right of return and reparation for Palestinian refugees would radically transform Israel from an ethnocentric, racist Jewish state to a true democracy based on justice and equality. The right of return is a basic individual and collective right that cannot be given away and is not voided by the passing of time; it’s inalienable.

The siege of Gaza is also an expression of “international consensus” of sorts, a consensus of the world’s hegemonic powers, not the peoples’; still, that doesn’t make it right. It’s an international conspiracy of complicity and silence; it is a war crime, indeed a crime against humanity, despite support from the US-controlled UN and all the powers that be around the world. It’s quite peculiar—and unfortunate—for activists, and public intellectuals who are counted as activists, to support the international consensus when they like to and oppose it on every other account. Opposing the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and calling for its independence from it at a time when there was an international consensus supporting Indonesia is a case in point. Progressive intellectuals the world over are not supposed to be fettered by some illusion of “international community,” which effectively means the United States, the European Union, and their satellites.

So “international consensus” often means that the main powers agree to perpetuate an unjust order because it fits their interests. That doesn’t mean we have to accept that; we have to struggle to change it, and the way we do that is on the ground. By proposing the more moral solution, we are saying that this can mobilize universal support from around the world—except from those who are keen to maintain Israel as a racist, ethnocentric state, or an evolved apartheid.