http://newint.org/argument/2014/10/01/argument-israel-boycott-rights/
Two prominent professors and authors, Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein,
go head to head.
Ilan
In
recent years, the Israeli political system has shifted to the Right,
and with this have come harsher policies: ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians from the West Bank, genocide in Gaza and apartheid inside
Israel. Without an international reaction, Palestine and the
Palestinians will soon disappear.
The Palestinians have
tried armed struggle, which failed to liberate even one square inch of
the land. They then put their faith in a diplomatic process that was
meant to end the occupation of the 1967 areas [claimed by Israel after
the Six-Day War]. The peace charade was based on the misconception that
there is a significant voice within Jewish Israel that is willing to
limit Zionist racism to 80 per cent of Palestine, and leave alone the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The ‘peace process’ allowed Israel to
deepen the Judaization of the West Bank to a point of no return. At the
same time, international immunity has enabled Israel to expand the
apartheid system against the Palestinians inside Israel and to ghettoize
Gaza. Israel has become a worse regime than Apartheid South Africa ever
was.
It has to be stopped, and quickly. The same
methods used against Apartheid South Africa and other rogue states are
being called for. The most effective way is to send a message to the
cultural and academic élites who are still received warmly in the
Western world as representatives of the only enlightened state in the
Middle East.
In reality, they represent a rogue regime
whose moral legitimization should be questioned. They should be targeted
first, and the targeting is already bearing fruit. For the first time,
we hear voices of significant dissent from within these communities in
Israel. It should be followed by divestment and sanctions, which have
finally begun to appear – the only international activity that seems to
deter the Israeli government.
The nonviolent method of
boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), when expanded and adopted as an
official strategy by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and
Hamas (and we are close to this tipping moment in time), will offer a
horizon and an alternative to a desperate armed struggle that leads
nowhere.
Norman
The BDS movement is said to be
anchored squarely in international law. The platform consists of three
planks: an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza;
equality of rights for Palestinian Israelis; and recognition of the
Palestinian refugees’ right of return. It repeatedly points to
international law as the fount of this political agenda.
The
core right, from which the three-fold agenda derives, is said to be the
Palestinian right to self-determination. However, BDS takes no official
position on the Israeli state. Its justification for this lacuna is
that it ‘adopts a rights-based, not a solution-based approach’.
Under
international law, however, Israelis also have rights, including the
reciprocal right to self-determination and statehood. This right has
been ratified by the very same bodies to which BDS gestures in support
of its ‘rights-based approach’.
BDS also invokes the
‘UN-sanctioned rights’ of Palestinians: true, the UN has sanctioned the
Palestinian right to self-determination and statehood, but only
alongside Israel, not in lieu of it. Thus, the General Assembly’s annual
resolution, the ‘Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question’,
invariably ‘reaffirms its commitment, in accordance with international
law, to the two-State solution of Israel and Palestine, living side by
side in peace and security, within recognized borders, based on the
pre-1967 borders’.
It is hard to make out how a
‘rights-based’ movement anchored in international law can credibly claim
‘no position’ on the core right – based on one and the same
international law –of the party with which it is in conflict.
Ilan
BDS
derives its legitimacy from Palestinian civil society and respects
international law. On these twin pillars its strategy offered a
21st-century, clear definition of the right of all Palestinians to
self-determination: for the refugees to return, for the citizens to be
treated equally, for the occupied to be freed and for the besieged to be
liberated. In the past, when this right was limited to the people of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and only to a mere one-fifth of the
homeland, it was inevitably a failed strategy that served well the
colonizer and disadvantaged the colonized.
‘It is hard
to make out how a “rights-based” movement anchored in international law
can credibly claim “no position” on the core right – based on one and
the same international law – of the party with which it is in conflict –
Norman
BDS is very clear in its attitude towards
Israel. It does now play with elusive notions such as what is meant by a
‘state’. Far more poignantly, it deals with Israel as a regime that
violates all the basic rights of the Palestinians. Change the regime and
you have both a state that does not stand in the way of Palestinians’
right to self-determination and, at the same time, by adhering to
international law, you also cater for the rights of the Jews there. Not
as people who have colonized, ethnically cleansed or committed genocide,
but as equal citizens.
To sum up, this strategy, based
on human rights and nonviolence, offered by the people of Palestine,
points rightly to the need for regime change as a precondition for the
negotiations between the representatives of the settlers of Zion and the
indigenous people of Palestine.
Norman
The question was simple and, so far as I can tell, you put forth three responses.
First,
that BDS does not ‘play with elusive notions’ such as the meaning of
‘state’. In fact, many BDS members (yourself included) emphatically do
not consider one state in Palestine an ‘elusive notion’.
Second,
that BDS ‘far more poignantly deals with Israel as a regime that
violates all the basic rights of the Palestinians’. It is (or ought to
be) a truism that Israel must cease its violation of basic Palestinian
rights. But the question I posed was ‘how can BDS claim to be anchored
in international law when it takes no position on basic Israeli rights?’
‘The
nonviolent method of boycott, divestment and sanctions, when adopted as
an official strategy by the PLO and Hamas, will offer a horizon and an
alternative to a desperate armed struggle that leads nowhere – Ilan
Third,
you propose ‘regime change’. It’s odd for a person avowedly of the Left
to use the locution ‘regime change’, although it’s also indicative of a
truculent mentality among some members of the BDS movement. In any
event, if by ‘regime change’ you want to convey that the current Israeli
regime will likely not resolve the conflict based on international law,
you are surely right. But that’s evidently not what you mean. You
gesture to a future state that will ‘cater for the rights of the Jews
there as equal citizens’.
Wouldn’t it be more honest
for you to drop the phoney pretences and contorted arguments, and just
say that, notwithstanding international law, which calls for two States
on the 1967 borders, you – and BDS – support one state?
Ilan
The
need for a new approach is illustrated in the confused way you
alternate between two concepts: the right to self-determination of
Israelis and the right to self-determination of Jews. Both are
impossible and illogical notions, and the only reason international law
did not address them is because the Palestinians, who may do so now,
never asked to examine it according to their own yardsticks; so we do
not know what the international law verdict on it would be. The same
will be true of international law’s rulings about the changing political
landscape in Iraq and Syria.
There are no Israelis who
demand self-determination; there is only a Jewish community that
demands an international recognition for a supremacist regime. The other
notion, of self-determination for Jews, is not recognizable in
international law. Religions do not demand self-determination.
So
here’s the deal. The more we respect the equal rights of all those
living between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, the less Jewish,
Muslim or Christian the future political outfit would be, whatever you
want to call it. There is no use in hiding a Zionist position behind the
veil of international law.
Norman
You purport
that international law hasn’t to date rendered a verdict on Palestinian
claims to self-determination and statehood. You’re apparently unaware of
65 years of UN deliberations, hundreds of UN resolutions, and the
International Court of Justice 2004 advisory opinion. If international
law hasn’t to date addressed Palestinian rights, then how can the BDS
movement’s ‘rights-based’ platform be anchored (as it alleges) in
international law? If it is unknown where international law stands on
Palestinian claims, then how can it be known (as BDS alleges) that the
West Bank and Gaza are ‘occupied’ territories and Palestinian refugees
have a ‘right’ of return?
There is a case for some
general observations here. BDS is a cult. It has its guru (in Ramallah)
and its mantras (‘BDS’, ‘One State, from the River to the Sea’). It
functions in a hermetically sealed mental universe. Those who point to
its political incoherence and flights of fantasy are routinely accused
of being – God forbid! – Zionist. Like other political cults, it
substitutes epithets and excommunication for rational argument.
During
the 1960s, white radicals derived a masochistic pleasure from
self-abasing, demeaning and degrading protestations of guilt. Beating
their chests, they histrionically renounced ‘white-skin privilege’. The
more they grovelled before the ‘Black vanguard of the Revolution,’ the
more radical they fancied themselves to be. As it happened, they ended
up doing a lot of stupid things while the ‘Black vanguard’, although
publicly heaping praise on their ‘solidarity with the Oppressed’,
properly harboured contempt for these pathetic flunkies who lacked
personal dignity, the essential prerequisite of which is preserving
one’s independence of thought. Replace a few phrases – such as ‘Jewish
privilege’ instead of ‘white-skin privilege’ – and you gain insight into
the mindset of some Jewish supporters of BDS.
It’s the
pity’s pity that, although passing through that lamentable phase of the
1960s, they learned nothing from it and, although by now fully formed
adults, they still can’t resist these juvenile antics.
