Jewish Peace News

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Noura Erakat: BDS in the USA

The latest issue of Middle East Report includes this perceptive article by Noura Erakat surveying the history of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the United States over the past decade, with a focus on the University of California at Berkeley, where she was an undergraduate student and political activist. She notes that according to Omar Barghouti, a leader of the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), "the fundamental pillar of the BDS call was its rights-based approach that does not endorse any particular political solution to the Arab-Israeli colonial conflict, but insists that for any solution to be just and sustainable it must address all three basic rights [an end to the occupation, equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian refugees' right to return] stated in the call." At the same time, the BDS victories in the US have targeted the occupation rather than Israel itself. However, many Arab-American and
Jewish-American supporters of the two-state solution regard BDS, and all the more so terming Israel an apartheid state, as undermining that effort. Nonetheless, the BDS movement is growing and knee-jerk "supporters of Israel" have been put on the defensive.

Joel Beinin

Middle East Report: BDS in the USA, 2001-2010
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer255/erakat.html
Noura Erakat

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and adjunct professor of international human rights law at Georgetown University.

On April 26, 2010, the student senate at the University of California-Berkeley upheld, by one vote, an executive veto on SB 118 - the student body resolution endorsing divestment of university funds from General Electric and United Technologies, two companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Proponents of the resolution needed 14 votes to override the veto and, as 16 senators had spoken in favor of doing so, it appeared a simple task.

But the vote in Berkeley had shifted the gaze of national pro-Israel organizations from Capitol Hill westward, begetting an unlikely alliance between the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its self-proclaimed liberal rival, J Street. The two groups collaborated in lobbying efforts on campus to sustain the veto. Ultimately, two senators changed their votes and a third abstained, bringing the final count to 13 in favor of overriding the veto and five opposed. While adherence to student body procedure has blocked the divestment measure, the numbers indicate the strong support for divestment on Berkeley's campus and can be regarded as a milestone in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The strident response to Berkeley's resolution from off-campus groups reflects that the BDS movement is being taken more seriously by its opponents than ever before. Berkeley students have been at the forefront of BDS efforts since February 6, 2001, the day Ariel Sharon became Israeli prime minister. They erected a mock checkpoint on campus and unfurled banners exclaiming, "Divest from Israeli Apartheid." Within the span of three years, this first university-based divestment campaign spread onto dozens of other American campuses as well as into churches and community organizations. Yet the movement did not gain international legitimacy and elicit serious treatment until a call for BDS came from Palestinian civil society in 2005.

Since then, and especially since the resounding failure of the international community to hold Israel to account for war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead, the assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009, the notion of extra-governmental tactics targeting Israeli human rights violations has permeated mainstream institutions. No longer the passion of idealistic students alone, BDS demands have reverberated within American retail stores, corporations and international multilateral organizations.

The movement's deepening acceptance among mainstream stakeholders correlates with the steady decline of faith in efforts to achieve a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While heads of state fail to extract the most modest commitments from Israel, such as a settlement freeze, BDS activists have increased compliance (albeit incrementally) with international law among corporations and institutions that have distanced themselves from, or divested their holdings in, settlement-related enterprises.

BDS victories to date, at least in the United States, have targeted Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, the notion being what should be boycotted and sanctioned is the occupation, rather than Israel itself. But the movement draws inspiration from similar efforts aimed at apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, coupled with the 2005 call emanating from Palestine that includes a demand for equality for Israel's Palestinian citizens and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. This genealogy makes BDS abhorrent to many loyalists of the two-state solution. J Street, for example, sees the movement as an attack on Israel's character as a Jewish state. In his blog entry opposing the Berkeley resolution, Isaac Luria of J Street complains that the movement "fails to draw a clear distinction between opposition to the post-1967 occupation and opposition to the existence of the state of Israel itself as the democratic home of the Jewish people. Even if it was not the intent of
the students who drafted this bill, its passage is now being seized on by the global BDS movement as a victory in its broader campaign." BDS activists insist that they emphasize rights, as opposed to political solutions, precisely to escape the debate over whether Israel and Palestine should be one or two states. They recognize, however, that the fruition of the 2005 demands may lead to an Israel that is a state of all its citizens irrespective of religion. Hence it is inevitable that BDS will be anathema not only to AIPAC, but also to J Street and Arab American partisans of the two-state solution like Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine.

In arousing the ire of both the right and the left ends of the spectrum of permissible opinion on Israel-Palestine in Washington, the BDS platform and movement cuts to the heart of the conflict over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and could become central to the conflict itself.

Visions of Justice

The tripartite strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions is rooted in economic logic: Israel must comply with international law because non-compliance is too politically and economically costly to maintain. Divestment pressures institutions with stakes in Israeli companies, or in companies that sustain Israeli human rights abuses, to drop their holdings. Boycotts encourage consumers to "let the market decide" upon justice by refusing to buy goods made by companies that benefit from the occupation or inequality in Israel. Sanctions, on the other hand, are trade restrictions imposed by governments upon others.

In the US, BDS is associated with the solidarity movement aimed at ending apartheid in South Africa. That movement is widely credited with helping to topple apartheid and free Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner for 27 years, who became the first black president of South Africa. The African National Conference of which Mandela was a part called upon the world to boycott, divest from and sanction apartheid South Africa in 1958. Due to the South African experience, BDS is seen as a grassroots strategy that works. According to Abdul Minty, secretary of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, "The worldwide movement was effective because it was a coalition of committed governments and people's movements in the West that managed to inﬂuence policy at the national level, as well as institutions like the UN."

As with South Africa, the impetus for a global BDS campaign against Israel came from Palestinian civil society. On July 9, 2005, a year after the International Court of Justice's historic advisory opinion declared the route of Israel's wall illegal, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations issued a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions. The call gave voice to a growing movement that began, appropriately, in Durban, South Africa at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, where non-governmental organizations and activists equated Israel's racially discriminatory policies throughout Israel proper and the Occupied Territories with apartheid and advocated BDS as the strategy of choice for fighting back. In Durban and subsequently, the activists have drawn upon the general definition of apartheid laid out in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid: policies "designed to divide the population…by the creation of
separate reserves and ghettoes for the members of racial groups, …[or] the expropriation of landed property...[or] the persecution of organizations or persons…because they oppose apartheid." Directly preceding the 2005 call, a group of Palestinian intellectuals and academics issued a call for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel in 2004. The Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel's (PACBI) fundamental principles ultimately formed the basis for the 2005 document, which demands that Israel comply with international law and uphold universal human rights by:

Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

The 2005 call marked a significant shift in the movement for Palestinian self-determination. Most importantly, it emphasized the rights of Palestinians everywhere irrespective of which state they live in today or where they envision living tomorrow. Omar Barghouti, a founder and steering committee member of PACBI and a drafter of the 2005 document, explains that "the fundamental pillar of the BDS call was its rights-based approach that does not endorse any particular political solution to the Arab-Israeli colonial conflict, but insists that for any solution to be just and sustainable it must address all three basic rights stated in the call."

Not everyone considers the affirmation of all three rights to be a neutral act. The likes of J Street view it as threatening to Israel's self-proclaimed identity as a Jewish state, because the return of refugees in appreciable numbers would render Jews a small minority. Those committed to the two-state solution on the "pro-Palestinian" side, like Ibish, have interpreted the call as a repudiation of the state-building project in place since 1993 and a return to the liberation model. It was important, however, to the BDS drafters to represent the interests of all Palestinians, and not just those living within the elastic boundaries of a future Palestinian state. Hence the call's second clause demands the full equality of Israel's non-Jewish Palestinian citizens.

It is logical that this clause would be inserted, given the participation in the drafting of Ittijah, the umbrella network of Palestinian NGOs in Israel, which demands equal treatment before the law irrespective of race, ethnicity, national origin and religion. From the perspective of the BDS organizers, therefore, objecting to this clause amounts to rejecting Palestinians' self-definition as a unified national body. Still, for supporters of Palestinian human rights who prefer to indict the occupation only, the second clause is an affront to their solidarity. For these supporters, ending Jewish privilege within Israel may be desirable, but it exceeds the mandate of a movement for Palestinian self-determination. Despite its best efforts to transcend political solutions, therefore, the BDS call has been read as an implicit endorsement of the one-state solution.

Perhaps surprisingly, several Palestinian NGO representatives within the Occupied Territories initially opposed the BDS call as well. They viewed the comprehensive approach to Palestinian rights as a veiled endorsement of the one-state solution, and hence a blow to the Palestinian Authority and a subversion of the strategic direction of the Palestinian national movement since the late 1980s and enshrined by the "peace process" of the 1990s. Drafters of the call, including PACBI, Ittijah, Badil and Stop the Wall, invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in explaining that the fundamental emphasis on rights was necessary to redress the concerns of a cohesive Palestinian national body as opposed to endorsing a particular political solution. Ultimately, the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, the coordinating body for the major political parties in the Occupied Territories, along with the largest Palestine Liberation Organization mass movements, facilitated
the
acceptance of the BDS call by major sectors of Palestinian civil society within the Territories and beyond. Constricted by the parameters of the "peace process," the Palestinian Authority has neither endorsed nor repudiated the BDS call. They have, however, launched a narrower boycott of settlement-produced goods. In January 2010, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad staged the burning of $1 million in settlement products and created a National Dignity Fund to support the production and distribution of Palestinian-made goods. Unlike the 2005 call, the PA initiative perpetuates a state-centric approach to resolving the conflict and as such does not attempt to represent the rights of a unified Palestinian national body.

Barghouti explains that the call for equality within Israel remains the least popular element of the call among solidarity activists, even more controversial than the right of return, because it goes beyond calling on Israel to rein in its occupation policies in the Palestinian territories and demands that Israel rectify its domestic policies to afford non-Jewish Arab citizens full equality. But as Barghouti asks: "If a political system is built on a foundation of inequality and would collapse if equality set in, is it a system worth keeping?"

Mainstreaming BDS

Barghouti's rhetorical question is precisely what makes BDS so controversial. Though BDS is in fact a reform movement, one that seeks to alter corporate and state behavior, it has been viewed as radical. Mark Lance, a Georgetown philosophy professor and co-founder of Stop US Taxpayer Aid to Israel Now (SUSTAIN), explains that when his group first approached cohorts with the idea of divestment in 2001, they were hostilely dismissed as naïve. The established solidarity organizations feared such a tactic would alienate average Americans who were ready to support a Palestinian state but not to criticize Israel or call its internal policies into question. SUSTAIN redirected its energy at young global justice groups, Lance continues, and waited for the time for BDS to ripen. Within two years, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, the "connective tissue" of American Palestine solidarity groups, had incorporated numerous BDS activists.

Established in 2001 with a $20,000 grant and a few dozen member organizations, today the Campaign has grown to more than 300 members and boasts a budget of $250,000. In 2005, the Campaign endorsed the BDS call and mounted a campaign against Caterpillar, manufacturer of the heavy bulldozers used by the Israeli army to raze Palestinian homes. Phyllis Bennis, a Campaign co-founder and steering committee member, explains that Caterpillar emerged as a target for its role in the destruction of Palestinian olive trees and the murder of Rachel Corrie, the Evergreen State College student run over by a bulldozer in 2003 while trying to prevent a home demolition. Soon, Bennis says, "the discussion moved from the tactical targeting of Caterpillar to the strategic effort to build a campaign against corporations profiting from occupation."

The Campaign's focus, which reflects its member groups' prerogatives, has continued to shift. In 2006, the coalition adopted an anti-apartheid framework, which expounds on the discriminatory treatment of Israel's non-Jewish citizens, and in 2009, it endorsed the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, another controversial strand of the BDS movement. The Campaign's progression from divesting from occupation to boycotting Israel may be a bellwether of change in mainstream organizations that have joined the BDS movement but have limited their activism to targeting war-profiteering corporations involved in the occupation.

Code Pink, the women's peace group famed for head-to-toe pink attire and unabashed disruption of business as usual on Capitol Hill, coalesced in opposition to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to member Nancy Kricorian, Code Pink expanded its mandate to include the occupation of Palestine when it joined the Campaign in 2006—but the gesture was largely symbolic, as the group's work remained focused on Afghanistan and Iraq. This quiet engagement became much louder in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, when Code Pink brought Palestine to the front and center of its agenda, to the dismay of several members and funders. Undeterred, the women's group has since taken two solidarity delegations to Gaza, co-led the Gaza Freedom March in January 2010 and launched Stolen Beauty, a boycott of Ahava, the settlement-manufactured cosmetics line. Since its inception in June 2009, Stolen Beauty has pressured Oxfam into suspending its goodwill ambassador, "Sex and the City" starlet
Kristen Davis, for the duration of her contract as an Ahava spokeswoman and pushed Costco, a national wholesaler, to take the product off its shelves.

Despite these achievements, which have been covered in the New York Post and elsewhere, Kricorian shares that her group still uses the "A-word" gingerly. While BDS can be presented within the framework of corporate accountability and war profiteering, the term "apartheid" is controversial. "This word still triggers people's emotions in a way that shuts off dialogue. It is a trigger because of its history in South Africa, but in the case of South Africa, most people would not have dreamed of saying that apartheid was necessary for security's sake, or that it was a good idea to keep blacks in bantustans."

Fayyad Sbaihat, a former University of Wisconsin student and a leading member of al-Awda Wisconsin, which garnered faculty senate and union endorsement of divestment across the 25 University of Wisconsin campuses in 2005, explains that the first and strongest opposition to BDS came from long-time allies who feared that the movement would drive away liberals or induce a backlash in Israel. "It was a hindrance in the short term," says Sbaihat. "Not only was BDS too much to ask of the 'fair-weather friends' of Palestine, but also it was too much for them to accept or live with the apartheid analogy. However, part of the appeal of BDS as we recognized it was getting the uninterested to begin asking questions and then questioning Israel's character, and using the apartheid analogy was a way to provoke questions from the casual observer."

Glenn Dickson hopes to present precisely this challenge to the Presbyterian Church USA. At its 2004 general assembly, the 2.3 million-strong church endorsed divestment from companies profiting from Israeli occupation by an overwhelming vote of 460-41. Despite threats to burn down houses of worship and pressure from Congress to rescind the resolution, the church has reaffirmed its commitment to corporate engagement at subsequent general assemblies where support for divestment has only increased. In 2006, 17 of the 170 overtures submitted to the assembly opposed the divestment resolution, while in 2008 only two overtures protested the church's stance. Today, the Presbyterians' Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee has denounced Caterpillar for profiting from the non-peaceful use of its products and continues to explore divestment from Motorola, ITT, Citibank and United Technologies for their role in sustaining the occupation.

Dickson is the retired Presbyterian pastor who introduced the 2004 divestment resolution. He did not consider including boycott at the time because he felt that unlike divestment, which lends itself to corporate engagement, boycott precludes dialogue. He rightly predicted divestment's potential to excite controversy despite the church's legacy of principled divestment from South Africa, Indonesia and Sudan, among other human rights violators. Today Dickson and his colleagues are thinking of introducing the concept of apartheid at the 2010 General Assembly because "it will help people to realize that Israel is as bad as South Africa in its poor treatment of people of color…. Because most people in the US see Israel as a benevolent democracy and see Palestinians as terrorists, reframing who Israel is will help us."

Blessing or Burden?

Notwithstanding its popular association with South Africa's experience, the term "apartheid" is not a requisite element of the BDS strategy, though it may be a useful instrument of branding in and of itself. Like the US Campaign, Code Pink and the Presbyterians, activist groups have launched BDS campaigns without adopting the loaded term, only to adopt it later as their advocacy efforts developed. Even Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel, a group at Stanford University for whom the term was obviously central, has used it tactically at most.

According to Omar Shakir, a founding member of the group who is now at Georgetown, the Stanford students wanted to make apartheid central to demonstrate the power disparity inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and move beyond the language of "two sides," which can imply that Israel and the Palestinians have equal resources to draw upon. When campus opposition focused on the asymmetry between the South African and Palestinian cases, however, Shakir and his colleagues dropped the framework and focused instead on divestment criteria, including disparate treatment of Israel's non-Jewish Arab citizens. The method here was to describe the violation rather than call it by name. "In the beginning," Shakir comments, "the opposition focused on apartheid more than our goal of divestment…. We liked the way we did it because we could pick and choose; we weren't wedded to apartheid."

The apartheid framework is both a blessing and a burden. On the one hand, because the South African experience is so well known and so roundly condemned, mere mention of apartheid forces pro-Israel advocates to defend an entrenched system of racial discrimination and oppression rather than rally support for Israel's security. On the other hand, the two cases are far from identical. No South African blacks were allowed to vote or participate in government, as are Palestinian citizens in Israel. Neither were blacks subjected to military offensives or debilitating humanitarian blockades as are Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and nor were tens of thousands exiled as refugees to raise subsequent generations in the diaspora. Notwithstanding these differences, in the BDS movement there is general consensus that the apartheid framework is effective, especially in the symbolic realm. As Lisa Taraki, a Birzeit University professor and PACBI steering committee member, comments, "All
historic
analogies are fraught with problems, but in this case…I think this line of argument has been very successful on the whole, and has put Israel's supporters in a very uncomfortable position, to put it mildly."

That activists deploy the "A-word" tactically does not diminish their sincere belief that the framework is apt. To the contrary, Shakir and Taraki's attitudes are responses to detractors whose focus on the analogy's fine print is an attempt to dismiss it for lack of perfect symmetry. Such attempts are misguided because although the South African experience makes the apartheid paradigm more compelling, it is by no means the yardstick against which to measure all occurrences of apartheid, whether in Israel-Palestine or elsewhere. Perhaps only a legal forum like the International Court of Justice can settle this tension. In the meantime, public discussions of Israeli apartheid continue to be a battle for domination of the symbolic world.

Strategic Considerations

Activists have waged this battle offensively for six years in their organizing of Israeli Apartheid Week. Originally limited to educational activities in Toronto and New York, today it spans 40 cities worldwide, including, for the first time in 2010, Beirut.

Adalah-New York's BDS campaign is an organic outgrowth of Israeli Apartheid Week organizing. Unlike other groups, Adalah-NY began with the apartheid framework first and moved toward the divestment tactic later. The success of its campaign against Lev Leviev, an Israeli diamond mogul whose companies support the expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, has made it a premier example of BDS organizing in the US. Lubna Ka'abneh of Adalah-NY explains that the apartheid analogy constituted a cornerstone of the group's outreach work "so that our [US] audience could make the connection to their own experiences." Ka'abneh and her cohorts have discovered that American audiences relate much more easily to narratives of institutionalized racial discrimination than those of occupation. Hence they work to draw parallels between the civil rights movement and the Palestinian movement to achieve freedom and equality.

Since launching its campaign in 2008, Adalah-NY has effectively pressed Danish Bank Dankse and the Danish pension fund PKA to exclude Leviev's enterprise, Africa-Israel, from its investment portfolio, encouraged the second largest Dutch pension fund to divest from Africa-Israel, and convinced UNICEF, Oxfam, the British government and several Hollywood stars to distance themselves from the entrepreneur. Adalah-NY's success in simultaneously highlighting Israel's discriminatory character while choosing the occupation as its BDS target both captures the movement's strategic possibilities and reflects political maturity in the movement.

The history of efforts at Berkeley is telling as well. While originally written to combat Israeli apartheid and therefore target all companies with subsidiaries worth $5,000 or more within Israel, the student body resolution SB 118 eventually limited itself to two American corporations that profit from Israel's military occupation. "Divestment is ultimately about students engaging the administration," comments Abdel-Rahman Zahzah, a founding member of the Berkeley campaign and now a leader of similar efforts in Beirut. Zahzah notes that Berkeley students did not start out with a political strategy in 2001. Instead they issued abrupt threats to the administration: "Divest all your holdings from apartheid Israel or we'll take over academic buildings." While activists did occupy Wheeler Hall twice, they did not come close to achieving divestment until nine years later when students introduced SB 118 in the student senate.

The tactical shift is derived in part from Hampshire College's monumental success in becoming the first American institution of higher education to divest from Israel in 2009. Ilana Rosoff, a leading student organizer at Hampshire, explains that their campaign was a direct response to the Palestinian BDS call. Her fellows were motivated by the opportunity "to stand behind and re-empower Palestinians in their own national struggle." Still, to avoid debilitating opposition, the students developed a strategy that targeted Israel's occupation "but did not try to make moral arguments about Israel as a nation-state."

The students won over the college's board of trustees when in February 2009, the trustees voted to divest Hampshire's holdings from Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT and Terex, companies that supply the Israeli military with equipment and services for use in the Occupied Territories. Under pressure from Alan Dershowitz, one of several self-appointed policemen of American discourse about Israel-Palestine, Hampshire's administration denied that its decision was linked to Israeli human rights abuses and trumpeted its other investments in Israeli firms. The minutes of the board of trustees' meeting nevertheless reveal an explicit link; the college president "acknowledged that it was the good work of Students for Justice in Palestine that brought this issue to the attention of the committee." And, of course, the students took care to claim that Hampshire was divesting from Israeli occupation, not from Israel.

The Logic of BDS

While the Hampshire and Adalah-NY successes have made indelible marks, most campaigns cannot demonstrate their work's impact in measurable units. Instead, the virtue of BDS has been its ability to challenge Israel's moral authority, arguably the most coveted weapon in its arsenal. Israel was not a major recipient of US aid dollars until the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which greatly enhanced Israel's image as a David facing down an Arab Goliath. In June 1968, the Johnson administration, with strong support from Congress, approved the sale of supersonic aircraft to Israel and established the precedent of US support for "Israel's qualitative military edge over its neighbors" (actually, any possible combination of its neighbors). Since then, no American politician seeking high office has spoken of Middle East peace without first stressing US commitment to the security of Israel.

BDS campaigns puncture holes in this security narrative by assuming an offensive posture. By asserting that Israel is worthy of BDS treatment, activists compel Israel's defenders to explain the logic of its policies, such as the imprisonment, at one time or another since 1967, of 20 percent of the entire Palestinian population. When the conversation is taken to its logical end, as it is more and more often, pro-Israel spokespersons are forced to declare that Palestinians' mere existence is a security threat.

In a recent address in Herzliya, site of an important annual security conference in Israel, Harvard fellow Martin Kramer leapt straight to the bottom of this slippery slope. He argued that when the proportion of adult men in the Arab and Muslim world reaches 40 percent of the population, their propensity to violence increases because they have become "superfluous" in society. Kramer not only dismissed political explanations for radicalization in favor of simple demography—dubious social science, to say the least—he concluded by encouraging the deliberate stunting of population growth among Palestinians as a matter of national security policy. The address, as Kramer said himself, was "memorable."

Its legitimacy continually eroded by such pronouncements, Israeli structural discrimination will still find allies among Christian Zionists, who beseech God and Israel to hasten Armageddon, the defense industry, which wishes to protecting net earnings, and those American Jews who, for one reason or another, remain blind to Palestinian suffering. These allies are formidable, but they are not the broad spectrum of Americans whose backing Israel wants to safeguard its moral authority. For this reason, AIPAC's executive director, Howard Kohr, dedicated his address at the group's 2009 annual conference to warnings of the dangers of BDS, which he lamented is "part of a broader campaign not simply to denigrate or defame Israel but to delegitimize her in the eyes of her allies."

The Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, concurs. In its 2009 study, "Building a Political Firewall Against Israel's Delegitimization," Reut concludes that a network of activists working from the bottom up and from the periphery to the center has succeeded in casting Israel as a pariah state and warns that, within a few years, the campaign may develop into "a comprehensive existential threat." In its presentation to the Knesset, the institute recommended that the government mitigate this threat with a multi-pronged strategy, including ending its control of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories.

Taraki says that such statements show BDS is having an effect. Unlike efforts at dialogue, which reinforced power discrepancies by creating "a false sense of symmetry [that] does not acknowledge the colonizer-colonized relationship," BDS tackles the Israeli state head on. The proper response to ending Israel's impunity is the application of pressure and "the logic of BDS is the logic of pressure."

On the horizon is the burgeoning movement for academic and cultural boycotts. Although launched a year before the 2005 BDS call, academic and cultural boycott does not enjoy the support of economic BDS campaigns. Some argue that culture should be immune from politics and that boycotting intellectuals infringes upon academic freedom. Others contend that Israeli intellectuals are the best allies within Israel of the global movement for peace with justice. A close examination of the PACBI call makes it clear that boycott is restricted to Israeli institutions and entities that are complicit in justifying, promoting, supporting or otherwise perpetuating Israel's occupation, colonization and apartheid. Today, this call could not be more relevant as Israel rolls out its "Brand Israel" campaign, meant to rehabilitate its hobbled image through the media of popular culture. Irrespective of form, Barghouti says, BDS is "the most effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian people
today." Its non-violent and universal nature makes it "Israel's worst nightmare."

................................................................
--------
Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Z. Shlensky
Rebecca Vilkomerson
Alistair Welchman
------------
Jewish Peace News archive and blog: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com
------------
Jewish Peace News sends its news clippings only to subscribers. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or manage your subscription, go to http://www.jewishpeacenews.net

Friday, June 4, 2010

Alice Walker: You will have no protection / The Electronic Intifada

I'm killing time, waiting to hear what's happening with the Rachel Corrie boat, heading for Gaza. For a while the word came out that the boat was boarded by Israeli soldiers, then this was retracted. The boat is quite close to shore as I write this.
Anyway, someone sent this beautiful piece by Alice Walker to one of the lists I was checking, and I've decided to share it with you.
Racheli Gai.

You will have no protection
Alice Walker, The Electronic Intifada, 4 June 2010

You will have no protection

-- Medgar Evers to Civil Rights Activists in Mississippi, shortly before he was assassinated, 12 June, 1963

My heart is breaking; but I do not mind.

For one thing, as soon as I wrote those words I was able to weep. Which I had not been able to do since learning of the attack by armed Israeli commandos on defenseless peace activists carrying aid to Gaza who tried to fend them off using chairs and sticks. I am thankful to know what it means to be good; I know that the people of the Freedom Flotilla are/were in some cases, some of the best people on earth. They have not stood silently by and watched the destruction of others, brutally, sustained, without offering themselves, weaponless except for their bodies, to the situation. I am thankful to have a long history of knowing people like this from my earliest years, beginning in my student days of marches and demonstrations: for peace, for non-separation among peoples, for justice for Women, for People of Color, for Cubans, for Animals, for Indians, and for Her, the planet.

I am weeping for the truth of Medgar's statement; so brave and so true. I weep for him gunned down in his carport, not far from where I would eventually live in Mississippi, with a box of t-shirts in his arms that said: "Jim Crow Must Go." Though trained in the United States Military under racist treatment one cringes to imagine, he remained a peaceful soldier in the army of liberation to the end. I weep and will always weep, even through the widest smiles, for the beautiful young wife, Myrlie Evers, he left behind, herself still strong and focused on the truth of struggle; and for their children, who lost their father to a fate they could not possibly, at the time, understand. I don't think any of us could imagine during that particular phase of the struggle for justice, that we risked losing not just our lives, which we were prepared to give, but also our children, who we were not.

Nothing protected Medgar, nor will anything protect any of us; nothing but our love for ourselves and for others whom we recognize unfailingly as also ourselves. Nothing can protect us but our lives. How we have lived them; what battles, with love and compassion our only shield, we have engaged. And yet, the moment of realizing we are truly alone, that in the ultimate crisis of our existence our government is not there for us, is one of shock. Especially if we have had the illusion of a system behind us to which we truly belong. Thankfully I have never had opportunity to have this illusion. And so, every peaceful witnessing, every non-violent confrontation has been a pure offering. I do not regret this at all.

When I was in Cairo last December to support CODEPINK's efforts to carry aid into Gaza I was unfortunately ill with the flu and could not offer very much. I lay in bed in the hotel room and listened to other activists report on what was happening around the city as Egypt refused entry to Gaza to the 1,400 people who had come for the accompanying Freedom march. I heard many distressing things, but only one made me feel, not exactly envy, but something close; it was that the French activists had shown up, en masse, in front of their embassy and that their ambassador had come out to talk to them and to try to make them comfortable as they set up camp outside the building. This small gesture of compassion for his country's activists in a strange land touched me profoundly, as I was touched decades ago when someone in John Kennedy's White House (maybe the cook) sent out cups of hot coffee to our line of freezing student and teacher demonstrators as we tried, with our signs and slogans and
songs, to protect a vulnerable neighbor, Cuba.

Where have the Israelis put our friends? I thought about this all night. Those whom they assassinated on the ship and those they injured? Is "my" government capable of insisting on respect for their dead bodies? Can it demand that those who are injured but alive be treated with care? Not only with care, but the tenderness and honor they deserve? If it cannot do this, such a simple, decent thing, of what use is it to the protection and healing of the planet? I heard a spokesman for the United States opine at the United Nations (not an exact quote) that the Freedom Flotilla activists should have gone through other, more proper, channels, not been confrontational with their attempt to bring aid to the distressed. This is almost exactly what college administrators advised half a century ago when students were trying to bring down apartheid in the South and getting bullets, nooses, bombings and burnings for our efforts. I felt embarrassed (to the degree one can permit embarrassment by
another) to be even vaguely represented by this man: a useless voice from the far past. One had hoped.

The Israeli spin on the massacre: that the commandos were under attack by the peace activists and that the whole thing was like "a lynching" of the armed attackers, reminds me of a Redd Foxx joke. I loved Redd Foxx, for all his vulgarity. A wife caught her husband in bed with another woman, flagrant, in the act, skin to skin. The husband said, probably through pants of aroused sexual exertion: All right, go ahead and believe your lying eyes! It would be fun, were it not tragic, to compare the various ways the Israeli government and our media will attempt to blame the victims of this unconscionable attack for their own imprisonment, wounds and deaths.

So what to do? Rosa Parks sat down in the front of the bus. Martin Luther King followed her act of courage with many of his own, and using his ringing, compassionate voice he aroused the people of Montgomery, Alabama to commit to a sustained boycott of the bus company; a company that refused to allow people of color to sit in the front of the bus, even if it was empty. It is time for us, en masse, to show up in front of our conscience, and sit down in the front of the only bus we have: our very lives.

What would that look like, be like, today, in this situation between Palestine and Israel? This "impasse" that has dragged on for decades. This "conflict" that would have ended in a week if humanity as a whole had acted in defense of justice everywhere on the globe. Which maybe we are learning! It would look like the granddaughter of Rosa Parks, the grandson of Martin Luther King. It would look like spending our money only where we can spend our lives in peace and happiness; freely sharing whatever we have with our friends.

It would be to support boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel to End the Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and by this effort begin to soothe the pain and attend the sorrows of a people wrongly treated for generations. This action would also remind Israel that we have seen it lose its way and have called to it, often with love, and we have not been heard. In fact, we have reached out to it only to encounter slander, insult and, too frequently, bodily harm.

Disengage, avoid, and withhold support from whatever abuses, degrades and humiliates humanity.

This we can do. We the people; who ultimately hold all the power. We the people, who must never forget to believe we can win.

We the people.

It has always been about us; as we watch governments come and go. It always will be.

Alice Walker is a poet, novelist, feminist and activist whose award-winning works have sold over ten million copies.

Lynda Brayer: The Legal Framework of International Law

I've been listening to, and reading various items in which Israeli officials and its PR people have tried to explain how and why what Israel did when it attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was legal and appropriate.
Here is a short essay by Lynda Brayer - a human rights lawyer who specializes in the laws of war and international law in representing Palestinians and who lives in Haifa - which puts the lie to any such claims.

Racheli Gai.

Lynda Brayer: The Legal Framework of International Law

The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by Israeli Navy Commandos
on May 31, 2010

Crimes against the Peace and
Crimes against Humanity

During the pre-dawn hours of May 31, 2010, the Israeli Navy attacked the six civilian vessels of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The attack took place in international waters against ships flying under national flags of countries with which Israel is not at war, namely Turkey, Greece and the United States. The ships were carrying civilians from more than sixteen countries.

Salient points:

Since no state of war existed at the time, the attack on these vessels constitutes an act of war against those governments under whose flags the vessels were sailing.

The attack falls within the purview of the ius ad bellum, those laws which govern the resort to armed conflict. Israel's action does not fall into the category of the ius in belloor the laws which govern the actual conduct of war.

Because this attack was carried out in international waters, the status of the relationship between Hamas, or any other Palestinian body, and the state of Israel is of no relevance whatsoever. Likewise, neither the blockade of Gaza nor Israel's claims and legal interpretations regarding it has any bearing on its acts of aggression in international waters.

This is not an act of piracy. Piracy is an act of aggression carried out in international waters by individuals and not by states.

The following internationally binding treaties, charters, and agreements are relevant to the attack by Israel:

1. Article 6 of the Charter Provisions of the Nuremburg Trials

(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

(3) Crimes against Humanity: namely murder…deportation, and any other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war...in execution of or in connection with any crime…whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

2. 1907 Hague Regulation Convention (XI) Relative to Certain Restrictions with Regard to the Exercise of the Right of Capture in Naval War

Chapter II – The Exemption from Capture of Certain Vessels
Article 4. Vessels charged with religious, scientific, or philanthropic missions are likewise exempt from capture.

Salient points:

The standard for judging the Israeli acts is objective and not subjective. It is irrelevant what Israeli ministers, generals, admirals, or soldiers thought or intended. The test is in what they did.

What they did was engage in acts of war using weapons of war in international waters against vessels that are protected not only in peacetime but also in times of war.

Israel has therefore committed both crimes against the peace and crimes against humanity.

These are crimes that have international jurisdiction. Israeli political and military personnel can be named in trials held in any and all countries of the world. If the Israelis do not attend the trials, they can be tried in abstentia, and those decisions in which the Israelis are found guilty can be executed anywhere in the world.

Because unarmed civilians were murdered by a preplanned military attack, capital crimes have been committed. While it would appear that the international community no longer finds capital punishment civilized, the punishments for these capital crimes can be multiple life sentences.

These crimes give rise to damage claims for huge sums of money and Israeli accounts can be blocked using decisions finding them guilty.

The unarmed vessels were on a philanthropic mission, carrying civilians and humanitarian supplies. Even if Israel were in a state of war with any of these countries, it would be prohibited from capturing the vessels according to the terms of the Hague Convention of 1907.

Conclusion:

It follows, therefore, that Israel was first of all not allowed to attack these vessels militarily, and then not to board these vessels by force, capture these vessels, attack the passengers, imprison them on the vessels, forcibly remove them from the vessels, and steal their private property in the form of cameras, computers, clothes, etc.

Every single act carried out by the Israeli military forces in international waters no May 31, 2010, are unqualifiedly and absolutely violations of international law.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Israeli forces’ attack on Freedom Flotilla ( update 2)

The Free Gaza Movement's aim of bringing the legitimacy of the Israeli government's blockade on Gaza into question appears to be increasingly successful. Nicholas Kristof in today's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/opinion/03kristof.html?ref=opinion) himself referring to an opinion piece in Haaretz (http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/a-special-place-in-hell-the-second-gaza-war-israel-lost-at-sea-1.293246) and yesterday's editorial (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02wed1.html) as well as Amos Oz's op-ed from yesterday (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02oz.html?src=me&ref=general) all question not only the justice of the raid on the flotilla but also the justice of the blockade itself. By contrast, the only opinion pieces in the Times defending Israeli government actions are from Israeli officials (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/opinion/03oren.html?ref=opinion) and apologists
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/opinion/03gordis.html?ref=opinion).

As the Israeli government returns the detained flotilla members, eyewitness accounts are beginning to emerge into the media. Again Democracy Now is on the forefront of publicizing these. Today's show (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6//03) has interviews with (among others) Huwaida Arraf, Chair of the Free Gaza Movement (FGM) and Ann Wright, a Retired Army Colonel and former U.S. diplomat. Both of them were on the Challenger 1 ship, which was alongside the ship that suffered casualties; and both claim that Israeli commandos attacked with sound bombs, tear gas and gunfire before boarding the ship. Arraf maintains that the volunteers had agreed to engage only in passive, non-violent resistance; but, given the treatment she and others received on the Challenger 1 she said it would be understandable if others had decided in the heat of the moment to defend themselves.

As usual, however, it is crucial to distinguish this side-issue—which may never be resolved since Israeli forces have stolen all recording media from everyone on every ship and blocked live satellite transmission—from the important one of the legitimacy of the Israeli forces' attack in the first place.

On the subject of propaganda, M.J. Rosenberg's blog entry (reproduced below), skewers the 'obscene' attempt to compare the armed Israeli commandos (with the might of the 4th largest army in the world behind them) to powerless African-Americans prior to the civil rights movement. More importantly, he criticizes the following argument, found in many editorial accounts of the attack: the FGM does not merely have the "innocent" intention of delivering humanitarian aid (i.e. it also wants to point to the illegitimacy of Israel's blockade); therefore, the motivations of the FGM are somehow suspect, tantamount (the impression is given) to terrorism. Rosenberg provides the following analogy from a 'colleague', also from the civil rights era: "Israel's defenders," he says, "are arguing that Israel had the right to attack the people on the ships because the flotillas' goal was not really to supply the Gazans but to break the blockade. Supplying the Gazans was only a pretense
for
their larger political goal. … So does that mean it was okay to beat and brutalize kids who were sitting-in at Woolworth counters throughout the south in the 1950's and 1960's because their real goal was not being served lunch but ending segregation."

Alistair Welchman

M.J. Rosenberg
http://palestinenote.com/cs/blogs/blogs/archive/2010/06/01/israel-s-obscene-use-of-the-term-quot-lynching-quot-and-the-real-civil-rights-analogy.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

Has anyone else noticed? Israeli spokespersons are obviously under orders to use the term "lynching" when they describe what the flotilla people were trying to do to the Israeli soldiers who boarded the ships.

Obviously, the tender civil rights liberals of the Likud party believe that applying the term "lynching" to an alleged attack on armed soldiers would make us dumb Americans think the Israeli soldiers were would-be victims of racist terrorism -- like Emmett Till and about a thousand other African-American victims of lynching between 1890 and 1964.

How obscene. Lynch victims were unarmed, powerless, and attacked by armed thugs. Comparing armed Israeli commandos to 12 year old black kids strung up for looking at a white woman is revolting.

Here is a better analogy from the civil rights era, offered by a young friend and colleague.

"Israel's defenders," he says, "are arguing that Israel had the right to attack the people on the ships because the flotillas' goal was not really to supply the Gazans but to break the blockade. Supplying the Gazans was only a pretense for their larger political goal.

He continues:

"So does that mean it was okay to beat and brutalize kids who were sitting-in at Woolworth counters throughout the south in the 1950's and 1960's because their real goal was not being served lunch but ending segregation."

Perfect.

Meanwhile Israelis celebrate their military triumph.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Israeli forces’ attack on Freedom Flotilla ( update)

Israeli forces' attack on Freedom Flotilla (update)

The Israeli government is still refusing to release most of the members of the flotilla, so not much new information has emerged. But there have been a number of important reactions and comments summarized in the MERIP article below ('Outlaws of the Mediterranean' http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060110.html) and on Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/1). Most of the reaction—both official and unofficial—have been highly critical of Israel; but with the conspicuous exception of the United States, which officially 'regrets' the incident and seeks to ascertain the facts. The US has already managed to scupper a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel and calling for an independent investigation.

Yesterday's Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/1/global_condemnation_of_israeli_armed_attack) features interviews with Adam Shapiro, founder of the International Solidarity Movement (whose wife was on the Flotilla), Amira Hass (the only Israeli journalist based in the Occupied Territories), Ali Abunimah (founder of Electronic Intifada) and Richard Falk (an international lawyer and UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestine Territories).

Hass talks about a number of protests in the West Bank (including one at which an American student and ISM volunteer was attacked by Israeli forces with tear gas canisters and lost her left eye as a result) that have called, among other things, for the PA to cease dealing with the Israeli government in either negotiations or any form of security cooperation.

Falk is especially clear that the official Israeli propaganda strategy of focusing attention on whether Israeli commandos were attacked and were acting in self-defense is morally misplaced: the Israeli government launched an unprovoked attack on an unarmed civilian vessel in international waters; the Israeli government was therefore the aggressors and its commandos had no right of self-defense. The civilians being attacked did have such a right.

And Ali Abunimah clearly articulates the rage and outrage felt especially by Palestinians both about this incident and about the euphemistic, misleading and sometimes downright mendacious language that surrounds it.

Today's Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2/israels_explanation_for_deadly_gaza_aid) contains an interview with Daniel Carmon, Israel's deputy ambassador to the UN giving the official Israeli justification for the attack and an interview with Edward Peck, a former US Ambassador who was on one of the smaller flotilla ships and who criticizes the Carmon.

Alistair Welchman

Outlaws of the Mediterranean
From the Editors
June 1, 2010
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060110.html

At 4 am Eastern Mediterranean time on May 31, elite Israeli commandos rappelled from helicopters onto the deck of the Turkish-registered ship Mavi Marmara, part of an international "Freedom Flotilla" that had met in Cyprus and then set sail to deliver humanitarian relief supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip. The Mavi Marmara, the largest of the relief vessels, was carrying some 600 activists, mainly Turks but also others of diverse nationalities. The commandos fired live ammunition at some of the passengers, who Israel claims were lightly armed with metal rods or knives, and may have resisted the raid. Some reports say that other ships were also boarded and/or fired upon. The lowest reported death toll among the activists is nine, and the lowest number of wounded is 34.

The details are unclear, because Israel took custody of the entire flotilla and everyone on board, dragging the ships to the port of Ashdod, where the wounded are being treated and everyone else "processed" at a detention center prepared for the purpose. Communications with all the aid vessels were cut shortly after the raid, and journalists have strictly limited access to the Ashdod facility, which is located in the section of the port belonging to the Israeli navy. The news blackout has been near total, but official Israeli sources have made it known that those of the activists who are unhurt will be deported, except a handful who refused to sign deportation orders and will be jailed. Seven hundred activists in total were aboard the flotilla.

Reaction to the raid, from Turkey to the European Union to the UN, has been swift and (almost) universally condemnatory. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it an act of "state terrorism." Turkey currently sits on the UN Security Council, which convened an emergency meeting. That meeting went into closed session as night fell on May 31. Meanwhile, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri dubbed the raid a "crazy move." EU countries have summoned Israeli ambassadors to demand an explanation. "No one in the world will believe the lies and excuses which the government and army spokesmen come up with," said Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and leader of the Gush Shalom peace group in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu canceled a visit to Washington scheduled for June 1 -- perhaps in tacit agreement with Avnery, though it seems at least possible that President Barack Obama did not wish to be seen "standing with Israel" on this
occasion. Publicly, in any case, the White House remains the odd man out, saying only that it "regrets the loss of life" and is "working to understand the circumstances of the tragedy."

Much is unknown for certain about the commando operation, but it is nonetheless a moment of clarity in the ongoing drama surrounding Israel's 43-year occupation of Palestinian lands and its ten-year siege of Gaza, which has been tightened to a stranglehold since the Islamist party Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Once again, Israel has made the asymmetry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict crystal clear. With this raid upon a peaceful ship on the high seas, Israel has made clear its disdain for international law -- and its contempt for the notion that it will be held accountable for its violations. Israel will persist in this behavior until someone, and that someone is the United States, ends its impunity.

Who?

The "Freedom Flotilla" was a convoy of six ships, three bearing passengers and three cargo, organized by the Free Gaza Movement, a coalition of Palestine solidarity activists from Europe, North America, the Middle East and elsewhere. Two additional boats are being held in reserve in Cyprus. The Free Gaza Movement grew out of the first effort to bring aid by sea, in August 2008, when what organizer Huwaida Arraf called "two humble boats" arrived in the coastal strip with a shipment of hearing aids for Gazans deafened by the sonic booms of Israeli warplanes. Subsequent convoys have delivered other goods, despite attempts by the Israeli navy to deter them. In the summer of 2009, Israel interdicted an aid vessel and diverted it to Ashdod.
The activists are motivated by the desire to "break the siege of Gaza" and "raise international awareness" of Gazans' plight, according the movement's website. In one of eight "points of unity" on the site, the group members pledge: "We agree to adhere to the principles of non-violence and non-violent resistance in word and deed at all times." These tactics, expressing activists' frustration with the official international community's inaction on Palestine and aiming to embarrass Israel in the global media, are in line with the peaceful campaigns of Palestinians and Israelis to stop construction of Israel's wall in the West Bank. They also resemble the goals of the International Solidarity Movement, a group founded by Arraf and her husband Adam Shapiro that housed internationals with Palestinians in the West Bank (and, previously, Gaza) as witnesses to everyday excesses of occupation.

Arraf, a Palestinian-American, was aboard a smaller ship of the "Freedom Flotilla," along with as many as 12 other US citizens, possibly including an ex-ambassador and also Code Pink activist Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel. Three German members of Parliament embarked on the boats, as well as nationals of Britain, Ireland, Greece, Canada, Belgium, Sweden, Australia and Israel, perhaps among other countries. The precise passenger lists of the seized boats are unknown, due to logistical confusion in port in Cyprus. According to Shapiro, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, who was scheduled to travel to Gaza, remained in Cyprus, as did the Irish Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan. Among the passengers who did depart is Hanan Zu'bi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and member of Knesset. Thus far, the blackout has covered up her whereabouts as well.

On board the Mavi Marmara were hundreds of Turks affiliated with the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (known by its Turkish acronym, IHH), an Islamist organization whose relationship with Turkey's "soft Islamist" ruling party, the AKP, is fraught. Close to the AKP's more overtly Islamist precursor parties, which were banned by the Turkish courts, the IHH views the AKP as defectors who are insufficiently vocal in their engagement with "Islamic" issues, notably Palestine. The government did nothing to stop the IHH from departing for Cyprus, despite warnings from its nominal ally Israel, for fear that its own "Islamic" credentials might be further questioned. Early reports say that six Turks are among the dead, meaning that this incident will reverberate loudly in Turkish politics.

What?

Spin doctors in Israel have been working fast and furious to mold the metanarrative of what happened aboard the Mavi Marmara. The American mainstream media has mostly concentrated on Israeli allegations that some of the activists were carrying weapons and thus posed a threat to the lives of the highly trained Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commandos. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told European diplomats that the ship's passengers were "terrorist supporters who fired at IDF soldiers as soon as the latter boarded the ships." An IDF-distributed video, shot from a helicopter, shows what appears to be a melee on deck and says the activists tried to "kidnap" a soldier. The goal is to spread the story that the commandos acted in self-defense. To this tale, Adam Shapiro replies, "Our understanding is that Israeli soldiers fired first." In Ashdod, the Associated Press briefly glimpsed one American passenger, who blurted out, "I'm not violent. What I can tell you is
that there are bruises all over my body. They won't let me show them to you," before being hustled away.

Again, minus the carefully impounded testimony of the activists themselves, it is difficult to know what exactly precipitated the shooting. It is certainly clear that the raid itself was no panicking naval captain's improvisation, but was approved by the Israeli security cabinet under the imprimatur of Defense Minister Ehud Barak. According to the IDF's official statement, "This IDF naval operation was carried out under orders from the political leadership to halt the flotilla from reaching the Gaza Strip and breaching the naval blockade."

The dispute over who started the on-board combat misses the point, however. From a legal point of view, the Israeli operation was completely out of bounds and Israel is the aggressor. The raid occurred in international waters, meaning that Israel violated the convoy's right of free navigation. Richard Falk, an international legal scholar and the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, says that the raid is "clearly a criminal act, being on the high seas." Falk explains that storming a peaceful boat is akin to a home invasion, with the aggravating circumstance that the invaded space in this case was packed with goods intended to alleviate human suffering. "The people on these boats would have some right of self-defense," Falk continues, as they were the ones who were under unprovoked attack. Israel's claim of self-defense is preposterous, no matter who threw the first punch, because Israel's self is not located at sea.

Before the convoy sailed, Israeli passenger Dror Feiler speculated that if the Israeli navy tried to stop the ships by force, "they'll be the new pirates of the Mediterranean." The Free Gaza Movement has echoed this charge, as has the Financial Times in its May 31 editorial denouncing "this brazen act of piracy." This particular accusation will not stick, for the simple reason that by maritime law a state cannot commit piracy, but again it is important not to get tangled up in words. Israel has no legal leg to stand on, because it mounted a military assault upon a civilian boat (which is not, by any conceivable law, barred from carrying knives and metal rods) in waters not its own.

Why?

In part because of the murky details, early commentary on the commando raid has focused on the atmospherics. Everyone except the Israeli state and its kneejerk defenders, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), believes that Israel has done itself a great disservice, at least in public relations terms. Writing in the May 31 edition of Ha'aretz, columnist Bradley Burston lamented that Israel's foes have switched the spotlight onto the blockade of Gaza, Hamas or no Hamas. Burston continued: "We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam." On the Huffington Post website, M. J. Rosenberg, formerly of the liberal Israel Policy Forum, quoted blogger Moshe Yaroni saying that the incident is "Israel's Kent State."

The operation comes on the heels of the kerfuffle caused by a lengthy essay by Peter Beinart titled, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment," which appears in the June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books. Beinart is the former editor of the pro-Israel magazine The New Republic, and a slowly recovering liberal hawk who backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (for which he has repented) and authored A Fighting Faith (2004), a book calling for a revival of Cold War bellicosity in liberal foreign policy thinking. His essay lambasts the likes of AIPAC for maintaining its "Israel, right or wrong" stance amidst the rise of blatantly illiberal political forces in Israel and the continuation of the settlement project. Beinart is worried that the pro-Israel reflex will corrode Israel's support base among American Jewry. "For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism's door," he writes, "and now, to their
horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead." The editors of Foreign Policy were so struck by the essay that they commissioned eight responses.

The hand wringing among Israel's backers in the US will intensify as the crisis unfolds. The chorus will rise that Israel has overreacted or miscalculated; much blame will be laid at the door of Netanyahu, who is an easy target because of his brusque demeanor and pointed defiance of the Obama White House on settlement construction. Netanyahu, it will be said, has made a "crazy move" and placed the all-important US-Israeli "special relationship" in jeopardy.
It is more plausible that the Netanyahu government calculated this maneuver precisely, exploiting the Free Gaza Movement's gift of Memorial Day timing, when the Obama administration would be on vacation and hence readily able to make do with a grunt of "regret." For decades, Israel has tried the patience of the official international community with its military adventures, but whenever that patience has run out, Washington has stepped in to spare Israel the consequences.

The glaring example at present, the commando raid excepted, is the winter 2008-2009 assault on Gaza, when Israel bombarded the tiny strip for over a month, killing some 1,300 Palestinians, and claiming as justification the ineffectual rocket fire of Gazan militants. The Obama administration stymied any Security Council consideration of the UN report on that offensive, by retired South African jurist Richard Goldstone, protecting Israel from investigations of possible war crimes. Compared to the carnage in Gaza itself, the casualties among the Free Gaza Movement are few. Israel is counting on the US, once again, to deflect the international furor over its actions and enshrine the principle that Israel can do whatever it wants, legal or not, to the Palestinians and those who try to help them.

What Now?

Perhaps, nonetheless, Israel did miscalculate. Free Gaza Movement members not on the boats are stunned by Israel's violence, and mournful at the losses in their ranks, but heartened by the alacrity and sharp tone of world reaction to the raid. The next step for the activists, says Shapiro, will be to decide when and where to sail with the two aid vessels still in Cyprus. Gael Murphy of Code Pink predicts that Palestine solidarity networks will be "moved to action" more concerted and determined than before.

In Israel-Palestine, the burning question is the fate of Sheikh Ra'id Salah, a resident of Umm al-Fahm and the leader of the Islamist Movement in Israel. Salah was a passenger in the "Freedom Flotilla," and Arab media reports have said that he was injured or even killed by the commandos. Many observers believe that if Salah was hurt there will be massive demonstrations by Palestinians both inside and outside Israel, perhaps sparking confrontations and giving Israel the opportunity to reassert control over the crisis and the coverage of the conflict in general.

In Turkey, the government cannot ignore popular protests over the attack on the Mavi Marmara, the largest of which have taken on a religious dimension. On May 31 crowds of Islamists in Istanbul blocked the Trans-European Motorway linking the European and Asian continents, upstaging the faster-moving, but smaller gatherings of leftists. Both the IHH involvement in the convoy and Erdogan's impassioned denunciation of the raid have painted the AKP into a corner. They must show the Turkish public that they will stand up to Israel and its US patron in the diplomatic arena, and also that they will not abandon the mission of relief for Gaza. The AKP government has canceled three joint Turkish-Israeli military exercises, recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv and repatriated the national youth soccer team from Israel. Erdogan promised to order a Turkish naval escort for the next flotilla, and with elections not far off in 2011, he may be hard pressed to renege. At the same time, the AKP
cannot be completely comfortable in the role in which it has been cast, which increasingly requires it to face down not only the state-secularist establishment in Turkey but also the country's mightiest friends in Washington. The Obama administration is already irked by Ankara's brokering, with Brazil, of a nuclear deal with Tehran.

The destination of the boats, Gaza, stands at risk of being overshadowed by the deadly scuffles off its coast. It is there, however, that the situation is most dire. The "Freedom Flotilla" was carrying, among other items, cement for the reconstruction of the 6,400 Palestinian homes that were razed or damaged in the winter of 2008-2009. The World Health Organization counts some 3,500 families as displaced by the bombing, more than a year later. The Israeli assault exacerbated the effects of the years-long siege, which has sent the already impoverished strip into downward spirals of human misery. In May 2008, the WHO estimates, 70 percent of families were living on less than $1 a day; 10.2 percent of Gazans were chronically malnourished; and 67 percent of young people were jobless. These numbers have certainly worsened since the data was collected, due to the bombing, and to subsequent Israeli and Egyptian crackdowns on the smuggling of goods through tunnels underneath the
Gazan-Egyptian border.

What of the response of Barack Obama? The path of least resistance, sure to be greased by Congress, would be to instruct his UN envoy to spurn Turkish and other demands for Israeli accountability. With the assistance of the American media, it may not be so difficult for the White House to pretend that this naked display of unlawful violence was just a "tragedy" occurring in the heat of the moment. The media, after all, is bleating insipidly about the effects this episode may have on the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process." Obama is likely to face little domestic pressure to put a stop to Israeli impunity and back a full and impartial investigation, though UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for one. And having just slapped down the Turkish-Brazilian deal with Iran, Obama may be ready to do all his damage to US-Turkish ties at once. It may be harder to avoid a conversation about lifting the indefensible blockade of Gaza, which Assistant Secretary-General Oscar
Fernandez-Taranco described as "counterproductive and unacceptable" before the Security Council on May 31. One thing is certain: If Obama chooses the former course and shields Israel from international scrutiny, no speech, however silver-tongued, will persuade the world that his Middle East policy is different from his predecessor's.

Monday, May 31, 2010

Electronic Intifada editorial: International solidarity and the Freedom Flotilla Massacre

This editorial from the Electronic Intifada gives a good summary of what's known so far in regards to the deadly attack inflicted by Israeli forces on the Freedom Flotilla. There is a lot that isn't known, since Israel has not released basic information such as: Names of the dead and injured.

Racheli Gai.

International solidarity and the Freedom Flotilla massacre
Editorial, The Electronic Intifada, 31 May 2010

Early this morning under the cover of darkness Israeli soldiers stormed the lead ship of the six-vessel Freedom Flotilla aid convoy in international waters and killed and injured dozens of civilians aboard. All the ships were violently seized by Israeli forces, but hours after the attack fate of the passengers aboard the other ships remained unknown.

The Mavi Marmara was carrying around 600 activists when Israeli warships flanked it from all sides as soldiers descended from helicopters onto the ship's deck. Reports from people on board the ship backed up by live video feeds broadcast on Turkish TV show that Israeli forces used live ammunition against the civilian passengers, some of whom resisted the attack with sticks and other items.

The Freedom Flotilla was organized by a coalition of groups that sought to break the Israeli-led siege on the Gaza Strip that began in 2007. Together, the flotilla carried 700 civilian activists from around 50 countries and over 10,000 tons of aid including food, medicines, medical equipment, reconstruction materials and equipment, as well as various other necessities arbitrarily banned by Israel.

As of 6:00pm Jerusalem time most media were still reporting that up to 20 people had been killed, and many more injured. However, Israel was still withholding the exact numbers and names of the dead and injured. Passengers aboard the ships who had been posting Twitter updates on the Flotilla's progress had not been heard from since before the attack and efforts to contact passengers by satellite phone were unsuccessful. The Arabic- and English-language networks of Al-Jazeera lost contact with their half dozen staff traveling with the flotilla.

News of the massacre on board the Freedom Flotilla began to emerge around dawn in the eastern Mediterranean first on the live feed from the ship, social media, Turkish television, and Al-Jazeera. Israeli media were placed under strict military censorship, and reported primarily from foreign sources. However, by the morning the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli soldiers who boarded the flotilla in international waters were fired upon by passengers. Quoting anonymous military sources, the Jerusalem Post claimed that the flotilla passengers had set-up a "well planned lynch." ("IDF: Soldiers were met by well-planned lynch in boat raid")

The Israeli daily Haaretz also reported that the Israeli soldiers were "attacked" when trying to board the flotilla. ("At least 10 activists killed in Israel Navy clashes onboard Gaza aid flotilla")

This narrative of passengers "attacking" the Israeli soldiers was quickly adopted by the Associated Press and carried across mainstream media sources in the United States, including the Washington Post. ("Israeli army: More than 10 killed on Gaza flotilla")

Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon stated in a Monday morning press conference that the Israeli military was acting in "self-defense." He claimed that "At least two guns were found" and that the "incident" was still ongoing. Ayalon also claimed that the Flotilla organizers were "well-known" and were supported by and had connections to "international terrorist organizations."

It is unclear how anyone could credibly adopt an Israeli narrative of "self-defense" when Israel had carried out an unprovoked armed assault on civilian ships in international waters. Surely any right of self-defense would belong to the passengers on the ship. Nevertheless, the Freedom Flotilla organizers had clearly and loudly proclaimed their ships to be unarmed civilian vessels on a humanitarian mission.

The Israeli media strategy appeared to be to maintain censorship of the facts such as the number of dead and injured, the names of the victims and on which ships the injuries occurred, while aggressively putting out its version of events which is based on a dual strategy of implausibly claiming "self-defense" while demonizing the Freedom Flotilla passengers and intimating that they deserved what they got.

As news spread around the world, foreign governments began to react. Greece and Turkey, which had many citizens aboard the Flotilla, immediately recalled their ambassadors from Tel Aviv. Spain strongly condemned the attack. France's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner expressed "profound shock." The European Union's foreign minister Catherine Ashton called for an "enquiry."

What should be clear is this: no one can claim to be surprised by what the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights correctly termed a "hideous crime." Israel had been openly threatening a violent attack on the Flotilla for days, but complacency, complicity and inaction, specifically from Western and Arab governments once more sent the message that Israel could act with total impunity.

There is no doubt that Israel's massacre of 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was a wake up call for international civil society to begin to adopt boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel similar to those applied to apartheid-era South Africa.

Yet governments largely have remained complacent and complicit in Israel's ongoing violence and oppression against Palestinians and increasingly international humanitarian workers and solidarity activists, not only in Gaza, but throughout historic Palestine. We can only imagine that had former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni indeed been arrested for war crimes in Gaza when a judge in London issued a warrant for her arrest, had the international community begun to implement the recommendations of the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, had there been a much firmer response to Israel's assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai, it would not have dared to act with such brazenness.

As protest and solidarity actions begin in Palestine and across the world, this is the message they must carry: enough impunity, enough complicity, enough Israeli massacres and apartheid. Justice now.

Latest articles on EI:
Palestine : Activism News: Gazans unite in call for solidarity with Freedom Flotilla (31 May 2010)
Palestine : Opinion/Editorial: International solidarity and the Freedom Flotilla massacre(31 May 2010)
Palestine : Action Items: Action alert: Call your governments, demonstrate support for Freedom Flotilla (31 May 2010)
Palestine : Human Rights: Rights org condemns "hideous" attack on Freedom Flotilla (31 May 2010)
Palestine : Opinion/Editorial: The Gaza flotilla and the ironies of history (30 May 2010)
Palestine : Opinion/Editorial: Freedom Flotilla exposes international community's failure(28 May 2010)

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Marc Ellis: The Ongoing Nakba and the Jewish Conscience / palestinecenter. org

Dr. Marc Ellis is University Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, now in its third edition, Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time, Practicing Exile and most recently, Judaism Does Not Equal Israel. Dr. Ellis has been inducted into the Collegium of Scholars at the Martin Luther King International Chapel and Morehouse College.

Ellis sees contemporary Jews as divided into 3 groups in terms of their positions on the question of Israel/Palestine:
"... Constantinian Jews see Israel as a remarkable and innocent flowering of Jewish history. Progressive Jews see Israel as a remarkable and innocent enterprise that has gone wrong. Jews of Conscience go further than Constantinian or Progressive Jews, back to 1948 as the war for a state of Israel that ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population. An ethnic cleansing that has continued under various guises since the formation of the state of Israel and continues apace today. "
Perhaps because of his training and work as a theologian, Ellis has a somewhat different way of looking at things - which I found deep and compelling.

Racheli Gai.

Marc Ellis: The Ongoing Nakba and the Jewish Conscience

Thursday, May 27, 2010

To view the video of this briefing online, go to
http://www.palestinecenter.org

The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
27 May 2010

Dr. Marc Ellis:

Thank you very much for that introduction. I see many old friends and some former students. This is my third time speaking at the Palestine Center, so I'm very glad to be back. I have many good memories of my times here. Thank you for your invitation to speak at the Palestine Center. I spoke here many years ago and have fond memories of that time. But of course they are shadowed by the continuing and increasing desperate situation in Israel-Palestine. I have been saying that things would get worse and worse, over the years, and they have. I've been accused of being too despairing and that I should bring a message of hope. But hope can only come from reality; without reality hope is false. Jews and Palestinians are in a terminal condition, realistically speaking. And though vastly different in experiences, we Jews and Palestinians share the same sinking boat. We will be rescued together or we will go down together.

Today I am addressing the ongoing Nakba and Jewish Conscience. I will address these questions, partly through sum events that have occurred since I was invited to speak here because, I believe, they open the question of the ongoing Nakba and the Jewish Conscience in a relevant way. I'll also refer to a recent important lecture here by Professor [John] Mearsheimer where he referred to Righteous Jews, a category I will discuss in a few moments. But I have to make an immediate disclosure – he did not include me among the Jewish notables he lists as Righteous Jews. I may have been included in the "among others" category. Now I don't mention this because I am hurt or surprised. I doubt has ever heard of me. I mention it because it is telling for what he and others leave out. What is often left out of the discussion about Jews and Palestinians is an understanding of Jewishness that I believe forms a substantial component of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse and a substantial
component of a life beyond that impasse. The "something" that is left out is a crucial aspect of the war between Israelis and Palestinians and the internal war among Jews over the question of Israel-Palestine. That "something" often is not recognized by Palestinians either. To this "something" I will return. But first two recent articles in the press that illustrate this missing understanding.

To read the rest, go to http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/12975/pid/897I
If you prefer viewing it, visit http://www.palestinecenter.org
The video is 44 minutes long.

Jewish Peace News

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Noura Erakat: BDS in the USA

Friday, June 4, 2010

Alice Walker: You will have no protection / The Electronic Intifada

Lynda Brayer: The Legal Framework of International Law

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Israeli forces’ attack on Freedom Flotilla ( update 2)

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Israeli forces’ attack on Freedom Flotilla ( update)

Monday, May 31, 2010

Electronic Intifada editorial: International solidarity and the Freedom Flotilla Massacre

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Marc Ellis: The Ongoing Nakba and the Jewish Conscience / palestinecenter. org

Contributors

Subscriptions

Contact

Blog Archive

Older Articles