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by Peter A. Belmont / 2014-03-04
© 2014 Peter Belmont
M.J.Rosenberg has given his reasons for opposing an all-Israel boycott: Why I Oppose the ‘Boycott Israel’ Movement. I attempt, here, to show why I think he is wrong.
MJR opposes BDS again, at Netanyahu Is Mostly Right About BDS—But BDS Is Not the Issue, and much (but not all) of what he says here seems correct to me. I’ll treat this below.
In decrying an all-Israel boycott and favoring, instead, a boycott focused only on settlers and occupation, MJR asks why people who call for all Israelis to be punished for Israel’s crimes don’t call for all Americans to be punished for USA’s many crimes.
This would be a good question if boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) were “punishment”, as he suggests, and if BDS was regarded as a universal cure for universal ills. But they are not. Rather, BDS is an effort at persuasion of Israel’s electorate.
BDS seeks to persuade Israel (and the world) to help provide one or more democratic and non-discriminatory places (countries) within the territory of the Mandatory Palestine (of 1946) where all Palestinians may live without any longer suffering Israeli cruelties.
BDS (as such; people who adhere to BDS have their own opinions and desires) doesn’t care about how many countries there may later be—but wants them to be places where Palestinians can live happily. It does not seek to “destroy Israel” by overpopulating Israeli territory with Palestinians. After all, Israel can always accept much larger Jewish immigration to keep the population percentage numbers in good shape even if all Palestinian refugees/exiles from “1948” (when Israel performed ”ethnic cleansing” on Palestine) were allowed and accepted re-entry.
BDS is intended to persuade the Israeli electorate to steer their country away from occupation, settlement, discrimination against non-Jews, and its continuing refusal to readmit the Palestinian exiles from 1948. Nothing more.
And the achievement of these goals of BDS would not be punishment. It would be a restoration of the good and decent situation that would have obtained otherwise had Israel not sprung into existence by an expulsive war and maintained itself in existence ever since in a manner oppressive of Palestinians.
Israel should not have expelled and/or refused to readmit the Palestinian exiles of 1948, and the nations have been demanding that Israel readmit the (peaceable) exiles[1] continually since 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 13(2))[2] asserts that every person has the right to return to his own country.
The Fourth Geneva Convention together with other international law and conventions prohibit both the expropriation of land for settlement and the settling of settlers by an occupying power.
The UN Charter prohibits the acquisition of territory by use or threat of war.
Many laws and treaties prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or national origin.
Thus every goal of BDS is an attempt to bring Israel into compliance with international law, agreements, and human-rights norms. Achieving these goals would not be “punishment” of Israel but bringing Israel—kicking and screaming, I suppose—into compliance with law and norms of the international community.
Because BDS is an effort at persuasion, it is used appropriately whenever there is a realistic chance that the effort will succeed.
And it can succeed only if two things are true: first, that a sufficient international pressure can be mobilized to do the persuading, and, second, that the BDS demand a change in the status quo which is achievable. Those subjected to BDS persuasion must be persuaded to do something definite—it must be definite so they will know when the BDS pressure will cease.
BDS would fail if applied to the USA for two reasons. First, apart from criminal prosecution of various war-criminals among America’s leaderships (past and present), there is little that America can do to undo its crimes. Make reparations perhaps.
Second, no-one can realistically imagine that an attempt to boycott America could succeed. If some group (Iraqis, perhaps) wished to instigate BDS against America, what would they ask for in the way of change in the USA? Who would be their allies?
In the case of Israel, BDS is different, because Israel’s crimes CAN be corrected (to an extent). And because an alliance to perform the boycotts and sanctions can be imagined and is already growing and visible.
Not all of Israel’s crimes can be corrected, not all the killing and torturing and destruction of property and stealing of land can be corrected (although some stolen land could be returned to its owners). War-criminals could, of course, be prosecuted.
But at the macro-level, there can be a two-state-solution or a democratic one-state-solution and in that way a sort of justice can occur. Palestinians wish to live in a democratic nation which does not subject them to discrimination. They wish to be free of cruel Israeli discrimination, cruel Israeli denial of their human and national rights. These desires can be achieved. BDS proposes to make the costs to Israel of continuing to deny these things more expensive to Israel than the costs to Israel of allowing these things.
Let me return to the question of BDS as “punishment”. Of course, the several nations of the EU (or of anywhere else) will not all land on Israel like a unitary “ton of bricks.” It will take time for BDS to catch on, time for the EU states to form a common-joint foreign policy which calls for sanctions, and when that happens, the sanctions are likely to be small to begin with, escalating slowly to larger sanctions. I would not expect to see an embargo on general trade with Israel for many years. This means that I expect the “punishment” or inconvenience of imposed BDS to be gradual and slight to begin with, so that Israelis will see it coming and have a chance to deal with their problems before the BDS sanctions become extreme. For this reason I do not regard an all-Israel BDS (that is, sanctions and boycotts aimed at all Israeli companies and institutions) to be unduly punishing.
And this non-punishment is important because, although Israel is a good democracy, perhaps better in terms of citizen impact on government than the USA is. In the USA, the imperial policy is not a policy directed by the people, for the people, or by the people. It is a creation of the oligarchy and it would be very unfair to “punish” the American people to force the USA to abandon its imperial policies and world-wide military bases. Thus, pressure on the American people would be wrong because American is a DINO—Democracy In Name Only. I believe that the same is not true of Israel. However, even if it were true, I believe that trade sanctions on Israel; will hurt Israeli businesses and that they—like businesses in the USA—will prove to have sufficient influence on government to roll back the settlements and occupation. As to the other goals of BDS, only time will tell.
What about the idea that BDS should be used first against the worst nations (and MJR seems to think the USA is worse than Israel).
As many writers have noted, boycott is a tool to be used against any target where it can work. It need not be used only or first against the “worst” violator of human rights. The civil rights movement in the American South used boycotts successfully, and entirely fairly, despite the presence in the world of worse governments. Similarly the boycott against South African Apartheid was entirely fair even though there were worse governments.
We do not tell our police departments to stop arresting robbers simply because there are at the same time also murderers to arrest.
All police work is opportunistic, using available resources to do what can be done. As a rule, police can never do all that needs to be done.
Therefore, a BDS effort to reform the USA—which MJR seems to suggest, although perhaps only as a straw man—would likely fail whereas the present BDS against Israel shows many signs of succeeding.
The current BDS aims to reform Israel and shows many signs of success. Pressure is building on Israel and the case favoring BDS is overwhelming. Israel has been thumbing its nose at international law—and at the nations—for 66 years. There is a lot of anger and righteous outrage available to fuel the BDS movement against Israel. And, of course, the formerly-colonialist world is recovering from the racism of yore which overlooked the ill treatment of people of color all over the world. Generally (outside Israel anyhow) Palestinians are seen as human beings today, not as dispensable “natives” without rights. The racist premise of much that Israel has done and continues to do has lost favor today throughout much of the world.
Furthermore, to answer MJR’s call for a limited BDS aimed only at settlements, settlers, and occupation, it must be noted that the occupation and settlement projects (like the discrimination and refusal to readmit exiles) are Israeli-national projects for which all Israelis are responsible even if not all are “guilty”. If a settlements-only BDS could achieve all of the goals of BDS, it would nevertheless do so more slowly than pressure (BDS) applied to all Israel institutions. I’ve written about this here.
And a settlements-only BDS would likely run out of steam if Israel were to withdraw the settlers, leaving the problems of discrimination within Israel and Israel’s refusal to readmit the exiles of 1948. If all of the BDS goals are to be met, the BDS enforcement actions (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) must be all-Israel.
MJR opposes BDS again, at Netanyahu Is Mostly Right About BDS—But BDS Is Not the Issue, and much (but not all) of what he says here seems correct to me.
I agree that what matters is not what Palestinians and their civil-society friends do (i.e., BDS), but what nation-states do, and they may be motivated by many things, and not only or even principally by BDS. I hope, and it appears that MJR does as well, that the nations (especially the EU nations) will strong-arm Israel to pull back the settlements and settlers and to end the occupation. Perhaps they will take such action as a long-delayed fulfillment of their undertakings as signatories of the Fourth Geneva Convention. And not “because” of BDS. And perhaps it is pure accident that European action against the settlements and occupation seem to be being taken at the very “moment” when BDS has caught on among European citizens.
Where I disagree with MJR’s Netanyahu essay is where he says that BDS seeks to “eliminate the State of Israel by replacing it by ‘One State’ in which Jews will be a minority” by overpopulating it with returning Palestinian exiles from 1948.
MJR misreads, perhaps deliberately. BDS does not seek a form of government or a particular number of states. It desires a Palestinian Right of Return (PRoR) meaning a right of the exiles/refugees of 1948 and their progeny to return to their home country—whatever it be called—the country within which their villages and cities existed before the 1948 war.
Israel can provide a PRoR without losing its Jewish numerical dominance in either of two ways. First, it can encourage large scale immigration of Jews. Second it can accept a smaller territory for Israel (smaller than pre-1967 Israel) and thus remove from its territory the most populous pre-1948 Palestinian villages and towns; in that case PRoR would have those refugees returning to (a larger) Palestine rather than to (a smaller) Israel.
Israel’s (and perhaps MJR’s) disingenuous silence is about the SIZE of the ultimate Israeli state.
Zionists seem to think they are entitled to keep everything they seized in the war of 1948 while allowing (or at least MJR allows) that they are not allowed to keep all the territory seized 19 years later (in the 1967 war). And also that they are entitled to maintain a large Jewish majority in Israel’s populations.
Well, they cannot be “entitled” to both—although with a strong arm they may be able to keep both. But they might achieve a two-state peace along the old boundaries (Palestine to consist of Gaza and the West Bank including all of Jerusalem that was outside Israeli control in 1966, and a corridor between Gaza and the West Bank). And to allow PRoR. By more Jewish immigration. Or, as noted, by shrinking Israel and allowing a larger Palestine.
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[1] 11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
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[2] Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
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