The anti-boycott law, which the Israeli Knesset passed this week, has sparked a storm of controversy both inside Israel and within Jewish communities abroad.
The legislation effectively criminalizes Israelis who answer the Palestinian civil society call to join the BDS movement -- boycott, divestment, and sanctions -- intended to bring Israel in line with international law and to pressure the state into recognizing full human and civil rights for Palestinians. While many Israelis are uncomfortable with the BDS movement -- mistakenly seeing it as an attack on the state itself -- there are numerous Israeli peace groups and individual activists who have taken part in a targeted boycott of settlement products for years, refusing to buy anything that is manufactured over the Green Line. There are also a small number of Israelis who support the broader BDS movement.
Under the new law, both groups will be vulnerable to lawsuits. The complainant will not have to prove that his or her business was harmed by the boycott in order to sue someone. The law is retroactive and, if one is found guilty of participating in the boycott, he or she will be subject to steep fines.
The law was authored by Knesset Member Ze'ev Elkin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-line Likud party.
The legislation was widely decried as undemocratic and a strike against free speech. Some went as far as to say that the new law delegitimizes Israel.
Criticism was not limited to the left-wing alone. The increasingly right-leaning Jerusalem Post penned an editorial against the legislation. It even sparked a bit of controversy inside of Likud, with a couple of party members likening the legislation to "third world laws."
But the criticism from both the left and right is problematic -- for the most part, it neglects the serious problems that were plaguing "Israeli democracy" long before the anti-boycott law was approved.
An editorial penned by the New York City-based Jewish Daily Forward offers an example. After criticizing the recent legislation, the author(s) go on to add, "It may be that when the Israeli Supreme Court hears the inevitable legal challenge to the anti-boycott law, it will rule it unconstitutional and prove, again, that a democratic system of checks and balances exist in the Israel polity."
In reality, the Israeli Supreme Court has been impotent for years -- with the state consistently ignoring rulings that are not to its liking.
Take, for example:
In 2006, the Israeli Supreme Court struck down the binding arrangement, a policy that applies to migrant workers. Rather than respecting this decision, the Knesset recently passed legislation that is so severe human rights groups are calling it the "Slavery Law."
In 2007, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the position of the separation barrier in the West Bank Palestinian village of Bilin served no security purpose and ordered the state to move the fence. It took the state over four years to comply and, still, the villagers remain separated from some of their land.
During Operation Cast Lead, Israel blocked media from entering Gaza. Although the Supreme Court lifted the ban, press was not admitted to the Gaza Strip.
More recently, the state has overturned the policy that made migrant workers who had children in Israel lose their legal status, calling it a violation of Israel's own labor laws. Despite the fact that the mechanism that made these women and children illegal has been struck down, the state is continuing to deport them.
Human rights organizations contest the state's non-compliance on a regular basis. Former Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp has twice sent letters to the current Attorney General, Yehuda Weinstein, in hopes of getting the state to comply with such rulings.
It's also important to bear in mind that the anti-boycott law is but one in a slew of legislation that some critics are calling "proto-fascist," currently making its way through the Knesset.
Of course, I would question the strength of any "democracy" that kept Palestinian citizens of Israel under martial law from 1949-1966. (And it goes without saying that the occupation, which began a year after martial law ended, is decidedly undemocratic).
Perhaps it is high time that we all start using Dr. Oren Yiftachel's term for Israel -- ethnocracy, a regime that "facilitates the expansion, ethnicization, and control of a dominant ethnic nation... over contested territory and polity."
The anti-boycott law offers a reflection of this term. As Mairav Zonszein of the independent, bloggers' collective +972 Magazine points out, "The boycott law makes no distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories and thus is in effect a legalization and normalization of the occupation, the total erasure of the Green Line and the moratorium on the two-state solution."
She continues, "Instead of crying out about the violations of freedom of speech and the antidemocratic nature of the law, concerned entities, and first and foremost the US government, should be explicitly pointing out the message such a law clearly sends to the world about Israel's intentions vis-a-vis the two-state solution: primarily that it has none."
Indeed, the new legislation seems a desperate attempt to legitimize (and, by extension, better facilitate the expansion of) illegal settlements.
But the anti-boycott law also suggests that the term ethnocracy is no longer enough. For it is no longer enough to belong to the dominant ethnic nation, that of the Jewish people -- one must be Jewish and march lockstep with the hawks. Israel, it seems, is on the road to becoming an ethnocratic ideocracy.
No matter what name we use, the alarm sounding through Israeli society and the Jewish Diaspora should have been rung long ago -- the anti-boycott law is a symptom of a failed democracy, not a cause.
Follow Mya Guarnieri on Twitter: www.twitter.com/myaguarnieri
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I don't think so.
These are the people who welcomed ahmadinejad to Columbia and prevented Israeli ambassador from speaking at UC Irvine.
"Woe betide the Jewish democratic state that turns freedom of expression into a civil offense".
"I stand ashamed and mortified before my mentor, Jabotinsky,"”
Rivlin is Likud, which is hardly leftist, unless you would think Michele Bachmann is a communist?
The Law is aimed to crush democratic and non-violent dissent, hidden under the veil of "security", like everything else in Israel.
It is the State's answer to non-violence.
The surrounding countries should make peace and mimic Israel. Should aim to educate its populations to the same degree as Arab Israelis are permitted to be educated IN ISRAEL!!.
"
Yes Mr. Lieberman, I'm a proud Jewish terrorist
The foreign minister says Yesh Din, the organization of whose public council I am a member, is a terrorist organization - 69 years after the British Mandatory government defined me as a terrorist.
By Shlomo Gazit
But in the present situation, unfortunately, there is no equal treatment for Jews and Arabs when it comes to law enforcement. The legal system that enforces the law in a discriminatory way on the basis of national identity, is actually maintaining an apartheid regime."
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/yes-mr-lieberman-i-m-a-proud-jewish-terrorist-1.373979
Well, we already know Ergun Canor has been revealed as a fraud. Here's Anderson Cooper exposing Walid Shoebat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJN00dBhZVk&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74Tzz51VYXg&feature=relmfu
Why? So the war can thrive! And so |$rae|'s actions can always be justified.
Is it too hard to figure out why Z|0n|$ts are always found behind ambassadors of anti Muslim rhetoric.
"B’Tselem says nearly 100% of Palestinian children charged with rock-throwing are convicted, because of overwhelming pressure to plea bargain.
Only one Palestinian minor of 853 charged with rock-throwing between 2005-2010 was acquitted, according to a new report by the human rights group B’Tselem."
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-convicts-most-stone-throwing-palestinian-children-right-group-says-1.373807
We should applaud Israeli SOCIETY (not Netanyahu, society!) for having the civil society and democratic credentials necessary to support such an obvious home grown critic of government and military policy.
Due to the fact that we are a small start up project, with no financial resources, we will take great efforts to make sure that we are not in violation of the new law. The intimidation of the law is enough for the process of self censorship to take full effect on our work. There are a number of opinions about BDS and settlement boycott on +972, this law has made it so that those who support or even flirt with such nonviolent initiatives no longer have a seat at the debate."
http://972mag.com/the-boycott-law-is-effect-can-i-write-that/
And if you find it disconcerting that a legislative body would pass new legislation in response to a court ruling that struck down an older law as invalid, you definitely do not understand the concept checks and balances.
And now its happening in Israel too.
One day they will look around and say "how did we allow this to happen?"
http://original.antiwar.com/hacohen/2011/07/12/things-you-can-say-things-you-cannot/
Historians speak of anti-Semitism in pre-Nazi Germany as a common system of beliefs and utterances shared by the average (non-Jewish) person as normal, acceptable, respectable, even obvious facts of life. Everybody hated Jews, just like everybody hates cockroaches — what’s the big deal? The taxi driver reflects the Israeli mainstream nowadays. With such a government and such a public atmosphere, the old taxi driver is the last person I can blame.
Now that is democracy in action!
For a planet on the edge of self-destruction, this is just one more blow it doesn't need.
The government in Israel was elected by the majority of voters, they control about 80 of the Knesset 120 seats.....So all your wishes about revolts is ludicrous, and it is about time that Israel stop letting its detractors exploit its free speech and open society to starngle its economy.... Israel population is abour 7.9 million of which 6 million are Jews, how that for apartheid?
What leftist media?
Not a word about the Palestinian School Teacher and mother whose head was blow off in front of 3 of her children by the explosive device placed on her front door in Gaza.
First BDS is not FREE SPEECH but a nefarious incitement to strangle Israel economy and isolate it academia and cultural associates. It is like shouting FIRE is a packed theater, which was ruled as not fall under the free speech category.
Second, the so called anti-Boycott law provide some balance to the matter, providing for the parties injured by the BDS activities to use a possible civil legal recourse against the offending party. Let the court decide the merit of the civil suit rather having the media, which is mostly extreme leftist to judge the issue on their papers.
Last, there is nothing immoral or undemocratic for a Democratic state to defends itself and refuse to assist its detractors in their quest to destroy it by all means short of armed struggle. It is about time Israel takes a stand and tell the Palestinians and their supporters even within Israel you will NOT use our free democracy and open society to harm Israel.
Israel will steal the paint off your car.
I wonder what happens to Arabs in the WB or Gaza that try to bring the PNA (Hamas and Fatah) in line with international law and to pressure them into recognizing the human and civil rights for Palestinians.
what was the name of the Palestinian School Teacher and mother whose head was blow off in front of 3 of her children by the explosive device placed on her front door?
you know, the lady that worked at an UHWRA elementary school.
the IDF wanted to do surveillance on Hamas.
i only mention it because the IDF had mistaken her as a Hamas supporter.
she was not.
she supported Fatah.
however, i fail to see the need to blow her head off to do survellaince.
well, whatever.
her survivors will not be supporting Likud.