What to do when the country I live in totally loses its compass? Totally loses its shame? What to do when the regime that collects my taxes uses them to deploy its high-tech military, armed to the teeth, against activists sailing to oppose a criminal siege? When this country's politicians authorize soldiers to shoot-to-kill into a deck-bound crowd? And then tell me they are protecting me? What to do when the governments of the world are too deeply implicated to hold this regime, this country accountable?
I have watched government after government in Israel present itself as a respectable, normal member of the club of developed countries; open, democratic, cultured and liberal. Israel recently launched a major "re-branding" campaign, emphasizing diversity, richness, creativeness, to divert attention away from its warring belligerence. Israel's leaders are deeply committed to keeping up their positive self-image.
I have noted the special privileges granted time and again on the pretext of this image. The US awards Israel billions every year for "defense" in the form of planes, missiles, guns and ammunition. Just this May, the organization of so-called developed countries (OECD) granted Israel full membership, after years of Israeli lobbying. Israel bases its equal footing in such clubs on its claim to democracy.
It is time for us all to hold it to that claim. Accountable. Not only privilege-able. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to end the occupation, reject, and actively remove, Israel's mask of "business as usual."
Each of us, each of you, can draw the line through BDS and act as a caring, responsible citizen of the world. To end Israel's 43-year-old occupation. To end the unacceptable, criminal siege of Gaza. To end racist laws and policies inside Israel, openly targeting the Palestinian citizens of Israel. To end more than sixty years of ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Inside Israel, BDS has already started to work. It is working where years of other civil society strategies have achieved far too little. For the first time in a very long while, many Israelis around me are sitting up and taking notice: Notice that there is still an occupation in place 43 years down the line, an occupation "out there" beyond their "normal" lives and beyond the self-perpetuated "existential threat." Notice that millions the world over believe "ordinary" Israelis -- both personally and collectively -- have something to do with this occupation. Notice that it just may turn out to be too costly.
For weeks now, dozens of items in Israeli media have reported on BDS developments, speculating on its chances and consequences. Israel's cabinet recently addressed the boycott of settlement goods by the Palestinian Authority. In May, a Harvard professor warned a Tel Aviv University conference of the grave strategic threat of Israel's crumbling legitimacy. Ignoring the country's record, he chalked up waning legitimacy to BDS, blaming individual activists who, he actually implied, were traitors. BDS activists in Israel regularly receive veiled and less veiled threats, including one recent death threat, in the media, through employers' reprimands, in the form of (so far) threatened legal suits, through university email lists and colleagues' petitions. A new bill making its way through Israel's legislature would criminalize support for BDS, past or present -- turning this op-ed into incriminating evidence against its author. Israel's minister of education has preempted legislation, already pledging punishment for academics who support BDS. All this is clear evidence that BDS has started to make its mark on society here in Israel.
Meanwhile, internationally, civil society organizations are passing resolutions in support of BDS -- trade unions, student bodies, municipalities, football teams, even one government -- in Norway, South Africa, Britain, New Hampshire, California, Sweden, France.
In 2005, Palestinian civil society groups came together to voice a powerful joint call for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. Activist groups all over the world and inside Israel have subscribed to this call and declared their support. BDS is a political tool claimed and operated by international civil society where other tools seem ineffective; When international institutions and governments are failing; When a long overdue need to end severe oppression is not being met. Today BDS may be the only non-violent tool capable of moving Israel beyond its patterns of militarized brutality.
Courageously and creatively, BDS faces violence with a firm commitment to non-violence. It stands in solidarity first and foremost with Palestinians, and then with humanity -- with the thousands of internationals and Israelis who have chosen nonviolent resistance as their means to oppose and end the oppression of Palestine.
A tool, a strategy, not an end in itself, BDS is meant to work. As it did in the past when a 1953 boycott of segregated buses jump-started the crucial years of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States; when the African American community of Baton Rouge boycotted and faced down a Louisiana court ruling; when, two years later, Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery bus and initiated the Montgomery bus boycott; when the massive school boycott in 1965 galvanized the movement again in Cook County, as more than 100,000 African American students stayed home from disgraceful schools despite a court injunction; when the world movement to resist South African apartheid gradually gained ground throughout the sixties to the dismay of successive US and British governments; when this movement kept growing, refusing to go away.
Today, BDS can make it increasingly difficult for Israel's government to keep up the occupation and the internal repression. Hiking up costs, it can make occupying unprofitable and racism disgraceful. Meanwhile, and no less important, it is already allowing Israeli society a clear reality check, reflecting what it looks like to international civil society, and capturing what it has become.
BDS is a means to justice for those to whom it has been denied. Not against, but rather for, both Israel and Palestine, it aims to end the policies destroying the lives of Palestinians and devouring the humanity of Israelis. BDS supports the livable, viable futures of all the people of this land.
Rationale for BDS includes:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
One can visit http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869
and http://www.bdsmovement.net/
to learn more about the growing boycott movement and can endorse the US call to boycott here:
http://usacbi.wordpress.com/”
thank you for your well written and informative article.
it addresses the underlying issues that are too often overlooked.
i support your goal to achieve peace by the use of non violent protest vis a vis BDS.
1) It appears to me that the BDS movement is designed to punish your punisher and that is Israel. I don't believe that is positive although as you say it is primarily a non-violent movement.
2) [And this is far more important functionally]. I don't believe that even if/when you get 10 x the response or even 10 x that it will move the Palestinian people one inch closer to a free state of their own. I believe that Israel already sees itself as deligitimized daily in the eyes of the world. The BDS movement will only force it to enact more barriers to hide behind making the Occupation more rather than less onerous and peace less rather than more likely. Israel is not South Africa or the racist America of the 1950's. It is filled with people who see no alternative in facing the oncoming threat to fighting against it or dying not only as individuals but as a people.....
Larry Snider
BDS certainly shows that though we may well be a minority: we will be LOUD!
Feel free to immigrate to one or more of the following "free" countries: N Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Libya, China, Iran, Syria, or - to save relocation expenses - just move to free Gaza.
Great blog, Rela!
a friend alerted me to this, and i ceased its usage.
i do not mean this as a criticism.
i only pass it along.
I am saddened to hear about attempts to pass Israeli legislations to incriminate BDS activists as aside from unjustly penalizing humanitarians like yourself, passage of such resolutions would undermine Israel's very claim to being a civil and democratic society. Good luck Rela!
Link to BDS Website:
http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/9
729 on the barcode => Israeli Goods
It is heartbreaking to see Israel sliding into a mire of its own making by becoming infexible and seeking to recapture a past that was never golden.
Those who are willing to march in lockstep behind conservatives will harm the nation beyond repair.
It is imperative that those who see a future filled with war be driven out of office and possibly away from Israel. The future lies in peace and justice not in pushing away those have a just claim on life in the middle east.
Personally I have very little faith in Muslims and find it very hard to trust them but the effort must be made. I am well aware that they are taught to hate Jews and to consider all non-Muslims to be worthless if not even human.
When your neighbors daily threaten to burn down your house and kill you and yours it becomes very easy to build up overwhelming strength and stop listening to those who make no threats at all.
Your assertion that you "[personally] have very little faith in Muslims and find it very hard to trust them but the effort must be made. I am well aware that they are taught to hate Jews and to consider all non-Muslims to be worthless if not even human" reveals an appalling ignorance of Islam and history.
To quote Rabbi Sassoon Kehdouri, Iraq's Chief Rabbi for 48 years, from a speech he gave before the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine: "Iraqi Jews will be forever against Zionism. Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for a thousand years and do not regard themselves as a distinctive separate part of this nation."
Indeed, Palestine's indigenous Arab Jews were utterly opposed to Zionism as well.
Anyone who imagines that Muslims are benevolent need only look at life in any Arab Muslim country, whether it has oil or not. Look at the treatment of women, guest workers, servants. Look at and describe the ineffable benevolence of Muslim societies and their vicious lying leaders.
I grew up with muslims and Jews. As a child I saw no difference but as I got older I began to study all religions and came to the conclusion that religion is the most evil invention of humanity. The 1% good it does in no way excuses the 99% of harm.
i, in my ignorance, failed to understand some of your comments on other threads.
thank you for educating me.
"It is not mere coincidence that the flowering of Jewish culture in the Arab world should occur at the very time that Islamic civilization was at its apogee. Day to day contacts between Muslims and non-Muslims were on the whole amicable." (Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: a History and Source, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979)
"When Rabbi Benjamim of Tuleda visited Baghdad in 1170 A.D., he found ten rabbinical schools and 238 synagogues in the land." "The Chief Rabbi," he wrote, "was held in highest esteem, being regarded as a descendant of David." (Philip Hitti, The Arabs, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956)
http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/week-s-end/a-typical-israeli-stunt-1.298265
Israel has this huge media/political infrastructure in place so it could deflect criticism. Yes, it's a shame Americans to a lesser extent Canadians are sheltered from the true horrors of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. People should be turning off their television to show the big media corporations that we dont need them anymore. SIX people own most of the media companies in the US and they are heavily pro-Israel, thus you see no exposure of what is happening there. Shop local. Support your local businesses will further put a damper on the big corporations and help the BDS movement.
Europe could hasten the end of the occupation but putting tariffs on Israeli exports.
http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/4#diy
===
1. Get rid of your own investments in Israel
Examine any investments you have and identify Israeli companies as well as secondary companies who are directly aiding the Occupation, and invest your money elsewhere. Write to the company telling them that you have disposed of your investments, and the reasons. Encourage them to put pressure on the Israeli government to end the oppression of Palestinians.
2. Lobby financial institutions:
If you have money in a bank, building society, pension scheme or other financial body you can obtain a list of where your money is being invested by writing to them or calling them. If money is being invested in Israeli companies, lobby the bank to get rid of these investments. If they refuse to do so, you can transfer to a different institution in protest.
“What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?!
The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.
The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.”
- Leo Tolstoy
(What is the Jew?
quoted in The Final Resolution, pg. 189, printed in Jewish World periodical, 1908)
and let me be the 1st to fan you !