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Because of my Arabic name, I am reluctant to write about Palestine. I get afraid that my words will be too easily dismissed because of my name, because of the racist idea that everybody with an Arabic name can only be partisan by nature. Like everybody with a Jewish identity is presumed to be in support of Israel, regardless of Independent Jewish Voicesand other groups we don’t hear about in the media because their protests go uncovered, their letters ignored. It’s another form of anti-Semitism, this monolithic certainty, this lumping of people into political blocks for sociopaths to play with.

I attended the BDS conference in Montreal  this weekend because I realized that I knew very little about this movement that is gaining such momentum all over the world. Since the transformation of Gaza into a gigantic prison camp and the flotilla massacre, the call to boycott, divest from and sanction the state of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinian people has been steadily growing. I often hear the lament that people don’t learn from history. Well, the people who support BDS certainly did. The first wave of support for BDS came from South Africa because South Africans know what it was like to live under apartheid conditions and they know that a boycott campaign worked for them.

I’m old enough to remember my father explaining to me that, as a “coloured person,” certain rights would be denied to me in South Africa. I didn’t understand it then, as a little girl, and I don’t understand it now. I don’t understand how anybody in the twenty-first century could attempt to justify such practices. But I remember that song “Sun City” and the jubilant headlines when South African apartheid ended.

Headlines about “The Middle East” seem to create a fog of uncertainty, in the midst of which people wander, bemused, without the kind of clarity that allows us to confidently declare, as the anti-apartheid artists did in the 80s, “I ain’t gonna play Sun City.” We start worrying about one- and two-state solutions, about a “peace process” and about dates and technicalities: 1948? 1967? What’s not going to get us into trouble, like Libby Davis did ? What won’t bring a shitstorm of raving denunciations down on our well-meaning heads? We stop listening to our consciences and start thinking about politicians and positions. “Politics,” said Orwell, is “largely the defense of the indefensible” and nothing bears this statement out so well as the complicity with Zionism that can be fostered in a population lost in a fog of diffused Islamophobia and diplomatic jargon. “The Middle East is too complex and there’s too much going on. I’ll let the politicians sort this one out,” we think and we look the other way.

So, what’s indefensible? Among other things, I learned this weekend that Israel has a two-tiered legal system, which allocates rights based on identity, so, for example, it denies the right to own land to non-Jewish people. I learned that an eleven-year-old boy was pistol-whipped to death by an Israeli soldier, who paid for his crime with six months of community service. I learned that the people who live in Gaza are being slowly poisoned by water that is 90-95% contaminated by bombed sewage systems that they are not permitted to repair. I also learned that, since 1967, even though they don’t get any labour protections such as unemployment insurance under the two-tier system, 11% of Palestinian workers’ wages have been forcibly deducted to finance Histadrut, the Israeli labour federation that Golda Meir described as “a great colonizing agent,” which condones such practices as painting a red X on Arab construction workers’ hardhats for the convenience of Israeli marksmen. I learned that the Canadian Labour Congress invites Histadrut to its conventions and that Conservative MPs such as Jeff Watson claim that God has given Israel to the Jews (at least, you know, until that Rapture thing happens and everybody in the world perishes except for Jeff Watson and his coreligionists, and possibly his family pets and the family pets of his coreligionists…).

I learned that we are living in the most pro-Zionist country in the world at the time of this writing, one that is seriously debating making any criticism of the state of Israel a hate crime punishable by the laws of this country.These tendencies go back, I learned, to Lester B. Pearson and to the Christian Zionist movement that wanted to create a “Jewish homeland” as part of the British empire. The fact that other people might already live in the Jewish homeland didn’t matter. We can shrug off the residential schools and the reservations, after all, can’t we? The dispossession and subjugation of yet more brown people who inconveniently happened to be living there when the Europeans arrived can easily be met with a “Meh.” But, you know, Avatar was really, really cool, eh? We’ve got tears to shed for big blue fictional aliens, eh? Just don’t mention those Palestinians, even though they’re losing their life-giving trees too.

Talk of the cruelties that are becoming more obvious for all the world to see is getting harder to silence and shut down. The increasing momentum of the BDS movement has created panic among Zionists, who have been wildly flailing that “anti-Semite” paintbrush around, smearing it left and right. These people don’t want to debate facts because the facts are against them. The facts get in the way of their opinions and their opinions are increasingly exposing them as cowardly apologists for sociopathic regimes. When Omar Barghouti from the BDS committee offered to debate pro-Zionists, not one of the so-called “journalists” who hurl accusations of “Anti-Semite” like monkeys flinging feces at the zoo was brave enough to leave the comfort of their newspaper monologues and meet him in a public forum. When the union I work for took a pro-BDS position, I noticed that the handful of people rounded up to threaten and harass us preferred to remain anonymous.

In the meantime, octogenarian Holocaust survivors are supporting the Palestinians, divestments from Israeli businesses that fund the occupation are growing, and around the world it’s getting harder and harder for any of us to play Sun City. Unlike South African apartheid, however, which saw black South Africans as a cheap labour force to be exploited, the fundamentalist Israeli regime has no use for the Palestinians. It wants them dead or gone. And it wants us to shut the hell up while it kills them and drives them out. So, I decided to write about Palestine and what I learned at the BDS conference in the hope that others, whether or not they have Arabic names, will join the growing numbers of us who are gaining the courage to speak out.

Aalya Ahmad

Aalya Ahmad

Aalya Ahmad has a PhD in comparative literature, a crush on George Orwell and a rather impressive collection of cloth bags from the various public service unions she has worked with over the years....