Leonard Cohen's Ramallah concert in Palestine got cancelled last week. He had added it to a September concert in Israel. But a Palestinian group heading a broad campaign against Israel -- BDS, for boycott, divestment and sanctions -- demanded he not get away with "whitewashing Israel's colonial apartheid regime" by a "token" show of "balance." A Palestinian prisoners' club had sponsored the concert. It was unhappy but agreed to the decision.
The BDS campaign has gained backing in the West among academics, artists etc. As a supporter of Palestinian rights and a critic of much Israeli policy, I'd like to say why I find it problematic and even disturbing.
I confess I feel an instinctive antipathy toward boycotts. That may be based on having experienced some myself, especially in my early writing days, often over pieces I wrote about Israel. Or on a family past that avoided rather than confronted issues. At any rate, I don't think you can fully quarantine these personal reactions from your politics.
But, more generally, boycotts have a mixed record. The half-century U.S. shunning of Cuba led nowhere good. U.S. sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s caused mass deaths of children and ensconced Saddam Hussein in power. Apartheid South Africa is always cited in the positive column. But, by the time boycotts began to bite there, the regime was already very isolated and it's questionable how much real effect they had. Personally, I was uneasy even in that case. In 1986, some Canadian journalists picketed others who'd invited South Africa's ambassador to be on a panel. I was inside at the panel.
I don't feel the same about particular boycott targets such as, say, a Canadian company that builds on occupied land. Author Tariq Ali refused to attend a Turin book festival in 2008 that celebrated Israel's 60th year, because they didn't invite an equal number of Palestinian writers. Agree or don't, but his wasn't a blanket no. It was a measured response.
In the "disturbing" category is the way that self-righteous language on each side tends to mimic the other, via demonizations and dismissals rather than direct moral confrontations. I'm thinking here of formulaic phrases such as "whitewashing Israel's colonial apartheid regime" on one hand; or how Israel decided this week to ban the use of "nakba," a Palestinian term for the "catastrophe" of 1948, from textbooks. That is an Israeli equivalent to Holocaust denial. Yet, these two peoples will eventually need to share that land.
There are also practical considerations. Decades of Arab boycotts failed to weaken Israel. Just recently, after last winter's invasion of Gaza, many Westerners seem ready to think more critically about Israeli policy. But the boycott campaign could divert that discussion -- to fears about renewed anti-Semitism or into countermobilizations, such as supporters of Israel buying up all the tickets to a boycotted exhibit of the Dead Sea scrolls in Toronto.
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Edward Said -- the late scholar, Palestinian advocate and music critic -- supported his friend, conductor Daniel Barenboim, who holds both Israeli and Palestinian passports, when the latter was attacked in Israel for playing the music of an anti-Semite, Richard Wagner. "Real life cannot be ruled by taboos and prohibitions," he wrote, trying to apply what he had learned from the failed Arab boycotts. "Ignorance and avoidance cannot be adequate guides ..."
Edward Said also revered the music of Glenn Gould, who was devoted to "contrapuntal" musical forms, which he defined as "an explosion of simultaneous ideas ... where one implicitly acknowledges the essential equality of those ideas." This didn't mean they were morally equal; it meant they were equally present, acknowledged and responded to each other, found ways to co-exist and, finally, some resolution. Bach, as an example to us all.
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Personally, I will never cross a picket line. And when virtually all Palestinian civil society organizations -- including all Palestinian trade unions -- call for a boycott, I will consider that a picket line and respect it. If someone doesn't want to participate in this boycott, that's their right. But they shouldn't spend their energy denouncing the effort.
Comparing a grassroots campaign to boycott the Israeli economy to U.S. embargoes on Cuba and Iraq is just inaccurate. The U.S. embargoes were designed to starve civilians of aid and basic necessities, all in a quest to overthrow foreign governments. The boycott movement against South Africa and now Israel were both designed to apply economic pressure on the elites of those countries to respect human rights and international law.
The article says that by the time boycotts "began to bite" in South Africa, apartheid was already on its way out. But calls to boycott apartheid South Africa had been launched since the 1950's. Movements take time to build -- almost 40 years in the case of South Africa. There is no question that the "isolation" the South African government suffered was a direct result of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign. Why else would they have been isolated? Before anti-apartheid activists applied pressure on Western governments and corporations to divest, they were gladly investing in South African apartheid.
As Naomi Klein said, economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the non-violent arsenal. All other methods have been tried and Israel still refuses to honour repeated UN rulings. Surrendering the boycott tactic leaves Palestinians with no other option. Frankly, Israel should consider itself lucky to be treated only with a boycott for creating and maintaining the longest-standing refugee population on the planet.
Sanctions are rarely effective, but the threat of sanctions is frequently effect. In order for the threat to remain effective, paradoxically, sanctions are implemented when it is known that they will likely fail.
The relatively recent development of targeted sanctions 2001, changed the game for sanctions. There are now fewer humanitarian issues, but I'm not sure there is enough data to conclude about their effectiveness.
Salutin ignores the fact that the boycott is already having an effect.
And his "pox-on-both-their-houses" attitude is mere cowardice.
Grow a spine, Rick, and take a stand!
This type of thing is typical of the glob - which is why it shouldn't be from you. Why this now Rick?
Rick, if you really can't figure out the difference between boycott and sanctions (i.e. people's power vs. state coersion), perhaps you could ask the California farm workers' union if they consider César Chávez' call for the boycott of table grapes and lettuce to have been successful.
Yes, this view is coloured by my personal experiences -- my first political memories include picketing a Dominion store on Bloor St. during the grape boycott, and Garfield Weston Sr. (founder of Loblaws) speaking out in favour of apartheid as people started boycotting South African goods in his stores. Yes, those boycotts took a while to bite -- and precisely because of that they were instrumental in building movements for justice and freedom. Boycotts are important not just because of their economic impact but because they bring the struggle home to your own shopping basket and concert-ticket purchases: struggles in other countries become a more real if I have to think my own daily choices in the wider context.
We don't get to choose "appropriate" strategies for Palestinian civil society based on what we find "problematic" or "uncomfortable". We either stand in solidarity with their struggles, including BDS, or we don't.
It is not credible for Rick Salutin to paint all boycott campaigns with the same brush.
U.S. sanctions against Cuba are an attack by an imperialist country on a small oppressed nation. U.N. sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s cost hundreds of thousands of lives and were the preliminary act in the horror that became the Iraq war.
The civil society movement to isolate South Africa through a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions was, by contrast, a movement against imperialism and war -- a call to isolate a racist, sub-imperialist power. This is of a kind with the civil society movement to isolate Israel through a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Israel is a sub-imperialist power that is built on the basis of the racist exclusion and oppression of the Palestinians.
The issue is -- are we with imperialism and its allies, or with the oppressed and their allies in the fight against imperialism?
Salutin then changes the goal posts and questions the efficacy of such campaigns. That is something that has been discussed at length in the social movements. Very few maintain that BDS alone brought down apartheid. The key factor in the fall of apartheid was the generations-long struggle by the black people of South Africa themselves – from the uprising in Soweto to the magnificent illegal miners' strikes. This movement received considerable support from others in Africa (and from the armies of Cuba), engaged in their own struggles against colonialism and racism. Finally, to the extent those of us in the West could play a role, it was through exposing our governments' and corporations' complicity by calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
And "self-righteous language on each side"? In what way can the use of the term "apartheid" be equated with the Israeli state banning the use of the term "nakba?" Both express a truth – that the Israeli state is based on the racist exclusion of the majority of the Palestinians. The reality of the mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians does in fact make 1948 a catastrophe (nakba), just as the ongoing exclusion, fragmentation, isolation and separation of the Palestinians is a fact that deserves the label "apartheid". What unites both these terms is the way in which their use has been greeted with hysteria. We must not use the label "apartheid" or the term "nakba" – because these terms make it difficult for a complacent political class to continue to wallow in 61 years of willful ignorance about the reality of Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.
what a useless article. comparing a boycott of israel with the US sanctions against Cuba? i'd expect that from a neocon, or a child.