A
Boycott Of Israel:
Something Has Changed
By John Pilger
24 August, 2007
The New Statesman
From
a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can see Jerusalem.
I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his son holding
the tail of his long tattered coat. He extended his hand and did not
let go. "I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer," he said in
measured English. "Over there, I played many musical instruments;
I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and because I was rather poor,
my very small son would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks. When
we lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped
his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, "Show me how a Palestinian
picks up his food rations!" So I made the monkey appear to scavenge
on the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti
threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was
not right; I was an artist, not a beggar . . . I am not even a peasant
now."
"How do you feel about
all that?" I asked him.
"Do you expect me to
feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and
their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them
for their stupidity. They can't win. Because we Palestinians are the
Jews now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or
you to forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after
them . . .".
That was 40 years ago. On
my last trip back to the West Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia,
now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil
drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting
flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced
by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long, I
was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At the United
Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records
were consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been "taken
away . . . very ill". No one knew about his son, whose trachoma
was surely blindness now. Outside, another generation kicked a punctured
football in the dust.
And yet, what Nelson Mandela
has called "the greatest moral issue of the age" refuses to
be buried in the dust. For every BBC voice that strains to equate occupier
with occupied, thief with victim, for every swarm of emails from
the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli
state's commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more
powerful now than ever. Documentation of the violent expulsion of Palestinians
in 1948 is voluminous. Re-examination of the historical record has put
paid to the fable of heroic David in the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh
and his family were driven from their home. The alleged threat of Arab
leaders to "throw the Jews into the sea", used to justify
the 1967 Israeli onslaught and since repeated relentlessly, is highly
questionable.
In 2005, the spectacle of
wailing Old Testament zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud. The building
of their "settlements" has accelerated on the West Bank, along
with the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers from their crops,
children from their schools, families from each other. We now know that
Israel's destruction of much of Lebanon last year was pre-planned. As
the former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has written, the recent "civil
war" in Gaza was actually a coup against the elected Hamas-led
government, engineered by Elliott Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy
on Israel and a convicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine
is as much America's crusade as Israel's. On 16 August, the Bush administration
announced an unprecedented $30bn military "aid package" for
Israel, the world's fourth biggest military power, an air power greater
than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country
on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction,
as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one
of the world's tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored
by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.
But something is changing.
Perhaps last summer's panoramic horror beamed from Lebanon on to the
world's TV screens provided the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism of Bush
and Blair and the incessant use of the inanity, "terror",
together with the day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity
in all our lives, has finally brought the attention of the international
community outside the rogue states, Britain and the US, back to one
of its principal sources, Israel.
I got a sense of this recently
in the United States. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times
had the distinct odour of panic. There have been many "friends
of Israel" advertisements in the Times, demanding the usual favours,
rationalising the usual outrages. This one was different. "Boycott
a cure for cancer?" was its main headline, followed by "Stop
drip irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific co-operation between nations?"
Who would want to do such things? "Some British academics want
to boycott Israelis," was the self-serving answer. It referred
to the University and College Union's (UCU) inaugural conference motion
in May, calling for discussion within its branches for a boycott of
Israeli academic institutions. As John Chalcraft of the London School
of Economics pointed out, "the Israeli academy has long provided
intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human
support for an occupation in direct violation of international law [against
which] no Israeli academic institution has ever taken a public stand".
The swell of a boycott is
growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed, reminiscent
of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so has South
African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish
members of the liberation struggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led
academic campaign against Israel's "methodical destruction of [the
Palestinian] education system" can be translated by those of us
who have reported from the occupied territories into the arbitrary closure
of Palestinian universities, the harassment and humiliation of students
at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of Palestinian children
on their way to school.
These initiatives have been
backed by a British group, Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories
include Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm. The
country's biggest union, Unison, has called for an "economic, cultural,
academic and sporting boycott" and the right of return for Palestinian
families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the Commons' international development
committee has made a similar stand. In April, the membership of the
National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted for a boycott only to see
it hastily overturned by the national executive council. In the Republic
of Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment
from Israeli companies: a campaign aimed at the European Union, which
accounts for two-thirds of Israel's exports under an EU-Israel Association
Agreement. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler,
has said that human rights conditions in the agreement should be invoked
and Israel's trading preferences suspended.
This is unusual, for these
were once distant voices. And that such grave discussion of a boycott
has "gone global" was unforeseen in official Israel, long
comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great power sponsorship,
and confident that the mere threat of anti-Semitism would ensure silence.
When the British lecturers' decision was announced, the US Congress
passed an absurd resolution describing the UCU as "anti-Semitic".
(Eighty congressmen have gone on junkets to Israel this summer.)
This intimidation has worked
in the past. The smearing of American academics has denied them promotion,
even tenure. The late Edward Said kept an emergency button in his New
York apartment connected to the local police station; his offices at
Columbia University were once burned down. Following my 2002 film, Palestine
is Still the Issue, I received death threats and slanderous abuse, most
of it coming from the US where the film was never shown. When the BBC's
Independent Panel recently examined the corporation's coverage of the
Middle East, it was inundated with emails, "many from abroad, mostly
from North America", said its report. Some individuals "sent
multiple missives, some were duplicates and there was clear evidence
of pressure group mobilisation". The panel's conclusion was that
BBC reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not "full and fair"
and "in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that
sense misleading picture". This was neutralised in BBC press releases.
The courageous Israeli historian,
Ilan Pappé, believes a single democratic state, to which the
Palestinian refugees are given the right of return, is the only feasible
and just solution, and that a sanctions and boycott campaign is critical
in achieving this. Would the Israeli population be moved by a worldwide
boycott? Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa's whites
were moved enough to support an historic change. A boycott of Israeli
institutions, goods and services, says Pappé, "will not
change the [Israeli] position in a day, but it will send a clear message
that [the premises of Zionism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21st
century . . . They would have to choose." And so would the rest
of us.
This article was first published
at the New Statesman
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