Tuesday, November 05, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Last time, I pointed out the various excuses the boycott-Israel crowd uses
when forced to confront their clear double-standard on human rights stances
(i.e., Israel deserves to be boycotted for building a fence to keep suicide
bombers from its cities, but Syria and China should not be boycotted since they
merely killed 3-500,000 or 70,000,000 of their own people).
As noted, most of these
excuses have the distinction of being both transparently self-serving and
unbelievably lame. But one “reason,” the one claiming that the call to boycott
Israel wells up from Palestinian civil society and is thus unique, begs for a
more careful review.
The claim that BDS is a
response to boycott calls originating from people in the region is based on the
2004 Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of
Israel (or PACBI). Whenever Naomi Klein or some
other boycott advocate talk about a boycott call endorsed by over 200
Palestinian civic organizations, the groups on the list of original PACBI
signatories is what they’re talking about.
Within that original list
of participating organizations (which I can no longer find now that PACBI has
been folded under a general BDS Web umbrella), 10-15% of the signatories were
identified as originating outside Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, including over
20 organizations from surrounding countries (13 from Syria, 6 from Lebanon and
2 from Jordan) and another 9 from Europe or North America. Now it may be that
some of these (as well as some of the organizations not identified by location)
are refugee or Diaspora groups. But
given the large Syrian contingent on PACBI’s original roster, the notion that
we’re talking entirely about un-coerced volunteers becomes shaky.
Second, as the name
implies PACBI stands for an academic and cultural boycott (the least popular
form of BDS, by the way), meaning those who signed up in 2004 were not
necessarily joining a movement for wholesale economic isolation of the Jewish
state. So those claiming that PACBI is the origin for broad-based BDS
activities may be putting words into the mouths of Palestinian agricultural,
medical and industrial unions/organizations, many of whom may not be that
excited about economic boycotts that punish them as well as Israel.
On more meatier matters,
the first group that topped the list of “Unions, Associations, Campaigns”
supporting the PACBI boycott call is the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, a coalition that includes Hamas,
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and some of the more violent
sub-sets of Fatah. Call me crazy, but I suspect that it’s much easier for this
Council to get the Palestinian Dentist’s Association (also a PACBI signatory) to
agree to its requests that vice versa.
The potential that the
PACBI boycott call arises from coercion within Palestinian society (vs. being a
consensus welling up from the grass roots) also points out an interesting
paradox. The claim that Israel uniquely deserves the BDS treatment is, to a
certain extent, based on Israel supposedly being exceptional with regard to its
level of human rights abuses (vs. Iran, China, North Korea, etc.). And yet the
members making up PACBI can only be seen as legitimately representing
Palestinian civic society if Israel’s “repression” does not extend to
eliminating such civic space in both Israel and the West Bank.
Like the claim that Israel
is inflicting a “Holocaust” on a Palestinian population that is simultaneously
experiencing a population explosion, the very existence of PACBI demonstrates
that the level of repression found in countries ignored by BDS activists
(Sudan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) does not exist in Israel. And thus we are led back
to the conclusion that the best way to avoid being a target of alleged “human
rights” activists pushing boycott, divestment and sanction is to actually be a
repressive dictatorship that crushes civic society rather than letting it exist
to sign boycott petitions.
Finally, a note on dates.
PACBI, as stated on their own Web site, made its “plea” for academic BDS in
2004, years after divestment programs originating at the 2001 Durban conference
were well underway in North American and European universities, unions,
churches and municipalities. In other words, the PACBI call was the result of
the success BDS was seeing between 2001-2004, and being the result it could not
have simultaneously been the cause.
Time travel underlies much
of the BDS project, as is underlies much of what passes for analysis of the
Middle East. My favorite example of this is the projection of today’s US
support for Israel (which didn’t really kick into high gear until the 1970s)
back to 1948 and beyond in hope of finding a US-Zionist conspiracy going back
to before the founding of the Jewish state.
If ignorance is bliss,
then the folks behind the PACBI excuse for BDS are either the happiest people
on earth, or at least the most manipulative.
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