Boycott Israeli Apartheid
by Stanley Heller
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 12, 2006



 

I must have been out of my mind. I was bombarded with emails asking me to call my member of Congress and ask that she oppose the so-called Palestinian Terrorism Act.  CNI, US Campaign to End the Occupation, Jewish Voice for Peace, even an Israeli group wrote me. Defeat 4681! Call, call, call today. So I called and wrote to my lists and urged that they call. I put “We Might Win This One” in the subject line. Then the vote was delayed. Wow! The calls are having an effect. Redouble our efforts! Maybe we really can…

Then the vote occurred. 361 in favor, 37 against, and 9 voting present. It passed by a ten to one margin! Ten to one to declare every Palestinian city a “sanctuary for terrorists or terrorist organizations” and banning US exports except under special licenses. Ten to one to tell the US trade representative at the World Bank to stop any humanitarian projects. Ten to one to forbid US contacts with any member of the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian political organization. Ten to one to cut dues to the UN in proportion to what the UN spent on Palestinian rights advocacy. Read the actual bill: if you have the stomach for it. It still has to pass the Senate, but nothing will stop it unless Bush finds it a hindrance.

People write to me and say we’re making progress. “It took three months to round up the sponsors.” “There was actual debate on the floor of the House.” “AIPAC is wounded.” Really. Such glacial “progress” will bring Palestinians relief during the next ice age.

A web of sanctions, laws and regulations is being drawn chokingly tight around the Palestinian territories. The million plus Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being strangled. According to Chris McGreal writing in The Guardian (UK) on May 25, the Karni Crossing, the Strip’s main trading point with Israel and the world, has been open this year for a total of three weeks. No Palestinian products have been let out for months. Israel allows in not what the Palestinians what but what it wants to sell. At the same time, the Israeli army is bombarding the Gaza Strip. Over 5,000 artillery shells have been shot at targets there in the last two months. McGreal writes graphically about farmers and Bedouin ripped apart by the shells.

It’s the Iraq sanctions and bombings all over again and it could end up with the same ghastly results.

Now what will the future bring?  Will the Palestinians turn out Hamas and bow down to Olmert and Peretz? Not very likely. Perhaps the Israelis will be able suppress the useless rockets coming from Gaza and seal in the Palestinians behind walls and a new generation of high tech checkpoints, but what will happen internationally? The sanctions will be a huge, huge shot in the arm for al-Qaeda. It will seem to confirm their analysis that the West will do anything to Muslims and must be attacked mercilessly. We can expect more atrocities like last October’s bombings in the Taba Egypt. In fact, I propose that H.R. 4681 be renamed the Al-Qaeda Recruitment Act.

Yet when all looks hopeless, rays of light do break through. On May 28, the Ontario division of Canada's largest union voted to support an international campaign that is boycotting Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. The convention of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario which is made up of 200,000 members voted unanimously to support an “international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until that state recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination.”

Two days later the British National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) voted to boycott any Israeli academics who refuse to come out publicly against their country’s actions in the Occupied Territories. NATFHE is  the biggest higher education union in the UK.

Instantly Israeli apartheid apologists came out howling. Phyllis Chesler called the British action “Academic Anti-Semitism.” Israeli extremist politician Natan Sharansky called the Canadian boycott “un-Canadian.” David Horowitz’ Frontpage Magazine website (which sports a photo of a busty young lady with a shirt on which a picture of an exploding nuclear weapon covered by the words “Iran Wants Nukes, give them to Them!”) is a case in point. The site features a statement by something called the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom. It criticized the NATFHE boycott and piously stated, “A boycott strikes against free speech and the free exchange of ideas, limiting the ability of academics to contribute to mutual understanding.” Where was the “Advisory Board” when the Israelis were closing down Palestinian universities, detaining and deporting tens of thousands of students or during the first intifada when the authorities closed down all schools and made it a crime to teach math or reading to children in one’s own home?

Rightist efforts to compare a boycott of an oppressor country with the Nazi boycott of helpless Jews during the 1930s are ludicrous. For one thing Israeli Jews like Ilan Pappe, Tel Aviv professor Rachel Giora and Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy support a boycott. Better compare current efforts with the boycott of Nazis that Jewish war veterans and leftists started in 1933 (which incidentally was broken to pieces by the World Zionist Organization). Or compare it with the boycott efforts of anti-South African-apartheid groups in the 1980s.

Will a boycott bring Olmert and friends to their knees? No. Israel is giant economy with everything from a huge Intel complex to a recent billion dollar influx from investor Warren Buffet. A boycott won’t cripple Israel, but it will get under the skin of its ruling class, especially those who are all over the world trading and vacationing. Boycotts also let the individual person take part in a direct action instead of endlessly appealing to heartless authorities. The action can be as small as refusing to buy Israeli Hanukkah candles or writing a letter to Pentecostal church considering divestment or as large as mounting a campaign against the dreadful Caterpillar company.

How to get started?  Just google  “+boycott +Israel” and you’ll be off.

Stanley Heller is chairperson of the Middle East Crisis Committee and host of The Struggle Video News.  He’s a Jewish guy with an eight-foot banner saying “Boycott Israeli Goods” in his basement. He welcomes comments at: mail@TheStruggle.org.
 

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