Divestment from peace

IMO Blog, 2006

Left-wing people want to put principles and moral values above opportunity and power-games. I speak out of my own experience and don't aim to bash the left here. When I was younger and more naive than I am now (I am still no old lady and naive sometimes) I made lists of all kinds of companies that were involved in dirty politics, and drove my parents crazy by insisting to not buy anything from them. The lists became longer and longer and I found out that it became quite impossible to go shopping or simply buy food, and convenience won out over my noble principles. But there was more. I found out that boycotts only make sense if you do them in an organized way and a large number of people join in, so the company really suffers from it. Also it is important to make clear to the company why you boycott them and put forward demands about what they have to change. As one can't do that for all firms that are involved in dirty things, we targeted some 'symbols' of the policy and morality we despised so much, like MacDonald's and Shell. Insofar that we were successful, people went to Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken instead, and fuelled at Texaco instead. One can seriously question if that is a big achievement for our goals, namely a better and more just world and less environmental pollution.

These problems and objections are all the more true regarding the boycotts of countries. South Africa is the number one example of a successful boycott that brought about the regime change that was desired. Many other boycotts brought about more misery for the population while the bad regime was hardly affected. The boycott of Iraq under Saddam Hussein is just one example.

Perhaps those are the kinds of moral considerations that have lead to a very strange (if not so sad, it would be ironical) situation: the country targeted more and more in recent years by boycott actions is a democracy where people are free to voice their opinion, worship in their faith and an independent judiciary and anti-discrimination laws protect the citizens against arbitrariness and persecution: Israel. So at least the citizens are responsible for their government and one can target them without a bad conscience, the advocates of such a boycott must think. How great. How moral! The most important question is, what is the aim of this boycott? Is it to make the people vote for another government, or to isolate and weaken Israel, with the aim of bringing about its disappearance? The latter seems to be the case, as the people engaged in the boycott and divestment campaigns don't relate to left-wing parties in Israel, support them, or organize exchange programs. Labour and even Meretz/Yahad are evil Zionists in their eyes, who support an 'evil ideology based on the superiority of the Jews'. The people and organizations these people relate to are on the radical left, like Gush Shalom, the Alternative Information Center, Woman in Black, the Committee against House Demolitions. They are marginal within Israeli society and will never represent more than a few percent of the population because of their radical rejection of so much that Israel stands for, and their siding openly with the Palestinians.
The demands of most supporters of boycotts/divestment go beyond a two-state solution and the end of the occupation alongside with Arab/Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. In the best case they demand that Israel withdraw from all occupied territories, which includes East Jerusalem, and take in at least some hundreds of thousands of refugees. All this without any demands on the Palestinians to reign in terror and dismantle the terrorist factions. Terrorism will stop if justice is done, is their credo. And anyway, the Palestinians have a right to 'resistance' against the occupation and in fact, it is Israel that commits 'state terrorism' against the Palestinians. But what justice? Some Palestinians, radical 'peace' organizations like the Palestine Solidarity Movement and parts of the organizations mentioned above favour a one-state solution, and thus the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state, a racist concept according to them. They will not be satisfied by a compromise that provides for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as all of Israel is occupied territory according to them.

Some quotes from the Palestinian Badil organization and PSM make this very clear:

We must understand that occupation will end only after, or simultaneously with, de-Zionization. Doing away with the old dichotomy will also mean fusing together the struggle to end the occupation and the struggle for return
...
We must turn the one-state solution into a relevant political agenda, in Israel, the 1967 OPT, in the camps in Lebanon, among Palestinian exile communities in Detroit, everywhere. The task is to transform an intellectual discourse or exercise into a concrete platform. And we must know that all lines with Jewish society will be cut, when a call for sanctions/boycott is raised. But we must also remember that no power from within that can change the current reality, neither from within Jewish society, nor from within Palestinian society in the 1967 OPT.