[ In 2005, Palestinians called on the world to boycott Israel
until it complied with international law. What if we had listened? The
current atrocities in Gaza dramatically strengthen the case for
boycott, divestment and sanctions.]
[[link removed]]

ONLY OUTSIDE PRESSURE CAN STOP ISRAEL’S WAR CRIMES  
[[link removed]]


 

Naomi Klein
January 10, 2024
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ In 2005, Palestinians called on the world to boycott Israel until
it complied with international law. What if we had listened? The
current atrocities in Gaza dramatically strengthen the case for
boycott, divestment and sanctions. _

One thing is certain: the current atrocities in Gaza dramatically
strengthen the case for boycott, divestment and sanctions.’ A
protest in Cape Town, South Africa, on 21 September 2015.,
(Photograph: Rodger Bosch/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // The Guardian)

 

Exactly 15 years ago this week, I published an article
[[link removed]] in
the Guardian. It began like this:

Back in January 2009, Israel had unleashed a shocking new stage of
mass killing in the Gaza Strip, calling its ferocious bombing campaign
Operation Cast Lead. It killed 1,400 Palestinians in 22 days; the
number of casualties on the Israeli side was 13. That was the last
straw for me, and after years of reticence I came out publicly in
support of the Palestinian-led call
[[link removed]] for boycott, divestment and sanctions
against Israel until it complies with international law and universal
principles of human rights, known as BDS.

Though BDS had broad support from more than 170 Palestinian civil
society organizations, internationally the movement remained small.
During Operation Cast Lead, that began to shift, and a growing
[[link removed]] number
of student groups and trade unions outside Palestine were signing on.

Still, many wouldn’t go there. I understood why the tactic felt
fraught. There is a long and painful history of Jewish businesses and
institutions being targeted by antisemites. The communications experts
who lobby on Israel’s behalf know how to weaponize this trauma, so
they invariably cast campaigns designed to challenge Israel’s
discriminatory and violent policies as hateful attacks on Jews as an
identity group.

For two decades, widespread fear stemming from that false equation has
shielded Israel from facing the full potential of a BDS movement –
and now, as the international court of justice hears
[[link removed]] South
Africa’s devastating compendium of evidence of Israel committing the
crime of genocide in Gaza, it truly is enough.

From bus boycotts to fossil fuel divestment, BDS tactics have a
well-documented history as the most potent weapons in the nonviolent
arsenal. Picking them up and using them at this turning point for
humanity is a moral obligation.

The responsibility is particularly acute for those of us whose
governments continue to actively aid Israel with deadly weapons,
lucrative trade deals and vetoes at the United Nations. As BDS reminds
us, we do not have to let those bankrupt agreements speak for us
unchallenged.

Groups of organized consumers have the power to boycott companies that
invest in illegal settlements, or power Israeli weapons. Trade unions
can push their pension funds to divest from those firms. Municipal
governments can select contractors based on ethical criteria that
forbid these relationships. As Omar Barghouti, one of the founders and
leaders of the BDS movement, reminds
[[link removed]] us:
“The most profound ethical obligation in these times is
to _act_ to end complicity. Only thus can we truly hope to end
oppression and violence.”

In these ways, BDS deserves to be seen as a people’s foreign policy,
or diplomacy from below – and if it gets strong enough, it will
eventually force governments to impose sanctions from above, as South
Africa is attempting to do. Which is clearly the only force that can
get Israel off its current path.

Barghouti stresses that, just as some white South Africans supported
the anti-apartheid campaigns during that long struggle, Jewish
Israelis who oppose their country’s systemic violations of
international law are welcome to join BDS. During Operation Cast Lead,
a group of roughly 500 Israelis, many of them prominent artists and
scholars, did just that, eventually naming
[[link removed]] their group Boycott from Within.

In my 2009 article, I quoted their first lobbying letter, which called
for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions”
against their own country and drew direct parallels with the South
African anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was
effective,” they pointed out, saying it helped end the legalization
of discrimination and ghettoization in that country, adding: “But
Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must
stop.”

That was true 15 years ago; it is calamitously so today.

THE PRICE OF IMPUNITY

Reading BDS documents from the mid- and late 2000s, I am most struck
by the extent to which the political and human terrain has
deteriorated. In the intervening years, Israel has built more walls,
erected more checkpoints, unleashed more illegal settlers and launched
far deadlier wars. Everything has gotten worse: the vitriol, the rage,
the righteousness. Clearly, impunity – the sense of imperviousness
and untouchability that underpins Israel’s treatment of Palestinians
– is not a static force. It behaves more like an oil spill: once
released, it seeps outwards, poisoning everything and everyone in its
path. It spreads wide and sinks in deep.

Since the original call for BDS was made in July 2005, the number of
settlers living illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,
has exploded
[[link removed]],
reaching an estimated 700,000 – close to the number of Palestinians
expelled in the 1948 Nakba. As settler outposts have expanded, so has
the violence of settler attacks
[[link removed]] on
Palestinians, all while the ideology of Jewish supremacy and even
overt fascism have moved to the center of the political culture in
Israel.

When I wrote my original BDS column, the overwhelming mainstream
consensus was that the South African analogy was inappropriate and
that the word “apartheid”, which was being used by Palestinian
legal scholars, activists and human rights organizations, was
needlessly inflammatory. Now, everyone from Human Rights Watch
[[link removed]] to Amnesty
International
[[link removed]] to the
leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem
[[link removed]] have done their own careful
studies and come to the inescapable conclusion that apartheid is
indeed the correct legal term to describe the conditions under which
Israelis and Palestinians lead starkly unequal and segregated lives.
Even Tamir Pardo, the former head of the Mossad intelligence
agency, conceded
[[link removed]] the
point: “There is an apartheid state here,” he said in September.
“In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems,
that is an apartheid state.”

Moreover, many also now understand that apartheid exists not only in
the occupied territories, but inside Israel’s 1948 borders, a case
laid out in a major 2022 report
[[link removed]] from a coalition of
Palestinian human rights groups convened by Al-Haq. It’s hard to
argue otherwise when Israel’s current far-right government came to
power under a coalition agreement that states
[[link removed]]:
“The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all
areas of the Land of Israel … the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan,
Judea and Samaria.”

When impunity reigns, everything shifts and moves, including the
colonial frontier. Nothing stays static.

Then there is Gaza. The numbers of Palestinians killed in Operation
Cast Lead felt unfathomable at the time. We soon learned that it was
not a one-off. Instead, it ushered in a murderous new policy that
Israeli military officials casually referred to as “mowing the
grass”: every couple of years brought a fresh bombing campaign,
killing hundreds of Palestinians or, in the case of 2014’s Operation
Protective Edge, more than 2,000, including 526 children
[[link removed]].

Those numbers shocked again, and sparked a new wave of protests. It
still wasn’t enough to strip Israel of its impunity, which continued
to be protected by the US’s reliable UN veto, plus the steady flow
of arms. More corrosive than the lack of international sanctions have
been the rewards: in recent years, alongside all of this lawlessness,
Washington has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and
then moved [[link removed]] its
embassy there. It also brokered
[[link removed]] the so-called Abraham
accords, which ushered in lucrative normalization agreements between
Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
 

Palestinians inspect ruins in Khan Younis after Israeli airstrikes in
Gaza on 8 July 2014.  (Photograph: Anadolu  //  The Guardian)
It was Donald Trump who began showering Israel with these latest,
long-sought-after gifts, but the process carried on seamlessly under
Joe Biden. So, on the eve of 7 October, Israel and Saudi Arabia were
on the verge of signing what had been giddily hailed
[[link removed]] as
the “deal of the century”.

Where were Palestinian rights and aspirations in all these deals?
Absolutely nowhere. Because the other thing that had shifted during
these years of impunity was any pretext that Israel intended to return
to the negotiating table. The clear goal was crushing the Palestinian
movement for self-determination through force, alongside physical and
political isolation and fragmentation.

We know how the next chapters of this story go. Hamas’s horrific 7
October attack. Israel’s furious determination to exploit those
crimes to do what some of the government’s senior leaders had long
wanted to do anyway: depopulate
[[link removed]] Gaza
of Palestinians, which they currently appear to be attempting through
the combination of direct killing; mass home demolition (“domicide
[[link removed]]”);
the spread of starvation
[[link removed]],
thirst and infectious disease; and eventually mass expulsion
[[link removed]].

Make no mistake: this is what it means to allow a state to go rogue,
to let impunity reign unchecked for decades, using the real collective
traumas suffered by the Jewish people as the bottomless excuse and
cover story. Impunity like that will swallow not only one country but
every country with which it is allied. It will swallow the entire
international architecture of humanitarian law forged in the flames of
the Nazi holocaust. If we let it.

A DECADE OF LEGAL ATTACKS ON BDS

Which raises something else that has not stayed stable over the past
two decades: Israel’s escalating obsession with crushing BDS, no
matter the cost to hard-won political rights. Back in 2009, there were
many arguments being made by BDS’s critics about why it was a bad
idea. Some worried that cultural and academic boycotts would shut down
much-needed engagement with progressive Israelis, and feared it would
veer into censorship. Others maintained that punitive measures would
create a backlash and move Israel further to the right.

So it is striking, looking back now, that those early debates have
pretty much disappeared from the public sphere, and not because one
side won the argument. They disappeared because the entire idea of
having a debate was displaced by one all-consuming strategy: using
legal and institutional intimidation to put BDS tactics out of reach
and shut the movement down.

To date in the United States, a total of 293 anti-BDS bills have been
introduced across the country, and they have been enacted
[[link removed]] in 38 states, according to
Palestine Legal, which has closely tracked this surge. It explains
that some legislation targets university funding, some requires that
anyone receiving a contract with a state or working for a state sign a
contract pledging they will not boycott Israel, and “some call on
the state to compile public blacklists
[[link removed]] of
entities that boycott for Palestinian rights or support BDS”.
In Germany
[[link removed]],
meanwhile, support for any form of BDS is enough to get awards
revoked, funding pulled, and shows and lectures cancelled (something I
have experienced first-hand [[link removed]]).

This strategy is, unsurprisingly, most aggressive inside Israel
itself. In 2011, the country enacted the Law for Prevention of Damage
to the State of Israel through Boycott, effectively nipping the
nascent Boycott from Within movement in the bud. The Adalah legal
center, an organization working for Arab minority rights in
Israel, explains [[link removed]] that the
law “prohibits the public promotion of academic, economic or
cultural boycott by Israeli citizens and organizations against Israeli
institutions or illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It
enables the filing of civil lawsuits against anyone who calls for
boycott.” Like the state-level laws in the US, “it also prohibits
a person who calls for boycott from participating in any public
tender”. In 2017, Israel began openly
[[link removed]] barring
pro-BDS activists from entering Israel; 20 international groups were
placed on the so-called BDS blacklist
[[link removed]],
including the anti-war stalwart Jewish Voice for Peace.

Meanwhile, across the US, lobbyists for oil and gas companies and gun
manufacturers are taking a page from the anti-BDS legal offensive and
pushing copycat
[[link removed]] legislation
to restrict divestment campaigns that take aim at their clients. “It
points to why it’s so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine
exception to speech,” Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at
Palestine Legal, told the magazine Jewish Currents
[[link removed]]. “Because not only is it harmful to
the Palestinian rights movement – it eventually comes to harm other
social movements.” Once again, nothing stays static, impunity
expands, and when the rights to boycott and divest are stripped away
for Palestinian solidarity, the right to use these same tools to push
for climate action, gun control and LGBTQ+ rights are stripped away as
well.

In a way, this is an advantage, because it presents an opportunity to
deepen alliances across movements. Every major progressive
organization and union has a stake in protecting the right to boycott
and divest as core tenets of free expression and critical tools of
social transformation. The small team at Palestine Legal has been
leading the pushback in the US in extraordinary ways
[[link removed]] –
filing court cases that challenge anti-BDS laws as unconstitutional
and supporting the cases of others. They deserve far more backup.

IS IT FINALLY THE BDS MOMENT?

There is another reason to take heart: the reason Israel goes after
BDS with such ferocity is the very same reason that so many activists
have continued to believe in it despite these multipronged attacks.
Because it can work.

We saw it when global companies started pulling out of South Africa in
the 1980s. It wasn’t because they were suddenly struck by
anti-racist moral epiphanies. Rather, as the movement became
international, and boycott-and-divestment campaigns started to affect
car sales and bank customers outside the country, these companies
calculated that it would cost them more to stay in South Africa than
to leave. Western governments began belatedly imposing sanctions for
similar reasons.

That hurt the South African business sector, parts of which put
pressure on the apartheid government to make concessions to the Black
liberation movements that had been rebelling against apartheid for
decades through uprisings, mass strikes and armed resistance. The
costs of maintaining the cruel and violent status quo were growing
higher, including for South Africa’s elite.

Finally, by the end of the 80s, the pincer of pressure from the
outside and inside grew so intense that President FW de Klerk was
forced to release Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years, and then
to hold one-person-one-vote elections, which carried Mandela to the
presidency.

The Palestinian organizations that have kept the flame of BDS alive
through some very dark years still place their hope in the South
African model of outside pressure. Indeed, as Israel perfects the
architecture and engineering of ghettoization and expulsion, it may be
the only hope.

That’s because Israel is markedly more insulated from internal
pressure from Palestinians than white South Africans were under
apartheid, who depended on Black labor for everything from domestic
work to diamond mining. When Black South Africans withdrew their
labor, or engaged in other kinds of economic disruption, it could not
be ignored.

Israel has learned from South Africa’s vulnerability: since the 90s,
its reliance on Palestinian labor has been steadily decreasing,
largely thanks to so-called guest workers and to the influx of roughly
a million Jews from the former Soviet Union. This helped make it
possible for Israel to move from the oppression model of occupation to
today’s ghettoization model, which attempts to disappear
Palestinians behind hulking walls with hi-tech sensors and Israel’s
much vaunted Iron Dome air defense.

But this model – let’s call it the fortressed bubble – carries
vulnerabilities of its own, and not only to Hamas attacks. The more
systemic vulnerability comes from Israel’s extreme dependence on
trade with Europe and North America, for everything from its tourism
sector to its AI-powered surveillance-tech sector. The brand Israel
has fashioned for itself is that of a scrappy, hip, western outpost in
the desert, a little bubble of San Francisco or Berlin that just
happens to find itself in the Arab world.

That makes it uniquely susceptible to the tactics of BDS, including
cultural and academic boycotts. Because when pop stars wanting to
avoid controversy cancel their Tel Aviv stops, and prestigious US
universities cut their official partnerships with Israeli universities
after witnessing the detonation of multiple Palestinian schools and
universities, and when beautiful people no longer choose Eilat for
their holidays because their Instagram followers won’t be impressed,
it undermines Israel’s entire economic model, and its sense of
itself.

That will introduce pressure where Israel’s leaders clearly feel
little today. If global tech and engineering firms stop selling
products and services to the Israeli military, that ups the pressure
still further, perhaps enough to shift the political dynamics.
Israelis badly want to be part of the world community, and if they
find themselves suddenly isolated, many more voters could start
demanding some of the very actions that Israel’s current leaders
dismiss out of hand – like negotiating with Palestinians for a
lasting peace rooted in justice and equality as defined under
international law, rather than trying to secure its fortressed bubble
with white phosphorus
[[link removed]] and
ethnic cleansing.

The hitch, of course, is that for BDS’s nonviolent tactics to work,
the wins cannot be sporadic or marginal. They need to be sustained and
mainstream – at least as mainstream as the South African campaign,
which saw major corporations like General Motors and Barclays
Bank pull
[[link removed]] their
investments, while massive artists like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo
Starr joined a quintessentially 80s supergroup to belt out
[[link removed]] “ain’t gonna play
Sun City” (a reference to South Africa’s iconic luxury resort).

The BDS movement targeting Israel’s injustice has certainly grown
over the past 15 years; Barghouti estimates
[[link removed]] that
the “labor and farmers unions, as well as racial, social, gender and
climate justice movements” that support it “collectively represent
tens of millions worldwide”. But the movement has yet to reach a
South Africa-level tipping point.

That has come at a cost. You don’t need to be a historian of
liberation struggles to know that when morally guided tactics are
ignored, sidelined, smeared and banned, then other tactics – unbound
by those ethical concerns – become far more appealing to people
desperate for any hope of change.

We will never know how the present could have been different if more
individuals, organizations and governments had heeded the BDS call
made by Palestinian civil society when it came in 2005. When I reached
out to Barghouti a few days ago, he was not looking back at two
decades of impunity, but on 75 years. Israel, he said, “would not
have been able to perpetrate its ongoing televised genocide in Gaza
without the complicity of states, corporations and institutions with
its system of oppression”. Complicity, he stressed, is something we
all have the power to reject.

One thing is certain: the current atrocities in Gaza dramatically
strengthen the case for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Nonviolent
tactics that many wrote off as extreme or feared would get them
labelled antisemitic look very different through the dim light of two
decades of carnage, with new rubble piled upon old, new grief and
trauma etched in the psyches of new generations, and new depths of
depravity reached in both word and deed.

This past Sunday, for his final show on MSNBC, Mehdi
Hasan interviewed
[[link removed]] the
Gaza-based Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who risks his own
life, day after day, to bring images of Israel’s mass killing to the
world. His message to US viewers was stark: “Don’t call yourself a
free person if you can’t make changes, if you can’t stop a
genocide that is still ongoing.”

In a moment such as ours, we are what we do. So many people have been
doing more than ever before: blocking arms shipments, occupying seats
of government demanding a ceasefire, joining mass protests, telling
the truth, however difficult. The combination of these actions may
well have contributed to the most significant development in the
history of BDS: South Africa’s application to the international
court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague accusing Israel of committing
genocide and calling for provisional measures to stop its attack on
Gaza.

A recent analysis
[[link removed]] by
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that if the ICJ rules in South
Africa’s favor, even if the US vetoes military intervention at the
United Nations, “an injunction could result in Israel and Israeli
companies being ostracized and subject to sanctions imposed by
individual countries or blocs”.

Grassroots boycotts, meanwhile, are already beginning to bite. In
December, Puma – one of BDS’s top targets – let it be known that
it will terminate
[[link removed]] its
controversial sponsorship of Israel’s national football team. Before
that, there was an exodus
[[link removed]] of
artists from a major comics festival in Italy, after it emerged that
the Israeli embassy was among the sponsors. And this month, the
McDonald’s chief executive, Chris Kempczinski, wrote
[[link removed]] that
what he called “misinformation” was having “a meaningful
business impact” on some of its sales in “several markets in the
Middle East and some outside the region”. This was a reference to a
wave of outrage sparked by news that McDonald’s Israel had donated
[[link removed]] thousands of meals to
Israeli soldiers. Kempczinski has sought to separate the global brand
from “local owner operators”, but few people in the BDS movement
are persuaded [[link removed]] by the
distinction.

It will also be critical, as momentum for BDS continues to pick up
steam, to be acutely aware that we are in the midst of an alarming and
real surge of hate crimes, many of them directed at Palestinians and
Muslims, but also at Jewish businesses and institutions simply because
they are Jewish. That is antisemitism, not political activism.

BDS is a serious, nonviolent movement with an established governing
model. While giving local organizers autonomy to determine which
campaigns will work in their areas, the BDS national committee (BNC)
sets the movement’s guiding principles and carefully selects
[[link removed]] a small
group of high-impact corporate targets, chosen “due to their proven
complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights”.

The BNC is also very clear that it is not calling for individual
Israelis to be boycotted because they are Israeli, stating that it
“rejects [[link removed]], on principle, boycotts of
individuals based on their opinion or identity (such as citizenship,
race, gender or religion)”. The targets, in other words, are
institutions complicit in systems of oppression, not people.

No movement is perfect. Every movement will make missteps. The most
pressing question now, however, has little to do with perfection. It
is simply this: what has the best chance of changing a morally
intolerable status quo, while stopping further bloodshed? The
indomitable Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy has no illusions about what
it will take. He recently told
[[link removed]] Owen Jones: “The key
is in the international community – I mean, Israel will not change
by itself … The formula is very simple: as long as Israelis don’t
pay and are not punished for the occupation and not taken accountable
for it and don’t feel it on a daily basis, nothing will change.”
 

Riot police threaten anti-apartheid student protesters in
Johannesburg, South Africa, on 20 August 1989.  (Photograph: Louise
Gubb/Corbis  //  The Guardian)
IT’S LATE

In July 2009, a few months after my original BDS article was
published, I traveled to Gaza and the West Bank. In Ramallah, I gave a
lecture on my decision to support BDS. It included an apology for
failing to add my voice sooner, which I confessed
[[link removed]] had
come from a place of fear – fear that the tactic was too extreme
when directed at a state forged in Jewish trauma; fear that I would be
accused of betraying my people. Fears that I still have.

“Better late than never,” a kind audience member said to me after
the talk.

It was late then; it’s later still now. But it’s not too late. Not
too late for all of us to create our own foreign policy from below,
one that intervenes in the culture and economy in intelligent
and strategic
[[link removed]] ways –
ways that offer tangible hope that Israel’s decades of unchecked
impunity will finally come to an end.

As the BDS national committee asked
[[link removed]] last week:
“If not now, when? The South African anti-apartheid movement
organized for decades to gain broad international support leading up
to the fall of apartheid; and apartheid did fall. Freedom is
inevitable. The time is now to take action to join the movement for
freedom, justice and equality in Palestine.”

Enough. It’s time for a boycott.

_[NAOMI KLEIN is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She
is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for
Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
[[link removed]].]_

_Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free
journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s
because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden
to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they
can afford to pay for news, or not.
[[link removed]]_

* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* war crimes
[[link removed]]
* Boycott
[[link removed]]
* Sanctions
[[link removed]]
* BDS
[[link removed]]
* Ceasefire
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Israeli airstrikes
[[link removed]]
* Israeli bombing
[[link removed]]
* Hostages
[[link removed]]
* Hamas
[[link removed]]
* Occupied Territories
[[link removed]]
* apartheid
[[link removed]]
* South Africa
[[link removed]]
* international solidarity
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

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