In a report [.pdf] published this week, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Christian Aid and other leading aid agencies decried Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza. The siege amounts, they concluded, to the illegal “collective punishment” of a civilian population, and its effect is to

“systematically … [destroy] the hopes of Gaza’s people for social and economic development and of its business sector for growth and trade; and with them … the key foundations for a just and sustainable peace”.

Next week will mark the one year anniversary of ‘Operation Cast Lead‘, the three week orgy of killing and destruction that left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead, the vast majority of them civilians, including hundreds of children.

During the massacre Gaza’s civilian infrastructure was systematically targeted. Entire residential areas were “almost completely flattened”, dozens of hospitals and clinics were severely damaged, hundreds of schools were destroyed or damaged and 700 private businesses were either partially or totally destroyed. In total a full third of all public buildings [.pdf] and perhaps 14% of all buildings [.pdf] in Gaza were affected.

Today, nearly a year later, the situation in Gaza remains desperate. The  total ban on exports and the 80% reduction in imports, which are now restricted to only the most basic humanitarian and medical supplies, has taken its toll on the civilian population:

• About 10% of children under five suffer from malnutrition (WFP)
• Over 80% of Gaza residents depend on humanitarian food aid to survive (UN)
• More than 120,000 jobs have been lost in the private sector (UN), Gaza’s entire industrial zone has been either demolished or crippled by the three- year blockade

The Red Cross (h/t lenin) reports that “[t]here has been scarcely any improvement in the situation since the end of the war in Gaza, mainly because of the tight closure, which is preventing reconstruction”. Israel has prevented the import of construction materials like concrete and glass to the Strip, making rebuilding on any significant scale impossible:

“since Operation Cast Lead, only 41 truckloads of construction materials for all purposes have been permitted into Gaza. Thousands of truckloads are required to rebuild all the houses destroyed. And this is to say nothing of all the remaining reconstruction desperately needed to put right damage to all the schools, hospitals, other buildings and water network because of previous military action or serious dilapidation caused by lack of repair materials due to the blockade.” [my emph.]

This amounts to “barely four trucks of construction material a month”, or 0.05% of pre-blockade monthly flows. As a result hospitals, schools, factories, farms, homes and other essential civilian infrastructure “remain in ruins”. 20,000 people are still displaced, some of them living in tents or relying on emergency mud brick huts built by the UN. It has been estimated that if the current pace of reconstruction continues, it will take 500 years to repair the damage from ‘Cast Lead’ alone. Then there’s the power network which, already “on the verge of collapse” due to the siege, suffered “extensive, long-term damage” during the massacre. “[U]rgent repairs” have “not been allowed to proceed”, and so the population of Gaza faces a difficult winter ahead with power cuts of four to eight hours per day and “frequent … gas and water shortages, seriously affecting daily life and public health”.

Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure is even worse shape. Decades of neglect, the siege and repeated Israeli attacks (during ‘Cast Lead’ wells and pumps were “bombed or bulldozed on a huge scale”) have meant that only 5-10% of Gaza’s water reserves meet international safety standards for drinkable water. Thousands of people are still without running water, and despite the “desperate need” for repair work Israel won’t even permit the entry of generators to power the wells. Earlier this year local authorities and UN agencies warned of a looming water crisis – already 12% of young deaths are caused by diarrhoea, an “easily preventable disease”.

That Israel is blocking reconstruction in Gaza should come as no surprise. ‘Operation Cast Lead’, erroneously portrayed by most Western commentators – even those sympathetic to Gaza’s plight – as a response to the Qassam rockets, was part of a broader policy of “protracted collective punishment” designed to isolate and paralyse the Hamas government, undermine the ‘moderates’ within Hamas, punish the population for its defiance and, crucially, prevent economic development and reduce Gaza to aid dependency.

The destruction meted out during ‘Cast Lead’ was thus anything but random. On the contrary: an EU study [.pdf] found that 84% of the structural damage was “inflicted on three key sectors: housing, agriculture and the private sector”. As the UN World Food Program reports, ”it was precisely the strategic economic areas that Gaza depends on to relieve its dependency on aid that were wiped out.” The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights similarly concluded that Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure was designed “to make Gaza go decades back“.

The destruction of Gaza’s agricultural industry, which used to employ 13% of Gaza’s workforce, is a case in point. In the course of ‘Cast Lead’ crops, livestock and agricultural infrastructure were extensively targeted. Taking into account both the direct damage caused by Israeli tanks and missiles and Israel’s subsequent unilateral extension of the ‘buffer-zone’ along the border, which put between a third and a quarter of Gaza’s agricultural beyond the reach of Palestinian farmers, “an estimated 46% of agricultural land has been put out of production”. The UN inquiry [.pdf] into the massacre chaired by Prof. Richard Goldstone concluded that

“in the destruction by Israeli armed forces of private residential houses, water wells, water tanks, agricultural land and greenhouses there was a specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance to the population of the Gaza Strip.”

In short, the strategic objectives that led Israel to force the closure of 98% of industrial operations in Gaza before ‘Cast Lead’ were the same strategic objectives that led Israel to bomb hundreds of factories during the massacre. The objectives that led Israel to bomb Gaza’s only power station back in 2006 were the same objectives that led Israel to extensively target Gaza’s power infrastructure during ‘Cast Lead’ and prevent its reconstruction afterwards. The objectives that led Israel to destroy 20 of Gaza’s 29 ready mix concrete plans, including its only cement packaging and storage plant, during ‘Cast Lead’ are the same objectives motivating its refusal to permit concrete and other building materials to be imported into Gaza now. The siege and the periodic military assaults on Gaza are part of the same overarching, long-term policy to impoverish and isolate Gaza, undermine Hamas and permanently eliminate any potential for economic development – what Harvard specialist Sara Roy has termed “de-development” [.pdf]* or, as one Israeli officer described his mission, “no development, no prosperity, only humanitarian dependency” [.pdf].

International complicity

The aid agencies’ report accuses world powers of having “betrayed” the population of Gaza by failing to genuinely challenge Israel’s siege:

“They have wrung hands and issued statements, but have taken little meaningful action to attempt to change the damaging policy that prevents reconstruction, personal recovery and economic recuperation.”

Despite its “continuing and devastating” humanitarian impact – which, the report emphasises, is no accident but “a matter of policy” – the siege has effectively been “accepted” by the international community, which has failed to back up its words with meaningful action and has generally sought “little more than small concessions” from Israel.

The report focuses in particular on the EU, which as Israel’s largest export market could apply real pressure on Israel to end the closure (the US’s leverage over Israel is, of course, even greater). While the EU has taken some positive steps – notably the strong criticism levelled against both the occupation and the siege by new EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton – it has, as a result of pressure from some member states (Britain undoubtedly one of them), failed to brand the siege “collective punishment” or even a violation of international law. Despite the freeze on a formal upgrade of EU-Israel relations instituted consequent to the Gaza massacre, the EU “continues to extend new economic and trade privileges to Israel”, most recently in the form of a November agreement to liberalise agricultural trade. Indeed, as David Cronin reports, the much-hyped tension between the EU and Israel has been largely “superficial“:

“While there may have been the occasional angry word exchanged on the diplomatic front, the EU’s political and economic ties with Israel have been strengthened over the past few years to such an extent that Javier Solana, who stepped down as the Union’s foreign policy chief in late November, has remarked that Israel is an EU member state in all but name.

[...]

Israel’s effective integration into the EU has coincided with a marked reluctance on the part of the Union to denounce acts of aggression against the Palestinians. Although some individual EU representatives have described the blockade of Gaza as an act of “collective punishment” against 1.5 million civilians, no statement criticising the blockade as contrary to international humanitarian law has been issued by the 27-member bloc in its entirety.

Furthermore, all of the EU’s most populous countries – Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain and Poland – either opposed the Goldstone report or abstained when it was considered by the UN’s General Assembly in November. (In that report, the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone and his fellow investigators found there was no justifiable military objective behind almost every attack on Gaza’s civilians undertaken by Israel in late 2008 and the beginning of this year).”

When challenged on what they’re doing to end the siege, government officials typically point to the large amount of aid (over $4bn in total) pledged to help reconstruct Gaza. In fact, as the aid agencies’ report notes, the aid has largely failed to materialise, far less made any substantive difference on the ground, because of the Israeli blockade. As the EU report linked above (sigh [.pdf]) notes, “access is a precondition for any recovery activity in the Gaza Strip”. The big danger of humanitarian reports like this is that they can inadvertantly encourage a focus on Gaza as a purely humanitarian problem, stripped of its fundamentally political causes. Indeed, as Prof. Avi Shlaim has observed, one of Israel’s aims in Gaza is precisely to “ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood”. The World Bank [.pdf] has been consistent in warning against this “illusion that economic prosperity can be de-coupled from a political horizon”, adding that

“real reconstruction of Gaza – one including some revival of the moribund private sector — entails not only the opening of the crossings for building materials and cash, but also enabling external trade so that the revitalized private sector can continue to mend and flourish”.

What we can do

In the face of this refusal by governments to adhere to and enforce international law, it falls to us as citizens of those governments to act. This means organising to pressure our representatives to end state support for Israeli crimes. More concretely, the Gaza Freedom March is planned for December 31 and it needs our support. Some 1,300 activists from around the world will converge on Gaza and then march alongside tens of thousands of Palestinians towards the Erez border crossing in an attempt to nonviolently break the siege. As I’ve previously written, if it is successful this effort has the potential to be a real game-changer, in terms of both ending the closure and establishing a powerful precedent for the successful use of mass nonviolent resistance to oppose Israel’s occupation.

Unfortunately the Egyptian government, which is itself heavily complicit in the siege, has declared that it will not allow the international activists to enter Gaza through Rafah. The march’s organisers are confident that if enough people send emails and make calls to their nearest Egyptian embassy demanding that Egypt let the marchers through then the demonstration will be permitted to proceed – so get on it.

More generally Israel is suffering badly from what Netanyahu calls the “Goldstone threat“, namely the PR catastrophe that resulted from the brutality of ‘Cast Lead’ and the Goldstone inquiry’s subsequent condemnation of Israel’s actions as ‘war crimes’. As an Israeli journalist known for his establishment connections recently wrote in Ma’ariv,

“Israel’s diplomatic status is undergoing a rapid collapse, whose like we have never known before. We did undergo crises during the first Lebanon War, the First Intifada and on other occasions – but never did we fall from a such great height to such a low depth, and the bottom is still far down.”

With the relentless colonisation of the West Bank continuing apace and nonviolent Palestinian activists facing an increasingly brutal campaign of repression by the Israeli military, now is no time to ease up the pressure.

______

* A UN report leaked in September described “a process of de-development in the Gaza Strip, which potentially could lead to the complete breakdown of public infrastructure and further deterioration in the economy.” As far back as 2007 the World Bank warned of potentially “irreversible” economic collapse in Gaza.

A video by Ben White:

See also lenin’s post here.

via Max:

Tony Blair and others love to talk of “institution building” in the West Bank, but the basis for a decent Palestinian state lies not with Hamas or the collaborationist police state being constructed by the US and Israel in Ramallah, but with the grassroots resistance movement that has developed in both the West Bank and Gaza, notably in the course of the popular struggle against the wall.

How does Israel react to this campaign of nonviolent civil resistance? With violent repression, as during the First Intifada. Almost all the organisers of the resistance campaign in Bi’in have been ‘arrested’ – earlier this month, for example, IDF soldiers detained school teacher and Bil’in Popular Committee coordinator Abdallah Abu Rahmah in a midnight raid on his house. And how do Israel’s apologists in the West, always so passionate in their denunciation of any Palestinian violence, react to all this? Well, how do you think?

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat is keeping vigilant:

‘Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat on Thursday rejected municipal recommendations and cut funding for a toddler health-care center in East Jerusalem, while approving aid to a similar center in a Jewish neighborhood.

The funds would have gone to opening a branch of the “Drop of Milk” (Tipat Halav) program, which provides prenatal and toddler health-care services in Silwan, an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Last year, authorities from the Jerusalem municipal offices recommended to the mayor to open the aid center in Silwan, which would service around 100,000 residents.

Authorities also recommended opening a similar center in a Jewish neighborhood that is home to around 7,000 residents.

During discussions on the 2010 budget, Barkat decided to cut the aid that would open the center in Silwan while simultaneously approving the aid to open the same center in a Jewish neighborhood – a move that outraged residents of Silwan.’

As Yitzhak Laor writes, “the most important undertaking of the State of Israel, within narrow or expanded borders, has always been to maintain the supremacy of the Jews”. So long as the refugees are forced to remain in exile, and the Palestinians living under military occupation are denied all their basic civil and human rights, Israel’s Palestinian population is, as Ehud Olmert put it, a “manageable problem“. The above is an example of how that “problem” is “managed”.

As the Angry Arab would say, this is Zionism.

The British government’s panic over the recent warrant issued by a British magistrate’s court for the arrest of former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and its subsequent determination to change the law to prevent a similar situation arising again, reveals a lot about the sincerity of much of the official propaganda we have been subjected to over the past decade.

As a member of Israel’s war cabinet during the Gaza massacre, Livni ‘played a key role in decisions made before and during the three-week offensive‘. That ‘offensive’, recall, was launched after Israel unilaterally violated two separate ceasefires, both of which were adhered to by Hamas, and rejected repeated offers from Hamas for a third (in the words of former President Jimmy Carter: “Hamas had offered to extend the cease-fire in December, but the Israelis were not willing to do it”). In the course of the massacre, which involved [.pdf] the “systematic destruction of civilian buildings” and indiscriminate and “intentional attacks on civilians”, including with flechette shells and white phosphorus, more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, the vast majority of them civilians, including hundreds of children.

Subsequently, numerous independent investigations of Israel’s conduct during the ‘Cast Lead’ attack – most notably the UN inquiry [.pdf] chaired by Richard Goldstone, the Arab League inquiry [.pdf] chaired by Prof. John Dugard, and the detailed investigations by Amnesty International [.pdf] and Human Rights Watch – have accused Israel of perpetrating war crimes, possibly amounting to “crimes against humanity”. The Goldstone report also explicitly and repeatedly accused Israel of practicing terrorism:

“the treatment of these civilians constitutes the infliction of a collective penalty on those persons and amounts to measures of intimidation and terror. Such acts are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and constitute a war crime”

“the rounding-up of large groups of civilians and their prolonged detention under the circumstances described in this Report constitute a collective penalty on those persons … [and] amounts to measures of intimidation or terrorism prohibited by article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”

“[Israel] viewed disproportionate destruction and creating the maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve not only military but also political goals [i.e. terrorism]“

This isn’t a verdict that should surprise the British government. ‘Cast Lead’ was, after all, governed by the same logic as that underpinning the now nearly four-year old siege of Gaza, which the Department for International Development [.pdf], for instance, has long recognised to be “collective punishment” as “part of a political strategy to get Hamas to sign up to the Quartet principles”, with the prolonged border closures intended to further the “political objective” of “isolating Hamas”. In other words, terrorism.

During the massacre Tzipi Livni engaged in “intensive diplomatic activity” aimed at, in her words, “deflecting the pressure for a cease-fire” – pressure that was coming from, among others, Hamas. She rejected calls for a reciprocal ceasefire on the grounds that “[t]here is no intention here of creating a diplomatic agreement with Hamas”. Prior to the attack, while Hamas was offering to agree another truce with Israel, Livni argued strongly for a military offensive and pledged regime change through military and economic as well as diplomatic means. She rejected a truce with Hamas, maintaining that an extended ceasefire “harms the Israel[i] strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement”, and promised a campaign of political assassinations against Hamas officials. During the massacre, Livni spoke proudly of Israel’s “wild” attacks in Gaza, and after it was finally over she criticised Barak and Netanyahu for being too soft on Hamas:

“There are those sitting with the Hamas regime who want to reach understandings with the group, and there are those [referring to herself] working to bring an end to the Hamas regime. A settlement with Hamas would give it legitimacy, and those working for that with the Egyptians [to reach a long-term ceasefire agreement] need to understand that”.

Just a couple of weeks after the attack had finished, Livni was agitating for renewed military action in Gaza, and to this day, despite the multiple detailed studies (see above) documenting the extensive economic and human devastation caused by Israel’s attack, she remains “proud of all her decisions regarding Operation Cast Lead“.

Livni is, in short, an unrepentant terrorist. Hence the arrest warrant.

There is no legal basis for the British government’s interference in what is supposed to be an independent judicial process in order to shield Livni from justice. As Sir Geoffrey Bindman, who represented Amnesty International and others in the case against General Pinochet, points out, Livni is a private citizen and who was not visiting on diplomatic business. David Miliband’s apology to Livni is particularly galling in light of the fact that he just last week signed an EU document pledging “to promote an international order where no state or individual is above the law and no person is outside the protection of the law”. Neither have I encountered any remotely plausible non-legal argument defending the government’s approach. Interestingly, no one is arguing that the arrest warrant is (er) unwarranted because Livni is innocent – Israel’s actions in Gaza, actions that Livni bears direct responsibility for, are indefensible, and everyone knows it. Thus in his appearance on Newsnight Stephen Pollard focused on issues of legal process, ignoring the substance of the charges against Livni completely, and even the Times, which branded attempts by human rights activists to use the justice system to actually secure justice “repugnant“, restricted itself to the observation that the Gaza massacre was “not the genocide at Srebrenica”, surely a new benchmark for faint praise.

The other justification offered for the decision – that arresting Livni would somehow damage the “peace process” and Britain’s involvement in it – is no more convincing.  One, because as an opposition figure Livni isn’t part of any peace process; two, because Livni is on record as rejecting the international consensus two-state settlement; and three, because no meaningful peace process currently exists, thanks in no small part to the British government’s strong support for Israeli rejectionism and its ongoing complicity in the siege of Gaza, which continues to prevent any real reconstruction from taking place.

As men who themselves bear direct responsibility for wars of aggression and the appalling human rights abuses that followed, it is understandable that Brown and Miliband are hostile to the concept of universal jurisdiction. Indeed, Livni’s grandiose claim that the warrant for her arrest amounted to a warrant against all democracies fighting terrorism was pointedly directed at the architects of Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, in their eagerness to welcome Livni and protect her from judicial investigation Brown and Miliband have once again illustrated the bankruptcy of the official propaganda underlying the “war on terror”. As long as they’re our terrorists, the British government is positively delighted to receive them.

All this aside, the arrest warrant for Livni is an important victory for Palestinian solidarity activists. We are not yet at the stage where the actual prosecution of Israeli officials is a realistic prospect, but the achievement is significant nonetheless because, in the context of the British government’s decision to advise supermarkets to indicate where produce has been grown or manufactured in an Israeli settlement and the continuing growth of the BDS movement, it represents further evidence that Israel is losing the argument. As Juan Cole comments,

“Israeli militarism and expansionism have jumped the shark when it comes to European public opinion, and this sea change will have real world effects as boycotts spread against this growing Apartheid”.

Livni will escape justice for now, but Israeli officials will not be able to keep running for ever (deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon also recently turned down a visit to Britain fearing arrest). Until then, it’s up to us to keep the pressure on, through active solidarity, boycott and, most importantly, organising to end our government’s support for the occupation.

======

For reference, below is the response of the (Israeli) Coalition of Women for Peace to Livni’s arrest warrant:

Coalition of Women for Peace to Tzipi Livni:

“Cooperate with any international investigation against you”
This morning (Wed. 16/12/09), the Women’s Coalition for Peace sent a translation of the Goldstone Report to Knesset Member Tzipi Livni (head of the opposition and Foreign Minister during the “Cast Lead” offensive), who received notice of a warrant for her arrest in Britain this week. In a letter attached to the report, Coalition members wrote: “we are convinced that if you refer to the report you will understand why British citizens and organizations have turned to the courts with a request to issue a warrant for your arrest.”

The report directly refers to remarks by senior political figures in Israel which encouraged indiscriminate attacks on civilians, in contradiction of international law. It is in this context that MK Tzipi Livni is quoted as saying, on 13 January 2009, that “we have proven to Hamas that the equation has been altered. Israel is a state that, when its citizens are shot at, will respond insanely. And that’s a good thing.”

Furthermore, runs the letter, “the Goldstone Report details a long list of indiscriminate attacks against civilian populations […] In addition, the report surveys the extent of the damage to industrial infrastructure, food production, water facilities, sewage infrastructure and residential buildings; the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and the targeting of medical staff. The testimony of Israeli soldiers corroborates the allegations made in the Report that during Cast Lead heinous war crimes were committed.

“The attention of the Goldstone Commission was drawn to the way the military operations affected women particularly adversely. The responsibility of women towards their homes and children forced them to deal for a period of weeks with extraordinary difficulties caused by impossible conditions which denied them of the means of sustenance – including access to food, water, heating supplies and protection against the rain, shelter, intentional attacks on civilians, destruction of infrastructure and denial of medical attention. Women suffered most of all from the attack which you helped lead, and for which you served as the international spokesperson.

“As a feminist organization active in Israel, we consider that only a process of legal investigation and prosecution of war criminals by the international community has the power to bring a measure of justice to the women and men of Gaza. In our opinion the correct reaction on your part to the Goldstone Report would be a coming to terms with the wholesale murder with which you collaborated freely as a senior minister in the Israeli government as part of an election campaign. We call on you to cooperate with any international investigation that may be opened against you and to counsel your colleagues in the government and military to do the same.

The incomparable Naomi Klein on the Copenhagen summit:

Here’s Johann Hari on the ‘giant fraud’ being perpetrated by Western leaders:

“Our leaders are aren’t giving us Hopenhagen – they’re giving us Cokenhagen, a sugary feelgood hit filled with sickly additives and no nutrition. Their behaviour here – where the bare minimum described as safe by scientists isn’t even being considered – indicates they are more scared of the corporate lobbyists that fund their campaigns, or the denialist streak in their own country, than of rising seas and falling civilisations.

But there is one reason why I am still – despite everything – defiantly hopeful. Converging on this city now are thousands of ordinary citizens who aren’t going to take it any more. They aren’t going to watch passively while our ecosystems are vandalised. They are demanding only what the cold, hard science demands – real and rapid cuts, enforced by a global environmental court that will punish any nation that endangers us all. This movement will not go away. Copenhagen has soured into a con – but from the wreckage, there could arise a stronger demand for a true solution.”

Those activists have been met with heavy repression from the Danish police, whose tactics (e.g. ‘kettling‘) suggest they have been taking lessons from the Met. Demonstrators were ‘held for hours in freezing conditions without medical attention, water or toilets’:

On Saturday nearly 1,000 protestors were arrested – all but 13 of them have been released without charge.

The latest news is that the bloc of developing countries has withdrawn from the summit in response to attempts to marginalise their concerns by the Danish presidency and the rich states generally – for more on that, see the secret document leaked last week showing the efforts by Denmark and other rich states, the UK included, to sideline the influence of poorer countries and the UN in climate negotiations.

Finally, here is President Nasheed of the Maldives explaining why the achievement of a strong deal to reduce carbon emissions to the levels demanded by the science is perhaps the central moral and political challenge facing us today. As he put it, quite simply: if such a deal is not reached, his country along with many others will simply cease to exist:

As I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, there is a name for the wilful destruction of an entire people, and it’s not “climate change”.

A couple of weeks ago we held a meeting in Cambridge to oppose the Clare College choir’s decision to tour Israel, skipping the occupied Palestinian territories altogether except for a single fig-leaf performance in Bethlehem. I’ve been meaning to do a brief write-up of it, because I think our experience confirms what I already thought (funny how experiences tend to do that!) about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions debate.

Firstly, for some brief background to the issue, see this article in the Varsity, (I wrote a response to the “correction” but it wasn’t published) and this awful stream-of-consciousness ramble defending the choir’s decision in The Cambridge Student (I was going to write a response but frankly I didn’t know where to begin).

Opposition to the choir’s tour came from members of the college and former members of the choir itself, as well as from bodies inside Palestine (who ultimately cancelled the Bethlehem concert as a result). Some of it was based on the virtual exclusion of Palestinian venues from the tour, and some of it was based on arguments for a cultural boycott of Israel. We sought to include both perspectives on our panel of speakers – representing the former was Yazeed Said, a Palestinian Christian and Chaplain at Corpus Christi college, and representing the latter were Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, an activist with Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG), and Nancy Elan, a violinist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Despite the rain, a last minute room change and the fact that the meeting was held in the last week of term, a good 20-30 people showed up. Most of them were from the Israel Society or Jewish Society and were strongly in favour of the choir’s tour.

Yazeed Said, whose grandparents own land in Karmiel, one of the destinations on the choir’s tour, was by far the most ‘moderate’ on the panel, speaking in a measured tone and responding calmly and rationally to even the most offensive remarks from the audience. His approach reminded me of Obama’s in this respect: in order to avoid alienating anyone in the audience he largely restricted himself to vague pieties about the need to empathise with everyone, about how we should be a “friend” to all parties to the conflict and arguing that the settlement project is “destructive of the souls of both Israel and Palestine”. He stressed that he was not opposed to the choir visiting Israel per se, just to the one-sided character of this particular tour. This approach – perhaps best summed up when he said “never mind the politics for a bit” – was successful in the sense that even the most “pro”-Israel members of the audience took a liking to him and was receptive to his message. But as this ‘message’ consisted largely of feel-good truisms, the utility of this consensus is highly questionable. One may as well take a stand and passionately proclaim one’s support for rainbows and kittens.

In fact I have found this to be the case with liberal Zionists generally: it is possible to have a productive discussion with them, and to reach broad areas of common agreement, as long as any real criticism of Israel’s policies, and in particular any serious effort to change them, is avoided. They will, for example, agree that Israel sometimes makes mistakes, or that the settlements should be strongly criticised, but will tend to reject any criticism of those policies that goes beyond very narrow boundaries (for instance, criticism of the Israeli political class as a whole rather than just the Right) and will recoil from any attempt to use boycott or other concrete means to bring those injustices to an end. (This is in contrast to right-wing Zionists, who will generally passionately defend or deny all of the above.

As a result, I don’t think the people who made up most of our audience – i.e. those already heavily invested in Israel’s narrative – should be our main targets. While it is possible, as I say, to make some progress with them, so many layers of indoctrination and obfuscation must be peeled away to do so that, in most cases, it’s frankly not worth the trouble. ‘Engagement’ typically ends up as dialogue-for-dialogue’s-sake (which, it must be said, suits many of them just fine). Rather, our principal audience should be that vast majority of people who are strongly invested in neither side’s arguments and who are as a result fairly open to persuasion on the basis of human rights reports, UN inquiries, mainstream accounts of the factual record, and so forth.

Naomi and Nancy were much more forthright. Both drew the analogy between Israel and apartheid South Africa, and argued that Israel assiduously cultivates its international image, particularly in the ‘West’, as part of its efforts to normalise the occupation, and that by touring Israel the choir would become complicit in those efforts. Rejecting the argument that what is needed is dialogue rather than ostracization, Naomi cited Naomi Klein’s experience that participating in the boycott has actually stimulated engagement with Israelis rather than ending it:

“My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.”

Nancy stressed that artists are not ‘above’ politics and argued that by playing in Israel the choir would be, in effect, supporting the occupation, ethnic cleansing and Israel’s denial of the right of return to Palestinian refugees.

The audience’s response to all of this was, as you might expect, not positive. To a large degree this was inevitable, as explained above, although it would have helped if the speakers had not allowed themselves to be sidetracked onto issues that are both highly incendiary and largely irrelevant to the contemporary debate (e.g. the question of whether or not a ‘Jewish state’ is, in principle, racist). There were a few idiots in the room: for example, when Nancy challenged those audience members who opposed BDS to suggest an alternative means for Palestinians to resist the occupation, one guy suggested that they work to reassure the Israeli state and congratulate the IDF for “investigating” its own conduct during the ‘Cast Lead’ massacre. I shit you not. There were a couple on the “pro”-Palestine side as well – one guy, for instance, kept personally accusing audience members who were supportive of the tour of committing this or that injustice, hardly an approach that is conducive to reasoned discussion. That said, most audience members were reasonable, in tone at least, and the following were the main objections raised to BDS, and to cultural boycott in particular:

- We need more dialogue, not less. This objection has already been answered very effectively by Naomi Klein (see above), but in any case it should be pointed out that dialogue for its own sake is not only unhelpful but positively harmful, in that it allows all parties to go away feeling good about themselves without actually having done anything to change the situation on the ground (Yazeed Said similarly made the point that engagement is only useful if it “raises the right questions”). The problem in Palestine is not that Israelis and Palestinians are unable to understand each other – on the contrary, Israelis and Palestinians struggle side-by-side against the occupation on a daily basis – but rather an entrenched political and military system that must be overthrown. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported last year, the “peace industry” has a very poor track record when it comes to producing substantive results:

‘”between 1993 and 2000 [alone], Western governments and foundations spent between $20 million and $25 million on the dialogue groups.” A subsequent wide-scale survey of Palestinians who participated in the dialogue groups revealed that this great expenditure failed to produce “a single peace activist on either side.”‘

As Faris Giacaman comments,

‘The lack of results from such initiatives is not surprising, as the stated objectives of dialogue and “coexistence” groups do not include convincing Israelis to help Palestinians gain the respect of their inalienable rights. The minimum requirement of recognizing Israel’s inherently oppressive nature is absent in these dialogue groups. Rather, these organizations operate under the dubious assumption that the “conflict” is very complex and multifaceted, where there are “two sides to every story,” and each narrative has certain valid claims as well as biases.’

- Travelling to a country is not necessarily a political statement. This argument was offered more than once by audience members and appeared to be widely accepted. The first thing to say about this is that it is unlikely that those who advocate it in the case of Israel would be prepared to see it universalised: it is unlikely, for example, that they would fail to see the political dimension were a college choir to have toured apartheid South Africa during the height of the boycott. Secondly, it is false almost by definition: Palestinian cultural, labour and human rights organisations have put out a call to international civil society to aid them in a nonviolent struggle against the occupation by instituting an economic and cultural boycott of Israel. As a result the choir, when faced with the choice of whether or not to tour Israel, had precisely two options – to abide by the Palestinian call for BDS, or to violate it. Plainly either decision is a thoroughly political one: to tour Israel does not necessarily indicate support for this or that Israeli policy, but it does represent an explicit decision to violate the Palestinian request for international solidarity in the form of BDS.

-  Boycotts are inherently discriminatory: they lump all Israelis into one group, making no distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The first part of this objection is correct: by definition boycotts are discriminatory. Thus, for example, a decision to boycott South Africa could be viewed as discrimination against South Africa. The response to this can only be: so what? The issue is whether the discrimination, motivated by political rather than racist or xenophobic concerns, is justified and appropriate, something that must in each case be evaluated on its merits. The second part misses the point completely: a boycott is intended as a means to force a change in Israeli state policy, not as an expression of judgement on the character of this or that Israeli citizen. As Israeli activist Assaf Oron puts it,

“This is not about punishing or branding an entire nation. This is about making the Occupation stop being so damned convenient.“

- The choir should be consistent – it has visited China and Russia, so why not Israel? A boycott is a tactic, not a principle. In this case, we have Palestinian civil society calling on us, as citizens of a state that is heavily complicit in Israel’s occupation, to aid it in its nonviolent struggle for freedom from military occupation. Palestinian demands enjoy widespread international support, including the virtually unanimous backing of the UN and the International Court of Justice, and Israel relies heavily on its international image as a “civilised”, liberal, democratic Western state (this has always been the case: see for example the early Zionist depictions of Israel as an outpost of Western civilization in a sea of Arab barbarism). In these circumstances, a boycott is both morally justified and has a good chance of achieving something, and so it should be supported. If Chinese civil society called for an international boycott of China, and the grounds for such a boycott proving effective were there, then I see no reason why we wouldn’t support that as well. It should be noted that if this style of argument – “why pick on Israel?” – had won out with respect to South Africa, it’s possible that we might now be living in a world with two apartheid regimes instead of one.

Other arguments were raised as well, though these were the most prominent. In my view, the strongest case for BDS is the simplest: Palestinian civil society has called for international solidarity to help it resist Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory with a nonviolent campaign of boycott and sanctions. As citizens of a state that is heavily complicit in Israel’s occupation, and which bears significant responsibility for starting the conflict to begin with, how can we in good conscience violate this call? Moreover, if we would like to reject suicide bombings and Qassam rockets as legitimate means for securing Palestinian liberation, how can we then undermine one of the only nonviolent alternatives Palestinians have available to them?

Finally, the meeting reinforced my view that in order to be most effective the campaign for BDS in this country should focus on institutions and products that are directly related to the occupation and the settlement project. Once this movement for a targeted boycott grows we might be able to extend it, but for now, the perception that we are targeting Israeli society as a whole rather than the occupation specifically makes a lot of people who might otherwise support us uneasy, puts us on the defensive and requires us to engage in time-wasting debates about the legitimacy in principle of cultural boycott, the need for “dialogue”, and so on, that primarily serve to distract from the most important issues at hand.

Your humble blogger has once again been cited by the loony right as proof of the evil that is the soft-liberal, Democratic Party-aligned Obama lovefest that is Daily Kos:

“On Israel-related news, one of the most frequent Daily Kos bloggers is one called Heathlander[31] who also maintains his own blog.[32] Heathlander has penned diaries – which are still up on the Kos website – with such headlines as “Suicide Bombings Are An Inevitable Result Of Israel’s Military Policies”[33] and “Israeli war criminals – in their own words.”[34]  In one post Heathlander says: ”Just as the French had the right to violently resist the Nazi occupation…so the Palestinians have the right to violently resist the Israeli occupation.”[35] In one long post, Heathlander would not condemn a fellow Kos blogger who used the term “Zionist Occupied America.”[36]“

This is taken from a report for the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs by one Adam Levick, which purports to document the virulent antisemitism and “anti-Israelism” that, it claims, infests the major US progressive blogs – Daily Kos, Salon and the Huffington Post.

There are four charges levelled against me in the quoted paragraph, the first three of which are true but unobjectionable and certainly not, by any reasonable estimation, evidence of antisemitism. Respectively: to explain Palestinian terrorism in terms of Israel’s occupation is not to excuse it; to call the Israeli politicians responsible for last year’s slaughter in Gaza “war criminals” is entirely apt; and to observe that Palestinians, like every other occupied people, have the right to resist their occupiers using violence if necessary is entirely accurate. The last – that I “would not condemn a fellow Kos blogger who used the term ‘Zionist Occupied America’” – is technically accurate but utterly misleading. I won’t bore you all with the extended meta background (and believe me, it’s boring as hell), but suffice to say that while I and others defended the blogger in question against a campaign of smears and bullying, I did not defend her use – on one occasion – of the phrase “Zionist Occupied America”, and indeed I have repeatedly criticised the view that the US functions as a client state of Israel rather than the other way around, arguing instead for Chomsky’s account of Israel’s role as a “strategic asset” to U.S. elites (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here – shit, I didn’t realise I was so repetitive!).

The rest of the piece is similarly riddled with distortions, misrepresentations and apparently accurate quotations that are, said accuracy notwithstanding, deemed by the author to be so manifestly offensive as to require no further comment. Perhaps the most immediate indication of the absurdity of the article is its decision to target Glenn Greenwald – a prominent liberal blogger who, like me, is Jewish (though, Levick darkly notes, “he does not refer to this”). Greenwald will no doubt respond to the charges himself, though since they consist entirely of presenting such quotes as

“Anyone who has argued that a desire to protect Israeli interests plays too large of a role in our foreign policy has been subjected to some of the most vicious and relentless smears. Ask Juan Cole about that, or John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Those tactics have, as intended, prevented a substantive debate on this question, as most people have feared even approaching the topic”

and

“large and extremely influential Jewish donor groups are the ones agitating for a U.S. war against Iran, and that is the case because those groups are devoted to promoting Israel’s interests”

as self-evident (certainly, no further argument is offered) evidence of antisemitism, perhaps he’d be wiser not to bother. The clincher in Levick’s case against Greenwald is the latter’s “extreme accusations against well-known Jewish pro-Israeli commentators, using almost demonizing terminology”. Examples?

“In one post he accuses Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard and Martin Peretz of The New Republic of “psychopathic derangement” over what he characterizes as their insensitivity toward civilian deaths. He goes on to impute to them “sociopathic indifference,” and says these are the same attributes as terrorists possess. Goldfarb and Peretz, he says further, seem to get a “blood-pumping excitement” from the suffering of the weakest members of society.”

Turning to Greenwald’s posts, we see that those accusations came in response to Goldfarb’s and Peretz’s open celebrations of attacks on Palestinian civilians, the former on the grounds that it might “make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel” and the latter on the basis that the ‘Cast Lead’ massacre in Gaza would drive home to Palestinians the message: “do not fuck with the Jews” (Peretz then proceeded to dismiss potential qualms about the killing of hundreds of civilians as “whining”). This is the same Peretz, moreover, who has repeatedly propagated anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism of the worst kind, regularly producing filth like:

“[The Lebanese] fight simply because they live. And the culture from which they come scarcely thinks this is odd. Their men fight on and on, and the women and children bleed” (source)

“[N]onviolence is foreign to the political culture of Arabs generally and of the Palestinians particularly” (source)

“The Palestinian death toll from Palestinian killing rose to 17 on Wednesday. Any bets on high it will go on Thursday?” (source)

“Arab society is, well–how do I say this?–hidebound and backward.” (source)

“Yes, I know: Muslims are nice cuddly people like the rest of us, the majority of them certainly. The problem is that at this moment in history you have to take the proposition on faith. No, not any particular faith, just faith.” (source)

and so on. Greenwald’s adjectives, then, would appear to constitute not antisemitism but rather a dry and if anything restrained description of the facts.

Returning to Daily Kos, some of the examples Levick cites do indeed support his claim that some antisemitism exists on progressive blogs – though since such blogs are open to anyone and are as a result constantly trolled by far-right nutters of all varieties, this fact by itself demonstrates only that antisemites exist in the world, and that some of them possess an internet connection. Clearly we owe a debt of gratitude to the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs for bringing this astonishing finding to our attention. Of course what Levick wants to do is to show not only that antisemitism exists on progressive blogs but that it is welcomed by and widespread on them. Unfortunately for him this claim is not only false but absurd, and so to make the leap from the anecdotal examples he is able to present to the broad conclusions he wishes to demonstrate he is forced to rely on innuendo, dark insinuations and misrepresentation of source material. Here are two examples of the latter:

• Levick cites this Daily Kos diary as evidence that “[n]arratives advancing the third abovementioned anti-Semitic staple [sic], Israel as Nazi Germany, appear perfectly acceptable in the Daily Kos community”. He neglects to mention that the diary in question received only one recommendation, its ‘Tip Jar’ was hidden with 17 ‘troll ratings’ (this is how Daily Kos community moderation works: offensive posts receive ‘Troll Ratings’ from other users, and if enough troll ratings are received, the offensive post becomes viewable only by “trusted users” of the site; if a commenter receives sufficient troll ratings, s/he is banned from the site). Levick goes on to note that the diary in question is “still on the site”, insinuating that this somehow suggests approval by the site owners. He fails to mention that it is Daily Kos general policy to never delete a diary, no matter how offensive it is.

• Levick links to this post to demonstrate the prevalence of ‘Jewish conspiracy’ theories on the site. Once again he fails to mention that the diary was universally recognised to be the work of an antisemitic, right-wing troll (its tags were changed to “banned user” and “anti-semitism” accordingly”) and received no recommendations, while the user responsible for it was promptly banned from the site. Levick doesn’t mention these things because were he to do so, the example would demonstrate precisely the opposite conclusion from the one he wishes to derive from it: namely, that antisemitism is not, in fact, tolerated on Daily Kos. Instead, Levick again gravely intones that “[n]otably, this post is still on the site” – a meaningless fact, as explained above.

I could continue, but I’ve got snooker to watch and the absurdity of Levick’s smear-job should, were it not already self-evident, by now be clear. It is of a piece with the broader efforts by the “new antisemitism”-mongers to detect antisemitism, in the form of criticism of Zionism and of Israeli-policies, on the liberal-left, and of the recent push by Israel and its apologists to aggressively market Israel’s image and arguments online. This is largely a reaction to the fact that Israel is increasingly losing the propaganda war as the realities of its brutal repression of the Palestinians become increasingly well-known. If Levick’s half-baked ramblings are the best that Israel’s apologists can come up with to reverse this trend, the prospects for Palestinian solidarity activism in the US and Britain look very good indeed.

A final point: it is worth noting that Levick’s piece, while ostensibly opposing antisemitism, in fact propagates and indeed relies upon a central antisemitic theme, namely the conflation of Israel with Jews. Hence, for example, his listing of “Israel is demonized” as an example of a “historical anti-Semitic staple”, and his concluding call for progressives to show “moral clarity” by condemning criticisms of Zionism as antisemitic. Clearly such manifest racism should not be tolerated. Will the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs follow Daily Kos’s admirable example and ban Levick from publishing on its site, or will it follow Levick’s more stringent demands and delete this piece of trash altogether?

Great cartoon from Steve Bell:

via Luna17.