Abstract
This chapter considers how post-war developments—decolonisation, the shift in international opinion regarding settler states, and the displacement of original populations or their relegation to inferior status—have created fertile soil for the anti-Israel boycott movement in the West. Drawing on a number of historical examples, the paper also identifies the extreme outcomes to which boycott movements can subscribe when they are associated with nationalism, and how this poses ‘moral-historical questions’ for the anti-Israel boycott movement. In this and other ways, the analysis probes a boycott movement in the contemporary world in terms of the history to which it relates, directly or comparatively.
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Notes
- 1.
For this, its context and ramifications, see Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (London, 2009), chapter 1.
- 2.
All Jewish nationalist organisations in Palestine participated in armed attacks against the British at various points between 1944 and 1947: for a sketch of these, see Benny Morris’ 1948. A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven and London, 2008), 29–30, 31, 35, 38–9.
- 3.
It is interesting that a major study of settler states, that focuses in great part on Rhodesia, should refer repeatedly to Israel for comparative purposes: see Ronald Weitzer’s Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (Berkeley, 1990), 25, 26, 27, 28–9, 31, 33, 35, 40, 44, 98, 131.
- 4.
See ‘Yasir Arafat, Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 13 November 1974’, reproduced as Appendix 8 of The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Agreement. A Documentary Record (Washington, 1994); quotations from pp. 212 and 213.
- 5.
Momentum, the grassroots organisation linked to the Labour Party, conceded that antisemitism was ‘more widespread in the Labour party than many of us had understood’, with the leader of Momentum himself having been treated to antisemitic abuse: see Jessica Elgot, ‘Momentum: antisemitism claims are not conspiracy’, The Guardian, 3 April 2018, p. 2.
- 6.
The socialist writer and Labour Party supporter, Owen Jones, in commenting on the Labour antisemitism furore is forthright about the existence of ‘[t]he poison of antisemitism…among a minority on the left’: see Owen Jones, ‘Labour has so much to do. It can’t let bigotry get in the way’, The Guardian, Journal section, 4 April 2018, p. 3.
- 7.
Illustrative of this would be the letter by Judy Samuel of London in The Guardian, 17 February 2015, p. 32. She was writing in opposition to the artists, including Jewish artists, who had declared a cultural boycott of Israel a few days before. Her response: ‘Could these British artists possibly be the target of sophisticated anti-Israel propaganda shrouding its antisemitic message under the cloak of liberal rhetoric?’ The boycott declaration had appeared in The Guardian on 14 February.
- 8.
These are the comments of Alan Dershowitz in his (unsuccessful) campaign to prevent the publication of a work by Norman Finkelstein by the University of California Press: see Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine, 369–370.
- 9.
This was argued by David Feldman in a paper he delivered in Cambridge in 2015.
- 10.
The classic study of the massive historical shifts underpinning the rise of abolitionism, of which the boycotts were a part, is Davis Brion Davis’ The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975).
- 11.
See Christoph Kreutzmüller, ‘The blockade of Jewish owned businesses in Nazi Germany – a boycott?’, a chapter in this volume.
- 12.
Gideon Reuveni, ‘The good, the bad and the marketplace: buycott, boycott and Jewish consumers in post-1933 Germany’, paper delivered at the ‘Boycotts – Past and Present’ conference, Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2014.
- 13.
See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2004).
- 14.
See Ari Shavit, ‘Lydda, 1948’, The New Yorker, 21 October 2013, pp. 40–46; quotations from p. 44.
- 15.
As demonstrated by Morris in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.
- 16.
The statements provided in the text above will be accepted by those who take the full force of the massive weight of evidence provided by the so-called revisionists. There are debates and disputes that have arisen, not least amongst the revisionists themselves, which have helped to refine and amend some of their findings. However, most non-partisan scholars would consider the statements in the text above to be beyond historical dispute. The key historians whose work made this possible are: Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim. Shlaim provides a survey and adjudication of key works in his Israel and Palestine, chapter 4.
- 17.
See Benjamin Pogrund, ‘Israel has many injustices. But it isn’t an apartheid state’: The Guardian, 22 May 2015, p. 37.
- 18.
See Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment. Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection (Baton Rouge, 1999), 1.
- 19.
Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861 (Lexington, 1995), 57.
- 20.
Consider the journalism of Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, collected together in his The Punishment of Gaza (London, 2010).
- 21.
See, for example, Ari Folman and David Polonsky, Waltz with Bashir (London, 2009) and the animation documentary to which it relates.
- 22.
See, for example, Gideon Levy, ‘A Just Boycott’ (4 June 2006) in his Punishment of Gaza, 3–6.
- 23.
An excellent introduction to the fact that pre-Likud Israeli governments—these were always Labour Governments—espoused and followed policies of discrimination, dispossession, expulsion, and annexation after 1967 is Noam Chomsky’s Peace in the Middle East? (London, 1975), which was published before Likud first came to power: see pp. 16, 93–94, 99–100, 103–104, 105, 108, 110–111, 116, 125, 150, 152–153, 155, 171 (n. 72), 177 (n. 2). For Golda Meir’s statements regarding the Palestinians as referred to in the text above: see pp. 104, 140.
- 24.
Unfortunately, too much evidence for this could be provided. Here is some of it. One of the leaders of Hamas called a knife attack in which Israelis were indiscriminately attacked on a Tel Aviv bus as ‘brave and heroic’: see The Guardian, 22 January 2015, p. 18: ‘Four seriously injured in Tel Aviv bus stabbings’. A good example of the culture of indiscriminate murder would be the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenagers in 2014 by Palestinians, which was followed by the kidnap and killing of a random Palestinian teenager by Israelis. David Remnick sketches the events in ‘The One State Reality’, The New Yorker, 17 November 2014, pp. 47–8.
- 25.
I have explored some of the problems that have arisen in applying Levinas’ theory to Holocaust studies in Jeremy Krikler, ‘Voice, Face and Holocaust’, The Holocaust in History and Memory, vol. 2, (2009), 91–2. In this, I was strongly influenced by the work and findings of Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Poltical (London, 2002).
- 26.
The Czech nationalist boycott referred to is dealt with in this volume in Michael Miller, ‘In Defence of Nation: Protectionism and Boycott in Central and Eastern Europe’; the Polish nationalist boycott is also dealt with in this volume in Grzegorz Krzywiec, ‘Swój do swego po swojel’ (‘Stick to your own for all you own’). The Anti-Jewish Boycott: Polish and East-European politics in the early twentieth century’; for the Jewish boycott of Arab labour, see Uri Ram, ‘The colonization perspective in Israeli sociology’, in: The Israel/Palestine Question, ed. Ilan Pappé, (London, 1999), 65, 70 and Gershon Shafir, ‘Zionism and Colonialism: a comparative approach’, in: The Israel/Palestine Question, ed. Pappé, 88, 89.
- 27.
The formal state ideal to which I refer was proclaimed by Yasir Arafat to the UN General Assembly in 1974: ‘In my formal capacity as Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and leader of the Palestinian revolution I proclaim before you that when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination. …We offer them the most generous solution, that we might live together in a framework of just peace in our democratic Palestine’. See ‘Yasir Arafat’s Address to the UN General Assembly’, 13 November 1974 as reproduced in Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 6th edn. (Boston, 2007), 348–351; quotations from pp. 350–351. For the formal recognition of Israel in 1988 and the immediate US signal of its significance, see ‘Statement by Yasir Arafat, Geneva’ and ‘Statement by George Shultz, Washington, D. C.’, both dated 14 December 1988: reproduced in Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 448–9.
- 28.
Quotation from the programme of the Unified Command of the Palestinian Resistance Movement, 6 May 1970: quoted in N. Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East?, 84. As Chomsky wrote, the Unified Command ‘included all the Palestinian organizations’.
- 29.
Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East?, 85.
- 30.
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 1.
- 31.
Many years ago, Noam Chomsky trenchantly described the corrosion of the democratic ideal and the discrimination resulting from defining the Israeli state in ethnic-religious terms: see Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East?, 16–17, 37–38, 72, 100, 101, 109–111, 116, 117–118, 128–9, 150–151, 152, 153.
- 32.
Linked to Netanyahu’s announcement was an Israeli cabinet endorsement of a bill, which alarmed even the Israeli President and Attorney-General, to declare Israel a specifically Jewish nation state. This was recognised immediately as running counter to the formal cast of the Israeli Declaration of Independence and a demotion of its democratic commitment: see The Guardian, 29 November 2014, p. 42, ‘With a bill for narrowly Jewish nationhood, a democracy is on the brink of downgrading itself’. The article was right to accord a significance to these developments but reveals an ignorance of the degree to which Israel was already defined, not merely in its policies, but in Israeli law as a Jewish state.
- 33.
See Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East?, 21. Note also the discussion on p. 110.
- 34.
For the 1913 Land Act and the history to which it relates, see—for example—Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London, 1979), chapter 7; Tim Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrializing South Africa. The Southern Highveld to 1914 (Basingstoke, 1987), chapter 6; and various articles in Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, August 2014, which has a special focus on the Land Act. An instructive comparative essay could be written comparing the Land Act and its subsequent fate under apartheid with the Basic Law: Israel Lands. This might help to offer some genuine (as opposed to rhetorical) similarities and differences between the segregation/apartheid order in South Africa and the elements of discrimination that exist in the Israeli state. Another fruitful area of analysis would be the forced removal of communities and individuals who do not have the full rights of citizenship. A further one would be the right to bear arms for the country, and also the recourse to detention without trial in both orders. The place of the franchise, obviously and crucially, would be another area to explore and here, of course, there is a key difference between apartheid South Africa and Israel.
- 35.
Ariel Sharon, that ‘fiercely aggressive advocate of Greater Israel’ is perhaps most associated with this idea: see Shlaim, Israel and Palestine, 108, 288–9, 291, 293–4. Quotations from pp. 108 and 289. However, it is important to bear in mind that this policy has a very long history and was followed in the decade after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, both in those places and indeed in the Golan Heights: see, Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East?, 31–32; for Jerusalem, see pp. 99–100, 111.
- 36.
The Guardian, 29 December 2016, p. 13, ‘Kerry accuses Israel of undermining peace hopes as Trump pledges strong US support’.
- 37.
One of the great symbols of discrimination and, indeed, oppression for republicans and Catholics in Northern Ireland had been the policies and Protestant domination of the police force. Clinton, with his knowledge of discriminatory policing in the South of the USA, was clear on the need to transform the police force in Northern Ireland so that it commanded confidence amongst Catholics.
- 38.
For the quotation, for Clinton’s last effort and its complete unravelling after Ariel Sharon and George Bush came to power in 2001, see Shlaim, Israel and Palestine, 259–260.
- 39.
See the Interview with Ami Ayalon, 22 December 2001: reproduced in Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 547–549; quotation from pp. 548–549. Until May 2000, Ayalon led Shin Bet.
- 40.
Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine, 206.
- 41.
Consider the statistics pertaining to 1948 as `provided by Onn Winckler, ‘Fertility Transition in the Middle East: the Case of the Israeli Arabs’, in: The Israeli Palestinians: An Arab Minority in the Jewish State, ed. Alexander Bligh, (London, 2007), 41 and 56.
- 42.
The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 14 May 1948, is reproduced as Document 5.5 in Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 223–225; quotation from p. 225.
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Krikler, J. (2019). Moral-Historical Questions of the Anti-Israel Boycott. In: Feldman, D. (eds) Boycotts Past and Present. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94872-0_16
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