It is easy to make the case for a boycott of Israel. You start by saying that Israel is an apartheid state. You ‘demonstrate’ this fact by giving some examples of institutional racism against Palestinians and you tell some harrowing stories of real injustices done to Palestinians. And we know what to do with an apartheid state, don’t we? The successful boycott of apartheid South Africa shows us the way.
But Israel is not South Africa. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is a territorial conflict between two peoples, both with tear-stained histories, struggling to maintain, or win, national independence. Apartheid in South Africa, where a small elite lived off the labour of a large and disenfranchised black population, ended when the majority won a democratic constitution. In contrast, the Israel/Palestine conflict can only be settled by an end to the Israeli occupation, and the foundation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Use of the apartheid analogy is intended to make us want to take sides with Palestine against Israel. But the left ought to be taking sides with those who fight for peace against the chauvinists and fundamentalists within both Israel and Palestine. The boycott campaign gives up on the project of peace and instead encourages the view that Israel can be defeated or even got rid of. The boycotters have given up on any possibility of normalising relationships between Israelis and Palestinians and they give up the hope for a peaceful Middle East.
Academics and trade unionists should be organising exchange programmes; they should be teaching in Palestine and Israel; they should be supporting Palestinian hospitals, sending books, money, equipment and friendship. Palestinians need political and practical solidarity. They need us to campaign against the occupation, against the Israeli regime in the West Bank. They need for us to campaign for freedom of expression and freedom of movement for Palestinian academics and students. We should campaign for our governments to do what they can to help and encourage and coerce the two peoples to come to a peace agreement.
But a boycott of Israeli Jewish academics, thinkers, writers, musicians and artists would help nobody. We should encourage engagement and communication rather than erecting even more artificial barriers to go with the ones that already exist.
Trade unions need to have a consistent policy with regards human rights violations in the world. The boycott campaign treats Israel as though it were a unique evil while it treats other human rights abusers, some responsible for violence on a hugely greater scale, much more leniently. There is no boycott campaign against Sudan, North Korea, Congo, Zimbabwe, China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Britain, USA, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkey – even though all are equal or worse human rights abusers.
A boycott of the Israeli academic and cultural community holds filmmakers, philosophers, footballers, choreographers and sculptors responsible for the actions of their state. We do not hold cultural producers anywhere else similarly responsible. The academic and artistic spheres in Israel are amongst the spaces were anti-racism is the norm and where peace is taught, practiced and struggled for.
The boycott campaign damages the unity of our own trade unions. Instead of proposing campaigns that can unite British trade unionists in support of peace, it proposes strategies that divide our unions. It asks us to exclude Israeli Jews from our campuses and from our theatres, from our journals and from our concert halls. Which trade unionist will feel comfortable picketing a lecture given by an Israeli Jewish scholar or organising a protest against an Israeli Jewish dancer? The boycott campaign talks of an ‘institutional’ boycott, but lectures are not given, ballets are not danced, by institutions.