Gaza in Crisis. Noam Chomsky

There may be overriding reasons, but in general I think that those channels should be kept open. As for boycotts in general, they are a tactic, not a principle. Like other tactics, we have to evaluate them in terms of their likely consequences. That is a matter of prime importance, at least for those who care about the fate of the victims. And circumstances have to be considered with care.

      Let’s consider South Africa and Israel, which are often compared in this context. In the case of South Africa, boycotts had some impact, but it is worth remembering that they were implemented after a long period of education and organizing, which had led to widespread condemnation of apartheid, even within mainstream opinion and powerful institutions. That included the U.S. corporate sector, which has an overwhelming influence on policy formation, transparently. At that stage, boycott became an effective instrument. The case of Israel is radically different. The preparatory educational and organizing work has scarcely been done. The result is that calls for boycott can easily turn out to be weapons for the hard right, and in fact that has regularly (and predictably) happened. Those who care about the fate of Palestinians will not undertake actions that harm them.

      Nevertheless, carefully targeted boycotts, which are comprehensible to the public in the current state of understanding, can be effective instruments. One example is calls for university divestment from corporations that are involved in U.S.-Israeli repression and violence and denial of elementary human rights. In Europe, a sensible move would be to call for an end to preferential treatment for Israeli exports until Israel stops its systematic destruction of Palestinian agriculture and its barring of economic development. In the United States, it would make good sense to call for reducing U.S. aid to Israel by the estimated $600 million that Israel has stolen by refusing to transmit funds to the elected government—and the cynicism of funneling aid to the faction it supports should be exposed as just another exercise in undermining democracy. Looking farther ahead, a sensible project would be to support the stand of the majority of Americans that all aid to Israel should be canceled until it agrees to negotiate seriously for a peaceful diplomatic settlement, instead of continuing to act vigorously to undermine the possibility of realizing the international consensus on a two-state settlement. That, however, will require serious educational and organizational efforts. Readers of the mainstream press were well aware of the shocking nature of apartheid. But they are presented daily with the picture of Israel desperately seeking peace but under constant attack by Palestinian terrorists who want to destroy it.

      That is not just the media, incidentally. Just to illustrate, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government published a research paper on the 2006 Lebanon war that has to be read to be believed, but is not atypical. It’s by Marvin Kalb, a highly respected figure in journalism, head of the Kennedy School’s media program. According to his account, the media were almost totally controlled by Hezbollah and failed to recognize that Israel was “engaged in an existential struggle for survival,” fighting a two-front war of self-defense against attacks in Lebanon and Gaza.9 The attack on the pathetic victim from the south was the capture of Corporal Shalit. The kidnapping of Gazan civilians the day before, and innumerable other crimes like it, are more self-defense. The attack from the north was the Hezbollah capture of two soldiers on July 12. More cynicism. For decades Israel has been kidnapping and killing civilians in Lebanon, or on the high seas between Lebanon and Cyprus, holding many for long periods as hostages while unknown numbers of others were sent to secret prison -torture chambers like Facility 1391 (not reported in the United States).10 No one has ever condemned Israel for aggression or called for massive terror attacks in retaliation. As always, the cynicism reeks to the skies, illustrating imperial mentality so deeply rooted as to be imperceptible.

      Continuing with the Kennedy School version of the war, it demonstrates the extreme bias of the Arab press with the horrified revelation that it portrayed Lebanese to Israeli casualties in the ratio of 22 to 1, whereas objective Western journalism would of course be neutral; the actual ratio was about 25 to 1. Kalb quotes New York Times correspondent Steven Erlanger, who was greatly disturbed that photos of destruction in South Beirut lacked context: they did not show that the rest of Beirut was not destroyed. By the same logic, photos of the World Trade Center on 9/11 revealed the extreme bias of Western journalism by failing to show that the rest of New York was untouched. The falsification and deceit, of which these examples are a small sample, would be startling if they were not so familiar. Until that is overcome, punitive actions that are well merited are likely to backfire.

      All this raises another point. For the most part, Israel can act only within the framework established by the great power on which it has chosen to rely ever since it made the fateful decision in 1971 to prefer expansion to peace, rejecting Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s proposal for a full Israel-Egyptian peace treaty in favor of settlement in the Egyptian Sinai. We can debate the extent to which Israel relies on U.S. support, but there can be little doubt that its crushing of Palestinians and other violent crimes are possible only because the United States provides it with unprecedented economic, military, diplomatic, and ideological support. So if there are to be boycotts, why not of the United States, whose support of Israel is the least of its crimes? Or of the UK, or other criminal states? We know the answer, and it is not an attractive one, undermining the integrity of the call for boycott.

      Finally, in April 2003, Gilbert Achcar wrote a “Letter to a Slightly Depressed Antiwar Activist,” which ended with, “This movement’s spectacular growth has only been possible because it rested on the foundations of three years of progress by the global movement against neoliberal globalization born in Seattle. These two dimensions will continue to fuel each other, to strengthen people’s awareness that neoliberalism and war are two faces of the same system of domination—which must be overthrown.”11 What would be your message today to antiwar and human rights activists around the world about their role in this worldwide struggle?

      Gilbert Achcar is quite right, though we should recognize, as he surely does, that the North is a latecomer to the very promising global justice movements. They originated in the South, which is why the meetings of the World Social Forum have been held in Brazil, India, Venezuela, Kenya. Also of great significance are the solidarity movements that developed, primarily in the United States, in the 1980s, something quite new in the hundreds of years of Western imperialism, and have since proliferated in many ways. The lesson to activists is stark and simple: the future lies in their hands, including the question of the fate of Palestine.