The Israeli parliament has passed a law in effect banning citizens from calling for academic, consumer or cultural boycotts of Israel in a move denounced by its opponents as anti-democratic.
The “‘Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott” won a majority of 47 to 38, despite strong opposition and an attempt to filibuster the six-hour debate. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu did not take part in the vote.
Under the terms of the new law, an individual or organisation proposing a boycott may be sued for compensation by any individual or institution claiming that it could be damaged by such a call. Evidence of actual damage is not be required.
The new law aims to protect individuals and institutions in both Israel and the Palestinian territory it has occupied illegally under international law since 1967. It in effect bans calls for consumer boycotts of goods produced in West Bank settlements, or of cultural or academic institutions in settlements. It also prevents the government doing business with companies that comply with boycotts.
A coalition of Israeli human rights groups immediately issued a letter of protest over the new law.
Hassan Jabareen of Adalah, a legal centre for Israeli-Arab citizens, said: “Defining boycott as a civil wrong suggests that all Israelis have a legal responsibility to promote the economic advancement of the settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. This means that Israeli organisations opposing the settlements as a matter of principle are in a trap: any settler can now constantly harass them, challenging them to publicly declare their position on the boycott of settlements and threatening them with heavy compensation costs if they support it.”
Tag Archive for 'settlements'
Better Place is an Israeli company, with an Australian office, that is delivering electric cars for an enviro-friendly future. Sounds nice in theory but in reality the company, as I have written for a while, operates in the occupied West Bank and should therefore be shunned.
Yet anther mainstream story, this time in the Guardian, glosses over this detail. Don’t believe the hype:
One work-around that seemingly nullifies the concerns over range and charging is the brain child of the world’s most prominent electric car advocate, Shai Agassi. In his native Israel last year, he launched a startup called Better Place that allows electric-car users to swap their drained battery for a new fully charged one at a network of “switch stations” at the same time as it would take to fill a car with petrol. And because Better Place owns the batteries, the owner of the car need not worry about the deteriorating condition or high price of the battery.
If the idea gains traction – Agassi is already in talks with the Chinese government, which promised last year to invest $15bn in seed money to kickstart its own electric car industry – then it could seriously challenge not just our perception of electric cars, but also the interests of oil companies with their vast global network of petrol stations.
Send them on the Birthright trip.
Here’s an interesting feature in the Nation on the countless number of Jews who are sent on a short propaganda trip to Israel in an attempt to convince them that Arabs are terrorists and the occupied Palestinian territories are in fact Zionist land:
Birthright’s boosters seem strangely unaware of the tribe’s more visible woes, the forty-four-year illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the racism and legal discrimination that underpins Israel’s ethnocracy. If the former was kept nearly invisible on my Birthright trip, the latter was laid uncommonly bare.
Our guide was Shachar Peleg-Efroni, a second-generation secular kibbutznik. Several times a day he said things like, “Arabs are those who originated from Saudi Arabia.” Everything we saw out the tour bus window was “in the Bible,” reinforcing Zionist claims to the land. He used “Palestinian” interchangeably with “terrorist.” Driving through northern Israel, Shachar gave a lesson in “Judaization,” the government’s term for settlement policy. Passing through an Israeli-Arab town, he called our attention to a litter-strewn road (perhaps the result of inequities in municipal funding, which escaped mention) and then pointed to a neat ring of state-subsidized Jewish towns. “Judaization,” he explained, was necessary “to keep them from spreading.” My American crush and I exchanged a knowing look.
From my notes on Day 8: “Israel just went in and cleaned Gaza,” Shachar said of Operation Cast Lead, which had taken place a year earlier, as we drove south to an organic farm along the border. There, the Israeli proprietor explained that his low-hanging trellises were Thai worker–sized and invited us to nibble the dangling strawberries. “Thank you, Thai worker!” he instructed us to say when a laborer walked by. En route to the next stop on the itinerary, Shachar pointed to tin shacks—Bedouin villages—and jovially detailed the government’s Bedouin home-demolition campaign, saying the IDF needed to “kick them away.” We arrived at our far more picturesque “Bedouin Dessert [sic] Village Experience” and rode camels into the sunset. A man named Mohammed served coffee and played a familiar tune on the oud: “Hava Nagila.”
To varying degrees, Birthrighters from an array of other trips have recounted similar experiences. “Don’t go to the Arab Quarter, because they will throw acid on your face,” Max Geller recalls his Birthright guide saying in 2006. Geller’s trip also featured AwesomeSeminar.com’s Neil Lazarus, a pro-Israel advocacy trainer who says he’s delivered presentations since Birthright’s inception. (“When the Palestinians kill Israeli men, women and children,” Lazarus says in one online video, “they celebrate, and they give out sweets in the streets.”) Lazarus’s take-home was, according to Geller, “Arabs want to kill you.”
While the Australian Zionist lobby continues to attack anybody who dares challenge the Israeli government (or settlements, or the siege on Gaza or Zionism in general) – AIJAC slams me for my recent appearances at the Sydney Writer’s Festival; yes, I dared talk about not believing in a racially discriminatory Jewish state – the Economist just published this. Welcome to the new reality, Zionists:
For many years now, we’ve heard American commentators bemoan the violence of the Palestinian national movement. If only Palestinians had learned the lessons of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, we hear, they’d have had their state long ago. Surely no Israeli government would have violently suppressed a non-violent Palestinian movement of national liberation seeking only the universally recognised right of self-determination.
Palestinian commentators and organisers, including Fadi Elsalameen and Moustafa Barghouthi, have spent the last couple of years pointing out that these complaints resolutely ignore the actual and growing Palestinian non-violent resistance movement. For that matter, they elide the fact that the first intifada, which broke out in 1987, was initially as close to non-violent as could be reasonably expected. For the most part, it consisted of general strikes and protest marches. In addition, there was a fair amount of kids throwing rocks, as well as the continuing threat of low-level terrorism, mainly from organisations based abroad; the Israelis conflated the autochthonous protest movement with the terrorism and responded brutally, and the intifada quickly lost its non-violent character. That’s not that different from what has happened over the past couple of months in Libya; it shows that it’s very hard to keep a non-violent movement non-violent when the government you’re demonstrating against subjects you to gunfire for a sustained period of time.
In any case, if you’re among those who have made the argument that Israelis would give Palestinians a state if only the Palestinians would learn to employ Ghandhian tactics of non-violent protest, it appears your moment of truth has arrived. As my colleague writes, what happened on Nakba Day was Israel’s “nightmare scenario: masses of Palestinians marching, unarmed, towards the borders of the Jewish state, demanding the redress of their decades-old national grievance.” Peter Beinart writes that this represents “Israel’s Palestinian Arab Spring”: the tactics of mass non-violent protest that brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and are threatening to bring down those of Libya, Yemen and Syria, are now being used in the Palestinian cause.
So now we have an opportunity to see how Americans will react. We’ve asked the Palestinians to lay down their arms. We’ve told them their lack of a state is their own fault; if only they would embrace non-violence, a reasonable and unprejudiced world would see the merit of their claims. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of them did just that, and it seems likely to continue. If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protestors continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do? Will we make good on our rhetoric, and press Israel to give them their state? Or will it turn out that our paeans to non-violence were just cynical tactics in an amoral international power contest staged by militaristic Israeli and American right-wing groups whose elective affinities lead them to shape a common narrative of the alien Arab/Muslim threat? Will we even bother to acknowledge that the Palestinians are protesting non-violently? Or will we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power? What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets?
My following article is published today in Overland journal and was co-written with John Docker and Ned Curthoys:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
– Mahatma GandhiIsrael is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world, the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in which the ideal is racist and exclusivist.
– IF StoneOn 14 December 2010, the Marrickville Council in inner-west Sydney, led by its Greens mayor Fiona Byrne, expressed its support for, in her words, ‘the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, to exert peaceful pressure on the government of Israel to honour its human rights obligations to the Palestinians’ (Fiona Byrne, ‘Rates, roads – and justice in Gaza’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 2011). As is well known, the council’s now failed proposal (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 2011) to support BDS was controversial and widely ridiculed, and not only in the feral newspaper The Australian. In conversation, friends and acquaintances who live in the Marrickville municipal area made it clear to us that while they are sympathetic to the Palestinians, they feel such an action is rather absurd and silly for a local council so far from the Middle East. They also thought the Council hadn’t provided its constituents with necessary information. They have a point in terms of the council’s failure to communicate the rationale of a BDS. But was the Marrickville Council support for BDS really so ridiculous? In this essay we try to provide information about BDS that can help stimulate discussion and debate. We contend that supporting BDS is not only necessary in order to help save the Palestinian people from an ongoing catastrophe, but vitally important for the self-respect of the international community.
As anti-Zionist Jews, we support the BDS, and agree with Sonja Karkar of Australians for Palestine (‘Report on BDS Vote in Marrickville’, 21 April 2011) that the Marrickville Council action spectacularly succeeded in bringing nation-wide attention to the existence of the international boycott-Israel movement.
We have our own ideas about what is absurd, and what is allegedly ‘extreme’ on issues to do with Israel/Palestine. It’s clear that not much is known about BDS in Australia, which is not surprising, given the crippled state of the print media in this country and its near-blanket censorship – what other name is there for it? – of views critical of Israel, especially the views of Palestinian, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals. On this issue the media in Australia make a mockery of democracy, media diversity, and intelligent and empirically informed journalism (Antony Loewenstein). Compared to the UK – think the Guardian and Independent – the print media in Australia is second-rate, and, given the near monopoly of the Murdoch press, getting worse. It’s stunning that so many Australian ‘journalists’ can accept money from the Israeli government, or from Zionist organizations in Australia dedicated to providing active support for the Israeli state, to visit Israel. It’s clear that upon their return they act as advocates and agents of influence for Israel, uncritically enunciating the policy concerns and worldview of an ethnocentric state with a racist immigration policy, a state that supports and subsidizes the ongoing colonisation of Palestine, illegal under international law; a state that is opposed to Australia’s own values as a secular, non-racial, pluralistic society. Aren’t journalists supposed to be independent of the state – any state? Isn’t this situation absurd?
There are, however, and thankfully, alternative sources of information. Here we focus on Omar Barghouti, whose 2011 book BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights draws attention to the epigraphs we’ve used above from Gandhi and I.F. Stone (pp.1, 78). Barghouti is in the great tradition of Palestinian intellectuals, historians and poets like Edward W. Said, Walid Khalidi, and Mahmoud Darwish, maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish diaspora and the Israeli people while advocating Palestinian rights in the most eloquent terms possible. With postgraduate degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, he works in Palestine as a dance choreographer. Barghouti is a founding member of both PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which made its first call for boycott in April 2004, and the general Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which made its call a year later, in 2005.
Importantly, Barghouti points out in BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions that the ‘BDS movement as such does not adopt any specific political formula’, for example, it steers away from the ‘one-state-versus-two-states debate, focusing instead on universal rights and international law’ (pp.51-52). He does, however, offer his own personal vision. He tells us that on ‘a personal level, not as a representative of the BDS movement’, he has for over twenty-five years consistently supported the one-state solution, ‘a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote – regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on’. Such a state can ‘reconcile our inalienable rights as indigenous Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as colonial settlers, once they’ve shed their colonial character and privileges and accepted justice and international law’ (p.178).
He opposes violence: ‘Even when it is in reaction to colonial violence, an indiscriminate attack on the civilian community of the oppressors is morally unjustifiable, in my opinion’; international law ‘never condones deliberate or criminally negligent attacks against civilians. I fully endorse that’ (p.130). So do we. Barghouti sees BDS as part of the tradition of non-violence whose most famous representatives are Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, though the majority of Palestinians have always engaged in ‘non-violent resistance even before the inspiration of Gandhi, King, and Mandela’ (p.174). Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, he reminds us, liken Israeli occupation practices to apartheid South Africa. The present BDS campaign itself is ‘largely inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa’, though he does not suggest that the two situations are identical. The analogy is worthwhile, however, since ‘Israel’s system of bestowing rights and privileges according to ethnic and religious identity’, including allowing Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories to vote in Israeli elections and creating infrastructure, including modern highway systems, designed for the near exclusive use of those settlers, fits both the UN definition of apartheid in its Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973 and the International Criminal Court’s Rome statute of 2002.
Barghouti describes Zionism and the Israeli state – and such a description should make all Australians think of our own history of colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands – as one of ‘settler colonialism’ (p.4). He regards Zionism as a form of racism, and refers to the Israeli state as ‘ethnocentric, racist, and exclusivist’. Drawing on Ilan Pappé’s 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he recalls that Israel’s creation in 1948 involved ‘massive ethnic cleansing, massacres, rape, wanton destruction of hundreds of villages’ by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army. Such brutality was ‘premeditated’ and ‘meticulously planned’ by Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister). Over 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed and uprooted and more than four hundred villages were ‘methodically destroyed to prevent the return of the refugees’. Now refugees and internally displaced persons, the majority of the population of Gaza (something ignored by the pro-Israeli media who are deliberately ahistorical about these issues), make up two-thirds of the Palestinian population.
Barghouti believes that the BDS movement, appealing to people of conscience everywhere, is necessary ‘to avert genocide’, by which he means Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinians as a people, enacted through the annexation of Palestinian land, alienation of Palestinian farmers from their arable lands, restrictions on Palestinian housing and construction permits, attacks on Palestinian olive crops, attacks on Palestinian rights of assembly, cultural expression and schooling, the mass imprisonment of young Palestinian men and boys, removal of Palestinian populations from East Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank, onerous military curfews, attacks on Palestinian freedom of movement, and a crippling undermining of the Palestinian economy.
In Gaza, Barghouti writes, the situation is desperate. He quotes the international law expert Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who argued in 2007 that what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza reveals a ‘deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty’. Falk urges the governments of the world and international public opinion to ‘act urgently to prevent these genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy’. Barghouti also quotes the Goldstone Report (more on the unfortunate Richard Goldstone in a moment) on the December 2008-January 2009 war on Gaza saying that the Israeli assault was a ‘deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’. Both Falk and the Goldstone Report emphasise that the Israeli mistreatment of the people of Gaza, which has included the destruction of their schools, wells, electricity generators, crops, and factories, reveals deliberate intention and systematic policy (pp.36-37, 46).
We can only lament Goldstone’s recent ‘turn’ here. While the meticulous research and legal judgements of the Report still stand, Goldstone’s reputation is irreparably damaged (Richard Falk, ‘What Future for the Goldstone Report? Beyond the Name’, 20 April 2011). In our view, Goldstone’s stumbling retreat from the Report reveals the acute dilemma facing many progressive Jews with a residual sympathy for Israel: the choice between supporting international humanitarian law, or a repugnant Israeli state dedicated to stonewalling and undermining the principles of international humanitarian law. The latter is a trait of the Israeli state at least since the late 1940s when it refused to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as required by international law (UN General Assembly resolution 194, 1948). Goldstone chose to support the Israeli state, thereby betraying the Palestinian people, his colleagues in international law, and the traditions of Jewish humanism and universalism that inspired him to investigate the events in Gaza in the first place. Despite Goldstone’s reversal, those traditions are now re-asserting themselves across the world, exampled by the inspiring support given to the BDS movement by leading Jewish intellectuals and activists such as Judith Butler and Naomi Klein. Richard Falk himself, who is Jewish, deserves very honourable mention in this respect as well.
Barghouti argues that the Palestinian call for BDS demands Israel observe the fundamental human right to full equality, ending its ‘system of racial discrimination against its Palestinian citizens’. He sees recognition of the Palestinian right of return as ‘the litmus test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict’. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war, including the West Bank of which East Jerusalem is a part, is illegal in international law. All Israeli settlements established in the occupied territories are a violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which Barghouti quotes: ‘The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’. An example in the academic sphere is the Hebrew University, which has moved Israeli staff and students into illegally confiscated land in East Jerusalem. On 9 July 2004, The International Court of Justice in The Hague declared that Israel’s construction of the infamous apartheid wall is illegal because it annexes Palestinian land and separates Palestinians from their lands, as it was surely designed to do.
BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions dismisses any accusation that the boycott campaign is anti-Semitic (pp.82-83). For one thing, as part of the struggle for ‘universal rights’, BDS is opposed to ‘all forms of racism and racist ideologies, including anti-Semitism’. For another, as we have suggested, there is growing support for the Palestinian-led BDS from Jews inside and outside Israel. In Israel, on 27 June 2010, following the Palestinian Queers for BDS initiative, ‘an Israeli LGBT’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) call endorsed BDS. Israeli groups of Palestinians and Jews that have endorsed the BDS call include the Alternative Information Centre, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, and Who Profits from the Occupation? which is a project of the Coalition of Women for Peace. Who Profits? keeps a database of Israeli and international corporations involved in the occupation. There is also the ‘courageous Israeli BDS group Boycott from Within’.
Outside Israel, there is accelerating Jewish support for the BDS campaign, beginning with the famous letter from Steven Rose and Hilary Rose to the Guardian on 6 April 2002 calling for a moratorium on EU funding of research collaboration with Israel, funding which is meant to be predicated on respect for human rights. In September 2010, more than 150 US and British theatre, film, and TV artists issued a statement initiated by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), supporting the boycott movement. In October 2010 Israeli-British architect, Abe Hayreem, founder of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, described how Israeli architecture and planning are instruments of the occupation. Jewish intellectuals mentioned by Barghouti who have been prominent worldwide in supporting BDS include Judith Butler, Mike Leigh, Richard Falk, Naomi Klein, Ilan Pappé, and Ronnie Kasrils. In the United States, issues like the BDS movement and Israel’s increasing distance from an American self-image of an inclusive liberal democracy based on human rights, are beginning to seriously fracture the Jewish community.
And what of local authorities in various countries? The implication of the ridicule of the Marrickville Council proposal appears to be that this small local government was the only one in the world silly enough to think globally and support the BDS. On the contrary. In June 2010 the South African Municipal Workers Union, we read in BDS: Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions, initiated a campaign ‘to rid all municipalities in South Africa of Israeli products’ in order to make them apartheid-Israel free zones, a campaign that has ‘started firing the imagination of BDS activists elsewhere’. There has been local council support for the Palestinian and international campaign against the Jerusalem Light Rail, the Israeli project whereby two giant French firms, Veolia and Alstom, build a tram route serving Israel’s illegal colonies in and surrounding occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In the West Midlands, UK, the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council decided not to consider further Veolia’s bid for the Waste Improvement Plan contract; Barghouti says that while the decision was presented as commercial, he is confident it was the result of BDS pressure. Furthermore, several local campaigns, from Hampshire County to Liverpool to Camden to South Yorkshire, have ‘sprouted to derail Veolia’ from large public works contracts. Barghouti welcomes BDS actions wherever they occur, however small or directed to one object: ‘As I’ve jokingly said in my talks’, even if a group ‘decides to launch a campaign targeting Israeli tomatoes only’, the Palestinians would be glad. He admires CodePink who have ‘chosen to focus their creative energies on boycotting AHAVA, the Israeli cosmetics company’ that manufactures in occupied Palestinian territory. Many campaigns in Europe, he adds, ‘have a narrow focus in their BDS targets, and that’s perfectly fine’.
We believe that support for BDS is crucial for the future of the international community if it is serious about upholding the principles of international law, which include non-aggression towards civilians, the illegality of occupying and annexing foreign territories, and the refusal to legitimise racist and apartheid systems of governance. The Western powers, including Australia, attempt to lead the world by relentlessly suggesting they alone act on behalf of universal principles of justice, human rights, and international law. Yet their cynicism in ignoring universal rights whenever it is convenient to do so in their own interests (think of Western intervention in Libya, yet no support for democracy in Bahrain) is glaringly revealed in the history of Israel/Palestine since 1948. Those powers blatantly protect the state of Israel, ignoring universal rights and international law, despite the fact that Israel’s self-conception, as I.F. Stone observed, is ‘racist and exclusivist’ (‘Holy War’, New York Review of Books, 3 August 1967); Israel is, according to its own preferred self-definition, a state that serves the prerogatives and interests of Jewish nationals rather than the entirety of its citizens. Consequently, while the Palestinians face a very bleak future that includes diminution of land and water rights and continuing exposure to military violence, the West generates anger and contempt for its egregious hypocrisy. We submit that BDS is indeed a litmus test for humanity, because it asks the world’s citizens to act to uphold universal human rights. If BDS fails, we are all diminished.
Israeli peace group Peace Now explains the addiction of colonies experienced by the Zionist state:
On the 26th of September 2010, the 10 months settlement moratorium came to an end. Since then, the settlers have managed to “catch up” with the construction freeze and erase its effect, starting construction of some 2,000 housing units in 75 different settlements and outposts, one third of them in settlements east of the Separation Barrier (this number is higher than the yearly average for the last few years). Meanwhile the Israeli Government has approved the planning and marketing of at least 800 new units in 13 settlements.
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent most of the afternoon in discussions on Friday, after which Netanyahu told his staff that he felt better about the U.S.-Israeli relationship than when he went in.
“Look, I went into the meeting with concerns and I came out of the meeting encouraged,” Netanyahu said after emerging from the marathon session at the White House, according to one Israeli official who was part of Netanyahu’s briefing.
The meeting went on so long that the working lunch that Obama and Netanyahu had scheduled with their respective staffs was cancelled; the two leaders had food brought in, and the other officials and staffers went to eat on their own. The U.S. officials present included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, NSC Senior Director Dennis Ross, incoming Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, and the State Department’s Acting Middle East Envoy David Hale.
But there was some disagreement between the two leaders. In Obama and Netanyahu’s public remarks following the meeting, the Israeli prime minister declared that Israel “cannot go back to the 1967 lines — because these lines are indefensible.” The Israeli official insisted that Netanyahu was not lecturing Obama in his statement, but simply felt it necessary to publicly state clear Israeli positions on major issues.
“This is not a personal issue,” the Israeli official said. “[H]e wanted to go on record in public and state what Israel’s red lines are, what is imperative for Israel’s security needs.”
Those red lines include that Israel cannot accept a return to negotiations based on the 1967 lines, as Obama said was U.S. policy on Thursday; Israel cannot accept the return of Palestinian refugees; and Israel cannot negotiate with any government that includes the participation of Hamas.
Netanyahu called Clinton on Thursday morning, prior to Obama’s address on U.S. policy toward the Middle East, to try to convince her to take the contentious lines out of his speech. The official described it as a “tough conversation.”
But there was also a lot of agreement inside the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. The two leaders talked about Syria, Iran, and Israel’s defense needs. Obama tried to explain to why he decided to make his policy announcement about the 1967 borders on Thursday, and he clarified the U.S. position on Hamas and the Palestinian right of return, where there is largely bilateral agreement.
On a conference call with Jewish leaders on Thursday, a recording of which was provided to The Cable, National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes also tried to clarify Obama’s remarks.
“The president reiterated our support for core principles and he also stated the U.S. position on issues of territory and security that can be the foundation for future negotiations, specifically a Palestinian state based on 1967 lines with swaps,” he said. “It can provide a basis for negotiations as the parties address security and territory as well as the very emotional issues of Jerusalem and refugees.”
The Mearsheimer/Walt thesis on America’s (worrying powerful) Israel lobby is proven right time and time again. Today’s Wall Street Journal:
Jewish donors and fund-raisers are warning the Obama re-election campaign that the president is at risk of losing financial support because of concerns about his handling of Israel.
The complaints began early in President Barack Obama’s term, centered on a perception that Mr. Obama has been too tough on Israel.
Some Jewish donors say Mr. Obama has pushed Israeli leaders too hard to halt construction of housing settlements in disputed territory, a longstanding element of U.S. policy. Some also worry that Mr. Obama is putting more pressure on the Israelis than the Palestinians to enter peace negotiations, and say they are disappointed Mr. Obama has not visited Israel yet.
One top Democratic fund-raiser, Miami developer Michael Adler, said he urged Obama campaign manager Jim Messina to be “extremely proactive” in countering the perception in the Jewish community that Mr. Obama is too critical of Israel.
He said his conversations with Mr. Messina were aimed at addressing the problems up front. “This was going around finding out what our weaknesses are so we can run the best campaign,” said Mr. Adler, who hosted a fund-raiser at his home for Mr. Obama earlier this year.
“Good friends tell you how you can improve. They don’t tell you ‘everything’s great’ and then you find out nobody buys the food in your restaurants,” he said.
It is difficult to assess how widespread the complaints are. Many Jews support Mr. Obama’s approach to the Middle East, and his domestic agenda. But Jewish fund-raisers for Mr. Obama say they regularly hear discontent among some supporters.
The Obama campaign has asked Penny Pritzker, Mr. Obama’s 2008 national finance chairwoman, to talk with Jewish leaders about their concerns, Ms. Pritzker said. So far, she said, she’s met with about a half dozen people. She said the campaign is in the process of assembling a larger team for similar outreach.
“I do think there’s an education job to be done, because there’s lots of myths that abound and misunderstandings of the administration’s record,” she said. “The campaign is aggressively getting the information out there.”
Robert Copeland, a Virginia Beach, Va., developer, who has given large donations to many Democrats, has already decided he won’t vote for Mr. Obama in 2012. “I’m very disappointed with him,” he said. “His administration has failed in Israel. They degraded the Israeli people.”
A leading Jew is blocked from receiving an honorary degree at City University of New York because he’s critical of Israel (and dares challenge the Jewish state’s occupation policies in strong ways, which is more than most liberal Zionists do). Although the decision has been reversed and Kushner has got his piece of paper, the whole episode is instructive of what’s happening to public opinion in the US over the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Here’s Kushner on Democracy Now! this week:
I think that a policy in the Middle East in this country, based on right-wing fantasies and theocratic fantasies and scripture-based fantasies of what history and on-the-ground reality is telling us, is catastrophic and is going to lead to the destruction of the state of Israel. These people are not defending it. They’re not supporting it. They’re in fact, I think, causing a distortion of U.S. policy regarding Israel and a distortion of the internal politics of Israel itself, because they exert a tremendous influence in Israel and support right-wing politicians who I think have led the country into a very dark and dangerous place. And, you know, I think, at the moment, Israel has many, many more serious problems than me. And I think that if people like Jeffrey Wiesenfeld were really concerned about the continued existence of Israel, they should take a look at what has happened in the past, going all the way back to ’47 and ’48, and what actually happened when the state of Israel was founded, and to try and understand the reality that the country faces now and to, you know, understand the realities that the Palestinian people face, because it’s impossible to shape a legitimate and successful path towards peace based on rhetoric and demagoguery and fantasy.
Leading BDS proponent Omar Barghouti, who is clearly anti-Zionist, writes that Israel increasingly finds itself having to defend racist policies and the Zionist Diaspora is caught in a delicious bind:
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League repeats the mantra that by advocating comprehensive Palestinian rights, including full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the UN-sanctioned right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were forcibly displaced, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is “de-legitimizing” Israel and threatening its very “existence.” This claim is frequently made by Israel lobby groups in an obvious attempt to muddy the waters and to push beyond the pale of legitimate debate the mere statement of facts about and analysis of Israel’s occupation, denial of refugee rights, and institutionalized system of racial discrimination, which basically fits the UN definition of apartheid.
Specifically, what is often objected to is the demand for full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. One can only wonder, if equality ends Israel’s “existence,” what does that say about Israel? Did equality destroy South Africa? Did it “delegitimize” whites in the Southern states of the U.S. after segregation was outlawed? The only thing that equality, human rights and justice really destroy is a system of injustice, inequality and racial discrimination.
The “delegitimization” scare tactic, widely promoted by Israel’s well-oiled pressure groups, has not impressed many in the West, in fact, particularly since its most far-reaching claim against BDS is that the movement aims to “supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle” — hardly the most evil or disquieting accusation for anyone even vaguely interested in democracy, a just peace, and equal rights.
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Having largely lost the battle for hearts and minds at the grassroots level in several key European and other states, and due to a significant rise in negative ratings of Israel in the U.S. public, Israel’s lobby groups in the United States are desperately trying to safeguard Israel’s impunity. Cognizant of the circumstances and dynamics that marked the final stages in the struggle against South African apartheid, Israel is only too well aware of the dire consequences of its militarist, unjust, and patently discriminatory policies being exposed to the U.S. public, its last bastion of popular support around the world. Without challenging Israel’s exceptionalism, however, the prospects for comprehensive and sustainable peace based on justice will remain dim.
This is so desperate it’s comical. Those backing Jewish colonies who live in the Zionist Diaspora want nothing more than no debate over the growing numbers of young Jews turning away from Israeli occupation policies.
American Ted Lapkin (who used to work for the Zionist lobby AIJAC and now lurks with a right-wing think-tank) once wrote regularly in the Australian media about the glories of the Iraq war, the Afghan war, war on Iran, Israeli wars on Palestine, wars on Arabs and just war in general. He seemed oblivious to the fact that such rabid views made Jews seem like war-mongers who couldn’t help kill Arabs at any opportunity. Great PR for Zionism.
He’s now back, writing on the ABC today that young Jews still love Israel and people like me simply can’t accept that Israel is a glorious place. Any mention of the West Bank occupation? Of course not. Siege on Gaza? Hardly. Rampant Israeli racism against Arabs? No chance. Any understanding that mainstream debate in the US is rapidly changing? Fat chance.
Debate about Israeli crimes is now mainstream.
Onto the delusions:
The ‘disaffected Jew’ meme also popped up last year in the pages of the Leftwing NewMatilda magazine. “The Jewish Disaspora is Turning on Israel”, proclaimed the headline of an article by Antony Loewenstein, John Docker and Ned Curthoys.
But the recent publication of two academic research surveys has cast the theory of Jewish detachment from Israel into serious intellectual disrepute. The American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) 2010 Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion found that 74 per cent of American Jews felt “fairly close” or “very close” to Israel. This figure is entirely consistent with the findings of previous surveys done over the past decade.
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The more extreme version of the Jewish disaffection thesis peddled by Loewenstein, Docker and Curthoys is relatively easy to dismiss. After all, these are self-avowed enemies of Zionism who oppose a Jewish state both in concept and reality. And as we have observed, their argument flies in the face of objective polling reality.
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Since the 1967 war, it is undeniable that Left-of-centre opinion has moved away from support for Israel towards empathy with mortal enemies of the Jewish state. This is most pronounced amongst radical academics and rent-a-mob protestors who march arm and arm with Hezbollah supporters in street demonstrations.
But these currents have also taken their toll within the more moderate currents of the centre-Left. And as a result, support for Israel is far less pronounced these days amongst progressives than it is amongst conservatives.
Beinart attributes that erosion to Israel’s abandonment of its original sublime ideals. He claims that it isn’t he who left Zionism, but that Zionism left him.
But the true act of defection has been on the part of Western progressives who have cast by the wayside the only full-fledged democracy in the otherwise benighted Middle East.
The greatest supporters of Israel these days are Christian fundamentalists and those who love a charming settlement in the middle of Palestinian land. That’s quite a future Zionism is building for itself.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has spent his life protecting poor little Israel and writing columns from his ivory tower. His latest piece proves what many people have been saying for a long time; Zionism cannot thrive, let alone survive, with real democracy in the Middle East. What does that say about supposed Jewish self-determination?
Have no illusions: The main goal of the rejectionists today is to lock Israel into the West Bank — so the world would denounce it as some kind of Jewish apartheid state, with a Jewish minority permanently ruling a Palestinian majority, when you combine Israel’s Arabs and the West Bank Arabs. With a more democratic Arab world, where everyone can vote, that would be a disaster for Israel. It may be unavoidable, but it would be insane for Israel to make it so by failing to aggressively pursue a secure withdrawal option.
A leading Palestinian voice in Gaza is Haider Eid. I met him in the Strip in 2009. He is well known for piercing supposedly accepted truths about the conflict.
His latest article does not disappoint, puncturing those who are celebrating the possibility of a September UN vote to endorse Palestine:
The induced euphoria that characterizes discussions within the mainstream media around the upcoming declaration of an independent Palestinian state in September, ignores the stark realities on the ground and the warnings of critical commentators. Depicting such a declaration as a “breakthrough,” and a “challenge” to the defunct “peace process” and the right-wing government of Israel, serves to obscure Israel’s continued denial of Palestinian rights while reinforcing the international community’s implicit endorsement of an apartheid state in the Middle East.
The drive for recognition is led by Salam Fayyad, the appointed prime minister of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority. It is based on the decision made during the 1970s by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to adopt the more flexible program of a “two-state solution.” This program maintains that the Palestinian question, the essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, can be resolved with the establishment of an “independent state” in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. In this program Palestinian refugees would return to the state of “Palestine” but not to their homes in Israel, which defines itself as “the state of Jews.” Yet “independence” does not deal with this issue, neither does it heed calls made by the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to transform the struggle into an anti-apartheid movement since they are treated as third-class citizens.
All this is supposed to be implemented after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza. Or will it merely be a redeployment of forces as witnessed during the Oslo period? Yet proponents of this strategy claim that independence guarantees that Israel will deal with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank as one people, and that the Palestinian question can be resolved according to international law, thus satisfying the minimum political and national rights of the Palestinian people. Forget about the fact that Israel has as many as 573 permanent barriers and checkpoints around the occupied West Bank, as well as an additional 69 “flying” checkpoints (“Promoting employment and entrepreneurship …,” Food and Agricultural Organization, 2010). And you might also want to ignore the fact that the existing Jewish-only colonies and roads and other Israeli infrastructure effectively annex more than 54 percent of the West Bank.
Here’s how a major American Jewish publication, Forward, discusses the Middle East, by looking into the real effects on US campuses of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions). The result? Not many tangible successes but something else has clearly been created; raising the rights of Palestinians under Zionist occupation. And that’s priceless:
An Israeli diplomat issued a stark warning to a roomful of Jewish communal professionals at a major Jewish convention last fall. The campaign to impose boycotts, divestment and sanctions on Israel, he said, amounts to putting “a practical warhead on the tip of an ideological rocket.”
The Israeli official, a public diplomacy officer with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs named D.J. Schneeweiss, was not alone in describing in drastic terms the threat posed by the international anti-Israel campaign, known by the acronym BDS, at the New Orleans convention of the Jewish Federations of North America. Since the blow-up months earlier at the University of California, Berkeley, over a student government resolution calling on the school to divest from firms selling weapons to Israel, concern over the BDS movement had been at the forefront of the Jewish communal agenda. Communal officials warned that it gave everyday activists a concrete outlet for their efforts.
And they were willing to do more than just talk: At the convention, officials announced the launch of a $6 million organization that would fight what supporters described as efforts to delegitimize Israel.
But there is little clarity from pro-Israel advocates on the precise scale of the threat, particularly as it exists on North American college campuses, a central battleground in the Israel debate. And while BDS leaders claim to be inspiring a sea change in the American discourse on Israel, they can enumerate few specific gains.
An extensive national survey by the Forward indicates that, despite a sharp increase in the past year, significant BDS activity on North American campuses is limited to a handful of instances since 2005, the year of the official launch of the BDS campaign. The Forward counted 17 instances at 14 campuses over the past six years of a boycott or divestment effort that was significant and well-organized enough to draw an active official response from a student government or campus administrative body.
In no instance has BDS action led to a university in the U.S. or Canada divesting from any company or permanently ceasing the sale of any product.
Both BDS activists and Jewish Israel advocates argue that the small number of significant campus BDS campaigns fails to capture the importance of the movement. But the Forward’s count calls into question the dire rhetoric and far-reaching claims employed by both the proponents and critics of BDS.
Though efforts to impose boycotts on Israeli goods or to divest from firms doing business with Israel date back decades, leaders of the current movement cite as their inspiration the July 2005 statement by scores of Palestinian civil society groups, calling on international supporters of the Palestinian cause to adopt tactics similar to those used to mobilize worldwide action against South Africa’s apartheid regime.
The paper’s editorial highlights the fear within the Zionist community. Note the complete lack of awareness of why BDS has become such a big issue globally; Israeli policies of occupation. This isn’t about Israel needing better PR but about realising that pressure will only increase until Zionists accept that full equality for all its citizens is vital:
If you can believe the breathless e-mails and exhortations sent to some parents of Jewish college students, the nation’s campuses are swarming with anti-Zionists ready to persuade unsuspecting Jewish students to sign up for the local branch of Hamas. We exaggerate, but not by much. There is an assumption that many campuses are increasingly dangerous places for Jewish students, breeding grounds for the insidious movement known as BDS — a push to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel in order to isolate the Jewish state from the family of nations.
Forward reporters spent several months examining that premise and here’s what they found: Only 17 instances of significant BDS activity occurred in North American campuses since 2005, the official start of the pro-Palestinian campaign. Now, that number does not include actions falling under the rubric of free speech — a lecture, a petition drive — because they are difficult to catalog and even more difficult to vilify. Universities, after all, are designed to be places where all manner of ideas are debated and challenged. But the number — only 17, over six years —does include any time groups have taken serious steps to swing campus policy away from supporting Israel.
And in no instance has BDS action led to a university in the U.S. or Canada divesting from any company or permanently ceasing the sale of any product.
By that measure, BDS on campus has so far failed.
Proponents won’t say that, of course, and neither will those opposed to BDS. Both sides have reason to play up the threat. And the truth is, what pro-Israel activists rightfully fear is what BDS supporters want: A shift in tone, a growing acceptability that Israel’s right to exist should be questioned, or even denied.
That threat is real, and it must be addressed, but it also must be kept in perspective. Fighting BDS cannot be turned into a cottage industry for the fearful and anxious. And these efforts must recognize that all calls to boycott are not the same. A group can support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state and still believe that buying products made in the occupied territories helps perpetuate an untenable, immoral situation. Boycotts are peaceful, legitimate tools of economic leverage, and don’t automatically lead to delegitimization.
The black citizens in Montgomery, Ala., who refused to ride segregated buses didn’t believe that their city shouldn’t exist. They were simply using economic clout to challenge and try to change an unjust system.
The real affront is when BDS is targeted against all of Israel, or against its legitimate means of defense. Then it is no longer challenging an unjust system, it is challenging the very right of Jews to govern themselves in their internationally-recognized homeland. That movement must be countered at every turn.
Hopefully, the mainstream leadership of Jewish communal organizations involved in anti-BDS work appreciate these distinctions. Parents must, as well. Those who came of age in the heady days of independence and military victory may find it difficult to know how to deal with criticism of contemporary Israel, and it may be harder still for college students who matured during intifidas and terrorist campaigns. But in confronting the challenge, we must not inflate it and risk making our opponents appear much stronger than they really are.
Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick loves Zionist aggression…anywhere.
In her latest column, she instructs Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to ignore the world, continue occupying Arabs and expanding the occupation. She even mentions Sydney’s Marrickville (brief) embrace of BDS:
The same people telling us to commit suicide now lest we face the firing squad in September would also have us believe that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the single greatest threat to the economy. But that lie was put paid this month with the demise of the Australian town of Marrickville’s BDS-inspired boycott.
Last December, the anti-Israel coalition running the town council voted to institute a trade, sports and academic boycott against Israel. Two weeks ago the council was forced to cancel its decision after it learned that it would cost $3.4 million to institute it. Cheaper Israeli products and services would have to be replaced with more expensive non-Israeli ones.
Both Israel’s booming foreign trade and the swift demise of the Marrickville boycott movement demonstrate that the specter of international isolation in the event that Israel extricates itself from the Palestinian peace process charade is nothing more than a bluff. The notion that Israel will be worse off it Netanyahu admits that Abbas has again chosen war against the Jews over peace with us has no credibility.
The following statement was just released by the Australian Parliamentary Friends of Palestine at the conclusion of the delegation’s Middle East visit:
The Parliamentary Friends of Palestine study tour arrived in Palestine on 17 April and has been here for eight days, visiting the West Bank, Gaza and Israel. It has been an informative and rewarding experience.
We were given a very warm welcome by the people of Palestine and we are grateful for the hospitality and friendship that has been shown to us.
We have met with Palestinian leaders, religious representatives, NGOs, academics, United Nations representatives and we visited Australian development projects.
In addition, the members of the Parliamentary Friendship Group met with current and previous Israeli Knesset Members and Israeli civil society organizations.
We appreciate Australia’s long-standing and bipartisan foreign policy commitment to a secure and independent Palestinian state existing side-by-side with a secure and independent Israel.
Australia is delivering support for Palestine through 4 main pathways:
1. A 5 Year Funding Agreement between Australia and the Palestinian Authority via the World Bank Palestinian Reform and Development Program Trust Fund for the building of transparent, accountable government institutions.
2. Direct aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian refugees.
3. Long-term funding for Australian aid agencies working with Palestinian civil society on a range of projects in the West Bank and Gaza.
4. Education funding through the Australian Leadership Award Fellowships and Australian Post-Graduate Scholarships
The Delegation learned first-hand about the importance of resolving the Final Status Issues of Borders, Security, Settlements, Jerusalem, Water and Refugees.
Our group has visited both the West Bank and Gaza and has seen first-hand the difficulties experienced by Palestinians in their daily lives under occupation; from checkpoints, closures, home demolitions; settlements; the separation wall; and the permit system; as well as the crippling effect of the blockade on Gaza.
It has been instructive to hear first hand from Palestinian farmers about the severe economic and social effects on families and communities, of losing significant farming land to settlements and the Wall, and to then have access to their remaining land severely restricted through the system of permits.
We were told of the lack of access to water, severely impacting Palestinian communities.
Young Palestinian students explained to us the difficulty of crossing multiple checkpoints in order to attend university.
At Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem and the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza, the group met with Palestinian women with breast cancer who are experiencing difficulty accessing treatment.
Statistics show that the death rate for breast cancer within Gaza and the West Bank, stands at 70%, some 30% higher than in the rest of the world.
We will return to Australia with energy and determination to inform our parliamentary colleagues and our communities about the situation as we experienced it on the ground. We look forward to further developing the relationship between our parliaments and peoples.
Palestinians and their President Mahmoud Abbas with whom we met yesterday, have reaffirmed their commitment to peace and their readiness for statehood. We know that ordinary people in Israel also want peace and security.
We sincerely appreciate the support provided by the Palestinian Authority, the Australian Representative Office in Ramallah, the Australian Embassy in Tel Aviv, and the General Delegation of Palestine in Australia.
If anything has been clear over the last months during the Marrickville BDS/Israel-Palestinian debate, it’s that every major, Australian mainstream politician and most journalists simply won’t allow any dissent on the Middle East. Insecurity, paranoia and bullying are the norm. The local Zionist community just wants to sing the Israeli national anthem. And now this insidious McCarthyism grows:
Greens MPs in the Victorian parliament will be forced to declare whether they support a boycott of goods and services from Israel in a potentially fiery reprise of the dispute that has dogged the party in NSW.
A senior Baillieu government minister is planning to draft a motion for debate in the upper house that would force the three Victorian Greens to say whether they back a ban on Israel.
Health Minister David Davis urged Greens MPs across the nation to state their position on the global boycott, divestments and sanctions campaign.
Mr Davis said that if the Greens in Victoria did not publicly state their opposition to the ban he would introduce a motion to force a vote on the issue.
“Given the damaging statements by the Greens in NSW and the unfortunate policy of targeting Israel, it’s important Greens all around the country declare their hand,” Mr Davis told The Australian.
“Do they support the boycott being proposed in NSW or are they opposed to it?”
Mr Davis said it was important for Greens MPs to be honest and open about where they stood on the issue.
Two of the three upper house Greens MPs yesterday refused to reveal their attitudes on the boycott, while the third did not return calls.
The Greens leader in Victoria, Greg Barber, said he had not seen any motion on the issue and that it was a matter of federal policy.
“It’s not my job to have a view because I am a state MP,” he said.
His colleague, Colleen Hartland, said she would not comment until she had seen the proposed motion, adding it was an “interesting” way for Mr Davis to operate in parliament.
The Greens parliamentary whip, Sue Pennicuik, did not respond to calls.
Mr Davis’s bid to force a public declaration from the Greens comes after the push for an Israel boycott sparked heated debate during the NSW election and at Sydney’s Marrickville Council.
Anybody want to talk about Israel’s ever-increasing colonisation? Of course not. The Middle East is changing, and Zionism wants to maintain a status-quo that allows it to occupy and brutalise Palestinians. Fat chance.
Following this week’s Marrickville BDS decision, today’s Sydney Morning Herald publishes an editorial that shows a profound ignorance of the conflict. The word “democracy” is thrown about so carelessly when describing Israel that many in the West continue living under the illusion that Israel proper gives full rights to its citizens. Arabs are profoundly discriminated against. Palestinians in the West Bank are treated like second-class citizens. A democracy doesn’t behave this way (and neither does Australia, by the way, offering many in Aboriginal Australia little more than a dusty town and terrible services).
BDS is vital because simply hoping and praying that Israel will give up its occupation has failed. 44 years of failure. Outside pressure is both necessary and moral:
The short-lived boycott of Israel by Marrickville Council has been an interesting study of how distant foreign policy issues can sometimes intersect with local politics. The council and its mayor, Fiona Byrne, would never have envisaged the attention they ended up getting from what they would have regarded as a worthy but probably futile gesture.
After all, many other councils – especially in the gentrified inner areas of Sydney and Melbourne – have similarly ”warned the Tsar” by adopting causes in conflict with Canberra’s official policy. They have flown the Tibetan or West Papuan flag, hosted East Timorese resistance leaders, damned the Burmese junta. Why not support Palestinians?
The difference is that Israel is a democracy, at least within its pre-1967 borders, and is open to argument; indeed in its domestic politics it’s riven by argument. By jailing a former president for rape and putting a recent prime minister on trial for corruption, it has shown a strong ethos of impartial justice. This suggests engagement, not boycotts, is the way to apply pressure about the continued occupation of the West Bank and control of access to Gaza, and the Jewish settlements. We have argued that Israel, propelled by a rightwards drift in its politics and the rise of ultra-orthodox religious groups, is making the goal of a two-state peace settlement ever more elusive. Formal exclusion could entrench this kind of thinking.
Given the interconnections of the global IT industry, it also emerged that a boycott of every commercial interest linked to Israel could be quite costly to the council budget. Councils have a right to pursue ethical purchasing; they should work out the potential costs first. But this was not just about Israelis and Palestinians. It was about clobbering the rising electoral power of the Greens on the head. Byrne came very close to unseating the former deputy premier Carmel Tebbutt, the most acceptable face of NSW Labor in what was previously an extremely safe Labor seat. The issue was a convenient one to portray the Greens as wacky zealots likely to steer Australia into causes that offend old friends and wider national interests.
Whatever the merits of this particular exercise, it is equally unrealistic to expect local governments to stick to garbage and potholes, as if this is all residents care about. If war is too important to be left to the generals, foreign policy involves more than foreign ministers and diplomats. If Marrickville wants to take a stand, it must be ready for the flak.