Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, October 29, 2012

When it comes to Israel, there are boycotts and there are boycotts

With the arteries of the official Middle East peace process almost terminally hardened, it is easy to understand why some people want to take action into their own hands.

A favoured tactic these days is the boycott.

But when it comes to Israel, there are boycotts and then there are boycotts. Settlement products are one thing; to my mind, Israeli academics quite another.

The boycott that has got the most attention lately is that of products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, essentially colonies of Israeli Jews that have been set up inside the Palestinian West Bank contrary to the most widely accepted interpretation of international law. The population of these settlements has doubled over the last decade to around 350,000.

Canada’s United Church recently officially supported a boycott of settlement products as have so-called liberal Zionists such as the American writer Peter Beinhart who argue that Israel needs to be saved from itself if it is to remain a democracy.

The argument for this boycott is straightforward. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states plainly that an occupying power may not transfer any of its own population into a territory it occupies.

The Israeli government mounts a legalistic rebuttal to this argument.

But if you talk with the settlers as I have  – at least those that are politicized and not just going for cheap housing – they will most often tell you that they have a right to what they call Judea and Samaria, conferred on them by God.

My experience with gods in conflict zones is that they have the unhelpful habit of communicating directly with one of the parties to the conflict without sharing their wisdom or will with the others. This makes them an unreliable guide for outsiders.

When I lived in Israel – first as a journalist and later running a small NGO office in Jerusalem  – I avoided buying settlement products. It was not a boycott, which implies a public political act and would have been inappropriate for me as a reporter. Rather it was a personal ethical decision as a consumer, akin to avoiding the purchase of carpets made with child labour.

Since returning to Canada, I don’t think it has been much of an issue. It is fairly difficult to find settlement products not to buy especially if, like me, you aren’t often shopping for wine or bath salts. In the circumstances, it feels a little grandiose to say that I boycott settlement goods. But if someone else is so inclined, I have no objection.

Where I do have a problem is with a boycott of Israeli academics, which flourished first in Britain and has since spread to Canada, where it has become mixed up with the messy union and student politics over the Middle East. There was a report last week of a York University professor who pulled out of a conference in Austria because it had some Israeli sponsorship.

As someone who supports the right of Israel to exist, but strongly opposes many of the policies of the Israeli government towards both its own Arab citizens and the Palestinians who live in the territories it occupies, I understand some of the sentiments behind such a boycott.

However, in practice if not in theory it indiscriminately targets all Israeli academic and cultural institutions and those who work in them. Anyone who has interacted with Israeli academics knows that they represent a huge range of views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To ostracize them as a group is a terrible mistake.

At a time when Israeli public opinion is closing in on itself – with some Israelis explicitly advocating elements of an apartheid policy – it would be a tragedy to hermetically seal off dialogue with the outside academic world. At a time when Israel’s vaunted press and academic freedom are arguably under threat at home, it would be a mistake to cut off the oxygen of debate from abroad.

Last week, the MIT linguistics professor and leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky – who I do not always consider to be a reliable guide on political matters, I hasten to say – had the courage to go to Gaza and explain why he objects to the boycott of Israeli academics.

He objected on practical grounds, saying that an academic boycott would strengthen Israel’s hand in the United States.

But I think there is a stronger argument to be made on liberal grounds.

One of the fundamental values of academic life is the principle of freedom of expression. The idea is that ideas matter, as does their exchange.

A couple of years ago, I spoke to a conference organized in part by the Israeli embassy that was held in the West Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. At one point I was heckled for saying what I thought: which was that misguided Israeli policy was at least partly to blame for Israel’s political isolation.

I don’t really suppose that I changed any minds. But I am sure that if we stop talking with either the Israelis or the Palestinians, there is very little chance that they will ever resume talking meaningfully with each other. And that is at the heart of this human tragedy.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Paul Adams

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