Spyfail, p.26
Spyfail, page 26
Netanyahu’s problem, however, was that the more Israel’s atrocities came to light, the more the BDS movement gained strength around the United States and the world, both on campuses and throughout Western society. In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a twenty-three-year-old American college student and Palestinian human rights activist, was killed when she was run over by an Israeli military armored bulldozer during a protest. At the time, wearing an orange fluorescent jacket with reflective stripes, she was bravely attempting to protect a Palestinian home in the Rafah refugee camp from demolition. “The driver cannot have failed to see her,” said eyewitness Richard Purssell. “The driver didn’t slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again.” She was far from alone, noted London’s Observer. “On the night of Corrie’s death, nine Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, among them a four-year-old girl and a man aged 90.”
The BDS movement began a few years after Rachel Corrie’s horrific death and modeled itself after the successful worldwide nonviolent anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa. Leading the group as cofounder was Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian and a 1993 graduate of Columbia University with a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He later moved to Israel to pursue a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University. In 2017 he received the Gandhi Peace Award.
Among the movement’s supporters was the late South African archbishop Desmond Tutu, who along with Nelson Mandela had long battled the White apartheid government in Pretoria. During an emotional address and press conference in Boston in 2007, Tutu called Israel “worse” than South African apartheid in some respects, including the illegal use of “collective punishment” of Palestinians. He also criticized the government for its brutality and its “gross violation of human rights.” Mandela was likewise outraged by Israel’s apartheid as well as its key role in supporting South African apartheid and undermining the global boycott against it. “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” he said during an address in Pretoria at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in 1997.
And in July 2022, South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, said Israel should be classified as an apartheid state and that the UN should establish a committee to investigate whether it satisfies the charge. “The Palestinian narrative evokes experiences of South Africa’s own history of racial segregation and oppression,” she added.
By 2015, thanks to a variety of dedicated human rights organizations, within Israel as well as internationally, the evidence was becoming impossible to hide or cover up. Between 2006 and 2012, violent settlers’ attacks on Palestinians nearly quadrupled, with 324 incidents reported in 2014, averaging more than six attacks a week. They often came from outposts manned by religious settlers with kippahs on their heads and automatic weapons over their shoulders. Little would change over the years. In January 2021, settlers from the Mitzpeh Yair outpost attacked a seventy-eight-year-old Palestinian farmer with clubs. Then a gang of about ten returned with pistols, rifles, clubs, axes, and iron chains and went after his family. “Violence by settlers (and sometimes by other Israeli civilians) toward Palestinians has long since become part of daily life under occupation in the West Bank,” concluded a report by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. And then there are the near-daily home destructions. Protected by heavily armed Israeli troops, powerful tractors claw at the walls and roofs of Palestinian homes as workers toss children’s cribs, toys, and family beds into makeshift trash piles.
Over the years, Israel has continued to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Palestinians, land on which they have lived for centuries. Today, about six million Israelis live on 85 percent of the area that was Palestine during the time of the British mandate. As a result, behind four hundred-plus miles of concrete walls over two stories high, Palestinians are squeezed into the remaining 15 percent, with their cities and towns trapped between Israel’s ever-expanding settlements and a network of segregated roads, armed security barriers, and military fortifications. B’Tselem has accused the government of creating conditions that bear “clear similarities to the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa.” John Dugard, a South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor, also sees little difference between the two. “Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the Whites and sending the Blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country,” he said. “And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied territories].” Israel also now allows its draft-age youth to volunteer to protect settlers in the occupied territory rather than serve in the army.
According to Amnesty International, 2015 was a cruel year for occupied Palestinian families, but then again it was not much different from any other year, before or since. The previous summer, during Israel’s bloody war on those living in Gaza, Israeli forces killed over five hundred children, according to a United Nations report. Children seemed to be a key target,1 among them four boys playing soccer on a beach, blown apart by an Israeli shell. In stark, dry, emotionless statistics, Amnesty International offered an equally grim review of 2015:
The authorities detained thousands of Palestinians from the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories]; most were held in prisons inside Israel, in violation of international law. Hundreds were held without charge or trial under renewable administrative detention orders, based on information withheld from them and their lawyers; some engaged in prolonged hunger strikes in protest… The Israeli authorities launched a new clampdown on protests by Palestinians in the OPT amid the escalation in violence from October, arresting more than 2,500 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, and significantly increasing their use of administrative detention.
Israeli military and police forces, as well as Israel Security Agency (ISA) personnel, tortured and otherwise ill-treated Palestinian detainees, including children, particularly during arrest and interrogation. Reports of torture increased amid the mass arrests of Palestinians that began in October. Methods included beating with batons, slapping, throttling, prolonged shackling, stress positions, sleep deprivation and threats. Jewish suspects detained in connection with attacks on Palestinians also alleged torture. Impunity for torture was rife. The authorities had received almost 1,000 complaints of torture at the hands of ISA since 2001 but had yet to open any criminal investigations.
Israeli soldiers and police killed at least 124 Palestinians from the OPT in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, 22 in the Gaza Strip, and 10 inside Israel during the year. Many of those killed, including children, appeared to be victims of unlawful killings.
Israeli forces, including undercover units, used excessive and lethal force against protesters in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, killing dozens, including 43 in the last quarter of the year, and injuring thousands with rubber-coated metal bullets and live ammunition. While many protesters threw rocks or other projectiles, they generally posed no threat to the lives of well-protected Israeli soldiers when they were shot. In September, Israel’s security cabinet authorized police to use live ammunition in East Jerusalem. On 9 and 10 October, Israeli forces used live ammunition and rubber-coated metal bullets against Palestinian protesters in border areas of the Gaza Strip, killing nine, including a child, and injuring scores.
Conditions would only grow worse. On July 22, 2019, nine hundred Israeli soldiers and border police arrived in the Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi al-Hummus to demolish thirteen apartment blocks. Following the destruction, the former residents, poor, destitute, and psychologically traumatized, would sit on the broken slabs of cement and watch as the same tractors returned. This time, however, the dust would be caused by the construction of modern homes in a new illegal Jewish settlement surrounded by a chain-link fence, barbed wire, and armed guards.
Among the victims was fifty-two-year-old Abdul-Ghani Awawdeh. “They startled us with no prior notification,” he said. “We slept on the ground covered with a plastic bag.” By then, according to a scorecard maintained by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), the total number of Palestinian structures deliberately destroyed by Israel had reached nearly fifty thousand. Israel’s aim, according to ICAHD, is “to Judaize Palestine, to transform an Arab country into a Jewish one.”
In May 2022, fear ran through the Najjar family when a neighbor called with the message “The bulldozer is coming.” By then, the house demolitions had eclipsed a thousand since the day Biden took office, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Among them was the home of a ninety-five-year-old physically disabled woman. Her family had built it on the ruins of the house in which she had lived for the last fifteen years to make it wheelchair-accessible.
“Gangs of settlers carry out raids in the dead of night, attacking in Ku Klux Klan style,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli attorney and expert in humanitarian law who represents Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations. “The evidence of how the Israeli government abets settler criminality is extensive and unequivocal.”
Even members of the government could no longer keep silent. “We, members of the Jewish people, which has suffered pogroms throughout history, come and perpetrate a pogrom on others. These aren’t people. They’re subhuman,” Deputy Economy Minister Yair Golan told Israeli television viewers in January 2022. “This extremist, nationalist wild behavior will bring disaster upon us.” But rather than take action against the settlers, the Israeli government instead condemned Golan, calling his comments “shocking” and “bordering on blood libel.”
Netanyahu’s greatest fear was that as a result of the growing strength of the BDS movement, the public would finally begin seeing Israel in the same light that many people in the rest of the world, and even in Israel, saw it: as a brutal apartheid state.
Unlike many in their parents’ generation, the students who supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement rejected Israel’s claims of being a democratic country while at the same time denying not only the vote but even basic human rights to millions of people under military occupation. Nor did they accept the pious assertions that God had given Israel exclusively to the Jews. These were claims blindly accepted by generations of older Americans captivated by the idea of Israel rather than its reality. It was a faux Israel propagated by well-financed pro-Israel pressure groups, powerful lobbies, and politicians pandering for payoffs.
The BDS student activists seemed to even have a layer of Kryptonite as phony charges of anti-Semitism, the tired, go-to weapon used to instantly silence the press and critics of Israel, simply bounced right off them. But most of all they had the courage to fight against an unjust regime in Israel, as an earlier generation of American students fought against an unjust war in Vietnam.
Originally dismissed as inconsequential by Netanyahu and other Israelis, by 2015 the boycott movement had become one of the country’s biggest political threats. On the same weekend that Adelson’s secret task force was forming in Las Vegas, an Associated Press news article noted, “In boardrooms and campuses, on social media and in celebrity circles, momentum seems to be growing for a global pressure campaign on Israel. The atmosphere recalls the boycotts that helped demolish apartheid South Africa a quarter century ago… Increasingly prominent is the so-called ‘BDS’ (boycott-disinvestment-sanctions) movement, run by Palestinians and leftist activists from around the world.”
To Israel’s shock, the week before the launch of Adelson’s task force, FIFA, the world’s main soccer body, considered the country’s expulsion at the request of the Palestinians, but at the last minute the Palestinians withdrew it. Shortly afterward, Orange, the giant French telecoms company, notified the Israeli government that it wanted to terminate its relationship with the Israeli company that licensed its brand. And around the same time, the National Union of Students in the UK voted to support boycotting Israel.
Then the European Union ruled that goods produced by Israelis in the illegally occupied territories be labeled “made in settlements.” Norway, although not a member like Sweden and Finland, followed suit. It was a deep embarrassment, reminiscent of actions against apartheid South Africa, and would make it easier for countries to boycott Israeli goods. The action coincided with a critical Human Rights Watch report that noted how Israeli businesses had exploited the occupation for profit, calling it unlawful and abusive.
Over the years, the movement quickly would spread. The 5.6-million strong British Trade Union Congress voted unanimously in favor of a motion to “encourage affiliates, employers and pension funds to disinvest from and boycott” Israel. The organization charged, “For too long the international community has stood idly by as the Israeli state has been allowed to carry out its crimes and this cannot be tolerated or accepted any longer. Decisive action is now urgently needed in relation to Israel’s illegal actions against the Palestinians.” And later the British Labor Party Conference voted in favor of a motion to identify Israel as a state practicing the crime of apartheid. The motion committed the party to implement sanctions, including ceasing UK-Israel arms trade and trade with illegal Israeli settlements.
At Cambridge University, in a demonstration that recalled the anti-apartheid campaigns in South Africa, students demonstrated against visiting Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Protestors chanted, “Silence is complicity, acceptance is complicity, platforming is complicity.” And in an open letter, the students wrote, “Hotovely is a proud supporter of Israeli settler colonialism.”
In the United States, the BDS movement was gaining significant ground with both religious and educational organizations. The New England Conference of the United Methodist Church condemned Israel’s apartheid system by an 88 to 12 percent vote. According to the resolution, “Israel has blatantly codified a racist governing principle in the Nation State Basic Law of 2018, which grants self-determination exclusively to the Jewish citizens of Israel; Jewish supremacy was thereby made a binding constitutional principle and all state institutions must now promote Jewish supremacy.” Therefore, “the Conference calls on the U.S. government to condition U.S. funding to Israel upon Israel’s willingness to dismantle its apartheid system and implement all the rights due to Palestinians under international law.” (emphasis in original)
Adding to the pressure, the U.S. Presbyterian Church during its 2022 General Assembly also voted overwhelmingly to recognize that “Israel’s laws, policies and practices regarding the Palestinian people fulfill the international legal definition of apartheid.” They determined that Palestinians have been systematically oppressed through inhuman acts for the objective of racial domination and called on the United States to take action against Israel. “Christians spoke out in the 1950s against segregation in the United States and later against apartheid in South Africa,” said the resolution. “They must again raise their voices and condemn Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians and give a name to the crime against humanity that this discrimination represents, the crime of apartheid,” it said.
Around the same time, the Episcopal Church in the U.S. at its Baltimore convention passed resolutions that “condemn the continued occupation, segregation and oppression of the Palestinian people” and called on President Biden and Congress to “oppose legislation that punishes supporting nonviolent boycotts and divestments on behalf of Palestinian human rights.” Then the governing body of the World Council of Churches charged that Israel’s “discrimination against Palestinians is overt and systemic, and the ongoing half-century-long occupation continues to contradict the equal human dignity and human rights of Palestinians living under this system of control, while the response of the international community continues to reflect egregious double standards.”
And in a surprising move, the North Carolina Democratic Party adopted a resolution calling for Israel to end its “commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.” Titled “A Resolution in Support of Human Rights in Israel/Palestine,” it said the United States should end its arms sales to Israel and impose “targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, on those individuals and entities that continue to commit” human right crimes. It also alleged that Israel had engaged in massive ethnic cleansing with the forcible transfers of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and the seizure of 65 to 85 percent of Palestinian land within Israel in service of Jewish settlements.
In the state of Washington, the Seattle Education Association passed a resolution expressing solidarity with Palestine and endorsing the BDS movement. “As a Jewish Educator, I am proud to be a member of SEA,” said Emma Klein. “Educators and institutions from around the world have come forward, as part of a vibrant and growing international movement in opposition to Israeli colonization and apartheid. We call on others to join us.” Shortly before, the United Educators of San Francisco, a union representing sixty-two hundred public school teachers and aides in the city, also passed a resolution endorsing BDS. “Over 1,500 Palestinians from neighborhoods in Jerusalem are facing the threat of forced displacement and home demolitions by Israeli authorities,” said the resolution. “This pattern and practice of dispossession and expansion of settlements has been found to be illegal under international law.”
For Netanyahu and many Israelis the greatest humiliation came when actress Natalie Portman, who is Jewish and was born in Israel, refused to accept one of Israel’s highest honors, the Genesis Prize, known as the “Jewish Nobel.” Her decision, noted Haaretz, is “a very big deal” that “has touched a very raw nerve.” Presented during a high-profile ceremony, it comes with a $1 million prize that recipients are free to direct toward causes of their choice. “The mistreatment of those suffering from today’s atrocities is simply not in line with my Jewish values,” Portman said. “Because I care about Israel, I must stand up against violence, corruption, inequality and abuse of power.” Regarding Netanyahu, she has said, “I find his racist comments horrific.”
