A half century of occupa.., p.24
A Half Century of Occupation, page 24
V
The BDS civil society movement broke into the public arena with its call in July 2005. Its resistance tactics are based on the double rejection of the premises of Oslo and the violent means of the Second Intifada and Hamas. BDS is a loose network of some 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, from trade and professional unions through social service and women’s organizations to bodies already dedicated to specialized struggles (such as the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-apartheid Wall Campaign and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). Philosopher Omar Barghouti, one of the movement’s founders and major intellectual spokespersons, presents the movement’s means and goals in his volume BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.35 The movement has many spokespersons, and their emphases and preferences vary. Abunimah and Erakat offer two additional keen analyses of the issues raised by BDS. Their writings are at once supportive of BDS and critical of some of its aspects.
To start, we need to recognize just how innovative the BDS movement is. In at least three ways, BDS places the Palestinian struggle against Israel on a new footing that is transgressive compared to other approaches. First, the BDS movement is unlike the PNA, which is seeking to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem through the creation of a state in part of Palestine, and is distinct from Hamas, which wishes to establish an Islamic state in all of Palestine. It struggles for equal rights—humanitarian, human rights and fully equal citizenship—rather than for a Palestinian state. This shift is revolutionary. After all, the biggest accomplishment of the Palestinian national movement in the 1970s was the redefinition of the “Palestinian Question” from a refugee problem to a legitimate struggle for national self-determination. From then on, instead of viewing Palestinian refugees as a social problem in search of humanitarian aid, the international community began focusing on the Palestinian national question seeking political resolution. Simultaneously, from its inception, the PLO was engaged in setting up the institutions of a state in exile in the refugee camps it had access to. The attainment of a Palestinian state has been held up as both the core of the Palestinian cause and its vehicle, as well as the cement holding the institutions of Palestinian life together, and all other Palestinian political parties still adhere to this goal. Thus the rejection of the state paradigm and its replacement with a rights-based framework have not achieved predominance within Palestinian political life. BDS is a thorn in the side of both the PLO, which negotiated the Oslo DOP and the subsequent agreement outside the framework of international law, and Hamas, which has no commitment to human rights. Consequently, BDS has had to bypass both the PNA and Hamas to operate and coordinate its own campaign. Its strategy consists of calling on companies, civic bodies, and institutions around the world to boycott, divest from, or impose sanctions on Israeli businesses, universities, and institutions and foreign companies that transact business with them until the movement’s goals are met.
Second, unlike the PNA, which operates in the international diplomatic arena, and unlike Hamas, which views armed struggle as the main tool of its long-term goals, BDS employs nonviolent means to reach its goals. Its approach recalls the practices of the First Intifada. Unlike both the PNA and Hamas—which frequently act in an authoritarian fashion and use violence against each other—the BDS movement requires and supports a democratic order. Precisely because BDS depends on grassroots mobilization and is a participatory mass movement, this reliance reinforces the movement’s nonviolent approach. It depends not only on Palestinian civil society bodies and NGOs but also on an international civic solidarity movement, rather than regional Arab or Muslim supporters such as the Rejection Front states (Syria, Libya, Algeria, etc., who refuse to consider a negotiated peace with Israel), the Arab League, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. It seeks to mobilize global civil society for support and publicity for Palestinian demands and protests (as epitomized by the highly sophisticated militant—but largely nonviolent—resistance movements in villages such as Nabi Saleh and Bil’in against the appropriation of their land by Israel). BDS demands are represented by local support organizations that seek to act as catalysts for the adoption of BDS practices in European countries and, increasingly, the United States. The BDS network carves out a distinct terrain for a new type of Palestinian resistance that is located within, and is associated with, global civil society.
Third, the BDS movement seeks to unify the respective struggles of the three major fragments of the Palestinian people—Palestinian citizens of Israel, occupied Palestinians, and scattered Palestinian refugees—in a single political program. The rights-based approach serves as a necessary common foundation for the attempted merger of the distinct demands of each of these fragments; their attempted political merger in a common struggle is a segue to creating a state that will accommodate all of them. The BDS movement, therefore, has three demands:
1. End the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantle the Separation Wall.
2. Recognize the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.
3. Respect, protect, and promote the rights of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194.36
The BDS’s struggle, as described in its original call, is expected to continue “until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law.”
BDS separates its struggle from considerations of the “moment after” its potential success and is focused on the former alone. The BDS network, as Barghouti explains, has not taken a position as to whether it views the future of Israelis and Palestinians in terms of a two-state or a one-state outcome: “While individual BDS activists and advocates may support diverse political solutions, the BDS movement as such does not adopt any specific formula and steers away from the one-state-versus-two-states debate, focusing instead on universal rights and international law, which constitute the solid foundation of the Palestinian consensus around the campaign.” In fact, he adds, writing as recently as 2011, “Most networks, unions, and political parties in the Boycott National Committee still advocate a two-state solution outside the realm of the BDS movement.”37 The BDS movement seems to be hedging its bets in order to carve out a narrow route for its distinct approach within the cross-pressures of Palestinian society, but most of its supporters are known to favor the one-state solutions discussed in section IV above.
VI
The bedrock of the BDS network’s struggle is its identification of the Palestinian struggle with the successful South African antiapartheid struggle. Supporters of the BDS effort pinpoint its beginnings in the 2001 World Conference against Racism that was held in Durban in South Africa. The NGOs that participated in the conference equated Israeli policies vis-à-vis Palestinians—both within the Green Line and in the OPT—with the apartheid regime. In particular, they drew upon the definition of apartheid in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid: interrelated policies adopted with the intention “to divide the population . . . by the creation of separate reserves and ghettoes for the members of racial groups, . . . [and] the expropriation of [their] landed property.” By July 2005, they stated that the BDS movement was inspired by the “struggle of South Africa against apartheid” and the support it received from the international community. “Our South Africa moment has finally arrived,” said Barghouti in a speech he delivered in 2010.38 Related allusions to South Africa, such as the substitution of “the Apartheid Wall” for what Israel terms the Separation Wall and the designation of an annual “Apartheid Week” held across campuses around the world, are further illustrations of the BDS’s desire to closely associate Palestinians’ and black South Africans’ experiences and their respective struggles.
The antiapartheid struggle involved a network of organizations, among them the British-based Anti-Apartheid Movement, led by white liberal and communist emigrés; a broader coalition in the United States, which included African American groups, far-left organizations, and several independent bodies, such as the Committee on Africa and the Interfaith Coalition; and, of course, antiapartheid South African parties. Their combined efforts led to South Africa’s international isolation and subsequent abandonment of apartheid and its replacement with a one-person, one-vote citizenship polity. In our world of deepening national, ethnic, and religious conflicts that periodically break out in unspeakable violence, there is something unexpected and attractive about an attempt to settle a potentially destructive conflict by framing it as a project of democratic nation building based on a shared civic identity. Postapartheid South Africa represents high aspirations and naturally serves as an object of emulation.
Though the antiapartheid movement consisted of many political parties, civil society associations, and umbrella organizations from the United Democratic Front to the Mass Democratic Movement, the main adversaries pitted against each other were the National Party (NP), and the African National Congress (ANC). The NP, speaking for the Afrikaner nationalist view, claimed that South Africa was a multinational state, comprising between ten to twelve nations, each of which was entitled to the right of self-determination. The multiple-nations program evolved out of the main thrust of apartheid—the doctrine of racial separation—adopted in 1948 by the NP on the basis of the crude racial ideal of baasskap, or white “boss-ship.” Though the verkrampte (intransigent) elements of the NP remained satisfied with this version, by the 1960s the verligte (enlightened) wing of the NP reformulated apartheid’s justification by seemingly adapting the then fashionable ideology of decolonization to South Africa. Under the new plan, the black majority population was assigned to tiny, impoverished, and noncontiguous tribal Bantustans or “homelands” (making up 13 percent of South Africa’s land), where African tribes were allegedly free to pursue their own “separate development” and, eventually, to attain independence. Concurrently, black Africans were denied any vestiges of citizenship in South Africa and were treated as “immigrants.” Their movement was strictly regulated through influx control and pass laws. The disparity between the modern framework of the nation for whites and the relegation of Africans to fragmented, frequently moribund tribal frameworks reflected an approach to nationhood that, in spite of its ideological veneer, remained race based.
This combined Bantustan system and movement control regime of racial separation was the target of the antiapartheid struggle spearheaded by the ANC. In retrospect, the ANC’s oversized role in the antiapartheid movement is obvious, but for long stretches it was but one of the contenders for leading the movement, and at times it was eclipsed by its Africanist competitors. Expressions of separatist African nationalism can be found in the pronouncements of ANC leaders as well, but for most of its existence the party remained identified by the June 1955 Freedom Charter. This seminal document, drafted by the ANC and its political allies, was clear in speaking in the name of a unitary body, “the People of South Africa.” The Charter declared that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” and that all South Africans were “equals, countrymen, and brothers.” It demanded the formation of a democratic regime with equal human rights and opportunities, including the right of every man and woman to vote and stand as candidates for all lawmaking bodies. Whites were admitted for the first time as members of the ANC only following the Morogoro Conference of 1969. Non-Africans were invited to serve on the ANC’s center policy-making body—its National Executive (which replaced the Revolutionary Council, a nonofficial ANC body, on which whites already served)—only after the Kabwe Conference of 1985. Though the ANC adopted nonracialism slowly, the organization did practice the policy it preached.39
Given the abundance of references to South Africa as a template for the BDS efforts, it makes good sense to assess just how closely BDS hews to the South African antiapartheid struggle. I have already highlighted many similarities: BDS, like the antiapartheid movement, is rights based and vies for the support of churches, student associations, corporations, and the international community to force the hand of its unwilling government. At the same time, there are several large gaps between the antiapartheid template and that of BDS. My questions, therefore, are: How far has the BDS network adapted the antiapartheid movement to make it fit the Palestinian circumstances? Has it twisted the model out of shape?
BDS departs from the ANC in several respects, and I will focus the remainder of this section on the three most important differences. First, BDS strictly adheres to a nonviolent tactic of boycotts, sanctions, and divestment, unlike the ANC, which, like other African and Arab national liberation movements of the time, established its armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, or Spear of the Nation). The MK undertook several bombings between 1961 and 1963 and again between 1976 and 1984. The attacks between 1976 and 1984 claimed seventy-one dead, but although the MK promised to target only security personnel and repudiated attacks whose victims were civilians, the majority of casualties of attacks by operatives associated with the MK ended up being civilians. The ANC and several of its black opponents, in particular the Inkatha Party, were also involved in violent altercations in the buildup to electoral campaigns in the postapartheid years of transition. It is, therefore, a mistake to romanticize the ANC’s nonviolence. The BDS movement was born in different circumstances. Its leaders have consciously chosen a nonviolent path in response to the counterproductive nature of the Second Intifada’s violent suicide bombings and the harsh Israeli repression these have evoked. This contrast between movements, however, is overshadowed by their two other differences.
The second significant difference between the ANC and the BDS lies in their respective relationships to Afrikaners and Israeli Jews. Unlike the ANC, BDS views cooperation, dialogue, and all forms of engagement between Israelis and Palestinians as “normalizing” the Israeli occupation and consequently rejects this path. Even when all parties to a potential political, economic, or educational activity aimed at promoting dialogue agree that the occupation is anything but “normal,” the same antinormalization tactic is upheld. BDS guidelines require that any joint Palestinian–Israeli Jewish activity be based on addressing the root causes of the conflict and the requirements of justice—in effect, on the acceptance of the BDS analysis and strategy in full. Such cooperation, then, would constitute “co-resistance” to the exclusion of the multiple narratives of “coexistence.”40
The antinormalization tactic cannot help but remind Israelis of intense opposition to the normalization of their state’s existence from its inception and throw into doubt Israel’s right of national self-determination. Boycotts, actually, were not invented by the Arab states. That “distinction” belongs to the Hebrew Labor campaign for replacing Arabs with Jewish workers that commenced at the very beginning of the Second Aliya in 1905. But as early as 1945, economic boycotts had become the main tools of the Arab League, which produced both a primary boycott—refusal to trade directly with Israeli companies, and a secondary boycott—a ban on third-party companies that did. It was, and still is, exercised, though unevenly, by governments and professional and civic associations. Old and new boycotts of normalization not only resemble each other but at times intersect. When the Campaign for the Boycott of Israel Supporters in Lebanon denounced Amin Ma’alouf, the Lebanese-French novelist and member of the Académie française, for praising the value of culture as a means of normalizing relations between Israel and the Arab world, it also called on the government of Lebanon to prosecute him under its antinormalization laws that criminalize collaboration and association with Israelis or investment in Israel.41 BDS antinormalization tactics, therefore, not only are a throwback to the past but constitute a process of reversal—the severance of ties formed between Palestinians and Israelis since the start of the Oslo process and, in some cases, even before.
Antinormalization aimed at potential Jewish partners sets the BDS apart and even puts it in opposition to the ANC. In fact, BDS resembles and emulates the views of the ANC’s nationalist opponents. African, or Azanian (an African name for South Africa) nationalists, such as those in the Azanian Peoples Organization, propounded that there were two nations in South Africa: an oppressing colonial, white nation and a colonized, oppressed black nation. They claimed that black Africans were the only true nation and were therefore entitled to rule South Africa. The white nation, in contrast, was expected to disintegrate as a result of the black nation’s liberation struggle.42 One of the most dramatic political expressions of this perspective was the breaking away of the Pan African Congress (PAC) from the ANC in 1959 under the leadership of Robert Sibukwe. The PAC opposed adopting the nonracial premises of the Freedom Charter, repudiated the possibility that whites could identify with the African cause in a racially divided society, and called on Africans to struggle by themselves for their freedom. PAC also rejected the possibility of minority guarantees and claimed that whites refusing to remain in South Africa under its new rulers would emigrate and that those who stay would come to identify with the African nation.43
