On Palestine (12 page)

IP:
The Hebrew University is expanding on the land of Issawiya.

NC:
Then that should be brought up, that would make sense.

IP:
I agree with Noam that it would be good to have a thorough study on this.
*
We still don't have a clear study that tells ordinary people in the United States why the Israeli academia should be targeted. There is a need to present a clear proof to people about their complacency: the level of their collaboration with the occupation and the oppression.

Although BDS was an initiative of the Palestinian civil society, it emerged parallel to similar initiatives in the West by pro-Palestinian activists. They were looking for ways of sending messages to Israel, to show that enough is enough. If you are an academic or a trade union activist, you use your peer group and you say, we have to do something as academics, journalists, artists, filmmakers. You also have to know better what are you targeting and why you are targeting it. In this, I don't see as much harm as Noam does, but I do agree that, as I said before, a more concrete and transparent action is needed: you explain to people why you are doing what you are doing and do not leave it on this general level which says everybody's a criminal and so on and therefore by association should be targeted. I think there could be a constructive criticism rather than killing the impulse.

This is a very successful impulse. When you view it on the ground in Israel you can sense the apprehension that the next step would be, as suggested by Jibril Rajub, to take Israel out of the world or European football association. There you hear clearly that Israeli sports people know that the only reason that may happen is the way their state is treating the Palestinians in general and Palestinian footballers in particular. No discourse on anti-Semitism is heard in this context.

NC:
That would be like the South African case. It picks out actions that are unacceptable on the part of the state and intelligible on the part of the audience you are trying to reach. The ASA was the opposite.

FB: I agree that thorough studies on the implications of Israeli institutions in the occupation and Israeli crimes need to be done . . .

NC:
For some of it it's kind of obvious—the Ariel campus, you hardly have to study it.

IP:
The more general one is more difficult to understand.

NC:
The Hebrew University one will take work.

FB: . . . still, from what I understand, and from what I have read, it looks like most of them are indeed complicit in the occupation and in Israeli crimes. So even though I agree that more studies will be useful and are important, I do think that the educational process is happening during and after a resolution like the ASA one is passed. The debate in the US is on academic freedom, but people are also asking questions like why is the ASA, a respected institution, asking to boycott Israel? This question might not have been raised if the resolution had not been passed.

IP:
I think what Noam is trying to say, if I understood correctly, at least this is what I think, is that it is the other way around. You have not yet won the argument that Israel, as a political entity, is problematic. You have won the argument that Israel should not occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but that is something else. If the whole boycott movement were focused on getting the Israeli army out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I think there would have been less argument about it. As you know, I support it and I think there is a problem with the state of Israel as it is, not just with what it is doing in the West Bank but also what it is doing in Haifa, in the Naqab, and in Acre. This is not yet clear to many people in the West. I think that people there are not aware that they are facing a bigger injustice than just the Israeli policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. BDS so far has been an impulse, not a strategy. I think it is an impulse that needs to be accompanied by more thorough analysis, study, and explanation.

NC:
I would only add to that that critically the USA has to be brought into it.

IP:
Yes, I agree.

NC:
It's the crucial support for Israeli actions. Very much like in the South African case, where it was the US that maintained apartheid until the end.

FB: How would you bring the US more to the front? It seems to me like people do know, right now, that the US is complicit in Israel's crimes. How would you even start boycotting the USA?

NC:
Take, say, the negotiations, that are going on. The solidarity movement ought to be focused on that. Negotiations which are organized by the USA, which is a participant in the conflict. That makes about as much sense as if Iran was called upon to mediate the Shia/Sunni conflict in Iraq. People would just laugh. The very fact that the US is organizing it should be viewed as a joke. That's not understood. It should be understood. It's not just three billion dollars in military aid, it's also the vetoes, and the ideological support. That's crucial support in the USA. The striking case in the USA is the way the Cuban role in South Africa has been suppressed. To this day, you read articles by scholars that are suppressing it. These are things you have to deal with.

 

 

This conversation between Noam
Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, and Frank Barat was recorded on January 17, 2014, and has been condensed and edited.

*
A study by the Alternative Information Center from 2009, “Academic Boycott of Israel,” can be found online.

Chapter Four

The Future

 

FB: Is an Israeli Spring possible?

NC:
For the last ten years especially, there has been a very strong shift in Israeli mentality and politics toward the right, nationalism, toward more extremism, there is a kind of circling the wagons mentality which was also true in South Africa toward the end. “The world hates us because they are all anti-Semitic so we will do what we want.” Nothing is their fault; everything is somebody else's fault, a lot of brutality. I mean sometimes, unbelievable. The scenes for example during Cast Lead, the brutal attack on Gaza with Israelis sitting on beach chairs on the hills, applauding every time a bomb fell. This is beyond obscenity. But unfortunately, it is a large part of the population. There are countertendencies, but they are, as far as I can see, pretty limited. When there was the Rothschild demonstration, the tent city, kind of Occupy-type thing—except if you look at it, it is pretty narrow: it is, “I want something better for me, I want to be able to get an apartment.” In fact, there was a decision by the organizers that they could not mention the Palestinians, so it is just: “What can I get to make my life a little better?” It is true that Israeli society has been shifting from what used to be a kind of more or less Scandinavian-style social democracy to a kind of an extreme version of neoliberal, kind of a caricature of neo-liberalism, pretty much like the US, with sharp inequalities, wealth, and privileges. There is a strong effort to have an appeal to Western youth and youth culture and so on with the secular mood of Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv, we have gay bars and things like that—it may be the gay center of the Mediterranean.

I think is it becoming an ugly and kind of suicidal society. They are very concerned about what they call delegitimation and that is true they are delegitimizing themselves. It is a choice I think I may have mentioned that before, my own feeling is that this is virtually inevitable since 1971 when they basically made the decision to reject security in favor of expansion, and then lots of things followed more or less not automatically but fairly predictably and they've been happening. There are slight changes, how significant they will be I don't know, in the repression of the Palestinian population. For example the most extreme racist laws in Israel are those concerning the land. About 92 percent of the land was in the hands of Keren Kayemet, the Jewish National Fund, which is an organization that had contracts with the state of Israel that required them to work only for the benefit of “people of Jewish race/religion and origin” (that was the phrase) that with the whole array of administrative arrangements, bureaucratic structures meant that in effect they control over 90 percent of the land—which meant that it was Arab-free basically. There is a crack in that structure, about ten years ago, I think it was in 2000, the Supreme Court did invalidate it in principle with regard to a particular settlement. They said they could not keep Arabs out and I think after five or six years the Arab couple who was trying to live there were finally allowed in but, Ilan, you would know better than I do, I do not think it had any noticeable effects anywhere else and now legislation in the Parliament is trying to undercut it. It is one example of policies that are pretty rigid. There are some things that are going on that really shock me. I learned recently from Ruchama Marton, a wonderful woman who is the head of the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights organization, and you probably know this, that in Israeli hospitals, in maternity wards, Palestinian women citizens have to go to different wards than the Jewish women. . . . Things like that go on all the time.

I don't think it is a very pretty picture; you can't separate Israel itself from Greater Israel with their planning which is being implemented in the West Bank. People forget about the Golan Heights, but that is illegally occupied in violation of explicit Security Council orders. The world likes to forget that is Syria basically, and of course Gaza remains a horrible prison, brutalized, now it is even worse because of the Egyptian military regime which is closing off the tunnels and threatening to punish Gaza. The whole picture is extremely unpleasant to use a very mild, understated word and I suspect it will get worse.

IP:
Yes, I fully agree. I think it is an important question that you pose because for anyone who is watching from the outside, who is an activist, who is interested in analyses of a possible change from within the answer to this question will dictate one's strategy in the future. If you come to the conclusion which I think was at the heart of the strategy against apartheid in South Africa that change from within is not imminent, it is not going to take place, of course then the pressure from the outside becomes the major hope for change or military defeat which was an option during the age of the liberation movements but is probably less relevant today.

In this connection it might be helpful to mention two other related issues or rather two disappearances. One is the disappearance of liberal Zionism as a significant actor on the Israeli political stage. There seems to be no room in Israel for those who try to square a universalist point of view, be it liberal or socialist, with the racist definition of Zionism.

The second issue is the disappearance of the Green Line after forty-five years of occupation and with it has gone the distinction between what is “here” and what is “there.” The most recent indications for this is the creeping annexation of Area C by the Israelis and the suggestion of the Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Liberman to annex the Palestinian citizens of Israel in Wadi Ara to the West Bank. This brought to the fore more clearly the Israeli ethnic policies of dispossession and occupation and showed that these policies were not limited to a certain area or one group of Palestinians.

These two additional developments accentuate the conviction that we should not expect a change from within Israel. There are few movements that try to challenge it from within, there is even a younger generation that is trying to do things that have not been done before like the Anarchists Against the Wall, New Profile, and the like; but they are very small in numbers and they do not expand at any pace that would make you optimistic that they represent a more massive movement.

It may also be useful to mention in this context the 2011 Israeli social justice protests. It shows changes in the agenda of the Israeli middle class, but alas they are still not connected in any visible way to conflict with the Palestinians. One of the main reasons that until 2011 it fared much better than in most Western countries, even after the 2008 financial crisis, was the way the overdraft banking system worked in Israel. Regardless of your salary, you had a license to spend from the bank. It meant that a member of the middle class could live well beyond their means and their actual salaries. This fiesta has now come to an end and the bitter reality has unfolded: the average middle-class salary does not allow for a decent standard of living and in particular decent housing. This realization was the main impetus behind the 2011 protests. The banks have stopped doing this, overdrafts, and Israelis had to start to live according to the not-so-high salaries and they could not afford what is the most expensive item in the market, accommodation, and that was the major motive for the protest movement.

What it means in macroeconomic terms is that the middle class is dragged down and the rich become richer. In the long run it can have impact on the questions we discuss. A society without socio­economic integrity and solidarity can collapse from within, and not even a strong ideological indoctrination would keep it intact.

NC:
In comparison to South Africa, there really are differences in this regard. In South Africa, the oppressed population, the Black population, was 85 percent of the total population. They were their entire workforce, they depended on them. Also there was a huge Cuban force driving South Africa out of its neighboring countries that it was trying to integrate. Apart from that, there was in the 1980s, and after Soweto in 1987, a very fierce militant Black activism from within. There is nothing comparable in either of those two things in Israel.