Brooklyn College, BDS, and Palestinian Rights

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Mar 8, 2013 Palestine-Israel
Brooklyn College, BDS, and Palestinian Rights

Brooklyn College, BDS, and Palestinian Rights

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) on 2 March 2013.]

Earlier in February, a panel held at Brooklyn College on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel was subjected to relentless vilification, bullying, and unfounded allegations. The campaign against Brooklyn College was so intense that even the New York Times and the mayor of New York intervened to express their support for academic freedom by urging the event to go ahead as scheduled.  PACBI watched as one of its founding members, Omar Barghouti, was subjected to verbal abuse and the movement as a whole was demonized.  We watched as media coverage of the Brooklyn College controversy suppressed Palestinian voices, those that can best explain why Palestinian civil society has embarked on this non-violent, rights-based struggle for Palestinian rights and how it is deeply inspired by the South African anti-apartheid and the U.S. civil rights movements.

Yet, despite this, we stood strong with admiration as our supporters around the US pushed back and rallied to ensure not only that the event took place, but also that the movement’s principles were communicated with clarity and articulated with patience.

At PACBI, we feel it is necessary to offer a few words as we move forward, building from all the momentum that this episode has brought to the movement.  In the case of the accusations of our adversaries from the far right and center left, Professor Judith Butler has already addressed these with eloquence in her comments at the Brooklyn College event.  We would like, here, to deal with two specific issues that continue to be raised, unfortunately, by some supposedly well-read supporters of Palestinian rights, as we feel these are important issues to respond to as we build the movement, even if we have done so elsewhere over the years.  Those who sought to shut down the Brooklyn event also held onto these two points.  The first is that BDS does not take a position on a one or two state solution, and really just seeks to destroy Israel.  The second is that BDS targets Israeli academics and is thus against academic freedom, and worse, is racist. 

In the first instance, Israel and its well-oiled lobby groups, which even Thomas Friedman accuses of buying allegiance in Congress, have been trying to delegitimize the Palestinian quest for equality by portraying the BDS Call’s emphasis on equal rights and the right of return as aiming to “destroy Israel.” One must wonder, if equality and justice would destroy Israel, what does that say about Israel? Did equality and justice destroy South Africa? Did they destroy the US southern states during the civil rights movement? Justice and equality only destroy their negation, injustice, and inequality.  Indeed, the BDS movement does not take a position on political solutions; no matter what solution is reached, it must respect the three basic rights of the Palestinian people that are stated in the BDS Call and upheld by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians. 

Specifically, BDS calls for an end to Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967; an end to what even the U.S. Department of State slams as Israel’s “institutional, legal, and societal discrimination” against its Palestinian citizens; and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced.

BDS advocates equal rights for all and consistently opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.  One can imagine a fulfillment of our demands, which are enshrined in international law, through a number of solutions.  We do state, loud and clear, that any solution would have to be founded on international law, which would imply that Israel could not be an exclusivist Jewish state.

Those who condition their support for BDS on the movement`s adoption of the so-called "international consensus," which is nothing more than an unjust solution dictated by Israel and the world`s only current superpower, the US, are asking us to forfeit some of our basic rights as humans, which reveals a deeply disingenuous position. They are also asking us to forget the history of struggles from South Africa to Algeria to Northern Ireland to the U.S. south, where the "consensus" was once entirely unjust, until it shifted, with persistent, principled struggle, and tireless efforts by many, towards a more just solution. Our basic rights are not negotiable; solutions are.

On the second charge, PACBI has already stated clearly that the movement targets complicit Israeli institutions and not individual Israeli academics.  However, some have continued to accuse the movement of targeting individuals, either because they do not read the BDS movement’s literature, they are trying to spread misinformation for the sake of propaganda, or they legitimately feel that individuals represent the institutions they work in and thus see some inconsistency with this.  We address the latter. 

PACBI’s guidelines explicitly state that, “mere institutional affiliation to the Israeli academy is therefore not a sufficient condition for applying the boycott”.  This is important because one could indeed draw the extremist position that affiliation is de facto complicity, and one would not be entirely wrong.  However, PACBI has striven to ensure that guidelines could be properly implemented without falling into the traps of litmus tests for individual complicity, and was careful not to target individuals.  Our guidelines do leave room for individuals to go further in their personal implementation of the boycott, even if we may not specifically endorse this.  Thus, Israeli academics are regularly invited to speak in international venues with no objection by PACBI; our objection would arise should their participation be institutionally funded or sponsored by a complicit Israeli or Brand Israel institution.  To not boycott at all on the grounds that the movement does not target institutional affiliation becomes counterproductive in this context, and may reveal dishonest motivations.

Still, for others, the fact that PACBI has consistently refrained from adopting blanket boycotts against individual Israeli academics, despite the involvement of a great majority of them in planning or at the very least justifying and maintaining Israel’s occupation, colonization and apartheid, has not been sufficient, and they accuse academic boycott of infringing on academic freedom.  In holding to international law, we take the definition of the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights on academic freedom, which includes:

the liberty of individuals to express freely opinions about the institution or system in which they work, to fulfill their functions without discrimination or fear of repression by the state or any other actor, to participate in professional or representative academic bodies, and to enjoy all the internationally recognized human rights applicable to other individuals in the same jurisdiction. The enjoyment of academic freedom carries with it obligations, such as the duty to respect the academic freedom of others, to ensure the fair discussion of contrary views, and to treat all without discrimination on any of the prohibited grounds.

Keeping in mind the validity of this definition, we are keenly aware of the importance of the academic freedom of the individual, but also recognize that such freedoms should not extend automatically to institutions. Judith Butler has called on us to question

the classically liberal conception of academic freedom with a view that grasps the political realities at stake, and see that our struggles for academic freedom must work in concert with the opposition to state violence, ideological surveillance, and the systematic devastation of everyday life.

It is incumbent on all of us to develop such a nuanced understanding of academic freedom if we are to call for social justice and work alongside the oppressed in their struggles. Without increasing international pressure to hold it accountable to human rights principles, Israel will carry on with total impunity its brutal and illegal siege of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal colonies and wall in the occupied West Bank; its “strategy of Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley, and the Naqab (Negev); its adoption of new racist laws; and its denial of refugees’ rights, to name just a few violations.  A total and comprehensive boycott, including academic boycott, is a necessary and ethical form of resistance to achieve freedom, equality, and justice when the international community has failed to do so.
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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412