Finkelstein’s Boycott: A Meta-Narrative on the Ills of ‘Liberal-Zionism’
The Palestine Solidarity Movement
Mohammed Abed
February 12th 2006
In her book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Mary Daly discusses an insidious intellectual phenomenon she calls ‘semantic sleight of hand.’ Depicted in the abstract, sleight of hand involves presenting a contentious claim in such a way as to make it seem a matter of accepted fact, a fact established either empirically or by force of argument, when in reality, neither is the case. With some careful engineering, sleight of hand can be transmuted into a wide variety of different forms, each one as damaging to the prospect of open and informed debate as the next.
It begins with something as simple as inventing a euphemism to linguistically sanitize and obscure the horror and brutality of things as they actually are in real world (the classic example here is ‘collateral damage,’ a term used to describe the tortuous evisceration of innocent people using ‘smart bombs’ and other tools of the ‘legitimate’ state). When even the most subtle forms of euphemism fail to disabuse us of the notion that wanton cruelty is a ubiquitous feature of the world, practitioners of semantic sleight of hand will often attempt to de-couple a term from its standard referent and link it instead to some closely related phenomena. This relatedness, in so far as it yields a degree of ‘scholarly’ credibility, obscures the causes of oppression and the institutions that sustain it. Omission of relevant details can take on other forms. Daly cites the example of ‘academic’ or ‘scholarly’ discourse about ‘witch’ burnings in medieval Europe. The incineration of thousands of women is effortlessly re-described as the ritual burning of ‘people.’ Absence of the term ‘women’ obscures the obvious fact that ‘witch’ burning was a misogynist practice and that being labeled a ‘witch’ was determined by whether or not a woman was sufficiently deferential and subservient – not by the ‘neuroses’ or ‘madness’ cited in the ‘objective’ [read: misogynist] literature.
There are other ways in which the ‘scholarly’ apparatus can be used to surreptitiously smuggle in contentious claims that would otherwise require an argument. A controversial claim can be sandwiched between two truisms, the effect being to lull the reader into a false sense of epistemic security. There’s the false dichotomy, and when a halfway decent argument to substantiate non-rational or ideological preferences is out of reach, the obvious choice is to shield alternative solutions from view and present personal preferences as if they were established facts that require no further argument. The toolbox of academic ‘inquiry’ is a den of iniquity filled with many other devices that prevent us from seeing the world for what it is. As Daly says, “there is legitimation of the ritual [the atrocity, the injustice] by the rituals of ‘objective’ scholarship – despite appearances of disapproval.”
Norman Finkelstein’s recent article on the ‘economic’ boycott of Israel (‘Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified,’ Aftenposten | 01.14.2006) appears to take a principled moral stand against injustice in Palestine. Finkelstein’s views are couched in the language and methodology of ‘objective’ scholarship, even if ‘editorial’ is a more appropriate description of the article’s surface form. Consistent with the basic principles of ‘semantic sleight of hand,’ the article contains more than its fair share of true statements, most of them established by constant references to independent reports produced by International and Israeli human rights organizations, United Nations Resolutions, and various international treaties and conventions to which the state of Israel is a signatory. This ‘scholarly’ edifice creates and sustains a semantic fugue that deflects the reader’s attention away from the highly controversial – if not downright false – claims that Finkelstein smuggles into the article. The author offers no arguments for these claims, and yet they contain the seed of what is, in essence, the ‘liberal-Zionist’ narrative about resolution of the conflict in historical Palestine. Of course the reality about ‘liberal-Zionism’ is that it’s a contradiction in terms; Zionism is an exclusionary national movement that prevents the return of the Palestinian Refugees and exiles to their homeland on the basis that their presence would ‘upset’ Israel’s Judeo-centric ‘demographic’ balance, whereas there’s nothing in liberal political theory that would justify the state placing limitations on where an individual can live on the basis of nothing more than their ethnic origin. Just as the apparatus of ‘scholarly’ discourse can be used to legitimize claims that are morally indefensible, ‘moderate’ Zionists can use the language of liberal-democracy and human rights to conceal a deep ideological affinity with oppressive institutions and an unwillingness to recognize that it’s in everybody’s long-term interests that those instiutions be dismantled.t
Finkelstein tells us that ‘the basic terms for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict are embodied in U.N. resolution 242 and subsequent U.N. resolutions, which call for a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the establishment of a Palestinian state in these areas in exchange for recognition of Israel's right to live in peace and security with its neighbors.’ The first thing to notice about this claim is its placement in the text. Rather than supporting it with an argument that takes account of all the relevant facts and applies principles the author professes to endorse in an impartial manner, the claim is strategically placed at the conclusion of four long paragraphs that express, in stock scholarly terms, Finkelstein’s disapproving attitude towards Israel’s policies of wanton killing of Palestinian civilians, torture, house demolition, and the ‘apartheid nature’ of its regime in the West Bank and Gaza. Since the fourth paragraph contains perhaps the best example of semantic sleight of hand in the entire article, I consider it in more detail below, but for the moment, we can note that nothing in the paragraphs preceding the sentence quoted above provides any support for the idea that ‘embodied’ in U.N. Resolution 242 are ‘the basic terms for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict,’ and yet the placement of this claim makes it seem as if the two-state program is the logical outcome of accepting a body of facts about judiciously selected aspects of Israel’s human rights record, even though in reality, there is no more than a tenuous connection between the two. The two-state program does not naturally follow from the facts Finkelstein has chosen to highlight, appearances to the contrary, so we might wonder about the set of criteria he’s using to determine what counts as an appropriate selection. If we knew this, we would have a basis for explaining why violations that seem to be relevant from a ‘human rights’ perspective are omitted.
The first point to note in this regard is that on reading Finkelstein’s essay, one could be forgiven for thinking that Palestinians residing outside the West Bank and Gaza are not intimately invested in and directly affected by the outcome of the conflict in their homeland. Nothing is said about these invisible persons, even though it’s an uncontroversial fact that displacement and exile are insufferable harms that can only be remedied by facilitating their return to Palestine. Unlike ‘liberal’ and ‘Zionist,’ there’s no contradiction in supporting the right of return and also thinking that the principles of reparative justice should provide the normative basis for an international political culture, unless we believe the bizarre claim that ‘right of return’ is synonymous with ‘throwing the Jews into the sea,’ which presumably no reasonable person does. There are also no demographic, territorial, or economic impediments to materializing the return of the refugees, as scholars like Salman Abu-Sitta, Nasser Abufarha and others keep pointing out again and again. Given all this, what justification does Finkelstein have for ignoring the suffering and needs of the majority of Palestinians in the world? Their systematic expulsion from their homeland in 1948 is the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so facts about the refugees and their plight seem doubly relevant to a discussion of what program of resolution is best, on the principle that in order to resolve a conflict – as opposed to ‘managing’ or ‘containing’ it (doublespeak for ‘accepting the status quo’) – you must address its causes rather than blunting some of its effects.
Finkelstein does have a justification for ignoring these facts, although it’s not a very good one, and it’s certainly at odds with his statements in support of a just resolution in Palestine. Liberal coat of paint or not, it’s a basic plank of Zionist politics to ignore aspects of the Palestinian cause that problematize the idea that Israel, conceived of as a state that privileges Jews, is an accomplished fact that cannot be challenged, even if morality requires it. It would make a mockery of the right of self-determination if the Palestinian refugees returned to live under a state that by definition excludes them. A morally adequate program of reparations would therefore include the idea that Israel should be replaced by a political system that impartially guarantees both the individual rights of its citizens and the national equality of Israeli-Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the entire territory of historical Palestine. But an arrangement of this sort is anathema to the Zionist project, and this fact explains why Finkelstein wants to rely so heavily on resolution 242 as the framework for resolving the conflict. 242 and the ‘land for peace’ formula leaves Israel’s ethno-centric character untouched and legitimizes what in other circumstances would be forcefully condemned. One wonders how people concerned with human rights would have reacted if the United Nations called for the territorial partition of South Africa along ethnic lines so that the apartheid regime could live in ‘peace and security’ with its neighbors. It’s difficult to think of a good reason to accept a discourse that relies so heavily on the arbitrary whims of the institution that in 1947 gave ‘official’ sanction to the idea that ‘peace’ is synonymous with ethnic separation. After all, this idea initiated the processes that eventually led Israeli forces to cleanse 800,000 Palestinians from the areas that became the state of Israel. But even if we suppose, for the sake of argument, that the United Nations is a legitimate trans-national institution and that majority opinion has anything to do with truth, we could still be forgiven for wondering why Finkelstein would be so adamant about defining the basic parameters of resolution solely in terms of 242 rather than 194 (refugee return) or any of the other resolutions on the books. It’s clear from his article that he has faith in multi-lateral institutions, so what could explain this omission?
One possibility is that like his mentor Noam Chomsky, Finkelstein thinks that being ‘realistic’ or ‘practical’ about the conflict entails paying nothing more than mere lip service to the rights of the refugees. For Chomsky, ‘prudence’ also issues in a steadfast refusal to be involved in building a movement that transcends the shortcomings of the two-state framework, even in the face of stark evidence that – morality aside – the policies Israel is currently pursuing ‘will abort any possibility of a viable Palestinian state,’ to use Finkelstein’s words. Chomsky’s version of the ‘argument from prudence’ takes note of the ‘international support’ that exists for the two-state program but fails to mention consistent international support for the return of the refugees, at least if annual re-affirmations of 194 in the U.N. General Assembly is any indicator of the ‘majority opinion’ that Finkelstein and Chomsky put so much stock in. The best explanation of this selective deference is the exceptionalism that, as Noah Cohen and others have explained so clearly, propels Chomsky to resist the implementation of basic human rights in Palestine on the grounds that Israel’s ‘historical vulnerability’ makes it unique amongst colonial nations that commit massive atrocities against the indigenous peoples they conquer. As a result, the logic goes, Israel ought to be held to a different set of standards. Perhaps the translation of ‘international support’ is ‘deference to the opinions emanating from the corrupt centers of power [U.S. administration, Israeli government, Palestinian Authority, the amorphous ‘Europeans’]. After all, the governments and institutions that Chomsky derides with such vehemence in his discussions of other issues don’t support the implementation of the right of return, so there’s no danger that their policies will challenge Israel’s status as an apartheid state.
Again, a pertinent question to ask is whether Chomsky’s ‘pragmatist’ bent would have led him to get firmly behind the ‘general will’ if the international community had decided to ‘come to terms’ with the apartheid regime in South Africa, perhaps by accepting that ‘water and oil don’t mix,’ hence the Blacks must be shoved into an ethnic ghetto that would nevertheless remain under the military domination of the apartheid regime. And what would he have said under the condition that the ‘general will’ was interpreted as being nothing more than the attitude of resistance the United States and other powerful nations displayed towards the prospect of comprehensive decolonization in South Africa? The ‘record’ shows that whereas Chomsky supported a boycott of the regime in South Africa, he refuses to back a similar boycott of Israel, even though both are apartheid states distinguished only by Israel’s relative lack of dependence on indigenous labor, a historical means to creating lebensraum completely untainted by the original inhabitants of the land. In an attempt to make sense out of this inconsistency, Chomsky will often retreat to the even more dubious claim that, since Israeli society will never accept to have even more Arabs live amongst them, the international community should stick to the ‘water and oil don’t mix’ formula that has repeatedly failed to yield peace, despite its ad nauseam application since the partition plan of 1947. Similarly, at one time white South African society would have rejected a life of equality with Blacks, but perhaps one can surmise that in this case, Chomsky would not have so forcefully objected to the idea that the preferences of a racist community are irrelevant to determining what kind of political arrangement international civil society should work towards, or what methods it should use to achieve this end. It seems that in all cases of injustice and resulting conflict, what matters are broad principles and the facts relevant to the application of those principles, of which facts about the whims of an oppressor society are not.
If Chomsky had not quite scraped the bottom of the barrel with this defense of his exceptionalism, then he reaches deep into the dark bowels of the void for his frequently quoted final salvo: since Israel is sitting on top of some 200 nuclear warheads, it’s suicidal for the Palestinians and their supporters to make the right of return the central demand of an international boycott movement. Before it accedes to giving the Palestinians what they deserve, Israel will ‘do a Masada’ with the entire region. One unacceptable consequence of this argument is that it would reduce us to a state moral paralysis. The contours of what you can and what you cannot advocate for in political life would be dictated by military power, and this is nothing more than a non-moral version of the ‘might makes right’ argument. In fact, the logic of this ‘argument’ would undermine Chomsky’s own resistance to U.S. Imperialism. Since the empire can pound us all into submission, we should be careful about what we ask for. One should also keep in mind that the South African apartheid regime collaborated with Israel to develop it’s own nuclear weapons, and yet it never used them, presumably because even racists would prefer to live than die, and so they live on to experience the public shaming and exclusion that is the principal coercive mechanism of a comprehensive boycott.
Finkelstein, Chomsky, and others will often attempt to legitimate their Israel exceptionalism by citing the ‘overwhelming’ support enjoyed by the two-state solution amongst Palestinians. The sleight of hand in this case consists in the straightforward omission of relevant details; what they have in mind is not the Palestinian people in their totality but the subset of Palestinians whose opinions its convenient for them to cite (Palestinians under occupation). To understand the significance of the latter group’s opinions, some social and political context is needed, although the relevant details are often left to languish in the dark – for the sake of maintaining a convenient illusion. An underlying assumption of the Oslo ‘peace process’ (and one that can partly explain its failure) was that Palestinians in the areas conquered by Israel in the 67 war and the exiled population had given up their claims to lands inside Israel and that their exclusion from their homeland had become an accepted fact. Although polls have shown that the majority of Palestinians in the occupied areas support the establishment of a Palestinian state, it’s at best contentious to think this implies that they have reconciled themselves to the losses of 1948. The political climate has dictated that no well-articulated alternatives to the two-state program have had any - let alone sufficient - public exposure. ‘Favoring’ one program over another is only socially significant if the choice is made from amongst a range of alternatives, but the reality has been quite the opposite: the two-state program has been the only available alternative, and it exemplifies a political approach that enjoys widespread favor in the centers of power. There are also psychological considerations that together with the factors already mentioned can further demystify the results of these polls. For a poll to accurately reflect the attitudes of a population, it would have to be conducted in relatively non-coercive social and political conditions. If you ask someone what long-term options they prefer when the stress and degradation of military occupation engulfs them on a daily basis, the answer will more likely be a reflection of present needs and frustrations than attitudes about the trajectory of a nation’s political future. To make the point in other terms, if violence and fear are a constant feature of your life, you may – through no fault of your own – be unable to think clearly about what kinds of changes would effectively remedy less visible but equally harmful ills your society is faced with. What you know in the moment is that the violence must stop and you must live apart from its purveyors.
One clue that other alternatives may be met with approval is the overwhelming popular support that exists amongst occupied Palestinians for the right of return. As I have already mentioned, the right of return is impracticable within a two-state framework that normalizes the current ethno-centric construction of Israel. From all this, the very least we can infer is that opinion polls about the two-state solution should be treated with some caution. The support of Palestinians in the occupied areas for this solution may be instrumental in nature, and it’s certainly true that when Palestinians are considered as a whole – as most other peoples are – the ‘general will’ would seem to issue in a refusal to concede the historical and cultural connections to the homeland they were expelled from in 1948.
In Finkelstein’s article, the claim that 242 delineates the ‘basic terms of resolution’ is followed by a statement ostensibly meant to provide it with a further justification. This statement is yet another version of the Chomskyian ‘virtual consensus’ argument and an excellent example of semantic sleight of hand. If you’re engaged in the project of defending what is, given your prior principles, indefensible, a good idea is to present the view you wish to ‘establish’ using language that makes it seem innocuous and then make sure a few true but entirely irrelevant statements follow quickly on its heels. For example, Finkelstein is absolutely correct to point out that ‘in March 2002 all twenty-two member States of the Arab League proposed this two-state settlement as well as "normal relations with Israel." He’s also correct in thinking that consistent with its perpetually rejectionist stance, Israel refused this offer. However, what he would be hard pressed to substantiate is the idea that the opinions of the Arab world’s corrupt leaders has anything to do with arriving at an adequate solution to the conflict in Palestine, at least on the assumption that the notion of ‘adequacy’ (or the ‘basic terms of resolution’) has moral connotations. Although 242 and the Arab league offer issue in very similar terms, those terms have nothing to do with what’s morally required, so, given that Finkelstein’s article purports to adopt a moralized perspective on the conflict, why suggest that either does? It would be one thing to have begun the article with an explicit disclaimer that ‘justice’ or ‘morality’ will play no role in the discussion, but this was not Finkelstein’s starting assumption; perhaps a reminder that there is only ‘legitimation of the ritual [the atrocity, the injustice] by the rituals of ‘objective’ scholarship – despite appearances of disapproval.’
The idea that the Arab league can legitimately offer terms that negate the rights of the exiled Palestinian population is a convenient fiction for a number of reasons. It further entrenches the illusion that at it’s core, the conflict in Palestine is an interstate struggle over territory that no one has a cast-iron legitimate claim to rather than a clash between a colonial state and the indigenous people it colonized and continues to expel from their own lands. The interstate conception of the conflict prioritizes the brute imposition of political control over a territory the boundaries of which were arbitrarily determined by military force (West Bank and Gaza) over pushing for a creative political arrangement that would recognize both the Israeli and Palestinian need for institutionally guaranteed cultural expression over their traditional spaces, normalize their respective identities, and safeguard individual freedoms without regard to ethnic origin. In another article(1), I tried to show how, on the one hand, this order of priorities obscures important features of the conflict, and on the other, it exacerbates political and social processes that have deepened the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and given it an air of legitimacy it otherwise would not have had. The immediate danger is that there is now a virtual synonymy between ‘ending the occupation of “the territories” and the creation of a Palestinian ‘nation-state,’ and this identification exists in political conditions that make it possible for Israel – provided it has active U.S. support and European acquiescence - to change the international communities consciousness of what terms such as ‘the territories’ denote. Positions that were once relatively difficult to justify in the court of world opinion have now become the norm. Bringing the occupation of the territories to an end no longer means unconditional termination of the Israeli presence in and control over the areas beyond the armistice line of 1949. After all, no ‘reasonable’ person would expect Israel to disrupt the lives of the colonists living in the largest settlement blocks established after 1967. Build a wall to ensure these settlements (and the largest aquifers in the West Bank) remain under your direct control, and then what land is left over can realize a new kind of sovereignty for the Palestinians, a sovereignty without territorial contiguity or control over borders and airspace, sovereignty the only prerequisites for which are the capability to police and smoothly run the municipal affairs of the people who live under your control. For those who still persist in the belief that the ‘society of nations’ will not stand by and allow this to happen, it would be sobering to remember that far worse events have overwhelmed the Palestinians while these guardians of the ‘right’ and the ‘good’ sat idly by. The only remaining hope lies in an international grassroots campaign to exclude Israel from any kind of social or cultural exchange with the rest of the world. In the absence of such a campaign, the Palestinians really will ‘turn into Finns’ as Dov Weisglass so eloquently put it. But if the Palestinians are just a particularly unruly bunch of accidental bystanders, Arabs who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then why even consult them about anything? Surely the machinations of the Arab ‘leaders’ counts as a legitimate substitute expression of their collective will?
Sure enough, a movement to boycott and divest from Israel is beginning to take shape, and it is, literally, the last vestige of hope for decent and compassionate people who refuse to reconcile themselves to a world of brutality and oppression, not in Palestine and not anywhere else. Many of these people have recognized the urgency of the situation in Palestine. They see that given the unconditional support Israel enjoys, it can continue to freely implement a series of policies that will eliminate the presence of the Palestinian nation in their homeland, despite the heroic resistance so many Palestinians manifest by attempting to live their daily lives as best they can. Whatever the reasons, it’s now become amply clear that powerful nation-states, consociations, and multi-lateral institutions will continue to do nothing or to actively aid and abet Israel in its long-term genocidal plans. The only remaining option is for individuals and civil-society organizations to force the necessary changes from below, by harnessing whatever institutional and popular means they have at their disposal to isolate Israel in the cultural and social spheres of international exchange.
The correct precedent and model for this boycott is the grassroots movement that ended apartheid in South Africa, and this model suggests, contrary to title of Finkelstein’s article, that the effectiveness of a boycott is not a function of the economic leverage or pressure it exerts on a perpetrator society. It’s well known that the economic impact of the first anti-apartheid movement was negligible and could be ignored whereas the ‘pariah’ status it created for the apartheid regime was not, and the latter can only be achieved if the roots of oppression are bared for all to see. But this is not the only feature that explains the success of the campaign. Social change must be motivated in a variety of different ways, some positive and some negative and coercive. The first anti-apartheid movement achieved the former by offering white South African society a vision of an alternate political future in which they would not be ‘tyrannized’ by the majority whose oppression they had either actively enforced or enabled through their silence and indifference. The availability of an alternative that guaranteed freedom, equality, and a dignified life for all of South Africa’s citizens made giving up their privileged position in the country a viable option for whites, and this in turn eased the passing of the apartheid regime. A useful heuristic is that a boycott should not have a deleterious impact on the possibility of satisfying the basic needs of a perpetrator society, for the obvious moral reasons, but also because even the perception that there might be an economic impact is likely to breed intransigence rather than the grudging receptiveness necessary for positive social change. After all, the specter of an economic boycott brings with it the impression that even your basic well-being matters little and has become a mere means to the social changes envisioned by international civil society. This is why Zionist organizations will often misrepresent the nascent movement to boycott Israel by claiming it aims at ‘weakening the Israeli economy’ or ‘imposing economic hardship on ordinary Israeli citizens, including Arabs.’ A clear statement of the movement’s motivations, it’s aims, and a specification of the mechanisms it intends on employing would help to counter this propaganda. What’s clear is that use of the term ‘economic boycott’ does not help in this regard.
The parallels between Israel and apartheid era South Africa are more fundamental than the ‘modeling’ of one campaign on the other. It’s a foundational claim of this movement that there is something more than a loose family resemblance between the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Jewish State in Palestine, and that this analogy has something to do with the way in which these institutions define themselves rather than merely on the basis of a superficial similarity between their policies. It’s no accident that early Zionist leaders felt such affinity with their Afrikaaner counterparts or that Israel went to such great lengths in its military and economic collaboration with the apartheid regime. Mainstream Zionism and Afrikaaner nationalism are closely related variations on the same ideological theme. Both are defined by a highly idealized conception of ‘the nation,’ one that outdoes even ‘ethnic’ nationalism in the extent of its rejection of a world in which the fundamental condition is one of difference and plurality. This is by no means meant as a denial of the idea that Palestine is now home to a distinct Israeli culture and identity. It is, and a politics of liberation should show us how the Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian identities can be normalized in the same space. However, engagement with a set of cultural norms is not the criterion Israel uses to determine who is to be privileged by the state and who is not. ‘Culture’ is a relatively inclusive concept, whereas membership of the privileged class in Israel is determined by non-voluntary criteria (2). We can make sense out of these criteria, but only at the cost of reifying the world to an extent that creates a series of dangerous illusions, the most pernicious of which is the idea that there are essential differences between human beings in virtue of their membership in ‘nations’ and other social groups. From the very first moments when Zionism emerged from the realm of ideas and began to acquire the means necessary to its political realization, it became apparent that the interests and aspirations of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants were to be totally ignored, despite their status as the overwhelming majority. In the obtuse historical debates about whether the Palestinian refugee ‘problem’ was the result of a pre-planned, systematic ethnic cleansing policy or ‘borne of war, not by design,’(3) Ilan Pappe is one of the few scholars who has ventured to point out that when a group of people is dehumanized to the extent the Palestinians were and still are in mainstream Zionist discourse, you don’t need a series of official directives to ensure that when the time is ripe, they will be forcibly uprooted from the lands you covet.
Despite it’s best efforts to finish the job it started in 1948, Israel has not yet succeeded in realizing the Zionist dream of a state free from non-Jews. In fact, 2005 was the first time since the 1948 war that Palestinian Arabs once again became the majority between the river and the sea. Although Israel is not economically dependent on indigenous labor to anywhere near the extent the apartheid regime in South Africa was, it has nevertheless adopted an interim policy towards the Palestinians that resembles, across many dimensions, the apartheid regime’s methods for dealing with South Africa’s black population. The guiding principle in both cases is to impose segregation while denying the indigenous people self-determination and individual freedoms. In South Africa, this resulted in the majority Black population being forced into territorially non-contiguous ‘homelands’ that occupied no more than 15% of the country’s land area. In Palestine, the figure is perhaps higher if one counts the impoverished, de-developed ghettos Israel has created for Arabs living inside its de-facto borders, but the implications for the ability to live a decent and dignified life are much the same. Possession of the right to vote is often cited by Israel supporters as a principled distinction between South African apartheid and the Zionist system of rule in Palestine, but in reality this is nothing more than a fig-leaf for oppression; the ability of a minority to cast a ballot does not alter the facts about their purposeful social disenfranchisement. Because it defines itself as a Jewish State, Israel has denied its Arab minority the benefits enjoyed by the majority Jewish population. Systematic oppression of minorities can occur regardless of democratic participation, and this shows that ‘democratic participation’ and ‘equal citizenship’ are not synonyms, the objection notwithstanding.
The similarities between the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living under military rule in the West Bank and Gaza reveals something about the nature of apartheid itself. The ‘homelands’ system is not the only way to realize the aims of an apartheid institution nor is military force the only coercive means it has at its disposal. Apartheid’s crucial feature is, as I have already suggested, the fusion of a state apparatus with an essentialist ideology that denies the humanity in whole categories of people on the basis of features that are morally irrelevant. The State of Israel is an institution that takes this form, and opposing apartheid in historical Palestine means building a movement that, like the South African campaign, targets the prior causes of systematic discrimination against the indigenous population rather than specific policies or the particular ways in which this discrimination is manifested. The formula ‘separation without self-determination’ is a description of a political kind that can be implemented by actual physical segregation (the homelands system), by making indigenous peoples subject to a different system of laws that denies them basic economic, social, and political rights (‘virtual’ separation), through ‘de-facto’ exclusion in a society with a racist social ethos, by imposing physical segregation in the same spaces as the privileged community lives, or, by different combinations of these policies and social forms. At times, the state will employ military force to realize arrangements of this type, while on other occasions, the mere threat of violence will suffice. However, the important point to note is that these policies are symptomatic rather than constitutive of apartheid, and the fundamental injustice would persist if their causes remained untouched.
The analogy with apartheid South Africa finds its way into Finkelstein’s article, although semantic sleight of hand is once again employed to deflect attention away from the major obstacle to resolving the conflict in Palestine. We are told that ‘apart from the sheer magnitude of its human rights violations, the uniqueness of Israeli policies merits notice.’ Although this seems promising, what follows is less so. In the sentence directly after the second of two quotes from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Finskelstein makes the following claim: ‘If singling out South Africa for an international economic boycott was defensible, it would seem equally defensible to single out Israel's occupation, which uniquely resembles the apartheid regime.’ But the fact that an international boycott of South Africa was morally justified does not support the conclusion that singling out Israel’s occupation is also defensible, for the reason that a relation of ‘unique resemblance’ exists between the apartheid State in South Africa and the apartheid state of Israel in historical Palestine and not between the apartheid state in South Africa and Israel’s occupation. There may be another justification for boycotting Israel’s occupation, but it’s not the one cited by Finkelstein.
In fact, one implication of his claim is that it would have been sufficient for morality to boycott South Africa’s ‘homelands’ regime but to leave the State whose very nature necessitated the implementation of such a racist policy in place. If the Apartheid State had then found an alternative way of subjecting South Africa’s indigenous population, would we then need another boycott campaign? And what after that? A third? If we follow the Finkelstein/B’Tselem logic to its conclusion, we reach the absurd view that apartheid here is morally unacceptable, but we can live with apartheid over there, inside the ‘Green Line’ for example, where Arabs are identified as Arabs rather than Israelis on their national identity cards, or where the highway planners seem to forget where all the Arab towns are, or where the Negev Bedouin are thrown off their traditional lands and forced into urban concentration camps where they languish in utter despair, or where so many social goods and services are made contingent on serving in the brutal army that enforces apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza, something that Palestinians in Israel are unlikely to do, or where State lands are for the use of Jews only rather than the country’s citizens, or were the state engages in the same policies of land confiscation and house demolition seen so often in the West Bank and Gaza. Apartheid has as much to do with morally unjustified privilege of the kind that accrues to Israeli-Jews in virtue of their identity. When this privilege comes to an end, apartheid in Palestine will have been defeated.
Perhaps this is a mere innocuous omission, but it would be difficult to sustain this view given Finkelstein’s broad knowledge of the conflict and the inconsistency of adopting a moral perspective on a social problem but then failing to apply your principles in an impartial manner, or thinking that some human rights matter while others are less important. What is more, the ‘pragmatism’ in aiming all our efforts at ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has shown itself to be an illusion. The occupation has become more deeply entrenched for the simple reason that by its very nature, an apartheid state will never permit any kind of accommodation with the indigenous people it rules. This fact needs to be recognized if there is to be any hope of national survival for the Palestinian people, and it’s force should be immediately apparent to people concerned with the application of moral standards to political life.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and its source is the divestment and boycott movement beginning to grow in Europe and the United States. The success of this movement depends on many different factors, and given the stiff organized opposition it faces, it will likely be many years before we see it build enough momentum to pressure Israel into making the necessary concessions. But if the movement aims at a comprehensive and lasting settlement of the conflict in Palestine, it will have to follow the first anti-apartheid movement in its insistence on advocating for an end to the institution of apartheid itself and its replacement with a state that safeguards the individual freedoms of all its citizens and allows for Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab autonomy in the cultural and social spheres. What stands in the way of this is ‘liberal’ Zionism’s insistence that Israel is an exception to every rule, and that to question - let alone materially challenge - it’s national chauvinism is tantamount to calling for the destruction of the Jewish people. It’s very difficult to explain why Finkelstein would overlook the fact that apartheid is not a concept defined by its territorial reach but by its ideological substance and institutional expression without pointing to the interest that ‘liberal’ Zionism has in placing strict parameters on what the new anti-apartheid movement will and will not target.
The reality that has to be recognized is that Zionism – in so far as it has the concept of a Jewish State as its central component – is incompatible with a commitment to basic principles of justice and human rights, and it is the latter that ought to determine the character of the boycott movement. Chomsky, Finkelstein, and others have done an enormous amount of important work on the conflict. Finskelstein has debunked numerous myths about the 1948 war, explained the history of conflict, showed how mainstream Zionist groups have thoughtlessly used the memory of the holocaust to shield Israel from any kind of political censure as it carries out it’s war against the Palestinian people, and so much more. He is a well-informed and articulate critic, but what good is all this if the history of a people’s suffering and oppression is simply dismissed when the time comes to discuss what they deserve in the present? The logic of restitution is the only logic relevant to resolving the conflict in Palestine. Restitution does not require that present realities be ignored, but it does require that we make room for backward looking considerations as a means to transcending the status quo of injustice and moving forward towards a better future for all concerned.
END.
Mohammed Abed is a final year graduate student in the Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an activist, he has worked for the rights of the Palestinian refugees with Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition. He has also worked with the University of Wisconsin Divest from Israel Campaign.
FOOTNOTES
(1). See: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=8530
(2). It is true that Israel will grant citizenship to converts, but this would seem to be out of desperation rather than choice, and it accounts for a tiny proportion of annual migration to the country. Institutional efforts are aimed at the ‘ingathering’ of people with the relevant primordial essence. Accordingly, the ‘mass conversions’ that have taken place are actually cases where ‘converts’ are promised incentives and then cajoled into ‘discovering’ their ‘real’ identity. Moreover, making immigration contingent on conversion is by its very nature a coercive and exclusionary practice; it conditions the distribution of social goods on who you are rather than what you do, and this requires an unjustified level of interference in and control over the affairs of an individual.
(3). Morris has since revised his view, having spent many an hour in the Israeli archives unearthing more evidence of massacres, rape, and other atrocities committed by Zionist forces in the war of 1948. In an interview with Haaretz (‘Survival of the Fittest’ 09/01/2004), Morris revealed his considered opinion that all this was necessary and justified; after all, ‘if you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.’