EDITOR: Events move fast after Juliano’s murder
This senseless murder (well, is there another type of murder…) has shocked us all who knew and loved him and his work. Theories are flying about who is behind this atrocity and the PA had just arrested someone for the murder. I have heard three main theories about who might be behind it: Extreme Islamists, the Israeli Shin Beth (directly or indirectly, through a collaborator ), and the local settlers. We may find out who it really was in the next few days, or we may not. Mazin Qumsieh has made an important point today: What we should concentrate about is making Juliano a symbol of life together, of democratic and secular Palestine, of the freedom and centrality of art in the life of a nation. It is clear that Juliano was murdered because of his art, becuase of his politics, because of who he was and what he did. We should not forget him, and should not forget his amazing parents, Saliba Khamis and Arna Mer, two pioneers of secular, democratic Palestine!
Palestinians arrest suspect in murder of Israeli actor Juliano Mer-Khamis: Haaretz
PA police arrested and are interrogating former al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades militant who was released from Israeli prison more than five years ago, and is now a suspect in murder of Mer-Khamis.
Palestinian security forces arrested on Tuesday a suspect in the killing of Israeli actor Juliano Mer-Khamis in Jenin on Monday.
According to a security official, Palestinian police have been probing the man – a former al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades militant who was released from Israeli prison more than five years ago – but he has yet to confess to the murder.
Mer-Khamis, 53, an Israeli actor and political activist was shot dead on Monday outside a theater which he founded in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Jenin police Chief Mohammed Tayyim said Mer-Khamis was shot five times by masked Palestinian militants. Israeli security forces are also investigating the circumstances of his murder.
Mer-Khamis was affiliated with a local theater in Jenin, established by his mother in the 1980s. In 2006, Mer-Khamis opened the Freedom Theater in Jenin, along with Zakariya Zubeidi, the former military leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades in the West Bank city.
Zubeidi said in a press conference held at the Freedom Theater on Tuesday that he believed that either a country or organization was behind the murder of his friend.
He said the masked killer seemed to have been trained and that they shot Mer-Khamis in the chest and head seven times.
The Freedom Theater had faced threats before; it was torched twice in the past, and the threats persisted despite Zubeidi’s appointment.
Some of the criticism focused on the fact that the theater offered co-ed activities, despite prohibition in the Islamic moral code.
Gideon Levy remembers Juliano Mer-Khamis: An Arab, a Jew, a human being: Haaretz
Juliano Mer-Khamis was one of the most talented theater actors to ever emerge here was also the most courageous of them.
By Gideon Levy
A little over a month ago, Juliano Mer-Khamis stood on the stage of his Freedom Theater at the edge of the Jenin refugee camp.
Directing his remarks at the young, noisy group of children making its first-ever visit to a theater, he said: “This is a dangerous show, with subversive messages. Whoever talks will be thrown out of the hall.”
A hush came over the audience. For the next 75 minutes, I watched one of the loveliest, most stylish, political plays I had ever seen.
None of the children interrupted the show, with the exception of one infant who burst into tears at the sight of the servant hanging on a rope.
The Freedom Theater presents “Alice in Wonderland,” by Lewis Carroll. Directed by Juliano Mer-Khamis, with Udi Aloni as playwright.
I first saw Mer-Khamis in another time and another place. It was in the late 1980s, when he stood for a number of days in the front yard of the Israel Fringe Theater festival in Acre, his naked body dipped with oil as part of a one-man show that knew no end. Years later I caught “Arna’s Children,” a brilliant film which he co-directed with his dying mother, Arna Mer, the founder of the theatre in Jenin and the daughter of the doctor who cured malaria in Rosh Pina. It is arguably the most moving film ever created about the Israeli occupation.
Since then, I have met him on numerous occasions, always in the camp. This tall, strapping, handsome man who oozed charisma, a Jew and an Arab on account of his parents – perhaps a Jew in the eyes of the Arabs and an Arab in the eyes of the Jews – decided to devote his life to Jenin, where he lived as an Israeli and as a human being. One of the most talented theater actors to ever emerge here was also the most courageous of them.
The seven bullets extinguished the light of courage that he radiated. “Jule was murdered,” a trembling voice belonging to a refugee camp resident on the other end of the phone told me. My voice also trembled.
Goldstone’s Gaza report stands, UN insists: The Guardian
Judge’s informal remarks ‘do not invalidate findings’, says colleague on fact-finding mission into Israeli attack on Gaza
Richard Goldstone on a 2009 visit to a house destroyed during Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Photograph: Ashraf Amra/AP
The UN has roundly rebuffed remarks by the South African judge Richard Goldstone that cast doubt on the report into the Gaza war that bears his name, causing rifts within the UN and furious debate across the Middle East.
In the first public sign of a split within the four-person committee that compiled the report into the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008, the Pakistani human rights lawyer Hina Jilani has openly contradicted Goldstone’s comments. In an interview with the Middle East Monitor, she said that the UN report still stood.
“No process or acceptable procedure would invalidate the UN report; if it does happen, it would be seen as a suspect move. The UN cannot allow impunity to remain, and will have to act if it wants to remain a credible international governing body,” she said.
Jilani sat with Goldstone on the fact-finding mission that looked into allegations of war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas during the three-week war. The other two members of the committee, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers, could not be reached for comment.
Goldstone made his remarks in an article in the Washington Post in which he said that he regretted aspects of the report that he chaired, including the suggestion that Israel had intentionally targeted civilians. Had he been aware of evidence that had since come to light, he wrote, “the Goldstone report would have been a different document”.
In a further indication of his U-turn, the Israeli paper, Yediot Ahronot, said the judge planned to press for his report to be nullified.
The report, published in September 2009, found that Israelis involved in the Gaza war should face “individual criminal responsibility” for potential war crimes. Some 1,400 Palestinians died, at least 50% of whom were civilians, and 13 Israelis.
But the inquiry was carried out without Israeli co-operation, and information uncovered by Israel’s own investigations since then had changed his understanding of events, Goldstone said.
Though the judge’s comments have rekindled the heated debate that followed the Gaza war, they are unlikely to lead to any immediate action on the part of the UN. Cedric Sapey, spokesman for the UN human rights council that commissioned the report, said: “The UN will not revoke a report on the basis of an article in a newspaper. The views Mr Goldstone expressed are his own personal views.”
A move to change or withdraw the report would either require a formal written complaint from Goldstone, backed unanimously by his three fellow authors, or a vote by the UN general assembly or the human rights council, Sapey said.
Israel has leapt on the Goldstone article, arguing it proves that the original UN report was flawed. The interior minister, Eli Yishai, said he had contacted Goldstone to thank him. “As a Jew, he understands well the story of the Jewish people’s suffering,” he told Israeli army radio.
An Israeli official said the government would now try to get a re-evaluation of the report as well as “asking our legal experts to see how it affects the legal harassment” of Israeli politicians and officers, particularly in the UK.
Goldstone’s article comes at a particularly sensitive time for Israel. The human rights council has recommended the UN general assembly passes the Gaza report to the security council with the aim of referring both Israel and Hamas to the international criminal court for alleged war crimes. Any such move would almost certainly be blocked by the US, Israel’s main ally, which has the power of veto, though a referral could still prove politically damaging.
The Palestinian ministry of foreign affairs said Goldstone’s intervention was immaterial. “The Goldstone Report remains a valid and important document highlighting the need for a full and genuine investigation. Nothing in Justice Goldstone’s personal comments changes the essential need to provide the victims of the assault on the Gaza Strip with access to justice.”
Khalil Shiqaqi, a Palestinian political scientist, said it was clear that no one had read exactly what Judge Goldstone had written. “The Israelis think that Goldstone has overturned what was written in his report and the Palestinians have taken their cue from them. What he has actually done is slightly modified his controversial view that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians. Very few people among the international community or non-governmentable bodies said the same thing.
“If he retracted one thing, there was much he did not retract, such as Israel’s deliberate destruction of houses in the Gaza Strip.”
EDITOR: Have they been sleeping somewhere until now?
Some of Israel past top soldiers are now calling for a two-state agreement, about forty years after it became impossible because of their own policies and actions. Don’t they have any shame? By now, they are flogging a dead horse.
Leading Israelis push for two-state solution with new peace initiative: The Guardian
Many military and security personnel join group pushing for peace treaties with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians
A group of prominent Israelis, including heads of the army and security services, hope to revive the peace initiative by announcing details of possible treaties with the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon.
The Israeli Peace Initiative, a two-page document, states that Israel will withdraw from the land it occupied in 1967 in both the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and pay compensation to refugees. The document has been given to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, who has said he will read it with interest.
The authors of the document, which will be launched at a press conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, say that it is partly inspired by the revolutions that have taken place in the Middle East. It presents an opportunity for Israelis to participate in the “winds of change” blowing through the Middle East, they say.
“We looked around at what was happening in neighbouring countries and we said to ourselves, ‘It is about time that the Israeli public raised its voice as well.’ We feel this initiative can bring along many members of the public,” Danny Yatom, the former head of the Israeli external security agency, Mossad, told the New York Times.
The group aims to generate public support for a peace agreement that will force the Israeli government to re-engage with the Palestinians, who have suspended meetings in protest at continued settlement building in the West Bank. Palestinians see such building as an attempt to create “facts on the ground” that obstruct negotiations.
Yaakov Perry, a former head of Shin Bet, the internal security agency, said he hoped that the plan would galvanise the Israeli government in this time of change around the Middle East.
“We are isolated internationally and seen to be against peace,” he told the New York Times. “I hope this will make a small contribution to pushing our prime minister forward. It is about time that Israel initiates something on peace.”
The Israeli Peace Initiative recognises the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which was sponsored by the government of Saudi Arabia, as “a historic effort made by the Arab states to reach a breakthrough and achieve peace on a regional basis”. The Israeli initiative endorses the Arab statement that “a military solution to the conflict will not achieve peace or provide security for the parties”.
The initiative lays out the framework for peace agreements between Israel, Syria and the Palestinians. It calls for a sovereign and independent Palestinian state based on the borders between Israel and Jordan in 1967 but modified to ensure territorial contiguity for the Palestinian state. Some settlements would be placed under Israeli control.
Compensation would be paid to refugees and their host countries by Israel and the international community, according to the initiative, but the refugees would be able to return only to the Palestinian state, with a few exceptions who would be allowed to return to what is now Israel. The plan also calls for a road link between the West Bank and Gaza, which would cut across Israeli territory but would be under Palestinian control.
It also calls for Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights over five years in order to achieve peace with Syria and a peace agreement with Lebanon.
Dan Meridor, the deputy prime minister, speaking at an event in Jerusalem, said he had not yet studied the document. “The paradigm is clear, that is a two-state solution, but the other elements should be negotiated, not dictated,” he said.
Referring to the uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East, he said: “Some people say that we should wait for the aftershocks to happen, for everything to settle down, but I don’t believe we can wait.”
Editor: This only gets worse…
Ina disgusting move, Goldstone has now recanted publicly, and the thank you is an invitation by the occupation regime to visit the apartheid state. He must be proud.. We knew all along he was a Zionist, but this is too low for words! Maybe they will call a road after him in Tel Aviv…
Judge Goldstone to visit Israel, says minister: The Guardian
Richard Goldstone has accepted invitation to Israel and agreed to try to nullify UN report on Gaza conflict, says interior minister
The South African judge Richard Goldstone has accepted an invitation to visit Israel and promised to work to nullify his UN report accusing Israel of deliberately targeting civilians during its offensive in the Gaza Strip two years ago, Israel’s interior minister said on Tuesday.
The Israeli overture follows Goldstone’s recent comments in a newspaper article that he no longer believes Israel intentionally fired at civilians. Israel had blacklisted the internationally respected judge, who is Jewish and has strong connections to the country, since his report was issued in 2009.
The report was produced for the UN human rights commission, which ordered the investigation into the actions of Israel and the Hamas militant group during their three-week armed conflict in 2008-2009. The commission has said it stands by the report, and Goldstone would need to submit a formal request to change it.
The interior minister, Eli Yishai, told Israel’s Army Radio station he phoned Goldstone on Monday to express his appreciation for his “courageous” reconsideration of his charges, and to invite him to tour Israel’s southern communities that have sustained years of Palestinian rocket fire.
Yishai said Goldstone “as a Jew understands well the story of the Jewish people’s suffering … and it is very important for him to come and see this.”
Goldstone turned down an interview request from the Associated Press.
The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot said Goldstone told the paper he would visit Israel in early July as Yishai’s guest. The minister added that Goldstone promised to take additional steps to retract his report.
Also speaking on Army Radio, Danny Gillerman, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, who also participated in the phone call with Yishai, quoted Goldstone as saying he was ready to take steps to change the status of the report, but first wanted to “wait for the dust to settle” after his opinion piece in Friday’s Washington Post.
The Goldstone report concluded that Israel and Hamas committed potential war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during three weeks of fighting. The findings triggered outrage in Israel and a personal campaign against Goldstone.
In the article Goldstone said information had come to light that made him rethink his central conclusions. He lauded Israel for conducting dozens of investigations into alleged wrongdoing. In particular, he cited evidence that a deadly strike that killed more than 20 members of a Palestinian family resulted from faulty intelligence and was not an intentional attack.
Israel says civilian casualties in Gaza were the fault of the area’s Hamas rulers, claiming the group used residential areas for cover during the fighting. Israeli leaders have called for the report to be retracted.
Gaza: the stain remains on Israel’s war record: The Guardian CiF
Richard Goldstone’s partial retraction of his own report doesn’t excuse the conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza
The Netanyahu government is doing everything it can to interpret a recent Washington Post op-ed article by Justice Richard Goldstone as vindication of Israel’s conduct in the 2008-09 Gaza conflict. It is nothing of the sort. Israel’s reluctance to confront that reality finds a parallel in its refusal to date to conduct credible investigations into the serious violations of the laws of war that it committed in Gaza. The Goldstone article does not relieve it of the obligation to pursue those investigations.
As is well known, Goldstone led a UN commission that issued a detailed and damning report on the Gaza war, finding that both Israeli and Hamas forces committed war crimes. In his article, Goldstone backed away from a particularly controversial charge in the report – the allegation that Israel had an apparent high-level policy to target civilians. He now says that information from Israeli investigations indicates “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”.
Goldstone was right to make that amendment. Human Rights Watch also investigated some of the cases in which Israeli troops fired at and killed Palestinian civilians. In seven cases, for example, Israeli troops killed a total of 11 Palestinian civilians who had been waving white flags to signal their civilian status. In six other cases, Israeli drone operators fired on and killed a total of 29 Palestinian civilians, including five children, even though drone technology offers the capacity and time to determine whether the targets were combatants. Deeply troubling as these cases were, they were too isolated for us to conclude that the misconduct of individual soldiers reflected a wider policy decision to target civilians.
But Goldstone has not retreated from the report’s allegation that Israel engaged in large-scale attacks in violation of the laws of war. These attacks included Israel’s indiscriminate use of heavy artillery and white phosphorus in densely populated areas, and its massive and deliberate destruction of civilian buildings and infrastructure without a lawful military reason. This misconduct was so widespread and systematic that it clearly reflected Israeli policy.
What has Israel done to redress these violations? Mainly, it has investigated the common soldier while leaving the top brass and policymakers untouched. Israel’s investigations look good only by comparison with Hamas, which has done nothing at all to investigate its war crimes. The Hamas justice minister responded to the Goldstone article by attempting to justify deliberate rocket attacks on populated areas of Israel as part of the “right of self-defence of the Palestinian people” – a position wholly at odds with the laws of war.
As for Israel, a recent UN report mentioned in Goldstone’s article found that the Israeli military has examined the conduct of individual soldiers in about 400 cases of alleged operational misconduct in Gaza. But the report raised serious questions about the thoroughness of these investigations. When Human Rights Watch scrutinised Israel’s investigative response, we found that military prosecutors had closed some cases in which the evidence strongly suggested violations of the laws of war.
To date, Israeli military prosecutors have indicted only four soldiers and convicted three. Only one soldier has served jail time – seven and a half months for stealing a credit card.
Most important, Israel has failed to investigate adequately the policy-level decisions that apparently lie behind the large-scale indiscriminate and unlawful attacks in Gaza. Those decisions are obviously the most sensitive because they involve senior officials, not just troops on the ground.
Part of the problem is that the military has been asked to investigate itself – never an ideal way to arrive at the truth. Moreover, the person leading the military investigations – Israel’s military advocate general – probably took part in the policy decisions that should be investigated. That’s why a genuinely independent investigation is needed, as Israeli human rights groups have requested.
The Netanyahu government’s eagerness to bury the Goldstone report is understandable, but the report will live on. Even after Goldstone’s article, the report still represents a serious indictment of the way Israel and Hamas chose to fight the war in Gaza. The open question is whether the two sides will live up to their duty to investigate these charges credibly and to bring violators to justice. We all know that Hamas hasn’t done what is needed. The theatrics in Jerusalem cannot hide the fact that so far Israel hasn’t either.
Jonathan Cook: Goldstone’s rethink: IOA
5 APRIL 2011
The cleansing of Israel’s war crimes
Jonathan Cook
Israeli leaders have barely hidden their jubilation at an opinion article in last Friday’s Washington Post by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone reconsidering the findings of his United Nations-appointed inquiry into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008.
For the past 18 months the Goldstone Report had forced Israel on to the defensive by suggesting its army – as well as Hamas, the ruling faction in Gaza – had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel’s three-week Operation Cast Lead. Some 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including hundreds of women and children.
Goldstone’s report, Israeli officials worried, might eventually pave the way to war crimes trials against Israeli soldiers at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
In what appeared to be a partial retraction of some of his findings against Israel, Goldstone argued that he would have written the report differently had Israel cooperated at the time of his inquiry.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, immediately called on the United Nations to shelve the Goldstone Report; Ehud Barak, the defence minister, demanded an apology; and Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, said Israel’s actions in Gaza had been “vindicated”.
Israel would certainly like observers to interpret Goldstone’s latest comments as an exoneration. In reality, however, he offered far less consolation to Israel than its supporters claim.
The report’s original accusation that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes still stands, as does criticism of Israel’s use of unconventional weapons such as white phosphorus, the destruction of property on a massive scale, and the taking of civilians as human shields.
Instead Goldstone restated his position in two ways that Israel will seek to exploit to the full.
The first was an observation that since his report’s publication in September 2009 “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct”.
In the past Goldstone has made much of the need for Israel and Hamas to investigate incidents where civilians were targeted, saying that otherwise his report should be transferred to the ICC. In his article he favourably compared Israel’s investigations to the failure by Hamas to carry out any probes.
The significance of Goldstone’s reassessment from Israel’s point of view was underlined this week by comments to the Jerusalem Post newspaper from a senior unnamed legal official in the Israeli military. He said Goldstone’s professed confidence in Israel’s investigatory system would help to forestall future war cimes probes by the UN.
That will be cause for Palestinian concern at a time when, in response to renewed hostilities between Israel and Hamas, some Israeli government ministers have called for a Cast Lead 2.
Another unnamed commander told the popular Israeli news website Ynet yesterday that Goldstone’s change of tack might lift the threat of arrest on war crimes charges from Israeli soldiers travelling abroad.
However, according to both Israeli human rights groups and a committee of independent legal experts appointed by the UN to monitor implementation of the report, Goldstone’s applause for Israel’s investigations is unwarranted.
Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, an Israeli organisation monitoring human rights in the occupied territories, said Israel had failed to conduct a prompt, independent or transparent inquiry.
“The materials on which Israel has relied have not been made available to us, so we are not in a position to judge the quality of the investigations or the credibility of the findings.”
Likewise, the UN committee of experts, led by a New York judge, Mary McGowan-Davis, has complained that the Israeli army is probing itself and questioned the effectiveness of the investigations following “unnecessary delays” in which evidence may have been “lost or compromised”.
Human rights groups have pointed out that, despite the large number of deaths in Gaza, only three of the 400 investigations cited by Goldstone have so far led to indictments.
One of those cases involved the theft of a credit card. Another, in which two soldiers used a nine-year-old boy as a human shield, led to their being punished with three-month suspended sentences and demotion.
The second, more significant reassessment by Goldstone is that he was wrong to conclude in his report that Israel intentionally targeted civilians “as a matter of policy”.
Despite Goldstone’s misleading wording in the article, he is referring not to an Israeli order to intentionally murder civilians but a policy in which indiscriminate attacks were undertaken with a disregard to likely casualties among civilians.
Strangely, he appears to base his revised opinion on Israel’s own military investigations, even though no evidence from them has yet been made public.
Rina Rosenberg, the international advocacy director of the Adalah legal centre in Israel, which has been monitoring Israel’s investigations on behalf of Palestinian legal groups, said Goldstone had given Israel a “gift” with this observation.
“Israel has tried to focus the debate entirely on whether it intended to kill civilians, as though a war crime depends only on intentionality. Israel knows that intention – outside a policy like targeted assassinations – is very difficult to prove.”
She pointed out that there were other important standards in international law for assessing war crimes, including negilgence, disregard for the safety of civilians, and indiscriminate use of force.
Also, observers have wondered what new information has emerged since Goldstone published his report to justify a rethink on whether Israeli policy left civilians in the line of fire.
His original conclusion drew in part on public statements by Israeli military commanders that in Gaza they had applied the Dahiya doctrine – an Israeli military strategy named after a suburb of Beirut that Israel levelled during its 2006 attack on Lebanon. In his article, Goldstone cast no fresh doubt on his earlier premise that such a strategy would by definition endanger civilians.
In addition, Israeli group Breaking the Silence has collected many testimonies from soldiers before and since publication of the Goldstone Report indicating that they received orders to carry out operations with little or no regard for the safety of civilians. Some described the army as pursuing a policy of “zero-risk” to soldiers, even if that meant putting civilians in danger.
Similarly, leaflets produced by the military rabbinate – apparently with the knowledge of the army top brass – urged Israeli ground troops in Gaza to protect their own lives at all costs and show no mercy to Palestinians.
The timing of Goldstone’s article has raised additional concern among Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups that he may have succumbed to political pressure.
Late last month the UN’s Human Rights Council, which set up the fact-finding mission, recommended that the General Assembly refer the Goldstone Report to the Security Council – the decisive stage in moving it to the International Criminal Court.
It is expected that the US, which has consistently opposed such a referral, will block the report’s progress to the ICC – further embarrassing Washington after its recent veto at the UN of a Palestinian resolution against Israeli settlements.
Shawan Jabareen, director of the Palestinian legal rights group al-Haq, said Goldstone’s article had provided Israel and the US with a “new weapon” to discredit the report even before it reached the Security Council.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Ran Greenstein: Reflections on academic boycotts in the wake of the UJ-BGU campaign: IOA
5 APRIL 2011
By Ran Greenstein, South African Review of Sociology – VOL 42/1, 2011
INTRODUCTION
The past few years have seen an increase in calls for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. This is part of a broader campaign to apply pressure on the Israeli state and its agencies. A recent initiative to suspend relations between the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Israel received much media attention in South Africa and gave rise to controversy. In particular, three objections were raised:
1. The call for boycott poses a threat to academic freedom by curbing the free exchange of ideas and by penalising people for their opinions;
2. The boycott is a discriminatory form of political intervention, because it singles out a specific group of academics – defined by nationality or citizenship – for special treatment;
3. It is a vengeful and punitive measure that blocks dialogue and prevents a move towards conflict resolution.
In what follows, I discuss each of these points in turn. This is done not in order to set down the one ‘correct’ position, but to encourage reflection and debate regarding the issue. Before proceeding, we must recognise that there is no politically neutral language that can be used to address the matters at hand. Pretending otherwise would lead to a ‘dialogue of the deaf’, rather than to a meaningful exchange. The discussion below is based thus on three explicit political assumptions:
a. The framework for resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is international law. It is not an internal affair to be decided by Israelis alone, but a global human rights issue of concern to many actors;
b. Principles of justice and redress, individual and collective equality, and inclusive democracy, are central to a resolution of the conflict;
c. The main problem is the Israeli state’s denial of human and political rights to Palestinians. A change in Israeli practices therefore is essential for any move towards reconciliation.
This is not to deny that there are other historical and contextual factors that need to be considered in order to acquire a thorough understanding of the conflict. However, without an agreement on the three core points noted above, any debate on the academic boycott would lead nowhere (these core points themselves may be debated, of course, but in a separate forum).
BOYCOTT AS A STRATEGY
On this basis, then, the question facing all those concerned with human rights and justice is what can be done to facilitate a positive change in Israeli practices. In other words, a change that would involve adopting principles of justice and equality, granting the same rights to all citizens regardless of ethnic and religious affiliation, terminating the occupation of the 1967 territories and recognising the rights of refugees displaced as a result of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Ideally, change would be driven from the inside by Israelis, as a result of realising that no stable and secure existence for Israeli Jews can be based on the oppression and denial of rights to Palestinians. However, it is rarely the case that those who enjoy political and economic privileges give them up voluntarily, without some form of pressure. This is especially the case when the subordinate group – Palestinian Arabs – lacks substantial leverage to be used in order to overturn the system from within.
Black South Africans used their crucial role as labourers in the system of production as a strategic weapon in the anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Palestinians, by contrast, reside outside the boundaries of the Israeli system of control (if they are refugees), are excluded from the system of production (if they live under occupation), and are subject to marginalisation as a permanent minority (if they live within Israel ‘proper’). It is difficult to envisage a change in their conditions without international solidarity.
The internal anti-apartheid movement benefited from international solidarity efforts, such as sanctions and divestment campaigns, and sports, culture and academic boycotts. The precise contribution of each of these components to the demise of apartheid is impossible to quantify. No one has identified what specifically was achieved by the academic boycott, for example, as distinct from other aspects of the anti-apartheid campaign. But, there is broad agreement that it played a role in undermining the sense of complacency of an important section of the white population. Whether that forced it into action for change, or rather pushed it to disengage and abandon the country altogether, is a matter of ongoing dispute.
What is not in dispute is that the academic boycott – as applied in apartheid South Africa – is the inspiration for the current campaign targeting Israeli academic institutions. Thus, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) frequently invokes South Africa, in order to provide legitimacy for itself (since no one ever disputed the moral imperative of the anti-apartheid struggle), and as an example of a successful strategy that worked ‘there’ and therefore could be expected to work ‘here’. This is strengthened by the notion that Israel has a ‘system of apartheid’, in addition to its practices of occupation and colonisation (see the 2004 call for boycott at http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id-869 .
The call to sever relations between UJ and BGU uses a somewhat different angle. It speaks in the name of academics in South Africa, ‘a country with a history of brute racism on the one hand and both academic acquiescence and resistance to it on the other’. South Africans, it argues, ‘are under an obligation to revisit relationships forged during the apartheid era with other institutions that turned a blind eye to racial oppression in the name of “purely scholarly” or “scientific work”.’ It goes on to claim that Israeli universities are complicit in the occupation of Palestinian territories, in the oppression of Palestinians and discrimination against Palestinian citizens. The relationship with BGU must therefore be suspended, until ‘the state of Israel adheres to international law and BGU (as did some South African universities during the struggle against South African apartheid) openly declares itself against the occupation and withdraws all privileges for the soldiers who enforce it’ (http://www.ujpetition.com/2010/09/south-african-academics-support-call.html, September 2010).
In their different ways, these calls present us with a set of issues related both to the characterisation of the Israeli system as apartheid and the ways in which strategies used in the South African struggle could be adopted for the struggle against Israeli oppressive practices. These are distinct issues: the Israeli system of control may resemble apartheid in certain important respects, but that tells us very little about the effective and legitimate ways of challenging it (see discussion in the Johannesburg Salon, http://jwtc.org.za/resources/docs/salon-volume-3/RanGreenstein_Israel.pdf. Each political system presents a different configuration of forces in a different historical context, and therefore calls for unique strategies of protest and resistance. Having said that, the question of the academic boycott does raise some similar issues of concern, of a more general nature.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Let us address academic freedom first. Is it indeed the case that boycotts pose a threat to academic freedom and interfere with the free flow of ideas and debates?
Looked at in abstract terms, the answer may seem to be ‘yes’. The introduction of non-academic considerations is of necessity a limitation on the uninterrupted course of academic life. Some evidence exists that the campaign against apartheid made it more difficult for white South Africans (regardless of their personal views and record of activism) to compete freely in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. This, despite the fact that no international journal or academic association adopted a policy of excluding anyone from publishing papers, presenting at conferences, attending seminars, finding sabbatical posts, and generally taking part in global scholarly exchanges. Occasional restrictions were imposed on individual South African academics overseas, but it was usually at the initiative of local activists, frequently students, rather than a response to a coherent strategy (see anecdotes in Academe, 92(5) September-October 2006: www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2066/SO/).
It must be pointed out that activists campaigning for a boycott of Israeli institutions are generally careful not to support such exclusions, except perhaps in a few cases of notorious individuals who use their academic position to advocate and plan racist policies (taking part in demographic engineering processes to ensure Jewish numerical dominance in Israel or devising legal strategies to allow the Israeli military to commit crimes and escape international censure). In such cases, the boundaries between freedom of speech (which must be protected) and freedom of action (which must be curtailed if it involves acts of discrimination and human rights violations) are not always clear.
Beyond such possible exceptions there is no indication that the academic freedom of staff members at Israeli academic institutions is being violated in practice, or even potentially, as a result of the boycott campaign. The UJ petition is explicit about the focus on institutional relations, and expresses no objections to reading and assigning material produced by BGU academics, engaging them in debate, publishing their contributions, participating in conferences alongside them, and so on – all subject to the normal rules of academic exchange. In a similar manner, the PACBI campaign focuses explicitly on institutions, and does not envisage or call for any step that would violate the right of individual academics to engage in free debate and exchanges of views, opinions or analyses.
An academic boycott may indeed affect individual scholars to the extent that they represent their institution in public or submit requests for funding through the institution and in its name. But, entitlement to research funds from overseas sources (such as the EU) is not generally recognised as a universal right, nor is it part of the normal definition of academic freedom. True, it is not always easy to tell the difference between an individual acting in his/her own capacity, and as a member of an institution. But, for most practical purposes it should not be difficult to separate the two functions. How, then, can the campaign distinguish between individual and institutional targets?
To answer that, we need to identify the overall goal behind the campaign: it is to convey the sense that things cannot proceed as usual, that there can be no normal academic life in an abnormal society that practises systematic ethnic exclusion. At the same time, there is a need to maintain a dialogue with critical voices operating from within Israeli and Palestinian societies, and make a contribution to change. This cannot be achieved by abstention from contact and maintaining ‘purity’ in isolation. Here are a few suggestions, aimed to clarify the distinction and also serve as a possible guide for action: Do not attend conferences in Israel that do not explicitly address issues of rights and justice; link up with internal dissident forces and work with them to undermine discriminatory and abusive practices; boycott any academic project that has military links; do not teach or otherwise participate in specialised academic programmes that cater to members of the security/military apparatuses; campaign against any international funding for academic programmes that do not have explicit progressive content aiming to enhance equality and justice (this would include ‘neutral’ or ‘value-free’ research); condition any cooperation by insisting that the institution subscribe to something along the lines of the Sullivan Code, which was used under apartheid in South Africa to enforce a minimum code of acceptable practice.
SINGLING OUT ISRAEL?
The steps suggested above may be suitable in other contexts as well – why reserve them for Israel? We need to realise that since the demise of apartheid, governments and multilateral organisations have imposed sanctions on many countries including Serbia, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma and others. Israel clearly is not singled out for international censure (in fact, it receives preferential treatment due to unconditional US diplomatic and financial support), but we do need to understand what makes it distinct in the eyes of global civil society activists. It is not the only or worst offender that violates human rights and engages in oppressive practices. Other states in the Middle East and elsewhere are guilty of similar practices. It is not the only state born out of a colonial-type encounter, which resulted in the dispossession of indigenous people. Most states in the ‘New World’ owe their origins to a violent takeover of territory and resources by European settlers.
What is indeed unique about Israel, making it similar to apartheid South Africa, is the continuous re-enactment of the original acts of dispossession on a daily basis. The ethnic exclusion which accompanied the emergence of Israel in 1948 is an ongoing process – in fact, it is the central project that has driven Israeli policies from their inception. Recent years have seen dozens of new acts, regulations, pieces of legislation and government policies that aim to entrench ethnic inequalities, bolster Israel’s Jewish nature at the expense of indigenous Arabs, and restrict the political, social (and – where possible – physical) presence of Palestinians. They make Israel a ‘Jewish demographic state’ – an exclusionary state of a special type. It is not the solidarity movement that ‘singles out’ Israel. Israel singles itself out by such practices, which are without parallel today. To be clear, the term ‘Israel’ here recognises that the meaningful unit of analysis is ‘Greater Israel’ – which has included the occupied territories for the last 44 years – and ‘Greater Palestine’, with the excluded 1948 refugees as an essential part of the picture – rather than pre-1967 Israel which no longer exists.
There is one crucial historical difference between Israel and apartheid South Africa, however. The overall goal of political exclusion and segregation in South Africa was to entrench white prosperity. Central to this was the exploitation of black labour. Black people were ever-present on the streets, in white-dominated workplaces, mines, factories, farms, and homes, even if they were politically subordinated and socially marginalised. Israel is different in this respect due to the success of the strategy of externalising Palestinians. This has been the case since the early days of settlement: from the campaign for ‘Jewish labour’ early in the 20th century and the ethnic cleansing of 1948, through the suspension of 1967 occupied territories in an eternal limbo of non-annexation and non-liberation, all the way to the post-Oslo disengagement plans that leave Palestine inside the boundaries of Israeli control while Palestinians remain outside the boundaries of citizenship and rights.
While the occupation is still paramount in the daily lives of Palestinians, it has become invisible to the majority of Israelis, who choose not to see it or feel its presence in their lives. They profess not to understand what they have to do with the conditions of people living in ‘foreign’ territories. In this sense, Israeli Jews are different from white South Africans, who could not avoid the reality of apartheid, and for whom the relationship between ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ (in the form of sanctions) was fairly obvious. How can this relationship be made similarly visible to Israeli citizens?
SOLIDARITY AND EDUCATION, NOT PUNISHMENT
Israeli Jews, and particularly their business and educational elites, feel an integral part of the West. Academics regard themselves as part of the global academic community. This feeling is central to their professional identity and it contributes to a prevalent sense of complacency. While they are not particularly progressive or reactionary as a group, and are not different from other academics, they do work under unique conditions. This is the key challenge then: how to use the quest for normality and legitimacy to encourage ordinary people to move against extraordinary circumstances?
The rationale for the academic boycott in the case of Israel is that it targets a crucial component of the identity of dominant elites who tolerate, though not necessarily actively facilitate, oppressive practices. This campaign may be undertaken in order to make them realise that they cannot continue with life as usual, that they must act to change the situation if they wish to avoid being ostracised. This approach would not necessarily work when targeting other oppressive regimes with different historical legacies (which is why there was a focus on rugby and cricket boycotts in apartheid South Africa, wine in Pinochet’s Chile, football under the military junta’s rule in Argentina, and so on).
To be effective, the campaign would need to observe some guidelines. First, it should target institutions for specific practices for which they bear responsibility, rather than for general practices in which they are not directly involved. Second, the targets should be realistic: those affected should have the power to change the practices in question. Third, the identification of targets and nature of sanctions would ideally be done in cooperation between local and global academic activists.
At all major Israeli universities dissident academics and progressive student groups, which advocate equality and justice for all, are found. They are based internally and can identify the specific issues facing each institution. These may range from discrimination in residences, biased and offensive study materials, the presence of security-military academic programmes and institutions, the role played by security forces within the university, censorship, and so on. International solidarity organisations and academic activists need to establish links with local Jewish and Arab activists, work together with them to identify concrete concerns at different institutions, and campaign on that basis.
What are the advantages of this approach? It would come from within, but with external assistance and participation; it would lead to forging international links of solidarity and activism; it would avoid the charge of being a punitive external imposition, which engenders resistance to change. Most importantly, it would give people specific targets on which they could work as an educational and mobilising tool. The campaign can succeed because it is within the power of institutions to change their practices. For example, the demand raised in the UJ petition that BGU terminate special programmes to members of the security forces and denounce the occupation can be met by the institution if it chooses to, with no external actors involved.
This strategy requires regular exchange of information between academics. Israel-based progressive activists and academics, working for equality, justice and human rights, are subject to enormous pressure internally. The only way they could sustain a campaign to change society from within is by maintaining a constant exchange of information, solidarity, and a flow of moral support from the outside. Palestinian activists are even more in need of external exchange and assistance. It is only in dialogue between relevant actors that the campaign can move forward. The UJ-BGU campaign provides a useful starting point for future efforts, which hopefully would see greater involvement of South African academics in struggles for global justice.
Ran Greenstein in associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has written “Genealogies of Conflict: class, identity and state in Palestine/Israel and South Africa” (1995), edited “Comparative Perspectives on South Africa” (1998) and “The Role of Political Violence in South Africa’s Democratization” (2003). He is currently working on a manuscript titled “Alternative Voices: dissident perspectives in Israeli/Palestinian history”.
South African Review of Sociology VOL 42 • NO 1 • 2011
ISSN 2152-8586/Online 2072-1978
© South African Sociological Association pp 136–142
DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2011.563577
Published with the author’s permission