PACBI: Intellectual responsibility and the voice of the colonized: The Electronic Intifada
Statement, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 17 February 2010
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has recently encountered a number of projects that while intending to empower the colonized Palestinians, in essence end up undermining their will and choice of method of struggle for freedom, justice and self-determination. The publication of a new book entitled The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories belongs to this category. The book project represents a classic example of how the collective voice of the colonized is ignored in the production of a scholarly work supposed to empower them.
While it is crucial for scholars in relevant fields to expose and analyze the colonial situation in Palestine, this academic imperative should not imply that one overlooks how scholarship engages this colonialism. That is, this book, as a collaboration of various scholars — Israeli and non-Israeli contributors — was completed with support from the Van Leer Institute. In other words, through working under the aegis of the Van Leer Institute, this project has cooperated with one of the very institutions that PACBI and an overwhelming majority of Palestinian academics and intellectuals have called for boycotting. As such, the research project which led to the production of the volume violates the criteria of the academic and cultural boycott as set by PACBI and widely endorsed in Palestinian civil society, including by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) and University Teachers’ Association in Palestine (UTA).
Contrary to the claims of some left-wing Israeli academics that the Van Leer institute is an incubator for cutting-edge critical thinking and oppositional politics, the institute is firmly planted in the prevailing Zionist consensus and is part and parcel of the structures of oppression and domination. It subscribes to the “vision of Israel as both a homeland for the Jewish people and a democratic society, predicated on justice, fairness and equality for all its residents,” ignoring the oxymoron presented by this inherently exclusionary vision — a “Jewish State” of necessity discriminates against its “non-Jewish” citizens. The Van Leer Institute receives financial support from other Israeli universities and state institutions that are subject to boycott. Among its financial contributors and institutional “friends” are the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University; the Edelstein Center at the Hebrew University; the Israel Ministry of Science; the National Insurance Institute, Israel; and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Furthermore, Van Leer, like all other Israeli academic institutions, has never taken a stance against Israel’s policies of occupation and racial discrimination, nor against the recent war of aggression on Gaza or the ongoing illegal siege of 1.5 million Palestinians there. The Van Leer is, therefore, an institution with strong links to establishment institutions in Israel. As such, it is complicit in maintaining and entrenching Israel’s regime of occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people.
Though intellectual projects may aim to rigorously articulate the complex matrix of control that exists in Palestine, the intellectual process has a fundamental ethical and political component. As such, it is incumbent upon all scholars to realize that any collaboration which brings together Israeli and international academics (Arabs or otherwise) under the auspices of Israeli institutions is counterproductive to fighting Israeli colonial oppression, and is therefore subject to boycott.
A project involving only Israeli academics, on the other hand, receiving support from an Israeli academic institution, may be seen as a justifiable exercise of a right or an entitlement by Israeli scholars as tax payers and, as a result, may not per se be boycottable.
As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement gains momentum globally, an increasing number of voices are emerging in support of this strategy as the most effective, nonviolent route to bring about change towards justice and durable peace based on international law and universal principles of human rights. The endorsement by various artists and academics of specific boycott actions in the past few years is welcome and well-known. It is the responsibility of the boycott supporters to understand the broadly-accepted boycott criteria and guidelines upon which this boycott is based and adhere to it, rather than attempting to invent or suggest idiosyncratic criteria of their own, as the latter would undermine the Palestinian guiding reference for the global boycott campaign against Israel.
It is crucial to emphasize that the BDS movement derives its principles from both the demands of the Palestinian BDS Call, signed by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in July 2005, and, in the academic and cultural fields, from the Palestinian Call for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, issued a year earlier in July 2004. Together, the BDS and PACBI Calls represent the most authoritative and widely-supported strategic statements to have emerged from Palestine in decades; all major political parties, labor, student and women groups, and organizations representing Palestinian refugees all over the world have endorsed and supported these calls. Both calls underline the prevailing Palestinian belief that the most effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian people is direct action aimed at bringing an end to Israel’s colonial and apartheid regime, just as the apartheid regime in South Africa was abolished, by isolating Israel internationally through boycotts and sanctions, forcing it to comply with international law and respect Palestinian rights.
Since the formulation of these calls, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on defining the principles of the boycott movement. Rooted in universal values and principles, the BDS Call categorically rejects all forms of racism, racial discrimination and colonial oppression. PACBI has also translated the principles enshrined in its Call into practical guidelines for implementing the international academic and cultural boycott of Israel. However intellectually challenging and avant-garde some projects may be, by being oblivious to the Palestinian-articulated boycott criteria they in effect work against the internationally-embraced Palestinian struggle for justice.
EDITOR: Fisk on the Dubai events
In a short but concise interview, Fisk makes the point that the Dubai operation could not have taken place without the collusion and active assistance of the UK authorities – he is sure that the passports are real documents produced in the UK by the proper authorities, and only the pictures were swapped. This puts a whole new gloss on the UK government pitiful and embarassing silence, followed by ritual motions. This was not an Israeli-only operation, but one conducted by the combined efforts of the usual suspects, Israel and its western allies.
Growing row over Dubai killing: Al Jazeera online
Dubai’s police chief says he is almost certain Israel was involved in last month’s assassination of a senior Hamas official.
Dahi Khalfan Tamim says, if proven, an arrest warrant should be issued for the man in-charge of Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent.
He says if Israel is behind the assassination, then Tel Aviv could find itself in a diplomatic crisis with some of its European allies. To listen, Click here
Dubai police chief in Mossad arrest call: BBC
Dubai’s police chief has called for the head of Mossad to be arrested if Israel’s spy agency was behind the killing of a Hamas boss in the emirate.
Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan said Interpol should issue a “red notice” to approve the arrest of Meir Dagan.
Israel shrugged off the calls, saying the Dubai police chief had provided no incriminating proof.
Mahmud al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, was found dead in a Dubai hotel on 20 January.
Several fake European passports – including six from the UK – are thought to have been used by his 11 suspected killers.
The UK government denies it had any prior knowledge of the fake British passports being used, although Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said it was “entirely possible” the government had been alerted.
And a British newspaper claimed on Friday the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the government had received a tip-off from Israel.
Red notice call
Lt Gen Khalfan has said he was “99% certain” Israel was involved in the assassination.
In a televised interview on Thursday, said: “If the Mossad were proven to be behind the crime, which is most likely now, Interpol should issue a red notice for the head of the Mossad because he would be a killer.”
If there was proof Israel had used British passports… relations between the UK and Israel would be in a crisis
The international police agency Interpol – which has issued arrest notices for all 11 suspects although it admitted their true identities were unclear – issues red notices to seek the arrest of wanted persons with a view to extraditing them.
An unnamed Israeli official denounced the red notice “threat” as “absurd”.
“The accusations are baseless,” the official told AFP news agency.
“Police have not explained the circumstances of [Mr Mabhouh’s] death, or even any proof that he’s been assassinated. All there is are videos of people talking on the telephone,” he said.
Diplomatic tensions have been building between Britain and Israel after it emerged on Monday that six of the passports used by the 11 suspected assassins were British.
They were clones of passports belonging to men who have dual British and Israeli citizenship.
Three Irish passports were also used, along with a French and a German passport.
Dubai police are investigating US-issued credit card accounts used to purchase plane tickets, which they say the suspects obtained with the fraudulent passports, the New York Times quoted an unnamed official as saying.
‘Outrage’
Friday’s Daily Mail quotes a British security source who claims the UK’s intelligence service MI6 and the government were told of the operation.
A Foreign Office spokesman said it was “not correct” to state Britain knew in advance about the passports.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the use of the passports was “an outrage”, and Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, was summoned to the foreign office on Thursday to discuss the issue.
Israelis Share Suspicions in Hamas Leader’s Killing: The New York Times
Isabel Kershner
February 17, 2010 – 12:00am
The initial nods, winks and pats on the back here over the assassination last month of a senior Hamas official in Dubai are turning to puzzlement and concern as mounting evidence, including extensive surveillance videos, points to a remarkably clumsy operation many Israelis deem unworthy of their intelligence service, Mossad.
Officially, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the case, as is customary in delicate matters of intelligence and national security. But since the news of the assassination broke last month, Israel has unofficially made the story its own, with newspapers blaring congratulatory headlines and government ministers praising Mossad’s director.
However, then the Dubai police released images showing some of the 17 people suspected of being in the hit squad bumbling about in poor disguises, and Britain became infuriated by the use of faked British travel documents. Now Israelis are wondering whether their once-famed spy service could have been behind such a sloppy job or, in a John Le Carré-like twist, if Israel could have been framed.
On Wednesday, a commentator for the newspaper Haaretz, Amir Oren, wrote a front-page column about the case, calling for the Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, to step down.
“What must have seemed to its perpetrators as a huge success,” he wrote, “is now being overshadowed by enormous question marks.”
Israel wanted the Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, 50, for the capture and killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 and for smuggling weapons to Hamas in Gaza. On Jan. 19, he was killed in a Dubai hotel room.
On Monday, the Dubai police named 11 of the 17 people they suspect in the case. Among the names were those of three Irish citizens — of whom the Irish authorities have no record — and six British citizens living in Israel who appear to be victims of identity theft. The police also showed images culled from the ubiquitous closed-circuit TV system showing some of them in false beards, wigs and glasses, in almost comical attempts at disguise.
With the agents’ passport pictures now splashed across newspapers and television screens around the world, Israeli commentators said the agents, whoever they may really be, have been burned. Eitan Haber, a columnist in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot and a close aide to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, wrote Wednesday, “They cannot even go to the grocery store.”
In a first official reaction, the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said Wednesday that Israel’s policy of “ambiguity” in such cases was “correct.”
“I don’t know why we are assuming that Israel, or the Mossad, used those passports,” Mr. Lieberman told Army Radio. “Israel never responds, never confirms and never denies.”
Three former senior Mossad officials contacted by a reporter on Wednesday refused to comment at all.
The British authorities said they believed the British passports the Dubai police had collected were “fraudulent.” Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a full investigation.
The six British citizens living in Israel — who woke up on Tuesday to find their names linked with the assassination — do not resemble the agents’ photographs from the passports bearing their names. Among the Britons was a physiotherapist, a technical writer and a repairman who lives on a kibbutz.
The name of an American-born Israeli was used by another of the suspects, who carried a German passport. That person studies in a religious seminary near Tel Aviv.
Three of the British citizens gave interviews to the news media on Tuesday, expressing their shock and some fear. By Wednesday they appeared to have gone incommunicado and did not answer or return a reporter’s calls.
Mr. Oren, in his front-page column in Haaretz, anticipated a diplomatic crisis over the suspicions that Mossad had counterfeited British passports.
“It is as if Israeli governments had never apologized to London for using British documentation,” he wrote, “as if they had not promised solemnly, when passports of Her Majesty’s subjects were found in a certain phone booth, that this would never happen again.”
Fake passports fuel questions about Israeli role in Hamas official’s slaying: The Washington Post
Howard Schneider
February 18, 2010 – 12:00am
Pressure mounted Wednesday for Israel to respond to speculation that its Mossad spy agency killed a Hamas operative in a Dubai hotel last month, with Britain’s prime minister promising to investigate the use of forged British passports by the alleged assassins and analysts in Israel taking unusual aim at the country’s vaunted undercover organization.
Of the 11 members of the squad that Dubai authorities say carried out the killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, six carried apparently fake British passports bearing the names of Israeli citizens. The British Foreign Office summoned the Israeli ambassador to a meeting over the matter Thursday, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown said a full inquiry will be mounted.
“The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care,” Brown said. “The evidence has got to be assembled about what has actually happened and how it happened and why it happened.”
Police officials in Dubai have not ruled out Mossad involvement in Mabhouh’s slaying, but they have not emphasized the possibility, either. Dubai, like the other small Persian Gulf states that make up the United Arab Emirates, does not have diplomatic ties with Israel, but it is also considered less hostile toward Israel than some other Arab countries.
In Israel, several prominent commentators engaged in surprisingly sharp criticism of an agency that in recent years has been credited with successes against militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as their patrons in Iran and Syria.
In the Haaretz daily, security affairs correspondent Amir Oren urged that Mossad head Meir Dagan be fired in the wake of an operation that had turned embarrassingly public — Dubai police this week released security camera video of the suspects in Mabhouh’s hotel and elsewhere. Others called for a commission of inquiry. Whether supportive or critical of the operation, virtually all commentators wrote from the assumption that the Mossad had been involved in it.
“Mabhouh was not an envoy of the Education Board of Gaza to Dubai. He was a top terrorist,” former Mossad agent Gad Shimron said in an interview. “There is no doubt about the Israeli footprints in this. The question is whether those who planned it took in the possibility that the Dubai police would be very efficient.”
Israel has a record of using foreign passports to conceal the movements of its undercover operatives and has run into diplomatic trouble with Canada, New Zealand, Britain and others over the practice. The Mossad agents who tried to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan in 1997, for example, carried Canadian documents.
The Dubai case has the added wrinkle that the names and some other data on the passports match those of Israeli citizens who immigrated here from Europe — and who were shocked to find themselves mentioned in the material released by Dubai police.
That has left Israeli officials in a quandary, on the one hand trying to maintain the country’s “policy of ambiguity” — neither confirming nor denying its involvement in covert operations — and on the other, having to explain how the names of some of its citizens ended up on forged documents cited in an international murder investigation.
In Israel’s first official comments on the matter, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Army Radio on Wednesday that despite the presence of the names, there is “no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad and not some other service or country up to some mischief.”
Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said there are no plans to try to unravel why Israelis’ names appeared on the passports. If there is suspicion of identity theft or concern about implication in a murder, those involved should consult a lawyer, Hanegbi said.
“I don’t think the government is going to have anything to do with it,” he said.
Mabhouh, who was based in Damascus along with other Hamas exiles from the Gaza Strip, was a founding member of Hamas’s military wing. He was linked to the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers in the late 1980s and more recently is thought to have been involved in supplying arms and money to Hamas militants in Gaza. Hamas has blamed Israel for his death but has not said why he was in Dubai.
In Gaza, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing announced that the group has formed a plan to avenge Mabhouh’s death.