2010

Blue & White

Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Centre
The development of the Boycott and Divestments Campaign against Israel is not
without dispute. Here Michael Warchawski contests an earlier opinion piece by
Gush Shalom’s Uri Avnery title ‘Green & Red’, in which he called for the BDS
campaign to be specifically targeted against settlements in the occupied
territories , companies aiding and abetting the occupation such as Caterpillar and
those engaged in the normalization of relations between Israel and the
settlements. True to form Avnery just recently took part in an actor’s boycott of a
Tel Aviv based theatre company which plans performances in the settlement town
of Ariel. I’ve also included in this document a previous article by Warchawski
titled ‘Yes to BDS against Israel: Answer to Uri Avnery’. Saying all that what caught
my eye was Warchawski’s basis for a dual state solution as follows: 1) The ending
of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Syrian
Golan, 2) ensuring full and collective equality in the pre-1967 Israel and 3)
realiszing the right of Palestinian refugees to return’. I would agree with that but
would also take heed from Avery’s earlier warning of Netanyhu’s aspiration on the
Jordan Valley titled ‘All Quiet on the Eastern Fromt’. Clearly the Jordan Valley
needs to be understood as an integral part of the West Bank, for those who are
geographically challenged. In his earlier article (printed here) Warchawski states:
‘Our goal is the fulfillment of certain values, like basic individual and collective
rights, and end to domination and oppression, decolonization, equality, and as
much justice as possible. In that framework we obviously must support “peace-
initiatives” that can reduce the level of violence and/or achieve a certain amount
of rights. In our strategy however, this support for peace initiatives is not a goal in
itself, but merely a means to achieve the above mentioned values and rights….
The form of the solution, is in my opinion, irrelevant as long as we are speaking
about a solution in which the two peoples are living in freedom (i.e without a
colonial relationship). Whether the final result of that de-colonization will be a
“one-state” solution, two democratic states (i.e not a “Jewish State”), a federation
or any other institutional structure is secondary, and ultimately be decided by the
struggle itself and the level of participation of Israelis, if at all.’ It’s important that
the those engaged in the Peace Talks see the tremendous flexibility and scope for
action in Warchawski skilled conceptualizations. Although he is plainly an idealist
he is not an ideologue in so far as he is not wedded to specific structural
outcomes and isn’t necessarily ruling anything in or out. I think though that
Avnery’s case in relation to the BDS campaign cannot be dismissed lightly and I
would like to see a list of Kosher Israeli and Jewish International business’s in BDS
terms. Facebook for instance?

Paul Cassidy
paul@pdfwebpublishing.com
9/3/2010
Blue and White: Where Uri Avnery has it Wrong
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 06:49 Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC)
Once again Uri Avnery is using his blog to criticize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
(BDS) campaign against Israel. Under the title "Red and Green," Avnery comments on the long
and interesting program recently broadcast on Israeli Channel 10 on the growing international
isolation of Israel.

Avnery, the veteran journalist and activist, repeats his main arguments against "boycott
Israel" campaign and the need to focus only on the boycott of settlers and settlement
products. I have already reacted to a similar criticism by Avnery , but the well-deserved
authority of Uri Avnery within the international solidarity movement requires a debate of
what I consider to be his (very few indeed) mistaken views.

"Indeed there is no need for a world-wide [BDS] organization [the reportage] says,
because all over the place there is a spontaneous surge of pro-Palestinian and anti-
Israeli feeling. Following the "Cast Lead" operation and the flotilla affair, this process
has gathered momentum," summarizes Avnery.

After this summary, Uri's blog focuses on a criticism of the campaign of boycotting
Israel. His main argument is that the campaign doesn't distinguish between Israel and
the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). For Avnery, while the OPT should be totally
freed from Israeli control and domination, the territories west of the "Green Line" are
"naturally" Israeli, just as Manchester is Great Britain and Hanover is Germany. There
should be no challenge to this reality and, as Uri said once, he will be the first to defend
Israel from any such challenge. For Avnery, the colonial nature of the State of Israel is
obsolete within 1948.

Confronted with the colonial behavior and continuous dynamics of the state of Israel,
more and more people are questioning Avnery’s approach, having difficulties to believe
that the colonial behavior of all Israeli governments since 1967 is only a long series of
mistakes due to severe blindness. Unlike my friend Uri, I don't think that our problem is
the world-wide "red and green" alliance", but definitely the "blue and white" nature of
Israel and its structural colonialism.
Towards the end of his blog Uri Avnery writes: "all this becomes impossible if there is a
call for a boycott of all Israelis [my emphasis, MW)". This is a mistake, but not an
accidental one: the BDS campaign has never been oriented towards individuals, but
towards products and institutions. The mistake, however, reflects the basic confusion of
Avnery (and others) between the State, its deeds and its population. For Avnery, the
state and population are more or less the same; the State is the collective organization
of the citizen's community and attacking the state (and even more so, denying its
legitimacy) is synonymous with attacking its population and denying its right to exist as
a collective.

In reality, however, the state is an accumulation of its deeds and institutions. State and
civil society (its organized population) are two different entities, often antagonist to each
other. Israel is a colonial state in its modus operandi, institutions and history, the same
way South Africa was an apartheid state and the US, before the civil rights movement, a
segregationist one.

Uri Avnery rightly points that the BDS campaign is targeting the colonial/apartheid state
of Israel, not only the settlements and their products. BDS is calling for a triple
revolution: ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and
the Syrian Golan, ensuring full individual and collective equality in the pre-1967 Israel,
and realizing the right of Palestinian refugees to return. Only the fulfillment of these
three set of demands can make Israel a civilized state, acceptable in the community of
democratic nations; until then, Israel (the real state of Israel, not an ahistorical and
abstract concept) will remain a pariah state for all who are coherent in the defence of
basic human rights and democracy and should be boycotted, the way apartheid South
Africa, Fascist Spain or Greece of the military dictatorship have been boycotted.

As for the Israeli population that both Avnery and I would like to see on the frontline of
the struggle for a just peace in this area, modern history has taught us that only the
efficiency of the anti-colonial struggle and the growing price - in blood, money,
international isolation and internal degeneration - to be paid for ongoing colonialism will
ultimately make the change. Until then, we will remain a tiny minority of visionaries,
adding our important voices – important, because they are coming from within the belly
of the beast – to the growing international demand for justice for the Palestinian people.

Contrary to Uri Avnery's claim, the solidarity movement with Palestine

should not "support the Israeli activists", but the other way round: the Israeli activists
should provide their support to the world-wide campaign aiming at isolating the Israeli
apartheid State, for the sake of the rights of the Palestinian people as well as for the
sake of a viable future for our grandchildren.
Yes to BDS against Israel: Answer to Uri Avnery
Wednesday, 25 August 2010 00:00 Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC)

The call for BDS—Boycott,

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
Sanctions—has
has finally reached Israeli public
opinion.

The decision of Norway to divest from Israeli corporations involved in settlement

building made the difference, and provided the first big success to that important
campaign. After having ignored the BDS campaign for several years, Uri Avnery finally
felt obliged to react, twice, in his blog. Like Uri, I rarely react to other’s opinions and in
my own blog, g, as he put it nicely, “I don’t want to impose my views, I just want to provide
food for thought and leave it to the reader to form his or her opinion”. Some of the
arguments put forward by Avnery, however, require an answer, because they may
mislead his readers.

Despite the fact that I sometimes disagree with Avnery’s opinions

opinions—though
though much less
than in the past—II have great respect for the man, the journalist, the activist and the
analyst, and since the bankruptcy of Peace Now during the Oslo process, we have been
closely active together, and I would dare say that we became friends. This is why I feel
compelled to react to his criticism of the BDS campaign.

Let’s start with the obvious and with what I consider to be a false debate. “Hatred is a
very bad advisor” writes Uri, and I will be the last to disagree with him. I know also that
he will agree with me if I add that in our political context, hatred is understandable.

“Israel is not South Africa” says Uri. Of course it isn’t, and every concrete reality
real is
different from every other. Nevertheless, these two countries have some similarities:
both are racist states with (different kinds of) apartheid systems (the literal meaning of
apartheid being “structural separation”). Both countries were established as “European
states” in a national/ethnical environment composed of non-European who were
considered a hostile environment, and rightly so. We do also agree—and this is even
more important—that in order to achieve substantial results in our struggle, we need to
build joint dynamics including the Palestinian national resistance, Israeli anti-occupation
forces, and an international solidarity movement. Ten years ago, I call this the "winning
triangle.”

We share a lot in common indeed, until the issue of Uri’s misrepresentation of his
political opponents comes up. In his article debating Neve Gordon's article in LA Times,
Uri writes: “Neve Gordon and his partners in this (BDS) effort have despaired of the
Israelis.” If this were true, why do Neve, myself and many other Israeli BDS
campaigners devote so much of their time in building, together with Uri Avnery, an
Israeli movement against war, occupation and colonization? The true question is not
“changing Israeli society,” but how and for what.

The political goal of Uri Avnery is "an Israeli-Palestinian peace," i.e., a compromise that
should satisfy the majority of the two communities, on a symmetrical basis (in another
important article, he called it "truth against truth"). Such symmetry is the result of
another important political assumption by Avnery: the conflict in Palestine is a conflict
between two national movements with equal legitimacy.

Neve and many supporters of the BDS campaign disagree on both assumptions:
our goalis not peace as such, because "peace" in itself doesn't mean anything (almost
every war in modern history was initiated under the pretext of achieving peace). Peace
is always the reflection of relation of forces in which one side cannot impose on the
other all that it considers being its legitimate rights.

Unlike Uri, our goal is the fulfillment of certain values, like basic individual and collective
rights, an end of domination and oppression, decolonization, equality, and as-much-
justice-as-possible. In that framework, we obviously may support "peace initiatives" that
can reduce the level of violence and/or achieve a certain amount of rights. In our
strategy, however, this support for peace initiatives is not a goal in itself, but merely a
means to achieve the above-mentioned values and rights.

That difference between "peace" and "justice" is connected to the divergence

concerning the second assumption of Uri Avnery: the symmetry between two equally
legitimate national movements and aspirations.

For us, Zionism is not a national liberation movement but a colonial movement, and
the State of Israel is and has always been a settlers' colonial state. Peace, or, better,
justice, cannot be achieved without a total decolonization (one can say de-Zionisation)
of the Israeli State; it is a precondition for the fulfillment of the legitimate rights of the
Palestinians—whether refugees, living under military occupation or second-class
citizens of Israel. Whether the final result of that de-colonization will be a "one-state"
solution, two democratic states (i.e., not a "Jewish State"), a federation or any other
institutional structure is secondary, and will ultimately be decided by the struggle itself
and the level of participation of Israelis, if at all.

In that sense, Uri Avnery is wrong when he states that our divergences is about "one
state" or "two states." As explained above, the divergence is on rights, decolonization
and the principle of full equality. The form of the solution is, in my opinion, irrelevant as
long as we are speaking about a solution in which the two peoples are living in freedom
(i.e., without colonial relationships) and equality.

Another important divergence with Uri Avnery concerns the dialectics between the
Palestinian national liberation agenda and the role of the so-call Israeli peace camp.
While it is obvious that the Palestinian national movement needs as many Israeli allies
as possible to achieve liberation as quick as possible and with as little suffering as
possible, one cannot expect the Palestinian movement to wait until Uri, Neve and the
other Israeli anti-colonialists convince the majority of the Israeli public. For two reasons:
first, because popular national movements do not wait to fight oppression and
colonialism; second, because history has taught us that changes within the colonialist
society have always been the result of the liberation struggle, and not the other way
round: when the price of occupation becomes too high, more and more people
understand that it is not worth continuing.

Yes, a hand extended for coexistence is needed, but together with an iron fist fighting
for rights and freedom. The failure of the Oslo process confirms a very old lesson of
history: any attempt for reconciliation before the fulfillment of rights strengthens the
continuation of the colonial domination relationship. Without a price to be paid, why
should the Israelis stop colonization, why should they risk a deep internal crisis?

This is where the BDS campaign is so relevant: it offers an international

framework to actin order to help the Palestinian people achieve their legitimate rights,
both on the institutional level (states and international institutions) and on that of civil
society. On the one hand it addresses the international community, asking it
tosanction a State that is systematically violating international law, UN resolutions, the
Geneva Conventions and signed agreements; on the other hand, it calls on international
civil society to act, both as individuals as well as social movements (trade-unions,
parties, local councils, popular associations etc) to boycott goods, official
representatives, institutions etc. that represent the colonial State of Israel.

Both tasks (boycott and sanctions) will eventually be a pressure on the Israeli people,
pushing them to understand that occupation and colonization have a price, that violating
international rules will, sooner or later, make the State of Israel a pariah-country, not
welcome in the civilized community of nations. Just like South Africa in the last decades
of apartheid. In that sense, and unlike Uri's claim, BDS is addressed to the Israeli public,
and, right now, is the only way to provoke a change in Israeli attitudes towards
occupation/colonization. If one compares this BDS to the anti-apartheid BDS campaign
that took twenty years to start bearing real fruits, one cannot but be surprised at how
efficient the anti-Israeli occupation campaign has already been, and even in Israel we
already witness its first effects.

The BDS campaign was initiated by a broad coalition of Palestinian political and social
movements. No Israeli who claims to support the national rights of the Palestinian
people can, decently, turns his or her back to that campaign: after having claimed for
years that "armed struggle is not the way," it will be outrageous that this BDS strategy
will too be disqualified by those Israeli activists. On the contrary, we must all together
join to "Boycott from Within" in order to provide Israeli support to this Palestinian
initiative. It is the minimum we can do, and it is the minimum we should do.