For Israel, a reckoning

No more a taboo

In the United States and Europe, trade unions, mainstream churches and academic associations have brought back the strategies that were used against apartheid South Africa. In a resolution adopted by 431 votes to 62, the US Presbyterian Church voted for a process of “phased, selective disinvestment” in multinational corporations doing business with Israel. This followed the opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s wall and its “settler” colonies were illegal. A similar declaration by the court in 1971, denouncing South Africa’s occupation of Namibia, ignited the international boycott.

Like the South Africa campaign, the issue of law is central. No state is allowed to flout international law as wilfully as Israel. In 1990, a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Saddam Hussein get out of Kuwait was the same, almost word for word, as the one demanding that Israel get out of the West Bank. Iraq was driven out while Israel has been repeatedly rewarded. On 11 December, Barack Obama announced $2.8bn in “aid” for Israel, part of the $30bn US taxpayers will gift from their stricken economy during this decade.

The hypocrisy is now well understood in the US. A “Stolen Beauty” campaign pursues Ahava cosmetics, which are made in illegal West Bank “settlements”; last autumn it forced the firm to drop its “ambassador” Kristin Davis, a star of Sex and the City. In Britain, Sainsbury’s and Tesco are under pressure to identify “settlement” products, whose sale contravenes human rights provisions in the European Union’s trade agreement with Israel.

In Australia, a consortium led by Veolia lost its bid for a billion-dollar desalination plant following a campaign highlighting a plan, involving the French firm, to build a light rail connecting Jerusalem to the “settlements”. In Norway, the government pension fund has withdrawn its investment in the Israeli hi-tech company Elbit Systems, which helped build the wall across Palestine. This is the first official boycott by a western country.

In 2005, Britain’s Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions complicit in the oppression of Palestinians. The AUT was forced to retreat when the Israel lobby unleashed a blizzard of character assassination and charges of anti-Semitism.(called him bobby the anti-semite) The writer and activist Omar Barghouti called this “intellectual terror”: a perversion of morality and logic that says to be against racism towards Palestinians makes one anti-Semitic. However, the Israeli assault on Gaza on 27 December 2008 changed almost everything. The US Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel was formed, with Desmond Tutu on its advisory board. In 2009, Britain’s Trade Union Congress voted for a consumer boycott. The “Israel taboo” is no more.

http://laudyms.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/for-israel-a-reckoning/