Berkeley's Israel boycott: The occupation's new friend
dsharavi
By Bradley Burston
Thu., April 08, 2010 Nisan 24, 5770
JERUSALEM - If I were a person who wanted to see the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian land continue for as long as possible, I
would be beside myself with relish at the thought of the current
Boycott,Divestment,Sanctions (BDS) campaign at the school I love, the
University of California, Berkeley.
A word of background. At the time when I was an undergraduate at
Berkeley, to talk with Palestinian peace activists and to back a two-
state solution was to risk arrest in Israel.
I strongly believed then that a Palestinian state should be
established on the West Bank and Gaza land which Israel captured in
the 1967 Six Day War, and that the capital of that independent nation
should be in East Jerusalem.
I still do. And because when I left Berkeley, I went to Israel and
have lived here ever since, I take heart in the polls which for years
have shown that a majority of Israelis want to see an eventual two-
state solution to their long conflict with their Palestinian
neighbors.
This is something else I have learned about living in this place: You
get to know acts of political narcissism when they see them. You get
to know when people, in the guise of putting themselves on the line,
are merely putting themselves in the spotlight. And you get to know
double standards like nobody else.
That is why hardliners can only adore the current campaign of Students
for a Just Palestine and other groups to pass a Berkeley student
senate resolution entitled "A bill in support of UC DIVESTMENT FROM
WAR CRIMES."
The bill, which could come up for a decisive vote as early as April
14, plays directly into the hands of those who want to see the
occupation go on and on.
Simplistic as it is pretentious, the bill is easy to dismiss even by
those who agree with its thrust, but who also are aware of the morass
of moral issues involved.
The measure's own preamble puts this better than its critics could,
explicitly acknowledging the "complexity of international relations in
all cases, including the Middle East," and going on to recognize "the
inability of a body such as the ASUC to adjudicate matters of
international law and human rights law, or to take sides on final
status issues on wars and occupations throughout the world."
That out of the way, the bill instructs us in the wrongful acts of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which, in its view, consist in their
entirety of Israeli acts of collective punishment and violence against
Palestinian civilians.
This is followed by a declaration which sets new standards for
dissembling:
RESOLVED, that this ASUC resolution not be interpreted as the taking
of sides in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but instead as a
principled expression of support for universal human rights and
equality.
It is not the universal issue of war crimes against civilians in the
Holy Land that is of interest to the campaigners. If it were, the bill
would at least make mention of the conclusion of the UN's Goldstone
report , which states [Paragraph 1950] that Palestinian rocket and
mortar launches into southern Israel "constitute a deliberate attack
against the civilian population," and that "These actions would
constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity."
Or, in their zeal to support universal rights and equality, the bill's
authors might have made mention of Paragraph 1955 of the Goldstone
findings, referring to the Palestinian government which rules Gaza:
The Mission finds that security services under the control of the Gaza
authorities carried out extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests,
detentions and ill-treatment of people, in particular political
opponents, which constitute serious violations of the human rights to
life, to liberty and security of the person, to freedom from torture
or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, to be
protected against arbitrary arrest and detention, to a fair and
impartial legal proceeding; and to freedom of opinion and expression,
including freedom to hold opinions without interference."
From the standpoint of advancing the causes of peace and justice for
Palestinians, the Berkeley bill is worse than useless. It feeds the
far-right portrayal of proponents of an independent Palestine as being
unremitting opponents of anything and anyone Israeli.
Moreover, it suggests that the best way to get a pointed message to
Israel and to Washington, is to sell some pension fund shares in
American companies which make military aircraft engines - and which
will continue to do so, and sell them to Israel, regardless of the
vote.
If the ASUC's goal is to effect positive change in Israel-Palestine,
the ways to do so are many and well worth supporting. The best place
to start, here and in the Bay Area, is to back the many organizations
actively working for a two-state solution and Jewish-Arab
reconciliation.
The proof is in the performance. From Britain to Berkeley to Toronto,
the only actual consequence of the BDS movement has been to
dramatically inflate the importance of its proponents in their own
eyes.
Think about it. If you wanted to do something direct and concrete to
protest the killing of civilians and journalists by a U.S. Army Apache
helicopter gunship in Baghdad, you could take direct effective action
in a number of ways. You could organize and hold a demonstration. You
can contact public officials directly. You can take your case to the
media, and do community organizing.
Alternatively, the next time you fly home, you could politically spin
your wheels by boycotting Boeing, which made the helicopter. You'll be
doing the government a favor, getting yourself off its back.
Should you decide to go this route, which, the path both of least
resistance and of least likely good, it'll be easy enough for you to
remember. Boeing refers to its division which manufactures the Apache,
by the initials BDS.
Next week: Part 2 - How to know when a 'Mideast Expert' is lying
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1161713.html
Deborah