Is a cultural boycott "non-violent"?

From the acceptance speech of Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood (via Adam Holland), awarded the Dan David prize in Israel:

We two fiction writers are very small potatoes indeed in the context of the momentous political events now unfolding. But writers everywhere are soft targets. It’s easy to attack them. They don’t have armies, they can’t retaliate. We have both received a number of letters urging and indeed ordering us not to attend, on the grounds that anything connected with Israel is tabu. (Oddly enough, neither the President of Italy, Giorgo Napolitano – winner of the “Past” category for reason and moderation in political affairs – nor the three computer scientists – Leonrad Kleinrock, Gordon Moore, and Michael Rabin – who were awarded in the “Future” category — were targeted by these correspondents.) We have both sent letters to many but not all of the urgers and orderers. (Not all, because in some cases the petitions etc. have appeared online without having been sent to us first.) The letters we have received have ranged from courteous and sad to factual and practical to accusatory, outrageous, and untrue in their claims and statements; some have been frankly libelous, and even threatening. Some have been willing to listen to us, others have not: they want our supposedly valuable “names,” but not our actual voices.

In other words, the all-or-nothings want to bully us into being their wholly owned puppets. The result of such a decision on our part would be – among other things – to turn us into sticks with which to beat other artists into submission, and that we refuse to do. We are familiar with what other artists of many countries have been put through in similar circumstances.

The metaphor of beating others into submission is apt. Even discounting the threats they received as the fringe of a movement (though I don't think it is the fringe), the boycott is fundamentally coercive. It is not about bringing people together. It is not in the tradition of nonviolent movements such as Gandhi's or Martin Luther King, Jr's. At least, not as I understand those movements. Looking through MLK quotes, I find:

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

The "white intifada" has yet to take this step, loving and sacrificing for peace, rejecting hate. I hope it evolves. Perhaps it will evolve as Israelis respond in kind. Perhaps as it becomes less bizarre to Palestinians to reject violence. But for now non-violence is a tactical choice, not a moral decision.

I recently saw the film Budrus. One thing (among many) that stands out is how shocked Ayed Morrar, an organizer of non-violent protests, was that there are Israelis who would join them in protesting the separation barrier. The impression was that he had imagined Israelis as evil. Eventually, peace activists who hope to be truly effective must come to love even those who hate.

I don't say that as someone who embraces non-violence the way Gandhi did; I think it is often the only acceptable option, but not always. In fact, I have real problems with Gandhi's stance on WWII. But I do hope, in part because I believe only non-violence will work, in part because I think violence against Israeli citizens is wrong, that it becomes the dominant strategy among Palestinians. I hope the white intifada continues to grow and evolve.

The cultural boycott against Israel is not about making peace through love and sacrifice. The Montgomery bus boycotts were about proving Blacks to be an integral part of society; the boycott of Israel is about proving Jews to be dispensible in the world. It is about proving the weakness of Jews, incapable of standing up against the world. It is about making Jews weaker by depriving Israel of support. So, we should ask how history will one day view a boycott against a weak minority.

Palestinians don't want BDS

Hopefully, this should be quite a blow to the BDS movement. Palestinian workers and unions don't want it, because they understand that it will hit them hardest. It becomes clear the boycott is being pushed by (1) Palestinian elites who don't represent their people and (2) Westerners with a distorted need to "do something" and a lack of imagination on what can be done. Unfortunately, I think the drive to do something is awfully powerful.

Chaplin's tradition

Modernity and Mira Vogel call attention to Gary Sinyor's public response to Ken Loach. Long story short: Ken, unfortunately a pretty important filmmaker, is pretty antisemitic and involved in boycotting Israelis.

The row began after the festival accepted a £300 donation from the Israeli embassy to pay for a film studies graduate of Tel Aviv University to attend the premiere of her short movie Surrogate at the festival in Scotland next month. But the sponsorship raised the hackles of Loach, who backed a boycott unless the money was returned forcing the EIFF to find alternative ways to fund Tali Shalom-Ezer's trip.

Loach called the festival organizers and got his way. (If a Jew had done such a thing, to suggest to organizers that they might not want to provide a platform to an antisemite, surely it would be unfair and stifling interference - a gross display of power, even.)

In a blog, Tali Shalom-Ezer, aged 31, was quoted as saying: "Generalising all citizens of Israel as warmongers and racists is racism and outrageous, and as members of the peace camp we are personally hurt by it."

A coincidence, so far unmentioned but kind of poignant to me, is that Sinyor was the recipient of the Chaplin award. Chaplin, of course, made The Great Dictator while most of Hollywood was cowed into silence over Germany's horrors. I hereby call on the EIFF to change the name of their award.

boycott as violence

Gershom Gorenberg writes, in a larger piece about Palestinian non-violence (which is, so far, nascent and not really non-violence yet):

Many Israelis believe both that continued rule over the Palestinians is untenable - and that there’s no chance of making peace with the Palestinians. The challenge of effective Palestinian political action is to make Israelis pay more attention to their misgivings about the occupation - while alleviating their fears that peace is just the prelude to the next attack.

I'm going to keep thinking about some of the stuff in the post for a while. I have an attraction to, or at least a willingness to tolerate, some 'revolutionary' violence. Or maybe it's better to say I have an attachment to ridiculing some of the more idiotic (and half-hearted) versions of pacifism. But in the end, there's emotion there that I have to dig up and examine. Violence is surely sometimes necessary, but Gorenberg skewers the attachment many 'radicals' have to violence. It ceases to be a tool and becomes an aesthetic - as surely on the Left as on the Right.

But I wanted to highlight the above quote and put boycotts in that context. Boycotters often claim boycotts are nonviolent, but they are, by their very nature, coercive. They are about power and demonstrating power. I wish more boycotters would accept that as the obvious truth it is.

And boycotts will fail on the two tests Gorenberg offers to measure the effectiveness of violence. It will make Israelis more fearful and they will background their concerns about the occupation. And then the boycott will fail. What then?