The risk of such
a boycott is not zero simply because we have a long lasting anti Israeli voting
bloc in the UN itself. This can be used
to push a boycott agenda and to provide legitimacy. Yet it is also a measure just how complete
Israeli supremacy is today that such a strategy can be argued. Everything else you can say about such a
scheme shows it a waste of time.
Firstly, Israel
is essentially completely walled off from its natural hinterland and its most
receptive market. The instance that ends
its neighbors will experience rapidly increasing prosperity and direct
investment. Thus the actual leverage of
a boycott is completely in Israel’s favor.
In fact the
boycott bloc has been boycotting Israel from day one. The problem is that it is beginning to look
just as stupid as it in fact is and it has become necessary to add other
gullible faces to the party to save face.
In the meantime,
Israel is certainly pursuing a policy of creeping occupation of strategic
pieces of desert against both housing need and the ultimate capitulation of the
majority of Palestinians to outright Israeli citizenship or emigration. While the real boycott is maintained, this
decision has not been pressing. The day
Israel is able open trade doors with its neighbors formally allowing real
normalization this position will simply become untenable and Israel will be
able to absorb the whole West Bank. It
remains only a question of when and a decade or two will not matter much as
memories fade.
Israel inches
closer to 'tipping point' of South Africa-style boycott campaign
Analogies with apartheid regime in the wake of
Mandela’s death could accelerate efforts to ostracize Israel - especially if
John Kerry’s peace process collapses.
By Chemi Shalev
| Dec. 11, 2013 | 9:15 PM |
This has happened in recent days: The Dutch water
company Vitens severed its ties with Israeli counterpart Mekorot; Canada’s
largest Protestant church decided to boycott three Israeli companies; the
Romanian government refused to send any more construction workers; and American Studies Association academics are voting on a measure to sever
links with Israeli universities.
Coming so shortly after the Israeli government
effectively succumbed to a boycott of settlements in order to be eligible for
the EU’s Horizon 2020scientific
cooperation agreement, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the BDS
(Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement is picking up speed. And the
writing on the wall, if anyone missed it, only got clearer and sharper in the
wake of the death of Nelson Mandela.
There were valid arguments to be made both for and
against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s participation in Tuesday’s memorial ceremony for
Mandela, but there is no denying that the prime minister’s inept on-again,
off-again, too-expensive, leave-me-alone public handling of this sensitive
issue attracted unwanted publicity and compounded an already precarious
situation.
The embarrassing flap singled out Israel as “odd man
out," fueled media scrutiny of Israel’s past collaboration with the
apartheid regime and provided valuable ammunition to those who would equate the
two. More ominously, from an Israeli point of view, the analogy between today’s
Israel and yesterday’s South Africa could also stoke a belief that the former
can be brought to its knees in much the same way as the latter was in the late
1970s and early 1980s.
When the United Nations passed its first non-binding
resolution calling for a boycott of South Africa in 1962, it was staunchly
opposed by a bloc of Western countries, led by Britain and the United States.
But the grassroots campaign that had started with academic boycotts in the late
1950s gradually moved on to sports and entertainment and went on from there to
institutional boycotts and divestment. Along the way, the anti-apartheid
movement swept up larger and larger swaths of Western public opinion,
eventually forcing even the most reluctant of governments, including Israel and
the U.S., to join the international sanctions regime.
In a 1998 article entitled “International Norms, Dynamics and Political Change," political scientists Martha Finnemore, now
of George Washington University, and Kathryn Sikking of the University of Minnesota
laid out the foundations of the “life cycle” by which certain norms develop to
shape the behavior of states and then of the international community as a
whole. The first step, they claim, is “norm emergence," when a new norm is
championed by NGO’s and “norm entrepreneurs." The second stage is a “norms
cascade," when states fall into line to embrace the new norm. And a
prerequisite for evolution from the first to the second stages is a “tipping
point” that occurs when a critical mass of events and opinions converge to
create the norms cascade.
In the case of South Africa, the first “tipping
point” probably came in the Soweto riots of 1976, which sparked the protest and
disinvestment campaigns that ultimately swept American universities, pension
funds and multinational corporations. The second “tipping point” came after the
black South African rebellion against the racist 1983 constitution and the
imposition of a permanent State of Emergency in 1984-1985, which brought the
rest of the world into line.
“Tipping points," of course, are hard to
predict, and efforts to do so have been the focal point of widespread,
multidisciplinary research in recent years. “You know the edge is out there,
but it’s dark and foggy. We’re really great at knowing where thresholds are
after we fall off the cliff, but that’s not very helpful,” as lake ecologist
and “tipping point” researcher Stephen Carpenter told USA today in 2009.
Israel could very well be approaching such a
threshold. Among the many developments that could be creating the required
critical mass one can cite the passage of time since the Twin Towers attacks in
September 2001, which placed Israel in the same camp as the U.S. and the West
in the War on Terror; Israel’s isolation in the campaign against Iran’s nuclear
programs; the disappearance of repelling archenemies such as Osama bin Laden,
Muammar Gadhafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, to a lesser degree, Yasser Arafat;
the relative security and lack of terror inside Israel coupled with its own
persistent settlement drive; and the negative publicity generated by
revelations of racism in Israeli society, the image of its rulers as
increasingly rigid and right wing and the government’s own confrontations with
illegal African immigrants and Israeli Bedouin, widely perceived as being
tinged with bias and prejudice.
In recent days, American statesmen seem to be more
alarmed about the looming danger of delegitimization than Israelis are. In
remarks to both the Saban Forum and the American Joint Distribution Committee
this week, Secretary of State John Kerry described delegitimization as “an
existential danger." Vice President Joe Biden, speaking to the same JDC
forum, went one step further: “The wholesale effort to delegitimize Israel is
the most concentrated that I have seen in the 40 years I have served. It is the
most serious threat in my view to Israel’s long-term security and viability.”
One must always take into account the possibility of
unforeseen developments that will turn things completely around. Barring that,
the only thing that may be keeping Israel from crossing the threshold and
“going over the cliff” in the international arena is Kerry’s much-maligned
peace process, which is holding public opinion and foreign governments at bay
and preventing a “tipping point” that would dramatically escalate the
anti-Israeli boycott campaign.
Which only strengthens Jeffrey Goldberg’s argument
in a Bloomberg article on Wednesday that Kerry is “Israel’s best
friend." It also highlights, once again, how narrow-minded, shortsighted
and dangerously delusional Kerry’s critics, peace process opponents and
settlement champions really are (though you can rest assured that if and when
the peace process collapses and Israel is plunged into South African isolation,
they will be pointing their fingers in every direction but themselves.)
No comments:
Post a Comment