Stop the assault on Gaza!

Submitted by Anon on 16 July, 2006 - 11:46

Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people in the territories it occupied four decades ago has long been an international obscenity.

Once more a senseless small-scale Palestinian guerrilla action against Israel — this time not an attack on innocent Israeli civilians, but on Israeli soldiers — has triggered enormously disproportionate Israeli action against Palestinians; the deliberate destruction from the air of bridges and other parts of the infrastructure on which any hope of a Palestinian return to anything like normal everyday life depends.

Whatever about the past — and Solidarity is far from sharing the demonisation of Israel and the “absolute” anti-Zionism of the kitsch-left — the main responsibility devolves on Israel, by far the stronger force.

The great-power bullying and mistreatment which Israel now so casually deploys against the Palestinians cannot but work against a viable long-term settlement. The Israeli government acts as if it wants to make any agreed settlement impossible. Why? It seeks “justification” for imposing a unilaterally decided “final” border between Israel and the Palestinians. It is goading the Palestinians.

In that way it hopes to get what it could not get in negotiations; the annexation of a sizeable part of the territory it captured in the war provoked by Israel’s Arab neighbours, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in May 1967, and the reduction of any future Palestinian state to a series of disjointed territories. It wants to make impossible an independent Palestinian state, to relegate it to one of the might-have-beens of history.

That would be grossly unjust to the Palestinians. From the point of view of Israel’s own long term hopes of establishing a modus vivendi with its Arab neighbours it would also be enormously short-sighted. It would prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the distant future.

The relationships of power between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab world may not always be what they are now The great powers will not always be as indulgent of Israel as the US and the EU are now.

Unless enough Israelis make themselves felt against what their government is doing the Israeli government is likely to continue doing it. The tragedy is that so much of Israeli “public opinion” was soured and embittered by the collapse of the 2000 peace talks and the eruption of violence and suicide bomb attacks that followed the breakdown of the talks.

In this situation, it is easy enough to conclude that “something” must be done and from that go on to advocate various sorts of boycott of Israel — academic, scientific, trade and so on. As we have argued in this paper before, there are four objections to boycotting or campaigning for a boycott of Israel.

Boycott is a crude and imprecise weapon that would hit indiscriminately at all Israelis, including those fighting Israeli government activities in the West Bank.

It would to some extent rally the forces of Israeli chauvinism around the Israeli government and help generate a siege mentality.

Such boycotts are never very successful. The boycott of South Africa that began after the Sharpville massacre in February 1960 had little effect over the next third of a century.

The strongest argument against, however, is that a boycott Israel campaign would for a certainty involve boycotting and campaigning against non-Israeli Jews. It would inevitably degenerate into the boycotting of Jews and of Jewish-run or Jewish-owned, or reputedly Jewish-owned, enterprises. It has already, for example, led to attempts to boycott Marks and Spencer. It would turn into a de facto anti-Jewish campaign.

The logic of the situation, would ensure that outcome. Most Jewish people, to one degree or another, critically or uncritically, identify with Israel. How could a people with their history in the 20th century — the history that produced modern Israel — not do so? The activities of anti-semites, operating as “anti-Zionists” would also work to that outcome, as would the present “absolute anti-Zionist” policy of so much of the kitsch left — whose “anti-Zionism” is itself a form of anti-semitism, because, uniquely, it proposes the conquest and destruction of the Jewish nation in Israel.

The damage done by the eruption of anti-semitism inescapable from such a campaign would so outweigh any possible benefit to the Palestinians as to make such a policy an absurdity for anyone or any organisation that is not consciously working to reinvigorate anti-semitism throughout the world. Unconfirmed rumours suggest that Respect and the SWP plan to launch a strong “boycott Israel” campaign. Serious socialists should oppose it vigorously.

The urge to “do something” for the Palestinians is honourable as well as understandable. But what we do must be governed by reason and the realities of our situation as well as by raw-feeling of political indignation on behalf of the Palestinians.

The labour movements of Britain, Western Europe, America and Russia as well as in Israel — should demand of their governments that they, at the very least, work to implement the “Road Map for Peace” to which Israel, the US, Britain, Europe and Russia subscribed or some replacement for it, that is a framework which stipulates an independent Palestinian state side by side with Israel. The idea that we can tell them what they should do, or that we can trust them, would be reformist wishful thinking. Pressure can, however, usefully be exerted on them.

In the last reckoning it is in the interests of the powers who make up the international “quartet”, guarantors of the “Road Map”, to bring peace and stability to the Middle East. That is why demands and pressures on them by the labour movement may have some effect.

And socialists activists should work to express our solidarity with the Israeli and Palestinian left. We should build support for campaigns inside Israel-Palestine which oppose the anti-Palestinian actions of the Israeli government — the military incursion in Gaza, roadblocks on the West Bank and all the senseless brutalities of the Israeli government.

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