Rejection

I traveled to South Africa in February of 1995, very shortly after the ANC came to power.  We were making our way from Cape Town to Johanesburg, where we were to participate in a voter registration drive.  In a rental car we drove along the Garden Route, marveling at the stunning beauty of it all and stopping on occasions to talk to people, all of whom were exceptionally friendly and keen to converse.  In Port Elizabeth, a kindly lady invited us to her home and served us tea and cookies, and wanted to know all about us.  She was, herself, quite apolitical, and probably also a bit of a racist, in a genteel sort of way ("all those cute, cute, chocolate babies").  We stayed all of 30 minutes and when we were getting up to leave, she said, "I cannot tell you how wonderful it is that people like you are coming to South Africa again". 

And there it was.  What the years of boycott and sanctions had meant for that woman and for many, one is sure, like her.  It was not the declining economy that got to her - she had not suffered from it.  It was not the moral injustice of apartheid that got to her - even if in her way she didn't think it quite right.  Surely, her individual life had not changed much.  The black housekeeper, one could be sure, would continue to come, and the guests for tea would continue to be white.   What got to her was the universal judgment, the relentless condemnation, the rejection. Juxtaposed with that was her need - that community's need, to be approved of, to be accepted, to be taken back into the bosom of the 'civilized' world.  'You cannot imagine how wonderful it is that people like you are coming here again'...

The boycott of Israel is very much at its beginning.  Economically, it has been insignificant.  It has even been difficult to get a compelling result for boycotting goods from the settlements.  The cultural and academic boycott, however, has been considerably more successful.  And gradually, one is starting to perceive the hurt feelings, the sense of insult, that are emerging, in Israel, around it.  The palpable consternation at being judged, condemned, rejected, emerging precisely with those sections of the population that long the most for such acceptance, those sections of the population that would like to think themselves non-culpable, but which are.

Why do you boycott Israel, people ask.  Shouldn't you boycott the US?  But boycott is like guerrilla warfare.  You pick the fights you can win.  We just might win this one.

Reactions

One way or another, I inform people.  My computer is down and I don't have access to many of my addresses, and so I make use of Facebook, and search through old mails. Digging names that I may have forgotten from old group messages...

The responses are truly gratifying.  Many people who congratulate me, who support me, who think I am doing something wonderful and special.  Brave.  But I do not feel particulary brave.  I have watched my Jewish Israeli friends, in Israel, stand in road blocks every weekend, as part of Machsom Watch; I have watched others of my friend every Friday traveling to Bilin to endure gas grenades and not-so-rubbery bullets;  yet others who have gone to jail for refusing to serve in the army; all those who have continued to fight, year after year, against torture and abuse and denial of medical treatment.  And I actually feel quite cowardly, having opted to leave, to go someplace else, so I could pursue my own life.  So that unlike the Israeli-Jewish activist who wrote to Obama, I wouldn't have to think about this everyday, all day.  If I had to put a word to how I feel abot going, the word would be 'compelled'.   

My family, though, is taking all this quite hard.  In an ironic sort of way, for mostly they do not share my perspective, their image of what Israel is capable of, what the Israeli security services - from the IDF to the shabac and down the line are capable of, is so much more ruthless than mine...

And so they are worried and frightened, and their worry and their fears, loving as their concern is, are hard on me.  I have been quite good at refusing to look under stones and in dark corners, places where fears lurk.  They seem rather determined to make me... 

"Remember that before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide; it's half the width of the Washington Beltway. These were not the boundaries of peace. They were the boundaries of repeated wars."
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Prime Minister of Israel.

If those were boundaries of repeated wars, what are the present boundaries exactly???  A guarantee of blissful harmonious peace, just in case we haven't noticed!

Without endorsing the pre 1967 borders in any way, it is nevertheless the case that between 1949 and 1967 Israel was involved in exactly one war, which it started, and it was in the Sinai.

The 2010 Flotilla - thoughts

For some reason, the events surrounding the flotilla of 2010 had a hold of me that few events had previously, no matter how otherwise crucial or horrid.  The overwhelming desire to cheer them on, the deep regret that I was not there.  Even before the confrontation with the IDF, as the ships were still making their way, I was checking the news agencies every five minutes.  And indeed, I was the first to break the news to the lists I am on.  I even managed to log on to Turkish TV broadcasts in my efforts to try and absorb every bit of information that was available, on that first day, and the 10 that followed it.

Much has been said about those events and I cannot really hope to add much.  What I could talk about, however, is the way in which it confronted me, yet once again and this time in a particularly sharp relief, with the different, hugely skewed way in which the Jewish Israeli society - and its supporters - view themselves and the conflict. The knowledge is not new, of course.  It informed an enormous relief I felt when I first left Israel in 1977, to find out I am not a freak, after all. 

The flotilla, however... had the circumstances not been so tragic, it would have been the material of comedy - the soldiers of an invading elite commando, of an army that claims itself of the best in the world, weeping tears of betrayal and terror, having encoutered sticks and stones.  Indeed, an entire society behind these soldiers, truly - and hysterically - believing that those sticks and stones represent a an ingenious devilish threat to its existence.  Multitudes of people, intelligent, sophisticated people, watching blurry video clips with assorted red circles and inflammatory captions announcing to them what they should be seeing, and who instantaneously convert that to a deep conviction about some 'truth' about a sinister plot.  Few, so few, who entertain the possibility that the passengers on these ships are exactly who they say they are - human right activists who are incensed by imprisonment of the Gazan population.  Few, so few, who wonder how much danger can come from several hunderd passengers, many well over 45 years of age, seeing, as one clearly does, that they are coming with no weapons short of wooden sticks and the bars they are ripping off the sides of their own boat...

Few, so few, who even care to find out how, exactly, people live in Gaza...

But there is a threat.  And the threat will be augmented the more ships go, and the more artists and scholars cancel their performances in Israel.  The threat, already in evidence, is that the Jewish Israeli society will, finally, need to confront that other perspective.  The one that does not hold that Palestinian children are terrorists, or that Israeli armed commandos are defenseless children.  The one according to which Israel has now prevailed, ruthlessly, over oppressed civilian population for 63 years.  The one according to which the Israeli Jewish population, insofar as it has either supported this oppression or turned a blind eye to it, is not 'nice'. 

No, it will not defeat the Israeli army.  It might, however, shake the Israeli Jewish society from within in ways that will force it to change.

A bit about myself

I was born in Israel in 1952.  That is where I grew up and that is where I lived until 1977, when I came to the US to study.  In 1992 I became an American citizen and am now a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California.

The 1967 war found in me a rebellious high school student, but nonetheless neither my education nor my upbringing would have allowed me at the time to question the official presentation of the events or the motivation behind that war.  Perhaps my problem was that I believed in it too literally.  I did believe Israel wanted peace, and I did believe that it would trade its 1967 victories against one.  Perhaps also tales of Europe during WWII were still fresh in my mind.  What Israel came to control in the wake of the 1967 war, as I saw it then and as I have seen it ever since, is not real estate.  It is people.  It is the expression of numbed shock in the eyes of the residents of East Jerusalem when I first walked along its streets, some three weeks after the end of the war that has stayed with me.  The rest were really details.  It took the years that it took to come to realize that Israel is not interested in a just peace, to challenge the official narratives, the consensus, and finally the core idea of a Jewish state.  By the mid seventies, still in Israel, I have become an activist and I have been active since, with a myriad of groups in Israel, in the UK and in the USA, including student groups, Academic faculty groups, coalition groups, and media groups (including the Hamsin Collective and KPFK's Radio Intifada).  I lectured rather extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, primarily throughout the US to community and academic audiences, but also in other countries, and have written and published a few articles on the topic.

In the many years that I have been thinking of myself as an activist for Peace with Justice in the Middle East, there has been relatively little to make me optimistic.  Israel has become progressively more oppressive and brazen, both within and without the 67 borders, the situation in the Occupied Territories has become considerably worse, and international support has become progressively more and more feeble.  Nonetheless, in the past few years two successful initiatives have emerged which have made me audacious enough to hope.  One is the Boycott campaign, and the second is the campaign of sending boats to Gaza to break the Israeli Blockade.  For me, being part of the journey of The Audacity of Hope would be an opportunity to express physically, so to speak, both my support for the occupied people of Palestine, and my rage at the actions of a government that pretends to speak on my behalf.  I look forward to it as a means of bolstering my own belief in the possibility of change, as well as enhancing my ability to be an effective activist.