Historical Tourism
Jihad el Khazen Al-Hayat - 18/03/06//
I chose the weekend to arrange conference papers from events I have participated in, including the World Economic Forum, and discovered that I had set down some notes and items from the Forum's magazine, "Global Agenda," which follows its annual meeting in Davos. The 2006 edition included a bold article written by Professor Mazen Qumsiyeh entitled "Boycott Israel."
The article took readers on a documented trip of "historical tourism," examining Zionist thought, and no one would be up to the task except a professor of Qumsiyeh's standing. He has taught at Duke and Yale universities and his last book was "Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle."
The writer cited British government documents that suggested the Jews "colonize" the land of Palestine; he cited comments by the pillars of Zionism themselves, from Theodore Herzl, the Hungarian Jewish journalist, to Zeev Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of Ariel Sharon. These figures also talked about colonizing the land of Palestine; Jabotinsky called openly for the Zionist colonization of Palestine, despite the wishes of the indigenous population.
Colonization turned into settlement in the Promised Land and in Greater Israel. Professor Qumsiyeh complains that all of the American media prevents any challenge to political Zionism. Any debate that takes place is between different types of this Zionism, not between its partisans and detractors, even though leading Jewish thinkers acknowledge that political Zionism is a problem, a view they share with millions of people around the world.
The article is excellent, as it goes on to discuss the apartheid-like racial discrimination in Israel. It cites the opinion of Amnesty International, which criticized the racism of some Israeli laws against Palestinians. It also describes how Zionist groups in America spend hundreds of millions of dollars to conceal the racism of the Israeli regime.
Qumsiyeh builds a very strong case to arrive at his objectively, namely to say that 170 Palestinian civil organizations met in July 2005 and issued a historic document detailing Israel's violation of international and humanitarian law. They urged "international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era."
The article was great, except it had a shocking impact at Davos; the World Economic Forum calls for strengthening trade and the freedom of commerce in the entire world, and not boycotts. The chairman of the Forum, Professor Claus Schwab, was forced to apologize for publishing the article and said that he had sought for 36 years to promote understanding between peoples, doing his best to bring together the peoples of the Middle East.
I support Professor Qumsiyeh's article and I support Professor Schwab's objections; the article had no place in a meeting founded on the notion of free trade.
Nonetheless, the idea of boycotting Israel is not Qumsiyeh's invention. In fact it's present everywhere in the west, from universities and churches to unions and elsewhere. However, Arab civil organizations have been lacking in their efforts, not understanding the importance of a boycott campaign and failing to deal with and support the initiative as it deserves.
The Palestine Solidarity Movement will hold its fifth annual divestment conference at Georgetown University on 17-19 March; it's a movement started by American students and began at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001, with the work of the Students for Justice in Palestine. The idea spread quickly to dozens of universities, where students are calling for imposing an economic boycott on Israel, like the earlier on against South Africa, for the same reasons, namely racial discrimination and apartheid.
We hear about Christian Zionists who support Israel, but there are a number of Protestant churches that have begun to boycott Israel, most famously the Presbyterian Church, which in 2004 unanimously voted to engage in morally scrupulous investing, to avoid companies that profit from illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
The decision provoked a huge controversy and probably influenced the decision by the Church of England, headed by the Queen, to boycott Israeli companies operating in Palestinian territory. The biggest union of university faculty in Wisconsin urged the University of Wisconsin to divest in Israel. A more famous boycott campaign is the huge effort begun by professors at British universities, led by Stephen Rose and his wife Hillary (both Jewish professors), while British architects announced a few days ago that they would boycott Israel to protest construction in Palestinian territory. The engineers backtracked under pressure, but the boycott remains.
The racist South African regime fell under pressure of the boycott; the whites there realized that they would not be able to deal with the country and its people like milk cows, and the result was the formation of a legitimate government that represented the black majority, while preserving the rights of white South Africans. Nelson Mandela, the first president of a free South Africa, has always supported the Palestinians and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, said that "If I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa."
The boycott is not being asked to bring down Israel or starve anyone there; it's meant to force Israel to leave the occupied Palestinian territories and change the racist laws that make Israel a state based on religion or ethnicity.
I would urge our people to contact individuals and organizations in the west, along with churches, including the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, to gain popular support in the west (and in the east) to boycott Israel until it goes back on its racism and extremism. However, I'm afraid that our people will frighten those advocating a boycott abroad, whether due to ignorance, or the lack of a diplomatic touch in dealing with an extremely sensitive issue. However, whether or not we play a role, the boycott Israel movement will be very influential and I expect that it will continue as long as institutionalized Israeli racism does, and have an impact in the end.
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