BDS: driving global justice for Palestine

In France people get arrested for wearing pro-boycott T-shirts. In the USA, pro-Palestine professors have been fired, anti-occupation students suspended and threatened with expulsion, pro-Palestinian groups defunded.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop neither understands BDS nor cares much for the rules of international law. She condemns BDS as anti-Semitic. To deflect attention from Israel's cruelties and illegalities, she trots out the time worn argument that it's hypocritical to criticize Israel when other countries encourage even worse human rights abuses.

Legislators across the US and Europe say they protect freedom of speech if it concerns racist, anti-gay and hate speech, but when they want to protect Israel from any criticism, they don't care one iota for free speech.

Israeli Exceptionalism

Israel is allowed to be exceptional. The Jewish American scholar, Judith Butler says that protecting Israeli Jews from criticism is in itself an outrageous form of censorship. She insists that censoring any criticism of the policies of Israel would suppose that criticism is not a Jewish value, a contention 'which clearly flies in the face not only of the long tradition of Talmudic disputation but of all religious and cultural sources which have been part of Jewish life for centuries.'

Israel's exceptionalism and politicians' indifference to the plight of Palestinians is challenged by the BDS movement. For that reason, cowed legislators make support for BDS a criminal offence.

The distinguished Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes that it has become a crime to protest a crime, a crime to boycott the criminal, a crime to fight violation of international law.

Why don't politicians, academics and any leaders in public life discover the international law based objectives of the BDS movement, and find sufficient courage to express their support? Those questions could be regarded as a means of shaming but such a technique seldom works. Instead, let's ask why people don't open their hearts, if only because they've learned about the conditions which the BDS movement seeks to end, such as the dire situation in Gaza.

A previous UN report said that by 2020 this densely populated strip of land would have no safe drinking water, no reliable sewage system, standards of health care and education would have declined alarmingly, and visions of reliable electricity supply would be a distant memory. Gaza would become uninhabitable. With the collusion of Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority, today's almost complete ending of electricity supplies to beleaguered Gazans is a catastrophe already happening. No-one is waiting for 2020.

Organizing the BDS conference could be regarded as brave. I see it as important but unexceptional. BDS follows a significant history of non-violent dissent. In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King argued, 'A boycott only means withdrawing from an evil system. That's not heroic. That's a moral obligation.'

Jeremy Corbyn recently observed, 'When people's minds are opened up, there's no end to the possibilities.'

Learning about BDS provides a possibility to participate in ending the abuse of a whole people. Such protests for justice are even good for mental health and could make participants feel better physically. That's a prescription worth trying.