Anti-BDS activism and the appeal to authority
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- Written by Steven Salaita Steven Salaita
- Published: 01 March 2014 01 March 2014
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For months, in response to recent BDS successes, people have asked, “How will Zionists react?” The inevitable backlash has arrived and we have enough examples to answer the question. Specific tactics differ, but the overall strategy has been an intensive appeal to authority.
The appeal to authority is reliant on the cultural and political elite and on legislative bodies to offer a corrective to grassroots agitating. While BDS continues to generate support among students, activists, and performers, the opposition cultivates patronage from centers of power: university presidents, politicians, state senates, financiers, and so forth.
This difference is important: it shows the juxtaposition of Zionism with violent conduct while USACBI, the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, has successfully avoided the coercions of sectarian loyalty. Organizations that maintain dossiers on pro-Palestine activists and work closely with surveillance agencies to suppress dissent really have no choice but to evoke the repressive apparatuses of state power in order to counter threats to their supremacy.
I’ve worked with USACBI for around five years—closely during the process to pass the ASA resolution—and I’m constantly impressed by the democracy and inclusiveness of its organizing practices. We have no formal hierarchies and use a consensus-based approach to decision-making.
More important, USACBI doesn’t accept funding from governments, corporations, or political parties. When we need money, we get it the old-fashioned way: everybody chips. What we lack in material resources is exceeded by the efficiency of unfettered praxis.
In my opinion, the greatest strength of BDS is its desire to remain adamantly independent, accepting cues from Palestinian civil society, because movements for justice work well only in proportion to their freedom from vested interests. Activism should always inform a multivalent radius based on an antagonistic relationship with sources of political and economic power.
The ethical distinctions between BDS activists and our opponents are discernible relative to the affinities each camp maintains with institutions that rely on laws and guns to enforce compliance.
USACBI does not need the endorsement of university presidents or lawmaking bodies. Nor does it want their endorsement, which would constitute an abdication of what BDS works to accomplish, decolonization of the institutions those bodies exist to enrich and represent.
The appeal to authority constitutes a serious form of oppositional force. It will exist as long as Zionism remains synchronous to the neoliberal order. However, the appeal to authority is not a threat to USACBI. It is a validation of both the structure and content of our work.
Amnesty: ‘Trigger-happy’ Israeli army and police use reckless force in the West Bank
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- Written by Amnesty International Amnesty International
- Published: 01 March 2014 01 March 2014
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Israeli forces have displayed a callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank over the past three years with near total impunity, said Amnesty International in a report published today.
The report, Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank, describes mounting bloodshed and human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as a result of the Israeli forces’ use of unnecessary, arbitrary and brutal force against Palestinians since January 2011.
In all cases examined by Amnesty International, Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers did not appear to be posing a direct and immediate threat to life. In some, there is evidence that they were victims of wilful killings, which would amount to war crimes.
“The report presents a body of evidence that shows a harrowing pattern of unlawful killings and unwarranted injuries of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in the West Bank,” said Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International.
“The frequency and persistence of arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and police officers – and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators – suggests that it is carried out as a matter of policy.”
Read more: Amnesty: ‘Trigger-happy’ Israeli army and police use reckless force in the West Bank
This Divestment Bill Hurts My Feelings
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- Written by Remi Kanazi Remi Kanazi
- Published: 19 February 2014 19 February 2014
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Poem by Remi Kanazi Video by Suhel Nafar Audio by Andrew Felluss This Divestment Bill Hurts My Feelings this divestment bill hurts my feelings that Caterpillar bulldozer ended life in the body of an American citizen. drove her bones into the ground while a company cashed in on the sale . . .
Association for Asian American Studies has unanimously approved a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli universities
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- Written by Elizabeth Redden Elizabeth Redden
- Published: 19 February 2014 19 February 2014
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A First for the Israel Boycott?
April 24, 2013
The general membership of the Association for Asian American Studies has unanimously approved a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli universities, making it the first scholarly organization in the U.S. to do so, according to the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
About 10 percent of the association’s membership was present for last week’s secret ballot vote, which was open to all members and took place on the final day of the AAAS annual conference in Seattle. The resolution raises a number of concerns about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian students and scholars – including restrictions on travel and the forced closure or destruction of schools as a result of Israeli military actions – and describes Israeli academic institutions as “deeply complicit in Israel's violations of international law and human rights and in its denial of the right to education and academic freedom to Palestinians, in addition to their basic rights as guaranteed by international law."
“Be it resolved that the Association for Asian American Studies endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions,” the resolution reads in part. “Be it also resolved that the Association for Asian American Studies supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.”
The AAAS president, Mary Yu Danico, confirmed the resolution was approved and directed questions to the association’s past president, Rajini Srikanth, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Srikanth likened the academic boycott to that which was levied against South African universities to protest apartheid, and emphasized that the boycott is of institutions, not individual academics. “The reason that we’re very clear that this is a boycott of Israeli institutions and not Israeli scholars is that we are very aware that there are Israeli scholars who understand the difficulties that Palestinian academics and students have and speak up in support of Palestinian rights,” she said. “So we would absolutely be working with them, and providing them whatever support they need to challenge their institutions.”
At the same time, she said, “We would discourage partnerships with Israeli academic institutions, whether they’re curriculum partnerships or study abroad partnerships, because that would be becoming complicit with the discriminatory practices of Israeli institutions, and we would be encouraging faculty, staff and students to forge alliances with Palestinian faculty and Palestinian students who now have so much difficulty engaging in conversations with scholars from the rest of the world."
Britain’s main faculty union, the University College Union, has issued a series of resolutions over the years that fall just short of endorsing an academic boycott of Israel (see for example this 2008 resolution and this one from 2011). In April, the Teachers Union of Ireland became the first educational trade union in Europe to support an outright boycott, as The Jerusalem Post reported. However, the issue hasn’t gotten as much traction among academics on this side of the Atlantic, where boycotts are widely viewed as antithetical to academic freedom.
The American Association of University Professors opposes academic boycotts, stipulating in a 2005 statement that "since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas." (The AAUP further elaborated on that statement in regards to a then-proposed boycott of two Israeli universities here.)
“It’s a morally incoherent argument that somehow on behalf of the Palestinian cause it’s O.K. to abandon the principles that academics normally hold dear, which is that you don’t penalize scholars for having political affiliations that you may or may not agree with,” said Richard L. Cravatts, the president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel organization, and the director of Simmons College’s communications management program. "Having a litmus test for the political affiliations or connections of professors has always been anathema to most academics."
Cravatts also rejected as “abhorrent” what he described as a singling out of the Jewish state for criticism when many other governments engage in condemnable behavior. Srikanth argued, however, that on the contrary academic criticism of Israel is subject to suppression through intimidation or censorship and that it is precisely the absence of meaningful criticism of Israel's human rights record on the part of the U.S. government that necessitates an academic boycott. "This is where civil society comes into play," she said.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/24/asian-american-studies-association-endorses-boycott-israeli-universities#ixzz2tn1Qz95j
Inside Higher Ed
Why Israel Fears the Boycott
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- Written by OMAR BARGHOUTI OMAR BARGHOUTI
- Published: 19 February 2014 19 February 2014
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JERUSALEM — IF Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to revive talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority fail because of Israel’s continuing construction of illegal settlements, the Israeli government is likely to face an international boycott “on steroids,” as Mr. Kerry warned last August.
These days, Israel seems as terrified by the “exponential” growth of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or B.D.S.) movement as it is by Iran’s rising clout in the region. Last June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu effectively declared B.D.S. a strategic threat. Calling it the “delegitimization” movement, he assigned the overall responsibility for fighting it to his Strategic Affairs Ministry. But B.D.S. doesn’t pose an existential threat to Israel; it poses a serious challenge to Israel’s system of oppression of the Palestinian people, which is the root cause of its growing worldwide isolation.
The Israeli government’s view of B.D.S. as a strategic threat reveals its heightened anxiety at the movement’s recent spread into the mainstream. It also reflects the failure of the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s well-endowed “Brand Israel” campaign, which reduces B.D.S. to an image problem and employs culture as a propaganda tool, sending well-known Israeli figures around the world to show Israel’s prettier face.
[Read more on the NY Times website]