Be strategic about trade with Israel to pursue justice for Palestine

THERE is something disingenuous about the way we talk about the Nakba. Even the term itself, which in Arabic means “catastrophe”, is largely misleading.

It implies a single cataclysmic event causing sudden transformation of Palestine into Israel and the abrupt degradation of Palestinians into a nation of the dispossessed and oppressed.

Obviously, this is not what happened. The 1948 declaration of Israeli statehood was a milestone reached after more than 50 years of aggressive Zionist immigration to Palestine and the gradual marginalisation of Palestinians.

In other words, for half a century, the Zionists were “creating facts on the ground” which would inevitably have to be recognised at the political level.

What we call the Nakba, then, was essentially political recognition of existing facts on the ground. This recognition normalised Zionist dominance.

By portraying the establishment of the Zionist state as some sort of catastrophic blast out of nowhere, we absolve ourselves of responsibility and wilfully suppress lessons that should be drawn from how this event occurred.

I would argue that the annual commemoration of Nakba Day (May 15) has become a way to ignore ongoing Zionist gains.

I am not talking about land acquisitions, eviction and settlements, but about Israel’s integration into the economies of the Muslim world.

You would be hard pressed to find a single Muslim or Arab country today that formally opposes normalisation with Israel, which is not simultaneously engaged in a trading relationship with the Zionist state.

There is almost no Muslim-majority country that does not have economic relations with Israel regardless of their rejection of diplomatic ties.

This official rejection, then, represents a kind of smokescreen by states that know their populations want nothing to do with Israel. The “no to normalisation” stance is little more than a veneer on top of a real, existing and meaningful economic relationship, intended to obscure it.

A neighbouring country does not recognise the state of Israel but exports nearly US$150 million worth of goods and services a year to Israel and imports roughly US$50 million.

Now, every country that normalises diplomatic relations with Israel, either individually or via the Abraham Accords, has been widely condemned as a traitor to the Palestinian cause.

But, this ignores the fact that these countries had normalised economic and trade ties with Israel well before signing any treaty.

Just as with the Nakba, these forms of political recognition of the Zionist state were preceded by de facto normalisation over the course of decades in the economic sphere. No one is isolating Israel.

One can easily predict what could be called the second Nakba occurring within the next decade or so — the full normalisation of diplomatic relations with Israel by every Muslim and Arab country in the world.

This will occur exactly as the first Nakba because everyone already has relations with Israel and the charade of non-normalisation will eventually be pointless. Particularly when we do not publicly acknowledge the extent of our trade relations.

Malaysian exports to Israel are estimated to be close to US$9 million, with imports at around US$7 million. This is not particularly massive, and it accounts for only direct trade and not via third parties.

However, even if the amount was much lower, it still belies Malaysia’s official non-recognition of Israel and many Malaysians might be surprised to discover that any trade exists between the two countries.

This is something we must be open about. Every trading relationship endows both parties with a degree of leverage over the other, and if those trade relations are conducted in the shadows, the public cannot discern who is leveraging whom and we cannot know whether our country’s economic leverage is being used to support the Palestinians or making us complicit in the crimes committed against them.

We would not like to be in a position like the neighbouring nation, where economic relations have grown to such an extent that political normalisation becomes potentially inevitable without the population even realising it.

If we can discuss the reality of trade ties with Israel frankly, we can either insist that they be suspended or formulate a strategy of tactical trade in pursuit of justice for the Palestinians.

But, if we continue to quietly build economic relations with Israel while pretending to oppose normalisation, then we are laying the groundwork for a second Nakba that no one will see coming.