Dear Fatima, does this boycott benefit anyone?
Boycotting Israel or Israeli products harms the cause for peace in the Middle East, says Steve Linde in a letter to the late Fatima Meer, once his thesis supervisor
people around the world to bring real, direct pressure on Israel until it complies with all relevant international laws and to take action to end companies’ and governments’ complicity in Israel’s human rights violations”.
Desai, who recently voiced the view that publicly chanting “Shoot the Jew” is no big deal, is hardly a leading proponent of Gandhian passive resistance. And Israel respects human rights as well as the rights of women, minorities, including Christians and Muslims, as well as gays much more than any of its neighbours.
His appeal to boycott Israeli companies will not help break the current impasse in IsraeliPalestinian peace negotiations.
Palestinians themselves do not support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, and many of the companies being targeted (especially in the West Bank and Jerusalem) employ a predominantly Palestinian workforce.
It is also worthy to note that relatives of senior Fatah and Hamas leaders from Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Syrians wounded in the civil war in their country, routinely receive medical treatment in Israel. And there was no talk of boycotting the field hospitals Israel dispatched in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to combat Ebola.
While I was in South Africa, the latest local firm to be targeted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement was Woolworths supermarket chain and its shareholders for selling figs, pomegranates and pretzels from Israel. A student activist even resorted to the repugnant act of placing a pig’s head in the kosher section of a Woolworths store in protest of the chain’s support for Israel.
This is clear anti-Semitism, which should not be tolerated in the new South Africa. Woolworths, admirably, has refused to buckle under the pressure.
“We can confirm that we have not stopped [selling] Israeli products,” said a statement published on the Woolworths website, noting that less than 0.1 percent of its food comes from Israel. “We respect our customers’ right to make individual purchasing choices, which is why we clearly label every product’s country of origin and fully comply with government guidelines on products from Israel.”
During the week that I was in Durban, I was inundated with questions about the Woolworths boycott when I met with local journalists. And more prominence was given in the media to the Woolworths boycott than to the barbaric Palestinian terrorist attack at a Jerusalem synagogue on November 18, in which four rabbis were butchered during morning prayers.
The subsequent death of a Druse Arab policeman from the wounds he sustained in the gunfight with the two terrorists received almost no press coverage. On my return to Israel, I felt compelled to give my take on the Woolworths boycott.
What would Gandhi have said? He may indeed have supported a non-violent boycott against Israel, but he surely would not have sanctioned the use of savage violence by the two terrorists against innocent Jews praying to God.
What would Nelson Mandela have said? During his visit to Israel in 1990, which I covered, he squarely backed the Jewish state’s right to exist in security, while calling on it to hand over the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognise Israel within secure borders,” I heard him say quite clearly after meeting with then foreign minister David Levy in Jerusalem.
Surely South Africa and the entire world should be encouraging both parties, Israelis and Palestinians, to return to the negotiating table and hammer out a deal to peacefully end their bitter conflict. Encouraging the Palestinian Authority to make unilateral appeals to the UN and other international bodies, while several countries make symbolic pronouncements in favour of a Palestinian state, as Spain, Sweden and the British Parliament have recently done, can only be detrimental to any chance of peace between the parties.
Israel should not have withdrawn unilaterally from the Gaza Strip; it should have negotiated the withdrawal with the Palestinian Authority. The hasty pull-out enabled Hamas to seize power in the Strip, sabotaging any opportunity for a negotiated peace settlement. Hamas, after all, is a terrorist group bent on Israel’s destruction.
Similarly, the Palestinians should not be encouraged to act unilaterally. Their current leadership, under President Mahmoud Abbas, must be urged to put an end the current cycle of violence and resume a peaceful dialogue with Israel.
When US President Barack Obama visited Jerusalem last year, he stated his support for Israel unequivocally. “I see this visit as an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds between our nations, to restate America’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security,” he said.
Peace must come to the Holy Land, Obama declared, adding: “We will never lose sight of the vision of an Israel at peace with its neighbours.”
Peace is what Obama wants. It’s what Gandhi and Mandela would have wanted. It’s what you should have wanted, Fatima. It’s what most Israelis and Palestinians want, too.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement is based on a false premise, that Israel is an apartheid state. It is the Palestinians, not Israel, who should be pushed to renounce violence and show they are genuinely interested in peace.
It is the Palestinians who should be reprimanded for resorting to terror, inciting violence and aspiring to create a state devoid of Jews – what the Nazis called “Judenrein”.
Israeli leaders have said repeatedly that they are prepared to make painful concessions and negotiate the establishment of a demilitarised Palestinian state alongside Israel. Successive Israeli governments have made generous offers to their Palestinian counterparts, only to be rejected time after time.
Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert all offered most of the West Bank and even part of Jerusalem, but were spurned by their Palestinian counterparts.
Israel did not initiate the conflict in Gaza this past summer. It was purposely provoked by Hamas. Israel wants peace. But true peace can be achieved only by direct negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
South Africa, which has been a beacon to the world in replacing apartheid with a rainbow nation, can play a positive role in advancing this process. Because it is by definition against the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arabs, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement can only cause harm and hinder an everdesirable peace accord.
Boycotting South Africa is not what really ended apartheid. Peaceful negotiations between Mandela and FWde Klerk, two leaders of vision, did.
Boycotting Israel will not result in the establishment of a Palestinian state. Only direct talks between the parties will.
Fatima, I was gutted when you cut off contact with me. When you died in 2010, I wept. Today you would probably be a vocal supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. But does boycotting Israel or Israeli goods benefit anyone, especially products that are helpful to humanity, such as medical and agricultural technologies?
Isolating Israel, an island of sanity in a tumultuous Middle East, is wrong. So is endorsing Palestinian terror, which only demeans the Palestinian cause. And so is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. Let’s rather support engagement by the parties in a peaceful dialogue, free trade and the search for a comprehensive, lasting and just resolution of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.
The writer, a former Durbanite, is editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. The views expressed are his own.