THE BDS MOVEMENT IN AUSTRALIA
The BDS movement has arguably become a major source of intolerance in Australian society as has also been the case in the UK and USA.
The presentation to be made tomorrow is entitled “How the BDS destroys prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation”.
By any reasonable judgement, the month of March 2002 was a particularly horrific episode in the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During that awful period, there were eight separate suicide attacks by Palestinian Islamic terrorists on Israeli civilians resulting in the deaths of 63 people and many hundreds injured. The final straw was the attack on the Passover Seder in Netanya’s Park Hotel which killed 30 people and injured 140. This attack provoked the Israeli invasion of the leading West Bank cities known as Operation Defensive Shield in an attempt to destroy the terror networks, and stop the carnage.
Yet it was precisely at this point that the international campaign for a boycott of Israel commenced. Two UK academics Steven and Hilary Rose proposed a boycott of all Israeli academics and academic institutions. Their initiative was copied in May 2002 by two Australian academics John Docker and Ghassan Hage, both of whom had a long-time record of hardline criticism of Israel. Their boycott petition, which was signed by 90 Australian academics, was based on the binary opposites of good and bad nations, and made the following key points:
- While the Palestinians are rightly requested to reign in their extremists, the Israelis have elected their extremists to power’;
- Israel has perpetrated ugly murder, rampages, systematic crimes of war, and an anachronistic act of colonization in the West Bank and Gaza;
- Israel is impervious to moral appeals from world leaders;
- While some academics and intellectuals in Israel oppose the government and some also are involved in cooperative Israeli/Palestinian research projects, the vast majority have either supported the Israeli Army onslaught on the Palestinians, or failed to voice any significant protest against it;
- As with boycotts against apartheid South Africa, international action is now required to stop the massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people;
- We call for a boycott of research and cultural links with Israel. We urge our colleagues not to attend conferences in Israel, to pressure our universities to suspend any existing exchange or linkage arrangements, and to refuse to distribute scholarship and academic position information.
Even putting aside the question of whether this petition may have been interpreted as supporting the Palestinian perpetrators of suicide bombings rather than the Israeli victims, the philosophical intent was obvious. The Australian BDS movement did not endorse the national and human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians, and did not seek to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation via a two-state solution. Rather, its sole concern was to stereotype Israeli Jews as an evil oppressor people, and to urge measures that would undermine the basis of their national existence.
In contrast, a petition based on a two-state perspective might have noted the following:
- Palestinians are not solely defenseless and innocent victims;
- A large number of Israeli academics are prominent in supporting the Israeli peace movement, and defending Palestinian human and national rights in the Occupied Territories;
- There are many Palestinian and Arab academics who support violent attacks on Israeli civilians;
- There are extremists and moderates on both sides;
- Whilst the Israeli presence in the West Bank has some superficial similarities with South Africa, the analogy cannot reasonably be applied to Green Line Israel given the civil and political rights enjoyed by its Arab citizens. Moreover Israel does not involve a small white population exploiting a much larger black majority;
- A selective boycott of Israeli West Bank settlements and their products might be appropriate as opposed to the boycotting of an entire national group.
As we note in our book “Boycotting Israel is Wrong”, the BDS movement’s extremist agenda has not changed since 2002. The major local manifestations include:
- The Max Brenner chocolate shop protests led by angry far Left extremists from the Socialist Alternative group who urge the restoration of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea which means the elimination of the State of Israel;
- The Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney whose Director Jake Lynch ironically boycotted the visiting Israeli peace academic Dan Avnon. Lynch has publicly argued that Jewish financial pressure was responsible for the ALP switching leaders from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard in June 2010.
- The NSW Branch of the Australian Greens which voted in December 2010 “to boycott Israeli goods, trading and military arrangements, and sporting, cultural and academic events as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory, the siege of Gaza and imprisonment of 1.5 million people and Israel’s institution of a system of apartheid”, later resulting in the embarrassing Marrickville Council BDS saga.
- The Victorian Trades Hall Council which hosted a BDS Conference in October 2010 with the American BDS activist Anna Baltzer, who favours the abolition of the State of Israel, as the key-note speaker.
- The Sydney University Staff for a BDS who construct Israelis as monolithically evil oppressors whilst its powerful supporters around the world allegedly bully and threaten any who challenge its hegemony.
The common theme here is that the BDS movement is not concerned with ending the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, or challenging specific Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. Rather the sole aim is to paint Israel as an allegedly racist and colonialist state which has no right to exist, and to transform Israel into an international pariah similar to South Africa under the former apartheid regime.
In doing so, the movement also demonizes any pro-Israel Jews elsewhere, whatever their varied views on conflict, as the political enemy. This was particularly apparent during the recent and continuing debate over Jake Lynch’s role in the aggressive disruption of Colonel Richard Kemp’s talk at Sydney University. Lynch’s supporters have constructed the debate as an apocalyptic battle between allegedly brave supporters of justice for the Palestinians versus powerful Jewish pro-Israel lobby groups. The BDS movement has arguably become a major source of intolerance in Australian society as has also been the case in the UK and USA.
Dr Philip Mendes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine at Monash University, and is the Director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit (SISPRU).
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