Boycott: lessons in class

Here's a good article in Zmag. Titled The Lessons of the AUT Boycott Reversal, it raises various class issues arising out of the campaigns for and against the AUT boycott. Early on in the article it is pointed out that Univerity teachers are not quite a proletarian vanguard.

Though university lecturers are hardly the stereotypical representation of working class struggles, they do represent a sector with considerable moral weight in setting the agendas of class struggle in their given social, political and economic manifestations. Furthermore, the possibility of selectively boycotting Israeli institutions, organizations, and universities, remains a possibility amongst wider sectors of the Western working class, including amongst its productive/ industrial/ service sectors. Here lies a crucial strategic weakness of Israel and its US partners. UK and US complicity in the crimes of Israel can indeed be threatened if “industrial quiet” which facilitates profit making, is disturbed and interrupted domestically. This relates to the classic power of the working classes whose interests – distinct from any other class – are to resist its own exploitation and the machinations of its capitalist elites.

But stressing the class nature of zionism and, in particular, US/UK support for it, it sets out a class response in terms of direct and solidarity action, as inspired by the AUT.

I don't think it's necessary for anti-zionists to explicitly renounce anti-semitism every time Israel is discussed but the writer, Toufic Haddad, makes a useful detour from the main thrust of this article to do just that:

The fact remains that US, and more broadly speaking, Western imperial interests in supporting Israel stem from the crucial significance these capitalist elites have attributed to the region and the role Israel can play in this regard. It is long overdue that Palestinian solidarity activism does away with conspiratorial theories about the power of AIPAC or of "world Zionism". Though no doubt Zionist forces are organized and have considerable powers, this is not sufficient to explain why the US, and the EU as well, support Israel as a "Jewish state". If indeed these forces were the reasons for US or EU policy, why is it that a famous anti-semite like Richard Nixon would ensure that Israel was airlifted supplies during the 1973 October War? Or why Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is still in prison? Or why the US has at times directly intervened to stop Israeli arms sales to India and China? Egypt receives the second largest amount of US foreign aid – almost comparable in size to Israel - but nobody has ever raised the question of "the Egyptian lobby". It is finally time to do away with these ideas as they actually tend to play into the hands of the Zionists who can then paint Palestinian solidarity activism as a re-articulation of genuine anti-Semitism – something we must be vigilantly opposed to both morally and organizationally.

Ok, I have found a couple of points to criticise here. First, I usually find that Palestinian and other anti-zionists do identify British and American imperialist interests as being behind US/UK support for Israel. The second is that, whilst Egypt does receive comparable levels of aid in national terms, Israel many times more in per capita terms. Also, zionism does infect American political culture in a way that cannot be attributed to any Egyptian ideology. When Condoleesa Rice visited Israel last year she told an audience that when she landed in Jerusalem, she felt she had "come home". She doesn't even say that when she comes home. This is not to negate the materialist reasons for American support for Israel but the blowback from that support is distorting relations between the two states. This is by no means unique. Look at Britain and Ireland. When the UK created the Orange state of Northern Ireland, NI was supposed to pay the UK £150 million per annum: the imperial levy. In the event Britain had to send in so many troops to prop up the ridiculous (and thoroughly nasty) entity, Northern Ireland became British imperialism's loss leader. Look also at Irish demands for "British standards of justice" to be applied in Ireland. Only recently did it become clear that Britain had repatriated the appalling standards of "justice" inflicted on Ireland for centuries, back to Britain.

I think the most important aspect of this article is the focus on trade unionism and not on academia. The expression "academic intifada" is good fun to hurl around, but this has been, and is, a trade union struggle and it will spread to other unions.