International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network: Building Power in 2016

IJAN is committed to grassroots organizing and grassroots fundraising. Your contributions, whether $5, $50, or $500 can really make a difference. Dear IJAN Supporter, Thanks to everyone for supporting our work in 2015. We are looking forward to another year of building power in 2016 and organizing in the United States, Canada, Spain, France and Argentina. We have some important projects planned for the year that we hope to get your support in making happen. In 2016, we plan to release an Anti-Zionist Primer with entries that define and describe key terms from an anti-Zionist perspective. We hope it will provide a tool for internal and external education. The primer will include entries on settler colonialism, genocide, Zionism, anti-semitism, joint struggle and more. Below is an excerpt from the anti-Zionism entry:             “Radical anti-Zionists oppose the colonial and racist nature of the state                and its role in maintaining Western control in the region, and work                toward a redistribution of power and resources in Palestine, in the                region, and globally. It emerges from anti-colonial, anti-racist, working                class, and anti-capitalist principles and movements.” If you can contribute $25, we can print 25 Anti-Zionist Primers In the spring, we are doing a tour through schools and cities across the U.S. with our report, The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements for Social Justice. We will be offering presentations, workshops and strategy sessions on this report as well as on topics such as pinkwashing (Israel’s claim to being a safe haven for Palestinian queers while they are actually subjected to the consequences of Israeli colonization and militarization) and greenwashing (using environmentalism to cover up ecological destruction and ethnic cleansing in Palestine).Please contact us if you are interested in scheduling a speaker to come to your town, school, or organization.   Your contribution of $50 or more will help toward travel expenses to host an IJAN presentation at campuses and cities across the United States and Canada. We will also continue our strategic defense locally and internationally, specifically around Zionist institutions using false claims of anti-semitism to propagate Islamophobic messaging. Finally, on March 30, 2016 – Palestinian Land Day, as part of the US Campaign to Stop the Jewish National Fund (JNF) we are filing a complaint to the IRS to investigate the charity status of the JNF. The filing will be supported by Tax Day actions and a taxpayer’s petition across the United States.   We appreciate your continued support. Please consider donating to IJAN in your end of year donations. May 2016 bring us victories in the face of challenges and humanity in the face of brutality, The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network P.S. Help us out by sending this email along to two or three of your friends who might support our work. We do not receive institutional support, we depend on our communities' support.
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network Argentina :: Canada :: England :: Europe :: India :: Israel :: United States ijan@ijsn.net :: ijan.org © International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Zionists outnumbered at their own demo

As far as I can tell from the Jewish Chronicle and its twitter account Zionists were outnumbered by Palestine solidarity supporters on a demonstration outside the Palestinian mission in London organised by some major Zionist groups for last night (13/10/2015).  Here's the JC:

An estimated 70 pro-Israel supporters gathered outside the Palestinian Mission in London on Tuesday evening to protest against the lack of condemnation for recent terrorist acts in Israel.

Is that the BNP and EDL in the background?

And here's a tweet retweeted by the @JewishChron account:

About 80 now on the pro-Palestinian side. 6 police officers stand in front of the crowd to stop any trouble. pic.twitter.com/OH459t2qze

— Josh Jackman (@josh_jackman) October 13, 2015

So not UK Zionism's most successful outing.

Jewish Chronicle forced to tell the truth, shock!

Here's a heart warming tale of how the Jewish Chronicle was forced to be honest not once but twice.

Check out the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for full details but here's a taste:

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has demanded that The Jewish Chronicle reissue a correction to a story which made false claims about Palestine Solidarity Campaign and our director, Sarah Colborne.

The demand came after The Jewish Chronicle (JC) failed to adhere to an agreement made with the PCC that the original correction would remain on the homepage of its website for two days and two nights.  After uploading the correction onto its UK News page on 23rd October, the JC then removed it later the same afternoon.

A week later, following intervention from the PCC, the JC is today (30th October) once again carrying the correction. This time, the link to the correction is on the homepage as agreed, and will remain there until 1st November.

The JC’s original story, which resulted in our complaint to the PCC, was published online on 17th July on its homepage, and was headlined Pro-Palestinian group says its supporters made antisemitic comments.

This was a completely false headline, and attributed comments to Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Director, Sarah Colborne, which were never made.

So here's the JC's link as it appears on its homepage,  The Palestine Solidarity Campaign which doesn't give much away.  And here's the correction as it appears when you click on the link:

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign

In an article published on July 17 headlined 'Pro-Palestinian group says its supporters made antisemitic comments', we stated that the Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Sarah Colborne, had said that demonstrations against the Gaza conflict "had been used by people to 'peddle hatred and intolerance' towards Jews".

Ms Colborne had not said that. In fact, what she had said was: "The Palestine Solidarity Campaign opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and racism directed against Palestinians whether living in the West Bank and Jerusalem, or as citizens of Israel." We are happy to set the record straight.

Last updated: 11:17am, October 30 2014

If they're so happy to set the record straight why did they hide the link when they did?

Norman Finkelstein seeks reconciliation....with Dershowitz

I looked at our tracker a couple of hours ago and noticed that we had got lots of hits from Norman Finkelstein's site.  It took me a little while to establish what this blog had to do with his headline:

ALAN DERSHOWITZ WARNS BAY AREA: FINKELSTEIN IS COMING! DON'T LET HIM SPEAK!

Hmm, poor old Norm, I thought, getting it in the neck again from the Dershmeister.  But below the headline is a copy of an email to the Palestine Solidarity Network:

Subject: [PSN] Finkelstein in SF in April

To: “palestine_solidarity_network” <palestine_solidarity_network@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, February 22, 2013, 4:38 PM

Norman Finkelstein is planning to come to SF in April and is looking for speaking engagements. In light of the offensive and libelous claims he’s made about the Right of Return and about the BDS movement recently, I’d strongly advise against co-sponsoring events with him. Zionist sites have been quoting him extensively, so that hosting him would just give them more ammunition. If you didn’t follow this, read more here http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2012/07/norman-finkelstein-continues-to-spread.html  ; http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/finkelstein-renews-attack-bds-cult-calls-palestinians-who-pursue-their-rights. The main point is that this isn’t just constructive criticism, but baseless accusations based on hasbara points.

So that would explain the hits but where does he get off comparing his detractors to Dershowitz?  The email doesn't look like a demand that he not be allowed to speak.  It looks like a suggestion that he not speak with the support of Palestine Solidarity Network or in any venue they control.  And how many venues could that be?

Now we can all play this game of comparing two opponents of each other to each other, like say, comparing anti-zionists to Alan Dershowitz.  I'm always struck by the similarities between zionist arguments and antisemitic ones.  But this latest hissy fit by Norm suggests that, in spite of attempting to get his first videoed attack on BDS pulled, Finkelstein has no intention of rethinking his position.  And just to recap on that, his position is that the State of Israel exists on the basis of international law and therefore we cannot demand the enforcement of those aspects of international law which might lead to the abolition of the State of Israel or lead to an Israel without Jewish supremacy.  He further insists that since the abolition of Jewish supremacy in occupied Palestine/Israel cannot be achieved because the public (or maybe the most powerful governments in the world at the mo') don't like it, it is cult-like to try for this.  Furthermore, to bolster his argument he has misrepresented aspects of the BDS campaign and its activists.

What would be interesting would be for Alan Dershowitz to come out strongly in support of Norman Finkelstein. This is unlikely because both of them have a lot of personal baggage bound up in their differences, but who knows what might happen?  Dershowitz supports Jewish supremacy.  Finkelstein acquiesces to it.  Both support the so-called two state solution. Are their positions really so far apart?

Hasbara by smear sheet goes nearly viral as does the smearing of Ben White

The Israel advocacy sites are very excited about this hasbara smear sheet.  It's by someone who doesn't like people criticising Israel advising people who do like criticising Israel on How to Criticize Israel Without Being Anti-Semitic.  I already read it via the Fat Man on a Keyboard blog and left this comment:

The guide you recommend to Steve Bell is an obvious exercise in Israel advocacy designed to hinder not help critics and opponents of Israel.

The very first point is bogus. Very few people say that "Jews think any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic" but there are many Israel apologists who say that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

The rest of the points are pretty damn bogus too since they may or may not apply to a small minority of Israel's detractors but not to the majority.

Of course it is wrong to conflate Jews, zionists and the State of Israel but since the guide does that in the first point, who's lecturing who here?

The glossing over of what zionism means is intended to justify the ethnic cleansing and other war crimes which the implementation of the zionist project has entailed. It's pointless now getting into what zionism could have meant before the State of Israel was established, except as an academic exercise in which case we might discuss feminism and futurism as early aspects of fascist ideology.

I'm not sure where the guide gets the idea that religious settlers are anti-zionist. Not all frummers are the same. It seems the writer just wants to say zionism is nice and that's that.

The middle part of the document is a self-contradictory mishmash. It correctly states not to get hung up on the ethnic heritage of the Jews and then does so itself by invoking historic or ancient claims.

The last few points appear to be straight denunciations of antisemitism that are routine in Palestine solidarity circles. If the denunciations of antisemitism from anti-zionist sources are genuinely not known about then it could simply be that too much fretting about a marginal prejudice like antisemitism is unseemly up against what the Palestinians have been going through this past several decades.

As it happens the owner of the Fat Man blog seems like an eminently reasonable chap though my comment elicited quite a grumpy response.  But the other usual suspects are on the case too.  Engage has a separate post on it as does, of course, Harry's Place.  In fact HP took its cue from Bob from Brockley (I always thought it was the other way round) who touts it - typically - within a post where he also posts a rather nasty smear of Ben White by a blogger calling themselves The Soupy One:

Anti-Israeli boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigners often claim they against antisemitism and racism, yet their actions tell another story.

London BDS as an unfortunate habit of using material from the racist, Press TV.

Recently, they praised an article by Jim W. Dean.

Astute readers will know that Dean is intimately connected to the terribleVeterans Today, not only that but any cursory reading of the article would ring alarm bells amongst any antiracist, where he argues:

“Real historians like David Irving were attacked for printing the forbidden truth and made examples of to cower the rest of the sheep. And yes, Jewish lobbies had their fingerprints all over the dirty deed. “

If London BDS and other Western pro-Palestinian activists wish to be more convincing than they should stop digesting the racist filth that Press TV puts out.

Anyone ignorant of David Irving should read Holocaust Denial on Trial and theGuardian’s special report.

The SPLC on Veterans Today.

Update 1: The PSC have put out a statement distancing themselves from the @LondonBDS account:

“Palestine Solidarity Campaign is shocked and disgusted that a twitter account @londonbds tweeted an article with clearly anti-Semitic content. We oppose all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Anti-racism is a core value of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Palestinians face systematic discrimination and building opposition to all forms of racism is a key part of our campaigning.

Supporting Palestine is supporting an anti-racist struggle and we shall continue to make clear that there is no place for any form of racism in our movement.

PSC has been informed that this is not the twitter account of London BDS group, whose account is @londonbdsgroup, but an apparently lone individual. We have reported this to twitter as hate speech. “

All very laudable, however, the PSC is not adverse to the racist Press TV, as a matter of principle, any simple search shows that.

The rest of their statement is decidedly implausible, as anyone with access to Google can see.

Readers will remember how long it took the PSC to kick out a self-proclaimed Holocaust denier, Francis Clark-Lowes, from their ranks. Even then about 1/5 of the conference delegates did not think Holocaust denial was antisemitic and wanted to keep him as a member.

Moreover, the notorious Ben White saw no problem with the @LondonBDS ascan be seen.

My bet is their next gambit will be “Some of our best friends are….”

I checked out the comments policy of the blog before wasting my time commenting thus:

LondonBDS tweeted an antisemitic article and was condemned for it by PSC.  Your link in the line suggesting "London BDS as (sic) an unfortunate habit of using material from the racist, Press TV" doesn't say anything about LondonBDS or any other BDS unless in my skimming I missed LondonBDS being referred to by some other name..

And your evidence for "the notorious (ffs) Ben White saw no problem with the @LondonBDS as can be seen" is a tweet dated May 2008 which is simply addressed @LondonBDS but makes no value judgement one way or the other about it.  Even if you infer from it that he "saw no problem with" it in 2008, did you see a problem with it back then? I mean apart from the letters, BDS.  If so can you show what the problem was?  It is of course possible that Ben White thought @LondonBDS was @londonbdsgroup, same as you seemed to think when you started the post.

Also, are you saying that PSC has run antisemitic content from PressTV or just content from a TV channel that also runs antisemitic content?  I suspect, if it's true at all then it's the latter but perhaps you could confirm.

Thanks.

I left the comment before 3 this morning. I think it may have fallen foul of an unwritten part of the comments policy. But on the subject of viral smears we have one silly document by someone who doesn't want Israel criticised telling people how to criticise Israel and the people who like it are people who never criticise Israel. More specifically we have a blogger, The Soupy One, who feels that the smearing of Ben White has gone so viral no evidence is required to make a case against him. Still he (Ben) seems to be holding up well enough and I'm sure he'll have a nice Christmas, well I hope he does anyway.

Greenwash this!

How eco-friendly Israel treats cyclists:



From Ma'an News Agency in Bethlehem:

Israeli forces assaulted a group of cyclists who were participating in a West Bank tour on Saturday, official news agency Wafa reported.

Footage appeared on Youtube which showed an Israeli commander hitting an international participant with the butt of his rifle, in an unprovoked attack.

Israeli forces can be seen physically assaulting cyclists in the video.

Soldiers stopped a group of around 250 participants near the Jericho village of al-Auja and refused to let them start a cycling tour, which was organized by youth group Sharek and officials from the al-Auja environmental center.

Ha'aretz reports on Netanyahu apologising for his soldier getting caught and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's report is the second major news item to appear on the google news page at the time of writing.

The Guardian has a report of the flytilla at Ben Gurion airport and those supporters of the flytilla who didn't quite make it to Ben Gurion.

Atzmon slagged

Not Quite "Ordinary Human Beings"—Anti-imperialism and the anti-humanist rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon

[The following statement has been published on several websites. The version published here is the final version and contained the most up-to-date list of signers as at 8 March 2012.]

Attempting to latch onto the just, vital, and growing movement in support of the Palestinian national liberation struggle, Gilad Atzmon is one of a very small and unrepresentative group of writers who have argued (in agreement with many Zionists) that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between Jews in general and Israeli atrocities. According to Atzmon, the latter are simply a manifestation of Jews’ historic relationship to gentiles, an authentic expression of an essentially racist, immoral, and anti-human “Jewish ideology.”

Atzmon’s statements, besides distorting the history of Jews and constituting a brazen justification for centuries of anti-Jewish behavior and beliefs, also downgrade anti-Zionism to a mere front in the broader (anti-Jewish) struggle. Atzmon has specifically described Zionism not as a form of colonialism or settlerism, but as a uniquely evil ideology unlike anything else in human history. In addition to any ethical problems, this line of argumentation actually strengthens Zionism’s grip and claim to be the authentic representative of Jews. It obscures the reality that Zionism is an imperialist and colonialist enemy of Jewish people and Palestinians, as well as the Arab people generally and all those oppressed and exploited by imperialism.

In his online attack on Moshe Machover, an Israeli socialist and founder of the anti-Zionist group Matzpen, Atzmon states:

Machover’s reading of Zionism is pretty trivial. “Israel,” he says, is a “settler state.” For Machover this is a necessary point of departure because it sets Zionism as a colonialist expansionist project. The reasoning behind such a lame intellectual spin is obvious. As long as Zionism is conveyed as a colonial project, Jews, as a people, should be seen as ordinary people. They are no different from the French and the English, they just happen to run their deadly colonial project in a different time.[1]

For Atzmon, such views are “pretty trivial” and “lame” because he holds that Jews are in fact radically different from the French and the English. Of the many quotes we could provide in this regard, here is a small sampling:[2]

In order to understand Israel’s unique condition we must ask, “who are the Jews? What is Judaism and what is Jewishness?”[3]

Zionism is a continuation of Jewish ideology.[4]

The never-ending robbery of Palestine by Israel in the name of the Jewish people establishes a devastating spiritual, ideological, cultural and, obviously, practical continuum between the Judaic Bible and the Zionist project. The crux of the matter is simple yet disturbing: Israel and Zionism are both successful political systems that put into devastating practice the plunder promised by the Judaic God in the Judaic holy scriptures.[5]

Sadly, we have to admit that hate-ridden plunder of other people’s possessions made it into the Jewish political discourse both on the left and right. The Jewish nationalist would rob Palestine in the name of the right of self-determination, the Jewish progressive is there to rob the ruling class and even international capital in the name of world working class revolution.[6]

Were Jewish Marxists and cosmopolitans open to the notion of brotherhood, they would have given up on their unique, exclusive banners and become ordinary human beings like the rest of us.[7]

I do not consider the Jews to be a race, and yet it is obvious that “Jewishness” clearly involves an ethno centric and racially supremacist, exclusivist point of view that is based on a sense of Jewish “chosen-ness.”[8]

At the most, Israel has managed to mimic some of the appearances of a Western civilisation, but it has clearly failed to internalise the meaning of tolerance and freedom. This should not take us by surprise: Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, and Jewishness is, sadly enough, inherently intolerant; indeed, it may be argued that Jewish intolerance is as old as the Jews themselves.[9]

Israel and Zionism then, has proved to be a short lived dream. It was initiated to civilise Jewish life, and to dismantle the Jewish self-destructive mode. It was there to move the Jew into the post-herem[10] phase. It vowed to make the Jew into a productive being. But as things turned out, neither the Zionists nor the “anti Zionists” managed to drift away from the disastrous herem culture. It seems that the entire world of Jewish identity politics is a matrix of herems and exclusion strategies. In order to be “a proper Jew,” all you have to do is to point out whom you oppose, hate, exclude or boycott.[11]

The conclusion to such views is not difficult to draw:

The endless trail of Jewish collective tragedies is there to teach us that Jews always pay eventually (and heavily) for Jewish power exercises. Yet, surprisingly (and tragically) enough, Jews somehow consistently fail to internalise and learn from that very lesson.[12]

More precisely, commenting on the climax of State violence directed at Jews in the 1930s, most famously by Germany, but also in most other European nations, Atzmon is clear:

The remarkable fact is they don't understand why the world is beginning to stand against them in the same way they didn't understand why the Europeans stood against them in the 1930s. Instead of asking why we are hated they continue to toss accusations on others.[13]

Within the discourse of Jewish politics and history there is no room for causality. There is no such a thing as a former and a latter. Within the Jewish tribal discourse every narrative starts to evolve when Jewish pain establishes itself. This obviously explains why Israelis and some Jews around the world can only think as far as “two state solution” within the framework of 1967 borders. It also explains why for most Jews the history of the holocaust starts in the gas chambers or with the rise of the Nazis. I have hardly seen any Israelis or Jews attempt to understand the circumstances that led to the clear resentment of Europeans towards their Jewish neighbors in the 1920’s-40’s.[14]

It is, as such, not surprising that Atzmon’s work has received enthusiastic reviews by such prominent members of the racist right as former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Kevin MacDonald of the Occidental Observer, David Icke, and Arthur Topham’s the Radical Press. It should not be surprising that Atzmon has distributed articles defending Holocaust deniers and those who write of “the Hitler we loved and why.”[15]These connections ultimately serve the interests of Zionism, which seeks to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Jewishness. Zionist agents have repeatedly attempted to ensnare and link Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim rights advocates to Neo-Nazism, through dirty tricks and outright lies.

It is more surprising and disappointing, then, that a small section of the left has opted to promote Atzmon and his works. In the UK, the Socialist Workers Party promoted Atzmon for several years before finally breaking with him; his latest book The Wandering Who? has been published by the left-wing Zero Books (a decision that elicited a letter of protest from several Zero authors).[16] In the United States, the widely-read Counterpunch website has repeatedly chosen to run articles by Atzmon. Currently, in February and March 2012, Atzmon is on tour in North America, where several of his speaking engagements are being organized by progressive anti-imperialists who we would normally like to consider our allies.

While perhaps well-meaning, operating under the assumption that any opposition to Zionism is to be welcomed, progressives who promote the work of Atzmon are in fact surrendering the moral high ground by encouraging a belief-system that simply mirrors that of the most racist section of Israeli society. Anti-racism is not a liability; on the contrary, it is a principle that makes our movements stronger in the long fight for a better tomorrow.

As political activists committed to resisting colonialism and imperialism—in North America and around the world—we recognize that there can be different interpretations of history, and we welcome exploring these. Without wishing to debate the question of whether far-right and racist ideologues should be censored, or how, we see no reason for progressive people to organize events to promote their works.

In our struggle against Zionism, racism, and all forms of colonialism and imperialism, there is no place for antisemitism or the vilification of Jews, Palestinians or any people based on their religions, cultures, nationalities, ethnicity or history. At this historic junction—when the need to struggle for the liberation of Palestine is more vital than ever and the fault lines of capitalist empire are becoming more widely exposed—no anti-oppressive revolution can be built with ultra-right allies or upon foundations friendly to creeping fascism.

As'ad AbuKhalil, The Angry Arab News Service, Turlock, CA

Suha Afyouni, solidarity activist, Beirut, LEBANON

Max Ajl, essayist, rabble-rouser, proprietor of Jewbonics blog site, Ithaca, NY

Haifaa Al-Moammar, activist, stay-at-home mom, and marathon walker, Los Angeles, CA

Electa Arenal, professor emerita, CUNY Graduate Center/Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Women's Studies, New York, NY

Gabriel Ash, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Geneva, SWITZERLAND

Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Dan Berger, Wild Poppies Collective, Philadelphia, PA

Chip Berlet, Boston, MA

Nazila Bettache, activist, Montréal, CANADA

Sam Bick, Tadamon!, Immigrant Workers Center, Montréal, Québec

Max Blumenthal, author; writing fellow, The Nation, New York, NY

Lenni Brenner, author, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, New York, NY

Café Intifada

Paola Canarutto, Rete-ECO (Italian Network of Jews against the Occupation), Torino, ITALY

Paulette d’Auteuil, National Jericho Movement, Albuquerque, NM

Susie Day, Monthly Review, New York, NY

Ali Hocine Dimerdji, PhD student at The University of Nottingham, in Nottingham, UK

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, professor emerita, California State University

Todd Eaton, Park Slope Food Coop Members for Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions, Brooklyn, NY

Mark Elf, Jews sans frontieres

S. EtShalom, registered nurse, Philadelphia, PA

Benjamin Evans, solidarity activist, Chicago, IL

First of May Anarchist Alliance

Sherna Berger Gluck, professor emerita, California State University/Israel Divestment Campaign, CA

Neta Golan, International Solidarity Movement

Tony Greenstein, Secretary Brighton Unemployed Centre/UNISON, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, Brighton, UK

Andrew Griggs, Café Intifada, Los Angeles, CA

Jenny Grossbard, artist, designer, writer and fighter, New York, NY

Freda Guttman, activist, Montréal, CANADA

Adam Hanieh, lecturer, Department of Development Studies/SOAS, University of London, UK

Swaneagle Harijan, anti-racism, social justice activism, Seattle, WA

Sarah Hawas, researcher and solidarity activist, Cairo, EGYPT

Stanley Heller, "The Struggle" Video News, moderator "Jews Who Speak Out"

Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon!, Immigrant Workers Center, Montréal, CANADA

Elise Hendrick, Meldungen aus dem Exil/Noticias de una multipátrida, Cincinnati, OH

Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer, New York, NY

Ken Hiebert, activist, Ladysmith, CANADA

Elizabeth Horowitz, solidarity activist, New York, NY

Adam Hudson, writer/blogger, San Francisco Bay Area, CA

Dhruv Jain, Researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie and PhD student at York University, Paris, FRANCE

Tom Keefer, an editor of the journal Upping the Anti, Toronto, CANADA

Karl Kersplebedeb, Left Wing Books, Montréal, CANADA

Anne Key, Penrith, Cumbria, UK

Mark Klein, activist, Toronto, CANADA

Bill Koehnlein, Brecht Forum, New York, NY

L.A. Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee, Los Angeles, CA

Mark Lance, Georgetown University/Institute for Anarchist Studies, Washington, DC

David Landy, author, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel, Dublin, IRELAND

Bob Lederer, Pacifica/WBAI producer, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, New York, NY

Matthew Lyons, Three Way Fight, Philadelphia, PA

Karen MacRae, solidarity activist, Toronto, CANADA

Heba Farouk Mahfouz, student activist, blogger, Cairo, EGYPT

Marvin Mandell and Betty Reid Mandell, co-editors, New Politics, West Roxbury, MA

Ruth Sarah Berman McConnell, retired teacher, DeLand, FL

Kathleen McLeod, poet, Brisbane, Australia

Karrie Melendres, Los Angeles, CA

Matt Meyer, Resistance in Brooklyn, New York, NY

Amirah Mizrahi, poet and educator, New York, NY

mesha Monge-Irizarry, co-director of Education Not Incarceration; SF MOOC City commissioner, San Francisco, CA

Matthew Morgan-Brown, solidarity activist, Ottawa, CANADA

Michael Novick, People Against Racist Terror/Anti-Racist Action, Los Angeles, CA

Saffo Papantonopoulou, New School Students for Justice in Palestine, New York, NY

Susan Pashkoff, Jews Against Zionism, London, UK

Tom Pessah, UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, Berkeley, CA

Marie-Claire Picher, Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB), New York, NY

Sylvia Posadas (Jinjirrie), Kadaitcha, Noosa, AUSTRALIA

Roland Rance, Jews Against Zionism, London, UK

Danielle Ratcliff, San Francisco, CA

Liz Roberts, War Resisters League, New York, NY

Emma Rosenthal, contributor, Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation, Los Angeles, CA

Penny Rosenwasser, PhD, Oakland, CA

Suzanne Ross, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, The Riverside Church Prison Ministry, New York, NY

Gabriel San Roman, Orange County Weekly, Orange County, CA

Ian Saville, performer and lecturer, London, UK

Joel Schwartz, CSEA retiree/AFSCME, New York, NY

Tali Shapiro, Anarchists Against the Wall, Boycott From Within, Tel Aviv, OCCUPIED PALESTINE

Simona Sharoni, SUNY, author, Gender & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Plattsburgh, NY

Jaggi Singh, No One Is Illegal-Montreal/Solidarity Across Borders, Montréal, CANADA

Michael S. Smith, board member, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, NY

Pierre Stambul, Union juive française pour la paix (French Jewish Union for Peace), Paris, FRANCE

Muffy Sunde, Los Angeles, CA

Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin, Bronx, NY

Tadamon! (http://www.tadamon.ca/), Montréal, CANADA

Ian Trujillo, atheist, Los Angeles, CA

Gabriella Turek, PhD, Auckland, NEW ZEALAND

Henry Walton, SEIU, retired, Los Angeles, CA

Bill Weinberg, New Jewish Resistance, New York, NY

Abraham Weizfeld, author, The End of Zionism and the liberation of the Jewish People, Montreal, CANADA

Ben White, author, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Cambridge, UK

Laura Whitehorn, former political prisoner, NYS Task Force on Political Prisoners, New York, NY

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, founding member, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG)

Asa Winstanley, journalist for Electronic Intifada, Al-Akhbar and others, London, UK

Ziyaad Yousef, solidarity activist

* List in formation

* Organizations listed for identification purposes only

* Contact us at: antiracistantizionist@yahoo.com

Postscript:

This text is not intended as a comprehensive critique of Gilad Atzmon's politics. It was written quickly by some North American anti-imperialists who learned of Atzmon's 2012 speaking tour just days before it was to begin in late February 2012. At first it was thought it would be signed by just a few people, but the initiative quickly took on a life of its own, being posted to the web and to multiple listservs, discussed via email and on Facebook, and elsewhere, even before the wording had been finalized or a decision had been made as to how to use it (the initial assumption had been that it would be passed on to organizers with far less fanfare). Instead of a few signatures, within a week there were dozens, and emails continue to arrive from people wishing to sign on. We believe that this speaks to the deep frustration that many of us feel when confronted with Atzmon's anti-Jewish beliefs, which constitute an affront to our anti-racist principles, as well as a distraction from the essential tasks of opposing colonialist genocide and Israeli apartheid. What this response makes clear is that for many anti-imperialists, opposing such racism remains essential to building a movement against imperialism and the myriad forms of oppression that both feed on and are fed by it.

Any subsequent news or information about this initiative will appear here on the Three Way Fight website (threewayfight.blogspot.com). Those wishing to endorse or discuss this initiative, or for more information, should email antiracistantizionist@yahoo.com. We wish to reiterate that we consider many of those promoting Atzmon's work to be allies, but would ask that they reconsider their decision to do so. This is not a call for censorship, but for consistency and accountability.

---

[1] Gilad Atzmon, "Tribal Marxism for Dummies," originally published in June 2009, republished on his Web site on April 24, 2011.

[2] Many more quotes like these could be provided, but we assume this is enough to show that these are not out-of-context or out-of-character remarks. If not, readers may wish to peruse the section of Atzmon’s website on “Jewishness” at<www.gilad.co.uk/writings/category/jewishness>.

[3] Gilad Atzmon, "Tribal Marxism for Dummies," Atlantic Free Press, July 2, 2009.

[4] Anayat Durrani, "Exposing Dangerous Myths," Interview with Gilad Atzmon, originally published in Al-Ahram Weekly (May 19-25, 2011), republished on Atzmon's Web site on May 19, 2011.

[5] Gilad Atzmon, "Swindler's List: Zionist Plunder and the Judaic Bible," Redress Information & Analysis, April 5, 2008.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Gilad Atzmon, "An Interesting Exchange With A Jewish Anti Zionist," Atzmon's Web site, August 17, 2011.

[9] Gilad Atzmon, "The Herem Law in the context of Jewish Past and Present," Atzmon's Web site, July 16, 2011.

[10] “Herem” is a Hebrew word that refers to banning or excluding someone, it is also the name of the repressive legislation Israel recently passed to enable punitive lawsuits against those calling for a boycott of the apartheid state. For Atzmon, this law is just one more example of Zionism’s Jewish uniqueness (guess he never heard of SLAPPs), as he concludes that “this is what Jews do best: destroying, excluding, excommunicating, silencing, boycotting, sanctioning. After all, Jews have been doing this for centuries.”

[11] Ibid.

[12] Gilad Atzmon, "A Warning From The Past," Atzmon's Web site, May 26, 2011.

[13] Quoted in Shabana Syed, "Time for World to Confront Israel: Gilad Atzmon," Arab News, June 14, 2010.

This time he went too far - Virginia Tilley on Norman Finkelstein

I can't remember how I got this post from Virginia Tilley's blog but it only just occurred to me to paraphrase one of Finkelstein's book titles to describe his latest outburst against anti-zionism.  I have known for years that Finkelstein supports the two state solution but this time, whilst accusing others of disingenuousness, in his outburst against anti-zionists he drifts into some dubious formulations of his own.  I already linked to Lenin's Tomb's critique of Finkelstein. Gabriel Ash has some interesting comments under my post here on JSF.  But I think Virginia Tilley, author of The One State Solution gets the main arguments all in one place balancing criticism with what she believes Finkelstein got right:

A Response to Norman Finkelstein

Virginia Tilley

19 February 2012

Responding to bizarre statements always risks magnifying their exposure and importance. Hence I wouldn’t normally respond to Norman Finkelstein’s startling 32-minute video attack on the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which was recently posted on YouTube to considerable fanfare by Zionist blogs. Some other good writers have taken him on, like Sean O'Neill, so I could leave it there. But having watched the whole video-taped interview as well as the 5-minute version that someone cobbled together of its “highlights”, I’m sufficiently irritated to respond. Partly I'm concerned to counter some fallacies he promotes that are floating around more widely, but I also feel obliged to challenge people who use the worst conceits of the academy—“it’s science!” “it’s law!”—to trash people’s work while abusing the real rigor and subtlety of academe. In fact, some of Finkelstein’s points are flat wrong, others partly wrong, some partly right and others flat right.  I’ll start with the wrong ones.

First, it’s seriously irritating that Finkelstein goes on about international law in ways that reduce international law to a parody of itself. You can’t take some law and not all law, he says, as though law is a fixed box set. For one thing, he cherry-picks law with abandon himself, as I'll discuss later. But mainly, international law isn’t a frozen set of rules. Like any law, it’s a moving target. Rules and norms develop incrementally, and are interpreted and reinterpreted over time, as conditions and needs change. For example, when the United Nations voted for partitioning Palestine in 1947, apartheid in South Africa hadn’t yet been invented. Within a few more years, South Africa’s first apartheid laws were on the books, yet it was another decade before the UN began to react seriously against it and 1973 before the UN made apartheid a crime against humanity. Today, the prohibition of apartheid is codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and what Israel is doing can be defined and denounced in terms that did not exist a half-century ago.

This is why Finkelstein botches international law in holding that, because “Israel is a state,” no one has a jot to say about the situation of Arab citizens inside Israel. Even when he talks about the 1947 partition resolution of the UN, Resolution 181, which recommended partitioning Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, he gets it wrong. He forgets that Resolution 181 specified plainly that neither state could discriminate on the basis of religion or race. When the General Assembly admitted Israel as a member of the UN in 1949, on the basis of this history, its members relied (gullibly) on Israel’s hints that it would not discriminate against Arabs inside the state. So Israel’s discriminatory laws flew in the face of international opinion even in 1949, let alone sixty-plus years later, when human rights law has gained so much more strength in prohibiting racial discrimination and apartheid. Today, no state anywhere in the world today has a “right” to discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic or national origin. Israel has signed onto the international conventions which explicitly prohibit such discrimination and is bound by its obligations on this score.

So if Finkelstein and others try to rely on diplomatic recognition of Israel to argue that international law has nothing to say about discrimination against Arabs in Israel, they are flat wrong, because it is flatly prohibited. Yes, Israel is recognized as a state, but so is South Africa, and that didn’t stop the entire world from slamming apartheid as the racist abomination it was and insisting that the apartheid regime be dismantled.

Finkelstein is also flat wrong on another historical point: that the international legal framework for resolving the conflict has always been partition into two states. For evidence, he mentions that when Arafat—that legendary legal mind— proposed two states in 1989, he invoked the 1947 partition resolution as unfinished business of the conflict. Yes, Arafat did cite this, but his point was precisely to jump back over four decades during which the opposite was true. From 1947 to 1989, Israel flatly rejected creation of a Palestinian state anywhere in Mandate Palestine as an intolerable threat to Israel. The formal public position of the PLO from its creation until 1988 was also one state. Since 1967, Israel has made deadly clear—in rhetoric, laws, maps, settlement construction, military rule and anything else we might care to check—its intention is to keep all of Mandate Palestine under its supreme control. And in all that time, the UN Security Council said nothing about two states or even about Palestinian national rights. That’s precisely why the Oslo Accords manifested to naive international public as a “historic compromise”, blah blah.

Finkelstein calls for us to stick with this “historic compromise”. He dresses down the BDS movement for not doing so and for seeking instead, if implicitly, to “eliminate” or “abolish Israel”. We are all so sick of this language that I couldn’t normally find energy to write this sentence, except that he extends the point to delegitimizing the BDS organizers by saying that they “don’t want Israel to exist”. So let’s go through it one more time: this old Zionist chestnut makes open hash of international law by deliberately confusing two things—Israel as a modern territorial state and Israel as a Jewish state. Finkelstein’s critique of BDS doctrine is sort of right: yes, taken as a whole (as I agree with him we should take it), the comprehensive effect of the BDS agenda would “abolish Israel” as a Jewish state.


But is this logical implication—based entirely on international human rights law, by the way—illegitimate? I’d say, damn straight, Israel as a Jewish state must be abolished, just as white South Africa had to be “abolished”, and for the same reason—because ethnic states simply can’t exist without discrimination and oppression. But does this mean abolishing Israel as a modern territorial state? Of course not, just as South Africa was not “abolished” in this sense. So language about “eliminating Israel” is just pointless sophistry—scare-mongering, rhetorical sabotage—as Finkelstein well knows. Indeed, accepting his claim to senior experience of this conflict, we must assume he knows all about this manipulative language and his using it therefore can only mirror his accusations of hypocrisy back on himself.

Indeed, it is Finkelstein himself who avoids being honest—just saying straight out that he wants Israel to remain a Jewish state and won’t accept as "reasonable" any program that disagrees. Instead, he cites “international law” selectively and thinly as a cover for this. He also claims that the BDS movement contradicts “international law,” such as UN Security Council resolutions which call for creating two states. Yet here again, he cherry picks, and hoists himself on his own petard. He cites Resolution 1515 of 2003, which calls for two states, as “international law” yet then disparages Resolution 194, which calls for return of Palestinian refugees, as “indefensible”. Here more sophistry infuses his objection that mass return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Palestine would be entirely "unreasonable". For one thing, at least one study has found that the number of Palestinians actually wanting to return would be in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. But, in any case, defending the principle of Palestinian return hardly precludes sensible policies to manage the pragmatic realities of it, and activists firing questions from audiences in Finkelstein's talks (his example) hardly define the range of negotiation that must go into such questions. The very complexity of resolutions, diplomatic initiatives and contradictory clauses in the full history of the conflict precludes table-thumping about any one of them. All are necessarily subject to the diplomatic process, power politics, real politik, geographic constraints and evolving international views. Taking bits and pieces in isolation to call some “unreasonable” and others “international law” is meaningless.

It is indeed by viewing all this as a whole process, contradictions and all, that the “compromise” suggested by the Oslo Accords is revealed as a sham. Not least, Finkelstein ignores the glaring fact, hardly irrelevant to his claims about international consensus, that Israel itself has never agreed to a two–state solution. Aside from one sentence in a letter by Ariel Sharon, which was never formally endorsed by the Israeli Cabinet, Israel has never signed onto any document in any way that actually commits its government to create two states. Nor has it ever recognized the Palestinian people as a people or endorsed the Palestinian right to self-determination. The BDS movement might usefully address this farce and open discussions toward accepting that "Israel" now embraces all of Mandate Palestine and therefore must be reconceived as a secular-democratic state. But until that happens, the BDS movement can't be criticized for standing silent on a geographic version of Israel that Israel refuses to hold for itself. Here Finkelstein's citing the International Court of Justice on the question of where Israel's exists is only more cherry-picking: a mountain of international diplomacy confirms that Israel's final borders have not been set and the question remains a "final status" issue.

Finkelstein claims that BDS organisers will not admit to the true goals of BDS (the elimination of Israel) because they don’t want to split the movement. This isn’t a fact so much as an interpretation, but it’s easy to agree with him. He’s flat right that the three-tier goals of the BDS movement—end the occupation, return of refugees, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel—would “eliminate Israel” as a Jewish state. I’ve pointed this out myself, and am convinced for several reasons that the BDS organizers are fully aware of it. And I too have been bothered by the elision, but on reasoning opposite to Finkelstein’s. I think that a strategic fuzziness on this point deprives the BDS movement of its greatest potential, which is the unassailable moral force gained by clearly rejecting discrimination in all its forms and fighting for creation of a non-racial state, as in South Africa.

Finkelstein, by contrast, denounces the campaign’s silence on this point as deceptive, and failing to accept the inevitable. In doing so, he tramples all over principles of political activism as freely as he abuses international law. His first fallacy is to deride the BDS movement’s fogginess on its ultimate vision of one secular-democratic state as “childish” and “silly.” In this view, he is strangely naive, for a political scientist, about the politics of liberation movements. It’s a very old and time-honoured method in building mass movements to tread lightly around issues that divide people until consensus and trust build to the point where more difficult internal differences can be productively debated. The Zionist movement itself has done this from its earliest years, in skirting deep internal divisions about Judaism and Jewish social values, but we can spot the same manoeuvring in any liberation movement over the past few centuries. So it’s hardly "hypocritical" that the BDS leadership is treading gently by not confronting its constituency with divisive issues until the time has matured for some respectful internal debate about what “eliminating Israel” will actually mean to the future and well-being of the Jewish national home in Palestine. Perhaps it’s time for those discussions to be opened, but meanwhile it’s truly silly to call the delay “dishonest”. (Perhaps Finkelstein’s sensitivity on this score traces to Maoism, to which, by his own account, he was loyal for decades longer than most people. Once in a cult, always see cults?)

Finkelstein’s second fallacy about BDS is in disparaging its few “successes”. Here he fails to grasp the essential character of a BDS campaign. Although any such campaign naturally seeks and celebrates landmark victories, its true success is not measured by the number of companies pulling out of contracts but by the incremental growth of world public opinion. Let’s get this straight: the primary purpose of BDS is public education. This is mostly an intangible or qualitative matter, yet of immense importance, as Israel knows full well: hence Israeli state rhetoric these days barely mentions “terror” and focuses almost exclusively on “delegitimation”. I’d suggest it’s a far better indication of the BDS movement’s success that Israeli ambassadors, meeting in Israel over the New Year's break, reported that they had never before felt their diplomatic environments so chilly. Sean O'Neall has observed the same constraints confronting the stumbling Birthright Israel program, and other observers attest similarly.

Finkelstein’s third fallacy regarding activism is to protest that, if it’s honest about its “eliminate Israel” goals, the BDS will never reach a “mainstream public”. This objection about mainstream opinion, which he repeats several times, is bizarre on its face. Since when do human rights campaigns adjust their arguments to please mainstream opinion? Changing mainstream opinion is their very task. If activists took mainstream opinion as the proper guide to moral action, we would never have had the anti-slavery abolition movement, or the women’s suffrage movement, and apartheid would flourish in South Africa to this day. Indeed, we wouldn’t have most human rights campaigns. The toughest ones, which are often the greatest ones, must often start small and grow slowly.

Still, maybe Finkelstein is unintentionally helpful in drawing our attention to a seamier camp of human rights activism, by publicly positioning himself in it: some activists do tune their positions to what they think the majority wants to hear, eschewing stands that “lack support”. They may believe themselves pragmatic, but I call these folks “human rights entrepreneurs”, as they are essentially market-oriented. Like courtiers, they position themselves just behind the cutting edge, with a keen eye for trends, so they can surf a wave they didn’t actually have the courage or insight to create themselves. In other words, they are not guided by the moral principles of human rights but by how the rhetoric “sells”—how a human-rights posture gets them into the "club", invited to conferences and onto speaker circuits, and draws funds to their NGOs (although I make no assertion about Finkelstein on the money question). I don’t work that way, and I’d submit that the great human rights campaigns of human history have never built that way. They build on principle, and the greatest movements, like the campaigns to end slavery and apartheid, hammered away for decades through fog and darkness, eventually succeeding when moral authority and changing conditions finally synced. So were these all “cults” during those dark years? If so, call me a cultist.

I'm not saying Finkelstein is a money-grubber. On the contrary, he is clearly saying what he truly thinks, and, setting aside his unnecessarily rude and insulting language, I respect his independence of mind. But his position is still entrepreneurial in approaching human rights audiences as markets, in the guise of being pragmatic. If he remains dedicated to this approach, perhaps he can remember the power of marketing: persuading people that they want something. That’s how the ANC did it, anyway, eventually selling its idea of a shared state to what looked for many decades like unassailable white rejection.

In stark contrast to Finkelstein's argument, human rights campaigns must indeed assume, as a premise essential to their work, that public opinion—here, Jewish-Israeli opinion and Palestinian public opinion—is not fixed, but responds to persuasion, events and conditions. Especially, it responds to messages from the other side. A clarion call by the ANC for a shared state is what tipped South African apartheid leaders, once their world crumbled, to give up apartheid. When Palestinians decide collectively that their future is a reunited and shared Palestine, in which all citizens are equal in dignity and rights, the political chemistry of the entire conflict will change. By creating a “mainstream public” for themselves, they will ultimately create it for all.

This brings us to the question of leadership. One point I think Finkelstein did get right, and perhaps it was time to break ground by saying it. He decried the BDS Council for presuming to direct solidarity activities elsewhere. He mentions its squashing his own initiative in Gaza, which was a scandal, but also its claiming authority over initiatives by solidarity people anywhere in the world. I have to agree with him on this one: I’ve never seen anything like it, either—not with the Vietnamese, the ANC, Sandinistas, the Mayas, the PLO, East Timor, or any liberation movement I’ve ever supported or communicated with. The BDS Council is an able body of activists promoting an international campaign, but Finkelstein is right: it’s no more than an unelected, unrepresentative bunch of volunteers, and it has zip to say about what anybody else does, ever, anywhere, in support of the Palestinian people. Its only legitimate role is to serve as a resource, not an authority. Language I’ve heard by international activists on this score—that “proposals” for activity this or that must be “brought to the BDS Council” for “deliberation” and decisions about whether they should go forward—is gobsmacking and raises my political-alarm antennae. The same ugly impression was gained by AdamSchatz in the London Review of Books:

The idea of living with Jews—a central tenet of large sections of the Palestinian movement during the First Intifada—gave way to a vision of struggle against a faceless coloniser. When Israel began to build the wall, Palestinians retreated in pride and defiance behind a separation wall of their own. Many now refuse to associate even with those Israelis who are in sympathy with the Palestinian struggle. Amira Hass, the great left-wing Israeli journalist for Haaretz, who is based in Ramallah, was prevented from studying Arabic at Birzeit; Daniel Barenboim has been vilified by some leaders of the boycott movement on the grounds that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Arab-Israeli youth orchestra he created with Edward Said, is promoting “normalisation” with the Zionist state. One BDS leader told me with eerie self-assurance that Said would have shut down the orchestra in line with BDS demands. There was even a debate within BDS about whether the Bilin protests ought to be boycotted because of the participation of Israeli Jews who might call themselves Zionists. ‘These people don’t go to Bilin, [Palestinian lawyer Diana] Buttu said. ‘They prefer to issue fatwas from their laptops, and if you question the logic behind the fatwas, you get called a traitor. [emphasis added]’

Who the flippin’ hell is the BDS Council to shut down the Barenboim orchestra, or turn away Amira Hass or anyone else from Birzeit University, or—god help us—presume to assert that Edward Said, of all people, would kow-tow to its puerile diktat? What random NGO coalition is authorized to silence dissent by denouncing people as traitors? This is not just arrogance but dangerous arrogance, ringing of proto-fascism—centralisation by authoritarian personalities, claiming doctrinal and strategic control over a liberation movement in the name of ideological purity with racist overtones, although they have no popular mandate whatever, not even the democratic figleaf provided by the (long-defunct) Palestine National Council. The dangers of this distortion must not be underestimated and further submission to its intimidation tactics is unwise. Perhaps Finkelstein has done the solidarity movement a service, after all, by throwing open a window for true Palestinian democrats to confront this tendency and nip it in the bud. Sometimes a bull in a china shop does create an opportunity to sweep out the place.  

By the way, The Jewish Chronicle had its glee over the Finkelstein outburst on its home page just recently though, whereas lumping him in with a ragbag of neo-nazi racists like Gilad Atzmon and the BNP's Nick Griffin back in November 2011 appeared on the front page of the print edition, the article headed, Finkelstein disowns 'silly' Israel boycott only appears on page 5 of the latest print edition. Clearly the zionists at the JC aren't quite as ready to embrace two states as they like to make out.

UPDATE: I've paid more attention to the comments than I did to Virginia Tilley's article. Here's Gabriel Ash's comment to this post:

Tilley has its good points however, she seems to have a beef with PACBI, that seems as personal and as inappropriate as Finkelstein's. First, the Gaza March was not "squashed" by the BNC, and the shame is on Tilley for using this language. Some members of the BNC, speaking for themselves, criticized some aspects of it, constructively and politely, and most of the organizers accepted the validity of the criticism, except NF, who publicly tried to undermine the march while leaving the organizing committee. It is sad to see that Tilley supports NF's behavior and find faults with the very fact that Palestinian public intellectuals would dare comment on what they see as shortcomings of a solidarity campaign. It feels like a case of academics sticking together in defending the right to behave irresponsibly and without accountability, their professional sin. 

Second, preventing Amira Hass from learning at Bir Zeit, if it happened (and I was told it happened before BDS anyway), has nothing to do with BDS as such action is quite explicitly against the PACBI academic and cultural boycott guidelines. Obviously, there have been boycotts of Israelis before, including as part of the Arab boycott, and Tilley has as much right as anybody to suggest that that such boycotts are not helpful. In fact, I agree. But Tilley uses this event to smear activists who obviously had nothing to do with it. It seems that both NF and Tilley have found in the Palestinian initiators of the BDS call a scapegoat for every Palestinian who takes a political position they disapprove of. One wonders what is the motivation for this. Is the very presence of assertive Palestinians in the movements making them uncomfortable? 

Regarding The exchange between PACBI and the Diwan Orchestra, I think PACBI is right. The Diwan Orchestra does normalize the occupation, not because it brings Israelis and Palestinians together, but because it refuses to make any political statements when it does it. While the orchestra does little damage on its own, and is certainly not in the same league as, say, Elbit, I can say from experience that artists and especially aparatchiks in the cultural field use Barenboim's name as a fig leaf that allows them to argue that they "promote peace" and "fight against the occupation" when all they do is promoting Israeli propaganda. And if the orchestra doesn't want to be used in this way, it is certainly not taking any stand against it. Adam Schatz claim that Barenboim was "vilified" is indeed an example of what he condemns.

Finally, she is right that the BNC should not be in a position to decide how solidarity activists do their work in other countries. But neither she, nor NF, give any evidence that the BNC dictates solidarity. Tilley gives an example of Western activists asking for guidance with what might be uncharitably described as an excess of deference. If Western activists lose sight of their own autonomy, she should criticize them, not the BNC. But it is also worth remembering that part of the prehistory of the BDS call was Western activists complaining to Palestinians over the absence of guidance and a coherent strategy that can serve as a pole for organizing solidarity. The BDS council is, as Tilley suggests, a very important resource to solidarity activists. Providing needed guidance can easily slip into issuing orders, just as autonomy can easily slip into Western patronizing of Palestinians. The relation between the two sides has to be kept through dialogue in the right zone, and criticism of it for getting out of that zone is useful when it is done with care and respect, exactly the kind of care and respect that is found in the letter of those Palestinian intellectuals who criticized the Gaza March, and is absent from both NF's and Tilley's interventions. 

UPDATE 2: Here's further comment from David Landy:

This is a disappointing article by Virginia Tilley. Her points about Norman and THE LAW are well made – similar to Lenin’shttp://leninology.blogspot.co... in fact, and not too far away from Max Ajl who has offered the best commentary on this affair here http://mrzine.monthlyreview.or... (Myself, when listening to Finkelstein’s repeated invocation of the majesty of the law, I was reminded of the Kafka short story in The Trial where a man is kept waiting his whole life before the outer gates of the law, a gate he can never enter, a gate created just for him. And in the course of that wasted life he is reduced from pleading with the gatekeeper of The Law to pleading with the fleas in the gatekeeper’s beard.  The fate, I suppose, of those who put all their faith in The Law) 

However, Virginia’s attack on PACBI and the BNC is disturbing. Gabriel accurately explains how unjustified the attack is and I’ve nothing to add there. But why does Virginia Tilley, a long-term advocate of Palestinian rights (and the one-state solution), make such an attack? I think it is because PACBI are trying to create a leadership role for themselves in the movement. However, unlike Virginia Tilley I don’t find this problematic, but necessary. With the fighting between Hamas and Fatah, and their lack of popular legitimacy, a huge leadership gap has opened up – one which had the power to paralyse Palestinian solidarity in other countries. This is because the question arises as to what foundational authority the activism of those who don’t worship before the alter of The Law (human rights or international) rely on. The Palestinian people? But who represents them, if not their elected representatives? 

Here is where the BNC comes in, representing Palestinian civil society, giving the solidarity movement both the authority/legitimacy to act, as well the direction in which to act. Without doubt this ad hoc arrangement can be criticized; it is a terribly imperfect solution to the problem of Palestinian representation. The BNC, in short, doesn’t replace the PLO. Nor, as far as I’m aware, is any BNC member arguing that it should. It is, hopefully, a temporary solution. And as a leadership of sorts, it has adopted the role of urging solidarity organisations down certain routes, arguing against other routes (notably against a depoliticisation of the struggle, a reduction of it to humanitarian arguments, with Palestinians as victims to be rescued). 

As I’ve said, I’ve no problem with this, partly because I agree with their analysis, but more because I believe the way they are starting to provide leadership and making the solidarity movement more coherent to be absolutely vital – giving justification and direction to our work. Without doubt they are doing so from a position of shaky authority themselves, which is a problem. But to argue, as Virginia Tilley does, that the Sandanistas or PLO or ANC didn’t try to claim similar authority (or in fact, far more authority) over solidarity movements and direct their actions is gobsmackingly false. This is my problem with her article, not that she expresses problems with the BNC – and I don’t know if they stem from personal arguments as Gabriel says, or political disagreements. But that she extends her criticism from questioning their tactics to questioning their legitimacy as a ‘random NGO coalition’ who should just shut up about whatever the international solidarity movement does. This is deeply unhelpful, arguing for an inchoate movement. 

This condemnation of the BNC may derive from the black and white way she seems to see the struggle. Divisions are continually made in the article between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. For instance, she divides between’ good’ human rights campaigners who aspire towards the condition of marketing executives, and ‘bad’ ones whose greatest ambition is to be beggars towards those in power. In reality, all groups trying to change the world need to trim their sails somewhat, and there are more gradations in how people address power and the public than this Manichean division. 

However, where my attitude changed from disagreement to annoyance at these slapdash categorizations was when she caricatured those who support the boycott 100% as keyboard warriors – sneering that ‘these people don’t go to Bilin’. Contrasting boycott action with the direct action of the weekly demos at Bil’in is an unacceptable and false division, one which condemns boycott and fetishises this direct action in a way that is unhelpful to its goals.  That she needed to drag in a Palestinian voice to give this opinion some spurious authority only underlines its weakness. 

I would agree, most friends in the movement would agree that some tactical flexibility is needed in the boycott campaign – indeed in their so-called ‘fatwa’ against the WEDO orchestra (http://jewssansfrontieres.blog..., PACBI also recognises this. (It is ironic but unsurprising that those who are most dogmatic on this front, in my experience, are those who have experienced Israeli brutality face-to-face, or in other words those who have been involved in direct actions.) There is nothing wrong with calling for flexibility and arguing with more dogmatic people, there is something very wrong in labelling those who are less flexible than us proto-fascists. 

The one thing that is to be said for Virginia Tilley’s article, like Norman Finkelstein’s original intervention, is that it might encourage open debate about the goals, leadership and future of the movement. However this discussion, if it is to succeed, cannot proceed by invoking caricatures in the way that her article does.