If we take it as a given that the Israeli state is an apartheid colonial state based on the dispossession of the Palestinians -and we do – the question arises of how to provide the most effective solidarity to those oppressed by that state. The international campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel is a movement with growing international support, not least because it has the backing of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, the General Union of Palestinian Teachers, the Federation of Unions of Palestinian University Professors and Employees, the Palestinian Engineers’ Association, the Palestinian Lawyers’ Association and a total of 170 organisations representing Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state.
Socialist Appeal/the IMT have come out in opposition to BDS asserting that “this campaign does nothing to weaken Israeli imperialism and in fact pushes Israeli workers and youth into the arms of imperialists”. In fact they go a bit further and make the true but one-sided observation that " not a single Palestinian family has ever been saved from having their house knocked down thanks to a letter to the Toronto Star or the Montreal Gazette.”
The main elements of Isa Al-Jaza’iri and Alex Grant’s rejection of BDS are that:
- It takes the approach that the Israeli state is one monolithic reactionary bloc
- The class struggle inside the Israeli state brings together Palestinian and Israeli workers and is the principal threat to Zionism, the ideology that the state uses to divide the working class.
- BDS plays to the Zionist myth that the Israeli state is being isolated because it is Jewish.
- A labour movement campaign of targeted sanctions would be more effective.
There is no doubt of the authors’ unconditional support for the Palestinian people but their approach is strongly in line with the economism of the Militant tradition with an occasional lapse into fantasy. Writing of the Intifada the authors say “The Israeli capitalists’ worst fears were that Israeli workers would make the connection between cuts to their wages and services, and to the attacks on the Palestinian masses. “ The hypothesis seems to be that a a group of people who materially benefit from the national oppression of the Palestinians would suddenly conclude that the entire ideology of their state was wrong simply because the local clinic was closed down or they’d had to take a pay freeze. In the absence of a mass working class party which was anti-Zionist and offered the perspective of a different sort of state in the territory that is a very implausible outcome.
The rather abstract theoretical basis for this approach is “ that the Israeli working class – objectively speaking – has absolutely no interest in oppressing the Palestinian masses”. It all depends on what you mean by “objective”. Housing in Israeli cities is very expensive. You can get a European standard home pretty cheaply in the settlements with first world amenities and don’t need to come into any contact at all with the Palestinians who have been displaced into open air prison camps. Being determines consciousness.
Part of Israeli mass consciousness is that they are a European style liberal democracy. One of the big positive impacts of the BDS campaign is that it is starting to shift that perception. It is impossible to sustain this facade if produce from the country is being boycotted across the world as a direct reaction to the dispossession, mass murder and cultural strangling of the Palestinians. This point was understood by the Israeli financial daily, The Marker, which said of the siege of Gaza “the horrific images on TV and the statements of politicians in Europe and Turkey are changing the behaviour of consumers, businessmen and potential investors. Many European consumers boycott Israeli products in practice.” The economic and political isolation which follows mass action like this abroad are much more likely to cause Israeli workers to reflect on the state that they are living in than a revelation of the intimate bond between cuts in social provision and the oppression of Palestinians.
There are two aspects of the strength of BDS that Isa Al-Jaza’iri and Alex Grant gravely underestimate. The first is its power as an instrument to build a mass solidarity movement with the Palestinian people. Only tiny numbers of those who are in sympathy with the Palestinian struggle will ever be able to visit Gaza or the West Bank. Everyone can be part of a movement which boycotts Israeli clothes, food or technology. The recent gains of the BDS movement in North American and European unions are proof that this can be made into a working class method of struggle, in exactly the same way that boycotting South Africa was once a point of principle in the workers’ movement internationally. To use the authors’ own example of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, there is no reason it can’t call on its members to both boycott Israeli goods and to refuse to deliver any mail to SNC-Lavalin or similar companies that build weapons for Israeli capitalism.
This will impact on the politics of the Middle East too. A core theme in the Islamist propaganda is an undifferentiated Western support for the Israeli state. Union boycotts, consumer boycotts and academic boycotts give the lie to that and strengthen the hand of socialist forces in the region who are able to point to active solidarity from the international workers’ movement.
Finally, the authors are correct when they say that it is only the working class which can transform the situation. But again this has a rather abstract quality. Palestinians in Gaza are living on 2 or three dollars a day and Mahmud Abbas is running a puppet state with the active support of the CIA. The one message that everyone who returns from Palestine brings back is that the solidarity of the outside world is one of the things that adds to the will to resist. A mass BDS movement adds to that.
Thanks to Brad for this video of an action outside the Israeli state’s consulate in San Francisco.
Liam redux 
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