Thomas Blom Hansen
The success of this movement has made many forget the odds we were up against at the time. We were routinely called radicals, unbalanced, one-sided, agents of Soviet style communism, and supporters of “terrorist organizations” like the ANC’s armed wing Umkonte we Sizwe. We were told that there were two sides to this conflict; that we should go and see for ourselves (many of us had in fact been to South Africa which made us even more committed to our cause); and that people of color in South Africa in fact lived better lives than most of the people on the African continent.
We called for a boycott because we saw the systematic dispossession of an entire people – robbed of their land, history, livelihood, political rights, dignity, life and future – by a powerful and wealthy state, with the strongest military on the African continent, effectively backed and supported by the major Western powers.
Did the boycott campaign work? Yes, it contributed in no small measure to the gradual erosion of the apartheid regime’s legitimacy and standing in the world to the point that one is hard pressed to find anyone today that would admit to have ever supported apartheid, or even to have opposed a boycott of South Africa.
Did it hurt and inconvenience people in South Africa? Yes, it did in many fields, including many of the South Africans of color whose interests and future we were vested in. However, most of the progressive civic, religious and political organizations that opposed apartheid strongly supported the boycott. Anyone who speaks to South Africans of color who lived through this period will know that a vast majority deeply appreciated these efforts. It made them feel less forgotten by the world.
The boycott movement included calls for boycott of academic institutions, scholars, book contracts, research collaborations, academic visits, conference participation and much else. These measures were applied to all institutions and scholars in South Africa regardless of race and position. The complex history, problems, effects and implications of this academic boycott movement are summarized in a thoughtful and systematic study by Lancaster and Haricombe. They conclude that the boycott gradually, symbolically and indirectly isolated South African academics and undermined the credibility of the regime. See a summary at http://www.monabaker.com/pMachine/more.php?id=A1105_0_1_0_M
I had grown up with the heroic story of the rescue of Danish Jews during the war, and the special relationship between Denmark and Israel after the war became very much a part of our lives: visiting school classes, cultural events, lectures by eminent scientists, music performances, Israeli produce in our shops, and a steady flow of young Danes spending time in progressive kibbutz communities, at least until the 1982 invasion of Lebanon put a serious dent in the public prestige of Israel. In our worldview at the time, Israel and South Africa belonged to two very different categories. South Africa was the last bastion of colonialism, brutally dominated by what we thought to be a culturally unsophisticated and provincial white community. Israel, by contrast, appeared as a more cosmopolitan democracy full of vigorous debate and critiques of the consolidating occupation of Palestinian territories. Although the occupation clearly violated international law and the human rights of Palestinians, and although Palestinian organizations called for action against Israel, a full scale boycott as the one applied to South Africa did not appear as an appropriate action at the time.
This opinion, and this perception of Israel and Israeli policies, has not changed among many liberal minded people across the world. But events in Israel and in the occupied territories in the last two decades have been so many and so grave that there is every reason to re-evaluate this stance: the systematic expansion of settlements and theft of land across the West Bank, the undermining of the Oslo Accord, the undermining of the Palestinian Authority, the building of the wall, the planned military destruction of life and infrastructure in Gaza in successive campaigns, the routinized harassment of Palestinians by the IDF, the demonization of Israeli Arabs as an enemy within . This is only to mention some of the most glaring acts of state violence against an entire category of people.
Israel of today is different from the rosier picture I, and many others, grew up with. Its economy and society is more militarized and securitized than ever before. The political landscape is dominated by political formations that range from belligerent majoritarianism to the outright racist. An earlier rhetoric of co-existence and peace in the political mainstream has given way to a shrill rhetoric of danger and fear. Even moderate critics of Israeli state policies are shouted down as self-hating Jews, or, more commonly, as anti-semitic.
I cannot help but compare with the shrillness and aggressiveness of the apartheid regime in the 1980s as it grew ever more isolated in the world. Dignified men of the cloth like Desmond Tutu and Alan Boesak were depicted as blood-thirsty agents of world communism! That was every bit as absurd as Netanyahu’s recent statement that that the BDS campaign is a ‘strategic threat’ on a par with Iran’s nuclear program and that BDS in effect supports ISIS….!
Today, it is no longer just political organizations like the PLO that calls for boycott of Israel. The current BDS movement responds to calls from a broad range of Palestinian civil society organizations, professionals, and academics who after many years of attempts at collaborating with Israeli counterparts have reached an impasse in the face of an evermore aggressive state and hostile Israeli society. Their inevitable conclusion is that only comprehensive global boycott, divestment and sanctions against the state of Israel can begin to change the desperate situation of millions of Palestinians.
I want to support this effort because what I see now, is so close to what I saw in the 1970s, to repeat my formulation from above: ‘an entire people robbed of their land, history, livelihood, political rights, dignity, life and future – by a powerful and wealthy state, with the strongest military in the region, effectively backed and supported by the major Western powers.’
I am an academic and I would like to contribute to this effort from where I stand, think and work. I believe that an academic boycott of Israeli institutions that are actively engaged in research that supports and undergirds the occupation of Palestinian territory and violate the rights of Palestinians is the right way forward. It may not change Israeli policies, and yes, it may appear as merely ‘symbolic’ as the defenders of Israel’s policies never fail to tell us. However, as any anthropologist will know, symbols and symbolic action are at the heart of human life and can change things, albeit often slowly and indirectly – just as the academic boycott of South Africa worked slowly, symbolically and indirectly.
Joining an academic boycott of selected Israeli institutions is for me first and foremost an appropriate way of supporting our embattled Palestinian colleagues at their financially deprived and marginalized academic institutions. It is also a way of communicating to our Israeli colleagues in the academy that we are not afraid of taking a clear stand on this issue and that we would encourage them to do the same. In the 1980s South Africa, draconian emergency laws curtailed what academics and others could say and do in the public. No such strictures apply to Israeli academics and yet, surprisingly few have come out in solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues, or in open and articulate protest against the systematic violation of Palestinian human rights by the Israeli state.
To all those who argue that ‘yes, BDS was appropriate in the case of South Africa, but not in the case of Israel’, please take a moment to consider factually what actually happened in South Africa in the apartheid years, and what is actually happening today in Gaza and on the West Bank. Rather than dismissing this comparison as intrinsically unfair and even anti-semitic, as is often alleged, it behooves us as scholars and academics to look at the facts, the death toll, the structures of deprivation, the daily humiliation, the theft of land, the legal frameworks and much else. Let us have a real conversation, and let us use our resources as anthropologists and scholars to develop a truly informed debate that enables us to understand and properly assess what has been happening in Israel and Palestine for many years.
I would also ask my colleagues who are in two minds about the issue to take a moment to study the facts of the actual academic boycott of South Africa. It was pretty sweeping and blunt, it did not discriminate between institutions and it was targeted at inconveniencing individual scholars as well as whole professions. The current proposal for boycott measures against Israeli institutions by Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Institutions (https://anthroboycott.wordpress.com/the-statement/) is much less blunt than what was ever applied to South Africa, much more precisely targeted, and much less aimed at individual scholars. Unlike the South Africa campaign it does not assume that all academics in Israel are complicit with the actions of state. On the contrary, it targets institutions and, in so doing, it provides potential support to those of our Israeli colleagues, and progressives who are critical of their own institution’s active support of Israeli state policies in the occupied territories.
As Sheldon Adelson in his Las Vegas hotel persuades Republican presidential hopefuls that BDS is the next big threat against Israel and Jews across the world, it may be a good time to take a fresh look at the facts on the ground.
It may also be a good time to listen to the fast growing and truly progressive organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace that actively supports BDS.
http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/content/jvp-issues#1
Stanford, June 6, 2015
About the author:
Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor of Anthropology and director of the Center for South Asia at Stanford University. His most recent book is Melancholia of Freedom: Social life in an Indian Township in South Africa (2012).