[News] Israel - The time for worldwide boycott is now

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The time for worldwide boycott is now
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9358.shtml

Omar Barghouti, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2008

On Friday, 29 February 2008, Israel's deputy defense minister Matan 
Vilnai threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "holocaust," telling 
Israeli Army Radio: "The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets 
reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a 
bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

This date will go down in history as the beginning of a new phase in 
the colonial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, whereby a 
senior Israeli leader, a "leftist" for that matter, has publicly 
revealed the genocidal plans Israel is considering to implement 
against Palestinians under its military occupation, if they do not 
cease to resist its dictates. It will also mark the first time since 
World War II that any state has relentlessly -- and on live TV -- 
terrorized a civilian population with acts of slow, or low-intensity, 
genocide, with one of its senior government officials overtly 
inciting to a full-blown "holocaust," while the world stood by, 
watching in utter apathy, or in glee, as in the case of leading 
western leaders.

For an Israeli leader who is Jewish, in particular, to threaten 
anyone with holocaust is a sad irony of history. Are victims of 
unspeakable crimes invariably doomed to turn into appalling 
criminals? Can anything be possibly done to break this vicious cycle, 
before the state that claims to represent the main victims of the 
Nazi holocaust commits a fresh holocaust itself?

Before addressing those questions, however, isn't it exaggerated and 
pointedly counterproductive, one may ask, to compare Israel's crimes 
against the Palestinians, no matter how brutal and inhumane they have 
been, to Nazi genocide? Besides, isn't each crime unique and worthy 
of attention in its own right as a violation of human rights, of 
international law, of universal moral principles? The answer is yes: 
each crime is unique, and nothing Israel has done to date comes even 
close, in quantity, to Nazi crimes. But when 
victims-turned-perpetrators openly admit their intentions to carry 
out a unique form of offense that they are most familiar with, and 
they actually commit repeated acts that are qualitatively reminiscent 
of that crime in their unbridled racism and the ghastly level of 
disregard for the value and dignity of the human life of the "other" 
that is inherent in them, then their threats ought to be taken 
seriously. Everyone is called upon to react, to act in any way to 
stop this crime-in-progress from reaching its logical conclusion.

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA), despite its lack of 
political independence and its disputed mandate, is called upon to 
immediately exonerate itself from the popular accusation of 
complicity. Azmi Bishara was among the most prominent of those who 
issued this harsh indictment, in reaction to the announcement by the 
head of the PA in Cairo that al-Qaida had infiltrated Gaza, and that 
the projectiles fired indiscriminately by the Palestinian resistance 
at Israeli towns and settlements provide the excuse for Israel's 
aggression. The credibility of this complicity assertion was 
compelling enough to prompt Mahmoud Abbas to condemn the Israeli 
crime in unprecedented austerity and hyperbole, describing it as 
"more than a Holocaust."

Arab regimes, especially Egypt's and Jordan's, as unelected, 
illegitimate and subservient to the US as they may be, are still 
expected to distance themselves from Israel's lethal war of 
aggression on Gaza. After all, their continued diplomatic and 
commercial ties with Israel, as well as their implicit justification 
of Israel's crimes through their repeated and gratuitous vilification 
of Hamas, have convincingly labeled them in the eyes of their 
respective publics, not to mention the wider Arab public, as 
accessories in crime.

European governments, chiefly in France, Britain and Germany, have to 
also answer to the serious charge of collusion in Israel's crimes 
against humanity, prevalent among wide Palestinian, Arab and Muslim 
majorities. They have not only stayed silent in the face of Israel's 
willful killing of innocent civilians, many of whom are children, in 
the course of the last few days in Gaza; they have continued to treat 
Israel with reverence, celebrating its so-called 60th anniversary, a 
gruesome event of ethnic cleansing and colonial ruin itself, 
showering it with economic, political and scientific support that 
significantly contributes to its impunity.

The US government, on the other hand, cannot be accused of abetting 
Israel's acts of genocide in the same league as all the above 
sinister accomplices. It is and has always been a full and proud 
partner in planning, bankrolling and executing those crimes against 
the Palestinians, not to mention its own unmatched criminal record in 
Afghanistan, Iraq and, before both, Vietnam. When our own Nuremberg 
moment arrives, when Israeli war criminals are finally prosecuted in 
an international court, a substantial space in the defense chamber 
will have to be reserved for US commanders and political leaders. 
Without American partnership, expressed in immeasurable military, 
economic and diplomatic aid, Israel could not have committed all its 
racist and colonial crimes with such impunity.

Going back to the question of whether anything should and could be 
done to stop Israel, the answer is a certain yes. South African 
apartheid crimes were challenged not only by the heroic struggle of 
the oppressed masses on the ground in South Africa; they were also 
fought by worldwide campaigns of boycott, divestment and sanctions 
against the regime, with all its complicit economic, academic, 
cultural, and athletic institutions. Similarly, international civil 
society can, and ought to, apply the same measures of non-violent 
justice to bring about Israel's compliance with international law and 
basic human rights. Even the threat of sanctions has proven effective 
enough in the past to halt Israel's repeated campaigns of death and 
devastation.

If all those images of tens of Palestinian children torn to pieces, 
all those recurrent episodes of wanton killing and destruction by an 
occupation army against a predominantly defenseless civilian 
population, go unpunished, the world may well witness a new holocaust indeed.

Omar Barghouti is an independent political analyst.




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