Brahm Gabriel - The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel

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2015 by Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm

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Nelson, Cary:

The case against academic boycotts of Israel / Cary Nelson

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-0-9903316-0-5 (alk: paper)

ISBN: 978-0-9903316-1-2 (ebook)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

T he ancient Athenians used to ostracize anyone who was deemed to pose a political danger or was accused of a crime, and this custom was democratic and wise. Ostracism was democratic because the citizens were called upon to vote, and ostracism was wise because, by sending the troublemakers out of town, it kept the peace. Still, I have always loved the story that Plutarch tells about the illiterate fool who voted to ostracize Aristides the Just and, when asked why he would do such a thing, explained that he was sick and tired of hearing Aristides called the Just. Plutarch was ever attuned to the human eccentricities, and he wants us to notice that low rancor and the occasional impulse to damage society enter sometimes even into the most thoughtful of customs. And he draws a moral. He knows that sooner or later we ourselves, his readers, will be solemnly requested to join in banning someone from civilized company. He wants us to pause and ask, That famously stupid Athenian voterthat person couldnt be me, could it?

The modern version of Athenian ostracism is known as the boycott. The word itself, boycott, comes from nineteenth-century Ireland, where the Land League demanded that everyone shun a landlords agent of ill repute who happened to be named Captain Boycott. But the concept and even the wordboycotter in French, boicotear in Spanish, and so forthlong ago ascended into universal acceptance. People organize boycotts in order to level accusations and mobilize their supporters. The ostensible purpose is to exert an economic pressure. But a boycotts larger purpose has always been to convey a sense of moral opprobrium, which, if enough people will only join in conveying it, may exert pressures of a deeper sort. To lose a few customers because someone has mounted a boycott against you and your business can be a misfortune. But to be shunned by people you respect, to be treated as a contemptible person, to discover that your equals and colleagues decline to enter into even the coolest and most professional of relations with youthis can be unbearable. And so, a popular and well-conducted boycott can end up wielding a mysterious power. Normally the effects take a while to become apparent. Boycotts are not supposed to go on forever, though. They are supposed to be practical. Either they work, or fail to work. They resemble labor strikes, in that respect. And yet, in the years since Captain Boycott, there is at least one example of a boycott that has failed to work, and, even so, has gone on forever, as if drawing on inexhaustible sources of rancor and rage.

This is the boycott against the State of Israel and its antecedent, the early Zionist settlements in Palestine, which has got to be, by now, the oldest continuous-running boycott in the history of the worldor, at minimum, the oldest boycott that has called itself a boycott. The anti-Israel boycott enjoys a further distinction. It appears to have been, over the generations, the worlds most popular boycott, even if, from time to time, its popularity has bobbed up and down, now revitalized, now half-forgotten, in one region or anotherthe most popular of boycotts, judged by how many hundreds of millions of people appear to be its supporters even now. Still another distinction: the anti-Israel boycott has proved to be, ideologically speaking, the worlds most adaptable boycotta boycott that, without the slightest embarrassment, changes its costume every few years in order to present itself as Muslim, Christian, supernaturalist, right-wing, left-wing, liberal, secular, and sometimes all of the above, multi-striped, quite as if no single doctrine or philosophy or theology or geographical perspective, but only the lot of them ensemble, could possibly sum up the justifications for conducting the boycott, so various are Israels sins. The several extraordinary traits that attach to this most singular of boycotts raise a question, which I will put here. To wit, do the exceptional aspects of the anti-Israel boycott, its duration, popularity, and ideological chameleonism, derive from the boycotts targetfrom an exceptionally evil or iniquitous quality that somehow inheres to Israel and its place in the world? Israeldoes it deserve its fate? Orthe other possibilitydo the peculiarities of the boycott reflect, instead, certain eccentricities of human nature that, if Plutarch were among us, might attract his bemused and disdainful attention?

The argument in favor of boycotting Israel and the Zionists has gone through, by my calculation, three main phases or waves, with a fourth phase presently floating in our direction. The earliest of these phases, back in the 1920s and 30s, was simple, practical, and Palestinianan Arab boycott of the Jews, intended to put up a fight against the tide of Jewish refugees that was beginning to rival and outrival the Palestinian Arabs for control of the land. This was a boycott that, if anyone had been in a mood to work out a compromise between the two populations, might have conferred a much-needed negotiators advantage on the Palestinian leaders. The spirit of the age did not smile on people who attempted negotiations, however, and the argument for a boycott entered its second phase more or less simultaneously with the first.

The second phase was more than regional. It was international, and it rested on supernaturalist doctrines about the Jews and their cosmic menace to the world. The 1920s and 30s were an era of anti-Jewish boycotts in several parts of the world, sometimes secular, sometimes Catholic, and in all of those places the analytic tendency underlying the boycotts ascribed to the Jews a sinister and not-quite human plan to dominate the world, as described in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or sundry other documents with similar themes, unto The International Jew: The Worlds Foremost Problem, which was Henry Fords American contribution to the literature. And the same super-naturalist interpretation of Jewish power and evil, except with an Islamic twist, took root among the Palestinian leaders, or at least the most influential of them, which proved to be a hugely unfortunate development for Jews and Palestinians alike. The anti-Jewish boycott in the Middle East, when it spread outward from Palestine to the wider Arab worldCairo, 1936, the Muslim Brotherhood in command, riots in the streetsrested all too firmly on the supernaturalist argument, with its peculiar and fateful fusion of European conspiracy theory and Islamic tradition.

In the years after the Second World War, an anti-imperialist aspect within the boycotts justification began to loom a little more prominently. In this next phase of the argument, the old Nazi idea, which regarded Zionism as a plot against the Europeans, was turned upside down, and Zionism was accused, instead, of being a European plot, directed against everyone else for the purpose of maintaining the system of European imperialism. Third World solidarity, together with the need to protect Islam from the diabolical Jewish conspiracy, became the boycotts fundamental appeal, now under the administration of the Arab League. The anti-imperialist side of the new argument proved to be fairly convincing, too, here and there around the world, perhaps with a little help from the oil exporters. Only, in sketching these phases of the argument, I do not mean to ascribe too much simplicity or logic to the arguments or to the progress that led from one phase to the next. Certain of the supernaturalist arguments against Zionism and the Jews collapsed when the Nazis collapsed. Post-war Vatican reforms put an end to certain others. Some of the force in the anti-imperialist argument against Israel drained away when the Soviet Union drained away. The boycott itself, in its commercial aspects, went into decline.