10 July, 2002The Guardian
We've had smart sanctions; now make way for dumb boycotts. And they don't come much dumber than this: a campaign to exclude Israel from the world community of scholars. The idea is wrong in principle, doomed in practice and even a little cruel. But it has done us all a favour. Along with the row about British arms sales to Israel, it serves as a useful reminder of just how tricky these attempts at collective action against other states can be. Whether government-imposed sanctions or petition-inspired boycotts, whether against Israel or any other country, these are tactics which look appealingly straightforward but turn out to be perilously complex - often hurting the people they are meant to help.
Start with the academic campaign, first floated in a letter to this newspaper in April and brought before a wider gaze this week by Manchester professor Mona Baker's removal of two Israeli colleagues from the boards of two journals she edits. Dr Baker wrote to the pair, insisting she still regarded them as "friends" but no longer wanted "an official association with any Israeli". Note that wording: she was not severing ties with an institution but with two individuals whose offence was to be Israeli.
The principled objection to this should hardly need stating. It is a blow to academic freedom, but one not even made on academic grounds. When the Oxford don and critic Tom Paulin was quoted suggesting that Jewish settlers on the West Bank were Nazis who should all be shot, there were calls for him to be removed from his post. Rightly, the cry of academic freedom went up in his defence: thinkers should not be fired for their thoughts, no matter how difficult to stomach. But the Manchester move goes a crucial step further. Translators Gideon Toury and Miriam Shlesinger have not been handed their P45s because of their views, but because of who they are. This is rather more serious than a restriction on scholarly liberty; it is discrimination on the basis of national identity.
Those untroubled by that moral problem may be more disquieted by a practical consideration: if this tactic is aimed at nudging along the cause of peace in the Middle East and justice for the Palestinians, it can only fail. For who exactly is hit by an educational boycott, now backed by more than 700 academics including Richard Dawkins and Colin Blakemore? The target is the academy, one of the few Israeli communities where peace-minded voices still have a commanding presence. These are the very people who are trying to persuade their fellow Israelis back towards compromise. They need a leg-up from progressives abroad, especially in desperate times like these, when the Israeli cabinet has just approved a racist ban on Arabs living in Jewish areas; what they have got instead is a turned back.
The sacking of Ms Shlesinger is the embodiment of this backwards thinking. Is she some fierce advocate for Ariel Sharon, relentlessly translating anti-Palestinian texts into a variety of tongues? Is she a champion of the Israeli occupation? No, she is the former head of Israel's branch of Amnesty International, a brave member of a joint Jewish-Arab group which dodges Israeli army roadblocks to deliver food to Palestinian cities. Well done, Dr Baker! Sacking Miriam Shlesinger will certainly keep Ariel Sharon up at night.
But this error is still not the heart of the matter. That lies in the realm of psychology and memory, buried deep. It's been stirred most recently by another British boycott campaign, aimed at all Israeli products. For what Israel and its supporters cannot help but hear in such a move is a painful echo of past experience: the boycott of Jewish shops and goods that was one of the Nazis' first steps towards the Final Solution. Dr Toury made this point to Dr Baker, telling her that the only reason he was alive in the first place was that his parents fled Hitler's Germany for Palestine. "These dismissals may easily become the beginning of something much bigger," he wrote fearfully. "We've been here before."
In other words, a tactic that may have worked in one place can have an entirely different meaning somewhere else. Sanctions and boycotts appear to have worked wonders in South Africa - though it's easy to forget how contested they were at the time, even within the anti-apartheid movement - but they have a different resonance in the Israeli and specifically Jewish context.
Arms sales should be a separate matter entirely. Few even on the Israeli left would go to the wall for Jerusalem's right to buy British cockpit display units for F16s. Indeed, the backbench Labour argument against sales - that they violate European guidelines barring the export of weapons to countries where they might inflame tension, be used for internal repression or to assert a territorial claim - should be pretty persuasive.
The trouble is, this outrage is inconsistent. Why do Labour rebels shout so loud when the rules are broken for Israel - and yet only mumble or stay silent when Britain keeps up arms sales to India, even when it is about to go to nuclear war with Pakistan, or to repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar?
What we're all crying out for is a set of principles that might guide us through each new situation, telling us when to sanction, when to boycott and when to hold our fire. For it's never simple. Sanctions against Iraq used to look like a clever alternative to war - until the evidence grew that the embargo was hitting the people it was meant to save: the civilian population of Iraq. The lesson from Baghdad seems clear: sanctions don't work when the target is a dictatorship, where the regime is quite happy to pass the pain on to its people and where public opinion, even if it shifts, cannot express itself.
But a second rule applies, especially when sanctions are aimed at a democracy. They need to hurt your enemies, not your friends. Afrikaner devotees of the Springboks may have been firm backers of apartheid: depriving them of international rugby had a logic. Hitting a bastion of the Israeli opposition makes no sense. Fine judgments like that are essential. A boycott of goods produced in Israeli settlements on the West Bank or Gaza would be hard to oppose - indeed there is a domestic Israeli campaign on these very lines. But it brings new problems, even besides the unfortunate connotations of a boycott of Jewish goods. There is plenty of false labelling of settlers' produce as Israeli and, when an item is honestly identified, there's always a chance it was made in the West Bank by a Palestinian company. So right-thinking Islington shoppers could be depriving the very people they want to help.
In other words, sanctions and boycotts are a messy, contradictory business. Far better, in all but the most extreme cases, to deal with those nations we disagree with through dialogue and engagement, rather than ostracism and chilly exile. That's what we said to George Bush when he shunned the trio of states he branded an "axis of evil". We should take our own advice, and offer a hand - not a cold shoulder.
