Following my letter in last week’s Australian supporting the targeted boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, Labor MP Michael Danby responds:
Antony Loewenstein and Jake Lynch (The Australian, Letters blog, 22 September) criticise Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth for their opposition to the campaign for “boycott, disinvestment and sanctions” directed at Israel. But they fail to address the central issue pointed out by Mendes and Dyrenfurth – the hypocritical and one-sided nature of this campaign.
Sudan has killed at least 400,000 civilians in its genocidal war in Darfur. Russia killed about 40,000 people in its two brutal wars against Chechnya. Millions of people are suffering under dictatorships in Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria and others. Protesters are being shot down in the streets in Tibet, East Turkistan and Iran.
Are Loewenstein and Lynch calling for academic, cultural or communications boycotts against these countries? No, they’re not. Only Israel is so uniquely evil that it merits such treatment. The Israel-Palestinian conflict, which over the past 20 years has caused approximately 8,000 deaths (a third of them Israelis), is apparently worse than Darfur and Chechnya, worse indeed than anything else in the world.
Loewenstein and Lynch’s attack on the Australian columnists do serve a useful purpose in drawing out their real purposes. Firstly the perversity of the Director of Sydney University’s “Peace” Institute, which backs boycotts of Israeli academics rather than enhancing peace between the parties, could now not be starker.
Loewenstein’s support for the elimination of Israel coded as support for a one state solution shows that he was trying to sucker the few hundred who signed his Independent Jewish Voices “two state declaration”. Either way no serious Australian policy maker takes seriously ideas of boycotting Israeli academics and universities.
Michael Danby MHR is Federal Member for Melbourne Ports
My original piece addresses many of the issues inherent in this letter. Always remember the first rule of dogmatic Zionism: change the subject, never talk about the occupation and ignore the gross human rights abuses in the occupied territories.
UPDATE: Here’s Jake Lynch’s response:
I picture apologists for Israel’s serial breaches of international law, like Michael Danby, huddling together in an overheated room somewhere, getting terribly excited when they feel they’ve hit upon a particularly convincing argument, and sallying forth into the real world, certain it’s going to prove persuasive, only to stumble over the one obvious point they forgot.
I’ll let him down gently, then. He may be amazed to learn that, when I was going around, persuading people to boycott South Africa in the 1980s, I was not wholly oblivious to the human rights abuses being endured by the people of Iraq, El Salvador and many others.
In the words of Naomi Klein, boycott is not a dogma: it’s a tactic. The reason for trying it on Israel is that it might work, which is why Danby and his ilk are getting so uptight about it.
Israel presently enjoys impunity for its crimes, which incentivises repetition. End the impunity through BDS and it becomes clear that carrying on the brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory is not in Israel’s interests. That would be a first.
The number of publications devoted to being Jewish is staggering. With all this self-flagellating introspection, no wonder the participants don’t have much of a handle on the outside world.
And note how the lead graphic conflates an anti-Jewish push with the current moves against a pariah state that happens to be run by Jews.
These fuckers of course have no self-respect. They can’t even get right the character of the proposed boycott.
The bizarre thing is that the Zionist lobby is happy to claim Jewry in general as being supportive of Israeli criminality (while simultaneously excommunicating all detractors with venom), without confronting the moral implications.
If Jewry is thus defined, i.e. as being synonymous with an unrepentant support of a criminal state (whose raison d’être is ethnic cleansing), albeit dragging along as a rump buffer those who are squeamish but throw up their hands in powerless while finding comfort in the appropriate platitudes of mild angst against that criminality, there is ipso facto a rational basis for anti-Semitism.
To repeat the dictum from the (Jewish) philosopher Michael Neumann:
‘The more anti-Semitism expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks. Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism is a moral obligation.’
“Sudan has killed at least 400,000 civilians in its genocidal war in Darfur. Russia killed about 40,000 people in its two brutal wars against Chechnya. Millions of people are suffering under dictatorships in Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria and others. Protesters are being shot down in the streets in Tibet, East Turkistan and Iran.”
One thing which separates the above is that our government isn’t supporting and encouraging the brutal and criminal activities in Darfur, Chechnya, Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria, the Chinese annexations or Iran. Nor is it attempting to deflect, distort and discourage criticism of the above.
In the case of Israel the reverse is true.
Following, as it did, a ruthless starvation policy of Gaza which lead directly into a senselessly brutal military assault against the ailing infrastructure of the same district, to arrange for a delegation to visit Israel with the purpose of deepening our trade relations between our countries is nothing short of encouraging Israel’s brutality and soothing any concerns that international law might one day come to include the Israeli military.
Australia is directly complicit in Israeli crimes against humanity. If the Australian government refuses to condemn acts of blatant viciousness then is the moral duty of all people of conscience to act on their own behalf.
“The Israel-Palestinian conflict, which over the past 20 years has caused approximately 8,000 deaths (a third of them Israelis) …”
The Israel-Palestine conflict did not start 20 years ago. It has its roots in the early 20th Century and officially started 61 years ago when Israel ethnically cleansed a majority of the indigenous Palestinians, destroyed their villages, towns and neighbourhoods, and wiped Palestine off the map. Israel was built on the rubble, corpses, blood and tears of Palestine, and Israel continues to occupy and oppress, expand and colonise using its overwhelming military supremecy. As well as Palestinians, there’s also tens of thousands of Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese and other Arab victims of Israel.
And let’s not forget the Israeli victims. But with a kill rate ranging from 20:1 in the 1967 Six Day War, 9:1 in the 2006 Lebanon War, and 102:1 in the 2008/09 Gaza massacre, why would Israel refrain from using its weapons of mass destruction, which it used to such brutally devastating effects in its most recent wars.
There are alternatives of course. However, Israel has ignored and refuses to comply with international law or any UN Resolutions relating to Palestine, for example, General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948), Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973).
Like the US, Israel may not do body counts, but the victims of Israel and the US do, and they’re still counting.