Antony Loewenstein

Oh what a glorious war.

After killing up to 40,000 Tamils civilians during the end of the country’s civil war, Colombo recently organised a conference to show the world the wonderful techniques used to silence, intimidate and destroy Tamil hopes for a homeland.

Naturally, many other countries were keen to hear such wise words, including the US, whose official seemed to deny that government forces had deliberately targeted surrendering Tamil Tigers. The facts show otherwise.

Then Australian-born counter-terrorism “expert” David Kilkullen – I discussed his failures before and wondered how a man who has helped the US get crushed in Iraq and Afghanistan is asked by the media to comment on such matters – opined on the war and started with this:

Defense Secretary Rajapaksa, Professor Peiris, General Jayasuriya, distinguished officials, officers, and delegations: Good morning. Thank you for organizing this important conference, and for your kind invitation to talk frankly with you about Sri Lanka’s experience in Eelam War IV.  As I said when I accepted the invitation to attend, I believe your defeat of LTTE is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be studied. At the same time, the international community has legitimate questions about human rights and about the way operations were conducted, and it is in Sri Lanka’s interest to be as open as possible in answering those questions. I am not known for being diplomatic, so let me say from the outset that I do believe Sri Lanka has achieved a great success, but before you can put forward your approach as a model for others, it’s extremely important to address some important human rights critiques, and consider how to turn a military success into a sustainable peace. I don’t believe we are there yet.

Before I begin, let me also note that none of my comments today are or can be definitive. It would be arrogant and presumptuous for me to lecture you on “proper” tactics and strategy. All I can do is to provide an outsider’s perspective, and to share some of the lessons I’ve learned in the campaigns of the last decade: it is for you to decide how, and indeed whether, these insights apply to you.

…

It seems to me that the best hope for long-term peace, following the remarkably successful defeat of the Tigers in Eelam IV, lies in robust political and economic reform at the local, community-level in all former insurgent-controlled areas. A government that brings peace, justice, and reconciliation to its people will be defended by its people, regardless of ethnic group.

In reality, and Kilkullen would know this by appearing at an event that celebrated Colombo’s “victory” over the Tigers, Sri Lanka is moving in the opposite direction and his presence simply gave tacit backing for the government’s brutal activities.

Israeli writer Etgar Keret – who I interviewed in Indonesia last year and found him engaging, argumentative, passionate and funny – travels to Italy and asks Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu about the Zionist state’s plans for peace with the Palestinians. Suffice to say, there is no plan:

The briefing is already drawing to a close and I half push in and stutter a question. I travel a lot in the world, I say, and hear a lot of people who talk about Israel. Some love it and some hate it. But they all describe Israel as bogged down and passive. The Palestinians can initiate a flotilla one day and a declaration to the United Nations on another, while Israel, it seems, has no plan and can only react.

The prime minister objects and says these are the kind of statements that appear in the newspaper I’m writing for, but that does not yet mean it is true and that Israel actually has a great many friends, although we like to say it’s isolated. I nod and say that without reference to the issue of our friends, it is important for me to know what the government’s peace initiative is and what the plan is that we are promoting to end the conflict with the Palestinians.

The reporters around the table convey to me mixed feelings of empathy and impatience. They look at me the way I looked at my wife 14 hours before when she asked me to give Netanyahu a note from her. I feel as if they like this strange attempt of mine to get a pertinent answer from Netanyahu to my question, but for some of them at least, it’s a shame to waste valuable time on this empty move, especially when the clock is ticking and the Piazza Navona awaits.

The only person who treats the whole thing with patience and seriously is Netanyahu. “This is an insoluble conflict because it is not about territory,” he says. “It is not that you can give up a kilometer more and solve it. The root of the conflict is in an entirely different place. Until Abu Mazen recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, there will be no way to reach an agreement.”

The reporters around the table convey to me mixed feelings of empathy and impatience. They look at me the way I looked at my wife 14 hours before when she asked me to give Netanyahu a note from her. I feel as if they like this strange attempt of mine to get a pertinent answer from Netanyahu to my question, but for some of them at least, it’s a shame to waste valuable time on this empty move, especially when the clock is ticking and the Piazza Navona awaits.

The only person who treats the whole thing with patience and seriously is Netanyahu. “This is an insoluble conflict because it is not about territory,” he says. “It is not that you can give up a kilometer more and solve it. The root of the conflict is in an entirely different place. Until Abu Mazen recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, there will be no way to reach an agreement.”

Netanyahu made similar comments at a press conference a few hours earlier, but then it sounded like lusterless, recycled spin. Now that he was sitting across from me, looking me in the eye and explaining the same thing with endless patience, it suddenly sounded like the truth. Well, not my truth, but his truth.

I continued to nudge him, saying that even if all that was right, I still didn’t understand what pragmatic plan would come out of that conclusion. Netanyahu told me right away that the practical plan for advancing the peace process is to reiterate this at every opportunity.

“You have to see the effect it has on people,” he said, smiling. “You say it and they just remain slack-jawed.”

The US is unsurprisingly worried about cyber attacks from hackers, Russia, China or even a friendly nation. The future of warfare may well be fought in a different space altogether.

But this report proves how unprepared America is for the inevitable attempts to understand its inner workings. The problem lies in how hackers are viewed. Is Wikileaks in the same category? Clearly not, but Washington’s counter-attack may be far too draconian for a supposed democracy:

The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.

The twin efforts show how President Barack Obama’s administration is racing on multiple fronts to plug the holes in U.S. cyber defenses.

Notwithstanding the military’s efforts, however, the overall gap appears to be widening, as adversaries and criminals move faster than government and corporations, and technologies such as mobile applications for smart phones proliferate more rapidly than policymakers can respond, officials and analysts said.

A Reuters examination of American cyber readiness produced the following findings:

* Spin-offs of the malicious code dubbed “agent.btz” used to attack the military’s U.S. Central Command in 2008 are still roiling U.S. networks today. People inside and outside the U.S. government strongly suspect Russia was behind the attack, which was the most significant known breach of military networks.

* There are serious questions about the security of “cloud computing,” even as the U.S. government prepares to embrace that technology in a big way for its cost savings.

* The U.S. electrical grid and other critical nodes are still vulnerable to cyber attack, 13 years after then-President Bill Clinton declared that protecting critical infrastructure was a national priority.

* While some progress has been made in coordinating among government agencies with different missions, and across the public-private sector gap, much remains to be done.

* Government officials say one of the things they fear most is a so-called “zero-day attack,” exploiting a vulnerability unknown to the software developer until the strike hits.

That’s the technique that was used by the Stuxnet worm that snarled Iran’s enriched uranium-producing centrifuges last summer, and which many experts say may have been created by the United States or Israel. A mere 12 months later, would-be hackers can readily find digital tool kits for building Stuxnet-like weapons on the Internet, according to a private-sector expert who requested anonymity.

“We’re much better off (technologically) than we were a few years ago, but we have not kept pace with opponents,” said Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “The network is so deeply flawed that it can’t be secured.”

“IT’S LIKE AN INSECT INFESTATION”

In recent months hackers have broken into the SecurID tokens used by millions of people, targeting data from defense contractors Lockheed Martin, L3 and almost certainly others; launched a sophisticated strike on the International Monetary Fund; and breached digital barriers to grab account information from Sony, Google, Citigroup and a long list of others.

The latest high-profile victims were the public websites of the CIA and the U.S. Senate – whose committees are drafting legislation to improve coordination of cyber defenses.

Terabytes of data are flying out the door, and billions of dollars are lost in remediation costs and reputational harm, government and private security experts said in interviews. The head of the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has estimated that Pentagon computer systems are probed by would-be assailants 250,000 times each hour.

When satire is dead:

Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International and former editor of The Sun, has been shown evidence suggesting her phone was hacked more than 20 times by a private investigator employed by another Rupert Murdoch title, it emerged last night.

News International confirmed the 43-year-old media executive met detectives last week from Operation Weeting – Scotland Yard’s third investigation into phone hacking – to see records showing she was targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective employed by the News of the World to eavesdrop on the voicemails of numerous public figures.

The alleged hacking took place between 2005 and 2006, when Ms Brooks, who is also a former editor of the NOTW, was in charge of The Sun, and raises the question of whether Mr Mulcaire was at the centre of an effort by Britain’s top-selling Sunday newspaper to spy on its daily stablemate.

The revelation that Ms Brooks was a likely repeated target for Mr Mulcaire was made by Sky News, whose largest shareholder is Mr Murdoch’s News Corp. In a blog, the broadcaster’s City editor, Mark Kleinman, suggested the hacking could also have been done by the private investigator on behalf of a rival newspaper.

Hear the fear in the words of somebody who knows that true equality for Jews and Palestinians will mean the end of Jewish privilege. We should welcome it:

President Shimon Peres is concerned that Israel might become a binational state, in which case, he warned, it would cease to exist as a Jewish state.

“I’m concerned about the continued freeze [in the peace talks],” Peres said to people who visited him this week. “I’m concerned that Israel will become a binational state. What is happening now is total foot-dragging. We’re about to crash into the wall. We’re galloping at full speed toward a situation where Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state.”

Following my essay in the latest edition of literary journal Overland on cultural boycotts, politics, Palestine and Sri Lanka, the magazine interviewed me on various matters:

Passionate and outspoken about Israel/Palestine, among other things, Antony Loewenstein is a freelance independent journalist based in Sydney. Author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution, he is a denizen of the Twittersphere. Antony speaks regularly at literary festivals around the world and his essay ‘Boycotts and Literary Festivals’ is published in the 203 edition of Overland.

What was your pathway to becoming a speaker at literary festivals?

I wrote a book and many festivals in Australia invited me. It was My Israel Question, first published in 2006, and told the story of a dissident Jew challenging Zionist power in the West and the realities of occupation for Palestinians. Many Jews hated it, smeared me and tried to shut down the debate. It was typical Zionist behaviour. Thankfully, they failed miserably, despite continuing to try, and even today literary festival directors tell me that the Zionist lobby still tries to pressure them to not invite me to speak on the Middle East, or anything really. This is what Zionism has done to my people, convince them that victimhood is a natural state of affairs and that honest discussion about Israel/Palestine is too threatening to be heard by non-Jews.

The audiences at my literary festival events, since the beginning, have been largely supportive of my stance – though I don’t just speak about Israel/Palestine, also Wikileaks, freedom of speech, web censorship and disaster capitalism – and curiously the strongest Zionist supporters of Israel rarely raise their voices at literary festivals. Instead, they’ll later go into print arguing that festivals were biased against Israel (as happened recently by the Zionist lobby in Australia, condemning my supposedly extremist views on Israel during the Sydney Writer’s Festival). As I say, victimhood comes so naturally to some Jews.

I often have mixed feelings about attending writers’ festivals. I rarely reject an invitation – and have been lucky to speak at events in Australia, India and Indonesia – but it’s often a cozy club that shuns controversy. I like to provoke, not merely for the sake of it, but I know the middle-class audience will not generally hear such thoughts in events about ‘the art of the novel’ or ‘where is the US in 2011?’ I guess if I wrote about knitting or frogs, it may be harder to stir debates.

What is the purpose of a literary festival?

It should be to entertain, challenge and dissect contemporary life. As books sell less in our societies, attendance at literary festivals has increased. People crave intelligent discussion. They generally aren’t receiving that in the corporate media. To see massive audiences in Sydney, Ubud or Jaipur sitting or standing to hear robust debates on the ways of the world can only be a good thing. But there is an important caveat. Do these events too often provide comfort for the listener, a warm glow about themselves and their existence and all-too-rarely tackle the real effects of, say, government policies or the civilian murders in our various wars in the Muslim world?

I argue for a far more politicised literary scene, where intellectuals aren’t so keen to be loved and embraced by an audience but the art of discomfort is raised as an art form. This is why I argue for boycotts in my Overland piece, relating to Palestine and Sri Lanka. Surely our responsibility as artists is not to kow-tow to the powerful but challenge them? And surely our duty is to make people think about the role of non-violent resistance to situations in which we in the West have a role? Literary festivals are a unique opportunity to capture a large audience and throw around some ideas, thoughts which may percolate. If a reader can digest this, still buy a book and ponder something they hadn’t pondered before, my job here is done.

Writer discomfort, to being feted at literary festivals, is my natural state of being. I welcome it.

As a writer, what inspires you?

Passion, direct action, living life in a way that doesn’t ignore the hypocrisy of our realities, lived experiences, detailed journalism, inspiring tales of heroism (that don’t involve women giving up everything and living in Italy for a few months) and voices that struggle to be heard. I’ve always seen my job as a writer as to highlight and brighten the silenced voices in our society. It may be a Tamil or Palestinian, somebody living under occupation or the worker of a multinational who gets shafted for simply doing her job. This may sound pompous or self-important but frankly most journalists say they believe these things but then spend most of their lives dying to be insulated within the power structures of society.

The recent debate in Sydney over Marrickville council embracing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) over Israel was a rare example of government seeing injustice and trying to do something about it. The faux controversy concocted by the Murdoch press, Zionist lobby and Jewish establishment proved just how toxic the occupation of Palestinian lands has become. As a writer, I savoured the few brave individuals who stood up in the face of overwhelming bullying and spoke eloquently for Palestinian rights and real peace with justice in the Middle East. This position is not something that will be taught on a Zionist lobby trip to Israel (something undertaken by most politicians in Australia and many journalists) but real investigation. There are times, though, when I nearly despair, such as my recent visit to New York and attendance at the Celebrate Israel parade.

I think anger is an under-valued attribute in a good writer.

Where are you now, with your writing practice?

I know far more today than when I started my professional career in 2003. In some ways my anger is far more targeted and my writing has improved because of it. I’m pleased that both my current books, My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution, are currently being updated and translated in various countries around the world. I’m working on a book about the modern Left and another about disaster capitalism in Australia and the world. And that’s just for starters. I’m rather busy. I constantly struggle with the sheer volume of information that exists out there. The internet is a blessing and a curse. Taking time away from this device would be just lovely but I’m not too sure how to do it. Feeling connected as a writer is one of the most pleasing aspects of my job. From a schoolgirl who uses my work in her classes to an Iranian dissident who reaches out to raise the brutal nature of the Ahmadinejad regime.

Our society is infected with writers who seem to see their role as robots, spokespeople for a predictable cause, afraid to offend or provoke. Being on the road as a writer is a humbling experience, hearing people’s stories, but it can also be lonely. Being challenged on my positions, as I often am over an issue like Palestine, can (usually) only make my work better. The ignorance and cowardly behaviour of our media and political elites over such questions – Wikileaks, Palestine or refugee policies – is indicative of a wider societal malaise and sometimes I’m not surprised that I have so few friends in the media. It’s not a loss. Who wouldn’t want to breathlessly report on the latest press release by the Gillard government? Sigh.

If anything, I hope my Overland piece stimulates thought over the far-too-comfortable and insulated work of the literary and arts scenes in the West. Self-congratulatory back-slaps may feel good at the time but history ain’t being written by time-keepers.

Australian independent journalist Austin Mackell argues on RT that the military government still holds thousands of political prisoners:

My following essay appears in the latest edition of literary journal Overland (a shorter version is published on ABC online):

‘For thirty years the country [Sri Lanka] went through a kind of hell and endured untold economic and cultural deprivation. Now, with things looking up, we need all the friendly input we can get from well-meaning outsiders. Let the writers and the artists and the goodwill ambassadors come here and brighten up our lives, for Heaven’s sake. We have had enough dark days as it is.’

Richard Prins, The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka), 30 January 2011

A desire for normality is not unusual in a country that has experienced civil conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils and Sinhalese have been killed or maimed in Sri Lanka over the past decades. What better way to celebrate the end of war than the Galle Literary Festival, an annual event that brings local and international artists and writers together for five days of debate?

But cultural events don’t take place in a vacuum. This year, the festival became the centre of a global effort to highlight human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in an episode that highlights the complicated politics of literary boycotts.

In January, Reporters Without Borders and a network of exiled Sri Lankan journalists, Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, issued an appeal signed by a number of prominent figures, including Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Ken Loach, Tariq Ali and me. It called on participants in the festival to consider the message their attendance sent:

“We believe this is not the right time for prominent international writers like you to give legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech by attending a conference that does not in any way push for greater freedom of expression inside that country … We ask you in the great tradition of solidarity that binds writers together everywhere, to stand with your brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka who are not allowed to speak out. We ask that by your actions you send a clear message that, unless and until the disappearance of [cartoonist] Prageeth [Eknaligoda] is investigated and there is a real improvement in the climate for free expression in Sri Lanka, you cannot celebrate writing and the arts in Galle.”

The statement did not directly ask writers to boycott the event but instead urged them to reconsider their participation. The hope was that moral pressure would provoke serious thought about the situation in Sri Lanka. The war’s official end had not brought liberation for the Tamil minority; President Mahinda Rajapaksa still rules over an authoritarian state. Colombo recently tried to ban the Tamil version of the Sri Lankan national anthem, and in late December 2010 an education officer in Tamil-majority Jaffna was murdered by Sinhalese thugs for refusing to instruct students to sing the Sinhalese version. Corruption is also rife throughout the health, university and entertainment industries. Independent journalists are routinely snatched from the streets in white vans and often never seen again. Thousands of Tamils remain incommunicado in concentration camps in the north and there has been no war crimes investigation into the many serious allegations against senior members of the government.

For me, the Galle statement was part of an ongoing struggle to insert human rights into a world that I now inhabit: the literary and cultural festival scene. It is too easy to simply visit a city and event, to enjoy the luxurious hospitality and not consider the wider context. Who is excluded and why? Is my presence condoning the actions of organisers or the state (that often partly funds such events)?

I was particularly concerned about Galle after reading reports by Australian journalist Eric Ellis that the founder of the festival, Geoffrey Dobbs, had not fully accounted for money he had gathered after the devastating 2004 tsunami. Ellis expressed scepticism that the ‘Condé Nast Traveller crowd’ who came to the literary extravaganza would see the event as nothing other than ‘marrying the yuppie fervour for exotic foods with a neo-colonial languor and the presumed intellectual glamour of being in close quarters with famous wordsmiths’.

The festival responded with outrage. Curator Shyam Selvadurai told Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader that he ‘disagreed with the method of using the festival as a platform to voice disapproval’. When asked why a proposed panel on media freedom had been cancelled, he responded that it was simply too difficult ‘because it has to be fair and balanced. You have to give voice to both sides … We stand above all this partisan politics.’

I wondered if he believed that victims of war crimes should be given equal standing to those who commit them?

Selvadurai released a major statement in late January in which he claimed his voice had been ignored by the Reporters Without Borders:

“I am Tamil and the festival takes place in Galle, the deep Sinhala south, which has seen some of the worst violence committed against the Tamils [in fact, the worst massacres occurred in the east of the country in 2009, with tens of thousands murdered]. I am, in addition, openly gay, and in fact was the first person to come out publicly in Sri Lanka. This, in a country where homosexuality is still illegal.”

His call for dialogue was moving and forced me to seriously consider the purpose of the statement.

I felt comfortable with applying pressure on a festival that was backed by Colombo, an event used as a symbol of the postwar recovery advertised in tourist brochures across the world. Tourism is a massive industry in Sri Lanka. It helps normalise the international image of the nation if people return from the island to talk only about its beauty. When a writer explained in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times that the ‘infectiously feel-good, let’s-have-a-party character’ of Galle was sufficient enough reason for its success, it became clear that many Sinhalese and white visitors resented having their enjoyment interrupted with the inconvenient question of war crimes.

The aim of the statement was to highlight the world’s silence since the official end of the civil war in May 2009. Reporters Without Borders chief editor Gilles Lordet acknowledged that a boycott was ‘never a constructive solution’ but ‘it is a way to focus attention on a country that has been forgotten … Galle is one of the main tourist towns and you could imagine that everything is fine in the country, but that’s not the reality’.

South African writer Damon Galgut was the most high-profile withdrawal from Galle, declaring his discomfort with Sri Lanka’s human rights record and support of our statement. He was already in the country when he pulled out. Galgut told me personally at the Perth Writers Festival in March that the statement had alerted him to the grim reality of life in today’s Sri Lanka, a country he presumed had returned to semi-normality. Once he discovered the truth, he felt he had no choice but to withdraw.

Sri Lanka-based British travel writer Juliet Coombe praised the petition campaign to Agence France Presse because ‘there is a self-induced fear; not only among journalists and writers … Sometimes negative campaigns like this work. I had people calling from abroad, asking about the festival, about media suppression.’

Sri Lankan-born Roma Tearne also refused to appear. The event would, she said, bring nothing to the ‘poor and the displaced, the bereft and the victims of Sri Lanka’s war’, and ‘celebrity-seeking writers’ should not delude themselves otherwise.

The withdrawal of Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk and his partner, writer Kiran Desai, was initially reported as a response to the petition but may have resulted from visa complications or other personal reasons. I’d approached them both at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India in late January and Pamuk arrogantly refused to talk about Galle.

Nonetheless, during the festival itself, the human rights situation was debated in ways that would arguably not have occurred without our intervention. A BBC South Asia report by Charles Haviland confirmed that ‘dozens of writers had to make a quick decision on whether to pull out’.

Sandhya Eknaligoda, the wife of disappeared cartoonist Prageeth, was not allowed to present at the festival but handed out flyers to participants about her missing Sinhalese husband. It read in part:

“I welcome you to a country where thousands of women and children weep silent tears for a nation of innocent civilians who have been killed or disappeared on account on their ethnicity. Welcome to Sri Lanka.”

She alleges that her partner was abducted because he exposed the use of chemical weapons by Colombo in its war against the Tamil Tigers.

A few weeks later, Sandhya Eknaligoda emailed me personally to thank me for signing. It made me feel the petition provided comfort to some people in Sri Lanka who needed it most.

Throughout the Galle controversy, I was a guest at the Jaipur Literature Festival where I spoke about Palestine, Wikileaks and the Middle East. Some of the sponsors were multinationals with dubious human rights records (such as Shell), while Merrill Lynch, a key player in the global financial crisis, sponsored one of my events with the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson and the Washington Post’s David Finkel on ‘reporting occupation’.

A counter-statement issued by supporters of the Galle festival pointed out the supposed hypocrisy of people like me being selective in our outrage. What about Indian government abuses in Kashmir? they asked. Why wasn’t I boycotting Jaipur if I felt so strongly about human rights?

I asked festival director William Dalrymple about the sponsors and he honestly acknowledged that he simply hadn’t considered the issue but would for future events. I took comfort in a statement made by Naomi Klein when defending her backing of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel: ‘Boycott is not a dogma; it’s a tactic.’

When are boycotts appropriate? Who decides? And what gives an unelected group or individual the moral legitimacy to demand or ask a participant to not appear?

In my view, boycotts should not be a personal protest but a considered position with indigenous support from within the host country itself. Does the event receive government funding and if so, what actions are potentially worth protesting? Are there calls for a boycott – or at least a protest – from citizens of the particular country? How effective will a boycott be? If an individual simply doesn’t turn up at a festival or refuses an offer to attend, a private protest may be pointless. Will the decision receive media coverage, or can the news be broadcast to local media?

Today, the best example of a vigorous cultural and academic boycott movement is that directed at Israel for its ongoing violation of Palestinian human rights. In 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) issued a major call endorsed by the vast bulk of Palestinian civil society groups:

“Since Israeli academic institutions (mostly state controlled) and the vast majority of Israeli intellectuals and academics have either contributed directly to maintaining, defending or otherwise justifying the above forms of oppression, or have been complicit in them through their silence … We, Palestinian academics and intellectuals, call upon our colleagues in the international community to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonisation and system of apartheid.”

Examples abound of Israel making cultural life for Palestinians a daily grind. For example, in May 2009, Israeli troops tried to close the Palestinian Festival of Literature in Jerusalem by shutting a theatre on spurious procedural grounds.

‘We’re so taken aback. It is completely, completely independent,’ said Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who chaired the event. ‘I think it’s very telling. Our motto, which is taken from the late Edward Said, is to pit the power of culture against the culture of power.’

The campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a way to protest these violations.

PACBI has become highly effective in the past few years, applying moral force and practical, non-violent pressure on musicians, filmmakers, academics and writers either planning to visit Israel or receiving Israeli government funding. Musicians who have agreed to cancel appearances in Israel include Elvis Costello, Faithless, Santana, Gil Scott-Heron and Pete Seeger, while Canadian writer Naomi Klein only agreed to publish her best-selling The Shock Doctrine in Israel in 2009 with Andalus Publishing, a small imprint that specialises in Arabic literature. Her tour of the country and Palestine was specifically designed with publisher Yael Lerer to avoid backing any state-funded Israeli institutions.

Costello, arguably the most high-profile adherent to the PACBI call, explained his cancellation of dates in Tel Aviv in May 2010:

“I must believe that the audience for the coming concerts would have contained many people who question the policies of their government on settlement and deplore conditions that visit intimidation, humiliation or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security. Sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static.”

BDS is now a relatively long-standing and global campaign, supported by those directly affected by Israeli occupation. It’s not something being imposed by outside forces to bully Westerners to comply. BDS against Israel is catching on across the world, including here in Australia, with unions and even a major local council in New South Wales signing up (until the decision was overturned).

It’s sometimes argued that cultural boycotts have little effect. But American journalist Max Blumenthal and Israeli activist Joseph Dana recently explained why BDS was so vital, because it:

“disrupt[ed] the apathy that pervades middle class, urban Israeli society. Apathy allows Israelis to live in comfort behind iron walls while remaining immune to the occupation and inoculated from its horrors.”

Other common arguments are that engagement with locals can only bring better understanding and that entertainment/sport/pleasure shouldn’t mix with politics. Elton John, for instance, refused to heed the PACBI call on this basis. During his concert in Tel Aviv in June 2010, he told the audience, ‘Musicians spread love and peace, and bring people together. That’s what we do. We don’t cherry-pick our conscience.’

But precisely the same arguments were raised during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Back then, Elton John played (alongside other well-known acts such as Queen) in Sun City, located in Bophuthatswana, a nominally independent Bantustan. As South African critic Peter Feldman told the Brunei Times in 2008, ‘they [the musicians] used to say, “We’re doing it for our fans, we’re not politicians,” but the truth is they didn’t care. They were being paid millions to perform there.’

It is true that many public figures resent being placed under moral pressure. Novelist Margaret Atwood was asked by the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel to refuse the Dan David Prize for literature from Tel Aviv University. Before receiving the award, she said categorically, ‘We don’t do cultural boycotts. I would be throwing overboard the thousands of writers around the world who are in prison, censored, exiled and murdered for what they have published.’

But a short time later, perhaps feeling guilty about accepting the million-dollar prize, she wrote in Haaretz that Israeli society was becoming less democratic, more intolerant of difference and ‘the concept of Israel as a humane and democratic state is in serious trouble’.

British writer Ian McEwan faced similar criticisms in 2011 for accepting the Jerusalem Prize and attending a ceremony with Israeli President Shimon Peres. He refused to boycott and Palestinian writers refused to meet him during his stay. During his speech he condemned the ‘nihilism’ of both Israel and Palestinians, as if both sides were occupiers.

Closer to home, the case of the Melbourne International Film Festival illustrates how the growing BDS movement forces consideration of issues around Palestine. Festival director Richard Moore, whose son served in the IDF, received money from Israel in both 2009 and 2010 to pay for an Israeli director to visit Australia. In 2009, British filmmaker Ken Loach was outraged to find out his film would screen in a festival that received backing from a nation that brutalised Palestinians. In a letter to Moore, Loach mentioned the ‘illegal occupation of Palestinian land, destruction of homes and livelihoods’ and ‘the massacres in Gaza’ as reasons behind the boycott. Last year the makers of an Iraqi-set feature film Son of Babylon wrote to Moore after discovering the Israeli connection, demanding he not show their film.

Moore refused both requests but his decision led to pro-Palestinian pickets outside cinemas during the festival.

In my view, the BDS call against the Melbourne International Film Festival was wholly acceptable, a legitimate way to question the acceptance of money from a state that desperately wants to use culture and art as a distraction from its rapacious policies, just as the campaign around Galle was. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said, ‘If you choose to be neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’ It’s a responsibility that artists should feel, whether in Palestine or Sri Lanka.

Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney independent journalist and the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution

A rather startling Newsweek feature that shows just how shallow the US understanding of the Middle East has been for decades. Working with tyrants and torturers and murderers, in the name of fighting “terrorism”, has meant that the overthrow of such figures in the last six months has resulted in US eyes and ears becoming close to blind and deaf. Expect Washington to support any kind of reliable brutes in the months and years ahead:

Today’s Guardian editorial is a powerful indictment against any government, journalist or official who views Colombo as a model when fighting “terrorism”. The UN is also complicit. The take-away message is that murdering civilians during wars (something many nations are very good at, including the US, Israel, Congo and a host of others) must be investigated and never forgotten:

The footage screened by Channel 4 last night ranks among the most horrific yet shown on British television. Naked prisoners shot in the head; the dead bodies of women who had been raped, dumped on a truck; the immediate aftermath of a shell landing on a hospital – images caught on mobile phones of the atrocities committed by government soldiers in the final months of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war. The story of what happened two years ago when government forces corralled hundreds of thousands of Tamils in horrific conditions into an ever-shrinking space, as they closed in the defeated Tigers, is well known. A UN panel last month found credible allegations of war crimes committed both by the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. But the pictures of the shootings are new and Channel 4 has done what human rights organisations should have been doing in compiling and sifting through it.

The footage, shot either by escapers, or as trophy videos by soldiers committing the atrocities, is almost unwatchable. But on this occasion there are two reasons why it was right to dispense with the responsibility broadcasters have to avoid causing distress. First, the Sri Lankan government engineered a war without witness, which was why, in echoes of Srebrenica, they forced UN observers to leave first. This film atones, in small part, for the failure of the international community to make Sri Lanka accountable for these deaths. Second, the parallel with Srebrenica is only too real. As the UN panel reveals, the shelling of hospitals in the so-called no-fire zones was so systematic – there were 65 such attacks – that it is impossible to believe it was random. One shelling took place after a Red Cross official supplied the GPS co-ordinates to the Sri Lankan authorities, a procedure meant to avoid such shellings.

The targeting of civilians is a war crime. If proved, these charges go right up the chain of command of Sri Lanka’s military and government. If Iran stands condemned for killing hundreds in the wake of the June 2009 election, if Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic now face justice in The Hague, if Bashar al-Assad faces UN sanctions for an assault that has killed 1,300 Syrians, how it is that President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, the defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, escape all censure, after over 40,000 civilians were killed?

That the LTTE assassinated presidents and invented the suicide belt, that the Tigers used civilians as human shields, is no defence from the charge that Sri Lankan soldiers summarily executed prisoners in their custody. Sri Lanka is trying to pretend these events are history, as the economy and tourism pick up. They are not. This evidence has to be faced.

Evidence for the prosecution:

In December 2008, South Asian workers, two thousand miles or more from their homes, staged a protest on the outskirts of Baghdad. The reason: Up to 1,000 of them had been confined in a windowless warehouse and other dismal living quarters without money or work for as long as three months.

In a typical comment made by the laborers to news organizations at the time, Davidson Peters, a 42-year-old Sri Lankan man, told a McClatchy Newspapers reporter that “They promised us the moon and stars…While we are here, wives have left their husbands and children have been shut out of their schools” because money for their families back home had dried up.

The men came to Iraq lured by the promise of employment by Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor performing work for Houston-based KBR, Inc. under the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) III contract.

Now, a cache of internal corporate and government documents obtained by POGO offer insight into this episode of alleged war zone human trafficking by companies working for the U.S.—and suggest that hardly anyone has been held accountable for what may be violations of U.S. law.

The subcontractor, Najlaa, appears to have suffered no repercussions for its role in luring hundreds of South Asian workers to Iraq with promises of lucrative jobs only to turn around and warehouse at least 1,000 of them in dismal living conditions without work—and pay—for several months. In fact, Najlaa continues to win government contracts.

Despite strongly worded “zero tolerance” policies against human trafficking, the U.S. has directly awarded contracts to Najlaa after the December 2008 protests, including one contract that lasts through 2012.