http://www.rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/aalya/2010/10/what-i-learned-bds-conference
What I learned at the BDS conference
By Aalya Ahmad: October 26, 2010
http://www.rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/11481
Because of my Arabic name, I am reluctant to write about Palestine. I get
afraid that my words will be too easily dismissed because of my name,
because of the racist idea that everybody with an Arabic name can only be
partisan by nature. Like everybody with a Jewish identity is presumed to be
in support of Israel, regardless of Independent Jewish
Voices<http://www.independentjewishvoices.ca/>and other groups we
don't hear about in the media because their protests go
uncovered, their letters ignored. It's another form of anti-Semitism, this
monolithic certainty, this lumping of people into political blocks for
sociopaths to play with.
I attended the BDS conference in Montreal <http://www.bdsquebec.org/> this
weekend because I realized that I knew very little about this movement that
is gaining such momentum all over the world. Since the transformation of
Gaza into a gigantic prison camp and the flotilla massacre, the call to
boycott, divest from and sanction the state of Israel for its treatment of
the Palestinian people has been steadily growing. I often hear the lament
that people don't learn from history. Well, the people who support BDS
certainly did. The first wave of support for BDS came from South Africa
because South Africans know what it was like to live under apartheid
conditions and they know that a boycott campaign worked for them.
I'm old enough to remember my father explaining to me that, as a "coloured
person," certain rights would be denied to me in South Africa. I didn't
understand it then, as a little girl, and I don't understand it now. I don't
understand how anybody in the twenty-first century could attempt to justify
such practices. But I remember that song "Sun
City"<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aopKk56jM-I&feature=related>and
the jubilant headlines when South African apartheid ended.
Headlines about "The Middle East" seem to create a fog of uncertainty, in
the midst of which people wander, bemused, without the kind of clarity that
allows us to confidently declare, as the anti-apartheid artists did in the
80s, "I ain't gonna play Sun City." We start worrying about one- and
two-state solutions, about a "peace process" and about dates and
technicalities: 1948? 1967? What's not going to get us into trouble, like
Libby Davis did
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/harper-wants-ndp-to-fire-deputy-libby-davies-for-criticism-of-israel/article1605386/>?
What won't bring a shitstorm of raving denunciations down on our
well-meaning heads? We stop listening to our consciences and start thinking
about politicians and positions. "Politics," said Orwell, is "largely the
defense of the indefensible" and nothing bears this statement out so well as
the complicity with Zionism that can be fostered in a population lost in a
fog of diffused Islamophobia and diplomatic jargon. "The Middle East is too
complex and there's too much going on. I'll let the politicians sort this
one out," we think and we look the other way.
So, what's indefensible? Among other things, I learned this weekend that
Israel has a two-tiered legal system, which allocates rights based on
identity, so, for example, it denies the right to own land to non-Jewish
people. I learned that an eleven-year-old boy was pistol-whipped to death by
an Israeli soldier, who paid for his crime with six months of community
service. I learned that the people who live in Gaza are being slowly
poisoned by water that is 90-95% contaminated by bombed sewage systems that
they are not permitted to repair. I also learned that, since 1967, even
though they don't get any labour protections such as unemployment insurance
under the two-tier system, 11% of Palestinian workers' wages have been
forcibly deducted to finance Histadrut, the Israeli labour federation that
Golda Meir described as "a great colonizing agent," which condones such
practices as painting a red X on Arab construction workers' hardhats for the
convenience of Israeli marksmen <http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/343>. I
learned that the Canadian Labour Congress invites Histadrut to its
conventions and that Conservative MPs such as Jeff Watson claim that God has
given Israel to the Jews (at least, you know, until that Rapture thing
happens and everybody in the world perishes except for Jeff Watson and his
coreligionists, and possibly his family pets and the family pets of his
coreligionists…).
I learned that we are living in the most pro-Zionist country in the world at
the time of this writing, one that is seriously debating making any
criticism of the state of Israel a hate crime punishable by the laws of this
country<http://www.rabble.ca/columnists/2009/11/Harper-criminalize-criticism-Israel>
.These tendencies go back, I learned, to Lester B. Pearson and to the
Christian Zionist movement that wanted to create a "Jewish homeland" as part
of the British empire. The fact that other people might already live in the
Jewish homeland didn't matter. We can shrug off the residential schools and
the reservations, after all, can't we? The dispossession and subjugation of
yet more brown people who inconveniently happened to be living there when
the Europeans arrived can easily be met with a "Meh." But, you know, *Avatar
* was really, really cool, eh? We've got tears to shed for big blue
fictional aliens, eh? Just don't mention those Palestinians, even
though they're losing their life-giving trees
too<http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/10/21/olive-harvest.html>
.
Talk of the cruelties that are becoming more obvious for all the world to
see is getting harder to silence and shut down. The increasing momentum of
the BDS movement has created panic among Zionists, who have been wildly
flailing that "anti-Semite" paintbrush around, smearing it left and right.
These people don't want to debate facts because the facts are against them.
The facts get in the way of their opinions and their opinions are
increasingly exposing them as cowardly apologists for sociopathic regimes.
When Omar Barghouti from the BDS committee offered to debate pro-Zionists,
not one of the so-called "journalists" who hurl accusations of "Anti-Semite"
like monkeys flinging feces at the zoo was brave enough to leave the comfort
of their newspaper monologues and meet him in a public forum. When the union
I work for took a pro-BDS position, I noticed that the handful of people
rounded up to threaten and harass us preferred to remain anonymous.
In the meantime, octogenarian Holocaust survivors are supporting the
Palestinians<http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/jewish-aid-boat-leaves-cyprus-bound-gaza/>
, divestments from Israeli businesses that fund the occupation are growing,
and around the world it's getting harder and harder for any of us to play
Sun City. Unlike South African apartheid, however, which saw black South
Africans as a cheap labour force to be exploited, the fundamentalist Israeli
regime has no use for the Palestinians. It wants them dead or gone. And it
wants us to shut the hell up while it kills them and drives them out. So, I
decided to write about Palestine and what I learned at the BDS conference in
the hope that others, whether or not they have Arabic names, will join the
growing numbers of us who are gaining the courage to speak out.
Aalya Ahmad's blog <http://www.rabble.ca/blog/17902>
[image: Aalya's picture] <http://www.rabble.ca/blog/17902>
Aalya Ahmad has a PhD in comparative literature, a crush on George Orwell
and a rather impressive collection of cloth bags from the various public
service unions she has worked with over the years. She writes about and
practices cultural politics, feminism and activism.
_______________________________________________
Rad-Green mailing list
Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu
No comments:
Post a Comment