Yesterday there was an interesting diary showing the President is on the right side of the political equation with respect to contentious I/P debate. That being said, being on the right side of history often requires being on the wrong side of politics. Case in point, the Iraq War. Then Senator Hillary Clinton was on the right side of politics while then State Senator Barack Obama was on the right side of history. (Without the benefit of history that the four years between 2004 and 2008 gave us, the relative political fortunes of Clinton versus Obama would have been vastly different.) The President's famous Cairo speech indicated that this trend would continue but events this year indicate that this was just a desert mirage. You could see this coming when we were caught flat-footed by the Arab Spring, particularly if you look at the response coming out of the Secretary of State's office.
Still, the most appropriate historical metaphor is not Iraq but rather South Africa. There is one very important difference between South Africa and I/P and readers should note it. In the present-day case neither major political party champions the anti-apartheid cause. For now let's look at the similarities. Progressive Christians and Democrats fought through the use of an economic boycott to change the evil apartheid system in South Africa. Conservative Christians and Republicans motivated in part by racism saw the anti-apartheid movement as Communists and terrorists. This included Nelson Mandela individually. Note this 2008 USA Today story:
Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation "embarrassing," and some members of Congress vow to fix it.
The requirement applies to former South African leader Mandela and other members of South Africa's governing African National Congress (ANC), the once-banned anti-Apartheid organization. In the 1970s and '80s, the ANC was officially designated a terrorist group by the country's ruling white minority. Other countries, including the United States, followed suit.
Because of this, Rice told a Senate committee recently, her department has to issue waivers for ANC members to travel to the USA.
"This is a country with which we now have excellent relations, South Africa, but it's frankly a rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela," Rice said.
Here is Wikipedia on the relationship between us and the South Africa apartheid system and the boycott. Greater focus when analyzing American public opinion should be placed on Christians and progressives. While support for Israel on the left is because of solidarity with the Jewish people the support for Israel on the right -- and from conservative Christians in particular -- is driven by anti-Arab racism. My daughter at CU Boulder did not even know that this issue was particularly controversial on mainstream Democratic sites like this one. Everyone there was pro Palestinian because the emphasis was on progressive rather than Democratic politics. The latter is driven by pragmatism. Getting back to South Africa, note how we wanted to quietly reform our friend and how completely ineffectual that was until the boycotts came.
While international opposition to apartheid grew, the Nordic countries in particular provided both moral and financial support for the ANC. On 21 February 1986 – a week before he was murdered – Sweden's prime minister Olof Palme made the keynote address to the Swedish People's Parliament Against Apartheid held in Stockholm. In addressing the hundreds of anti-apartheid sympathizers as well as leaders and officials from the ANC and the Anti-Apartheid Movement such as Oliver Tambo, Palme declared:
"Apartheid cannot be reformed; it has to be eliminated." [My note: this is why I oppose the two state solution. No amount of Bantustans can solve the problem.]
Other Western countries adopted a more ambivalent position. In the 1980s, both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, in the USA and UK respectively, followed a 'constructive engagement' policy with the apartheid government, vetoing the imposition of UN economic sanctions on South Africa, justified by a belief in free trade and a vision of South Africa as a bastion against Marxist forces in Southern Africa. Thatcher declared the ANC a terrorist organisation, and in 1987 her spokesman, Bernard Ingham, famously said that anyone who believed that the ANC would ever form the government of South Africa was "living in cloud cuckoo land".
By the late 1980s, however, with the tide of the Cold War turning and no sign of a political resolution in South Africa, Western patience with the apartheid government began to run out. By 1989, a bipartisan Republican/Democratic initiative in the US favoured economic sanctions (realised as the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986), the release of Nelson Mandela and a negotiated settlement involving the ANC. Thatcher too began to take a similar line, but insisted on the suspension of the ANC's armed struggle.
Britain's significant economic involvement in South Africa may have provided some leverage with the South African government, with both the UK and the US applying pressure on the government, and pushing for negotiations. However, neither Britain nor the US were willing to apply economic pressure upon their multinational interests in South Africa, such as the mining company Anglo American. Although a high-profile compensation claim against these companies was thrown out of court in 2004, the US Supreme Court in May 2008 upheld an appeal court ruling allowing another lawsuit that seeks damages of more than US$ from major international companies which are accused of aiding South Africa's apartheid system. [Emphasis mine]
Now we have an attempt to again quietly reform our friend. This friend is even more intransigent than South Africa was at the time. The boycott movement is disparaged as anti-Semitic now like it was disparaged as anti-American and pro-Soviet for South Africa then. People have poo-pooed here BDS for being very, very weak in the U.S., which it undeniably is. But, just as successful social movements had very meager starts so can BDS.
South African leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu also see the historical connection and are active in the boycott effort. They see while BDS is currently small nonetheless they also see the potential there.
“Even some South Africans like Desmond Tutu have said that what they did in thirty years, the Palestinians did in three,” Sourani told me over tea. “The boycott is a lesson of the success of the South Africans. And why not? Nothing is imposible. When people hear that Palestinians are doing something like this, that we are taking action, they believe in the idea and the issue much more.”
Much angst and ink has been spilled over what we as a country can do. The answer like in South Africa is nothing. We are irrelevant. The people who are relevant are the international activists. What does this movement look like? After the fold videos from three perspectives. One a young American Jew, the second some young Gaza bloggers on Naksa Day, and the last a young Palestinian-American participant in the upcoming flotilla. Finally a documentary from young Palestinian documentarians on Operation Cast Lead.
Here's an interview with Lucas Koerner:
Maureen Clare Murphy: What brought you to Palestine?
Lucas Koerner: I’ve been an activist on a number of fronts for a long time and in particular Palestine solidarity for past three years or so. And for the past three or four years I’ve always wanted to go, I’ve never had the opportunity, it never came together. Finally someone told me about Interfaith Peace Builders, I applied for a scholarship, they gave me a scholarship and then I decided to go [on one of their delegations]. My main motivation was that being an activist, you can know all the facts, you can have all the graphs, all the tables, all the presentations, but when it comes down to it, none of that is a substitution for first-hand empirical experience of actually going and seeing it for yourself. That was the primary motivation.
I was there for eleven days, however I was supposed to stay for five weeks.
MCM: Have you been active in the solidarity movement in the US?
LK: I live in Philadelphia during the summer but I go to school in Boston. When I was in high school in Philadelphia I was involved with American Jews for Just Peace - Philadelphia. In my high school I started something of a Palestinian solidarity-type group or anti-war group. It wasn’t much of a group but we tried our best to show films, try to do whatever we could. I was also in touch with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
MCM: How did you get involved in solidarity with Palestine?
LK: I’ve been involved tenuously in anti-war activism around Iraq and Afghanistan since I was in 9th grade, since I was 15; I went to my first demonstration with my dad … [Palestine has] always been a fixture my political consciousness but it was really Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza massacre of late ‘08 early ‘09, that prompted me and compelled me beyond anything else to take on this work as my primary calling. I just couldn’t stay silent any longer.
MCM: Why were you protesting the day you were arrested?
LK: It wasn’t originally a protest at all or demonstration. Initially my friends and I, or my fellow delegates on our trip, were going down to watch the march and basically we were just holding up peace signs, we had our kuffiyehs on. We basically tried to make a statement as Americans that in the aftermath of Netanyahu’s speech before Congress and Obama’s speech before AIPAC, that we do not endorse Israel’s occupation and all of the concomitant violations of international law and injustices that go with it.
We had just came back from Hebron [in the occupied West Bank] earlier that day. It was really what we saw in Hebron — the utter segregation that the city has fallen under with the occupation, the division of the city into basically two zones — the center of the city is basically off limits to the [Palestinian] residents of the city. It’s ground zero of the occupation as many regard it, particularly in terms of settler brutality, and the absolute complicity of the IDF [Israeli military]. But seeing that and returning on Jerusalem Day to our hotel in East Jerusalem, and seeing these miles and miles of white and blue and all of these people jubilantly celebrating the conquest of East Jerusalem, celebrating the occupation in East Jerusalem, the chutzpah of all, that really affected us all and that is what prompted us to do what we did.
MCM: What was it like in Israeli detention?
LK: I was detained for almost two days. I was taken to a police station right afterwards, where I was held for about four hours before I saw a lawyer. I was threatened numerous times with being tased and being put to sleep by various weapons they had. I continually demanded my lawyer and for my persistence they threatened me numerous times. I was then taken to prison where I spent the night in the ER; the doctor determined I had to go there because of my injures, though it was nothing serious beyond superficial wounds. The next day I was taken to court where I was put under house arrest. However the prosecution appealed that decision within the hour and the district court judge stayed the decision, so I had to stay the night in the Russian Compound, the Israeli jail.
What struck me most about my time in prison is that it is a reflection of the rest of Israeli society in that it’s completely segregated. I was placed against my will in the Jewish cell. I asked to be put in the Arab cell. The Jewish cell conditions weren’t bad at all; it was still jail, but it was bearable. I did see the Arab cell or at least one of the Arab cells and the conditions there were absolutely abominable. … We had furniture, we had beds of some sort, we had a clean bathroom. They had nothing. Just a bench and an open toilet. The conditions were horrible. That’s what struck me most.
MCM: Did you get any support from the US consulate?
I received no support from the US consulate. My friends and family had contacted them and, from what I heard, they basically said that this happens a lot and there’s nothing [they] can do. They didn’t even come to my trials.
[The trials were] all done in Hebrew. It was lucky that I had a local activist there who could translate for me. The Israeli judicial system is very strange in that you can’t have a lawyer while being questioned. I was not allowed to have a lawyer present while being questioned and there are no laws within Israel that prevent you from being almost indefinitely detained before being charged. I was never formally charged but I was detained for two days.
Certainly my situation pales in comparison to that faced by Palestinian activists who face administrative detention — which is six months or more, as many as 18 months often — without being charged with anything. This is the legal structure of occupation and I had a very small dose of it. In my trial I was given house arrest, though the police wanted to hold me for a week without charging me with everything — and that was certainly a possibility, and why I had to come home.
MCM: What kind of reaction have you seen since you’ve been arrested?
LK: The reaction that I’ve received so far from the volume of Facebook messages and messages to my blog have been overwhelmingly positive, just great displays of love and solidarity which I greatly appreciate, though there’s hate mail starting to trickle in. The video has reached such a wide audience primarily because of my privileged position as an American Jew. I think that this kind of injustice which was perpetrated against me would make headlines and provoke such a visceral response. But my treatment, again, was moderate by the standards faced by Israeli and Palestinian activists in [the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood] Sheikh Jarrah and in a weekly basis in [the West Bank villages] Biln or Nilin, and their videos are only seen by a few hundred people. It’s the fact that I’m an American Jew that [the video] has seen such a wide audience.
MCM: What are your next plans for your solidarity work?
LK: I’m planning on doing some activism with some outfits in Philadelphia — American Jews for Just Peace, other groups. When I return to Boston in the fall I will continue my work as a leader of Tufts Students of Justice in Palestine and we do a lot of work with other SJP chapters throughout the city and CODEPINK and American Jews for Peace - Boston. I just hope to be able to share my experiences, not just my arrest, but everything else I saw prior to my arrest, in as wide a forum as I can.