Time for Worldwide Boycott of Israel

By Omar Barghouti

On Friday, 29 February 2008,
Israel's deputy defense minister
Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians
in Gaza with a "holocaust,"
telling Israeli Army Radio:
"The more Qassam fire intensifies
and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians]
will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because
we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

This date will go down in history as the beginning of a
new phase in the colonial conflict between Israel and
the Palestinians, whereby a senior Israeli leader, a
"leftist" for that matter, has publicly revealed the
genocidal plans Israel is considering to implement
against Palestinians under its military occupation,
if they do not cease to resist its dictates. It will also
mark the first time since World War II that any state
has relentlessly -- and on live TV -- terrorized a
civilian population with acts of slow, or low-intensity,
genocide, with one of its senior government officials
overtly inciting to a full-blown "holocaust," while the
world stood by, watching in utter apathy, or in glee,
as in the case of leading western leaders.

For an Israeli leader who is Jewish, in particular, to
threaten anyone with holocaust is a sad irony of history.
Are victims of unspeakable crimes invariably doomed
to turn into appalling criminals? Can anything be possibly
done to break this vicious cycle, before the state that
claims to represent the main victims of the Nazi holocaust
commits a fresh holocaust itself?

Before addressing those questions, however, isn't it
exaggerated and pointedly counterproductive, one may ask,
to compare Israel's crimes against the Palestinians, no
matter how brutal and inhumane they have been, to
Nazi genocide? Besides, isn't each crime unique and worthy
of attention in its own right as a violation of human rights,
of international law, of universal moral principles?
The answer is yes: each crime is unique, and nothing Israel
has done to date comes even close, in quantity, to Nazi crimes.
But when victims-turned-perpetrators openly admit their
intentions to carry out a unique form of offense that they are
most familiar with, and they actually commit repeated acts
that are qualitatively reminiscent of that crime in their
unbridled racism and the ghastly level of disregard for the
value and dignity of the human life of the "other" that is
inherent in them, then their threats ought to be taken
seriously. Everyone is called upon to react, to act in any
way to stop this crime-in-progress from reaching its
logical conclusion.

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA), despite its
lack of political independence and its disputed mandate, is
called upon to immediately exonerate itself from the
popular accusation of complicity. Azmi Bishara was among
the most prominent of those who issued this harsh indictment,
in reaction to the announcement by the head of the PA in
Cairo that al-Qaida had infiltrated Gaza, and that the
projectiles fired indiscriminately by the Palestinian
resistance at Israeli towns and settlements provide the
excuse for Israel's aggression. The credibility of this complicity
assertion was compelling enough to prompt Mahmoud Abbas
to condemn the Israeli crime in unprecedented austerity
and hyperbole, describing it as "more than a Holocaust."

Arab regimes, especially Egypt's and Jordan's, as unelected,
illegitimate and subservient to the US as they may be, are
still expected to distance themselves from Israel's lethal
war of aggression on Gaza. After all, their continued
diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel, as well as their
implicit justification of Israel's crimes through their repeated
and gratuitous vilification of Hamas, have convincingly
labeled them in the eyes of their respective publics, not to
mention the wider Arab public, as accessories in crime.

European governments, chiefly in France, Britain and
Germany, have to also answer to the serious charge of
collusion in Israel's crimes against humanity, prevalent
among wide Palestinian, Arab and Muslim majorities.
They have not only stayed silent in the face of Israel's
willful killing of innocent civilians, many of whom are
children, in the course of the last few days in Gaza; they
have continued to treat Israel with reverence,
celebrating its so-called 60th anniversary,
a gruesome event of ethnic cleansing and colonial ruin itself,
showering it with economic, political and scientific support
that significantly contributes to its impunity.

The US government, on the other hand, cannot be
accused of abetting Israel's acts of genocide in the
same league as all the above sinister accomplices.
It is and has always been a full and proud partner in
planning, bankrolling and executing those crimes against
the Palestinians, not to mention its own unmatched
criminal record in Afghanistan, Iraq and, before both,
Vietnam. When our own Nuremberg moment arrives,
when Israeli war criminals are finally prosecuted in an
international court, a substantial space in the defense
chamber will have to be reserved for US commanders
and political leaders. Without American partnership,
expressed in immeasurable military, economic and
diplomatic aid, Israel could not have committed all its
racist and colonial crimes with such impunity.

Going back to the question of whether anything should
and could be done to stop Israel, the answer is a certain yes.
South African apartheid crimes were challenged not only by
the heroic struggle of the oppressed masses on the ground
in South Africa; they were also fought by worldwide
campaigns of boycott, divestment and sanctions against
the regime, with all its complicit economic, academic,
cultural, and athletic institutions. Similarly, international
civil society can, and ought to, apply the same measures of
non-violent justice to bring about Israel's compliance with
international law and basic human rights. Even the threat
of sanctions has proven effective enough in the past to halt
Israel's repeated campaigns of death and devastation.

If all those images of tens of Palestinian children torn to
pieces, all those recurrent episodes of wanton killing and
destruction by an occupation army against a
predominantly defenseless civilian population, go unpunished,
the world may well witness a new holocaust indeed.

-Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political
analyst and founding member of the Palestinian Campaign
for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
(www.PACBI.org).