As you age, one of the more depressing realities you have to face is that you will see the same shit play out over and over again without change. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, how annoying it is to see the same endlessly stupid debates, particularly around racism, and how the status quo relies on this exact frustration to spill over and hurt the people advocating for better. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: what we are witnessing is a militant refusal by the white supremacist status quo to actually change, no matter how often or how eloquently we point out the system is broken. And so, we keep asking, even as things turn to shit everywhere. At some point, friends, we will have to stop asking and start demanding.
One of the depressing cycles I’ve been watching loop lately concerns BDS. In my previous post, I wrote about the ongoing debacle that is Sydney Festival, and its partnership with Israel. Here are some of the questions posed to Palestinian activists, since then, and which I’ve seen so many times before:
“What if other people around the world decide to boycott, say, Australia, for its policies?” (Actual phrasing, on national television).
“What about every other injustice in the world, particularly those perpetrated by Arabs and Muslims?” (Actual phrasing might be, “By focusing on Israel, aren’t you being anti-semitic?”)
“But Israel is a democracy!” (Actual phrasing).
“Isn’t it violent to ask for help?” (Actual phrasing might be, “Is it okay to aggressively pressure participants to boycott by asking them directly?”)
There are many more variations of the above, but all of them rely on moving away from the real situation and putting the onus on Palestinians and their allies to not only defend their right to protest, and the manner of protest, but also to prosecute any number of hypothetical scenarios that have nothing to do with them. In short, the conversation becomes about the conversation.
The real situation is this: Palestinians are occupied and oppressed by a foreign military power that is openly defiant of international law, and which enforces an unequal and unjust system of apartheid. When Palestinians attempt to resist with violence, they are massacred. When they attempted to resist by walking toward the border in the Great March of Return, they were massacred. When international law does nothing, and violence isn’t an option, nor are peaceful protests, what is being asked of Palestinians amounts to accepting their complete subjugation. The only strategy left is one that relies on global solidarity through the BDS movement, a cultural and economic boycott modelled on the successful South African campaign, and whenever this is attempted, Palestinians and their allies are called anti-semitic.
But that’s not the reason you should participate in BDS. What separates this issue from Australian human rights abuses, or Western war crimes, which are equally deserving of protest? Most often the answer to this is something like “nothing does, we should and do protest against injustice everywhere”, which is true, but there’s more to it than that. For one, we have in the West the fantasy of agency, of equality, law and order—the means to govern, or elect to be governed, in the manner we desire. (When I say fantasy, I mean something that is not fully realised). Put more simply, there isn’t a call here for such action, and whatever their effectiveness, we have numerous options we can take to influence policy. The main reason you should participate in BDS is because the Palestinian people have asked us to do so. They are asking the world to do so. It is that simple. You don’t need to imagine a hypothetical scenario involving other people—actually face this one. The question is, Will you help them gain their civil rights back? Our governments are not doing so and so now they are asking us directly.
They deserve an honest answer, which from the majority of people in Western media, even the so-called “progressive” arts, is no. Unfortunately, to them, Palestinians are Arabs and therefore eternally suspect, so much so that even their choice not to financially support Israel is called “economic terrorism”. The faux-progressives or PEPs don’t like saying no to this question, they are uncomfortable with this rejection, which flies in the face of the values they’re supposed to believe in, and so instead they shift away from answering altogether and make the conversation itself problematic. Whatever the phrasing, the intent beneath is always, You shouldn’t be asking this, ask something else, anything else. They don’t want to deal with it, want to shrug it off, like, “It’s not my responsibility. This is a government thing. If I could help—But I can’t. It’s too hard, you know.”
I’ve seen this even from people withdrawing from Sydney Festival in solidarity. The festival shouldn’t have put them in this position, they say, as if having to face the question themselves was equally damning as the answer the Board gave. This is the crux of it. Our government and our institutions are aligned with Israel. There is seemingly no evil too great for Israel to commit that would result in a change to this alignment; last year, even as Israelis killed 250 Palestinians, 65 children, in a bombardment that injured thousands and destroyed essential infrastructure, the Sydney Festival sought out this partnership. Western imperialism in the MENA region is bipartisan; what are we, the people of the West, prepared to do about it?
Voting isn’t enough. We all know that. There are concrete actions we can take to make our will known, to try to influence policy, and this is one of them. Under capitalism, nothing speaks louder than money. That’s partly why there is such relentless pressure against BDS, why there have been laws enacted in 35 US states trying to limit its effectiveness, and why a NSW Labor MP recently advocated for the same to occur here. It works, at least in generating noise. Conservatives know that it works. It’s the same reason they have no qualms whatsoever in advocating for and enacting crippling economic sanctions on other nations. Who can forget in 1996 Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, being asked the following about the years of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
To which Albright responded, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Half a million dead Arab children was, and remains, an acceptable price for the West. There is no degradation too low, no toll too high, when it comes to what the US and its allies are willing to inflict on Arabs.
To be clear, economic sanctions on the scale used by America enact a horrific toll. I bring it up to demonstrate what economic terrorism really looks like, to make obvious how disingenuous and despicable such claims are when levelled against Palestinians. It is not even remotely comparable to BDS, which for all its nominal focus on finances, largely operates in the cultural sphere to bring attention to the ongoing crimes committed by the Israeli state against Palestinians. Indeed, the only way for the boycott to impact Israel in a major way would be for it to be taken up by the US, European Union, or similarly large economic entity. The stakes for Israel are incredibly small. $20,000 dollars small.
The stakes for Palestinians are life and death, every single day.
I often think about phrases I hear chanted at protests and rallies, these public addresses aimed at the government, one of the most common of which is, “Not in our name!” There is a claim here that whatever our government does, we are responsible for in some way. After all, we elected them. They are our representatives—whether we voted for them or not—and there is a relationship between us and what they use our money, our resources, to enact in the world. It appears conservatives have been listening, and if anything, are tightening this relationship. The anti-boycott laws in the US function by tying government funding to a promise not to boycott Israeli companies. In short, the message is that any citizen using public resources—their own money—must act in concert with the reigning political party’s foreign policy. Everyone must become an agent of that party. This is concerning on a number of levels.
In the arts, there’s always been some consternation around “government funding”, a sense that to accept it is to implicitly agree to self-censor, to “not bite the hand that feeds you”. Listen to me carefully: fuck that. It does not matter which political party is in power—it is not their money. It is ours. It is always ours. The hands that feed me are the hands of the people, the hands of my communities. Wherever you are, whatever your position, there is a moral obligation to speak out against the powerful, against any leader, whenever they are acting unjustly, which is more often than not. It’s not government funding, it’s public funding, and it should be spent in a way that is consistent with our stated values, like truth, justice, equality, and freedom—with none of them being more important than the other, but always working in concert. What we have seen over the past few decades is the conservative thesis that their freedom to harm and to lie is more important than justice and equality—which is an obvious evil that continues to rot away at the fundamental pillars of society—dominate.
Well, if it’s okay to accept public funding, what about this Israeli embassy money? Isn’t it “the only democracy in the Middle East” and all that? There are a couple of technical points here that could be made; the embassy being the official political arm of Israel in Australia; the fact that Israel has mandatory military service and all its citizens partake in its brutal actions, etc. But again, the main point must be that this action is asked of us by Palestinians, who are actively being oppressed, killed, maimed and dispossessed. I also think another aspect to this that’s worth raising is that Israel is a young colony. It has not achieved the blanket mythic power of the “West”, the so-called free world, to enact astonishing evil without ever losing its credentials as a force for good. While it relies on Western funding and military aid, while the murderous ugliness of early colonisation is still in full view, it can still be held accountable. This is why the fight, outside of Palestine, is based in propaganda and PR, this is why the “only democracy” line is used over and over. The implication is that if you are a democracy, you are a force for good, purely by virtue of not being an outright bad, which is anything else, like, say, communism or dictatorships.
It’s hard to confront the fact that our governments, for all that we are supposedly citizens of democratic nations, routinely enact evil policies, whether we desire it or not. Even a functional representative democracy is not inherently good; likewise, no legal system is inherently just, though these words are often deemed synonymous. We have been conditioned to abdicate our agency to an increasingly unhinged and entitled upper class of politicians who have abandoned even the pretence of integrity. It’s easy to see why: in the face of weakened unions, a complacent and fearful populace, plus a majorly conservative media, there are no real consequences to their human rights abuses, to their corruption, or appalling mismanagement in a global health crisis—maybe they’d be doing this regardless, but we’ve undoubtedly enabled this behaviour. Without consequences, we cannot hope to create any kind of ethical change. More than that, we need to actively re-imagine how we live, and how we are governed.
To be consequence-free is what Israel desires, more than anything else, and for the sake of Palestinians and Israelis alike, this needs to be fought. Through BDS, through global solidarity, in every nation on Earth. We are facing a continual moral crisis all over the world, and the response—largely coming from the empowered—is generally something like, “Well, everything is bad, so why bother trying to change it?” You’re not going to solve systemic racism or climate change or anything by protesting, or by using your wealth and labor more ethically. Hopeless resignation is their preferred mode of being. Well, the only thing I can promise you this: if you do nothing, the only guaranteed outcome is that things will deteriorate. Yes, everything is bad—which is all the more reason to change everything to be better for everyone, everywhere.
At some point, you have to draw a line where you say: enough. For many who use whatabouttery in relation to Palestine, who try to take the conversation anywhere else, it’s clear that their line doesn’t include Palestine. Mine does, and it always will.