[Peace-discuss] Interview with Norman Finkelstein on Israel, etc.

[C. G. Estabrook]

...What are your views on the BDS movement...?

[FINKELSTEIN:] First of all, people are getting a little too cult-like about 
BDS.  You always know a movement is growing insular when it starts using these 
in-group abbreviations ('BDS').  In my day it was 'DOP' -- 'Dictatorship of the 
Proletariat'.  You have these little abbreviations to show that you're part of 
the 'in-group' and you're cool and you know what's going on.  So we should 
really steer away from that, because this is not about our egos, which are 
sometimes oversized.  It's about trying to achieve an important, humane goal.

There are now basically three strands, as I see it, of resistance to what Israel 
is doing.  One strand is the legal one: trying to hold Israel accountable 
according to international law.  That took its most salient form in the 
Goldstone Report, but there have been a lot of initiatives around it, like the 
use of universal jurisdiction in the UK to threaten lawsuits against Israeli 
officials and personnel who come to the country.  That to me is an extremely 
valuable tool in trying to organise people in the sense of leaning on the law to 
say that what we're demanding is simply what the law is demanding.  But in terms 
of application it's very elitist, because it's just a very narrow group of 
lawyers who can ever really bring to bear the force of law.

Another strand is the nonviolent civil resistance, which includes what goes on 
in places like Bil'in, the internationalists who go over there, and also things 
like the flotilla.  Those are all part of the nonviolent civil resistance 
component -- I won't say 'strategy' because I don't think any of these different 
approaches are in conflict -- of opposition to the occupation.

The third component is BDS.  This has, I think, two aspects to it: one aspect 
that targets Israel globally, saying anything and everything that has to do with 
Israel has to be boycotted, and a second that says we should focus on those 
aspects of what Israel does that are illegal under international law.  So for 
example, what the Methodist Church in Britain just did: it did not pass a 
resolution saying we should boycott all Israeli products, even though there were 
some people pushing for that.  It passed a resolution saying we should boycott 
Israeli goods that come from the settlements, because the settlements are 
illegal under international law.  And then there are the initiatives of, say, 
Amnesty International that call for a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel 
because the transfer of weapons to persistent human rights abusers is illegal 
under international law.  Then there's the targeting of Caterpillar because 
Caterpillar is involved in demolition of homes, which is illegal under 
international law, and so on.

So there's one subset of BDS that focuses not on Israel globally but on aspects 
of Israeli policy that violate international law.  There's another subset that 
says everything having to do with Israel should be boycotted -- its academic 
institutions, all of its products, and so on and so forth.  Personally, I think 
that the first subset -- namely targeting those aspects of Israeli policy that 
violate international law -- has a much better chance of success because people 
understand international law.  When you start targeting everything having to do 
with Israel it begins to pose questions of motive -- 'OK, now, what exactly are 
we opposed to here?  Are we opposed to the occupation or are we opposed to 
Israel completely?'  And the global targeting is, I think, deliberately 
obfuscatory on that issue...

Full article (part one of an interview) at
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/sw130710.html