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

[E.Wayne Johnson]

Well my first thought was that it meant Battered Day Saints but decided that
was either half-baked or just plain fried.

Then I thought about BS and what the D might mean and realized that what is
affectionately called BS in the USA has a canine equivalent in China 
implying
a similar lack of respect in the veracity measure.  But when you put Bull 
with Dog
it seems to lose some effect, and the Chinese hooligan patois generally
includes "chou" (stinking) which is not a clarifier for "gou" (dog) but
for "goushi", the familiar contemptible objet of pedestrian art and 
artifice.

Nonplussed by this exercise as you might imagine I tried "Dumb" instead of 
"Dog" but got nothing useful.  Finally I consulted Google which turned up 
Bush Derangement Syndrome (who cares), the British Deer Society, Blower 
Drive Service, and an outfit in Guangzhou that makes heavy duty drill 
presses.

Then I found that there is a Global BDS Movement and I imagined telethons 
for some
horrid connective tissue disease but read closely enough to find that it 
stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions for Palestine. I suppose I 
could lay off Matzos for awhile.  I am sure Kissinger would be anguished if 
he knew about it.  I thought maybe falafel was from Israel but I wasnt sure 
I could spell it right and googling it might take me circumnavigating back 
to the Blower Drive Service...that actually could explain the news item 
"Palestinian Queers Call for BDS" http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/741.

It seems to me that the solidarity of consumer revolt wouldnt do much, and 
it seems to take the focus off of the question "what is the US government's 
role in all this mess?" and "why cant we seem to do anything about that?".



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "peace discuss" <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2010 9:37 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Interview with Norman Finkelstein on Israel, etc.


> ...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
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>