Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Naomi Klein "Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction"

    * The Nation
    * Foreign Affairs
    * Israel
Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction
Lookout
By Naomi Klein
This article appeared in the January 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.
January 7, 2009
It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody 
occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement 
that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.
In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do 
just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose 
broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar 
to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign 
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions--BDS for short--was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and 
talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even 
emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 
Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to 
foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of 
immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel 
with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, 
but Israel is handled with kid gloves.... This international backing must 
stop."
Yet many still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and 
understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are 
the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges 
on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, 
followed by counterarguments.
1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world 
has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed 
utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: 
expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and 
imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite 
this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures--quite the opposite. 
The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only 
the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic 
improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety 
of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non-Latin 
American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine 
months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade 
deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed 
food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel 
Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: 
confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over 
seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index 
actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.
2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the 
South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when 
weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And 
there are indeed deeply distressing echoes: the color-coded IDs and travel 
permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only 
roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the 
architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza in 2007 
was "infinitely worse than apartheid."
3. Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western 
countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a 
dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against 
Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could 
actually work.
4. Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less. This one 
I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been 
published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published 
The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS 
activists, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an 
activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only 
Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into 
Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to 
Andalus's work, and none to me. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli 
economy but not Israelis.
Coming up with this plan required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant 
messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza 
City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott 
strategy, dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it? Building a 
movement requires endless communicating, as many in the antiapartheid 
struggle well recall. The argument that supporting boycotts will cut us off 
from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap 
information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant 
at one another across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: 
don't I know that many of those very high-tech toys come from Israeli 
research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. 
Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, the managing 
director of a British telecom company, sent an e-mail to the Israeli tech 
firm MobileMax. "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last 
few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with 
yourself or any other Israeli company."
When contacted by The Nation, Ramsey said his decision wasn't political. "We 
can't afford to lose any of our clients, so it was purely commercially 
defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to 
pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of 
calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long 
denied, to Palestine.
Further Reading: Disengagement and the Frontiers of Zionism
About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the 
author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock 
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier 
international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the 
collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the 
Globalization Debate (2002). more...
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 was "infinitely worse than apartheid."
I *COGLIONI* esistono anche tra i sudafricani.  E pure tra gli americani.
La Klein ne e' un fulgido esempio.
-Stefano