Mouood Mouood English Edition
Q: The Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, which has been in effect since 2006, has caused a true humanitarian disaster in the besieged coastal enclave. As you wrote in one of your recent articles, more than 90% of the people of Gaza live in extreme poverty, over 65% of the population is unemployed, and 95% of Gaza’s water is undrinkable. Why doesn’t the UN take action to change this calamitous situation and help the defenseless people of Gaza? Who is responsible for the plight of more than 1.5 million Palestinians entrapped in Gaza?
A: The role of the UN in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is important, yet often misunderstood. For not just years, but for decades, the UN has played a leading role in speaking out against the Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing, and oppression of Palestinians.
In its November 1967 resolution 242, the UN Security Council, including even the US, demanded that Israel withdraw from the territories it militarily occupied only five months before. Since this time, Israel has only withdrawn from the Sinai Peninsula; it still illegally occupies the West Bank and Golan Heights.
With UN Security Council resolution 446, adopted in March 1979, the UN also explicitly maintained “that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” The US abstained from this vote.
Countless UN resolutions and statements have since stated, in no uncertain terms, the same thing: Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, and the settlements are illegal. Moreover, every few years when Israel “mows the lawn,” massacring Palestinian civilians, UN officials consistently accuse Israel of war crimes.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has also been an important force in assisting the Palestinians. In some ways, UNRWA is problematic, as it outsources Israel’s legal responsibilities. As an occupying power, Israel has an obligation, under international law, to ensure the well-being of the population it occupies. Instead, Israel starves, tortures, and murders that population, and UNRWA and international aid ensures that it does not die. Yet UNRWA still provides an incredibly important service to Palestinian refugees whom many of the surrounding Arab states ignore and even oppress themselves.
Indeed, there are many things to criticize about the UN. There has been collusion between UN and Israeli officials; this is documented. Thanks to Wikileaks reports, in just one of the many examples of backdoor dealing, we now know that UN officials, all the way up to the Secretary General himself, were working with US officials to censor the Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, known colloquially as the Goldstone Report. Even the Goldstone Report, nonetheless, with all of its flaws, was quashed by President Obama.
The problem is not necessarily with the UN. The UN does have a lot of problems on a lot of issues, and it is much too kind to Israel, but the primary problem is not with the UN. The problem is with the US. Israel has violated at least 70 UN Security Council resolutions, but the US has prevented any punishment. Israel has committed crime after crime after crime, but the US has prevented the UN from taking any disciplinary action. The US constantly vetoes resolution that would hold Israel accountable for its crimes.
Distinguished historian Rashid Khalidi has written entire books about how the US has intentionally obviated peace in occupied Palestine. In a November 2014 interview on Democracy Now, Khalidi explicitly said “the United States is precisely the enabler of all of this.”
On some issues, the UN, bullied by the world’s hegemonic countries, is on the wrong side. In the case of Israel-Palestine, the UN is on the right side, because the vast, overwhelming preponderance of the international community is on the side of justice. The UN is very, very, very far from perfect; it is as imperfect as the countries that comprise it. Yet, as Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, has said, “you only have to be 10 percent objective to come to the same critical conclusions that I came to in relation to Israel’s violation of fundamental human rights in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, the three segments of occupied territory.” The UN is by no means objective, but, on the issue of Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine, it is at least 10 percent objective.
The party responsible for the plight of the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped in an open-air prison in Gaza, and the further 2.7 million Palestinians brutalized in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, is not the UN. The party responsible is indeed a two-letter acronym that begins with “U,” but it is not the UN; it is the US.
Q: A large number of US academicians have joined the wave of academic and cultural boycott of Israel, which includes a variety of mechanisms for embarrassing Israel on the global level and showcasing its isolation and loneliness, including pressing the presidents of American universities to refrain from visiting Israel, asking the American universities to stop their student exchange programs with Israel and cut any investment in the Israeli companies run from the settlement regions. Will such measures really yield significant results and compel the Israeli leaders to change their behavior toward the Palestinian people?
A: The BDS movement is, hands down, the most important movement in the struggle for justice in Israel-Palestine, outside of resistance in occupied Palestine itself.
For starters, BDS was called for by leading Palestinian intellectuals and activists as the ideal means by which the international community can express solidarity with the Palestinian people. In any movement against oppression, racism, and settler colonialism, it is imperative that activists wishing to stand in solidarity with an oppressed group in its struggle for justice do what that oppressed group has actually asked of them. The BDS movement is precisely that. Yet, even beyond this most significant factor, the BDS movement is so important because it is effective. And its efficacy is already being seen on campuses across the US, and across the world.
Israeli universities are doubtless complicit in Israel’s crimes. In the wake of Israel’s summer 2014 slaughter in Gaza, Israeli scholar Amir Hetsroni, who before the attack, had been opposed to BDS, wrote in Haaretz of “the undeniable attempts by academic management to prevent students and faculty from speaking their minds and punishing those who protest against the war.” “A college that prohibits students from taking part in political protest is not an academic institute. A university that vetoes its faculty’s right to publish non-Zionist – not to say anti-Zionist – scholarship is not a university. In such cases an academic boycott might be an acceptable response,” he said.
In October 2014 I published an article in Mondoweiss titled “Academia, the ‘battleground’ in the Palestinian solidarity movement,” detailing how Israel has outlined an intentional policy of targeting and repressing Palestinian solidarity activists on US campuses. During the Second Intifada, head of Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) and former Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky went on a tour of US and Canadian college campuses. Upon returning to Israel, he told Prime Minister Sharon “the most important battleground for the future of the Jewish people is campuses.” Israel and closely linked Zionist organizations have since gone so far as to work with US university administrators, police – including local police and the FBI, and even politicians to engage in a McCarthyist campaign of repression.
The real ground being gained in the BDS movement is indeed happening on US campuses, but it is not gained merely by cutting ties between universities; rather, it is being gained by divesting from corporations. A cultural and academic boycott is important, and cutting university ties is a step, but these are not enough. The real power of the BDS movement lies in its economic potential.
We live in a global capitalist system. If one wants to effect change, therefore, one must target powerful economic institutions—namely, corporations. The BDS movement’s call for divestment from and boycotts against large corporations, such as Caterpillar, HP, Lockheed Martin, and more, is where its power really lies.
BDS has already scared Israel’s Justice Minister, who noted that the movement is growing “exponentially,” warning that his fellow denizens in an oblivious Israel are living in a “bubble, … disconnected from the international reality.” Sodastream’s stock is plummeting. The corporation, whose principal manufacturing facility is situated in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, has virtually become synonymous with apartheid profiteering. Europe’s boycott movement is already taking a hefty economic toll. Now, peace organization CODEPINK is leading an exciting new movement, Boycott RE/MAX: No Open House, calling for a boycott of RE/MAX, the world’s largest real estate company. RE/MAX Israel, a franchise of the US-based corporation, sells properties in illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. This brand new campaign already has the corporation trembling in its pecuniary boots.
Universities have already played an important role in this movement, and will only continue to do so. That said, universities are still, in many ways, enclaves of privilege. Not everyone can go to college, and, given the enormous financial burden required to do so in the US, many students do not have time to participate in activism. The goal should hence be to extend BDS into all communities in civil society. No one should support Israel’s policies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism, and no corporation or institution should profit off of these crimes. In the words of a popular chant, “When Palestinians are oppressed, boycott, sanction, and divest!”
