Why Support the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel?

Adrienne Rich

Dear All,

Last week, with initial hesitation but finally strong conviction, I endorsed the Call for a U.S. Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. I’d like to offer my reasons to friends, family and comrades. I have tried in fullest conscience to think this through.

My hesitation: I profoundly believe in the visible/invisible liberatory social power of creative and intellectual boundary-crossings. I’ve been educated by these all my life, and by centuries-long cross-conversations about human freedom, justice and power — also, the forces that try to silence them.

As an American Jew, over almost 30 years, I’ve joined with other concerned Jews in various kinds of coalition-building and anti-Occupation work. I’ve seen the kinds of organized efforts to stifle — in the US and elsewhere — critiques of Israel’s policies — the Occupation’s denial of Palestinian humanity, destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, the “settlements,” the state’s physical and psychological walls against dialogue — and the efforts to condemn any critiques as anti-Semitism. Along with other activists and writers I’ve been named on right-wing “shit-lists” as “Israel-hating” or “Jew-hating.” I have also seen attacks within American academia and media on Arab American, Muslim, Jewish scholars and teachers whose work critically explores the foundations and practices of Israeli state and society.

Until now, as a believer in boundary-crossings, I would not have endorsed a cultural and academic boycott. But Israel’s continuing, annihilative assaults in Gaza and the one-sided rationalizations for them have driven me to re-examine my thoughts about cultural exchanges. Israel’s blockading of information, compassionate aid, international witness and free cultural and scholarly expression has become extreme and morally stone-blind. Israeli Arab parties have been banned from the elections, Israeli Jewish dissidents arrested, Israeli youth imprisoned for conscientious refusal of military service. Academic institutions are surely only relative sites of power. But they are, in their funding and governance, implicated with state economic and military power. And US media, institutions and official policy have gone along with all this.

To boycott a repressive military state should not mean backing away from individuals struggling against the policies of that state. So, in continued solidarity with the Palestinian people’s long resistance, and also with those Israeli activists, teachers, students, artists, writers, intellectuals, journalists, refuseniks, feminists and others who oppose the means and ends of the Occupation, I have signed my name to this call.

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich is the author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry, including Diving into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language, The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970, Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995, Midnight Salvage, Fox, and The School Among the Ruins, as well as Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. Rich’s newest book of poems is Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2007). She will publish a new collection of essays, A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, in May 2009 with Norton.

SAPA: Workers to boycott Israeli ship

South African Transport & Allied Workers Union
South African Transport & Allied Workers Union

Durban dock workers are expected to refuse to off-load an Israeli ship as part of a week of action against “apartheid” Israel, Cosatu and the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) said on Tuesday.

Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven and PSC spokesperson Salim Vally said dock workers would refuse to off-load the ship arriving on Sunday, February 8, as part of a refusal to support oppression and exploitation across the globe.

SA Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) general secretary Randall Howard said the union’s members were committed to not handling Israeli goods.

Last year, Durban dock workers refused to off-load a shipment of arms from China that was destined for Zimbabwe.

The arms would have been used to “prop up the Mugabe regime and to intensify the repression against the Zimbabwean people”, Craven said.

“In 1963, just four years after the Anti-Apartheid Movement was formed, Danish dock workers refused to off-load a ship with South African goods.

“When the ship docked in Sweden, Swedish workers followed suit. Dock workers in Liverpool and, later, in the San Francisco Bay Area also refused to off-load South African goods,” he said.

Western Australian members of the Maritime Union of Australia supported the “campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions” against Israel and had called for a boycott of all Israeli vessels and all vessels bearing goods arriving from or going to Israel.

“This is the legacy and the tradition that South African dock workers have inherited, and it is a legacy they are determined to honour, by ensuring that South African ports of entry will not be used as transit points for goods bound for or emanating from certain dictatorial and oppressive states such as Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Israel.”

Cosatu called on other workers and unions across the globe to follow suit and to do all that is necessary to ensure that they boycott all goods to and from Israel until Palestine was free.

The week of action would include a protest in front of the South African Zionist Federation and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies in Johannesburg on Friday, a rally on the same day in Actonville on the East Rand and a picket in front of Parliament in Cape Town.

The protest would be addressed by Howard and former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, Craven said.

The rally on Friday would be addressed by Vally, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, South African Council of Churches general secretary Eddie Makue and Kasrils.

A protest at Durban harbour and a rally in Cape Town were planned for Sunday February 8, Craven said.

Tuam Attatra

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

1 February 2009

Palestinian man surveys the damage to his home.
Palestinian man surveys the damage to his home.

In Tuam, Attatra, on day one of Israel’s declared, and immediately-violated, ‘cease-fire’ an old woman stood beside the wreckage of her 2 room cement block home. The tracks of the bulldozer which felled her home were still deeply rutted, painfully visible.

The house next her to her pile of rubble was still standing, but gutted by fire. Mohammed Abu Khusah had 19 people depending on the house whose kitchen, along with all of the bottom floor rooms, was burnt out. Upstairs, too. Six rooms upstairs completely black-stained and ravaged by fire, five downstairs.

Clothes taken out of cupboards and drawers, strewn everywhere. Sniper holes: 2 in front room, 2 in back room, 2 in a room looking onto a wide open area below. Hebrew writing, message unknown but intent suspicious, on many of the walls.

On the other side of the old woman’s rubble, another pile of blocks which had been three 3 level homes, housing 18, 10, and 6 people each.

Behind those ruins, down a slight rise of rubble, Khitam Abdel Majid sat in the dirt, shawls draped around her, surrounded by the men of her family and by twisted metal support beams. She told me that their 3 story house was bulldozed on the 15th day, along with everyone inside. Pointing at a corner room with cloth draped over the gaping hole, she explained her family was sleeping in the room. “It’s cold in there, freezing all night.”

A hand-written sign poking out of the heaps of concrete and house entrails denotes Wael el Khaldi’s former house. His house sits amidst yet another wasteland of destroyed homes. Atop the rubble, a wheelchair belonging to a 23 year old member of el Khaldi’s family sits squashed. One of the Red Crescent medics holds the crushed prosthetic legs belonging to the same amputee.

The Red Crescent teams are scouring the ruins, taking stock of blown out windows. Facing the massive destruction and 10s of destroyed houses in this northwestern area of Gaza alone, counting shattered windows seems trite, irrelevant. But the RC is doing what it can to immediately alleviate the suffering of Palestinians who can at least still stay in their homes, internal damage and desecration aside. It is winter, and the nights are cold. A window covering makes the difference between completely frigid nights and moderately tolerable nights (without electricity or gas, no means of heating except with blankets, if these have not been burned or tarnished).

Accompanying the RC team, I see a number of houses in a short time. No time for in depth testimony taking, just a surface view and understanding of each family’s tragedy.

Mohammed Ali laments the loss of the trees lining his family’s house (trees, as ever, are an important theme in Palestinians’ narrative: life, continuity, providing nourishment). “It took 12 years to cultivate these trees. We had oranges, lemons, olives, dates…” And a nice tiled patio, too, all razed with the swat of a gargantuan military bulldozer.

The next door neighbour’s front wall is missing, bulldozed. His porch swing sits inside the open room, the support beams buckling and cupboards bare for all to see.

“Henna kan fi bab. Mish maujoud,” the owner tells me. [There was a door here. It’s gone. (so is the wall, obviously)].

While the roads are only dirt lanes, the houses are spacious in this neighbourhood, and well-spaced apart. The lift would be good here, near the sea, were it not for numerous factors: the siege, the wanton destruction… We stop at a lovely olive and light green washed stucco house, again lined with trees (papaya, lemon, orange, date) and tastefully landscaped. Above the smiling faces which greet us and try to sit us down for tea, a gaping hole much larger than the original window. Bullet holes less-tastefully puncture the finish.

A villa, a seeming mansion, sits off the road, top floor window blackened from the chemical fires which raged inside. Professor Mohammed Okasha stands in his ruined kitchen, a vast kitchen arranged western-style, as is most of the house. “All of our clothes were burned. All of them. Everything,” he laments the losses in his house.

We move through the house, the walls are a uniform dripping-soot-black, and he explains:

“Every year, I went to Britain, photocopied books by Israeli authors which had been translated from Hebrew into English. Avi Schlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe…”

Many houses later, less time, I’m only able to jot down notes, impressions.Many houses later, less time, I’m only able to jot down notes, impressions.

– 5 rooms damaged; missile, tank, and bulldozer. 25 people in the house, soft eyes. Background music is firing from Israeli gunboats off the coast. Importance of something as simple as plastic sheeting.

White phosphorus damage in al-Faraheen

31st January 2009

Footage of a house in Al Faraheen village, damaged during the recent Israeli war on the Gaza Strip. Video shows the upper floor of the house shelled and burnt. Remains of the shell casing – marked “155m M825E1” – apparently a projectile for deploying white phosphorous – and a substance suspected to be white phosphorous were filmed and collected by ISM volunteers.

el Amoudi homeless

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

“Bissa flora,” he said. “Taste it, it’s delicious!”

“It’s used for stomach ailments, and is extremely healthy.  Has vitamins A, B, C and D,” Osama translated for me.  The botanist sat by his tree, his bulldozed tree, and went on extolling its virtues.

“The fruit helps to regulate your pulse and is good for blood circulation,” he confided.

How did he have so much knowledge about this tree, I wondered, and asked.

“I’ve got a catalogue inside my… house,” he said, gesturing at the re-piled concrete blocks, a portion of those which had formerly made up his home.  They now stood like  a Lego house, stacked 4m by 4 m and just tall enough to stand within with a slight stoop.

Back to the trees.

“I introduced this tree in Gaza.  I first saw it in Brazil and later found one in Israel, which I bought. I used to buy many trees in Israel, and I used to import many specialized trees for sale in Gaza,” he said.

Brazil?

“I’ve traveled in over 40 countries, you know. Before the siege, before it was impossible to leave Gaza.”

Why? For work? Other?

“I love to travel.”

Fair enough, so do I.

While the rest of the homeless in the el Amoudi area, in the Beit Lahia region, somewhere between Jabaliya and Attatra, were still working at making the most of their Lego shelter –cleaning up remaining rubble and rubbish, and keen to tell me about their new, completely inadequate shelters which stand roughly where larger, furniture and memory-filled homes stood until Israel’s war on Gaza –Abu Bassam was more interested in fostering my knowledge of the Bissa Flora tree.

He insisted on opening the remaining fruit for me to sample, cutting the rough outer skin pumpkin-style and scooping out an apricot-tasting pulp for me to sample.  He was right, delicious.

Curious as to which block shelter was his, I finally coaxed him away from talk of trees.  “He’s my husband, this is our house,” the woman who’d been patiently standing beside me, now and then trying to pry me away from Abu Bassam.  And so we went to see their home.  “It was 300 square metres before.  There are 10 in our family, so it was a good size,” she said, pulling back a cloth serving as a door to reveal a few mattresses spread on the floor.

“I’m sleeping here with 3 of our kids.  The others are still staying with family.  We want to live here, but you see, it’s too small and not possible to cook here.”

Like the 25 other houses in the neighbourhood, Abu Bassam’s house was first hit by Apache and tank shelling, and then bulldozed, intentionally felled, his wife explained. “The UNRWA has promised to rebuild our houses, but we don’t know if or when that will happen.  Right now, we’re just hoping for tents.  The tents are terrible to live in, but we have nothing now. Nothing.”

Looking around the wasteland of rubble and Lego houses, it became apparent that this is true, and even that what Abu Bassam has been able to salvage for a block structure is larger than some of the others, some of which measure just 2m by 2 m, barely large enough for one person to lie down in, let alone a family.