Tag: Naomi Klein

No celebration of occupation: 1,500 artists and writers sign letter protesting Toronto Film Festival decision to spotlight Tel Aviv

14 September 2009

A protest at the Toronto International Film Festival has taken center stage after a group of artists and writers signed a letter of protest against the festival’s decision to spotlight the city of Tel Aviv. Activists say the TIFF spotlight plays into Israel’s attempt to improve its global image in the wake of the assault on the Gaza Strip and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land. Over 1,500 people have signed the letter, called “The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation,” including Jane Fonda, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte. We speak with journalist and author Naomi Klein, who helped draft the letter.

AMY GOODMAN: The Toronto International Film Festival is renowned as one of the world’s top cinematic events, the staging ground for the top films in any given year. But since the festival’s opening last week, a protest over the Israel-Palestine conflict has taken center stage. At issue is the festival’s decision to host a showcase on Israeli films from Tel Aviv for its inaugural City-to-City program. Palestinian activists say the TIFF spotlight plays into Israel’s attempt to improve its global image in the wake of the assault on the Gaza Strip and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land.

In the weeks before the festival, a group of artists and writers drafted a letter of protest against the Tel Aviv spotlight. The letter is called “The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation.” It says, in part, quote, “Whether intentionally or not, [TIFF] has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine…We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers…nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of…an apartheid regime,” unquote.

The declaration has attracted over 1,500 signatories, including actors Jane Fonda, Viggo Mortensen and Danny Glover, musician David Byrne, and the actor and musician Harry Belafonte. But it’s been met with scathing criticism and accusations of anti-Semitism. Supporters of the Israeli government have accused the Toronto Declaration members of a slew of false charges, including that they want to boycott Israeli films and even the entire festival itself.

Well, the journalist Naomi Klein was one the original authors of the Toronto Declaration. She joins us now in our firehouse studio.
Naomi, just lay out the whole conflict and how you got involved and what this declaration is.

NAOMI KLEIN: Absolutely, and I’ll just—thanks for having me back, Amy. I just want to make one tiny correction, which is that the letter doesn’t call Israel an apartheid state. It says that this is a state that many respected people have described as an apartheid state, like Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu. So it invokes them, and it quotes them.

And I think that’s an important distinction, because what we’re trying to pull out in this letter is that this is a controversial decision, and the people who have signed it are saying exactly what the declaration is called, that they don’t believe this is a time of celebration, that the forty-two-year occupation continues. But moreover, this is the year that began, in January, with bombs and missiles falling on Gaza, leading to the deaths of an estimated 1,400 people, many of them children. There’s been no accountability for those crimes. Israel continues to refuse to cooperate even with a basic UN fact-finding mission led by the respected South African judge Richard Goldstone.

So, we’re very clear: this is not about whether or not there are Israeli films at the Toronto International Film Festival. Every year there are. Of course there should be. They’re welcome. If the films are wonderful, they should win honors. What’s happening at the Toronto International Film Festival this year is that not films, but a city is being honored, the city of Tel Aviv. The mayor of Tel Aviv is in Toronto being feted, because this is seen as something that’s really good for Israeli tourism. So this is really departing from the realm of arts and entering the realm of politics and industry in this decision to grant this honor and this privilege to the city of Tel Aviv, so that’s what people started objecting to it. And it wasn’t us who started it; it was Palestinians who rejected to the granting of this special status, this honored status, for the state of Israel in this year’s festival.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why the Toronto International Film Festival is celebrating Tel Aviv.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is a very—this is a controversial question. Cameron Bailey, the co-director of the festival, says that it was entirely his decision, that there was no political interference, and we take him at his word. He’s very respected in the film community. But what we are saying is that, whether knowingly or not, this decision fits in with a campaign, a very aggressive campaign, that has been launched by Israel’s Foreign Ministry to use culture really as a weapon to distract attention from the occupation and from the allegations of war crimes in Gaza, but even before the Gaza attack.

And what’s interesting is that in—Toronto has been selected to test market something that is called “Brand Israel,” the rebranding of Israel. And this is because Toronto has really been a kind of a battleground. It has a very strong Palestinian community and solidarity community. It also has a very large and active Jewish community. And it’s been a battle zone. So, actually, Canada has more Israeli diplomats than any other country in the world, because this—including the United States, despite our relatively small population, because the Israeli government sees Canada as a very important battleground, as a very important testing ground. So Toronto has been selected to sort of test-drive this rebranding campaign for Israel.

And, you know, it’s not our imagination; it’s not a quiet conspiracy. We’ve read about this in the New York Times and Reuters reports. And I’ll just give you one example. A couple of months after the attack on Gaza, as we remember, this was really a turning point in terms of world opinion with regards to Israel. There were protests around the world. In London, there were an estimated 100,000 people in the streets condemning Israel’s actions. Opinion polls were showing a plummeting of support. And more and more people were starting to talk about using tactics like the tactics that were used against South Africa during the apartheid years, saying that there has to be strategies beyond just talk. And so, it was in this context that a top official in Israel’s Foreign Ministry said—and this was quoted in the New York Times—“We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater company exhibits. This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”

And so, this has been playing out at a lot of cultural festivals, and you’ve covered this on the show before. The Paris Book Fair, which is an enormously important book festival, had a special spotlight on Israel for its sixtieth birthday a couple of years ago. The Turin Book Fair also did. But this—and there were protests, but they were much quieter than what’s happened now in Toronto, and that’s because of Gaza, I would say. It’s because now, because of the year that we’re in, because of the continued impunity for Israeli war crimes, people are drawing a line and saying this is no time to celebrate.

AMY GOODMAN: Respond to Ivan Reitman, the film director, who said, “Film is essentially about telling global stories, of exploring the complexities and contradictions of the human condition. Any attempt to silence that conversation, to hijack the festival for any political agenda in the end, only serves to silence artistic voices.”

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, I would actually agree with that statement, but it isn’t us who did that. We didn’t politicize the festival. We objected to the politicization of the festival. We’re not trying to silence anyone, but simply voicing our opposition to the festival’s decision to grant Israel this special status.

You know, when—we looked into this whole rebranding strategy. Jewish Voices for Peace, the terrific anti-occupation, San Francisco-based organization, jvp.org, they’ve done a—produced this great document, a fact check of all the lies that are being spread about our campaign that I really urge people to look up. But they talk about—they have some documents talking about this rebranding campaign and the goals of it. And they quote a top PR official in Israel, saying that the real goal is to create “a narrative of normalcy”—that’s a quote—“a narrative of normalcy around Israel.” So, you can have a tiny little compartment where you can criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza or the expansion of settlements, but when it comes to every other part of Israeli society, we have to act like nothing is going on; we should, of course, celebrate Tel Aviv in a film festival and at book festivals, and so on, and promote Israeli tourism.

So what has happened with TIFF is that—TIFF is the film festival—that—

AMY GOODMAN: Toronto International Film—

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah—is that they convinced themselves that it was normal just to have a celebration for the city of Tel Aviv in this of all years. And when people objected to that, led by Palestinians, they turned around and said, “You’re politicizing the film festival,” because I think they have really convinced themselves that there is nothing abnormal about this decision. And we’re saying, if this were any other country, it would be so obvious that this was a political decision that amounts to taking sides in a conflict.

And to just give you one example, imagine that this year the Toronto International Film Festival had decided to have a cinematic spotlight, a cinematic homage, as Ha’aretz described this program, on the city of Colombo, with the full blessing of the Sri Lankan government, overwhelmingly Sinhalese-dominated, not a single Tamil director, just as there’s not a single Palestinian director in this spotlight. Now, Toronto has a huge population—a huge Tamil population, very active. They would have been protesting outside, because it would have been perceived as a sort of a whitewash in a year that the Sri Lankan government rightly stands accused of war crimes.

For some reason, Israel is supposed to be the exception, and we are accused of singling out Israel. But, in fact, what we’re doing—and when you look at the people who have signed our letter, like Howard Zinn, Harry Belafonte, Eve Ensler, these are people who have devoted their lives to applying human rights standards across the board. They’re not singling out Israel. What they’re saying is, we insist on applying the same standards that we apply to every other country to Israel, as well. And just as we wouldn’t celebrate another country that stands accused of war crimes, we don’t believe it’s apolitical to celebrate Israel.

And there’s been this insistence—and I don’t think it’s a misunderstanding; I think it’s a strategy—to turn this into a debate over censorship, because everybody hates censors. You know, everybody wants to celebrate world cinema and so on. Nobody is calling for the boycott of TIFF. Nobody is trying to silence any films. But it’s much easier to sort of try to derail the conversation and turn it into a censorship battle, and that’s what the quote you just read is trying to do very deliberately.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have these quotes. You have one of the signers of the Toronto Declaration, Viggo Mortensen, who says—let’s see if I can find the quote—“The statement does not promote the boycotting or censorship of any artist or movie from Israel or anywhere else. Those who have attacked the statement with that accusation are simply spreading misinformation and, unfortunately, continuing the ongoing successful distraction from the issue at hand: the Israeli government’s whitewashing of their illegal and inhumane actions inside and outside their legal national borders.”

And then you have the award-winning filmmaker Robert Lantos, who says, “We are not talking about the West Bank or the Golan Heights here[, but] the biggest population centre in the heart of Israel, where the first neighborhood was built in 1887. If that is…‘disputed’ territory, then Ms. Klein and her armchair storm troopers are clamouring for nothing short of the annihilation of the Jewish State. They are effectively Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s local fifth column.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, it’s been a fun week, I have to say. Yeah, that’s actually the most powerful man in Canadian film and media saying that. And it’s an extraordinary lie, on every level. I mean, there are so many lies in that statement.
The reason why we are—we’re not singling out Tel Aviv; the festival singled out Tel Aviv, and it’s acting as if this is an apolitical decision. When you read the program, it says Tel Aviv is the economic and cultural center of Israel and doesn’t mention occupation once, actually doesn’t mention Palestinians once. It’s just this sort of light, frothy, breezy discussion of a city filled with cafes. And it even says—there’s an interview with one of the filmmakers, who talks about Tel Aviv is a place where you can go when you don’t want to think about the conflict twenty-four/seven. So it’s really this idea that you can not—you can sort of lift Tel Aviv out of the context of Israel, out of the context of the conflict, and just turn it into this apolitical space. The Defense Ministry is located in Tel Aviv. Fighter jets, during the bombing of Gaza, departed from the air force, very close to Tel Aviv. And people protested, Israeli peace activists protested, at the airbase to try to reach the pilots and tell them, you know, “What you’re going—about to do is commit war crimes.” You can’t lift Tel Aviv out of Israel. And the idea that by objecting to the spotlight we’re objecting to the existence of Tel Aviv, which is what he’s saying, is just diversion on a mass scale.

And it’s very, very unfortunate, because, as you said, you know, people like Jane Fonda have signed the letter, and the most dishonest smear campaign has been launched, directed at them. There was a headline on a bunch of gossip sites, like TMZ and Perez Hilton, last week that literally said Jane Fonda calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, which is so absurd. This is somebody who’s supported a two-state solution her whole life. And this is not a misunderstanding, once again. This is about discrediting everyone who dares to speak out on Israel, who dares to reject this narrative of normalcy. And the truth really appears not to matter.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, we’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. Naomi Klein, journalist, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. She helped launch the “No Celebration of Occupation” protest at the Toronto International Film Festival that’s taking place as we speak. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. She has a cover story of Harper’s Magazine, as well as a big piece in The Guardian in Britain.

Naomi, you went to Gaza earlier this summer to witness the aftermath of the Israeli attack on Gaza. I wanted to play the comments of Jessica Montell, executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Last week the group released a report on the toll from the Gaza assault. The report backs Palestinian findings that over half the 1,400 Palestinian victims were civilians, including 240 children.

JESSICA MONTELL: The discrepancy between what the Israeli army has reported and what B’Tselem’s research has revealed is quite disturbing. The most blatant example, regarding children under the age of sixteen, the Israeli military has claimed that eighty-nine Palestinian children under sixteen were killed in Operation Cast Lead. B’Tselem visited families, took death certificates, testimonies, other information from the families on 240 Palestinian children under sixteen killed.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jessica Montell of B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group. Naomi, you recently came back from Gaza, and just before we go to your piece on Jews, blacks, and the, quote, “post-racial” presidency in Harper’s, I want to ask you about that trip.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, in many ways, this—for me, this is why I’m involved in this whole mess around the Toronto International Film Festival, because when I was in Gaza, I was so—I was so struck by the fact that Gazans felt that people had forgotten them.
And I was told something that really stayed with me. I was working with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. They were taking me around, and we had a discussion with a group of NGO leaders, women’s rights leaders. And one of the things that was said to me was that there was actually more hope during the attack, which seemed—than there was now, than there was in the aftermath, which just blindsided me. I mean, how could you say that? How could you say that there was more hope while bombs and missiles were falling, when those children were being killed, than there is now?

And the answer was that when Gazans turned on their televisions—you know, in any kind of war, people who can are watching television to try to get any kind of information they can, or listen to the radio—and in addition to the carnage that they were hearing about, there were also hearing reports of a world enraged. They were hearing about those protesters in London, in cities around the world, just rejecting Israel’s actions, not buying that this was a defensive war. They heard reports of women in my city, in Toronto, occupying the consul general’s office. Jewish women did this and stayed, and it was an incredible action. And so, what I was told by people who I spoke to in Gaza was that there was a feeling that if they could survive these horrific attacks, this would be the turning point, that people were seeing the lawlessness, the brutality of the occupation, and there would be a demand for a new era, that the siege on Gaza, for instance, would have to be lifted.

Here they were, six months later, now eight months later, and the illegal siege on Gaza continued. There was no justice on the way. I mean, Gaza was—it felt to me like a massive crime scene, but that was being tampered with because the police hadn’t shown up. And just the outrage that such brutality, such open brutality, hadn’t led to any kind of justice. And that’s really what struck with me.

So when I got back to the city where I live, Toronto, and found out that we were planning to throw a big party for the state of Israel at our premier cultural event, the Toronto International Film Festival, that’s what prompted me to get involved in this protest, not that I enjoy being called Ahmadinejad’s fifth column—I really don’t—but, you know, I feel a sort of moral responsibility, having witnessed this sense from so many people in Gaza that these terrible crimes that we just heard about from B’Tselem had been forgotten and that there was no justice.

And when governments fail, you know, when the international community fails, when the UN fails to bring justice, then people have to step in and fill that vacuum. And that’s happened in the past, and it’s going to happen again. And this is, I think, why there is such an incredible fear and backlash against attempts to put other kinds of pressure on the state of Israel, not to just leave it up to Obama to talk to Netanyahu and hope that it works out. You know, people are seeing the failure of just high-level moral suasion.
And we know that there are other tools in the diplomatic arsenal, besides just talk, you know, besides just Obama suggesting to Netanyahu that maybe he shouldn’t build more settlements and Netanyahu proceeding to ignore him. There’s billions in military aid. There are all of these honors that are given to countries and all of these relationships, and all of them are treated as—when it comes to Israel, as completely untouchable. And there is an international movement that’s growing that is saying, actually, they’re not untouchable. We need to use all of these levers in the case of Israel, just as we have the right to use them in the case of any other country that refuses to abide by international law.

The Tel Aviv party stops here

Naomi Klein | The Nation

9 September 2009

When I heard the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was holding a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv, I felt ashamed of Toronto, the city where I live. I thought immediately of Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist I met on a recent trip to Gaza. “We had more hope during the attacks,” she told me. “At least then we believed things would change.”

Al Shawa explained that while Israeli bombs rained down last December and January, Gazans were glued to their TVs. What they saw, in addition to the carnage, was a world rising up in outrage: global protests, as many as 100,000 on the streets of London, a group of Jewish women in Toronto occupying the Israeli Consulate. “People called it war crimes,” Al Shawa recalled. “We felt we were not alone in the world.” If Gazans could just survive, it seemed that their suffering could be the catalyst for change.

But today, Al Shawa said, that hope is a bitter memory. The international outrage has evaporated. Gaza has vanished from the news. And it seems that all those deaths–as many as 1,400–were not enough to bring justice. Indeed, Israel is refusing to cooperate even with a UN fact-finding mission headed by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone.

Last spring, while Goldstone’s mission was in Gaza gathering devastating testimony, the Toronto International Film Festival was making the final selections for its Tel Aviv spotlight, timed for the Israeli city’s hundredth birthday. There are many who would have us believe that there is no connection between Israel’s desire to avoid scrutiny for its actions in the occupied territories and the glittering Toronto premieres. I am sure that Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s co-director, believes that himself. He is wrong.

For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel’s defiance of international law. It’s no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant topics: film, arts, gay rights–things that underline commonalities between Israel and places like Paris, New York and Toronto. After the Gaza attack, as the protests rose, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, told the New York Times. “This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.” And hip, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, which has been celebrating its centennial with Israeli-sponsored “beach parties” in New York, Vienna and Copenhagen all summer long, is the best ambassador of all.

Toronto got an early taste of this new cultural mission. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that the “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Gissin pledged, “I’m confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has.

Let’s be clear: no one is claiming the Israeli government is secretly running TIFF’s Tel Aviv spotlight, whispering in Bailey’s ear about which films to program. The point is that the festival’s decision to give Israel pride of place, holding up Tel Aviv as a “young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity,” matches Israel’s stated propaganda goals to a T. Gal Uchovsky, one of the directors in the spotlight, is quoted in the festival catalog saying that Tel Aviv is “a haven [Israelis] can run away to when they want to forget about wars and the burdens of daily life.”

Partly in response, Udi Aloni, the wonderful Israeli filmmaker whose film Local Angel premiered at TIFF, sent a video message to the festival, challenging its programmers to resist political escapism and instead “go to the places where it’s hard to go.” It’s ironic that TIFF’s Tel Aviv programming is being called a spotlight, because celebrating that city in isolation–without looking at Gaza, without looking at what is on the other side of the towering concrete walls, barbed wire and checkpoints–actually obscures far more than it illuminates. There are some wonderful Israeli films included in the program. They deserve to be shown as a regular part of the festival, liberated from this highly politicized frame.

It was in this context that a small group of filmmakers, writers and activists, of which I was a part, drafted The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration Under Occupation (torontodeclaration.blogspot.com). It has been signed by the likes of Danny Glover, Viggo Mortensen, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, Ken Loach and more than a thousand others. Among them is revered Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, as well as many Israeli filmmakers.

The counterattacks–spearheaded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the extremist Jewish Defense League–have been at once predictable and inventive. The most frequently repeated claim is that the letter’s signatories are censors, calling for a boycott of the festival. In fact, many of the signatories have much-anticipated films at this year’s festival, and we are not boycotting it: we are objecting to the Tel Aviv spotlight portion of it. More inventive has been the assertion that by declining to celebrate Tel Aviv as just another cool metropolis, we are questioning the city’s “right to exist.” (The Republican actor Jon Voight even accused Jane Fonda of “aiding and abetting those who seek the destruction of Israel.”) The letter does no such thing. It is, instead, a simple message of solidarity, one that says: We don’t feel like partying with Israel this year. It is also a small way of saying to Mona Al Shawa and millions of other Palestinians living under occupation and siege that we have not forgotten them.

Naomi Klein shows you can boycott Israel without cutting off dialogue over Palestine

Cecilie Surasky | AlterNet

1 September 2009

Few global-justice campaigns are more polarizing, even explosive, than the effort to use international boycotts, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its 42-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Just ask Neve Gordon.

Recently, Gordon, head of the political science department at Ben-Gurion University and a longtime peace activist, published a wrenching op-ed in the Los Angeles Times endorsing the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

After initially opposing the tactic, he became convinced, he wrote, that outside pressure “is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.”

He was braced for a backlash, but nothing like what he has faced over the past few weeks — members of the Israeli Knesset from a range of political parties called for his immediate sacking, the education minister called his article “repugnant,” and his university president threw him under the bus saying, “Academic personalities who feel this way are invited to look for an academic and personal home elsewhere.” She then hinted that his statement might have been an act of treason.

Clearly, BDS, part of the so-called South Africa strategy, crosses a line in the sand for many who believe that putting economic pressure on Israel is necessarily anti-Jewish.

But for proponents, BDS is a proven, nonviolent tactic that can pressure Israel to abide by international law, making an impact where various government efforts have failed and failed miserably.

Although Palestinian Civil Society made the BDS call in 2005, it gained momentum after Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza this past December and January.

Now it is undeniably growing, particularly in the arts world. Respected writers such as John Berger, Eduardo Galeano and Adrienne Rich have all endorsed it; and Israeli film festivals have faced a string of boycotts.

Most recently, the Toronto International Film Festival’s announcement of a special “city-to-city” celebration of Tel Aviv is threatening to turn the second most important film festival in the world (after Cannes) into a site of angry protests.

One of the most high-profile figures to endorse the call for BDS is Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, who typically enjoys overflow crowds, extensive media coverage and brisk book sales when she goes on international book tours.

When it came to publishing her latest best-seller, The Shock Doctrine, in Hebrew and Arabic, Klein decided the political situation in Israel and Palestine called for an entirely different approach.

In opposition to Israel’s occupation, she chose not to sign a traditional book deal with advances and royalties. Instead, she donated the book to Andalus, a publishing house that works actively against the occupation. It is the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew, something its founder Yael Lerer describes as “publishing as an act of resistance.”

Klein and Lerer also set out to craft a book tour that would honor the Palestinian call for a cultural boycott of Israel while also showing that boycotts need not cut off much-needed communication and dialogue.

With this in mind, Klein and Lerer, used the tour to draw attention to the boycott and the Palestinian struggle and to spark an internal Israeli dialogue about boycott as a way to pressure Israel to live up to international law.

Last month in Tel Aviv, I sat down with Klein and Lerer to ask about the goals, meaning and nuts and bolts of implementing a cultural boycott, and also why Lerer, a Jewish Israeli, is telling the world, “Please, boycott me.”

Here are some excerpts from that interview. — Cecilie Surasky
* * *

Cecilie Surasky: What is the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions? Why are you supporting it?

Naomi Klein: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions: It’s a tactic with a very clear goal, to force Israel to comply with international law.

The call [for BDS] was made in 2005 by an extraordinarily broad range of Palestinian civil society groups, political parties, and trade unions. But it didn’t really start to gain an international profile until the Israeli attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

In the midst of the war, the writer John Berger sent out a letter, signed by many prominent artists, mostly European, declaring their support for the boycott strategy. When that letter surfaced, I was in the middle of writing The Shock Doctrine, and I made a personal decision at the time that when the book came out, I wouldn’t do what I had done with the Hebrew translations of my previous two books, which was to publish with a fairly traditional commercial publisher.

Instead, I planned to do what John Berger was calling for, which was to find a way to publish in Hebrew that directly supports groups that are working to end the occupation. So that’s how I met Yael, who is anything but a traditional Israeli publisher, and who has been outspoken in her support of BDS, at genuine professional cost.

Surasky: You must have grappled with this idea of a cultural boycott. Many critics would say that it shuts down communication rather than opening it up. What brought you to take this step?

Klein: Well, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli government openly uses culture as a military tool. Though Israeli officials believe they are winning the actual war for land, they also feel that the country suffers because most of what the world hears about the region on the news is about the conflict: militarization, lawlessness, the occupation and Gaza.

So the foreign ministry launched a campaign called “Israel Beyond the Conflict,” which involves using culture, film, books, the arts, tourism and academia to create all kinds of alliances between Western countries and the state of Israel, and to promote the image of a normal, happy country, rather than an aggressive occupying power. That’s why we are always hearing about film festivals and book fairs with a special “Israel spotlight.”

And so, even though in general I would totally agree that culture is positive — books are positive and film is positive and communication is wonderful — we have to understand that we are dealing with a state strategy to co-opt all of that to make a brutal occupation more palatable.

There are other things that also fall into that category: the state of Israel has an open strategy of enlisting gay and lesbian rights and feminism into the conflict, pitting Hamas’s fundamentalism against Israel’s supposed enlightened liberalism as another justification for collective punishment of Palestinians (never mind the ever-growing power and intolerance of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews). It’s a very sophisticated strategy.

That means we have to come up with equally sophisticated strategies that defend culture and human rights on the one hand, but that, on the other, reject all attempts to use our work and our values to whitewash the ugly reality of occupation and segregation.

Surasky: You’ve done a book tour unlike any other book tour. Yael Lerer, your company, Andalus, published the book in Hebrew. On the face of it, there’s an inherent contradiction in coming to Israel-Palestine and doing a book tour while supporting a boycott. Yet you’ve managed to make that work. Can you explain?

Yael Lerer: Andalus has been dealing with this contradiction from the very beginning. We publish Arab writers that oppose “normalization” of the occupation — like we do. And we always try to find ways to deal with these contradictions.

Actually, this is the first time we have had a book tour, because our normal way of dealing with these contradictions is to translate the books but not hold any celebrations. Our writers never come here. So here we had this challenge for the first time.

We made the big launch of the Hebrew edition not in Tel Aviv but in Haifa, at an Arab theater, where our hosts were not Israeli official institutions, but Palestinian minority institutions. (As you know, there is a minority of 20 percent Palestinian within Israel.)

But this event was not aimed only at this community — we invited Israeli Jews to come as well. One could read everywhere in Hebrew, “Naomi Klein is coming to Haifa, come and hear her.”

At the same time, it was important to have the first book events in East Jerusalem and Ramallah, with the Arabic edition, and that before all the book events, Naomi participated in a demonstration in Bi’lin against the separation wall.

So we spoke to the Israeli public at the events and through the Israeli media. The book is available in Hebrew. But, at the same time, we expressed a strong anti-normalization position. We were not doing it like everything is normal.

Klein: And that’s the point. This is not a boycott of Israelis. It’s a boycott of pretending that everything is normal in Israel, because that’s what cultural producers are usually invited to do.

There has been a huge amount of misrepresentation about the boycott campaign, claiming that it is a boycott of Israelis, or Jews, or that it’s anti-Semitic. We are trying to address those misconceptions with this tour. There are some clear rules: We’re not going to work with a state-sponsored book fair, for instance. I have refused invitations to come to Israel, to speak at state-sponsored film festivals and things like that.

But If I were boycotting Israelis, I wouldn’t be in Israel engaging with Israelis. I would have stayed home.

One of the things we are trying to draw out with this tour is that for foreigners like me, however you choose to come to Israel, you are making choices, and you are taking a side. It’s possible to pretend that you are not, but that’s only because of Israel’s success in making the conflict invisible inside a carefully constructed bubble.

In my book there is a long chapter about Israel and the construction of the homeland security state. It looks closely at the companies that build the high-tech walls and fences and checkpoints and that keep Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in a state of constant surveillance.

It is because of the effectiveness of the homeland security sector that it’s possible to come to cities like Tel Aviv and be almost completely oblivious to what is happening in Ramallah, in Gaza. This state is like a giant gated community. It has perfected the art of constructing a security bubble, and that is, in a sense, its brand.

It’s a brand that is sold to Diaspora Jews like me. It says: “We can keep you safe, we can create, in a sea of enemies, a bubble of safety for you to enjoy, to have a wonderful beach holiday, to go to film festivals and book festivals — even as we bomb Gaza, even as we turn the West Bank into a chain of mini-Bantustans, surrounded by walls and expanding settlements, and roads Palestinians don’t have access to.”

These are two sides of the same coin: the bubble of normalcy, the brutality of enclosure. So it is not a politically neutral act to partake of that bubble.

This is a very important dialogue to have, and that’s why it was so important for us to publish the book in Hebrew — both to get the information out there, and to challenge people who are misrepresenting this tactic as being a boycott of Jews or a boycott of Israelis. We’re not doing that at all.

I donated the royalties to Andalus so that I’m not personally profiting from this, and I chose to work with Andalus because it is an activist publisher with a clear anti-occupation stand.

If the book does well, then it helps them to continue their work. The boycott campaign doesn’t ask people not to come to Israel or the Occupied Territories to share ideas and art — it asks that we do so in clear opposition to occupation and discrimination.

Surasky: And how has the Israeli media responded to the first pro-boycott book tour?

Klein: Not well. One of the contradictions we’re facing is that we really wanted to spark a debate in Israel, because while BDS is being debated in Europe and Canada, it’s almost invisible inside Israel; there’s real censorship around this issue.

Virtually the only perspective you hear is, “Oh, they’re just a bunch of anti-Semites, they hate Israelis, they hate Jews” — very, very distorted.

So our idea was to make it harder to distort by putting some facts on the ground and saying: “Look, we’ve translated this book, I’m here in Israel. Let’s have some of that dialogue and communication Israel is supposedly so intent on defending.”

What we’re finding is a lot of interest from Israelis but a huge amount of resistance from the Israeli media to just having the debate — both about the role of the security sector in lobbying against peace and the possible role of a boycott movement in creating new lobbies for peace.

Once I made my boycott position clear in Ha’aretz, a lot of media canceled on us, which doesn’t say much for the spectrum of debate, but it’s not all that surprising either!

Surasky: What is the objective of this campaign? What would you like to see coming out of this?

Klein: It’s modeled on the South Africa strategy that the anti-apartheid struggle used against South Africa very successfully in the 1980s. It had academic boycotts, cultural boycotts, consumer boycotts.

But the really big key economic lever was universities and municipalities divesting from companies that were doing business in apartheid South Africa. The campaign started to be too costly for both South African firms and for Western multinationals with major investments in South Africa.

There was also a situation a little bit similar with Israel where you had a white minority in South Africa that very much saw itself as being part of Europe, of being part of the West. And suddenly they weren’t getting the American and European concerts they wanted, they weren’t getting the book fairs they wanted, and they didn’t like that.

So they put pressure on their government to make it stop, even though white South Africans felt self-righteous and enormously enraged by the boycotts and sanctions.

The hope is that these sorts of dynamics can work in Israel, because it is so important to the Israeli self-image that the country be seen as an honorary member of the E.U. or an adjunct to the United States.

When writers and artists stop participating in the Israeli government’s strategy to use culture to hide what’s on the other side of the concrete walls, Israelis may eventually decide that those walls are a liability and decide to take them down

Lerer: I completely agree. As an Israeli citizen, I need boycotts for two reasons.

First, I want Israelis to feel more strongly that everything is not normal. It means nothing for many self-identified left-wing Israelis to say, “It’s awful, what’s going on in Gaza and in Hebron,” while continuing their daily lives like everything is fine.

They go to the shows and they go to the concerts. These people are the elites in this country. These are the journalists that work at the newspapers. I want to move them. I want to shake these people up and make them understand they cannot continue their normal life when Palestinians in Qalqiliya [a West Bank city completely surrounded by the separation barrier] — only 15 minutes away from Tel Aviv — are in prison.

The second reason I need the boycott is because I lost the hope of creating change from within, which was what I tried to do as an activist for many years.

Twenty years ago, I could never have imagined this semi-apartheid situation. I care about the future in this place. I care about my fellow Israelis. I have a huge family here and many, many friends.

I know many people who don’t have any other passports and who don’t have any other options. I think that the solution for this place, the only possible future, is living together. Unfortunately, at this stage, I don’t see how this future can be achieved without international pressure.

And I think that boycott is a nonviolent tool that has already shown us that it can work. So I’m asking: Please boycott me.

Klein: I also think we need to be very clear: This is an extraordinarily asymmetrical conflict where the Israeli state is the biggest boycotter of all. The economy in Gaza and the West Bank has been utterly destroyed by closures.

Beyond shutting down the borders so producers in Gaza couldn’t get fruits and vegetables out, you had [over 200] factories in Gaza hit during the attack in late December and January. It was a systematic destruction of that economy to try to “teach Gaza a lesson” for having voted for Hamas. So, boycotts are happening.

The way I see BDS is that this is a tactic that we are resorting to because of Israeli impunity. There is an absolute unwillingness to apply international law to the Israeli state. Hamas has committed war crimes, but there is absolutely an international response to those crimes. [There is no response to Israeli war crimes, which are on an exponentially larger scale.]

We were just in Gaza. The thing that really struck me was the sense of shock among so many people that, even after the December/January attacks, even after hundreds of children were killed, there have been no actions taken by the international community to hold Israel accountable.

I mean, this was a display of utter impunity and disdain for international law, for the laws of war — which, by the way, were created in direct response to the Nazi atrocities of the second World War. And yet, not only are there no consequences for those crimes, but the illegal siege of Gaza is still on.

What BDS is saying is our governments have failed. The United Nations has failed. The so-called international community is a joke. We have to fill the vacuum.

I also believe this movement could be a game-changer in the United States. Let’s remember that a huge part of the success of the anti-apartheid struggle in the ’80s was due to popular education.

Once you said, “Our school or town should divest from apartheid South Africa,” you immediately had to have a big teach-in where you had to explain what apartheid was, and you had to make your case persuasively. And people were persuaded.

The Palestinian BDS call could play that kind of movement-building role today, giving people something concrete they can organize around in their schools and communities.

Whether he recognizes it or not, [President Barack] Obama needs the Palestinian struggle to be a popular, grassroots issue like the South African struggle was. He has taken very small steps to forge a new kind of deal with Israel, but he’s facing enormous push-back from the right. There has to be a counterpressure on Obama saying, “Actually, you’re not going far enough. Excuse me, no new settlements? How about no settlements, period?”

So the only hope of not just having him hold to this tentative position, but actually improving this position, is if there’s a popular movement that is very clear in its demands for Israel to abide by international law on all fronts, and that’s exactly what BDS is.

Surasky: How are Israelis on the left responding to the idea of a boycott?

Lerer: Something happened in the last war in Gaza in January. Five hundred and forty Israelis — including prominent academics, actors and filmmakers — signed a petition asking for international pressure on Israel.

One paragraph in this petition said that only boycott helped in the South Africa case. It was not yet a direct call for boycott, but it was a very important step. Now we are forming a new group of Israeli citizens who support the Palestinian call for boycott — Boycott From Within (BFW).

In 2005, we tried to arrange a group of artists to support the Palestinian call for academic and cultural boycott, and we failed. People told us, “How can we boycott ourselves? It is too difficult, it is too radical.” Many of these people have now signed the Gaza petition, and they are joining our new BFW group.

They understood that it’s not about boycotting ourselves, but about asking the international community, asking our fellow citizens everywhere in the world for action: Please help us by boycotting us.

Surasky: Let’s talk about specific examples of other people who are supporting this call.

Klein: Most artists do not know about the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, even though it comes from hundreds of Palestinian groups. We’re working within a context where Palestinian voices are virtually inaudible in the West.

So people will come to Israel to accept an award or agree to play a concert in Tel Aviv, and they don’t know that they are essentially crossing a picket line. Most don’t even know a call has been made for nonviolent resistance by a people who, let’s remember, have been utterly vilified for using any kind of armed resistance. I mean come on: If you reject armed resistance, and you reject boycotts and sanctions, what’s left? Online petitions? Do we really think that’s going to end the occupation?

But yes, some filmmakers who are politically active have decided not to participate in Israeli or Israeli-sponsored film festivals.

Ken Loach has pulled out of the Melbourne International Film Festival because it was sponsored by the Israeli government. The Canadian filmmaker John Greyson pulled a terrific film called Fig Trees from this year’s gay and lesbian film festival in Tel Aviv.

More recently, the Yes Men wrote a really thoughtful letter to the Jerusalem Film Festival explaining why they decided to pull their new film, The Yes Men Save the World, from the festival.

And now there is some talk of organizing a pro-BDS film festival in Ramallah, once again to boycott normalcy but to still get these films out there.

Surasky: I just read a criticism of BDS that said, “You’re not calling for a boycott of North Korea, or the United States for that matter because of Afghanistan or Iraq. So, that makes this anti-Semitic.” How do you address this criticism?

Klein: I’ve heard that too, but I’m not calling for a boycott of anyone. I am respecting a call for a boycott that has been made by hundreds of Palestinian groups.

I believe in the principle that people under oppressed circumstances have a right to self-determination. That’s at the heart of this struggle. This is a nonviolent tactic that has been selected by a broad range of civil society groups.

Iraqis, so far as I know, have not called for BDS tactics against the United States, though it would certainly be their right. And yet some people act as if I sort of made it up in my bedroom like, “who should I boycott today? Eenie-meenie-miney-mo, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, Israel!”

Once again, the only reason this can happen is because Palestinian voices are so effectively marginalized in the Western press.

By the way, most of the examples that are trotted out in these debates are examples where there are very clear state sanctions against these countries. So we’re not dealing with impunity as we are with Israel.

In this case, you need a grassroots project to fill in where governments have completely abdicated their responsibility to exert pressure on behalf of international law.

Lerer: But not only that — these countries don’t have these film festivals, and Madonna is not going to have a concert in North Korea.

The problem here is that the international community treats Israel like it was a normal, European, Western state. And this is the basis of the boycott call — the special relationship that Israeli universities have with European universities and with universities in the United States, which universities in Zimbabwe don’t have.

I do believe that Israel could not continue the occupation for one single day without the support of the United States and the European Union. The Western community supports the occupation. Like Naomi was saying, not doing something is the active thing.

Surasky: Some say, “This is not going to help. Israelis see themselves under siege, we Jews see ourselves under siege. It’s actually going to make Israelis less open to peace.”

Klein: It’s inevitable that, at least in the short term, it’s going to feed this Israeli feeling of being under siege.

It’s not rational, because in fact, what we’re dealing with is a context where Israel has been rewarded. If we look at these key years since the election of Hamas, when the siege on Gaza became utterly brutal and just undeniably illegal, trade with Israel has actually increased dramatically. There have been new special agreements launched with the European Union and Israel, with Latin America. Last year, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent.

Even though Israel is being rewarded for this criminality and is getting away with just extraordinary violence, the feeling among many Israelis of being under siege is increasing.

The question is, do we just cater to this irrationality? Because if we just cater to it, that means we do nothing, we voluntarily surrender the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal.

Israel, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, believes that the whole world is against it and that all the criticism it faces flows from anti-Semitism.

This is simply untrue, and as activists, we can no longer allow one nation’s victim complex to trump the very real victimization of the Palestinian people.

Oppose the state, not the people

Yotam Feldman | Ha’aretz

2 July 2009

Ramallah’s intellectual elite, foreigners and curious spectators gathered last Saturday at the Friends School in Ramallah to hear writer and political activist Naomi Klein lecture to a packed auditorium. Following a musical interlude by a string quintet, one of whose members is blind, Klein took the stage. She chose to speak – in Ramallah – about her Jewish roots.

“There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way,” she said. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us? … [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card … There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that says, ‘Never again to anyone.'”

It seems that during her brief visit, which began last Thursday night, Klein has not rested for a moment. Straight from the airport, she set out for a tour of Highway 443 that runs through the West Bank between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, connecting them to Modi’in and the adjacent Jewish settlements. She went on to the demonstration against the separation barrier at Bil’in, where there was a press conference on the civil suit in Quebec against Green Mount and Green Park, two Canadian companies that are providing construction services to the Jewish settlement of Upper Modi’in. In the evening she attended an event at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.

At the beginning of this week, Klein went to the Gaza Strip, where she interviewed residents. Wednesday she appeared at the Almidan Theatre in Haifa.

Since her 1999 book “No Logo” become an undisputed textbook of the anti-globalization movement, Klein, 38, has lectured at hundreds of meetings around the world. A celebrity journalist, political activist and commentator, she came to Israel to launch the Hebrew translation of her latest book, “The Shock Doctrine” (Andalus Publishing).

Klein, who supports an economic and cultural boycott of Israel as pressure to end the occupation in the territories, thought long and hard about publishing her book in Hebrew, as well as visiting Israel. She finally decided to issue the book with Andalus Publishing, which specializes in Arabic literature, and to contribute her royalties to the press. Klein and Andalus publisher Yael Lerer carefully planned Klein’s itinerary in Israel to avoid the impression that she supports institutions connected to the State of Israel and the Israeli economy.

“It certainly would have been a lot easier not to have come to Israel, and I wouldn’t have come had the Palestinian Boycott National Committee asked me not to,” said Klein in an interview before her arrival, at her Toronto home. “But I went to them with a proposal for the way I wanted to visit Israel and they were very open to it. It is important to me not to boycott Israelis but rather to boycott the normalization of Israel and the conflict.”

So why did you decide to come nevertheless?

“First of all, I deal in communications. It’s my profession and my passion and I naturally rebel against any kind of cutting off of channels of dialogue. I think that one of the most powerful tools of those who oppose the boycott is the argument that it is a boycott of Israelis. It’s true that some academics won’t agree to accept an article by an Israeli for publication in a journal. There aren’t many of them, and they make stupid decisions. This is not what the boycott committee has called for. The decision isn’t to boycott Israel but rather to oppose official relationships with Israeli institutions.

“I try to be consistent in the way I act in conflict areas – I don’t want to act in a normal way in a place that seems very abnormal to me. When I was in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, I didn’t go to cocktail parties and also in Iraq – no cocktail parties. The State of Israel is trying to show that everything is fine in its territory, that it’s possible to spend a nice vacation here or to be part of Western culture, very Western culture. I don’t want to be a part of that. I am waiting impatiently for the time when I will be able to come for a vacation or a normal book launch in Tel Aviv. But this is a privilege that should be reserved for all the inhabitants.”

Last April Klein attended on assignment for a magazine the Durban 2 conference in Geneva, which Israel and a number of Western countries boycotted because of the invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She is still upset by her experiences there.

“The most disturbing feeling,” she explains, “was the Jewish students’ lack of respect for the representatives from Africa and Asia who came to speak about issues like compensation for slavery and the rise of racism around the world. In their midst, Jewish students from France ran around in clown costumes and plastic noses to say ‘Durban is a joke.’ This was pure sabotage, which contributes to the tensions between Jews and blacks – Durban wasn’t just about Israel: The Durban Declaration acknowledged for the first time that the trans-Atlantic trade is a crime against humanity and that opened the way to compensation. The boycott of the conference created a vacuum that was filled, on the one hand, by Jewish students who wanted to sabotage the conference, and on the other, by Ahmadinejad – both of them were truly awful.”

Do you think it was necessary to allow Ahmadinejad to speak out so prominently at a conference against racism when he is calling for Israel’s destruction and denying the Holocaust?

“I think that silencing the Palestinians was a big part of the reason he got so much attention. He is the only one who acknowledged what happened this year – more Palestinians were killed in 2008 than in any year since 1948. The boycott seems to me to have been an irresponsible decision – the Jewish community unifies in an attempt to shut down a discussion of racism when there is a shocking rise in racism on the right in places like Austria, Italy, Switzerland, in the midst of an economic crisis, in conditions close to those in which fascism spread in all of Europe.”

Extreme neo-liberalism

In her new book, Klein analyzes how politicians and corporations have fomented neo-liberal change in various countries’ economic systems. She describes how countries have been thoroughly privatized, have almost entirely lifted government market intervention and have given a foothold to multinational companies, while stealing money from citizens and denying them basic services they had previously received from the government.

The economic crisis in the United States, which erupted less than a year after “The Shock Doctrine” was published, could have provided a dramatic final chapter for the book. In Klein’s opinion, it embodies one of the most extreme and absurd manifestations of neo-liberal reform.

“We are living in the most corrupt stage of neo-liberalism,” she says. “At least in the 1990s the idea was to take the state’s assets and privatize them so that the state would get money while private interests would run the services. What is happening in the United States is that they are using the crisis to transfer unprecedented amounts of public money into private hands. The banks aren’t providing any service to the public and they are still getting its money. In the economic crisis the debts were nationalized, the risks were nationalized and the profits were privatized. They are keeping the profitable part of the market ideology, but the moment it isn’t profitable they are throwing the laws out the window to save the banks that have failed. We see this when [United States President Barack] Obama says, ‘We don’t want to run the banks.’ What they should be doing is using their power to influence the banks to keep the jobs and the social services, but he isn’t doing this.”

Nevertheless, there also have been unexpected developments – a new president has been elected who has promised social responsibility.

“Yes, there’s a new president, and he was elected because he promised to regulate the financial sector. There is no doubt that the public wants the change – Obama promised that he would rescue not only Wall Street but also Main Street and that this would be a success from below, not from above. I think that things have improved in some areas, and of course it’s better than [Republican presidential candidate Senator John] McCain or [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”

However, Klein is also critical of Obama, and has reservations about the adoration for him that has swept up many people on the radical left in the United States and Canada.

“It’s strange,” she says. “I’m very glad that he’s the president and he is clearly an intelligent man, but the idea of falling in love with the most powerful man in the world, with the most powerful arsenal in the world, is incomprehensible to me. I can’t understand that people are still wearing the shirts with his image printed on them – stop it, the elections are over. It’s embarrassing.”

Are you concerned that identification with Obama will blunt criticism and popular protest against the rule of the corporations on the American left?

“That’s a pretty theoretical danger, almost an intellectual exercise. First you have to imagine that there is opposition and then you have to imagine that it is swallowed up. There is no such thing, and the nature of the political culture in the United States is that the elections swallow up everything. That wasn’t so before the Bush era. What was special about the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, and hasn’t recurred since, is that political movements demonstrated an independent position. The same people who demonstrated outside the Democratic convention also demonstrated outside the Republican convention.”

Israel’s politics and economy are woven though various chapters of Klein’s book. Stanley Fischer, the current governor of the Bank of Israel, was involved in his capacity at the International Monetary Fund in negotiations with various countries on the introduction of liberal reforms, and a number of the oligarchs who led the privatization of the Russian economy in the 1990s have found refuge in Israel.

In a chapter entitled “Losing the Peace Incentive,” Klein describes the Israeli economy during the past decade as a model of a liberal market that is not affected by a state of conflict, and even gains from it thanks to its military exports.

“The first collaboration of the economics department at the University of Chicago wasn’t with the Catholic University of Chile,” she says, “but rather with Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I look at Israel as an economic model that various countries in the world are heading toward. Because of its history, Israel needed extensive government involvement in issues like planning and land ownership during its first years. It is interesting to see that today, governments all over the world are realizing the disastrous results of neo-liberalism in creating the economic crisis.

“Meanwhile, here in Israel, this same ideology – Milton Friedman’s ideas about how the government isn’t the solution but rather always the problem – are flourishing.”

Klein believes that corruption is an integral part of neo-liberalism.

“The idea that corruption is a surprise when you deregulate is crazy,” she says. “The free market ideology that various countries have adopted believes that greed is the main growth engine for human development and social justice. Milton Friedman advised [Chilean leader Augusto] Pinochet: ‘The basic error is to try to do good with public money.’ In other words, Don’t try to be kind, don’t try to deal with poverty – just pursue your interest and that way you will be more successful than if you attempt to take care of other people. Therefore, maybe it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that even if you are a little corrupt and look out for yourself, by doing so you’re just propelling the growth engine of capitalism – that everyone should look out for his own interests.”

Do the new rich believe in the market ideology, or are they just plain greedy?

“I’m not sure it matters, because the ideology they choose is one that celebrates greed. In the United States there is an exaggerated need to believe in people’s goodwill, but I think it’s better to judge people by their deeds than to busy yourself speculating about their good intentions.”

Naomi Klein in Bil’in: boycott Israel

Mondoweiss

26 June 2009

Naomi Klein with Iyad Burnat of the Bil'in Popular Committee

Naomi Klein visited the West Bank village of Bil’in today to voice her support for the weekly demonstrations against the Separation Wall, and to reiterate her support for boycotting Israel. Her visit it timed with the release of her best selling book, The Shock Doctrine, in Israel/Palestine where it is being published in Arabic and Hebrew. During a press conference held under an olive tree near before the weekly protest, Klein explained her support for the boycott:

“It’s a boycott of Israeli institutions, it’s a boycott of the Israeli economy,” the Canadian writer told journalists as she joined a weekly demonstration against Israel’s controversial separation wall.

“Boycott is a tactic …we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa,”

“It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy,” the Canadian writer and activist said.

“When that is threatened, when the rock concerts don’t come, when the symphonies don’t come, when a film you really want to see doesn’t play at the Jerusalem film festival… then it starts to threaten the very idea of what the Israeli state is.”

The Ma’an News Agency reports that Klein was moved to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement because of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Ma’an also explained the creative approach Klein is taking to selling her book in Israel while honoring the boycott:

As a part of her push for a boycott, Klein is donating the royalties her the book to her local publisher, Andalus, which specializes in translating Arabic texts into Hebrew. She is also working closely with Palestine’s Boycott National Committee (BNC), and refusing to cooperate with Israeli state institutions during what she called an “unusual book tour.”

Klein discussed choosing the Andalus publishing house in her January 2009 article in the Nation. In that article she made the important point that the boycott increases debate rather than cutting it off. The difference is that it forces discussion of the issues that must be discussed, but are frequently ignored. She made a similar point today in explaining her book tour,

“We’re rejecting normalization,” Klein said of her Middle East visit, “We’re rejecting the idea that there can be apolitical cocktail parties and book signings while violence like this is taking place so nearby.”

The AFP reports that after the press conference Klein watched as the Israeli military attacked the weekly protest with tear gas. She observed: “‘This apartheid, this is absolutely a system of segregation,’ Klein said adding that Israeli troops would never crack down as violently against Jewish protesters.”