Should unions boycott Israel?
Posted on Saturday 16 June, 2007
Filed Under Israel
Decisions by the National Union of Journalists and the University and College Union to boycott Israel have generated media coverage worldwide. Unison will shortly vote on the issue too.
David Cameron is in no doubt who the prime movers are, according to the Jerusalem Post. Speaking at a recent Conservative Friends of Israel meeting, the Tory leader declared himself ‘a Zionist’ and went on:
“Israel is a democratic country and these Trotskyists are treating Israel as some sort of pariah state,” Cameron said. “[They] may be a bunch of lunatics, but what they are doing is profoundly wrong and profoundly damaging,” he added.
Not all Trotskyists agree with the SWP-defined far left orthodoxy, of course. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty have long singled themselves out in this respect. And there’s an interesting article on the Socialist Party website, arguing that the boycott call is tactically wrong-headed.
Nevertheless, if I had been a delegate to the NUJ conference – which I have been on around half a dozen occasions in 19 years of membership – I’m not sure how I would have voted.
In general, my ethical position is that labour movement organisations, or any vertebrate self-respecting liberal come to that, should put whatever moral pressure they can on repressive regimes. And Israel is certainly that. Justification for backing the motion, then?
But it is scarcely uniquely repressive. It is not qualitatively worse than Saudi Arabia, Burma, Sudan or Zimbabwe, to mention some obvious examples. Certain of these countries are hailed in some quarters of the British left as anti-imperialist. For the sake of consistency alone, support for a boycott of one should entail support for a boycott of all of them.
Just by way of trying to think this one through, I’ve asked myself a few questions. First, does Zionism really ‘equal racism’ or even apartheid? No. I have read Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. None of the content struck me as an apologetic for racial supremacy.
Second, is Israel ‘a client state of US imperialism’? Again, there is no doubt that it pursues a policy of alliance with the US as a tactical expedient, precisely because it regards this as the best means of ensuring its survival. But it is not the only US ally in the Middle East. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are favoured by Washington too..
Third, is Israel ‘a settler state’? There are arguments that post-1948 Israel can be so described. But the intended parallel with South Africa falls down, not least because there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine for thousands of years.
Finally, what should socialists say? Throughout the long period that I considered myself a Trotskyist, I had a ready-made answer to that one off pat: socialist revolution in the Middle East would be led by the Arab working class, which would liberate Palestine and bring about a socialist republic with full rights for Jews and all national minorities. I even used to get up in meetings and argue that kind of stuff.
But it’s not much of a perspective to cling to at a time when the domination of ruling classes best described as theocratic, kleptocratic or both seems unshakeable throughout the Middle East, while Palestine itself descends into de facto civil war, and even Hamas fears losing its grip on the streets to forces even further on the Islamist scale.
Can anybody offer a guide for the perplexed?
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Comments
257 Responses to “Should unions boycott Israel?”
Paul wrote:
By the way, crusading athiesm, like the kind you support, has been responsible for an awful lot of deaths too,
I have never crusaded for athiesm, and as you constantly, and rather crudely, misrepresent most of my utterances, I see little point in discussing these complex issues with you or continuing any meaningful discussion on this topic here.
PS: I am more than happy to debate these points at HP or my own feeble blog, but it is unfair on Dave to continue such an acrimonious exchange on his blog.
Dave, give Paul a narrow points victory and close the thread
‘if you think that associating the Palestinian Solidarity campaign with racists like Atzmon, Israel Shamir and Paul Eisen is worth while, please say so’
a] PSC has made clear it has never had anything to do with any of these three, nor they with it
b] Atzmon has claimed that the reason why the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has not had greater success, is that there are too many Jews in it who act as ‘gatekeepers’ and dilute its line…
c] the first to blow the whistle on Shamir was the Palestinian blog ‘Electronic Intifada’.
How come Rance and Greenstein think the PSC has been infiltrated by anti semites and holocaust deniers then?
I’m not sure if this statement by the U.C.U Left has been posted in this thread already.
It clarifies a few points about what’s going on in the U.C.U: -
http://www.uculeft.devisland.net/israel-boycott-statement.html
We are opposed to any attempt to go over the heads of the democratically elected bodies of the union
To the members?
Once again, the “reasonable” wing of the anti-Israeli tendency(ie those who are not actually anti-semites) fail to answer the questions put to them -in partiular those pertaining to israel’s right to exist. andy Newman and Stephen marks would do well to adderess that issue, if they are not to be desdcribed as appeasers of anti-semites.
By me. Personally.