Working The Field

6th June 2010

Post reblogged from Second Balcony with 2 notes

For The Record

secondbalcony:

I’m against a blanket boycott against Israel but I support reactive sanctions. In case you wanted an Israeli vantage point. Anyway, back to my regular scheduled programming of semiotics and preciousness.

I support sanctions against Israel (general and strategic) but I oppose voluntarism and have some pretenses of analytic lucidity. The problem with the BDS movement is that the analogy between Israel and apartheid South Africa although it more-or-less captures the similarity in treatment of the Palestinians and non-white South Africans— political strategies should not derive solely from moral analogies but from informed analysis of concrete political situations which includes one’s own political praxis. In other words, what the movement needs is rational criticism. In the South African context international sanctions helped to hasten the demise of apartheid because they converged with the interests of South Africa’s capitalist class which was dissatisfied by 1) the costs of maintaining two separate governments based on racial classification 2) a system of racial privilege that created economic inefficiencies by artificially raising the cost of hiring white labor while suppressing the total quantity of skilled labor and 3) threatened their access to foreign capital which was necessary for the country’s capital intensive diamond industry (this is the most direct link with the anti-apartheid movement but it is unlikely to be replicated by the Palestinian BDS movement).

I’m not going to go in too hard on economic history and political science but Israel has managed some of the crucial political-economic contradictions inherent in a colonial project by terminating its reliance on Palestinian labor, through its relationship with the US (which has been crucial in helping Israel navigate its recessions—an important fact that is often overlooked in favor of discussing the US-Israel military relationship), by subsidizing high-tech industry heavily and through creating robust and collaborative economic relationships with the EU.

Finally, there’s a cultural logic to our politics that favors BDS explicitly because its non-violent. This is yet another conflation of moral and rational analysis. There isn’t much in the particular conjuncture or the general situation which I think makes BDS likely to be especially effective. It’s humble effects should discourage moralizing endorsements of BDS tactics. In addition to being tied to the ability to reproduce moral criticism or bring attention to the suffering of the Palestinians solidarity should be informed by a close reading of the power-dynamics and relation of forces in Palestine/Israel. This is necessary in order to avoid confusion, exhaustion and irrelevance.  At the very least, BDS should open itself up to critique from new angles and field some uncomfortable questions about its own praxis as well as Hamas, the Hezbollah and the anti-Wall movement.      

Source: secondbalcony