While Israel and its supporters become wildly hysterical over calls by Jews and non-Jews alike to boycott, divest and impose sanctions on Israel for its continued and well-documented human rights abuses, rampant discrimination even within its borders, and alleged commission of war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere — calling these calls anti-Semitic, Israel and its supporters have a long-standing history of boycotting Palestinian and Arab institutions, products, and even individuals (e.g. Gazans, as Levy explains). Meanwhile, while those boycotts include the withholding of humanitarian aid and by doing so harm millions of Palestinians in a very tangible and physical way, the BDS calls against Israel (the boycott of the boycotter) and those who invest in it are purposefully non-violent and hold the potential to harm Israelis and investors in the occupation only economically.

Levy explains:

Most people here are appalled at the notion that anybody beyond Israel’s borders would think to boycott their country, products or universities. Boycotts, after all, are viewed in Israel as illegitimate. Anyone who calls for such a step is perceived as an anti-Semite and Israel-hater who is undermining the state’s very right to exist. In Israel itself, those who call for a boycott are branded as traitors and heretics. The notion that a boycott, limited as it may be, is likely to convince Israel to change its ways – and for its own benefit – is not tolerated here.

It would be possible to identify with these intolerant reactions were it not for the fact that Israel itself is one of the world’s prolific boycotters. Not only does it boycott, it preaches to others, at times even forces others, to follow in tow. Israel has imposed a cultural, academic, political, economic and military boycott on the territories. At the same time, almost no one here utters a dissenting word questioning the legitimacy of these boycotts. Yet the thought of boycotting the boycotter? Now that’s inconceivable.

The most brutal, naked boycott is, of course, the siege on Gaza and the boycott of Hamas. At Israel’s behest, nearly all Western countries signed onto the boycott with inexplicable alacrity. This is not just a siege that has left Gaza in a state of shortage for three years. Nor is it just a complete (and foolish ) boycott of Hamas, save for the discussions over abducted soldier Gilad Shalit. It’s a series of cultural, academic, humanitarian and economic boycotts. Israel threatens nearly every diplomat who seeks to enter Gaza to see firsthand the unbearable sights.

In addition, Israel bars entry to anyone who wishes to lend humanitarian aid. We should note that the boycott isn’t just against Hamas, but against all Gaza, everyone who lives there. The convoy of ships that will soon sail from Europe to try to break the siege will carry thousands of tons of construction material, prefab houses and medicine. Israel has announced that it plans to stop the vessels. A boycott is a boycott.

Doctors, professors, artists, jurists, intellectuals, economists, engineers – none of them are permitted to enter Gaza. This is a complete boycott that bears the tag “Made in Israel.” Those who speak about immoral and ineffective boycotts do so without batting an eye when it comes to Gaza.

Israel is also urging the world to boycott Iran.

Anyone who is suspected of supporting the Palestinians or expressing concern for their lot is boycotted and expelled. This group includes a clown who came to organize a conference; a peace activist who was due to appear at a symposium; and scientists, artists and intellectuals who arouse suspicions that they back the Palestinian cause. This is a cultural and academic boycott on all counts, the type of boycott that we reject when it is used against us.

Yet the anti-boycott country’s list of boycotted parties does not end there. Even a Jewish-American organization like J Street, which defines itself as pro-Israel, has felt the long arm of the Israeli boycott. It is permissible to boycott J Street because it champions peace, but we can’t tolerate a boycott of products made in settlements that were built on usurped land.

As long as the Israelis don’t pay any price, there won’t be a change.

This is a legitimate, moral position. It is no less legitimate or moral than those who claim that a boycott is an immoral, ineffective tool while exercising that same option against others. So you oppose a boycott against Israel? Then let’s first do away with all the boycotts we have imposed ourselves.”

Emily gives a summary of Bil'in's legal actions under a poster of Bassem Abu Rahma, killed at a demo one year ago, April 17.

By Emily Schaeffer

Some of us have become so used to West Bank demonstrations meaning major Israeli army presence, and, typically, the use of weapons, that we have forgotten what demonstrations in a democracy look like. We’ve forgotten that a protest against oppressive working conditions in downtown New York City, or against oppressive abortion policies in Fredericton, Canada, or against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in cities including London, Sydney, Paris, San Francisco and Toronto — means police presence only when the protests become so large that they overcrowd public spaces and need direction, when they damage city property, or (get this) when the protesters themselves might be at risk from onlookers with opposing views.

And so we attend demonstration after demonstration — from Bil’in to Al-Ma’asara to Hebron to Nabi Salah, and more — and we are enraged time and time again by the unjustified, disproportionate, immoral response of the army and border police.

But we hardly ever ask ourselves: why are they even here?

Ambulance evacuates Eymad Rezqa, hit in the head with a tear gas canister and is still in hospital.

What would happen if the army didn’t show up one Friday in Bil’in, for instance? If the army hadn’t shown up on Friday, April 23, at the 5th Annual Conference Demonstration, then Eymad Rezqa (also spelled Imad Rizka, dedicated Palestinian-Israeli activist) would not have been shot in the head with a tear gas canister and rushed to surgery; 2 Italian demonstrators, one Israeli activist, 2 Bil’in residents, a Palestinian woman from Bethlehem and a Palestinian journalist would not have been lightly injured by direct shots or shrapnel of tear gas and shock grenade canisters, and as it is rumored from a new type of weapon; 3 Israelis, one Mexican citizen, and one Palestinian would not have been arrested and detained for nearly 12 hours, released on the condition that they post bail and stay out of Bil’in and Ni’lin for 15 days; hundreds would not have suffered from the horrible feeling of tear gas inhalation (which studies show may damage reproductive organs, among other risks); and several pre-teens and teens might not have risked being caught by army cameras today only to be arrested out of their beds tomorrow and called in for interrogation for stone-throwing, likely to be given months of jail time for an offense that in most countries would bring a fine or perhaps a few weeks’ community service.

Masses of tear gas and shock grenades cover the demonstrators by the wall in Bi'lin.

The army has repeatedly claimed that their use of dispersal tactics (that have proven lethal) against the demonstrators is based on 3 main factors: 1) the demonstrations in and of themselves are illegal, as according to Israeli military orders a gathering of more than 10 people with a political or ideological purpose is an illegal assembly (and as of the latest military order it is illegal for Israelis to be within 200 meters of the wall); 2) they are responding to the dangerous stone-throwing by demonstrators, and in fact several soldiers and border police have been injured by these stones; and, 3) they are protecting the wall.

So technically when 10 Palestinians sit in a courtyard and discuss over tea the fact that they couldn’t access their fields yesterday they are committing an illegal act and should be tear gassed and/or arrested. Why does this sound logical to any thinking person? But let’s bring it to the more common example — the demonstration. Popular protest exists all over the world. Occupation is a scenario that logically leads to protest, and in fact under international law it is fully justified. Now Israel can compare itself to plenty of brutal occupations and dictatorships and perhaps still come out on top; but that’s not what Israel proclaims itself to be. Rather, Israel claims to be a democracy with the most moral army and occupation in the world. Under that paradigm, how can we reconcile the suppression of popular protest? Moreover, how can we justify it for 43 years and counting?

As for stone-throwing, we can all have mixed feelings about it, and for some it is the one contradiction to our repeated claims of a nonviolent movement. Still, if the army weren’t there, what reason would there be to throw stones? And if stones were thrown — because sometimes kids, everywhere in the world, pick up stones and throw them — who would they harm?

Now we come to the wall. Protecting state property — or military property. The army claims to the New York Times that if it didn’t show up, the fence/wall would be destroyed.

Rioters hurl rocks, Molotov cocktails and burning tires at defense forces and the security fence,’ the military said in a statement when asked why it had taken to arresting village leaders in the middle of the night. ‘Since the beginning of 2008, about 170 members of the defense forces have been injured in these villages,’ it added, including three soldiers who were so badly hurt they could no longer serve in the army. It also said that at Bilin itself, some $60,000 worth of damage had been done to the barrier in the past year and a half.”

Let’s put aside the fact that in Bil’in this wall is not only illegal under international law (because it illegally annexes occupied territory and what is more, for illegal settlements), but it is also illegal according to the High Court’s September 2007 ruling. Regardless, what the army is saying is that Palestinian lives (and those of their Israeli and international supporters) are worth risking in order to protect a set of metal objects (illegally placed there).

Now, one can imagine that the police would break up a group of people vandalizing or otherwise damaging a city hall, a museum building, a set of train tracks, or even private property in most democratic nations. But would they fire high velocity tear gas canisters directly at those people? Would they shoot rubber bullets? Live ammunition? Is this a proportionate — and dare I say — moral response?

Abdullah Abu Rahma answered the Israeli Army in that same New York Times article.

They want to destroy our movement because it is nonviolent,” he said. He added that some villagers might have tried, out of frustration, to cut through the fence since the court had ordered it moved and nothing had happened. But that is not the essence of the popular movement that he has helped lead.

‘We need our land,’ he told his visitors. ‘It is how we make our living. Our message to the world is that this wall is destroying our lives, and the occupation wants to kill our struggle.”

And now I will ask a different question. What would the demonstrators do if the army didn’t show up? One can imagine that at least the first few times the demonstration would have as much vigor and passion as any other day. Flags would be waved, chants chanted, brilliant and creative references would be made, and the media would capture them. But would demonstrators feel that their audience was missing? Would the media continue to show up week after week for a bloodless story in a culture of media sensationalism? Would the same frustration behind the stone-throwing be channeled somewhere we could support less?

Luma, Abdullah Abu Rahma's daughter, distributes posters in solidarity with father in jail for participation in Bil'in's non-violent movement.

Or would the demonstrations grow in numbers? Would their messages and tactics become more creative and attention-drawing? Would leaders currently jailed for organizing nonviolent resistance be free to start and expand new political and social movements? Would villages no longer terrorized by night arrest raids have the freedom to focus on their daily lives and on resisting the rest of the oppressive occupation policies? Is this perhaps the real reason why the army shows up?

There are those who come to demonstrations once or twice and conclude that both sides need each other in order to feel at the end of the day that power and persistence were demonstrated. But I dare say that the nonviolent resistance does not need the army; rather, the army needs to violently respond to the nonviolent resistance in order to attempt to contain it, in order to report back home (a few dozen km away) and to the world that Palestinians must be violently reproached, in order to experiment with new weapons for the world’s weapons industry, and in order to use enough weapons to maintain the same budget demands from Israel and its foreign aid suppliers year after year.

The good news is that the Palestinian nonviolent resistance apparently cannot be contained, even in the face of such extreme violence. But it is taking its toll. And I only hope that we can all shake out of what has become a normal scenario for us, and re-sensitize ourselves to this completely abnormal, illogical and unjustified military response to popular protest, in order to bring this reality to Israelis and to the world.

Women in solidarity: Luma (Abduallah's daughter), MEP (former VP) Luisa Morgantini, wife of Adib (another Bil'in prisoner), friend.

When I was a little girl, I sent my allowance to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel in the name of family members. I was told and passed on stories about an underdog that after centuries of persecution had finally found refuge in its birthplace only to face a group of greedy, violent people that had homes on two continents but insisted on denying my people this tiny strip of land. More anti-Semitism, I thought.

It took only a few months of living in Israel as an undergraduate student in the late 1990s to discover the lies – or at least key missing information – from my childhood. When I dug further, I also found out how much these rewritings of history and of the present had taken the world captive and rendered some of the most politically and economically powerful world nations Israel’s great enablers. As long as relations with Israel are normalized, its actions go unchecked, and no one really asks about the details, about “Who Profits?”. After all, support for Israel is sold to the general public as a means of supporting the only democracy in the Middle East.

But this is not a democracy; it is a nation and a nation’s people spoiled (in both senses of the word) by a separate and unequal domestic regime and an occupation that has become a 43 year-old violent apartheid. And while we Israelis accept restraints even on our own freedoms, we reap the benefits of this regime every day. Thanks to the multi-billion dollar version of my childhood tree-planting – foreign aid, military investments, and the telecommunications industry, among others – our economy stood strong while much of the world faced a recession. Ingenious inventions like the separation wall and bypass roads have meant that not only do we barely think about violent attacks within Israel but we don’t even have to see our neighbors who no longer can work or shop or socialize in our cities and towns. And we hardly worry about sending our children to the army now that they can fight remote-control wars that we only have to think about if we choose to open the paper or watch the news.

I recently met a young, hip Tel Aviv couple on the street and told them about Bil’in, and they simply had no idea that there even were occupied territories. In fact, they were fairly certain that there were just Arabs who were occupying Jewish land. And why would they know differently? At the height of Bil’in’s popularity, as it celebrates 5 years of non-violent resistance, watches the wall begin to move and return major portions of land lost, and finally has earned the support of activists, politicians, authors and every day professionals around the world, the short Israeli news broadcasts of the demonstration last Friday highlighted only the shaking down of the current (illegal) wall and the savvy army that was there to stop the protesters, once again, in a “violent clash.” The fact that these “riotous” Palestinians were joined, once again, by hundreds of Israelis and internationals – the very fact that Israelis most want to ignore, but must hear – went virtually unmentioned.

And if Israelis do take notice of the truth, we feel justified. The Zionist project has been consistent in telling the world that all Jews are a part of Israel, and then when opposition to Israel’s policies conflates Jews with Israel they use anti-Semitism as justification for maintaining them. We are raised to believe that only we can understand ourselves, only we can free ourselves and only we will keep ourselves safe.

And so the natural reaction to BDS is that it is another attempt to isolate and persecute Jews. It is a very convenient, self-protective strategy that renders all criticism of Israel tainted, and BDS one of its harshest forms. But this attitude cannot continue. And as support for BDS grows, it will not continue.

As more and more people come to realize that BDS is simply a non-violent, creative, temporary tool for highlighting what is really happening within Israel and in the territories it occupies and colonizes with settlements, Israelis will have to start looking inside and ask if maybe all these citizens from countries that they fantasize about emulating (from the US to the UK to Europe) don’t have a point.

The Palestinian call for BDS is not a campaign to bring Israel to its end, but rather a campaign to force Israel to uphold its commitments under international law and the moral and legal standards of a real democracy. It does not claim that Israel is the only country perpetuating these types of violations and crimes, but it is calling Israel’s bluff – if you purport to adhere to the standards of a healthy western democracy, then you cannot benefit from the justification that your circumstances warrant an exemption, or that in your neighboring countries far worse atrocities take place. And its message is that once you become what you preach, normalized relations will resume.

The Palestinian call for BDS is the call of intelligent, non-violent advocates for human rights, social justice, and self-determination that realize that as long as “business as usual” continues with Israel, Israelis will live in a worldwide-sponsored denial of a truth that contradicts even the most basic morals of Judaism and much of the ideals upon which Israel was supposedly founded. And more importantly, the Palestinian people will suffer decades more of displacement, harassment, economic deprivation, and the annihilation of a culture no less rich and established in this same tiny piece of land. The harm that BDS may cause to the Israeli economy – and by extension to the Palestinian economy, as well – will be small and short-term in comparison to the injustices inflicted on the Palestinians (and on Israeli democracy) for decades.

BDS is the start of a conversation that takes place in reality. BDS is a chance to force negotiations for a just solution that are balanced and honest. BDS is the beginning of an Israeli awakening to what the last century has brought, an acceptance of responsibility by the world of funders, investors and consumers that help make much of it possible, and a chance to create a place that Jews, Palestinians and world citizens alike can support. So let’s wake up and start talking.