En liten hilsen til Bård Flaarønning, Tore Sandvik og flere som mener at boikott og dialog er motsatte størrelser. Dette er fra Naomi Kleins glitrende oppfordring til boikott av Israel i The Guardian:

“Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.”

This one I’ll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus’s work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don’t I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel’s Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: “As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company.”

Ramsey says his decision wasn’t political; he just didn’t want to lose customers. “We can’t afford to lose any of our clients,” he explains, “so it was purely commercially defensive.”

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it’s precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

 

Klein har rett. Blodig urettferdighet avsluttes ikke ved å invitere palestinske og israelske barn til å spille fotball sammen – ikke så lenge israelerne drar hjem til sine tanks og sin nærmest komisk lange værneplikt, og palestinerne reiser hjem til arbeidsløshet i den innesperrede ghetto-tilværelsen uten framtidshåp og med en talibanisert regjering. Blodig urettferdighet avsluttes ved å tvinge undertrykkerne til å stoppe.

En kulturell og akademisk boikott av israel er ikke boikott av israelere – det er boikott av en stat.