In April, the United Methodist Church’s General Assembly will vote on whether or not to divest its holdings in companies that do business with Israel.
This is not the only campaign of its kind. Hundreds of efforts throughout the world seek to end investment in Israel or terminate relationships between local universities and Israeli universities.
These efforts have one thing in common — belief that Israel’s behavior in the West Bank/Gaza is so heinous that pressure has to be applied directly to Israel’s people, all of them.
It is argued that crippling the Israeli economy, the goal of divestment, will cause all Israelis to suffer and lead them to rise against the occupation to protect their jobs, incomes, or profits. (Funny how economic pressure does not cause suffering Palestinians in Gaza to turn on Hamas, however.)
Proponents of divestment argue that, like South African apartheid, the occupation can be brought down by economic pressure. The analogy, however, is specious and not because there is anything good to say about the occupation. There isn’t.
It has been in place for 41 years and there is little evidence it will end soon.
Settlements continue being expanded. Checkpoints — obstacles to movement not on the Israeli-Palestinian border but deep inside the West Bank — keep going up despite promises to take them down. Innocent Palestinians keep dying as collateral victims of Israeli retaliations or targeted assassinations.
The occupation has been a curse on Palestinians and Israelis both. The best thing that could happen for both peoples would be if it ended tomorrow.
More than policies
I could, at this point, discuss all the suffering Israelis have experienced at the hands of the Palestinians since peace talks broke down in the summer of 2000. I won’t because the issue here is the actions of the Israelis, not of the Palestinians.
don’t want to create one of those hokey balance sheets where we measure one side’s suffering against the others. And, frankly, I do not use the same yardstick to judge the actions of the Israeli government and Palestinian terrorists.
It’s not the Palestinian Authority that is inflicting terror on Israelis but terrorists, suicide bombers, and thugs. Forgive me, if I will not judge the state of Israel by the same standard I apply to Palestinian Islamic Jihad or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I hope I never do.
However, it is fair to compare Israel’s actions to those of the United Methodist Church’s own country: the United States.
Most of the world, including a clear majority of Americans, thinks that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a disaster, was unjustified, and has caused untold suffering among Iraq’s people.
Some make the case, and it’s not hard to make, that the U.S. invasion of Iraq essentially destroyed that country and that it will be many, many years before Iraq is reconstituted as a nation in which its people live with any sense of security.
Additionally, the international community made its opposition to the U.S. invasion clear before it began. The United States government was indifferent to world opinion. The war began and it continues. Like the Israeli occupation, there are few signs that it will end soon.
Does that mean that American citizens and businesses should be boycotted? Does that mean that righteous EU countries should divest from the United States to show opposition to the war? Should all Americans be punished because our policies in the Middle East are so destructive?
Frankly, I have never heard that proposed by anyone. I certainly have never heard an American say that we should all suffer because we elected the presidents and the Congresses that gave us Iraq or Vietnam or a dozen coups in Latin America.
The United States and its people are more than the total of its various policies. So is Israel. Even in countries where we choose our leaders, ordinary people should not be punished for the sins of their government, except in very rare cases, like the case of South Africa.
There, racism-based apartheid permeated every aspect of South African life. Not one city, village, or township was not permeated with it.
A terrible idea
South Africa was called the “apartheid regime,” because that is what it was. There was no escaping it. Without apartheid, there was no South African state. The collapse of apartheid produced an entirely new state.
That is not the case of the occupation and Israel. There is an Israel, a breathing, legitimate state independent of the occupation. Not only would Israel not collapse if the occupation ended, it would be infinitely better off.
Israel is a lot more than the occupation. It is the nation of the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Tel Aviv, and the kibbutzim, not just the settlements and “Jewish Settlers Only” West Bank roads. It is the home of a million survivors of the Holocaust and their progeny.
It is the only place in the Middle East where women and gays have equal rights under the law. Israel’s media is one of the freest in the world; in fact criticisms of Israeli policies that are considered off-limits here are regularly presented in Israel’s mainstream press.
But divestment would punish all Israelis — opponents of the occupation, civil rights activists, crusading journalists, ordinary people — for policies inflicted on the country by a powerful minority.
Former President Jimmy Carter was widely criticized, viciously in some quarters, for writing a book called “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.” Segments of the pro-Israel community called him anti-Semitic for suggesting that Israel was comparable to apartheid South Africa.
But that is not what he said. He said in dozens of interviews and speeches, “The book is about Palestine, the occupied territories, and not about Israel.” The word apartheid, Carter said, does not apply to Israel although, in his view, it does apply to the West Bank.
Carter has no reservations about condemning the occupation. But he distinguishes between the occupation and Israel.
The divestment campaign seems not to recognize that distinction. The goal is to punish all Israelis. It’s a terrible idea.
The way to end the occupation is through negotiations. Our role as Americans should be to promote those negotiations and to play the role of “honest broker” in them rather than simply acting as Israel’s lawyer.
Divestment makes sense only if one’s goal is not to end the occupation but to dismantle the Israeli state (as apartheid was dismantled).
Surely that is not the goal of the mainstream Protestants promoting divestment. They should shelve the idea.
M. J. Rosenberg is the Director of Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center.
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