EPACBI: European Platform for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
A small part of Judith Butler’s talk in Toronto March 9, 2011 and her talk March 11 at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in New York City
One State Solution: Butler is in favour of this, although BDS hasn’t officially supported this position.
Notes: Occupation is the institutionalization of inequality.
not discriminate on basis of religion, race
colonial occupation of Palestianians in West Bank
Jewish majority rule is unjustifiable on any grounds
– there have always been
– there’s a long history of anti-zionist jews
– modes of co-habitation across lines of gender
non-identitarian principles of working together
rights of Palestinians within the border
1948, 1967, 1993
BDS is an alliance, it is not an identity group, its not restricted to one community or another, its an assemblage, there are no requirements in advance, of where you have to be etc. …
Non-violent mode
Our idea of intelligibility has been constrained.
Do you support the right Israel to exist? What are the presumptions of this question?
What is an appropriate legitimation, to understand a state legitimated itself by establishing jewish sovereignty when over half the population was non-Jewish. Who called the state of Israel into question, it was Israel. The necessity for a refounding of the state, would it not be better for Israel Palestine be a democratic state in a fundamental sense. What we have to do is question the question.
(Part 1 of 5)
BDS Boycott Divestment Sanctions
Hold Israeli state accountable to international law when there are no existing international body to do so. BDS allows citizens exercise the power to call for the enforcement of international law. Academics have to allay with other cultural workers and artists and other public figures who are regularly invited to Israeli institutions and collaborate on projects with Israeli. In 2004 if I talked at an Israeli institution that institution would claim hey JB is against the boycott. Now eith BDS, she is able to take an explict stand and hold Israeli state accountable to international law BDS allows citizens and academics have to allay with other cultural workers and artists and other public figures
(Part 2 of 5)
1) Boycott on citizenship
The argument emerges that a strategy the focuses only on citizenship is discriminatory in that it singles out Jewish state, some faculty from UK no scholar, no emails from Israeli colleagues are not to be returned – lists of righteous Jews and unrighteous Jews,
2) Boycott on institutions
2005: different version of boycott has emerged makes a distinction between boycotting insitutions and boycotting individuals who happen to have a certain kind of citizenship.
Omar Barghouti (born 1964) is a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) who is currently studying for a masters degree in philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He was born in Qatar, grew up in Egypt and later moved to Ramallah (West Bank) as an adult.
Boycott Me Movement coming out of Israel
BDS is powerful instrument for forcing Israeli compliance within national law when existing national and legal institutions fail to compel that compliance
Naomi Klein tended to focus exclusively occupation.
To think about the occupation and understand the occupation is to think about itsstructural links to the discrimination of against Palestinian minorities within the border and 1948 rights of refugees
Material oppression of Palestinian academic institutions counts also as violation of academic freedom
How can one talk about rights of cultural exchange
– laws that restrict mobility
BDS: politics of anti-normalization seeks to force a wide range of institutinos and states to stop compliance with the occupation
Occupation of 1967 and not 1948: BDS is a movement of Palestinian self-determination, to join Palestinians trying to chart the course of their lives
Rights of refugees must be included. non-violent palestinian self-determination
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(Question and Answer: 3 of 5)
What role Divestment campaign?
DIVESTMENT campaigns: are focused on corporations, and there are easier arguments to be made, corps make military goods, one can show the link, documents, and then move to divest from those companies
BOYCOTT campaign: there is much more confusion, and that’s where charge of discrimination comes in, it’s important to link them, cultural workers, artists, intellectuals all have a way of providing legitimation for the state and its practices. And it is a power we exercise by going, by showing up, we must refuse to go, and then we withdraw the power of legitimation.
Both are complimentary strategies.
(3:06 minute mark) The state of Israel is being singled out. Analagoies between Occupation – setter colonialism , you’re not singling out Israel, but showing Israel is no exception to the general rule of settler colonialism and occupation.
Israel Apartheid Week: gets understood as hate speech. It presumes to be opposed to some aspect of Israel state power and its affect on Palestinians is to be anti-semitic, or Israel should not be compared to Apartheid under South Africa. What is happening in Palestine is part of a tradition of settler colonialism. There are some aspects that are like and some that are unlike South Africa. Apartheid has history, forms of apartheid has changed, depending on where they are located geographically and geo-politically, which does not mean you have to draw absolutely flawless analogy between one and the other, this is an historical context and historical evolving category that is pertinent to this occupation.
Nation of Palestine: 1948 are diasporic, scattered in various locations, Right of Return. Existing the boundaries are the exising sign of illegality
Right of Return:
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(Question and Answer: 4 of 5)
Cultural exchange: there is always a politics to cultural exchange, it presumes that everyone can arrive at the place where cultural exchange can take place, and if rights of mobility are restricted not everybody can arrive. Seeds for Peace, Bereavement groups do cultural exchange … but the problem with these ideas of cultural exchange is that most of them assume that you cannot talk about the power differential that limits participants that restricts or makes exchange impossible.
For a Palestinian academic to get to the USA for a talk: the wait for the visa, a number of hoops, Omar Barghouti ran into this problem, has been detained by bureaucratic officials which implies they are frightened of a certain type of exchange they don’t want BDS exchange, but if you are really radical about cultural exchange, you would militate about equal conditions of participation, you have to dismantle the occupation and then you could talk about cultural exchange.
5:00 minute mark: It will not do for BDS to be a completely male driven organization. It’s not ok to struggle for women’s rights to struggle for women’s/queer rights on the condition that other are deprived of rights, it must be part of radical social justice program, not just a narrow identitarian claim.
stabilizing of categories works to perpetuate subjugation, then de-stabilization of categories is a good thing But sometime de-stabilization of categories is an operation of power the we need to resist.
8:40 minute mark: Think of BINATIONALISM be that would take apart the nationalism of the nation. Even this radical separation by building the wall, binds them to Palestinians for life, and settlements built on West Bank produces a hideous neighborliness, between right-wing Israelis and local Palestinian population so what we have is wretched forms of binationalism. Up-againstness, adjacency …
It’s not possible to have a territory without a boundary if you have a boundary you are connected to the other side you dont’ have to be an advanced Hegelian to understand that
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(Question and Answer: 5 of 5)
these efforts at separation are entrenching modes of relationship and they are subjugated and horrible, but the question for me is what would it mean to think that relationship of unchosen fraught antagonism, the basis of a different kind of binationalism which would be housed within a single state, possibly federated, possibly understood in many different state, I’m holding out for less wretched forms of the binational, think of the bi-national beyond the binary because Palestine and Israel are not monolithic terms.
Queer
1:47 minute: Queer has been a way of characterizing alliance, ways of working across difference, a mode of alliance that moved beyond simple identity categories and special interest politics, mobilizing for this groups rights and not worryied about somebody else’s.
In the 1990s what was hard for me was to see how people struggled when lover’s died and were not able to get public recogntion for loss. AIDS inability to grieve, now in African continent, not recognized sufficiently. Which populations are grievable and which are not. Whose lives count, what populations do you have to belong to for people to believe that those lives are worth protecting . Queerness is a point of departure for thinking those kinds of alliances and their not always predictable alliances are alliances not between identities but alliances between those who face precarity or who face resistance in certain kinds of ways. Queerness is part of a radical social justice project, if not then its become too narrow identitarian, and bought into a liberal framework where you represent just yourself or your position at the expense of everyone else. Its hard to think about forms of alliance that aren’t just collections of identities, but what Queer allows us to do is to think about overlapping or analogous transposable conditions that allow us unite across geopolitical differences and invigorate social justice.
Queer is an alliance struggling for social justice on multple fronts, its not strictly a gay/lesbian front. Without a radical social justice project, queer has no meaning.