This conversation was nothing new to me. As a queer Arab male (not to speak on behalf of all queer Arab males), I constantly have to explain myself, since being Arab and queer seem to be contradictory to many people living outside of that sphere. I have to explain that, ‘No, I am not actively being persecuted, and queer people aren’t stoned where I’m from,’ and that I didn’t have a horrible time growing up because I’m queer. That is not to say the latter isn’t due to my class privilege. That is also not to say I am an apologist for oppressive government policies toward queer groups in the Middle East, which still negatively impact a lot of queer people. But while it is important to condemn violations of rights, and to support initiatives that fight them, vilifying a whole people because of this is unreasonable. Homophobia exists almost everywhere. The maltreatment of queer groups is not restricted to the so-called developing nations. Trans people still face despicable treatment in Canada and the U.S., and bisexual erasure is still very rampant in mainstream media, along with the trivialization of sexualities that might not fit the straight-performing, white, or white-performing gay/lesbian binary.

Pinkwashing
Pinkwashing is a strategy that utilizes the myth that so-called developed nations are safe havens for queer people. Many countries use this strategy in order to promote themselves as ‘progressive,’ or more ‘progressive,’ than others. In the U.S., for example, Hillary Clinton declared that it is the duty of the U.S. to protect the rights of gay people abroad. In response, Maya Mikdashi, a postdoctoral associate in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, critiqued Clinton in an article for Jadaliyya, asking “How and why, exactly, [would] the United States monitor and regulate LGBTQ rights internationally. Would the American army, for example, start ‘enforcing’ the rights of gay Iraqis or gay Afghanis? Would the United States impose sanctions on governments that were non-homo friendly?”

In an email to The Daily, Toronto-based academic and activist Natalie Kouri-Towe explained that “pinkwashing is a practice used by governments, state institutions, PR firms, corporations, lobby groups, et cetera to draw public attention away from [their] unjust practices by highlighting some token feature that appears to be equitable or just.” Israel, similarly to the U.S. (which uses the queer and feminist issues as an excuse in order to invade countries and wage wars, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq), also uses this strategy in order to build up its image as the so-called bastion of human rights in a ‘dark and savage’ Middle East. This strategy (one of many) aims to maintain a deadly and costly occupation, and to distract away from Israel’s human rights abuses in the territories it illegally occupies, all of which are now evident to anyone with a working internet connection and a critical mind.

For Israel, not unlike many other countries, the queer issue is not just seen as one of the foremost civil rights issues of our century, but it is also seen as a marketing tool. The state effectively speaks on behalf of, and over, many queer people and markets itself as a safe haven for queers from both Israel and Palestine. This is all part of an elaborate PR campaign called “Brand Israel,” which was the fruit of three years of negotiations between the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s office, and the Finance Ministry in consultation with American marketing executives, with the goal of marketing Israel in a way that would be friendly and relatable to Western* audiences. “Celebrating the out and vibrant gay night life of Tel Aviv, Westerners were supposed to identify with Israel. This aimed to normalize the apartheid system, making the military occupation, illegal wall, and other violations of international law and human rights seem necessary to uphold and protect the Israeli state,” explained Kouri-Towe.

An integral part of this plan is its comparative aspect. In a ‘clash of civilizations’-like effort, Israel actively compares itself to Palestinian society, thereby placing itself in a superior position – a vacuum for criticism. How could people criticize a state, after all, with an allegedly stellar human rights record that upholds the same values and morals as the ‘West?’ For example, Israeli officials exploit the few cases of queer Palestinians asking for permits to join their Israeli or Palestinian partners in Israel, in order to claim that Palestinian society is homophobic and ostracizes its queer community, and that Israel, on the contrary, advocates for the rights of queers. This reasoning follows with the assumption that we should “therefore […] not pressure Israel, because if we pressure Israel we are going against the rights of women, queers, [and] all marginalized groups in society,” points out Samia al-Botmeh, professor of Economics at Birzeit University in the West Bank, visiting professor at the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies, and a steering committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

“Coming out is not a precondition for a vivid movement, we proved we can build a community without everybody needing to be ‘out’ on all different levels.”
Haneen Makey, Co-founder of alQaws

The role of Orientalism
Israeli officials and their proponents further perpetuate this discourse by making sensationalist statements such as: “In a dark, and savage, and desperate Middle East, Israel is a beacon of huamanity, of light, and of hope,” as declared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who is currently running for re-election) in a speech at the 2015 American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy (AIPAC) conference. Statements like these are not only offensive, but also erase any cultural differences within the Middle East, with their treatment of social issues and the asymmetric and differential nature between Western and non-Western cultures.

Edward Said touched upon this kind of rhetoric in his seminal work Orientalism, where he states, “the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist (with a great deal of specific knowledge of course) who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements […] the Orientalist would be understood (and would understand himself) as also making a statement about the Orient as a whole.” Following that logic, Israeli officials are operating in pure Orientalist fashion when they make essentialist statements such as Netanyahu’s about Palestinian society. Therefore, one cannot simply say ‘our treatment of queer groups is better than yours,’ especially if there is an asymmetry of power between the nations being compared, such as in the relationship between occupier and occupied, and when these nations do not operate on an equal platform, such as in the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

In this way, if non-Western society, specifically in Palestine, understands and goes about queer issues differently than the West, then this culture is seen as intolerant of queers specifically, says al-Botmeh. She asserts that this stems from classic Orientalist practices. For example, when a crime is committed in ‘non-Western’ countries, a cultural cause is searched for, while if the same crime is committed in Western countries, the cause looked to is distinctly non-cultural – the difference between domestic violence in the ‘West’ versus honour killings in the ‘non-West,’ for instance.

“The manner in which we conduct our society is different from Israel, we are not a Western society, and Israel is a Western [one]. The way we go about our lives in general is different, and that applies to everybody: that applies to men, women, to how social relations are conducted, how society is organized. […] And therefore we do have a difference of approach with regard to queer issues, [one that] is not a Western approach,” al-Botmeh continues. “Of course Israel plays on that, [in the same way that it plays] on the issue of women for example, [claiming that Palestinian society] is uncivilized, backward, that it violates the rights of women, et cetera.”

What critics of Palestine also miss is the fact that homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, “when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow,” according to an article in the New York Times (the situation remains different in Gaza following the Hamas/Palestinian Authority rift).

“I am an Arab, I am a Palestinian, I am gay. My gay haven is not a glittered parade in Tel Aviv. It is a liberated Palestine.”
Fahad Ali, op-ed writer for Honi Soit

Palestinian movements
It is worth explaining that Palestinian society does have its particularities, just like any other society does, and hence has its own way of dealing with issues. AlQaws, “a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and queer (LGBTQ) Palestinian activists and allies collaboratively working to transform Palestinian society’s perspectives on gender and sexual diversity and struggling for broader social justice,” is an example of one of a few Palestinian civil society organizations advocating for sexual and gender equality, and social justice.

“I often hear the objection: ‘so what if Israel wants to promote its gay-rights policies?’ But it’s not about gay rights, Israel commits human rights violations and occupies another people and then abuses my difficulties and my name by saying my society is backward and homophobic. My struggle is dismissed and my people are demonized. This has a direct impact on our image internationally, but more importantly on Palestinian gay youth who internalize these ideas and dream about running away to Israel, the supposed bastion of gay rights,” says Haneen Maikey, co-founder of alQaws, in an interview with International Viewpoint.

Al-Botmeh explains that the ‘West’ aims to impose its own model on the rest of the world in order to fight differences that might not conform to Western standards “We know from the struggle of feminism [that] that is counterproductive. In the sixties and the seventies many Western feminists tried to impose their values on the [‘non-West’] and the results were catastrophic.” (For more information, see the article Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? by Lila abu-Lughod). In this way, alQaws responds to the needs of Palestinian society and responds to this society’s particularities, without borrowing from already existing Euro-American approaches to queer rights.

Maikey affirms that Palestinian society is much more communal and community-based than individualistic societies in most of the West (certainly communities of colour in the West could be considered communal). “We all have friends who know and some family members that know, but others don’t. In different places, we can be different people. We can have this flexibility in our identity without having the ‘ceremony’ of coming out. We are not a Christian culture, we don’t have this tradition of confessing. In the Western context, ‘coming out’ grew organically from its social context. It’s a very individual approach, from an individualist society,” states Maikey.

In Palestine, many individuals value their ties with their communities more than coming out. Maikey continues, “my parents are more angry about me moving away than being a lesbian. Many people are very connected to their families and are not willing [to] break with them by coming out in the Western sense […] Coming out is not a precondition for a vivid movement, we proved we can build a community without everybody needing to be ‘out’ on all different levels.”
Pinkwashing, then, not only distracts from Israel’s blatant human rights abuses, but also ignores the existence of an active queer movement within Palestine and Palestinian civil society.

“I often hear the objection; ‘so what if Israel wants to promote its gay-rights policies?’ But it’s not about gay rights, Israel commits human rights violations and occupies another people and then abuses my difficulties and my name by saying my society is backward and homophobic.”
Haneen Makey, Co-founder of alQaws

The politics of queer
In 2009, two gay youth were shot in the centre of Tel Aviv. AlQaws expressed solidarity against this hate crime, and attended the demonstration to denounce this crime. Maikey recounts, “[The demonstration] was dominated by white men and right-wing politicians. Shimon Peres [the former president of Israel] was on the stage, saying ‘don’t kill’ while two months earlier he was part of killing hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, and the Israeli national anthem was played. So, as Palestinians we were excluded from this demonstration. We asked to speak from the platform but this was refused with the argument this was not the place to talk about politics – as if the whole issue is not political!”

Of course, a conversation about pinkwashing cannot take place without grounding the argument within the theory of homonationalism, as articulated by Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Puar explains that homonationalism is not just a state practice. It is the historical intersection of state practices, the flow of queer commodity culture (marketing things to the queer community), and the Euro-American human rights industrial complex (or the imposition of a Euro-American notion of human rights on the non-Euro-American world), first with each other, and then with broader global phenomena like Islamophobia. The latter now dictates that modern states be judged on the basis of how they treat their queer population (primarily gay men), but from a Euro-American-centric and Islamophobic perspective. Pinkwashing falls under the umbrella of homonationalism as one of its many visible outcomes. Furthermore, pinkwashing intersects with Islamophobic discourse post-9/11, which is characterized by the Western crusade against ‘radical Islam.’ Pinkwashing in Israel, therefore, would not exist in its current form without anti-Arab and anti-Islamic discourse.

Puar further writes that pinkwashing cannot be dissociated from the neoliberal capitalist context of the Western world, as it produces what she calls the “human rights industrial complex” which, when it comes to queer rights, still articulates a Euro-American-centric discourse and tries to impose this on the entire world. Therefore, Puar states that Israel is at the forefront of homonationalist discourse. “[The] homonationalist history of Israel, or the rise of LGBT rights in Israel, parallels the concomitant increasing segregation of Palestinian populations, especially post-Oslo.”

The U.S., Israel’s greatest financial supporter, is complicit in Israel’s homonationalist practices, as Israeli pinkwashing targets the U.S. lobbies first, and more and more in Canada as well – most notably AIPAC and its Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC), who use the queer discourse Israel co-opts in order to serve Israel’s purposes within the U.S. and Canada. “U.S. settler colonialism is inextricably intertwined with Israeli settler colonialism. Through their financial, military, affective, and ideological entwinement, it seems to me that the United States and Israel are the largest benefactors of homonationalism.”

Civil rights and self-determination
More importantly, and what may also seem contradictory to many, is that the queer struggle in Palestine does in fact have everything to do with the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and the struggle against Israeli occupation. A prominent example of this is Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS). The BDS movement itself aims to put pressure through various forms of boycott and the implementation of divestment initiatives, “and to demand sanctions against Israel, until Palestinian rights are recognized in full compliance with international law,” according to the BDS website.

PQBDS aims to counter Israeli pinkwashing and to promote BDS, since BDS is a grassroots call-to-action from Palestinian civil society. “We consider ourselves an integral part of Palestinian society: we do not mean this is in a nationalist way but in the sense that we suffer from the same hardships as other Palestinians. The occupation also affects queers; racism doesn’t distinguish between queers and straights. So we were already part of campaigns against the occupation, discrimination, and the separation wall. We feel we can contribute a special perspective to this struggle and this is why we wanted to create a separate, independent group that can work to support the BDS campaign from a queer perspective,” argues Maikey.

Kouri-Towe also notes the contributions of queer activism to the Palestinian struggle. “The way that queer activists have revealed the diversion tactics of pinkwashing has gone a long way to expose how the Israeli state is using public relations as its new strategy in denying Palestinian human rights […] I think queer activism has really shown how important it is to have diverse organizing strategies in social movements. In the Palestinian liberation movement, the organizing work of queer activists can help contribute to critiques of state practices and normalization discourses, which can [then] easily be replicated in mainstream organizations and groups.”

As a member of PACBI, al-Botmeh states that PQBDS is an integral part of the BDS movement and the fight against the occupation. Queer activists are very well-connected within Canada and the U.S., for example. For al-Botmeh, it is not about bringing the queer movement into civil society and BDS per se, rather it is only natural to work with queer activists on grassroots initiatives such as BDS. “Within Palestine, the queer movement is comfortable, it has more of its rightful place within civil society. No one would attack alQaws within civil society for example. It is as highly respectable, accepted, as any other organization within civil society. I think that is a very healthy indication of society in general, because civil society does represent the very base of society.”

The issue for Palestine is that the actualization of queer or feminist rights cannot be fully obtained without an end to the occupation. Moreover, queer and feminist activism is an integral part of the anti-occupation movement in Palestine – it is very much within. A Western model of Euro-American queer rights cannot be imposed onto Palestinian society; the queer movement and its politics and demands have to be indigenous to Palestine, of the people, and a response to the specific demands of Palestinian society. In the words of Fahad Ali, an op-ed writer for Honi Soit: “I am an Arab, I am a Palestinian, I am gay. My gay haven is not a glittered parade in Tel Aviv. It is a liberated Palestine.”

*By Western, I mean privileged, predominantly white, cis, heteronormative, and Euro-American.

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The Facebook event for the protest, initiated by the organizers, went viral online. Around 800 people instantly RSVP’d, a number which was reflected in the crowd that showed up.

The organization that initiated the protest was then only a week-old collaboration between Palestinian and Lebanese students in Lebanon’s major universities, whose membership mainly consists of the 12 presidents of the Palestinian clubs in those universities. “It is the first independent movement for Palestine [in Lebanon],” Mahmoud Alabassi – a Palestinian refugee, a student at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, and one of the main founders of the Student Coalition for Palestine – told me. “What we want is to shed the light on [the] Palestinian cause, it’s still alive, people are still dying in Gaza.”

Indeed, the struggle is an ongoing one. The protest came just as the Lebanese government announced that it would be turning away Palestinian refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict. The crisis is also very real in the Palestinian refugee camps scattered across Lebanon. Their conditions deteriorate by the second, with only branches of the UN such as UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are taking care of them.

The refugee struggle is doubled by the situation back home, as Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” closes its 17th day of aggression against Gaza. The most recent Palestinian death toll (as of July 24) has climbed to around 800 – 80 per cent of whom are civilians – and continues to rise, with thousands more wounded, according to latest estimates from the Gaza Health Ministry. Sunday July 20 marked the deadliest day of the operation, which saw the death of over 100 Palestinians trying to flee Israeli shelling in Shujaiyeh, a suburb of Gaza City.

The reality on the ground

“The situation is so difficult. Continuous airstrikes target houses round the clock. So far over 580 houses were destroyed, some of them after the alleged ceasefire. In some of these house targeting raids, whole families were obliterated, at one instance a family of 18 was killed at once,” wrote Belal Dabour, a medical doctor currently living and working in Gaza, in an email to The Daily from the besieged territory. “The airstrikes which target houses proceed at sometimes more than four houses in just an hour, which adds much to the horror of the families. Gaza is a very crowded place, and when a house is targeted, the whole neighborhood is damaged. Sometimes we receive casualties by the dozens from just one attack!”

The situation is, indeed, dire. On July 15, Gaza’s Health Ministry declared a state of emergency, given the exacerbation of pre-existing shortages of medical supplies by the ongoing Israeli aggressions on Gaza, and by Egyptian border policies which still limit movement across the border, according to a report by The Electronic Intifada. “According to the World Health Organization, 30 percent of the essential drug list and half the disposable medical supplies were out of stock in Gaza – even before the current crisis,” the article states. Current estimates for medical funding needs are at around $60 million US – meanwhile, the international community remains silent, and UNRWA can barely keep business going as usual. A Doctors without Borders team was scheduled to arrive in Gaza late last week. Moreover, Israel has conducted airstrikes on the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Gaza’s emergency response paramedic team.

“Gaza lacks almost everything. The continuous raids affect transportation as well as entry of supplies via the crossing. […] The situation wasn’t pretty before to begin with. It was so bad that the current war only adds a little to the big suffering we’ve been dealing with,” Dabour adds. “For eight years our movement has been restricted, our sea closed, our economy looted, and our safety threatened. For eight years now we’ve been having power supply [sic] of 12 hours per day, many times [even] less. And for more than eight years now, unemployment rates have been fluctuating between 20 and 40 per cent. A recent report stated that Gaza Strip is in need of at least 80,000 housing units, and with this war the number is sure to have increased, but construction materials have been banned from entry since 2007! It’s a compound picture, but it’s a dark one in general.”

It is estimated that 30 per cent of those killed as a result of Operation Protective Edge have been children – not to mention that the majority of the 1,100 wounded are also children. To add to that, a staggering 80 per cent of those killed have been civilians, according to a UN report. UNICEF has already condemned the targeting of civilians by Israel, and and UNRWA has called on Israel “to end attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure which are contrary to international law.”

Osama Damo, a member of Save the Children’s emergency response team on the ground, runs a blog for the organization out of Gaza. He writes of his reality: “From my home I can hear the sounds of bombs falling in Gaza from Israel and sometimes rockets being launched here in Gaza toward Israel. Gaza is so tiny, the buildings rattle and shake with every bomb.” Damo adds that, “We have enough food here for a few days, maybe a week if we are careful. Once the fuel runs out, there will be no water either. I worry about this. Hospitals are reportedly running out of equipment and some supplies.”

Since Hamas is Gaza’s democratically elected government, any public building is subject to attack. As a result, Israel has also fired rockets at hospitals, and many now fear going to hospitals in order to receive aid because they fear attack. “Early Friday morning, Israel fired two warning shots at Al-Wafa geriatric hospital [sic], east of Gaza City. Israel claims that the hospital – which provides rehabilitation treatment for accident victims and houses the elderly – is hosting a cache of weapons,” writes Khaled Alashqar in an Al-Jazeera report. 30 Palestinian elders live there and cannot be moved. Numerous international activists have staged a sit-in at the hospital, hoping that their presence in the building will prevent it from being bombed. Israel also bombed a rehabilitation centre for people with disabilities in northern Gaza on July 11, killing four.

Moreover, reports from doctors in Gaza lead to the conclusion that Israel is using bombs that shatter into literally a million metal pieces upon impact at very high speeds, or DIME bombs. Rania Khalek writes for The Electronic Intifada, “DIME munitions were developed by the US Air Force in 2006 and have since been tested repeatedly on the people of Gaza, who have long served as involuntary lab rats for Israel’s weapons industry. DIME bombs contain tungsten, a cancer-causing metal that helps to produce incredibly destructive blasts which slice through flesh and bone, often decapitating the lower limbs of people within the blast radius.” Many injured in Gaza will be disabled and physically scarred for life as a result. Furthermore, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Israel is using flechette shells on Gazans – shells that spray out thousands of tiny lethal darts.

“We have a phrase in Arabic, literally translated it means ‘we have not even had the chance to breathe yet’ – since the last conflict in 2012. It seems we have not even had the chance to adjust ourselves, to convince our children they are safe, before they are not safe anymore,” Damo writes from Gaza.

Despite the crisis, Palestinians have not stopped speaking up. Voices of Gaza gives an online platform for Gazans to share their stories with the world. Omar Ghraib, a journalist and citizen of Gaza, writes, “There are two prominent types of explosions we experience: either you hear the sudden blast of the explosion, or you hear the missile fall and then the blast. This will sound crazy, but we all favour ‘Type 2.’ We prefer to anticipate death instead of being blown up without any warning. But if you hear a missile falling, it means you’re lucky; it’s near you but not targeting you.” He adds that the ringing of the telephone is now a dreaded sound for Gazans, because they fear it is the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) calling to tell them to evacuate their house. The IDF does call, sometimes; at other times it only sends a warning missile flying into the targeted house. This phenomenon is known as the “knock on the roof” warning. Ghraib goes on to write: “They bomb the house with a warning missile and, after that, if you are still alive, you have 1-3 [sic] minutes to leave, or less. If you are lucky. Many houses have been bombed with no warning missiles, hence the huge numbers of fatalities and casualties.”

The Independent recently published a video of an attack on a house that was preceded by a warning missile. The footage was uploaded via Wataniya news agency based in Gaza, and can be viewed here. IDF military commanders feel no remorse. Israel sometimes doesn’t use warnings when attacking houses in Gaza – which amounts to large numbers of civilian casualties, a war crime by any other name – and even when it does, it usually comes in the form of a phone call that urges civilians to evacuate their house in less than a minute or face death. Other times, it comes in the form of a “knock on the roof” ‘warning’ missile that gives residents less than 30 seconds to evacuate. Most do not make it out alive, as the death toll continues to mount.

Ghraib goes on to write: “As usual, the house was shaking while I was writing this story. It’s like I am watching an action movie, but instead of watching it this time, I am actually living it.”

Whose war is it anyway?

“First, while one can place blame on both sides for the continuation of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it remains the fact that it is Israel that is occupying Palestinian territory, not vice-versa. It is Israel engaging in illegal settlement construction (a war crime under international law), and denying Palestinians self-determination. The current Israeli government is clearly unwilling to offer the sorts of sensible middle-ground compromises that would make a two-state resolution of the conflict possible,” writes Rex Brynen in a status updated on Facebook, professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill, and an expert in Middle East politics.

Despite this, he still blames Hamas (Gaza’s main ruling party and, to put it simply, the one firing rockets at Israel from Gaza) for putting Palestinians in even more danger by firing rockets at civilian targets in Israel, also a “war crime,” according to Brynen. It is a never-ending cycle: Hamas fires rockets at Israel in retaliation for what Israel did in the West Bank, Israel fires back, Hamas responds, Israel uses even more excessive force, and civilians die by the hundreds.

Julie Norman, a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill and an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told The Daily that Hamas is operating from a point of weakness. “It is understandable that Hamas leaders are frustrated, with the unity deal that they hoped would improve their financial and political standings backfiring almost immediately. In an apparent attempt to save face, they have fallen back on their tried-and-true identity as the force of resistance.” Norman iterates that Hamas is “hijacking” popular resistance in Palestine, as street demonstrations in the West Bank – a popular form of resistance circa the First Intifada – are on a decline, as the crisis in Gaza enters its 17th day.

“The international attention and media coverage that the street protests and demonstrations in Jerusalem had garnered have now shifted almost completely to Gaza and Hamas. In addition, the opportunity to start a meaningful discourse in and with Israel has been all but squandered,” she writes. Norman concludes that, “Hamas seems to have found itself in a corner and is trying to (literally) shoot its way out. Yet in doing so, it is hijacking Palestinian resistance and undermining the very communities it claims to represent.”

But, to reiterate, no matter what, Hamas is Gaza’s government elect, and so has a duty to defend itself as well – and so the cycle continues. As Gideon Levy editorializes in Haaretz: “What exactly were we thinking? That Gaza would live forever in the shadow of Israeli (and Egyptian) caprice, with the restraints sometimes loosened a bit, or sometimes painfully tightened? That the biggest prison in the world would carry on as a prison? That hundreds of thousands of its residents would remain cut off forever? That exports would be blocked and fishing restricted? What exactly are 1.5 million people supposed to live on? Is there anyone who can explain why the blockade, even if partial, of Gaza continues? Can anyone explain why its future is never discussed? Did we think that all this would continue and Gaza would accept it submissively? Anyone who thought so was a victim of dangerous delusions, and now we are all paying the price.”

The world is watching

While the international mainstream media has kept painting the overdone picture of Israel-as-victim, people across the world have not kept silent. Growing unease has lead to mass protests across the U.S., Israel’s main military and political backer. In Los Angeles, police opened fire on Palestinian supporters at a rally for Israel. Over 1,000 people gathered in Detroit in support for Palestine in one of the biggest Palestine solidarity demonstrations in the U.S. in years.

In London, hundreds gathered to protest the BBC’s portrayal of Gaza in the news, citing in an open letter to the BCC that any territory under occupation has the right to defend itself under international law, and that “Gaza has no army, air force, or navy, while Israel possess one of the strongest militaries in the world.”

Recent mass protests across the globe show that the masses are not blind, as world leaders would have us believe. The masses are slowly waking up from a very long Western hegemony-induced coma, and are finally coming to realize that the situation is becoming insufferable. Only so many times can a person turn a blind eye to a handcuffed man being beaten over and over again right in front of them.

It is paramount not to paint this war as an isolated incident. We need to historicize it, and remember the conflict has been happening for 66 years. And after 66 years, the world finally seems to be listening, but to what gain? Unless we collectively mobilize against these injustices, move past social media activism, and realize that everything is interconnected, then we will realize that in order to change the Israeli-Palestinian reality, we have to deconstruct and reshape the entire system the crisis plays out in. No longer should Western imperialism have a say in the daily lives of Palestinians, no longer should Western money (and Arab money, by proxy) play a role in civilian deaths, and against Palestinian resistance. In the end, we are all accountable and complicit, whether directly or indirectly.

Accountability

So far, an estimated 117,000 Palestinians have been displaced within the Gaza Strip, eliciting sentiments echoing those of the post-1948 Nakba displacement years, during which over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes.

And yes, it is true that a ceasefire was brokered, which Hamas rejected, but the fact is that the ceasefire did not take into account the best possible option for Gaza, and for Hamas. Hamas proposed its own alternative to the ceasefire proposed by Egypt, which was promptly ignored by Israel and Egypt, and so the fighting continues. Netanyahu has gone on the record saying that he will carry on with the Operation for “as long as it takes,” and until then, the smell of death will continue pervading Gaza’s streets.

As PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi stated on ABC’s This Week, “These are war crimes being committed before the world, before the eyes of the whole world and I just can’t understand how people sit back and say [it’s] self-defence. I just can’t take the language, I can’t take the propaganda, I can’t take the mantra that Israel has a right to defend itself. Against whom? Against innocent civilians? More than 80 children have been torn to bits. Is this self-defence?”

A full list of the people killed so far in “Operation Protective Edge” can be found here. They had names, lives, and families. Now they are another statistic in the ever-growing death toll that is a direct result of Israeli colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and oppression.

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BDS and Montreal
McGill’s own complicity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is quite obvious if examined. The university underwent weapons research for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that directly contributes to Palestinian oppression and Israeli apartheid. According to an article published on McGill’s website on September 14, 2012, McGill has signed memoranda of understanding with multiple universities in Israel. One of these is Technion University, which conducts arms research that furthers Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and has the highest number of graduates enlisted in the IDF in comparison to other Israeli universities, according to a report published by Tadamon! in October 2010.

It is hard for many professors to speak out in favour of academic boycott of Israel at McGill given the University’s standing toward the state, but underground support does exist. Paul Di Stefano, educator, researcher, activist, and a member of Tadamon!, wrote in an email to The Daily that, “There is a lot of support for BDS among activist collectives in Montreal. We see this collaboration during Israeli Apartheid Week where different groups, focusing on different issues, come together to organize a week dedicated to exposing Israeli apartheid.” Tadamon! is a “Montreal-based collective which works in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality, and justice in the ‘Middle East’ and in diaspora communities in Montreal and beyond,” according to its website.

In another email to The Daily, Michelle Hartman, associate professor of Arabic Literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, asserted, “One thing that we have seen recently, however, is [that] more and more scholarly and student associations, unions, and other groups, are supporting the Palestinian call for BDS and this is inspiring.” On the topic of activism in Montreal, she wrote: “Locally in Montreal there are groups like BDS Quebec working on specific issues, like drawing attention to companies like SodaStream [which operates within the occupied West Bank]. There are also a number of professors and other workers at local universities and CEGEPs who meet in a group called College and University Workers United (CUWU), one of whose aims is to support BDS locally and beyond.”

Human rights or academic freedom?
“If we do not apply or support the boycott, we are advocating normalization and, with normalization, Palestinians will always lose. Normalization is all about accepting the humanity of Israelis, while denying the Palestinians their own. This framework also improperly casts the relationship as symmetrical when it is, quite obviously, not,” Di Stefano said.

In her article “Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom,” published in Radical Philosophy, Judith Butler, American philosopher and gender theorist, warns that, “When academic freedom becomes a question of abstract right alone, we miss the opportunity to consider how academic freedom debates more generally – and here I would include both pro- and anti-boycott debates – deflect from the broader political problem of how to address the destruction of infrastructure, civil society, cultural and intellectual life under the conditions of the Occupation.” Butler’s words should be heeded, and people should never forget the intersectionality of the conflict itself when discussing issues of boycott and divestment. Yet, what is more important to remember is that academia is also dissent if utilized as such, and can have a tremendous effect as a result.

Ethics of a boycott
The academic boycott of Israel is underway, it is alive, and it is growing. That is not the question. The question being debated at the moment is if the boycott is ethical. Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and well-known pro-Palestinian activist, has come out against the boycott, stating that academics should concentrate on their own state’s complicity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (for example, as of 2010, 28 U.S. tax-exempt institutions raised $33.4 million in funding for illegal settlements in the West Bank) as opposed to boycotting other academics.

Typically, people who disagree with the academic boycott cite the hindrance of freedom of education, and discrimination, as reasons not to endorse it. According to a January 2014 Jerusalem Post article, as many as 92 American universities have rejected the academic boycott of Israel, in response to the recognition of the boycott by the American Studies Association (ASA). The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called the ASA’s measure “discriminatory and unjustified,” while Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, issued a statement shortly after the decision stating that “such actions are misguided and greatly troubling, as they strike at the heart of academic freedom […].” Prominent institutions that have rejected the boycott include Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, New York University, Yale, and Dartmouth. The U.S. Congress has also put forth a bill that “would strip American academic institutions of federal funding if they choose to boycott Israel,” according to Al-Jazeera.

“The fact that Palestinians are denied basic rights as well as academic freedom due to Israel’s military occupation is lost on [those arguing against a boycott]. And [the argument’s] privileging of academic freedom as a value above all other freedoms is antithetical to the very foundation of human rights,” writes Butler. Anti-boycott academics who want more academic freedom should be considering the academic freedom of Palestinians as well, since, according to Butler’s article, many students in the West Bank cannot get to their universities and classes on time because they are stopped at Israeli checkpoints, and sometimes have their universities shut down for a full semester. Students in Gaza are unable to reach universities in the West Bank due to the Israeli blockade, and are left with only one opportunity for higher education: the local university run by Hamas. When anti-boycott academics argue for the free transfer of education across borders, they do not take into account the reality that exists for most Palestinian students. As Di Stefano writes, “Palestinian academics are restricted from moving about freely, there is de facto segregation and underfunding of Palestinian schools in Israel, a deeply problematic vetting of Palestinian curriculum, and obvious limits to Palestinian students’ freedom of movement and ability to access education due to the system of checkpoints.”

Unfortunately, the question of ethics shall remain even after this article is published, though many like it continue to be written. Although a boycott might seem to be the worst way to solve the problem for many, it is only one of many solutions activists have for the conflict in light of the asymmetrical (U.S.-brokered) Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace’ talks. For Hartman, it remains a question of educating oneself and others about BDS and the conflict, which might lead to more support from the wider McGill community. As she writes, “A boycott is a powerful tool, and one which can be effective to bring international attention and pressure on Israel to end the occupation and colonization of Palestine, grant all people of the land equal rights, and respect and promote the right of return for Palestinian refugees.”

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