[rad-green] BDS: In the crosshairs of human rights colonialism

*https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/bds-crosshairs-human-rights-colonialism-191112092946199.html
<https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/bds-crosshairs-human-rights-colonialism-191112092946199.html>Aljazeera
         12 Nov 2019*

*BDS: In the crosshairs of human rights colonialism*

*A recent UN report contributes to Israeli exploitation of human rights
discourse to justify oppression in Palestine. **The discrediting of even
nonviolent strategies like BDS is tantamount to denying the Palestinians
any right to resist being colonised at all.*

*by Azeezah Kanji <https://www.aljazeera.com/profile/azeezah-kanji.html> &
David Palumbo-Liu
<https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/profile/david-palumbo-liu.html>*

[image: Israeli authorities order the closure of a school in Nablus, West
Bank on the pretext that students had hurled stones at Israeli soldiers and
settlers on October 15, 2018 [File: Anadolu]]
*Israeli authorities order the closure of a school in Nablus, West Bank on
the pretext that students had hurled stones at Israeli soldiers and
settlers on October 15, 2018 [File: Anadolu]*

In his report on antisemitism <https://undocs.org/A/74/358>, presented to
the United Nations <https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/organisations/un.html> on
October 17, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Belief Ahmed
Shaheed, cited - without rejecting - claims "that the objectives,
activities and effects of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS]
movement are fundamentally antisemitic."

This validation of the assault on BDS is a damning indictment - not of BDS,
but of the spurious logic used to impugn it.

The "objectives" and "activities" of the movement are entirely based
<https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds> on international law and the UN's own
resolutions: Ending the occupation of Palestinian territory, guaranteeing
equality of Palestinian citizens of Israel
<https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/israel.html>, and honouring the
right of return of refugees.

From an international legal perspective, it is not BDS that should be
considered controversial, but Israel's brazen recalcitrance when it comes
to respecting basic norms of international law.

As another recent UN publication
<https://www.ohchr.org/EN/newyork/Documents/A_74_48057_AUV.docx> points
out, Israel has implemented less than 0.5 percent of the
recommendations prescribed by the UN since 2009 to rectify the crimes of
the occupation - making the application of additional mechanisms of
economic and political pressure manifestly necessary. The UN itself has
identified 192 businesses
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22617&LangID=E>
in
likely breach of which break international law by facilitating and
profiting from Israel's illegal settlements.

The discrediting of even nonviolent strategies like BDS is tantamount to
denying the Palestinians any right to resist being colonised at all.

By erasing the context of the occupation, Shaheed's report perversely
manages to present Palestinians as the abusers of human rights rather than
the abused.

He references a UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
(CERD) report expressing concern about antisemitic hate speech in Palestine
<https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/palestine.html> - but completely
neglects to mention that this report
<https://undocs.org/en/CERD/C/PSE/CO/1-2> begins by acknowledging that "the
Israeli occupation, the expansion of settlements and the continued blockade
of the Gaza Strip, which are considered unlawful under international law,
pose severe challenges for [Palestine] in fully implementing its
obligations under the Convention [on Racial Discrimination]."

Shaheed also castigates the "left-wing antisemitism" of "individuals
claiming to hold anti-racist and anti-imperialist views". But he is
conspicuously silent on the racism inherent in imperialism itself,
including in Palestine, where the religious freedoms
<https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aai/pages/12256/attachments/original/1492788798/Report_%28interior%29.pdf?1492788798>
at
the crux of his mandate (and various other basic rights
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/>
of
the indigenous population under occupation) are routinely trampled. For
example, Palestinian Christians and Muslims face restrictions on accessing
sites like Bethlehem and al-Aqsa central for worship.

In reality, the overwhelmingly predominant contributors to escalating
antisemitism statistics in countries like Germany
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-politics-seehofer/germany-sees-20-rise-in-anti-semitic-crime-in-2018-blames-far-right-idUSKCN1SK1QX>
and
the United States
<https://forward.com/fast-forward/423538/every-extremist-anti-semitic-incident-tracked-by-adl-was-carried-out-by/>
are
not the "anti-racist and anti-imperialist" left, but neo-Nazis and the
far-right bolstered by the rise of the same white nationalist political
parties
<https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/union-israel-european-180716085952930.html>
that
have also put Muslims and Palestinian rights activism in their crosshairs.

The repressive implications of Shaheed's analysis are apparent with the
litmus test for antisemitism he endorses: the International Holocaust
Remembrance Association's (IHRA) guidelines.

The problem with them is not the definition of antisemitism they include - "a
certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews" - but
the examples of antisemitism they give, several of which involve criticisms
of Israel or Zionism.

For instance, in the eyes of IHRA (and apparently Shaheed himself) "denying
the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that
the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor" qualifies as
antisemitism.

Nevermind that some of the foremost critics of the creation of a Jewish
state were prominent Jewish politicians like British Cabinet member Edwin
Montagu, who in 1917 described
<https://www.thenation.com/article/myth-new-anti-semitism/> the premise
that Jewish people constitute a separate nation as "antisemitic".

As Oxford University philosopher and cofounder of Independent Jewish Voices
(UK) Brian Klug  notes
<https://www.thenation.com/article/myth-new-anti-semitism/>, the effect of
equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to conflate the Jewish state
with the Jewish people: The very sin that Special Rapporteur Shaheed
accuses critics of Israel of committing.

IHRA's redefinition of antisemitism has been criticised by Jewish scholars
<https://static1.squarespace.com/static/548748b1e4b083fc03ebf70e/t/5ce5c09cb208fc5f78b7ff65/1558560925106/Backgrounder+on+Efforts+to+Redefine+Antisemitism.pdf>
and
numerous civil liberties organisations, including the Center for
Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education, and the British Columbia Civil
Liberties Association, for conflating criticism of Israel with racism.

Despite being discarded
<https://static1.squarespace.com/static/548748b1e4b083fc03ebf70e/t/5ce5c09cb208fc5f78b7ff65/1558560925106/Backgrounder+on+Efforts+to+Redefine+Antisemitism.pdf>
by
the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, the IHRA redefinition is being adopted by
countries across North America and Europe - imperilling the democracy
Shaheed purports to be saving from the "toxicity
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1049591>" of antisemitism.

In the US, for example, IHRA's inflated conception of antisemitism has been
embraced
<https://ccrjustice.org/letter-civil-rights-groups-demand-doe-assistant-secretary-marcus-end-attacks-free-speech>
by the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights under President Donald
Trump <https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/people/donald-trump.html> appointee
Kenneth Marcus, who believes
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/trump-official-wants-students-prosecuted-israel-protests/25526>
students
protesting in support of Palestinian rights should be criminally
prosecuted. It has also been wielded
<https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/3/mass_judge_refuses_to_halt_pro> in
efforts to censor university events and courses on Palestine, and to bring
lawsuits
<https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3868786/Mandel-Et-Al-v-SFSU-Et-Al.pdf>
against
Palestinian professors.

This is part of a broader context of legalised speech suppression, in which
laws against BDS have been passed
<https://palestinelegal.org/righttoboycott> in 27 US states and proposed in
14 more - in direct defiance
<https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/58763b0e2f/2019.01.24_ECF-72_Knight-Institute-Amicus-Brief.pdf>
of
the US Constitution and Supreme Court decisions establishing the right to
boycott in general. While Shaheed clarified in his report that
"international law recognizes boycotts as legitimate forms of political
expression", he simultaneously legitimises the demonisation of BDS
underlying anti-boycott legislation.

The fixation on critics of Israel (Jewish and non-Jewish alike) diverts
attention away from the virulent and often deadly
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/trump-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-181029145322729.html>
antisemitism
of white supremacists and right-wing nationalists, who aspire to restore
American "greatness" by returning to the most overtly racist forms of
settler-colonial rule.

The irony of BDS being condemned in the name of "freedom of religion and
belief" exemplifies the contradictions inherent in the long tradition of
human rights colonialism - in which human rights, far from being the
salvation of the wretched of the earth, have been instruments of their
damnation.

From Napoleon's invasion of Egypt
<https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2014/12/human-rights-a-fragile-hegemony.html>
in
1798 to George HW Bush's onslaught on Afghanistan
<https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/afghanistan.html> and Iraq more
than two centuries later, imperialists have consistently deployed the
discourse of rights to represent themselves as the guardians of human
dignity, and those they massacre, torture and dispossess as the violators.

In the development of the modern international human rights system
following World War II, European powers paraded as the progenitors of human
rights, while insisting on exceptions
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=937341> to insulate
their own colonial atrocities
<https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15084.html> from criticism. The
reference to "fundamental human rights" in the 1945 UN Charter preamble was
introduced by Afrikaner statesman Jan Smuts
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/opinion/jan-smuts-south-africa.html>,
whose other notable legacies include segregation policies in South Africa
<https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/south-africa.html> that paved the
way for apartheid.

This colonial genealogy is continued in the present by Israeli government
bodies, settler NGOs and courts appealing to human rights to justify
Palestinian oppression.

As international law scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon note in their
book The Human Right to Dominate
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-human-right-to-dominate-9780199365005?cc=ca&lang=en>,
"indigenous Palestinians [are portrayed] as the invaders and thus
perpetrators of human rights violations, while Jewish settlers are
conceived of as natives and depicted as victims of abuse."

In the inverted reality of the dominators, the dispossession and
destruction of Palestinian property are legally rationalised
<http://www.ejil.org/article.php?article=212&issue=6> as necessary for
safeguarding settlers' "human rights" such as freedom of religion, while
efforts to curb or dismantle illegal settlements are decried as "racial
discrimination <https://www.haaretz.com/1.5083295>" and "ethnic cleansing
<https://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/FAQ/Pages/FAQ_Peace_process_with_Palestinians_Dec_2009.aspx#Refugees1>"
against settlers. Justice for Palestinians under occupation is denounced as
an injustice to their occupiers.

Those advocating for Palestinian freedom and self-determination are the
inheritors of another powerful tradition: Of anti-colonial movements
resisting those who claimed to speak for universal humanity while brutally
colonising 84 percent of it
<https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2015-10-07/how-europe-conquered-world>
.

Even when confronted by ruthless repression, demonisation, and
criminalisation, people under colonial rule persisted in challenging unjust
power structures and the racially-exclusionary concepts of rights, dignity,
liberty, law, and humanity that upheld them.

The fruits of their efforts were enshrined in UN General Assembly
resolutions recognising "the necessity
<https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/1514(XV)> of
bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms",
and "the legitimacy
<https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-184801/> of the struggle
of peoples for … liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign
occupation by all available means": A struggle for liberation that carries
on to this day, through movements like BDS.

*Azeezah Kanji (JD, LLM in Islamic Law) is a legal academic and writer
based in Toronto.*

*David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford
University.*

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