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The Case for Sanctions Against Israel [Paperback]

Audrea Lim , Omar Barghouti , Naomi Klein , Ilan Pappe , Slavoj Zizek , Ra'anan Alexandrowicz , Merav Amir , Hind Awwad , Mustafa Barghouthi , Dalit Baum , Joel Beinin , John Berger , Angela Davis , Nada Elia , Marc H. Ellis , Noura Erakat , Neve Gordon , Ran Greenstein , Ronald Kasrils , Jamal Khader , Paul Laverty , Mark LeVine , David Lloyd , Ken Loach , Haneen Maikey , Rebecca O'Brien , Jonathan Pollak , Laura Pulido , Lisa Taraki , Rebecca Vilkomerson , Michael Warschawski
2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Book Description

May 2, 2012

Leading international voices argue for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

In July 2011, Israel passed legislation outlawing the public support of boycott activities against the state, corporations, and settlements, adding a crackdown on free speech to its continuing blockade of Gaza and the expansion of illegal settlements. Nonetheless, the campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) continues to grow in strength within Israel and Palestine, as well as in Europe and the US.

This essential intervention considers all sides of the movement—including detailed comparisons with the South African experience—and contains contributions from both sides of the separation wall, along with a stellar list of international commentators.

Contributors: Merav Amir and Dalit Baum, Ra’anaan Alexandrowicz, Hind Awwad, Mustafa Barghouthi, Omar Barghouti, Joel Beinin, John Berger, Angela Davis, Nada Elia, Marc Ellis, Noura Erakat, Ran Greenstein, Neve Gordon, Ronald Kasrils, Jamal Khader, Naomi Klein, Mark LeVine, Ken Loach, David Lloyd and Laura Pulido, Haneen Maikey, Ilan Pappe, Jonathan Pollak, Lisa Taraki, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Michael Warschawski, Slavoj Žižek.


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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Omar Barghouti is a human rights activist, founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the BDS movement, and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, fellow at the Nation Institute and author of The Shock Doctrine.

Ilan Pappe is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His many books include The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and, most recently, Gaza in Crisis (with Noam Chomsky). He writes for, among others, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a Professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz is an Israeli filmmaker and activist.

Hind Awwad is a coordinator with the Palestinian BDS National Committee.

Mustafa Barghouthi is the Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, the president of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and a nonviolence democracy leader based in Ramallah.

Dalit Baum and Merav Amir are project coordinators of Who Profits from the Occupation? in the Coalition of Women for Peace.

Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University.

Storyteller, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic, John Berger is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, Here Is Where We Meet, the Booker Prize-winning novel G, Hold Everything Dear, the Man Booker–longlisted From A to X, and A Seventh Man.

Angela Davis is a teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer.

Nada Elia teaches Global and Gender Studies at Antioch University in Seattle. She is a member of the Organizing Collective of USACBI, the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Marc H. Ellis is University Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of History and Founding Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University. He is the author and editor of more than twenty books, including Encountering the Jewish Future.

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and Adjunct Professor of International Human Rights Law at Georgetown University.

Neve Gordon is an Israeli academic and the author of Israel’s Occupation.

Ran Greenstein works at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ronnie Kasrils is a former South African government minister and was an activist during the anti-apartheid struggle. Among other positions, he was chief of military intelligence of the ANC’s military wing. Today he writes and lectures, is active in the Palestinian solidarity movement, and is a noted author whose recent book The Unlikely Secret Agent won the country’s prestigious Alan Paton Award.

Father Jamal Khader is Chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies, Bethlehem University, Palestine.

Mark LeVine is a Professor of Middle East History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.

David Lloyd is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

Ken Loach is the director of The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Looking for Eric. Rebecca O’Brien and Paul Laverty were the producer and writer, respectively, for the latter film.

Haneen Maikey is cofounder and Director of al-Qaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, and cofounder of Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Jonathan Pollak is an Israeli activist who has been involved in the Palestinian popular struggle since 2002.

Laura Pulido is a Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Lisa Taraki is a Sociologist at Birzeit University in the occupied Palestinian territories, and a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Rebecca Vilkomerson is the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Michael Warschawski is a journalist, political analyst, and veteran Israeli anticolonial activist. He is also the cofounder of the Alternative Information Center.

Audrea Lim is an associate editor at Verso Books.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 244 pages
  • Publisher: Verso; Original edition (May 2, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1844674509
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844674503
  • Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 5.7 x 7.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #684,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Naomi Klein, born in Montreal in 1970, is an award-winning journalist. She writes a weekly column in The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, and is also a frequent columnist for the British Guardian. For the past five years, Klein has traveled throughout North America, Asia, and Europe, tracking the rise of anti-corporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator and has guest-lectured at Harvard, Yale, and New York University. She lives in Toronto. For more information, please visit her website at www.nologo.org.

Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars
(6)
2.0 out of 5 stars
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I would certainly recommend this book for people interested in the logic and rationale of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions as a means of ending Israel's on-going oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians. The book is composed of 26 chapters written by 29 contributors (some of the chapters are co-authored) coming from a broad range of back-grounds. The chapters are self-contained comments by the individual contributors.

Readers wishing to turn straight away to an explanation of the rationale of BDS should read the chapter by Naomi Klein (ch.19) and Ilan Pappe (ch.20) first. Ilan Pappe describes his decision to support BDS as follows:

"For an activist, the realization that change from within is unattainable not only grows from an intellectual or political process, but is more than anything else an admission of defeat. And it was this fear of defeatism that prevented me from adopting a more resolute position for a very long time.... Supporting BDS remains a drastic act for an Israeli peace activist. It excludes one immediately from the consensus and from the accepted discourse in Israel....But there is really no other alternative. Any other option - from indifference, through soft criticism, and up to full endorsement of Israeli policy - is a wilful decision to be an accomplice to crimes against humanity."

John Berger in his two page chapter (ch.21) provides a short but important analysis of how BDS should be understood and explained:

"Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it risks becoming exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions that support that policy, either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change."

I don't think that the importance of clearly understanding this point could be over-stated. It really is essential for BDS activists to be able to understand and communicate this point clearly if BDS is to be successful in bringing about the change in public consciousness that is required.

The book contains two chapter by South African commentators: Ronnie Kasrils (ch.11), a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and Ran Greenstein (ch.16), an academic from Johannesburg, both of which I found particularly powerful. Perhaps the most unusual chapter is written by Marc Ellis (ch.14), a Professor of Jewish studies at Baylor University in Texas. Although he echoes the discredited myth that Israel was faced with an existential threat prior to the 1967 war (or at least fails to clearly debunk it) he does make some interesting points, including drawing a parallel between the criticisms faced by 'Jews of conscience' and the Biblical prophets:

"Like the prophets, Jews of conscience who argue for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions are charged with treason. And, again like the prophets, Jews of conscience are seen as imperilling the security of the State of Israel and of Jews everywhere. Those who call for concrete measures against the policies of the State of Israel, especially after the Holocaust, are seen as blasphemers by the powers that be. But then the prophets were seen in exactly the same way."

My main criticism of this book is that is has no Introduction or Conclusion and so the reader is left to their own devises to try to pull together the themes of the various chapters into a coherent whole. This strikes me as an omission, and is certainly something that I would have appreciated as a reader. I would agree with the other four star reviewer that there is scope for more writing on this subject, and a more broad-ranging analysis of the tactic of BDS than we have been presented with yet.
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14 of 32 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Not a bad introduction to BDS April 26, 2012
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I will keep this as non-political as possible. I picked up the book because I have read many of the authors and although I am not particularly interested in BDS, I am actively involved in the Israel-Palestine issue, so I decided to get it. It has the usual authors about BDS giving short 2-10 page writings about various aspects of BDS. There is much overlap, especially about what they consider successes, and much about what boycott entails. I wish the book was formulated to giving compare and contrast arguments from various authors on the conflict, to give a broader spectrum of opinion on the matter. The book reads more like a hooray for BDS than anything else. There are a few noteworthy articles (about 35 total articles) and some that is hard to understand why they are in there. If you do not know much about BDS, it is a better choice than Omar Barghouthi's 300 page editorial turned into a book "BDS" but it still falls short of what should be written. If you want a hooray for BDS book, this is a good book for you. If you want a critical analysis of BDS, unfortunately this book is not for you, the only counter arguments, left and right, are the authors' interpretations of various arguments.
Hope this review helps, please don't waste time posting comments about BDS itself, this review is about the book, I honestly don't care to have some BDS debate on my review. Thanks
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6 of 20 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars An Uninformed Case January 7, 2013
Format:Paperback
I typically have agreed with Naomi Klein's positions in the past, however she's got it all wrong when it comes to Israel. If she wants to root for the underdog, then all she need do is purchase a map of the world and take a look at the size of Israel compared to all the Islamic countries around it. One almost needs a magnifying glass to find it. At that point, she should consider the fact that most, if not all of those countries have instituted a state policy of antisemitism, teaching it to their children, and refusing to recognize the Jewish state, which has been around for as long before the creation of Islam as from that time to present. The Arabs have acted with no sense of morality and have been routinely targeting civilians, including women and children with their bombs and rockets. The Israelis have painstakingly taken the moral high road and tried to only protect themselves by retaliating on military/terrorist targets, to the best of their abilities. The Arabs even use their own civilians as human shields to garner international pity. Let's not kid ourselves. This is not a political or nationalistic issue. It is a hatred of Jews issue - one that has been played out by the Christians in the Inquisition, the Russians in the pogroms, and of course the Nazis. The Jews are through running and hiding. They have finally returned to their homeland and will protect it against all terrorists. If Ms. Klein's family was under daily rocket attack as well as suicide bombings, I suspect she would be quick to change her flawed, ideological tune.
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