Why Boycott Culture?

"No heroism, just... basic human decency."

Last night, the motion for the debate was: ‘Cultural boycott can be an effective, indeed morally imperative, political strategy’. Speaking in favour was Omar Barghouti and Seni Seneviratne. Against, Carol Gould and Jonathan Freedland.

To cut a long story short, the discussion became very heated and there was a lot of heckling. Gould in particular received a lot of laughter and shouts when she talked about the attacks on Israel. An audience member shouted out that people were heckling because you could not compare the thousands of Palestinian deaths with the relatively few Israeli casualties.

Freedland made two very direct points: first, that he was not discouraging of action taken against the Israeli government he regularly criticises, but that a boycott, specifically, will not work in the country he “knows well”. Second, he said that the audience had revealed that they were against the principle of a Jewish state, not just the military actions of Israel. “It might make you feel good,” he said, “but you won’t change anything.” He called it “aromatherapy”.

Seneviratne made several comparisons with South Africa, which is the most obvious; the boycott of South African goods was an act of solidarity which did, eventually, contribute to the end of Apartheid. Despite Freedland’s claim that it was a “comfortable” analogue, she made the point so straight-forwardly that it was difficult to see how Freedland and Gould could bounce back. They didn’t, to be fair. In the face of Barghouti’s clear, articulate and compelling arguments emphasising the boycott as an act of non-complicity rather than heroism, Freedland and Gould were very much on the back foot.

No-one in the audience stood up to make any arguments against the boycott either, except one woman who asked why Jews were also referred to as a homogenous group. In this vein, Gould asked how one could call Israel an apartheid state if Barghouti himself had studied at the university of Tel Aviv – after all, did black people routinely study at Witts in South Africa? Barghouti dismissed any personal definitions of apartheid and stuck to the UN definition. I feel he’d already put the nail in the coffin when, during his speech, he said that the boycott was about ordinary people in allied countries refusing to be complicit in the actions of their government; that this boycott was to be taken up by Westerners because Israel is the only country that contravenes international law, but is still welcomed by countries like Britain and America; and that you cannot stand by and let culture be used as a tool to sweeten controversial military action. Gould said this was a shutting down of dialogue, and Freedland said it would make Israel even more isolated and belligerent because they’d believe that the world hated them. Freedland asked why Seneviratne, as a Sri Lankan, was not rooting for Tamils – or any other country with human rights abuses. She said if they called for a boycott she would happily join them too. Freedland was trying to make her look like a hypocrite, but unfortunately that argument is a bit like asking him why he doesn’t also become a doctor or a general, as well as a writer, if he cares about tackling injustice. Obviously, one person cannot do everything, or wholly support every cause.

At the end of the debate, the audience were asked to raise their hands if they were pro, anti or ambivalent about the current boycott of Israeli academy and culture. The vast majority were pro. Had there been a compelling moral argument that didn’t fall back on Nazi rhetoric, the Anti-boycott side might have been more interesting. Gould was heckled a lot, and this I thought was disrespectful in the context of the discussion, but she didn’t make compelling points in response the way Freedland did.

Barghouti shone and thus he wins the t.shirt. He had an endless bank of quotations at his disposal and nothing ruffled his feathers. As problematic as the comparison is, time will tell whether the result of the boycott will put Freedland and Gould in same position as white pro-apartheid South Africans, most of whom will deny they ever held that position.