[lbo-talk] Martin Luther King day and Boycott, Divest, Sanctions

Gar Lipow gar.lipow at gmail.com
Mon Jan 16 09:28:12 PST 2012


With the official celebration of the Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, it is time to remind USAians of a non-violent struggle going on right now. Like the civil rights struggles King played such a big part in, not only conservatives but many liberals condemn it and express outright hatred and contempt for those who take part in it.

I'm speaking of course of the call from just about every part of Palestinian society, including the most moderate parts, for a campaign of Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. This is the same kind of campaign that was once carried out against Apartheid in South Africa. And people throughout the world are supporting this campaign, which is sometimes condemned for not being sufficiently even-handed.

In the 19th century, the great westward expansion of the U.S. involved taking Native American land, and killing Native Americans or driving them onto reservations.  Sometimes, in addition to fighting back, Native Americans would commit massacres of their own - not on the scale to which they been subjected, but brutal enough.  This did not stop the Quakers, the great 19th century practitioners of non-violence, from supporting Native American rights. They wanted an end to continual conquest of Native American peoples, negotiation of fairer treaties, and the honoring of treaties that had already been agreed to.  And, horror of horrors, they were not even handed. They condemned massacres on both sides, but devoted most of their efforts to opposing injustices by the biggest perpetrator of violence, the U.S. government, and U.S. settlers.

Many of the same people who condemned the Palestinians for years for not using sufficiently non-violent tactics, now condemn the leading non-violent tactic that could become an alternative to rockets. And yet, nothing could be more non-violent and more moderate than BDS. After all, there is nothing comparable in any part of what is being called for to the siege still being carried against Gaza, where most of the people are still deprived of clean drinking water, and the ability to carry out basic agriculture, or the fishing or any of the industries on which their lives depend.  Israel boasts of having "loosened" its control, while infant and child mortality in Gaza still remain one of the highest in the world. BDS might, in the distant future, make Israeli imports more costly and exports more difficult. But that is just too harsh a response to the continuing death of children.  Persuading the Pixies to cancel a concert in Gaza, maybe even canceling a concert performed by Israeli orchestras, or action by local co-ops in no longer carrying Israeli goods: those are just rude responses to preventing the rebuilding of sewage lines that might help prevent cholera in Gaza, or the shooting of peaceful fishing boats. God forbid anyone take action that cost Israeli industries and elite institutions money or inconvenience.

Well Martin Luther King would recognize the tune. When he was alive, the New York Times regularly published editorials condemning him as an extremist, as anti-American, as hurting his own cause. Bad enough that the movement he lead undermined Southern moderates who might have ended Jim Crow in a few thousand years or so. But he non-violently opposed the American war in Vietnam, even though the Vietnamese independence movement was, like the American revolution, a violent one. Mostly non-violence is only praised when the struggle is over and ideally when the leader of the struggle is dead. Non-violent struggle still in process, carried out by living rather than those safely martyred, carried out on behalf of highly imperfect human beings rather than pure saintly victims is always condemned by the respectable and high-minded.

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