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The boycott, in its diverse forms, against the colonial regime in Palestine is a welcome step so long as its objective is to undermine the regime. Presumably, the intentions and aims of the leaders of the campaigns calling for the boycott are indeed to weaken the Zionist regime in Palestine, and that they are based on the contradictions of this regime. However, the boycott against the colonial rule in Palestine raises some questions that the horizon of Palestinian collective action has often ignored. Of particular importance is the question of the relationship between the tools of resistance and their users. This question is tied to the vision from which the tools of resistance are derived. From this perspective, the boycott does not exist in and of itself, and it can be effective only if it is used in a more general framework that strives to undermine colonialism. In this article, I shall examine the relations between the general, theoretical-political framework of the boycott as a tool of resistance, on the one hand, and the Palestinian who uses the tool to bring down the Zionist colonial regime in Palestine, on the other hand.

http://jadal.mada-research.org/UserFiles/file/Jadal_PDF_2011/jadal11-eng/Nashif-article-final.pdf

Entrenching the Boycott in the Principles of the Resistance

Esmail Nashif
Mada al-Carmel
Jadal, Issue no.11, September 2011

The most important feature of the boycott as a tool is perhaps that it is based on the nature of the Zionist regime as a capitalist venture from the socioeconomic perspective and as a regime that aspires to monopolize the victim status and the legitimacy resulting from that status in order to build its economic and military institutions. The boycott is a sociopolitical construct that prevents individual persons, groups, institutions, and profit- seeking companies from engaging in activity that maintains the colonial regime, and at times strengthens it, either in an economic and military manner or with respect to its moral legitimacy. The optimal prevention results from a willful abstention of individuals, institutions, and companies from engaging in such activity. In other words, collective internalization of the mental-emotional structure that refuses to take part (or even to cooperate with those who are taking part) in the colonial organizations that reject Palestinian existence, unless that existence provides a source of profit for those organizations. The prevention, in its minimal ethical form, is similar to an aggressive moral police that persecutes persons who violate the prevention, in order to remove them from the existing socio-political context, and thereby achieve abstention from performing the acts (economic, military, and moral) that serve the colonialism. These two poles — willful abstention and police prevention — define a certain kind of continuation that includes a mixture of the two kinds based on the current socioeconomic situation in the specific Palestinian context. Therefore, as with every other means of resistance, the tool must be positioned within the context of its creation and its use, i.e. in the diverse kinds of Palestinian contexts and in the relations between these contexts from the perspective of the boycott and resistance to the Zionist colonialism and to those who sustain this colonialism.

Many Palestinian components touch directly on the boycott issue, forcing us to reconsider our relations with the colonial regime. I shall discuss these components: the Palestinians of 1948; the West Bank and Gaza; and the Palestinian diaspora exiled in neighboring Arab countries. In the present situation, there is no inclusive sociopolitical-theoretical framework of these parts of the Palestinian people. As a result, each part is detached from the others and has a different and independent context, requiring another kind of resistance tools in general, and with respect to the boycott in particular.

Most of the Palestinians of 1948, with all the details of their material and symbolic life, are involved in the colonial regime and the regime's apparatuses that define their daily lives. In addition, there is limited, marginal social activity that seeks to break the cycle of dependence on the regime. As for the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority acts as a kind of sub-contractor of the colonial regime. This function has a structural ceiling designated for the Palestinian Authority, so the identity of the persons acting on its behalf is irrelevant; rather, it depends on the structural function within the colonial struggle in Palestine. In Gaza, the experience has been a two-edged sword. The resistance movements indeed managed to achieve a decisive result and to bring about the withdrawal of the regime there. However, the withdrawal led to another kind of control of the movement of people and basic raw materials and perpetuated the detachment of Gaza from every other Palestinian entity. The Palestinian diaspora in exile is entrenched in internal and other contractions with the existing Arab regimes. As a result, the need for examining its relations with the colonial regime has fallen to the third or fourth level of priority. Therefore, boycott in the diaspora has implications other than those involving the prevention I mentioned above.

This preliminary survey indicates that the boycott, in its present form, arose directly from the experience of the West Bank and from rejection of the character of the structure of the Palestinian Authority as a sub-contractor of the colonial regime. A conspicuous element in this regard is the lack of an overall vision or sociopolitical theoretical framework of the Palestinian collective. This lack of vision and framework has caused the boycott to atrophy to the point where it was reduced to the experience of certain urban elites who have gained ascendance following the general withdrawal of the entire Palestinian society. These Palestinian elites, for the reasons connected to the nature of the colonial apparatuses to which they have been subjected, view the boycott as a practice whose declared purpose is to force Israel to comply with international law and its undeclared purpose is to use the strategy of cleansing (that is, cleansing the Palestinian of his Israeliness) — this practice being part of the battle waged between these elites and the Palestinian Authority elites over control of Palestinian society and over who will serve as its sole representative in dealings with the international community.

The Palestinian Authority is characterized by its relations with Israel, while most of the elites, who use the boycott as their primary means, attempt to conduct a discourse that opposes the material aspect of these relations (the goods), on the one hand, and their symbolic aspect (the legitimacy of the occupation of the West Bank), on the other hand. The principal problem in the present form of the boycott is that it results from partial Palestinian experience, but an attempt is made to generalize it to the entire Palestinian case. For example, the boycott calls for a meaningful solution in the West Bank and in Gaza by means of the end to the occupation, while simultaneously proposing to the Palestinians of 1948 that they agree to full equality and integration in that regime that is being boycotted in other places. Furthermore, the boycott calls for return of the refugees without dealing in any substantial manner with the nature of the regime they will return to.

A material and symbolic ethical boycott of the colonial regime is insufficient so long as it does not lead to a profound examination of the Palestinian — regardless of his or her specific context — as an active agent in the social history that shapes his or her collective identity. When boycott is used as a tool, the Palestinian subject is turned into the sum total of practices that oppose the colonial presence. This kind of examination depends on that presence in order to reject it. One of the features of the formation of settler colonialism in Palestine is the almost absolute totalitarian presence in every sphere of life, a situation that originated with the advent of Zionism and its genesis in the capitalist project. The colonial presence includes, therefore, all spheres of daily life, including the symbolic life of the Palestinians. Thus, rejection of the forms of the colonial presence requires activity in all spheres of Palestinian life, in a way that fits the totalitarian logic of colonialism and enables boycotting and negating it. This dead-end is the main cause for the creation of the Palestinian subject as a victim who is incapable of being rescued from his or her catastrophe, and to the Palestinians perceiving it as such, and to placement of the Palestinian within the web of the capitalist apparatus in all its stages. But the principal factor that enables the colonial regime to relate to itself as an historical agent is necessarily the variety of victims, primarily Palestinians.

It could be that the main evidence of these processes is the division of the Palestinians into types according to the form of colonial presence in their collective and individual body. Consequently, the extent and form of the boycott that negates the colonizer and the colonial presence in Palestinians creates them anew, as if they were a tragic repetition of variations of the structure of the victim.

The history of Palestinian resistance is not lacking in the development of resistance tools as much as in critical debate that can improve these tools and the resistance to include a more profound and comprehensive liberation. The boycott as a tool of resistance brings to the fore the lack of a general Palestinian framework that encompasses the entire Palestinian collective, a framework that is not affected by the contradictions of the colonial regime and is not dependent on it. Therefore, the boycott's reach must include — at minimum — the dependence of Palestinian consciousness on Zionist colonial activity and develop an awareness of this dependence and the need to break it. Indeed, only this Palestinian intervention can embrace all the diverse Palestinian groups without the intervention being dependent on, and proceeding along with, the colonial reality. In its present form, the boycott, being derived from the hothouse of liberation from the hegemonic consciousness, is not conditioned upon the presence of the colonial regime within the Palestinian subject. Rather, it strives to attain the moment of the Palestinian presence after negating the principle of presence of the perpetrator in shaping the Palestinian victim. The other is only one of the forms against which the subject can be defined and its horizontal metaphor. On the other hand, negating the subject makes it possible to penetrate the depths of consciousness of the collective subject.

Thus, we must shape the boycott tool in the Arab-Islamic historical context as a primary frame of reference, and not in the context of the authority of Western purity, as is currently the case. If we do so, the boycott will become an integral part of the liberation from the colonial presence within the subject. The Palestinian intervention after its colonial moment is an Arab-Islamic intervention, since, on the one hand, it constitutes ratification of the geologic strata of the cultural tradition at the movement of its constitutive liberation intervention, and, on the other hand, it directs this tradition to forms of temporary experience on the basis of its humanist baggage. The most important thing in the framework of re-reading the Palestinian intervention through the Islamic Arab hothouse is the question of striving to reestablish the national Palestinian collective.

Esmail Nashif is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva.
This essay was originally written in Arabic.