INTERVIEW - Expert from Sydney University evaluates boycott in all aspects: 'Palestinians themselves are asking us to boycott Israel'

ISTANBUL (AA) – Dr. Nick Riemer, author of the book titled Boycott Theory and Struggle for Palestine, said: "The weapons that are developed by Israeli arms manufacturers in conjunction with Israeli universities are battle-tested on Palestinians."

In an interview with Anadolu's Strategic Analysis Department, Riemer spoke about the importance of boycotting Israel for Palestinians, effective boycott methods, and, as exemplified in the recent resignation of the University of Pennsylvania Director Liz Magill, the impact of the Zionist lobby on intellectual world.

Question 1: How would you define the pro-Palestinian boycotts?

Riemer: The Palestinian boycott movement is a response. That's the key thing. It's a counter-boycott. It's a response to the fact that Palestinians are already being boycotted to all intents and purposes.

If boycotting someone is cutting off ties with them, then that's exactly what the Israelis have done to Palestinians. It's most clear in the case of Gaza, which has been under siege, cut off from the world, its inhabitants deprived of the most basic requirements of a decent kind of life for an extremely long time.

So that is really a boycott in all but name. And the tactics that Palestinians have developed to resist that should be seen as a counter-boycott.

Palestinians are just responding to the deprivation and dispossession, and the violence that Israel inflicts on them.

Question 2: What is the importance of boycotting Israel?

Riemer: The most important thing about the boycott of Israel is that Palestinians themselves have asked for it. In 2005, there were over 170 Palestinian organizations, things like unions, charities, cultural organizations, and many others, who came together and called for a boycott of Israel until justice was achieved for Palestinians.

And that is the most important thing about the boycott. We have an oppressed people, Palestinians, and they are asking citizens of other countries, people of conscience elsewhere in the world to boycott Israel. And that's why we should do it, because if we didn't do it, that would be a very serious failure of solidarity to Palestinians.

Apart from the fact that Palestinians have asked for a boycott, it is an important and effective tool for many reasons. One is that it relies on ordinary people's power. It completely bypasses governments and states who have shown themselves to be completely ineffective in achieving justice for Palestine. The Oslo Accords were meant to lead to an independent Palestinian state within five years and decades, decades since they were signed, that independent Palestinian state is further away than it ever was.

The institutions of the so-called "rules-based international order" have failed to achieve justice for Palestinians. The boycott of Israel is a way for ordinary people to take power into their own hands by harnessing the power that they actually have: their power as consumers, their power as producers and receivers of cultural goods, for instance, and also the power they have in universities, because the boycott happens in universities as well.

Question 3: Do you think boycotts really work?

Riemer: The important thing about a boycott is that it needs to be part of a campaign. It's not enough to just stop doing something because that something is related to Israel. The boycott needs to be part of an explicit, publicized campaign, which everyone knows about and understands the reasons for.

And for that reason, the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, which is the organization that is in charge of Palestinians' own boycott tactics, have identified particular companies that they think should be boycotted as a priority. So companies like HP, the IT manufacturer, or companies like PUMA, the sportswear manufacturer, these companies are both subject to boycott campaigns which are coordinated by the Boycott National Committee in Palestine. [1]

What's important about that is that it gives those boycott targets a lot of publicity. It involves a concerted campaign to explain why those companies in particular are complicit with the maintenance of Israeli apartheid and, therefore, why they need to be boycotted. It's much less effective to boycott something if no one knows why you're doing so and no one understands why the company involved has responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians.

It's the targeted campaigns against particular companies, which are the most important priority. That's the way that we should think about an effective boycott of Israel: It needs to be a targeted boycott and it needs to be directed against the particular boycott targets that the Palestinians themselves are coordinating.

Question 4: Can you give some examples to boycotts that became effective?

Riemer: One very recent example where I am here in Australia is that there was a very widely supported boycott of a major arts festival in Sydney at the start of last year – the Sydney Festival boycott – because it was revealed that the organizers of that festival had accepted sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy. Many, many acts and artists who were previously appearing in the festival withdrew from it in protest, and that caused an enormous amount of controversy and public discussion, and it ultimately led to the festival directors agreeing that they would no longer accept money from any foreign government in the future.

So that was a very concrete and recent example of a boycott that actually happened in the cultural arena, in an arts festival, that was entirely successful.

Since Oct. 7, there has been a worldwide campaign targeting the ZIM shipping line, which is an Israeli shipping company that runs boats to ports all over the world delivering cargo.

This isn't quite an example of a boycott, but it's very similar. The Israeli shipping line ZIM is a well-known and important component of the Israeli economy and a major supporter of Israel's apartheid regime. ZIM had been subject to protests and blockades in many ports around the world: in Genoa, in Italy, for example, and in at least three Australian ports in Sydney and Melbourne and in Fremantle, protesters have tried to disrupt the unloading and the loading of ZIM vessels.

Question 5: Are there other types of boycotts?

Riemer: Of course, there are other forms of boycott than simply consumer boycotts. Less well-known, I think, is the academic boycott. And that was actually the first form of the boycott of Israel to emerge in the modern period, in the last 20 years. It involves universities or people who work at universities cutting ties with Israeli institutions. What that means is not going to conferences that are sponsored by Israeli universities or not accepting Israeli research funding for particular projects, or not having anything to do with student exchanges.

It's an institutional boycott in the sense that it doesn't target individual academics who just happen to work in Israel. So I can write an academic article with an Israeli academic if I want to. There's nothing that violates the boycott about that. What I can't do is go to Israel to a conference sponsored by an Israeli university, because that's an institutional level of connection.

Question 6: How do you evaluate the resignation of University of Pennsylvania Director Liz Magill?

Riemer: The Israeli government has set up a task force that does things like encouraging Zionist donors to withdraw funding from American universities which are not seen as sufficiently pro-Israel. The campaign against Liz Magill, the campaign against Claudine Gay at Harvard are both orchestrated attempts by Israel lobby organizations to target figures in the university world who it sees as insufficiently friendly.

And that's just one small component of a much wider campaign which targets universities specifically because universities are seen – rightly so, I think – as particularly important sites for Palestinian activism. We know that young people generally are more likely to be pro-Palestinian than older people. And that's something that often starts at university. And there are many ways in which Israel's efforts to silence pro-Palestinian speech at universities unfold.

One of them that's particularly important is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism. This is a particular definition of antisemitism, which Israel lobby organizations have been trying to impose on universities and other cultural institutions throughout the West. The effect of this definition is essentially to make it antisemitic to criticize the policies of the Israeli government towards Palestinians.

Simply to tell the truth about what's happening in Gaza is considered as antisemitic by Israel.

Question 7: How do the Israeli universities contribute to war crimes?

Riemer: As institutions, Israeli universities are deeply responsible for the kinds of violence that the Israeli state inflicts on Palestinians.

Israeli universities are deeply involved in, for example, research into weapons, which then goes to bolster the Israeli army's arsenals. So weapons for the Israeli army are developed in Israeli universities. Israeli universities are also involved in the training of officers in the Israeli military.

Palestine in many ways – the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – function as laboratories for the testing of Israeli weapons. The weapons that are developed by Israeli arms manufacturers in conjunction with Israeli universities are battle-tested on Palestinians. And it's because they're effective on Palestinians that they can be sold elsewhere in the world with the guarantee that they really do destroy people and blow them to smithereens.

Students who study at Israeli universities can get course credit for engaging in what is essentially propaganda online to support Israel. So there are all of these ways in which Israeli universities are institutionally responsible, directly responsible for the oppression of Palestinians.

Question 8: In your book you explain how 'smartwashing' contributes to Zionist cancel culture. Can you tell us more about that?

Riemer: This is the idea that the unambiguous situation that we see before our eyes is actually much more complicated and much more favorable to Israel than it seems. This is a standard claim that Zionists use to avoid the most basic facts, which are of course in favor of Palestinians.

Zionists "smartwash" Israeli atrocities, just like they tried to pinkwash them or greenwash them.

"Smartwashing" is a term that I use in my book to describe the way that Zionists and other conservatives or other reactionaries often claim that the facts are more complicated than they seem. So, for instance, they say to Palestinian solidarity activists like me: "Look, you're not being nuanced enough. You're not being subtle enough, you don't really understand … What's happening isn't really a genocide."

They say: "That's a misuse of the term 'genocide.' If you look at the term 'genocide,' it's actually much more complicated than that. And you're missing all of that, all of that complexity." Similarly with the claim that Israel is an apartheid state, Zionists tell us that's far too simple.

They say that everything is much more complicated, as though they're the cleverest people in the room and as though they're able to understand things which we Palestine solidarity activists just can't understand. And they never explain why we can't understand it.

So pinkwashing is the claim that Israel is friendly to gay people and greenwashing is the claim that Israel is environmentally friendly. And in both cases, these are ways of trying to paint Israel as superior or as desirable in a way that's meant to discredit the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

[1] After this interview was recorded, PUMA ended its sponsorship of Israeli football, in accordance with the demands of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. https://bdsmovement.net/news/heres-why-puma-leaked-news-it-wont-be-renewing-its-sponsorship-team-apartheid-israel