‘Brand Israel’ in the court of world opinion

Twenty-first century Israel has spared no expense in the effort to repair its degraded global image. Yet with a new BBC poll indicating that the Jewish state ranks an unenviable third among the world’s most negatively viewed nations, all the signs are that the much-vaunted ‘Brand Israel’ campaign is proving a costly exercise in futility. The production of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at London’s Globe Theatre on May 28 and 29 by the Israel’s national theater company Habima — as part of Britain’s 2012 cultural Olympiad — must have appeared well-suited to assist Brand Israel’s project of portraying a Jewish state that signifies not brutal oppression of Palestinian people but art, culture, sensitivity. However, Israel’s image is unlikely to be enhanced by a production which, from the moment it was mooted, has been dogged by controversy. Dismayed to discover that Hadima had put on shows in West Bank settlements, British luminaries of the performing arts, such as the actress Emma Thompson and the veteran Jewish directors, Jonathan Miller and Mike Leigh, endorsed calls for the production to be boycotted.
Their dismay was hardly lessened by the disclosure that Habima is receiving state subsidy and may thus be said to be formally involved in Israel’s mission to “de-toxify its brand.” Many believe Habima is irretrievably compromised and that its conduct amounts to implicit acquiescence not just in illegal Israeli land-grabbing and dispossession of Palestinians but in a state ideology of racial exclusiveness. The plain fact is that no Palestinian could possibly have attended its theater productions in West bank settlements.
None of this, perhaps needless to say, has stopped Zionists from excoriating those who seek to boycott the Habima production as ill-motivated zealots, persons with closed minds who purport to be upholding justice and human rights yet are really anti-Semites prosecuting a witch-hunt. In Israel last year, legislation was enacted to ban public support of boycott activities against the state, corporations and settlements, and not a few in the Jewish diaspora would doubtless be happy to see Israel’s boycotters likewise boycotted by their Western political masters.
For Zionists the bitter truth is that, in sharp contrast to the self-defeating Brand Israel campaign, the boycott movement is inexorably gaining strength. Israel may still be able to count in the main on the unconditional support of Western governments, but — as has been brought home by the BBC poll — the gulf between the attitude toward Israel of Western governments and Western public opinion is beginning to resemble a chasm. An international consensus is emerging that even though Israel cannot be regarded as an exact replica of South Africa, it is for all practical purposes an apartheid state.
A trenchant new book, The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim, comprises essays by leading proponents of the movement that has adopted the acronym BDS: Boycott Divestment Sanctions. In a terse but telling contribution, the US radical writer, Naomi Klein, herself a Jew, points out that it is in the broad sense of being a systematic oppressor state that Israel recalls apartheid South Africa: witness its imposition on Palestinians of colour-coded IDs and travel permits, its bulldozing of Palestinian homes and enforced displacement of Palestinian people, its roads that are exclusive to Jewish settlers. She invokes the testimony of the anti-apartheid activist, the Jewish South African politician, Ronnie Kasrils, who has observed that the “architecture of segregation” in the occupied Palestinian territories and in Gaza is “infinitely worse” than anything known under South African apartheid. His verdict has been echoed by another prominent participant in the campaign to end apartheid, emeritus Bishop Desmond Tutu.
It must be said that, even among critics of Israel, many reject boycotting on principle, regarding it as the betrayal of intellectual freedom. Yet, as Klein argues, claims that boycotts sever communication are misleading. Contending that they can have precisely the opposite effect, she relates how she identified as the preferred Israeli publisher of her international best-seller, The Shock Doctrine, the small imprint Andalus, which has been much involved in the anti-occupation movement and, uniquely among Israeli publishers, is devoted to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. Devising this plan, which entailed giving the proceeds of the book to Andalus, occasioned endless phone calls, e-mails, and instant messages stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. The result was a dramatic increase in dialogue.
Conceding that governments in Europe and the US are never likely to support the BDS campaign, Klein’s fellow contributor to the BDS volume, the Israeli historian and activist Illan Pappe, stresses how the boycott campaign emerged not from the corridors of power but from civil societies. Pappe, who was effectively driven out of Israel and who these days teaches at the University of Exeter in the south west of England, is encouraged by developments on US university campuses, where the enthusiasm and commitment of growing numbers of students has greatly raised the US public profile of the case for sanctions against Israel. The urgent need now, he maintains, is for progressive and radical Jewish dissidents in Israel to build a bridge to the wider Israeli public — in the absence of whose engagement Israel will never be persuaded to abandon its brazenly hegemonic policies.
Apologists for the Habima Theatre implausibly insist that its activities have no bearing on Israeli propaganda. What makes this insistence all the more implausible is that at a moment when Israel is pursuing ever more ruthless oppression while condoning the endless expansion of Jewish settlements, the company has chosen to stage, at a leading London venue, a play whose chief protagonist, Shylock, is Western culture’s archetypal persecuted Jew. The impression is of an Israeli political and cultural establishment mired in ethnocentrism and pathologically insensitive to civilized world opinion.

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