Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said this week that he wants to use trade negotiations as a means of undermining nonviolent Palestinian solidarity movements in Europe.
Cardin asked US Trade Representative Michael Froman on Tuesday whether the Obama administration is using negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as a cudgel against peaceful attempts, through the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), to actively oppose the occupation of Palestine.
“There’s a growing concern with our European partners that they are sympathetic to BDS legislation,” he told Froman. “I’d be interested in those discussions whether we have been raising the issues that such action by our European trading partners would be considered against our overall trading objectives and whether we are using TTIP as an opportunity to protect against such legislation.”
Froman responded that he “is not familiar with that particular area of legislation.”
“It’s not something that has come up in our negotiations, but we’re happy to follow-up with you and look into it,” he added.
Any attempts to oppose BDS with state power, however, would almost certainly infringe upon freedom of speech and assembly. When news broke that the often-militaristic American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was pushing the trade tactic brought up by Cardin, Program Director at the Foundation for Middle East Peace Mitchell Plitnick pointed out that “no government is running this program, not even the pseudo-governments of the Palestinian Territories.”
“If businesses could not engage in such activities, there would be great outrage,” he noted.
Many European governments have warned their citizens that there is litigation risk in doing business with Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank, however.
The BDS movement was initiated in 2005 by a wide range of Palestinian civil society organizations. It calls for the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, full equality for Arab and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees, as UN General Assembly resolution 194 called for.
Ironically, Cardin lauded US trade policy as a means of furthering human rights around the world before launching his anti-BDS inquiry.
“For those who are concerned, as I know some of my colleagues are about mixing trade and human rights, let me just remind you that it was US leadership in trade that helped change the apartheid government of South Africa,” he noted.
Many organizers who suffered under the apartheid government in South Africa have compared it to Israel and called on the world to support BDS. “Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of ‘normalcy’ in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice,” Bishop Desmond Tutu wrote in Ha’aretz last year, as Israel’s often indiscriminate bombing campaign raged in Gaza, killing and injuring thousands of Palestinian civilians. Tutu also said in April that when he has visited “the holy land” he sees “a mirror image of the sort of things that I experienced under the apartheid.”Nelson Mandela once described Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat as a “comrade in arms.” When the pair met just days after Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Mandela said Arafat “is fighting against a unique form of colonialism, and we wish him success in his struggle.”
Despite its clear targeting of a violent political system, many Israeli officials and their supporters have breathlessly sought to denounce BDS and its supporters—many of them Jewish—as antisemitic.
Jewish Voices for Peace, a group that claims it has 100,000 people participating in “online activism” has said that it “rejects the assertion that BDS is inherently anti-semitic.”
“JVP defends activists’ right to use the full range of BDS tactics without being persecuted or demonized,” it has said. “We support divestment from and boycotts of companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.”
It also has noted that it supports the goals of BDS “and believe[s] that they can and must, in the end, be achieved in mutually-agreed ways that uphold the well-being of Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
