The Georgetown Israel Alliance (GIA) seems to have taken considerable exception to an earlier campus event featuring a lecture and question-and-answer session with Princeton international law scholar and former U.N. Special Rapporteur Richard Falk.
Subsequently, a member of the GIA went on to dismiss and denounce the event as having been “an evening of half-truths” and “manipulative rhetoric,” sprinkled with some legitimization of wanton violence and served with a side of “egregious lies” in a “A GIA Response to Former U.N. Special Rapporteur Richard Falk” published by The Hoya on Dec. 18.
The author accused Falk of anti-Semitism — a charge that is both unsubstantiated and diversionary. Further, in aiming to criticize Falk’s proposed course of action —that of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — the author shed crocodile tears over the plight of those Palestinians who would be unable to work at a SodaStream plant that was operated on illegally occupied territory.
The closure, which followed significant losses in SodaStream revenue, was one of the recent indications of the effectiveness of the BDS model. It epitomizes the colonial enterprise’s tendencies to feign best interests for the subjugated in order to induce quiet compliance.
While the closure of the SodaStream factory has been painted by the media as economically harmful, the economic loss the Palestinian people have suffered over the years has left hundreds of thousands to languish in grueling poverty to this day, and it is not properly recognized.
The viewpoint’s criticisms lack evidence and are emblematic of the methods that inhibit robust and intellectually honest engagement between Israel and Palestine.
For too long in American newsrooms, halls of power and towers of academia, prevailing assumptions about what does and does not constitute “legitimate” or “constructive” or “civil” discourse around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have caused the development of skewed conceptions that discourage dissent.
Those who dare challenge the demarcations laid down run the risk of being dismissed as “divisive” or “radical” or worse. Sadly, however, these phenomena are neither new nor restricted to Palestinian advocacy.
My advice to the GIA, and those who support its positions on the issue of Palestine and Israel, would be to return to the drawing board. As should be evident by any honest survey of American civil society, especially in light of global reactions to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza this summer, the stale strategies of yesteryear are rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Slow but nonetheless significant victories are being achieved for the Palestinian cause within societies across the globe and on college campuses across this country. In the last couple months alone, varied iterations of the BDS model have succeeded at places like Harvard and UCLA despite meeting strong resistance.
And this resistance isn’t reactionary. There’s a reason why money is being poured into initiatives aimed at challenging and defeating campaigns such as BDS — they work.
In a recent piece entitled, “The Dead End of Post-Oslo Diplomacy,” professor Falk details the Oslo approach’s flaws, as well as his recommendations for a way forward. Far from the GIA’s retelling, Falk did not discuss or legitimize acts of violence against civilians. Rather, he cited the strength of the Palestinian case from the perspectives of global solidarity, morality and international law, as well as the great potential that lies in methods of “nonviolent militancy” such as BDS.
How on earth, the GIA asked, could Mr. Falk condemn the protracted diplomatic exercises that bore such wonders as, not one, but “two Nobel Peace Prizes?” Does Falk see no other avenue but violence? The error and sensationalism that pervades both questions should be sufficiently clear. And if they are not, as Benjamin Netanyahu once said, “study the facts.”
Amin Gharad is a junior in the College and a board member of Amnesty International, who, along with Students for Justice in Palestine and the Georgetown University Lecture Fund, initially coordinated Richard Falk’s visit to campus.