Oppose the state, not the people
By Yotam Feldman
This section is from the middle of the article. I hope you read it. Naomi is very courageous and brave.
Ramallah's intellectual elite, foreigners and curious spectators gathered last Saturday at the Friends School in Ramallah to hear writer and political activist Naomi Klein lecture to a packed auditorium. Following a musical interlude by a string quintet, one of whose members is blind, Klein took the stage. She chose to speak - in Ramallah - about her Jewish roots.
"There is a debate among Jews - I'm a Jew by the way," she said. The debate boils down to the question: "Never again to everyone, or never again to us? ... [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card ... There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that says, 'Never again to anyone.'"
It seems that during her brief visit, which began last Thursday night, Klein has not rested for a moment. Straight from the airport, she set out for a tour of Highway 443 that runs through the West Bank between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, connecting them to Modi'in and the adjacent Jewish settlements. She went on to the demonstration against the separation barrier at Bil'in, where there was a press conference on the civil suit in Quebec against Green Mount and Green Park, two Canadian companies that are providing construction services to the Jewish settlement of Upper Modi'in. In the evening she attended an event at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.
At the beginning of this week, Klein went to the Gaza Strip, where she interviewed residents. Wednesday she appeared at the Almidan Theatre in Haifa.
Since her 1999 book "No Logo" become an undisputed textbook of the anti-globalization movement, Klein, 38, has lectured at hundreds of meetings around the world. A celebrity journalist, political activist and commentator, she came to Israel to launch the Hebrew translation of her latest book, "The Shock Doctrine" (Andalus Publishing).
Klein, who supports an economic and cultural boycott of Israel as pressure to end the occupation in the territories, thought long and hard about publishing her book in Hebrew, as well as visiting Israel. She finally decided to issue the book with Andalus Publishing, which specializes in Arabic literature, and to contribute her royalties to the press. Klein and Andalus publisher Yael Lerer carefully planned Klein's itinerary in Israel to avoid the impression that she supports institutions connected to the State of Israel and the Israeli economy.
"It certainly would have been a lot easier not to have come to Israel, and I wouldn't have come had the Palestinian Boycott National Committee asked me not to," said Klein in an interview before her arrival, at her Toronto home. "But I went to them with a proposal for the way I wanted to visit Israel and they were very open to it. It is important to me not to boycott Israelis but rather to boycott the normalization of Israel and the conflict."
So why did you decide to come nevertheless?
"First of all, I deal in communications. It's my profession and my passion and I naturally rebel against any kind of cutting off of channels of dialogue. I think that one of the most powerful tools of those who oppose the boycott is the argument that it is a boycott of Israelis. It's true that some academics won't agree to accept an article by an Israeli for publication in a journal. There aren't many of them, and they make stupid decisions. This is not what the boycott committee has called for. The decision isn't to boycott Israel but rather to oppose official relationships with Israeli institutions.
"I try to be consistent in the way I act in conflict areas - I don't want to act in a normal way in a place that seems very abnormal to me. When I was in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, I didn't go to cocktail parties and also in Iraq - no cocktail parties. The State of Israel is trying to show that everything is fine in its territory, that it's possible to spend a nice vacation here or to be part of Western culture, very Western culture. I don't want to be a part of that. I am waiting impatiently for the time when I will be able to come for a vacation or a normal book launch in Tel Aviv. But this is a privilege that should be reserved for all the inhabitants."
Last April Klein attended on assignment for a magazine the Durban 2 conference in Geneva, which Israel and a number of Western countries boycotted because of the invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She is still upset by her experiences there.
"The most disturbing feeling," she explains, "was the Jewish students' lack of respect for the representatives from Africa and Asia who came to speak about issues like compensation for slavery and the rise of racism around the world. In their midst, Jewish students from France ran around in clown costumes and plastic noses to say 'Durban is a joke.' This was pure sabotage, which contributes to the tensions between Jews and blacks - Durban wasn't just about Israel: The Durban Declaration acknowledged for the first time that the trans-Atlantic trade is a crime against humanity and that opened the way to compensation. The boycott of the conference created a vacuum that was filled, on the one hand, by Jewish students who wanted to sabotage the conference, and on the other, by Ahmadinejad - both of them were truly awful."
Do you think it was necessary to allow Ahmadinejad to speak out so prominently at a conference against racism when he is calling for Israel's destruction and denying the Holocaust?
"I think that silencing the Palestinians was a big part of the reason he got so much attention. He is the only one who acknowledged what happened this year - more Palestinians were killed in 2008 than in any year since 1948. The boycott seems to me to have been an irresponsible decision - the Jewish community unifies in an attempt to shut down a discussion of racism when there is a shocking rise in racism on the right in places like Austria, Italy, Switzerland, in the midst of an economic crisis, in conditions close to those in which fascism spread in all of Europe."
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