You know the call to boycott Israel has gone mainstream when it gets taken up by the Queen. Actually Olivia Colman, of course, who played Her Majesty in several seasons of The Crown and has now pledged not to work with Israeli film institutions that are ‘implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people’.
Others among the thousands of signatories include Guy Pearce, Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Ayo Edebiri, Riz Ahmed, Josh O’Connor and Cynthia Nixon.
The pledge reads: ‘As film-makers, actors, film industry workers, and institutions, we recognise the power of cinema to shape perceptions. In this urgent moment of crisis, where many of our governments are enabling the carnage in Gaza, we must do everything we can to address complicity in that unrelenting horror.’
They’ve clearly struck a nerve.
But the response from Nadav Ben Simon, who chairs the Israeli screenwriters’ guild, will be wearisomely familiar to those of us who’ve spent years building up the academic boycott. Such actions are ‘counter-productive,’ he’s been quoted as saying.
That ‘counter-productive’ argument echoes those put to me at the University of Sydney, where I’m an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, in what became a well-publicised landmark Federal Court Case in Australia, ultimately dismissed, in which I had to defend my action of not endorsing a Fellowship application from a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for political reasons relating to Palestine. The legal action, I should add, was abandoned.
How come the contestation is so intense in settings where ostensibly the exchanges are confined to ideas and images, not bullets and bombs? How come increasing numbers of artists and performers are now calling for a boycott of creative industries, as well as academics in universities?
Thing is, we know such special interests as the arms industry and big-money finance will oppose any boycott call. There’s a direct connection between what the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, calls ‘The Economy of Genocide’, and their bottom line. That’s already ‘priced-in’.
In similar fashion, we know right-wing political parties are generally indifferent to the slaughter of people of colour by settler-colonial regimes. (With some notable exceptions, as for instance recently when Tory MP Kit Malthouse called in the British Parliament for peacekeeping troops to protect the Palestinians).
No, the real frontline is in the familiar category of ‘progressive except on Palestine’. One with which those Sydney Uni colleagues who opposed boycotting the Fellowship would align themselves without demur, I daresay, especially given its close kinship with another: ‘liberal Zionism.’
It needs to be made impossible to count oneself as being generally on the right side of arguments over justice, while still denying, minimising, excusing or relativising the excesses visited on Palestinians or the abrogation of their rights.
There can be no engagement with Israeli creative industries or universities without conferring impunity. The impunity extended over decades towards occupation, illegal settlement and apartheid has been a crucial enabling condition for the genocide. That’s a word you will not hear, of course, from political leaders in countries – such as Australia – that remain key diplomatic and military allies of Israel.
Weapons are still flowing from our factories, both directly and indirectly, to the very army that has systematically targeted journalists, health resources and aid workers. That’s without even mentioning the sinister pattern of bullet wounds observed by doctors in children who’ve been slain. The very definition of innocent bystanders.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars recently issued an authoritative pronouncement: what’s underway in Gaza fits the description to a T. If acknowledged, that would oblige these states to suspend arms supplies under the Genocide Convention that requires signatories to prevent and punish it. So they continue to gaslight us, despite the consensus of evidence-based credentialled opinion.
It’s reckoned to be career suicide in Australian universities to talk and write about Palestine. That’s because their treatment is unjustifiable. Power, to be power, requires resistance, Michel Foucault told us. In fact, it needs to perform itself by demonstrating indifference to that resistance – to quell it where necessary and divert it where possible with obfuscation and distraction.
University managements, keen to do the dirty work for powerful political and economic interests, are leery of Palestine justice advocates because in that very advocacy they signal that their acceptance of power and its dictates is conditional on evidence justification. Ultimately, the role of those managements is to instil obedience.
That’s why increasing numbers of creatives have joined academics in supporting the boycott. At stake is our own freedom to follow our intellect and imagination where they lead us. The actors are now taking up the call: in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.
Jake Lynch is an Associate Professor at The University of Sydney. His latest novel is Mind Over Murder.
