An author’s misadventure

Responding to Israel’s war on Gaza in the summer of last year, a group of British literary figures announced in February that they would stop engaging in any cultural relations with Israel.

Their stated reason was, among other things, that Palestinians had “no respite from Israel’s unrelenting attack on their land, their livelihood, their right to political existence”.

Some days ago J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter fantasy series, found reason to get involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to place herself on the wrong side, when it comes to Palestinian rights.

She signed, together with a number of British literary and political figures, an open letter that claimed “cultural boycotts singling out Israel are divisive and discriminatory, and will not further peace”.

Instead, the letter called for dialogue to promote “mutual understanding and acceptance”.

In a later Twitter message to some fans who argued in favour of the boycott, Rowling wrote: “The Palestinian community suffered untold injustice and brutality, I want to see the Israeli government held to account for that injustice and brutality.”

But she went on to express her continued opposition to a cultural boycott of Israel because it could “silence” voices that need to be heard.

The author of Harry Potter would have been far wiser if she had stepped away from her magical world, taken a breather and reflected, if only for a moment, on how to end what she calls the brutality of occupation in Palestine.

She wants Israel to be held to account, but she fails to explain how. Yet, it is precisely to hold Israel to account that the calls for the boycott of Israel are spreading.

History tells us that cultural coexistence can only succeed between free peoples, but not between oppressors and oppressed.

Open dialogue and interaction can and at times does promote greater understanding and mutual acceptance, but definitely not in the case of Israel.

That road had been fruitlessly travelled time and again. Israel used it as a convenient cover to implement its national project for the total conquest of Palestine.

If Rowling reviews the record of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations over the past 25 years, she will realise that her romantic notions about “dialogue and mutual understanding” are tragically out of place.

She will also realise that BDS and similar civil society pressure movements, together with recourse to the international criminal justice system, are actually the last remaining non-violent venues capable of convincing Israel to deliver on its obligations to peace.

The alternative is more violence, more suffering and bloodshed.

The long-drawn Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” proved to be an exercise in futility.

At its starting point, in the early 1990s, the Palestinians conceded 78 per cent of historic Palestine to Israel in return for the remaining 22 per cent on which they hoped to build their own state. But that promise was never realised.

For close to a quarter of a century of negotiations, or dialogue if Rowling prefers, the “peace process” grinded on with no end in sight.

Israel conceded nothing but self-rule on 3 per cent of that 22 per cent, Palestinians were also permitted to administer a little more than 20 per cent at the pleasure of Israel and under its military boot, while over 70 per cent of the West Bank remained under the exclusive control of Israel.

The “peace process” turned into a farce, all process but no peace.

A “cottage industry”, as Roger Cohen of The New York Times called it, the “peace process” did work, but only for the benefit of unyielding Israeli negotiators and duplicitous self-promoting book-writing mediators.

The Palestinian negotiators persevered only to discover that the freedom they sought was turning into a mirage.

As this charade played out in fits and starts, land grabs continued unabated and the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem tripled.

No reprieve was in sight from the daily humiliation and abuse the Palestinians were receiving at the hands of the Israeli authorities and their settler protégés.

It has become crystal clear that Israel never intends to withdraw to its own borders or accede to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

And yet, Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of questionable credibility, never tire of repeating the litany of readiness to negotiate “without preconditions”.

And why not, it has worked quite well for them so far.

The worldwide boycott campaigns, including the BDS movement, are meant to challenge Israel’s obduracy and convince it that there is a price to pay: economic, cultural as well as political, for its refusal to concede to Palestinians their legitimate rights under international law.

Israel has now started to feel the pinch of those campaigns, but still refuses to heed their message.

Instead, it has launched a counter-campaign to fight them, utilising all available assets it commands worldwide to delegitimise them.

If Israel succeeds in defeating the boycott movements, it will extinguish the last ray of hope for genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace for years to come.

Whether consciously or not, by signing that letter, Rowling and her friends have played into the hands of Israel, turned themselves into instruments of its system of occupation, tools Israel uses in the fight against a legitimate and peaceful movement of resistance to occupation and oppression. 

A far-from-charming episode in the charmed life of J.K. Rowling.

The writer is a former Jordanian diplomat who served as ambassador to the United States and to Germany. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.