Boycotters meet match

Editorial

The group Palestinian and Jewish Unity, which had been boycotting a Montreal shoe store for carrying a line of Israeli footwear, has temporarily suspended its protests outside the store, because they have attracted support from a group with which they would rather not acknowledge common cause.

PAJU did not want to be seen rallying in cahoots with the Mouvement Nationaliste-Revolutionnaire Quebecois, whom PAJU condemns as “racist and anti-immigrant.” The revolutionary nationalists, evidently, announced plans to join PAJU at the shoe store, creating a perfect tableau of the anti-Israel movement today. The fringe left and the fringe right may well have more in common than they would like to admit.

The development is comical in part because the MNRQ has done what Zionists, as well as Liberal and Conservative members of Parliament who made their way to the store to conspicuously buy Israeli shoes, could not do. They undermined the boycott, specifically by threatening to embarrass PAJU with making public its strange bedfellows.

Of course, PAJU deserves credit for calling off the boycott, at least temporarily. The boycott is a silly gesture that would likely only succeed in putting one man out of business. But this, of course, is not why members of PAJU have postponed their protests. They did not want to be seen marching in lockstep with neo-fascists. Till now, however, the anti-Israel movement has been shamefully untroubled by some of the supporters they have assembled. Among the ranks of the Israel-haters are Islamist groups, communists and far-right groups. The anti-Israel movement has been especially blithe about the presence of antisemitism and antisemites in their ranks, opting to confront not the Jew-haters but the Jews, dismissing the very concept of contemporary anti-Jewish prejudice in books such as Michael Keefer’s Antisemitism Real and Imagined. The dismissal of the role of prejudice in their movement is troubling, but so is the presence of antisemites, who have seemed welcome, as long as they do not take so public a role that they could affect the reputation of the movement. In Montreal, the radical rightists’ desire to join the protest was too much for the radical leftists, so they took their signs and went home.

But PAJU should take a hard look inward, too. They should ask why they find themselves on the same side of this issue as the neo-fascists. They would say that they have come to the same conclusion through a diametrical process of thought or ideology. But have they? The extreme right is pretty up front about their views of Jews. The extreme left couches their position in the language of liberation, colonialism and occupation. Suggestions of any less pure motivations are shut down before they can even be critically considered, as in Keefer’s implying that anti-Jewish prejudice is all in our heads.

In the context of broader world events, the boycott of a Montreal shoe store is as infinitesimal as it deserves to be. Day by day, we see people across the Arab world standing up to the regimes that have oppressed them, calling – notably – not for “death to America” or “down with the Zionist entity,” but for freedom and economic opportunity. The coming days and weeks could change the course of history even more than the weeks in 1989 when Europe’s greatest division dissolved.

Of course, unbridled optimism is not called for. While the people appear to be demanding democracy, revolutions can be co-opted and democracy is perhaps less likely than radical Islam to emerge as the winner in any of the countries seeing street protests this week. As bad or worse is the potential that democracy will win but Islamist insurgents will use Iraq and Afghanistan as models to ensure democratic governments do not have a moment’s peace.

To be more hopeful, these protests could be the first phase in the democratizing of the region. And this would almost certainly mean that peace will come to Israel because democracies do not go to war with one another. This axiom is not a coincidence. Institutions and societies with democratic structures subscribe to a belief in discussion leading to consensus. Democratic countries resolve internal conflicts not through force, but through discussion and compromise. Similarly, in the international arena, democracies negotiate, unless faced with an adversary who knows only force.

In addition, if freed from oppressors who for decades have scapegoated the Jewish state, Arab citizens will finally be able to do what they woulda/shoulda/coulda done decades ago: coexist with, work with and learn from the only democracy and the most successful economy in the region.

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