There are also Israeli organizations fighting tooth and nail to create an alternative to the conversation and practices that prevail at the top – an alternative that favors Israeli-Arab coexistence, humanistic education, human rights in the territories, exposing the injustices of the occupation, and providing legal assistance to Palestinians. The left’s galaxy of idle chatter is also studded with groups of authors, intellectuals and academics who believe they have the power to come up with a magic formula that will convince hundreds of thousands of people to flock to the polls on Election Day with the correct ballot in their hands. [...]
It’s worth studying a few lessons from the battle against apartheid in South Africa. Few people remember that the boycott movement there actually began as a domestic effort by the African National Congress in 1952. Its model was the effort by India’s Congress Party in the ‘30s, which called for a consumer boycott that undermined Britain’s economic interests such as its monopoly on salt production. In other words, long before there was an external boycott, a boycott was organized within South Africa by opponents of the regime. [...]
Awareness of the situation in South Africa began filtering into the West, and especially the United States, after human rights activists realized there was a connection between, say, the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama – which was ignited by Rosa Parks in December 1955 – and the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in March 1960 in which police killed 69 black demonstrators. But liberal groups worldwide haven’t yet made the connection between their war on xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism in their own countries and, for example, the war crime Israel committed when it slaughtered more than 120 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. [...]
In Israel, its base must be Jewish liberals and leftists and Arabs. The Israeli left must understand that the only hope – albeit a small one – to change Israel’s direction lies in creating a full alliance with the Arab minority. After that, the left must also try to add other spurned groups to this coalition of minorities.
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