Daily Times

It is possible you would think denying the people of Israel a chance to listen to the tabla is not the most appropriate method of opposing their state’s oppression of Palestinians. Yet the Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (INCACBI) persuaded the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain to cancel his performances scheduled in Israel in July, consequently enhancing the decibel of the growing clamour to shun Israel in the global cultural arena. Palestinians believe measures such as Hussain’s could compel Israelis to dismantle their discriminatory system, in the same manner as South Africa’s apartheid was two decades ago.

On May 31, INCACBI petitioned Hussain to rethink his decision of displaying his magical musical skills in Israel, arguing his performances would not only be tantamount to approving its brutal policies, but that these would tacitly contradict the concert he gave free of charge in Ramallah for raising money to develop music therapy for Palestinian children. The organisers of his July tour, Avshalom Farjun, apparently tried to lure him through promises of making arrangements for the presence of Palestinian students from Ramallah in his concerts. Ultimately, though, INCACBI triumphed, as it had earlier in mounting the boycott of Deconstructing India, an art show planned in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, by many of the Indian artists who had been invited to it.

Perhaps the most significant triumph of INCACBI is its claim to have convinced the novelist Vikas Swarup to pull out from a literary festival in Israel. Swarup is the author of the riveting bestseller, Q&A, on which was based the super-hit film, Slumdog Millionaire. His supposed withdrawal assumes importance because Swarup also wears the hat of a diplomat. For him to join the boycott of Israel cannot but be interpreted as dissent from the Indian foreign establishment over its Israel policy. But Swarup has not spoken on INCACBI’s claim. We can only guess the reason behind Swarup’s decision. It is possible INCACBI’s appeal to Swarup came at the time he had decided to withdraw because of his pressing work schedule in Osaka, Japan, where he is the country’s consul general. It is also true that had Swarup sought the government’s permission to participate in the festival, it would have been promptly granted. Such is the extremely warm relationship India and Israel share, forged in just 20 years, beginning 1992, when the full-fledged diplomatic relationship between the two countries was inaugurated.

It is precisely India’s Israel policy that INCACBI is stridently opposed to. Its Facebook site vows to relentlessly oppose India’s ‘morally repugnant’ Israel policy and expresses its determination to reverse it, thus hoping to convey that Indians have not abandoned the Palestinian cause nor forgotten their own bitter colonial experience. Indeed, for many, it is impossible for India to strike a balance between Israel and Palestine, pointing out for instance that India’s defence purchases from Israel, running into billions of dollars, keep well oiled the Israeli war machinery that is callously deployed against the Palestinians.

A positive response to appeals for boycotting Israel is not the rule. In 2010, the celebrated novelist Amitav Ghosh rejected the plea of 50 Indian intellectuals for turning down the Dan David award (worth $1 million) that Tel Aviv University jointly bestowed upon him and Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. Ghosh responded to the petitioners through a missive, in which he doubted the efficacy of a boycott as a political tactic, stressed the necessity of recognising the autonomy of cultural and educational institutes from the state, and wondered about the impact of a boycott on the dissidents living in Israel. Opponents of the boycott have often echoed the ethical underpinnings of Ghosh’s arguments.

Yet we know a boycott was particularly effective in dismantling apartheid in South Africa, mooted and initiated in British universities in the 1950s and gradually expanded to include the entire gamut of collective life. Even the ongoing attempts to culturally and academically boycott Israel, popularly known as the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement, has gathered momentum from the time 171 civil society organisations in Palestine proposed it in 2005. Those who have responded to it include musicians such as Roger Waters, Carlos Santana, U2, Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, and a long list of academics and authors.

Perhaps a better measure of the BDS movement’s efficacy can be gleaned from the steps taken to counter it. Israeli politicians passed a law last year allowing the suing of those who call for a boycott of music shows, and established a committee for exploring the possibility of compensating organisers who encounter politically motivated cancellation. The incipient Creative Community for Peace, a joint initiative of the United States-Israel music industry, has sought to create an alternative narration for those artists chaffing under the pressure of BDS activists.

In the US, a pro-Israel advocacy group, the Amchi Initiative, has been mounting pressure on four Californian universities to disallow professors from using public resources to promote the BDS and inviting for talks people like the historian Illan Papp, a Jew who is a strident critic of Israel. In April, 140 American professors wrote to the editor of The New York Times objecting to the advertisement the David Horowitz Freedom Centre placed in the newspaper. The advertisement compared the BDS movement to the Holocaust, and shockingly demanded the public shaming of 14 professors who had participated in a discussion on the issue in the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps Ghosh has a point in wanting us to treat educational and cultural institutes autonomous of the state. No doubt, these institutes produce knowledge in justification of the Israeli state, yet they also nurture dissidents critical of its politics. The contention becomes fuzzier still as soon as you discover that Tel Aviv University receives funding from the state. About the university, the Palestine campaigners wrote to Ghosh saying that it has consistently refused to commemorate the “Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwwanis and its ethnically cleansed population on whose land the university was partially built.”

Yet there is no denying the imperative for insulating Israeli dissidents from the impact of the BDS movement. However, you are left befuddled as you read about the Israeli group Boycott from Within, whose members vociferously support the boycott, rarely missing an opportunity to plead with performers to cancel their shows in Israel. You want to hail this year’s decision of the Tel Aviv University president to allow students to organise a ceremony to commemorate May 15, the day on which Israel was born in 1948 and which the Arabs call the Nakba Day, or Day of the Catastrophe. But then you discover the students were asked to conduct the ceremony outside the gate of the campus lest the university fell foul of the Nakba law, which denies public funds to institutes guilty of perpetuating the Palestinian memory of the day.

In this world, there exist innumerable exploitative political systems. But Israel’s is a class apart, for it has built a violent, colonial state on the foundation of the exceptional sorrow Jews suffered in the Holocaust, and harnesses the paranoia arising from the memory of that suffering to legitimise institutionalised violence and subordination. Zakir Hussain’s decision to not go to Israel will now make us hear in his tabla recitals the lament of the Palestinians.

The author is a Delhi-based journalist and can be reached at ashrafajaz3@gmail.com