Telling friends from enemies

Boycotting Israeli settlement products is not as simple as it sounds, as Khalil Nakhleh* discovers

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Like many thousands of Palestinians in Ramallah, I feel utterly confused by the dishonesty of being railroaded into the local boycott of Israeli settlements products. However, since we -- my wife and I -- are committed to the principle and act of boycott as a means of resistance, I decided to clarify the primary issues involved, in order to minimise, as much as possible, the daily contradictions. I thus embarked on sorting out -- systematically, methodically, and with as much clarity as I could muster, the major issues.

The distinction between friends and enemies is not as clear as it sounds. The Ramallah government, together with its ministries, agencies, and commissions, repeats one line and wants to ram it down our throats. This line can be simplified as follows: "our primary enemy, at this historical juncture, is the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Therefore, and in order to punish these settlements and force them out, we, and our international friends, must boycott their products."

The words used do not reflect any conviction on the part of the government that these are Zionist settler colonies, and that, having been established on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank since 1967, they are only another phase in the Zionist settler-colonial project that started in the rest of Palestine much earlier than 1948. They are not the final phase of this onslaught either, however much we are being "duped" into thinking that this is so.

We are not being prepared to confront other phases in the not-so-distant future of the proliferation of Zionist settler colonies in the body of the Arab homeland. Just as they are doing in the Syrian Golan, it is certain that they will spread into Lebanon, Iraq and the Gulf region. Yet, the message imposed on us through this very visible hoop-la of boycotting "settlement" products says that the "settlements" are our enemy and the rest of Zionist Israel, so-called "Israel proper", is not.

Zionist Israel is actually our "partner" (and a preferred one at that), and it has the potential of becoming our friend. However, if challenged it may become upset, mean and vengeful. Thus, it's not expedient for us to boycott its products, which continue to flood our markets. On the contrary, we should facilitate the distribution and sale of Israeli goods in our minimarkets and supermarkets and in the process help increase the profits of those mercantile intermediaries who have become their exclusive brokers and the monopolies they have created.

After all, these special brokers are Palestinians, aren't they? And they provide employment opportunities through these monopolies to our youth? Such exclusive commercial brokering, according to this logic, helps to "develop" our society, because it garners extra capital and circulates it. To whom, where, and with what effect it's not very clear, and, worse yet, no one is posing these questions.

If Zionist Israel is inching towards the "friends" category, then all the businessmen who work hard to market its products in our midst, and effectively undermine and impede our ability to produce alternatives to these products, should also be considered our "friends". It also stands to reason that all those Palestinians and non-Palestinians who work very actively to normalise relations with Zionist Israel, from the Palestinian president downwards, should be placed squarely in the "friends" category.

Furthermore, shouldn't this apply to all those, Palestinians and non-Palestinians, who work so diligently to provide detailed information to Zionist Israel about our society and our local family structures and gatherings, about who does what, where and when, about our community- based resistance, about everything we do or say? In other words, shouldn't this apply to the informers and collaborators ( al-umala )? If so, where are our enemies? Isn't it odd that the latter category is shrinking rapidly, to an infinitesimal degree, even while we're still under occupation and suffering from oppression?

Armed with a slightly clearer understanding of who our local "enemies" and "friends" are, but in the absence of clear "official" guidelines as to who our international "enemies" and "friends" are, I felt all set to wade through the products available at our favourite minimarket. I embarked with the hope (proved unjustified) that our favourite minimarket would stock fewer products from Zionist Israel than would most supermarkets.

Yet, as I perused the shelves, my confusion persisted. In the first place, almost all the products were marked in Hebrew. Reading the labels, I felt proud that finally I had a clearer idea as to which products to boycott and which to buy. But then I realised that products coming from China, Turkey, Portugal, the USA, Morocco and Zionist Israel all had Hebrew writing on them. This did not help me identify those products coming from the "settlements", as products from Pesgat Zeev, or Ariel, or Modi'in, or Petah Tikva, or Nahariya are not marked "product of the settlements" but "product of Israel".

Since we don't produce fresh milk, I veered towards the major Israeli companies, mainly Tenuva, for that. But I couldn't tell if Tenuva fresh milk was settlement- contaminated or not. Moreover, what about the "al-Bustan" humus that supposedly comes from the Palestinian town of Imm Al-Fahm inside Zionist Israel? Should I boycott that, even though its owners are indigenous Palestinians (perhaps with Zionist partners), who, most probably, succeeded in building their humus factory as a reward for cooperation?

The deeper I delved, the more confused I became. Since we are committed to practising our boycott with zest, we stopped buying Nestle products, specifically Nescafe, after it was reported that the company had a plant in the settlement of Sderot in Al-Naqab contiguous to Gaza. And since we boycott obviously Israeli products, we could not look for an alternative there, so we searched instead for non- Israeli alternatives at our favourite minimarket. We started buying Maxwell House instant coffee as a more politically correct alternative. This is manufactured by an American company, Kraft Foods, and comes direct from Germany.

Likewise, looking for omega-3 sardines, we found ourselves buying the only available alternative of "small mackerel", a product of Portugal in the EU, but coming to us via an Israeli importing company. The only "contaminant-free" sardines we could find were a product of Morocco, which were brought to us thanks to a British export-import company. However, Morocco is another worrying and confusing case. On the one hand, it is an Arab country, but on the political correctness scale, it is hardly distinguishable from the US or France.

We also found and bought some canned mushrooms, a product of China but coming to us thanks to a Palestinian importer in Tulkarm, and so on. The success of the process demanded ongoing research, and we were limited in our choices.

The nagging question of who our real enemies are persisted and demanded a deeper explanation. Isn't America our real enemy? Aren't the EU countries, which support America in every major decision it takes against us, our real enemies? Isn't Turkey, which insists on maintaining and developing far-reaching strategic relations and cooperation with Israel in restructuring and controlling the region, dividing the labour between it and Zionist Israel, our enemy? Or is it our friend? How can we be sure without guidance?

To relieve the confusion, I escaped into what I thought would be the straightforward situation of fruit and vegetables. I went to Abu Issa, our preferred vegetable and fruit supplier, and asked, "Abu Issa, do you have any baladi [domestic] apples or pears?"

"Yes," he answered. "The green-skinned pears." I asked where they came from. "The Golan," he answered. Feeling elated that he considered the Golan as baladi, I bought some, assuming that they came from the proud and non- acquiescing Syrian-Arab-Druze villages in the Golan, and that these pears had defied various checkpoints on their journey to Ramallah.

I did not doubt that these were indeed baladi. But then I started to doubt my certainty. How could we be sure that they did not originate in the Zionist settlements in the Golan, which have now invaded the whole of that space? What evidence did I have that the green-skinned pears I was buying did not come from a collaborative project between Arab-Syrian Golan dwellers and Zionist settlers?

I moved to the vegetable corner, which was clearly marked intajuna (our production). After a brief enquiry, I found what was in season: aubergines, cucumbers, tomatoes, koussa (squash), bamyeh (okra), cauliflowers, grapes and figs. I was relieved, because I thought that sticking to what's in season, under the label of intajuna, would lessen the state of confusion in which I had started. We concluded in our household that we should try to stick to what we can buy directly from the farmers, our local producers, and to what's in season, even if we have to eat bamyeh three times a week in certain instances.

Why is it that our economy has not focussed on the production of alternatives for the basic foodstuffs that we need, which will minimise, and gradually cut out altogether, our dependence on products coming to us from our enemies? The answer is simple. The "Oslo-induced" national economy is, by and large, nothing more than a national warsheh (workshop) of consumption. Here, we are trained in the most effective methods of how to consume goods and products that have been produced by others and imported to us through a network of dealerships, fancy marketing schemes and the generous availability of credit.

This is what makes quick money and unprecedented windfall profits and opens our entire region into an area for quick returns on investment through the lucrative services of banks, insurance companies, five-star hotels, micro- credit schemes, construction, mortgage systems, restaurants and eating places. This is what Zionist Israel encourages, what "donors" and "funding agencies" push for and reward, and what our capitalists (big and small, old and new) welcome with open arms.

I keep wondering about all the new and fancy cars on the roads in Ramallah. Who owns them, and where did they get the money to purchase them? The few Oslo-induced monopolies, in which Palestinian and other Arab capitalists have invested funds, are basically service monopolies. They are involved heavily in car dealerships, dealerships of fancy foreign products that cater to the Oslo-created elite, real-estate development, and telecommunications. The few production monopolies focus on construction-related materials and not on agricultural production.

It is not by accident that the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 17 years has not been directed towards agricultural production using land as the main resource in the production process. Why has there been no serious investment in making sure that we control the cycle of chicken production, from eggs to chicks, to feed, and so on, for example? What about the development of goat and sheep milk production and of other environmentally and culturally adaptive cheese and dairy products?

To do such things in a feasible way we ought to have insisted from the outset, at least 20 years ago, that all land and water resources remain under our -- the people's -- control. It is clear to me that our investors, our capitalists, were never interested in having an independent economy in the first place. A very dependent economy under continued occupation is where the profits are. It's less of a hassle and less confrontational. A very dependent and empty miniature fiefdom of self-rule under continued occupation is where the profits are.

Let's look at a glaring example of an Oslo-induced production project, which at first glance may appear to contradict the above statement. This is the so-called National Beverage Company, in fact a Coca-Cola franchise that boasts annual sales of 10 million cases of this product that is neither "national" nor a wise health choice beverage. The name of the company is a classic case of deception. The essence of it is that we, or our capitalists, rush into using our precious and scarce water resources to produce an unhealthy drink for the younger generations, selling in the process both addiction and identification with our primary enemy, the USA.

Clearly, this type of "production" undermines and negates the entire notion of boycott and independence.

* The writer is a Palestinian anthropologist, researcher and writer. His book Development Ltd: The Role of Capital in Impeding People-Centered Liberationist Development is due to appear in 2011.