If BDS had its way, Israeli artists would be prevented from performing in Australia, Australian artists would be barred from collaborating with their Israeli counterparts, and many thousands of ordinary Australians would be deprived of the right to attend events they now flock to.
Nor would the damage to our liberties end there. Academic freedom would also be curtailed as universities were precluded from co-operating with Israeli research institutions, while Australian companies that partnered with Israel’s world-class high-technology sector would be punished.
Were Israel a gulag, the far-reaching harm those restrictions would impose might be worth bearing, so long as they were likely to improve the situation. The reality, however, is that Israel is by far the freest country in its region.
In effect, no country in the Islamic Middle East comes close to Israel in democracy group Freedom House’s latest rankings of personal freedom, with Israel’s personal freedom score being 60 per cent higher than its neighbours’ average.
Moreover, while much of the region has descended ever further into despotism, Freedom House finds personal freedom in Israel has increased in recent years, not least because of the commitment to human rights of the country’s fiercely independent judiciary.
Those personal freedoms are not just valuable in themselves; they are also at the heart of Israel’s cultural vitality – a vitality prominently on display in the Israeli-inspired modern dance performance that the BDS protesters targeted.
This is an area where the facts speak for themselves. In the entire Islamic Middle East there are a handful of cutting-edge modern dance companies, most of which struggle to survive. In Israel, by contrast, there are more than a dozen, with some 40 choreographers who feature regularly in the leading international dance festivals.
That difference is not due to underlying talent – there are plenty of excellent dancers and choreographers from the Islamic Middle East. What they are starved of, however, is as crucial as it is scarce: the liberty of artistic expression without which creativity cannot flourish.
So, too, in the sciences, where Israel’s academic institutions have spawned more Nobel prizes than all of their counterparts in the Islamic Middle East combined. And taking account of non-Israeli Nobel prize winners affiliated to Israeli research institutions more than doubles that gap, highlighting the abyss between the Islamic Middle East – whose leading academics are virtually all in exile – and this tiny, constantly imperilled country’s ability to attract the world’s finest minds.
However, the appeal of freedom reaches groups far broader than artists, scientists and intellectuals.
For all of Israel’s glaring weaknesses, no one is more aware of the country’s strengths than its Arab citizens, who far from rejecting the existence of what many BDS supporters call the “Zionist entity” – persistently define themselves as Israelis.
For example, in a 2019 survey by left-leaning pollsters Dahlia Scheindlin and David Reis, 14 per cent of Arabs in Israel identified as “Palestinian” while 46 per cent chose “Arab-Israeli”. And a 2020 survey by Professor Camil Fuchs, one of Israel’s top pollsters, found that given the option to identify as simply “Israeli” (which was not available in the 2019 poll), 23 per cent of Arab respondents picked that label, as compared with just 7 per cent who opted for “Palestinian”.
Every bit as tellingly, a poll taken only two months ago by the Palestinian News Network found that Jerusalem’s Arab population overwhelmingly preferred Jerusalem to remain under Israeli control, with most of the few who thought otherwise saying that should Jerusalem ever become part of a Palestinian state, they would seek to retain their Israeli identity card, with all the freedoms and protections it accords.
To those respondents and others, the fact that Mansour Abbas, who leads the United Arab List in the Israeli parliament, is now a member of Israel’s governing coalition can only have made the contrast between Israel’s vibrant (if perpetually chaotic) multiethnic democracy and the brutally corrupt governments of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip all the more salient.
Of course, those realities don’t wash away Israel’s faults and flaws – any more than Israel’s faults and flaws wash away the appalling errors of its neighbours, and their responsibility for the ongoing tragedies in (among others) Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya and now Lebanon and Turkey.
What an understanding of Israel’s realities does show, however, is the folly of reducing Israel’s complexities, and those of the issues that plague the region, to the sloganeering that is BDS’s stock in trade.
Those slogans – most notably the claim that Israel is an “apartheid state” – are not merely a sign of hypocrisy, although there is no shortage of that in BDS’s rhetoric, which studiously ignores both the horrific crimes being committed in the Islamic Middle East and those crimes’ impact on Israel’s outlook and options.
Nor is BDS’s sloganeering simply an effort to score legal points in the UN’s Human Rights Commission, whose conception of apartheid bears so little relation to the term’s ordinary connotations that China’s government-controlled media has recently begun to contend that the US should be treated as an “apartheid state”.
Rather, the slogans are a ploy to hide the difference between BDS’s goals and those of the boycott against South Africa. The BDS movement ducks and weaves about precisely what it is seeking to achieve, carefully tailoring its assertions to the audience it is addressing; but its advocates have demonstrated time and again that its aim is not reform – as was the case in South Africa – but the elimination of the Israeli state.
As even Noam Chomsky, who is one of Israel’s harshest critics, has recognised, achieving that objective would inevitably “involve the destruction by force of a unified society, its people, and its institutions”, provoking a humanitarian catastrophe and transforming the only country in the region where the Abrahamic faiths continue to coexist into a theatre of death and devastation.
Pursuing that objective is exactly the opposite of what is needed if progress is ever to be made towards peace – which is more dialogue, closer ties and greater mutual understanding, not less.
Instead, it merely strengthens Israelis’ conviction that their critics’ goal is not peace but the incessant war that has served throughout the Islamic Middle East as authoritarianism’s most enduring excuse. And it reminds Israelis that since at least the 14th century, Jews have experienced wave after wave of anti-Semitic boycotts aimed at excluding, impoverishing and ultimately annihilating them – but have never buckled.
With BDS and its misguided fellow travellers now threatening our own freedoms, nor should we.
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The objective of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s attack on the Sydney Festival is simple: to stifle the freedom of artistic expression.