Occupational Hazard (by Eve Garrard)

What moral weight should be given to the fact that Israel is an occupying power? Some people argue that a great deal of weight should be given to this; that it's weighty enough to protect those who support distinctively punitive measures against Israel, such as the recently rescinded decision by the AUT to blacklist Israeli academics, from the charge of unfair discrimination against Jews. So if the argument works, it's a significant one. But does it work?

Firstly, we should clarify the problem to which this argument is supposed to be a solution. The discrimination charge arises because measures such as the boycott are proposed against Israel, but not against other states which appear to behave in worse ways. That is, Israel is treated worse than other comparable states, without any obvious justification. This is discriminatory: to discriminate against members of a group of people just is to treat them disadvantageously compared to members of other groups, when there's no adequate justification for doing so. That's the definition of discrimination. It's a mistake to think that discrimination must take the form of venomous feelings towards the disfavoured group. What people do matters as much as what they feel, and if what they do involves unjustified disadvantageous treatment, then it's discriminatory. Israel, being the Jewish state, unsurprisingly contains a lot of Jews, and quite a lot more identify with it. So to discriminate against Israel is to discriminate against Jews. The name for discrimination against Jews is anti-Semitism, therefore measures such as the boycott, so this charge says, amount to anti-Semitism.

Now the charge of anti-Semitism is an offensive one (since anti-Semitism is an offensive practice), and there have been loud complaints about this offensiveness (including from the AUT itself). But an interesting feature of the charge is that logically speaking it's very easy to see off. All that's needed is that those who support distinctively adverse treatment for Israel should provide a good reason (i.e. a justificatory reason) for selecting it out in this way. If we're justified in selecting Israel for more hostile treatment than other states, then no discrimination is involved, and so hostile practices such as the boycott won't involve any anti-Semitism.

The usual response here is that Israel has done terrible things which violate human rights, and that's what justifies measures such as an academic boycott. But this response just won't do the work needed of it, since there are many other states which are far worse human rights violators, and no one has yet proposed to blacklist their academics. This is where the claim about occupations comes in: it's not so much that Israel is a human rights violator, some people (for example, Daniel Davies) are now telling us, but that it's an occupier - it's occupying other people's land, rather than violating human rights, that really matters. It's the moral dreadfulness of occupation which provides the needed justification for selecting Israel for punitive measures, and hence will fend off charges of double standards and discrimination.

Well, how is this claim supposed to work? Is it a normative claim, that occupying another country's land is actually morally worse than other serious human rights abuses, such as torturing and killing large numbers of people, or oppressing half the population, or committing genocide? But why on earth would we believe that to be true? And even if it were true, it wouldn't undermine the charge of discrimination, since Israel isn't the only occupying power in the world (China, Turkey, Morocco, the USA, Britain...) nor the worst one, any more than it is the only or worst human rights violator.

So perhaps we should construe the claim as a sociological one (which is how Davies seems to intend it). Here the thought is that rightly or wrongly, people actually care more about occupations than they do about human rights violations, at least where foreigners are involved, and this explains why they're ready to support distinctive punishment for Israel. No double standard is involved; it's just that we do have this strong objection to occupations, and Israel falls foul of it. But even if this claim were true, why would it have normative force? Davies fails to explain why, if what he is doing is reporting sociologically on attitudes, what he reports should be thought to carry any justificatory implication. People often have strong objections (for example, to treating women as the equals of men) which are morally quite unjustified. But in any case the sociological claim just doesn't seem to be true. No one has suggested that China should be boycotted on account of its being an occupying power. None of the boycotters who regarded the Iraq war and occupation that followed from it as illegal have suggested that American, British and Australian academics should be subject to a blacklist. Two things seem to follow from this: firstly, that people don't in fact care as much as Davies says they do about occupations; and secondly that, even if they did, it wouldn't explain why Israeli academics alone are singled out for punishment.

Davies's reply to this criticism (see the comments thread on his post) is that the other occupations are all actually legal, or at least the UN thinks they're legal, or most people think they're legal, or they don't really count because practically no-one lives in the disputed territory (I specially like this last one). And in the case of Tibet, where these remarks are inapplicable, he thinks that there actually has been a great deal of fuss about it, and that this proves his point. But there hasn't been a great deal of fuss about China, not in the AUT there hasn't (and not in the UN either, compared to the hostility shown there to Israel), and academics haven't been suggesting a boycott of Chinese universities. In any case it's most implausible to suppose (and Davies cites no supporting evidence for this view) that all these people who allegedly hate occupations are apprised of the current legal state-of-play in each of these complex cases, so that they know that most of them are really legal, and that, in spite of the legal complexities which are also present in the Israeli case, nonetheless it's Israel's occupation, alone among all others, which is actually illegal and therefore objectionable.

So what Davies's claim really amounts to is that Israel's occupation is thought by most people to be illegal, or more illegal than other similar ones, or to be the occupation that's really morally objectionable, the one that's worth selecting out for distinctive punishment. But this is a perfect example of a circular argument. What we're trying to explain is why people select out Israel for distinctive punishment, alone among other and worse wrongdoers. And what we're told is that the reason people do this is that they think that Israel's wrongdoing in being an occupying power is worse than that of others, even when the others are committing the same kind of offence. But that's the very thing that we're trying to explain. We can hardly explain selective hostility to Israel by appealing to selective hostility to Israel. This kind of argument is just hopeless.

(In passing here: arguing by analogy, Davies also seems to imply that normative judgements about human rights violations other than illegal occupation are not within the sphere of judgemental competence of would-be boycotters, but he provides no reason whatever for this extraordinary claim.)

The allegedly special immorality of occupations is no better at explaining why people want to single out Israel for punishment than is the immorality of human rights violations. In both cases there's the same unexplained, unjustified selectivity, and hence the charge of discrimination stands. I repeat, in principle it's easy to fend off this charge. All that's needed is a good reason for singling out Israel for punishment. One good reason. (Eve Garrard)