ISRAEL’S NEW STRATEGY: "SABOTAGE" AND "ATTACK" THE GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT
Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
16 February 2010

A Reut Institute presentation calls on Israel to "attack catalysts"
— global peace and justice activists.

An extraordinary series of articles, reports and presentations by
Israel’s influential Reut Institute has identified the global movement
for justice, equality and peace as an "existential threat" to Israel
and called on the Israeli government to direct substantial resources to
"attack" and possibly engage in criminal "sabotage" of this movement
in what Reut believes are its various international "hubs" in London,
Madrid, Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

The Reut Institute’s analyses hold that Israel’s traditional strategic
doctrine — which views threats to the state’s existence in primarily
military terms, to be met with a military response — is badly out
of date. Rather, what Israel faces today is a combined threat from a
"Resistance Network" and a "Delegitimization Network."

The Resistance Network is comprised of political and armed groups
such as Hamas and Hizballah who "rel[y] on military means to sabotage
every move directed at affecting separation between Israel and the
Palestinians or securing a two-state solution" ("The Delegitimization
Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall, Reut Institute, 14 February
2010).

Furthermore, the "Resistance Network" allegedly aims to cause
Israel’s political "implosion" — a la South Africa, East Germany or
the Soviet Union — rather than bring about military defeat through
direct confrontation on the battlefield.

The "Delegitimization Network" — which Reut Institute president and
former Israeli government advisor Gidi Grinstein provocatively claims
is in an "unholy alliance" with the Resistance Network — is made
up of the broad, decentralized and informal movement of peace and
justice, human rights, and BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions)
activists all over the world. Its manifestations include protests
against Israeli officials visiting universities, Israeli Apartheid
Week, faith-based and trade union-based activism, and "lawfare"
— the use of universal jurisdiction to bring legal accountability
for alleged Israeli war criminals. The Reut Institute even cited my
speech to the student conference on BDS held at Hampshire College last
November as a guide to how the "delegitimization" strategy supposedly
works ("Eroding Israel’s Legitimacy in the International Arena,"
Reut Institute, 28 January 2010).

The combined "attack" from "resisters" and "delegitimizers," Reut says,
"possesses strategic significance, and may develop into a comprehensive
existential threat within a few years." It further warns that a
"harbinger of such a threat would be the collapse of the two-state
solution as an agreed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and the coalescence behind a ‘one-state solution’ as a new
alternative framework."

At a basic level, Reut’s analysis represents an advance over the most
primitive and hitherto dominant layers of Israeli strategic thinking;
it reflects an understanding, as I put it in my speech at Hampshire,
that "Zionism simply cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish,
settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance."

But underlying the Reut Institute’s analysis is a complete inability to
disentangle cause and effect. It seems to assume that the dramatic
erosion in Israel’s international standing since its wars on
Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009 is a result of the prowess of the
"delegitimization network" to which it imputes wholly nefarious,
devious and unwholesome goals — effectively the "destruction of
Israel."

It blames "delegitimizers" and "resisters" for frustrating the
two-state solution but ignores Israel’s relentless and ongoing
settlement-building drive — supported by virtually every state organ
— calculated and intended to make Israeli withdrawal from the West
Bank impossible.

It never considers for a moment that the mounting criticism of Israel’s
actions might be justified, or that the growing ranks of people ready
to commit their time and efforts to opposing Israel’s actions are
motivated by genuine outrage and a desire to see justice, equality and
an end to bloodshed. In other words, Israel is delegitimizing itself.

Reut does not recommend to the Israeli cabinet — which recently
held a special session to hear a presentation of the think tank’s
findings — that Israel should actually change its behavior toward
Palestinians and Lebanese. It misses the point that apartheid South
Africa also once faced a global "delegitimization network" but that
this has now completely disappeared. South Africa, however, still
exists. Once the cause motivating the movement disappeared — the
rank injustice of formal apartheid — people packed up their signs
and their BDS campaigns and went home.

Instead, Reut recommends to the Israeli government an aggressive
and possibly criminal counter-offensive. A powerpoint presentation
Grinstein made to the recent Herzliya Conference on Israeli national
security actually calls on Israel’s "intelligence agencies to focus"
on the named and unnamed "hubs" of the "delegitimization network"
and to engage in "attacking catalysts" of this network. In its "The
Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall" document,
Reut recommends that "Israel should sabotage network catalysts."

The use of the word "sabotage" is particularly striking and should
draw the attention of governments, law enforcement agencies and
university officials concerned about the safety and welfare of
their students and citizens. The only definition of "sabotage"
in United States law deems it to be an act of war on a par with
treason, when carried out against the United States. In addition,
in common usage, the American Heritage Dictionary defines sabotage
as "Treacherous action to defeat or hinder a cause or an endeavor;
deliberate subversion." It is difficult to think of a legitimate use
of this term in a political or advocacy context.

At the very least, Reut seems to be calling for Israel’s spy agencies
to engage in covert activity to interfere with the exercise of legal
free speech, association and advocacy rights in the United States,
Canada and European Union countries, and possibly to cause harm to
individuals and organizations. These warnings of Israel’s possible
intent — especially in light of its long history of criminal activity
on foreign soil — should not be taken lightly.

The Reut Institute, based in Tel Aviv, raises a significant amount
of tax-exempt funds in the United States through a nonprofit arm
called American Friends of the Reut Institute (AFRI). According to
its public filings, AFRI sent almost $2 million to the Reut Institute
in 2006 and 2007.

In addition to a state-sponsored international "sabotage" campaign,
Reut also recommends a "soft" policy. This specifically involves
better hasbara or state propaganda to greenwash Israel as a high-tech
haven for environmental technologies and high culture — what it terms
"Brand Israel."

Other elements include "maintain[ing] thousands of personal
relationships with political, cultural, media and security-related
elites and influentials" around the world, and "harnessing Jewish
and Israeli diaspora communities" even more tightly to its cause. It
even emphasizes that Israel should use "international aid" to boost
its image (its perfunctory foray into earthquake-devastated Haiti
was an example of this tactic).

What ties together all these strategies is that they are aimed at
frustrating, delaying and distracting attention from the fundamental
issue: that Israel — despite its claims to be a liberal and democratic
state — is an ultranationalist ethnocracy that relies on the violent
suppression of the most fundamental rights of millions of Palestinians,
soon to be a demographic majority, to maintain the status quo. There
is no "game changer" in Reut’s new strategy.

Reut is apparently unaware even of the irony of trying to reform
"Brand Israel" as something cuddly, while at the same time publicly
recommending that Israel’s notorious spies "sabotage" peace groups
on foreign soil.

But there are two lessons we must heed: Reut’s analysis vindicates the
effectiveness of the BDS strategy, and as Israeli elites increasingly
fear for the long-term prospects of the Zionist project they are
likely to be more ruthless, unscrupulous and desperate than ever.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of
One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.