Solidarity as Imminent Critique: Uniqueness, Complicity, and the Argument for Boycott

In his 2010 Nelson Mandela lecture, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman remembered when the name of Mandela first acquired special significance in his life. Following the 1973 coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende, Dorfman went into exile as the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet came to power. South Africa and Chile were allies linked by both Cold War anti-Communism and U.S. support. In this context, Mandela became a symbol of resistance for many Chileans, both in exile and at home. With details amended, this story could be repeated many times over regarding the growth of the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 80s: the campaign was successful, in large part, because participants linked opposition to apartheid with their experiences of Cold War dictatorship, racism in countries like the United States and U.K., and early neo-liberalism under the Regan and Thatcher governments. Yet if the campaign drew its strength from these transnational networks of repression, resistance, and identification (and sometimes misidentification), antiapartheid rhetoric often made the case for international isolation based on South Africa’s “unique” status as a racial state in the postcolonial global order.

Drawing on this background, this paper will reflect on a tension that exists between two kinds of arguments made for the boycott of Israel: first, the argument that Israel is, uniquely in the world today, an apartheid state and, second, a mode of argument that links the U.S. and Canadian government’s support of Israel to legacies of settler colonialism, the “War on Terror,” and institutionalized racism in North America. Reflecting on the fraught rhetoric of uniqueness in the 1980s and today, I will argue that the most rigorous argument for BDS begins with a self-critical accounting of those aspects of U.S. and Canadian culture that have subtended popular and official support for Israel.