When the Korean car manufacturer Kia Motors began marketing its vehicles in Israel, it came up against a big problem: the pronunciation of its brand name was worryingly similar to the Hebrew word for vomit. Concerned about losing potential customers, the company rebranded its name with an alternative pronunciation, indicating just how much language matters in the world of marketing at even the most basic of levels. So too in the world of politics, where political branding is no less crucial than in the sphere of commerce, although the commodity being sold is ideas rather than goods.
The anti-Israeli BDS movement has for some time now been engaged in some political branding of its own and its main tool is the use of the word apartheid. As Professor Johan van der Vyver of Emory University, Atlanta, is quoted as saying, “[t]here is a political stigma attached to this word comfortably recognized in international law as being a crime against humanity”. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the proponents of sanctions against Israel delude themselves with the rather self-indulgent claim that it was the BDS campaign which brought about the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa, (conveniently ignoring the long struggle of so many South Africans of all colours) and that the same result can and should be achieved in the case of Israel. In order to gain as much tail wind as possible for their campaign, it is therefore in the interest of these anti-Israeli activists to cause as many people as possible among the majority of those undecided on or uninterested in the subject to associate in their minds the word ‘Israel’ with the rightly despised word ‘apartheid’.
Of course any objective observer of Israel would reject such a link on the basis of the evidence freely available regarding the equalities enshrined in Israeli law for all its citizens, Israel’s declared aspirations in its Declaration of Independence and the co-existence evident on a daily basis. Israel, like any other country, has its fair share of problems, but apartheid is not one of them. A dispassionate critic would also have to take into account the aims and methods of the ANC during its years of campaign against apartheid as compared to the aims of Israel’s opponents such as Hamas or Fatah. There is, after all, no Palestinian ‘Freedom Charter’. The failure of the anti-Israeli BDS movement to gain any real momentum in serious quarters since its inception can no doubt be credited to the basic common sense of the majority of ordinary people who know injustice and racism when they see it, but also know when they don’t.
So now, with or without the consent of its author, the new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky is being cited by writers such as Gary Younge as evidence of Israel’s supposed support for the South African apartheid regime in what can only be interpreted as yet another rebranding campaign designed to attempt to further establish the link in the public psyche between two completely different countries with totally different ideologies and vastly different circumstances, as part of a political campaign espoused by activists with an agenda rooted firmly in ignorance and what Gary Young himself would presumably describe as ‘identity politics’.
Of course these are entirely predictable types of comment to an article which opens with a totally unsubstantiated and frankly bizarrely sensationalist story and goes on to give casualty numbers for Operation Cast Lead without even pretending to be objective by at least remembering to point out that a considerable proportion of those killed were Hamas terrorists. The sad reality that Gary Younge’s comprehension of terrorism is bordering on the ‘imaginative’ is nothing new and indeed does everything to reinforce his own theory of identity politics. That the Guardian provides a willing platform for those with an anti-Israeli agenda in any shape or form is not novel either.
One wonders though how comfortable Polakow-Suransky feels with the fact that his book is being exploited for such a transparent rebranding campaign on the part of a movement which works hand in hand with those whose ideology is actually even more loathsome than that of apartheid South Africa. After all, if Hamas were to get its way, not only would Jews not be equal citizens in ‘liberated PaleOstine’, they would simply not be.
