All of this is happening, it's nationwide, it's unprecedented. There's a free speech emergency. But on the positive side of it, something that is just really encouraging is the taboo is being broken with the American Studies Association's vote on boycotting Israel. More and more professors -- Judith Butler, the philosopher who's at Berkeley and is now at Columbia wrote, and I quote her in the preface to the book, that just in the past two years she's seen a change. People are coming out of the silence. They are starting to speak.
And Israel does not have an answer to this except repression. They cannot win the argument, all they can do is try and stop it. And you know what? It's too late, it's happened.
DB: Do you see any change in the way the press has dealt with the issue? Because we know that one of the most censored stories of our time, and I think it's worse on the liberal channels, you know, the sort of Rachel Maddow channels who have sort of taken up the role of being the protector of the President. Do you think there is a change within the corporate press in terms of covering the story?
AA: Oh, no. It's worse than ever. And it's sometimes even worse on the Left, sadly enough. But I'll tell you a story that we've been covering on the Electronic Intifada just in the past few days, we exclusively published the secret court transcripts that everyone else refused to publish, the New York Times, the Associated Press. This was a secret court transcript of a hearing where a judge allowed the incommunicado detention, effectively the fourth disappearance of Majd Kayyal, a Palestinian journalist who's a citizen of Israel.
And it was because we published it, and a few other independent media outlets published it, that the judge was really forced to lift the gag order. And today, only, after the gag order was lifted the New York Times published the story and they even linked to the Electronic Intifada's coverage. Which I think shows that's one example of what we've seen time and again, that media like ours, we are setting the agenda. We are reaching people directly. Over the past week when Israelis could not get this news in their own censored media, they were coming by the thousands to the Electronic Intifada to read about what was happening in their own country -- where the secret police had disappeared a journalist.
So, on the one hand corporate media is worse than ever, it's more cowardly than ever, it's more censored than ever, but our ability to reach past it and talk to people directly is greater than ever before. And I really think that we are able to set the terms of discussion. You know it's worse, but there are so many things on the other side of that that are allowing us to really fight it.
DB: Is there support around the globe? Has it been growing in other countries, in other parts of the world for this divestment movement? How does it look at the global level?
AA: Well, again, it's never looked better. And I think one of the frustrations I've always had over the years is that there's always been very strong latent support for justice in Palestine in many countries around the world, but you know it wasn't mobilized. I mean people would go out and do opinion polls and find that people object to Israel's occupation as apartheid, its violence. But other than occasional street demonstrations -- those can be important -- it wasn't translating into effective pressure.
And I think the change now is that BDS, these campaigns, all over the world and they take so many forms. In Europe, it's just incredible what's been achieved in the past couple of years. They are giving people a way to actually have an impact on the situation, to get involved. And the thing about BDS is it was initiated by Palestinians almost a decade ago. It's still led by Palestinians but as more and more Palestinians see the response around the world, there's kind of a virtuous circle where Palestinians who were skeptical about BDS, or skeptical about its potential are saying "Well, actually this is something that we can get behind and we can encourage."
So I think that momentum has been really positive. And Israel doesn't know what to do about it. In The Battle for Justice in Palestine, I write about the Reut Institute. It's this think tank which set the strategy that Israel adopted in 2010 of how to sabotage the Palestine Solidarity Movement. And they were going to focus on what they called these hubs of delegitimization, which included specifically the Bay Area and U.C. Berkeley, which were perceived to be these places that were particularly hostile to Israel. And one of the things they say in their strategy is that basically the most valuable support for Israel, or the most valuable criticism of BDS is going to come from the Left.
Israel's strategy has been to target the Left through a kind of carrot-and-stick approach. On the one hand, the carrot is presenting Israel as this haven of green technologies, of LGBT rights, which is all bogus. In the book, I actually show how Israel's acclaims on these things are absolutely false. And its environmental record is horrific. It's disastrous. And on the other hand, the stick which is these repressive measures, the lawsuits which the Israeli consulate in San Francisco has been very involved in. They were involved in the lawsuit against the Olympian Food Co-op, for example, repression.
And the amazing thing is that all these resources that they are putting in, it's not working. This [BDS] movement is growing and growing. And I think that's really the story that needs to be told. And people should understand that actually we're powerful. We don't have to sit here and wait for John Kerry or Barack Obama or anyone else to pull something out of their hats. We can set the agenda and that's what's happening on this issue.
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