Naomi Klein takes the boycott to Israel

Naomi Klein, one of the foremost champions of the 'Boycott Israel' campaign, has just spent a week in Israel promoting her book The Shock Doctrine, to mark its recent publication in Hebrew.

One might wonder how someone who is promoting the economic and academic ostracising of Israel could justify visiting the country to break both the boycotts she is herself promoting?

The answer, according to Klein, is simple. By eschewing her share of profits from sales of the book in Israel, she is "boycotting the Israeli economy, but not Israelis". The same goes for her carefully-planned speaking tour around the country: she refuses to cooperate with Israeli state institutions, coordinating her engagements with organisations sympathetic to, and working to assist, the Palestinian cause.

‘Israeli culture is being co-opted by the state. To do nothing is to be complicit’

I heard her speak this weekend at the Arab-Hebrew Theatre in Jaffa, where she went down a storm with the vast majority of the 200-strong crowd. This kind of interaction was, she said, precisely what she hoped to achieve by supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign.

Those detractors who claimed a boycott stifled dialogue were wrong, she explained; instead, by forging links with like-minded BDS supporters in Israel, communication massively increased: "building a movement requires endless communicating". She wholeheartedly wants "more communication - just not through state-backed channels".

The Shock Doctrine was published in Arabic at the same time as the Hebrew edition, and Klein spent much of her trip in the West Bank and Gaza, including a visit to Ramallah, where she invoked the memory of the Holocaust as a reason to oppose oppressive Israeli policy towards the Palestinians: "[The question is], 'Never again' to anyone, or 'Never again' to us? [Some Jews] think we get a get-away-with-one-genocide-free card... there is another strain in the Jewish tradition that says 'Never again' to anyone."

In Jaffa, where the audience was made up almost entirely of Israeli Jews, she tailored her speech to implore them to pick up the baton of BDS from within Israel's borders. "It's crucial we have Israelis saying that this is a good idea," she declares. "We need to hear voices in support of BDS; right now, we only hear defensive voices, who accuse us of anti-Semitism - despite the call coming from Jewish people like me."

She maintains that there is a "moral responsibility" to respect the Palestinians' call for BDS as a form of non-violent resistance; "the only missing piece is Israeli Jews [joining the cause] who say 'we see this as solidarity, not as an attack'".

Klein believes it is incumbent on everyone, whether in Israel or abroad, to participate in BDS, as a way of "disrupting 'Brand Israel'" - a reference to the PR campaign embarked upon by Israeli officialdom to market Israel as a country as non-violent and normal as any other in the West. "The entire culture is being co-opted by the state," she says. "As artists, writers and intellectuals, doing nothing is to be complicit in the normalisation process."

The BDS church is a broad one, with some backers supporting a two-state solution, and others determined to usher in one-state as a way to solve the conflict. She accepts this, but