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not to come to the Jerusalem Film Festival. They said that I should
show my filmas Israelis shouldnt boycott Israelbut they asked
international figures to boycott the festival.
iek, who was the subject of one of the films in the festival, said
he would not speak about that film. But he asked: why not support the
opposition in Israel by speaking about Forgiveness? They answered that
he could support the opposition, but not in an official venue. He did
not know what to do.
iek chose to ask for your advice. Your position then, if I recall correctly, was that it was most important to exercise solidarity with colleagues who chose nonviolent means of resistance and that it was a
mistake to take money from Israeli cultural institutions. Your suggestion to iek was that he speak about the film without being a guest
of the festival. He gave back the money and announced that he was
not a guest. There was no decision about endorsing or not endorsing a
boycott. For me, at the time, the concept of cultural boycott was kind
of shocking, a strange concept. The movement has grown a lot since,
and I know that youve done a lot of thinking about it. I wonder what
you think about this movement now, the full Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions movement (BDS), three years after that confusing event?
Judith Butler: I think that the BDS movement has taken several
forms, and it is probably important to distinguish among them. I
would say that around six or seven years ago there was a real confusion
about what was being boycotted, what goes under the name of boycott.
There were some initiatives that seemed to be directed against Israeli
academics, or Israeli filmmakers, cultural producers, or artists that
did not distinguish between their citizenship and their participation,
active or passive, in Occupation politics. We must keep in mind that
the BDS movement has always been focused on the Occupation. It is
not a referendum on Zionism, and it does not take an explicit position
on the one-state or two-state solution. And then there were those who
sought to distinguish boycotting individual Israelis from boycotting
the Israeli institutions. But it is not always easy to know how to make
the distinction between who is an individual and who is an institution.
And I think a lot of people within the U.S. and Europe just backed away,
thinking that it was potentially discriminatory to boycott individuals
or, indeed, institutions on the basis of citizenship, even though many
of those who were reluctant very much wanted to find a way to support
a nonviolent resistence to the Occupation.

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