Correspondents 28#: On Appropriations of Boycott in Settler Colonial Australia

Authored by Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak and Carol Que

Published in The Funambulist, 15th March, 2022

Carol: It’s been some time since our last correspondence piece. So much has happened, but also I’m still at home shielding from the virus. I remember watching the livestreams of various Sydney Festival and Queer Film Festival Palestinian Boycott actions and rallies in January this year, and feeling energized by what’s still politically possible while the pandemic rages on. On the other hand, livestreams of the anti-vax right just downright drained me. People in this reactionary movement have called for boycott too — of the Australian Open — following Novak Djokovic being detained by the Australian government in the same inner-city hotel that has imprisoned Medevac refugee detainees since 2020 (they were previously indefinitely detained in onshore and offshore detention centers). However, calling for some dispersed reactionary boycott is very different from organizing a boycott. 

Tasnim: Yes, we’ve been witnessing the right’s appropriation of left-wing discourse and strategy for a while now and that extends to boycotts. Whether it’s the two year anti-vax movement in Australia or the boycotting of anything and everything Russian that has occurred this week due to white settler identification with Ukraine’s dignified struggle compared to Syria, characterizing the Russian invasion as an attack on western civilization and liberal democracy, we’re challenged with this undermining of resistance through its uprooting from radical politics. I think when we make a comparison with responses to pro-Palestinian BDS campaigning in Australia, we see an eagerness towards boycott when it is employed to entrench white supremacy and empire and a delegitimization of boycott when it challenges power. It was only last month that government MP Dave Sharma criticized the Sydney Festival boycott that our movement organized to pressure the festival to drop the Israeli Embassy’s $20,000 star sponsorship. He described the boycott as “fundamentally at odds with the purposes of art and culture”. 

Carol: LOL, Sharma, who used to be the Australian ambassador to Israel, who is on record on the talk show, Q+A arguing that “in Australia, if we were taking rocket fire here, I expect our population would be calling our political leadership and saying, “What are you doing to stop this?” It’s that Israel has a right to self-defense”.