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Boycott Talk
By Amira Howeidy
The buzzword makes a comeback
A while ago, my cousin told me that he stopped buying Pepsi and is more than happy drinking the local Sinalco soft drink instead. He has also been collecting donations from many of his acquaintances in order to buy an ambulance and send it to the Palestinians.
Hani, my colleague at work, has faithfully boycotted McDonalds, Pepsi and Coca-Cola for the past month. "And I will keep doing so for as long as I live," he assured me.
Boycotting the symbols of American global economic domination and buying an ambulance for Palestine may not seem related. But to many, they are. Both are manifestations of a desire to do something, anything, other than just accept the rising death toll of Palestinians killed by Israelis over the past month.
At work, in sporting clubs, in the press, on the internet and even on the Arab satellite channels, the idea of a boycott has been re-introduced as a serious concept for the first time in decades. Whether or not we agree on its effectiveness, the mere fact that the boycott issue has become such a buzz-word definitely means that something in the Egyptian subconscious needs to be addressed.
When my colleagues at work spend well over three hours discussing what seems to be the nations' fastest circulating guide-list to the American and American-related commodities that Egyptians should stop buying, this means something. And when they ask the office boys to replace the Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Sprite with the local Fairuz non-alcoholic beer, and the Lays with Chipsy -- and the office boys accept willingly out of their belief that they're fulfilling their national duties -- one must pause to make sense of the absurdity of it all. Of both the mad escalation of violence committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians, and of our reaction to it.
Why have so many students at the universities, and men and women at the mosques after Friday prayers, called for the boycott? And why were several branches of the British supermarket chain, Sainsbury's (believed to be Jewish) attacked? Why are so many US-affiliated businesses – or those that merely seem so -- paying tens of thousands of Egyptian pounds to publish front-page ads washing their hands of anything American? Why, in fact, is our society suddenly purging anti-American sentiments despite the fact that it has been saturated over the years with everything and anything that could be American?
The answer might well be that this is literally all people can do. After all, didn't the state-run TV stations feed us with the most poignant footage of Israeli brutality against unarmed Palestinians, to the accompaniment of national, pan-Arab songs and previously censored films promoting the Palestinian cause? What did they expect? Perhaps the heavily-loaded word "boycott" rendered itself fashionable, politically correct and patriotic, because our Arab governments mobilized us with an overdose of sentiment and anger over the reality of the situation in occupied Palestine, but did nothing to quench the thirst they created. Hence, a crippled nation was left with little other than boycotting American and Israeli commodities.
Indeed some voices argued that this will only harm Egypt's economy and deprive thousands of Egyptian homes of the income provided to them by the boycotted businesses. Others said the boycott is only "a naïve stance" because, in the end, it will not affect decision-making which, theoretically, is the objective.
But the spirit of "lets do something" has been stronger than such logic. And with the help of religious fatwas by well-respected Muslim scholars as Youssef El-Qaradawi, calls for a boycott won momentum. In a live interview on the Al-Jezira satellite channel, El-Qaradawi said that "each dollar we pay for a can of Coca-Cola, for example, becomes a bullet in the American/Israeli war machine that is directed at us." It is "haram", he argued, not to boycott.
However, when attempting to boycott America, many gradually found themselves in an odd situation. To their horror, they discovered that this is literally impossible, since US exports, products and ingredients are an inseparable part of our daily lives. Isn't baladi bread -- by far, the most traditionally Egyptian item on our table -- now made out of exported American wheat? Aren't our pharmacies packed with American medicine which we literally rely on? And even if our cars and computers are not American, do they not contain American parts? Our TV sets, pens and watches, our clothes, planes and refrigerators -- almost all the products we live with -- are American. How can one be sure that what appears to be a local product has no American affiliations whatsoever?
The simple fact is that no one can really claim that they are fully boycotting America.
It may be both easy and justifiable to blame the Arab leaders who assembled in Cairo for the last month's Arab Summit, for producing a carefully worded, non-binding communiqué that makes no mention, even remotely, of boycotting Israel, let alone the US. But the failure of our regimes to take a strong stance against Israel or the US should not be an excuse for our inability to act intelligently, or for us to react by shrugging off Pepsi cans and Big Macs without knowing how this will stop the carnage in Palestine, bring back the land occupied in 1967, or allow the 4.5 million-strong Palestinian Diaspora to return home.
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