Boycotting a Restaurant Is Not Going to Save Gaza

Today a group of protesters rode through Philadelphia with a list of local restaurants and a simple demand, that these establishments must go and that they do not belong in our city. The flyer that announced the action did not accuse any of them of a health violation, a labor practice, or a bad meal. The charge was what the owners believe about a war being fought by a government thousands of miles away, a government none of them serves and none of them controls, and the demand was that neighbors lose their livelihoods over it.

A restaurant is about the least powerful institution in public life, and that is exactly why a boycott like this deserves to be called what it is. A deli cannot move a border, free a hostage, stop a bombardment, or deliver a truck of aid, and nothing that happens at a counter in Philadelphia changes a single decision made by the governments fighting that war. Everyone who organizes an action like this knows that, which means the action was never truly aimed at the war. It was aimed at people here, at making a particular kind of Philadelphian understand that his place in this city is conditional, and that the condition is renouncing a belief or concealing an identity.

None of this requires indifference to what Palestinian civilians are enduring, and I condemn violence against them without qualification, because the families in Gaza who are losing their homes and their children hold no power over this conflict and want nothing more than to live their lives in peace. Anger about that suffering is honest, and carrying that anger into the street is a right worth encouraging, because a city where people cannot march for a cause they believe in is not a free city. But boycotting a restaurant in Philadelphia does not protect one Palestinian child, does not deliver one meal or one bandage, and does not move one decision maker, and we need to be better than a politics that mistakes punishing our neighbors for helping people an ocean away.

Antisemitism is not the solution to any of this, and it cannot be treated as an acceptable price of caring about Gaza. Whatever change comes to Israel's course will be decided by Israeli citizens through their own electorate, because that is how democracies settle their arguments, and no list drawn up in Philadelphia can substitute for the votes of the people who actually live with the consequences. We should also be honest about the limits of what we know, because we see the reporting that comes out of a war and we do not have all the facts, and treating incomplete information as if it were complete is how a movement ends up punishing whoever is nearest instead of whoever is responsible. That honesty has to run in both directions, because mistakes have plainly been made in this war and extensive reporting has documented them, and naming those mistakes is fair game for protest and debate. What is not fair game is pretending that a ride past a deli can reach into another country's politics and rearrange them, when better ways to press a complaint exist, from supporting the relief organizations that actually feed people to engaging the American officials whose decisions this country does control.

Notice what a list like this actually selects for. It does not name an act that any of these businesses took, because there is no act to name, and instead it names a category of people, owners whose ancestry and attachment to their people's homeland are treated as disqualifying. When a movement decides that a business may operate in Philadelphia only if its owner passes a test about where he comes from, it has stopped arguing about a war and started sorting its neighbors into those who belong and those who must go, and publishing lists of Jewish businesses that must go carries an echo of a much darker history of boycotts aimed at Jewish shops.

The encouraging part is how Philadelphia answers when it is at its best, because leaders condemn the targeting, neighbors turn out in support in larger numbers than the protest itself, and the targeted restaurants fill up with people who came on purpose to eat there. The most effective answer to a boycott of your neighbors is a line out the door, and that answer costs nothing and asks nothing of anyone except showing up for the people who feed this city.

Protest is not the problem, and no one should mistake this essay for an argument that anyone should have stayed home, because we should encourage the right to protest and the First Amendment right to say in public exactly what you think of any government on earth. The objection is to the target, because singling out businesses for where their owners come from will not bring forth the change the organizers say they expect, and Philadelphia does not keep lists of businesses that must go because of who owns them. If the argument is with a government, take the argument to that government, because the deli was never the address.