Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Divest This

Showing posts with label Divest This. Show all posts

Monday, May 14, 2018

Pragmatic Victories (Divest This!)

A few years back, I talked about a branch of philosophy called Pragmatism, the only major philosophical school of thought to cross from the US to Europe, in the context of this analysis of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Quoting (briefly) from that piece:

“by ‘pragmatic,’ I don’t just mean ‘practical.’ For according to the cornerstone principle of Pragmatism (the so-called ‘Pragmatist Maxim), reality itself is defined, and thus changeable, by human action in the real world.

… consider a canonical example of Pragmatic thinking: why a knife should be considered sharp. According to the Pragmatist, the knife is sharp NOT because it possesses (or partakes in) some metaphysical form of “sharpness,” nor because the notion of sharpness can be measured empirically (through some combination of blade width and hardness, for example). Rather, a knife is sharp because any rational person seeing one sitting next to a stick of butter would use the knife to cut the butter, rather than vice versa. And an irrational person who tried to do the opposite would necessarily fail.”

While many aspects of reality are dictated by things beyond human agency (the existence of the sun and mortality, for example), not everything falls into this category. As just mentioned “sharpness” might not be an actual thing without the act of human beings interacting with objects in the world. Similarly, human political agency creates, rather than just describes, things and the meaning behind them.

As a simple example, those of you who dislike manufactured pop music as much as I probably consider the Eurovision Song Contest (presuming you consider it at all) as a punchline or musical freak show. And, as proud as I am of the Jewish state’s many, many accomplishments, the victory of a chicken-warbling circus act at Eurovision ’18 would normally not get onto my shortlist of Israeli gifts to the world.

But once BDS got into the act, spreading their bile throughout the Interwebs in hope that they could rally the world to vote down Netta – Israel’s ultimately successful entrant into this year’s Eurovision contest – suddenly Eurovision became something it wasn’t before: a global political referendum on the Jewish state’s place in the world.

Keep in mind that this was not what Eurovision was created to be, nor were the performers – including Netta – interested in turning the event into a global vote for or against the their countries. But by making votes against Netta a political act of condemnation, BDS simultaneously (if inadvertently) turned votes for her into a political act of support.

Moving onto a more serious example, think about the impending opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. Under normal circumstances, this would be an unremarkable event, one that should have occurred decades ago.

For as long nations have established diplomatic ties, the location of embassies was not even a point of discussion. If you want to establish diplomatic presence in the US, the UK or France, for example, your only option would be to build an embassy in Washington, London or Paris. The same rule applies to every other state in the world, large and small: you build your embassy in the other guy’s capital.

But because this normal situation was denied in one special case, the idea of opening or not opening an embassy in Jerusalem city became more and more politically significant with each passing year.

If Israel’s foes had not raised this price sky high, building or moving an embassy in Jerusalem would be as un-newsworthy as every routine embassy opening in the world. But this decades-long denial of Israel’s legitimate rights turned the final, reasonable, and appropriate acceptance of those rights into a new game-changing, Pragmatic reality.

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What are the goals of BDS? (Divest This!)

One of the things that makes debate over whether BDS is winning or losing so confusing is lack of common agreement regarding what constitutes success and failure.

For example, this year we saw more BDS votes in student government than in previous years, and more of those votes go in favor of the BDSers. Needless to say, a movement like BDS which demands we treat everything (including defeat) as wins for them insists that more student government votes going their way constitutes unstoppable momentum for their cause. And, from our side, it’s difficult to totally dismiss more student votes against Israel as irrelevant.

Yes, school administrations have held the line by condemning and insisting they will never act on the non-binding requests made by this year’s Student Senate. And after two decades of effort, it is relevant to point out that all BDS has to show for itself are some toothless measures passed by transient student leaders through votes often taken behind the backs of constituents (meaning they cannot be said to represent campus opinion).

But this assumes that the goal of the BDS “movement” is to actually cause financial harm to the Jewish state. While that may be an ultimate desire or dream, their main or current goals might be different, requiring us to tease these out before measuring success or failure (or selecting our own strategies and tactics to fight them).

The most obvious goal the boycotters are trying to achieve is to brand Israel as a racist, repressive state akin to South Africa (which, it should be noted, ended its Apartheid system years before most of today’s college students were born). Given this, anything they can do to poison the minds of the young against the Jewish state represents furthering their actual goal. So even if a student government vote does not go their way, the speeches they make and letters in school papers condemning Israel in harsh and unfair terms represent the actual political activity they are engaged in designed to further their real goal of making Israel seem so loathsome that its elimination should be seen as virtuous rather than horrifying.

Another goal was best labeled by William Jacobson at Legal insurrection who described BDS as a “Settler Colonial Ideology” which strives to colonize and dominate the entire Left end of the political spectrum and make anyone who considers themselves left of center subservient to their will.

This goal has received a boost over the last year as anti-Trump “resistance,” coupled with the emergence of the ideology of intersectionality (which insists all progressive causes be linked), provided the most aggressive activists (which tend to be anti-Israel partisans) the opportunity to make demands on those with whom they join in “common cause.”

The scare quotes I just used around “common cause” was meant to illustrate that for a Settler Colonial Ideology like BDS, finding common cause is a one-way street. This is why women and gay groups must sign onto the anti-Israel agenda to be considered intersectional partners in good standing, while those pushing the intersectional agenda will never mention – much less fight for – women and gays repressed throughout the Middle East (including in “Palestine”).

In many ways, ground-level successes – such as the aforementioned student government votes – are a result of the success the BDS colonial project over the last year. And, as we have seen in the UK, the fully colonized anti-Israel/anti-Semitic Left can end up just one election away from obtaining genuine power.

So now that we know what the most important goals of the BDS project really are, how best to fight it? Having our own goals clearly articulated is a first step, a subject I’ll discuss next.

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The Price that Israel Critics Pay (Divest This!)

The price even a non-intentional embrace of anti-Israel propaganda places on the believer was brought home to me during a recent conversation with a good friend, whose opinion I respect on all matters, who was aghast at the bloodletting at the Gaza border over the last month.

Interestingly, she was willing to accept that the thousands of rockets shot from Gaza into Israel over the last decade constitutes acts of war, and was even willing to believe that Hamas was responsible for civilian casualties on its own side if it placed its rockets in civilian locations. And, with a little cross-examination, she was ready to give up her original assertion that the tunnels Hamas has been digging incessantly into Israel were not a means of civilian resupply, but rather tools of war.

But neither of these understandings could budge her from the opinion that Israel’s use of live fire to protect its border with Gaza was appropriate or legitimate. “You don’t shoot people,” she kept coming back to. In other words, she believes that the IDF has the right and responsibility to arrest, detain and do whatever other non-lethal things it could to protect the people it defends from harm, but that shooting should be a last resort to be applied only when actual lives are in danger.

Now keep in mind that my interlocutor is a decent and moral person, as well as being highly intelligent. But as we went through a series of logic-based arguments regarding the difference between war and crime fighting, the fact that a majority of those killed were jihadi fighters, or nature of the Hamas regime and its primary role in creating Gaza’s misery, I was clearly unable to shake her of the belief that undergirded her primary response to current events: that you shouldn’t shoot people if you don’t have to.

And you know what? She’s right! In the ordinary course of life, and even in policing and warfare, you shouldn’t shoot people if other effective choices are available. But given that non-shooting options, like the construction of a separation barrier in the West Bank (which all but eliminated casualties from both terror and the fight against it) has become Exhibit A for the Israel = Apartheid propaganda slur, it’s not at all clear that promises to judge Israel less harshly if it does something to defend itself other than what it’s doing right now will ever be kept.

Getting back to Gaza, it continues to surprise me just how many false things one must believe to accept the anti-Israel narrative. For instance, images and video that incontestably show the violent nature of the Hamas-inspired marches is on display for all to see. But this must be put aside in order to declare the marches and the marchers “peaceful,” or non-violence must be redefined to make room for Molotov cocktails, incendiaries, swastikas, and the occasional live ammunition.

One must also believe that even if rocket fire and the digging of infiltration tunnels – the primary activity of those who govern Gaza – might be warlike, this new tactic (charging the border week after week) is peaceful.

And I won’t even mention the things that didn’t come up in our conversation, such as Hamas’ attitude and behavior towards women, gays and religious minorities (never mind its medieval beliefs about Jews), things that should appall anyone who believes in the rights of such groups to not suffer humiliation, torture and death – not to mention the rights of the individual to live as he or she likes.

In trying to understand how good and smart people can believe bad and stupid things, I keep coming back to the concept of ruthlessness. While you can see a description of the phenomena here, and a much longer one in this series, it is easiest to sum up the concept with its most vivid example.

After World War I, the loss of a generation left the nations of Europe exhausted, demoralized and ready to consider any alternative superior to war. In theory, this laid the groundwork for finding new ways to settle disputes other than armed conflict. But, in one of history’s typical ironies, it also meant anyone ready to trigger another war would have enormous leverage over those who wanted to avoid war at all cost.

Thus, Adolf Hitler’s choice to threaten to reignite the continent if his territorial demands were not meant was not the act of a crazy monster, but rather the rational calculation of a ruthless actor who was ready to do every day what others could not even contemplate.

Today, when war is even more destructive and attitudes towards it even more hostile, most people can’t contemplate that this beast called ruthlessness still drives the decision making of political actors. Accepting that Israel’s enemies deliberately put their own civilians at risk in order to either kill or malign Jews and maintain power means accepting that ruthless actors are still doing things that decent people have trouble even imagining.

And one way of not thinking about something that puts your whole world view in jeopardy (especially a world view which hopes for an end to armed conflict altogether) is to strip away the dark corners of reality, replacing difficult moral choices – especially those that arise when faced with a ruthless foe – with comforting bromides, like “shooting people is bad.”

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A Disproportional Response (Divest This!)

The boycotters have been wetting themselves over last week’s “victory” getting 50 student groups at New York University (NYU) to jointly pledge a boycott of not just Israel, but campus groups (i.e., organizations created and run by other NYU students) and off-campus groups (such as Birthright, StandWithUs and the ADL) that support the Jewish state.

While the effort to get student organizations to join together to ostracize Israel supporters was one major goal of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) who drove the NYU measures, the pledge also helped SJP achieve another vital goal: rulership over left-leaning politics within a university.

As I’ve noted before, the intersectional pecking order tends to lead to domination by the ruthless. Allegedly, the intersectional construct assumes every injustice is linked with every other, requiring all oppressed groups to join together in solidarity. Such solidarity tends to be a one-way street, however, which is why alleged Israel “oppression” is on the intersectional-left’s agenda while the murder of woman and gays throughout the rest of the Middle East will never be.

The initial response to the NYU outrage has been the usual supportive (if tepid) criticism of the boycott by school administrators, coupled with sorrow-and-regret statements by local students and Jewish leaders on and off campus. What is missing is outrage, and an agenda fueled by the outrage that should accompany this level of injustice.

As long-time readers know, I tend to council caution in turning to authority figures (especially government) when dealing with BDS-related issues that could be solved by on-the-ground activists, including student activists. But the organization of dozens of campus groups to attack their Jewish schoolmates reeks of such overreach that it demands a response beyond what even the most capable campus groups can generate.

With that in mind, here are a few steps that would have a high impact on the situation at NYU:

1. Alumni donors who care about Israel or just care about the toxic atmosphere at their alma mater should contact the school and alert them that their donations are on hold until the school gets its house in order. Efforts to stem the flow of donor dollars to the school should extend to campaigns within the donor community to get others to pledge to not give to NYU while the campus is ruled by mobs engaging in illegal discrimination.

2. Speaking of illegal discrimination, legal support groups should immediately contact city, state and national bodies mandated to battle discrimination and provide whatever is needed for them to open investigations into whether anti-discrimination law is being violated at NYU.

3. Such investigations – which can be supplemented by private civil and criminal lawsuits – should target not just the school, but the campus groups and individual members of those groups to make sure everyone who might be involved with illegal discrimination is required to live with the consequences of their choices (rather than force others – like school administrators – to take the brunt of consequences for irresponsible student behavior).

4. While I’m not sure how student groups are funded at NYU, on most campuses this is done through a mandated student fee that bodies within student government get to distribute. But if it turns out that funds are being used to support student groups actively discriminating against other students, that means fees students are forced to pay are being used to fund potentially illegal activity. Given this, there may be legal grounds to halting such funding immediately (or during the next academic year), or replacing mandated fees with a voluntary opt-in (vs. opt-out) alternative.

5. During the outrage that would ensure if any or all of these suggestions are put into place, our side should refrain from talking about (or even mentioning) the Middle East. Rather, all of our talking points should focus on “illegal discrimination,” using the phrase as incessantly as our opponents use “Apartheid.”

These are certainly harsh measures likely to make the atmosphere on campus even more toxic. But right now, the only people being targeted are Jewish students leaving the Israel haters free to spew their poisons without consequence.

School administrators tend to make decisions based on who will cause them the most vs. the least trouble, which is why they are not likely to come down hard on 50 campus groups who could take over their offices, especially if the countervailing threat comes from a Jewish community writing them tearful letters about feeling unsafe. But visits by civil rights lawyers from the city and state of New York, as well as the Federal Department of Education (especially one run by Ken Marcus) would definitely change leadership calculus, hopefully causing them to take the reins of the school they allegedly lead.

As noted before, legal responses should be limited to just those situations where political options have been blocked or are impossible. But if one chooses to go down the legal route, such a response should be overwhelming, even (dare I say it) disproportionate, in order to let the world know that an assault on Jews is no longer cost free.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

The Siege – Gaza Version (Divest This!)

I remember getting a lot of pushback once I started using the siege metaphor to describe Israel’s situation, both historically and as part of a wider discussion of how to look at our battle with Israel’s enemies through the lens of military conflict.

That criticism largely stemmed from a misunderstanding of siege warfare, with advocates for “going on offense” against Israel’s foes perceiving being on the receiving end of an enemy’s siege as a passive example of what is often criticized as being stuck “playing defense.”

But the siege, like the pitched battle where armies face off in direct combat, are simply types of activities that take place in a war, each of which come with a full set of offensive and defensive tactics. And many an army has been defeated when they got tired or bored with fighting off a besieging army from within protected walls and decided instead to leave their fortress to needlessly clash with the enemy.

This month’s Passover attacks from Gaza are a perfect illustration of siege strategy in action. For, from the perspective of Israel, the nation’s borders are its defensive walls which the military inside those walls cannot allow to be breached. Outside the Gaza portion of those walls is a Hamas army, made up of fighters and the civilians they have recruited to protect them, trying to crash through the border/barrier to sack the city/nation within.

In this case, the besiegers tactics do not involve catapults or battering rams, although past (and likely future) siege attempts have involved a different age-old tactic of tunneling beneath enemy walls. But, in the case of this month’s attacks, the prime weapon is “the feint,” in this case the creation of distractions (large numbers of marchers mixing civilians and military men, huge plumes of smoke generated by enormous tire fires) that will allow militants to sneak into Israel to wreak havoc.

One advantage of Hamas’ tactics is that it fits a propaganda model that originated during Israel’s 2006 clash with Hezbollah in Lebanon, one that has been perfected during fights between Israel and Hamas ever since. This tactic involves triggering a war and then counting on allies (such as the UN and anti-Israel activists abroad) and a pliant media to turn the violence created by Hamas into a morality tale of Israel’s cruel targeting of civilians.

Such propaganda has had trouble getting off the ground this time around, possibly because it’s been overused (allowing Israel and its friends to blunt it using counter-tactics created during this same decade-long period), possibly because parts of the media – which is being asked to swallow ever greater lies - have grown tired of playing the role of Hamas stooges.

Getting back to the siege itself, success or failure can be judged based on how well the IDF has managed to keep the enemy on its side of the walls. And, so far at least, that enemy has failed at even the modest goal of slipping killers through the gates, making the actual dream of Israel’s enemies (thousands breaking out of Gaza to march on Jerusalem) no more than fantasy bombast.

A key feature of siege warfare is that it is as hard, or harder, on the besieger than the besieged, especially when siege tactics are deployed against a stronger party that is ready to fight patiently to hold the line.

Casualty figures routinely trotted out to condemn the Jewish state (which is criticized for asymmetrical body counts) actually demonstrates success on the part of the IDF since any successful war involves maximizing enemy losses while minimizing your own. So, putting aside the humanitarian question surrounding one side fighting behind civilians while the other side fights to protect them, simple military arithmetic shows that treating the current Gaza conflict as siege warfare has been a wise move on the part of Israeli military planners.

It remains to be seen if other forms of suffering will visit those who chose siege warfare as a tactic. Smaller crowds showing up to act as cannon fodder for Hamas’ current campaign would be one indication of that organization paying the cost of poor choice of tactics, as are reports of internal fighting within the organization over choices the leadership is making.

It’s ironic that Israel’s foes use the language of the siege to describe the situation within Gaza, given that Israel has no interest in using siege tactics (or any other tactics) to conquer territory it left behind over a decade ago. This is best demonstrated by the Jewish state’s refusal to engage in traditional siege activities (such as starving out your foe) during not just this conflict but every conflict where Israel continued to supply food and electricity to enemy territory while fighting was taking place.

Those who might still consider defending against a siege as an exercise in passivity should look at results, which are still unfolding, to decide who might be playing the right cards in the high-stakes game of war.

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Framing (Divest This!)

It’s only natural that we humans make sense of the world by placing things into categories. Action movies vs. comedies. The “Fruits and Vegetables food group vs. “Breads and Cereals.” Conservative vs. liberal.

Mental shortcuts that help us streamline our thinking are called “heuristics,” and while they can be an asset when trying to figure out the new and unexpected, they can also be a source of vulnerability, creating openings for those who understand heuristics to manipulate us.

Often such manipulation is innocent. For example, the “Four Food Groups” of my youth referenced in the first paragraph has been replaced by different structures over time, such as the “Food Pyramid” or “My Plate.” All of these were designed to accomplish a public good (getting Americans to eat a healthy, balanced diet) by tapping into the general human desire to make complex information simple through easy-to-grasp categorization.

More sinister manipulation takes place when communication, particularly political communication, takes advantage of heuristics-driven vulnerabilities in our mental makeup.

For example, the common practice of defining your opponent in a political campaign (by endlessly repeating he or she is a plutocrat or elitist – regardless of the subject allegedly being discussed) is an effort to get the public to make the quick and permanent association between the opposing candidate and the adjective chosen to define them (plutocrat, elitist, etc.). For once such an association is in place, appeals to understand the defined candidate as a complex human being become nearly impossible.

Similarly, an accusation that aligns with intuition (ideally delivered via a catchy slogan) is an easy way to get people to believe a crisis or problem exists, without having to do any research (or thinking) on their own. What is the scope and nature of America’s current problems vis-à-vis immigration, race relations and sexual harassment, for example? No need to think about the details if we simply embrace the #MAGA, #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo hashtags thoughtfully provided to us by people we have never met.

In the realm of BDS, the most well-known example of manipulative, heuristics-based politics is the “Apartheid” slur which anti-Israel activists pepper spray at audiences, regardless of what topic is being debated. Some have even gone so far as to replace “Israel” (already in scare quotes) with “Apartheid Israel” in written communication. The point of such efforts is clear: to cement the idea that Israel is the successor to Apartheid South Africa in people’s minds to the point where no amount of factual information can shake that notion loose.

While there is always a certain contempt for the audience built into political activism based on simplification and manipulation, the communication accompanying last weekend’s clashes at the Gaza border raises this contempt to the level of a dare.

There has always been a certain amount of objective reality Israel-haters insist their allies reject, from the Jenin “massacre” that never was, to the notion that Israel deliberately targets civilians whenever Hamas or Hezbollah decide to heat up a border. But the storyline that poured forth from Hamas’ news sources, amplified by that organization’s Amen Corner in the West (that the clash was a peaceful protest fired upon indiscriminately by brutal Israeli soldiers), is so divorced from the information and images before our eyes that it can only be seen as testimony to the contempt Hamas has for not just the public, but for their own supporters.

For example, what would make an organization scream that everyone killed at the border was an innocent civilian, while also proudly announcing the death of martyrs associated with terrorist groups (along with photos of those martyrs clad in camo)?

To a certain extent, such behavior assumes propaganda storylines developed during previous clashes (ones featuring Israeli brutality visited exclusively upon Palestinian innocents) will take hold immediately once new violence breaks out. But it also assumes the public to be made up of unbelievably ignorant suckers, as well as assuming full ownership over the minds of friends and allies who are being asked to scream at the top of their lungs that 2 + 2 = 5.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Urban (Foreign) Policy (Divest This!)

Word has it that a municipality in my area (one with a habit of making official statements on foreign policy matters) will be visited by the boycott brigade next month requesting the city pass some sort of “Israel is guilty of everything” resolution.

As usual, this is being presented as a simple, straightforward human-rights question, one that will get turned into a “See, a major city agrees with us that Israel is an Apartheid state!!!!!!!” message through the BDS bullhorn if government leaders decide to hand the name and reputation of their city to a group of ruthless, single-issue partisans.

As most readers know, this kind of bait-and-switch is standard operating procedure for the Israel-disliking community, one predictable enough to boil down to a simple and straightforward playbook (part of a larger work that describes ways to defeat these predicable BDS tactics).

Before getting too worked up about the whole affair, keep in mind that even back in 2005 when some of us were dealing with an actual divestment resolution being debated in a neighboring city, we learned that the city where next month’s debate will take place had passed a couple of resolutions condemning Israel for this and that a decade earlier, resolutions no one could remember because they had zero impact outside the BDS bubble.

The lack of impact of such symbolic votes outside the city should not minimize the havoc caused within a community when BDS comes knocking and demands everyone take a side on their pet issue.

Back when divestment was roiling Somerville, I pointed out to city leaders that:

“It’s hard not to notice that, despite the troubles in the Middle East, the towns of Methuen, Springfield and Ipswich do not find their citizens at each other’s throats over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nor are aldermen or town meeting members in Medford, Winchester or Malden sorting through hundreds of e-mails a day, trying to rapidly learn enough to officially come down on one side or the other.

The difference between Somerville and virtually every other community in America is that we have chosen to turn a conflict that has challenged and perplexed wise and committed men and women for generations into official city business.”

So, as with every debate instigated by anti-Israel propagandists ready to drag anyone and everyone in their vendetta by any means necessary, next month’s city hall debate will not be about the Middle East. Rather, it will be over whether city leaders are ready to harm the community they are pledged to serve by dragging it into one of the most vexing conflicts in history, just because a gang of single-issue fanatics insist that this is their only moral choice.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Bad Math (Divest This!)

Continuing from last week’s discussion of how to tell if we are winning or losing the fight against BDS, you might think the best way to answer that question would be to draw from numerical information. Numbers don’t lie, after all. But do they always tell the truth?

I thought about this several years ago when I read the exciting subhead to this story which explained we don’t need to worry so much about campus anti-Semitism since BDS is absent from 97% of colleges and universities in America.

Great news! one would first think in knowing that your cause is aligned with a big number (97%) vs. a small one (3%) until you realize that this entire analysis is an inadvertent, but still misleading, example of Proofiness.

That word comes from a 2010 book of the same name which is subtitled "The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception." The term derives from Stephen Colbert's "truthiness," a word the comic invented to describe "facts" that sound so good, they must be true (especially if they confirm what you already want to believe).

Proofiness plays with the human tendency to treat quantitative data more respectfully than we treat other types of information, which is why we (for example) lap up the latest poll results, regardless of how wildly divergent they are from one another, and despite the fact that their predictive power has been shown to be minimal. (Exhibit A-Z: Polls associated with the last US election.)

Because most people's desire to believe numerical data is coupled with a lack of understanding of mathematical concepts (for instance, does that "margin of error" reported in the last set of polls you read about include potential systemic error – such as poorly worded survey questions – or just statistical variance?), people can easily be deceived by different types of mathematical deception.

My favorite of these is the unit fallacy which you'll see frequently in discussions involving rates or percentages. This is the one where a CEO of a company whose profits have risen from 10% to 12% will express this growth as "our profits have grown 20%," which is technically accurate (if that 20% is applied to the original percentage, rather than the whole), but misleading since most people think of "growing 20%" as implying addition (which would make such a description more suitable for profits growing from 10% to 30%).

Proofiness is a staple of election politics where candidates play all kinds of fruity tactics, from cherry picking data to comparing apples to oranges. But in the case of the Times of Israel headline, we are faced with inadvertent Proofiness based on the seemingly remarkable statistic of only 3% of colleges dealing with anti-Israel incidents.

On the surface, this certainly seems like a wonderfully positive trend. After all, 97% is much, much bigger than 3%, and if I wanted to think of myself as being on the winning side, I'd far prefer to ally myself with that very large number vs. the very small one (which explains the Occupy Movement’s "We are the 99%" slogan – another "proofy" assertion).

But remember that there are over 4000 colleges in the US, which means that 3% comes out to over 100 schools. And if you heard a headline that said anti-Israel activity was prevalent in more than 100 US college campuses, you'd probably react differently than you would to that 97% vs. 3% figure. Further, if you looked at a list of those colleges (which would go on for 2-4 pages, depending on font size), you might not feel victorious at all, especially since such a list would include some of the biggest and best known schools in the country (including most of the Ivy League and the vast University of California system).

But before panicking at a different packaging of the same data, a look at the original report the Times story was covering provides a more reasonable description of the situation, one that will be familiar to most Divest This readers.

For, as that report analyzes (and the Times headline does actually confirm correctly), US campuses are not aflame. Anti-Israel activity is not constant, even on the 100+ campuses where it is regular. BDS, while not a complete wash out, is hardly on the march (and has yet to trigger even a dollar of actual divestment from the Jewish state). Most schools where loud protests, ongoing anti-Israel lectures and film series, or hectoring professors are a problem, these anti-Israel partisans have to compete with increasing numbers of pro-Israel students who long ago decided they had every right to use their own free speech rights to counter Israel's defamers.

Still, anti-Israel hate campaigns at 100+ schools is a problem (especially if who is in that 100 changes each year, meaning we could be seeing seeds planted at 200, 300 or more schools over the course of the decade). But figuring out what to do at a hundred high-profile campuses is a much smaller (or at least a different) challenge than having to deal with thousands of flaming campuses, which is why a dose of reality can actually help our side make more effective decisions on where to put time and resources.

So rather than panic that the campuses are turning against us, or take the equally fallacious path of deciding the problem is solved (since it "only" impacts 3% of schools), we should focus our attention on ensuring that students on each of the campuses where anti-Israel activity predominates have the knowledge, the tools and the arguments they need to ensure the BDSers and other Israel haters continue to be defeated and ignored.

We must also realize that since the war against Israel is not something we started, that we have no control over when it ends. And so we need to brace for campus (and other) fights that will go on year after year after year, showing the same level of persistence and resolve as Israel's foes, but bolstered by better tactics and the fact that we are in the right.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Fighting the Wrong Fight (Divest This!)

Every year or so, I’ll notice a fight breaking out in the Jewish press regarding whether or not we are winning or losing the fight against BDS.

Most recently, the UK’s columnist Liron Velleman and US Commentary contributor Jonathan Tobin talked about the decrease in Israel Apartheid Week activities in the US and abroad, as well as the lack of success BDS has had in slowing Israel’s rapidly expanding economy and growing diplomatic ties across the world (including the Arab world). This was met with harsh rebuke by Jack Saltzberg, founder of The Israel Group, who pointed out that BDS is unconcerned with causing Israel actual economic harm, but is instead embarked on a project to turn the next generation against the Jewish state through propaganda facilitated by boycott and divestment campaigns.

Both sides in this debate rely mostly on anecdotal information, although the accumulation of anecdotes (such as number of Apartheid Week activities or student government divestment votes – or votes won or lost) can indicate trends.

Given how much of my earlier work was based on embedding the BDSFail meme into discussion of this topic, I have seen these same arguments again and again (with this piece contrasting various measures of Israel’s success with the failures of BDS tending to draw the most criticism from Israel supporters fearful that a “BDS is a failure” storyline might cause us to miss what the boycotters are actually up to).

While I have tremendous respect for all of these writers and the arguments they are making, they are similar to previous sides taken in similar debates in that they focus too narrowly on a tactic (BDS) without analyzing the wider framework into which that tactic fits.

Before BDS (a brand that came into vogue in the mid-2000s), there was simply “divestment” (the name of campaigns that started with the 2001 “anti-racism” conference in Durban). And before divestment there were campaigns to get the US to end its financial support for the Jewish state. Before those, there were calls to get schools, churches and governments to pass motions condemning Israel for this or that alleged crime. Woven into all these projects was the strategic goal of branding Israel as the successor to Apartheid South Africa.

This strategic goal was and is part of a wider project. For if Israel = Apartheid in the minds of enough people, then its demise would be considered not sad and evil, but wonderful and good. And if the ultimate goal of those pushing this propaganda campaign is to see the Jewish state destroyed (which it is), then BDS can be seen as the propaganda arm of a wider military strategy, with militaries and terror groups allied with Israel’s national enemies assigned the role of carrying out the actual violence for which anti-Israel propaganda provides cover.

What this means is that we cannot judge the success or failure of anti-Israel movements by looking at just this student council vote or that state anti-BDS legislation (or even the number of them increasing or decreasing over time). For anti-Israel agitation has been with us since before the BDS acronym was invented, and will continue – organized around different tactics – if the Israel haters drop boycott and divestment tactics altogether.

While part of the reason behind a slow-down in BDS activity can be chalked up to our side’s successful efforts to organize resistance to it, there are also geopolitical reasons for why we find ourselves where we are today. Most notably, the chaos in the Arab world and growing understanding by Sunni nations of the threat of Iran means traditional supporters of every aspect of the global anti-Israel crusade (such as Saudi Arabia) are losing interest in both the Palestinians and those that support them.

Also, whatever you think about chaotic US politics, there is clearly a difference in how the current administration treats Israel and the Middle East vs. the last occupant of the White House.

As outlined here, one has to understand the field of battle before understanding whether one is winning or losing on the ground. And, despite where conflicts are taking place, the actual battlefield is not the chambers of student or municipal government. Rather, those skirmishes are part of a wider plan to damage or destroy the walls (physical, military, economic, diplomatic and emotional) that protect the Jewish state from harm

This means we need to determine if the siege warfare Israel’s strategy for survival is based on is working or not. If it is, then we should continue to support anything that makes Israel’s position stronger while weakening her enemies. If it’s not, then we should find out where the cracks are in the Jewish nation’s defensive barriers and put our effort into patching them and shoring up protective barriers in hope that those who began this war (Israel’s enemies – the only ones that can end it) eventually come to their senses.

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Jew vs. Jew (Divest This!)

One of the more challenging aspects of dealing with BDS is the number of Jews (including Israelis) who seem to be highly involved on both sides of the issue. “Another Jew/Israeli for Divestment” read stickers worn by several BDSers who cram most major BDS events and votes, reflecting that many divestment groups not only include Jewish members, but also have Jewish and even Israeli leaders.

Now I have many activist buddies who are driven to distraction by the phenomena of Jewish involvement in organized attacks on Israel and its supporters. And put a few beers into them (or even some mild tea) and you’ll soon know the whole history of Jewish anti-Semitism (called “self-hatred”), court-Jews, turncoats and treachery that dates back to before Josephus threw his lot in with the Romans, and continues to this day with academic “Wandering Jews” like Norman Finkelstein.

While this history is interesting, I tend to take a more pragmatic approach to the presence of my fellow tribesmen in the ranks of both sides of the BDS debate. After all, historic precedent would be useful if it provided an opening to educate (or at least shame) Israel’s Jewish critics regarding the historic baggage they carry. But given the current company Jewish anti-Israel activists keep, I don’t anticipate historic context would have much resonance for them. And as for shaming, as everyone reading this knows, the BDSers (Jew and Gentile alike) have no shame.

In fact, Jewish and non-Jewish Israel-dislikers have far more in common with one another than they do with me (despite all of their speeches which begin “As a Jew…”). And what they share is the one element that permeates all aspects of the divestment debate: fantasy politics.

I’ve talked about fantasy vs. reality with regard to anti-Israel politics in the past, and while most divestment advocates share a common general fantasy (one where they are intrepid and virtuous heroes, fighting against an all-powerful enemy which represses them), flavors of that fantasy vary from group to group. At its most extreme, the jihadi Israel-hater is trying to re-create a fallen Islamic empire purely through acts of will and violence, just as Mussolini thought he could resurrect the Roman Empire via fearsome will coupled with pageantry and tanks.

Christian divestment activists (like those in the Presbyterian Church) do not go nearly to this extreme. But they still dwell in a fantasy world where they and only they are in possession of “the truth” in which they liken the Palestinians to Christ on the cross and thus see themselves as martyred saints who are always about to be thrown to the lions. The fact that this political myth-making has become its own form of superstitious faith (with Israel Apartheid Week taking the place of a dustier Easter they don’t really celebrate anymore) is lost on such people who lack, along with a sense of shame, any sense of irony.

For the Jewish member or leader of Students for Justice in Palestine (or whatever), the fantasy takes the form of being a truly enlightened, morally superiority being whose distance from or rejection of the burdens of Jewish life (whether religious obligations or a willingness to fight for the political rights of the Jewish people) are proof positive of this courageous identity. Like the Christian BDSer whose anti-Israel animus demonstrates his or her Christ-like nature, the Jewish divestnik’s fantasy-self is just the latest iteration of a Jewish identity built on chosen-ness. The irony that this anti-Israel Jewish identity shows more assurance in its own correctness than the self-image of an ultra-Orthodox rabbi is again lost on those who dwell in BDS fantasy-land.

And while Jews have excelled at anti-Israel organization just as they excel at so many things, let’s not lose site of the fact that there is a market for Jews of any level of intelligence and political skill within the “I Hate Israel” movement. Which is why any Jew willing to join such a movement “as a Jew” (regardless of whether or not they have had a single Jewish moment in their life up to that point) is welcome to sign up and wear a sticker or sign a petition specifically pointing out the one quality that supposedly gives their voice weight: their Jewishness.

Taking part in such activity also allows the fantasist to celebrate his or her courage while actually not taking a single risk. For taking on “The Jewish Establishment” is not like publishing a cartoon of Mohammed or (if you live in Gaza) criticizing the government – an act that carries real risk of actual harm. In fact, the most these “Jewish Critics of Israel” can expect from their activity is to be criticized by people like me. And as much as they try to present such criticism as a form of censorship or repression, they must forever inflate the alleged power and villainy of their critics, lest reality penetrate a single ray of light into the fantasy world in which they dwell.

So my attitude towards the many Jews who flaunt their Jewishness solely for the purposes of attacking other Jews is the same as my attitude towards non-Jews who have turned lack of principle into virtue, ignorance into wisdom and cowardice into courage. To them I would say: the next time you decide you would rather live in fantasyland, could you please take up Dungeon’s and Dragons, rather than embrace a persona that asks me to be a prop in your fantasy and requires others (including Jews and Palestinians) to die in order to maintain your self-image?

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Stop Being So Illegal! (Divest This!)

An intriguing spat opened up a few years ago after Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon posted this video on YouTube which articulated the position that the legal status of territories in the West Bank and Gaza are “disputed,” and not “occupied,” (thus implying that a working out their final status would require a political (i.e., negotiated) rather than a legal solution).

Ayalon’s presentation was simply a YouTube-y animated version of what has been the position of the Israeli government (and many respected legal scholars) for decades. But for those who cannot stomach anything but their own opinion that these areas represent “illegally occupied territories,” Ayalon’s case was too much to bear.

Unsurprisingly, the Palestinian Authority bristled at the notion that another side’s legal and political opinion should be given any legitimacy. And Israel’s detractor’s abroad rushed to defend an enforced “consensus” that Israel is an occupier, and an illegal one at that.

One can understand the importance of this Palestinian interpretation and why they feel that it must be not only defended at all costs, but that all other possible interpretations should be banished from public discourse. After all, if the territories are “disputed” rather than “occupied,” then a resolution to their status (and ultimately peace) requires talk, debate and (possibly) compromise. In short, it requires the same amount of diplomacy and reasonableness that was required to resolve other territorial matters, such as the status of Northern Ireland (which was only solved when everyone put down their guns and began talking).

But if the territories are “illegally occupied,” then there is no need for dialog, for negotiation, for reasonableness (much less compromise), but simply the requirement that the party acting illegally stop doing so. Staking out such a position provides additional propaganda benefits since explaining actual legal statuses requires a fairly detailed analysis of not-always-clear-cut legal issues and history. This allows BDSers and their ilk to simply declare Israel an “illegal occupier” over and over and over, and then watch their audiences eyes glaze over when that interpretation is corrected with proper citation of relevant issues in international law (an analysis the boycotters will, of course, ignore as they continue to use the word “illegal” at every opportunity, facts be damned).

The use of this tactic (declaring everything you disagree with as a violation of the law) has long since spilled over to other political contexts (with everything from the War on Terror to European immigration restrictions being declared “illegal,” based on nothing but the accuser’s desire to put their opponents on the defensive). But it seems to have reached a somewhat hysterical degree in the case of the Arab-Israeli context lately, especially among those who write press releases such as this which would consist of little more than blank pages if shorn of the words “illegal” and “Apartheid.”

I suspect that part of this has to do with the PA’s all-but-official abandonment of the Oslo process and its choice of Hamas vs. Israel as negotiating partners. After all, if you have no intention of every negotiating in good faith or making any acceptable compromises, what better smokescreen than to declare yourself simply trying to force enforcement of (undefined) international law.

But I suspect there is another reason why accusations of illegality have become so ubiquitous and so shrill of late.

As I’ve noted before, the boycotters have a raft of excuses as to why their political rage is applied solely to Israel and not to the many nations (including many BDS allies) whose human rights record make Israel seem angelic in comparison. But now that the “Arab Spring” has generated more Arab corpses than every Israeli action of the last two decades combined (never mind the difference between military actions designed to stop having missiles shot into your territory vs. military action designed to crush political dissent), it’s getting that much harder for the BDS cru to claim “Yes, what’s happening in Syria and Iran and Libya is terrible, BUT our devotion to human rights requires we continue to focus all of our efforts on getting you to stop buying hummus made in New York and Massachusetts” and still be taken seriously as moral voices.

And thus the fog machine must be revved up to 11,000 in hopes that declaring Israel an “illegal occupier” and an “Apartheid state” enough times will make it so (at least in the eyes of a public that BDSers consider to be nothing more than a mob of easily manipulated dunces).

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BDS, Fail, Repeat (Divest This!)

It recently dawned on me that those behind the aptly named BDS “movement” must have gotten their hands on that computer Wile E Coyote used in To Hare is Human.

Fellow Bugs Bunny fans will remember that episode as the one in which the aforementioned villain decides to supplement his “super genius” with a build-it-yourself, cave-sized, UNIVAC electronic brain, complete with my favorite cartoon interface of all time: a mammoth keyboard in which each key features one word in the English language (including contractions), allowing him to give commands such as:

ROCK + FALLING + WHAT’LL + I + DO?

Given the consequences of following the machine’s suggestions, it occurred to me that our buddies in BDS-land might be falling victim to the same technology.

For example, they could have typed the following command into UNIVAC earlier this month to hatch their latest self-detonating scheme:

NEW + ORLEANS + CITY + COUNCIL + TRICK + INTO + SUPPORT + BDS

One would think that the failure of the BDSers to gin up any enthusiasm for municipal divestment since Somerville kicked them down the stairs in 2004 might have sent them the message that cities and towns are not interested in participating in their poisonous, propaganda project. But perhaps this long drought just gave the boycotters time to let a new generation of representatives come to power with no memory of the tricks that had been played on municipal leaders over a decade ago.

The BDS playbook has been put into practice so often and so routinely that I was recently able to boil it down to a simple set of endlessly repeated steps, but the New Orleans version can be summed up as: (1) find a progressive organization concerned over, but not hugely informed about, international affairs; (2) ask the group to pass a generic divestment proposal that claims to support general human rights, without mentioning BDS (or even Israel) specifically; and (3) once said generic proposal passes, take to the airwaves declaring that the institution is now fully aboard the BDS “Israel = Apartheid” bandwagon.

This is exactly what happened in New Orleans in early January and, as with similar debates in the past, local leaders who had been duped were not amused that anti-Israel activists were blanketing the world with anti-Israel propaganda, claiming support of city leaders. So, within days of being passed, New Orleans’ divestment declaration was rescinded – leaving the boycotters with soot-covered punims as their latest self-made roadrunner trap detonated in their collective face.

Or how about Ohio State University, a school where divestment has been rejected by both student government and the student body in the past?

But by plugging the following into UNIVAC, a new scheme emerged:

GET + STUDENT + GOVERNMENT + TO + PASS + ANYTHING + REMOTELY + RESEMBLING + BDS + AND + DECLARE + VICTORY

You may have seen dueling stories regarding the latest vote at Ohio State, one which claims victory for BDS the other declaring that anti-Israel divestment was defeated. The reason for this confusion is that the boycotters agreed to a measure that said nothing specific about Israel; leaving them to peddle the generic human rights initiative they had just helped to pass as actually a successful BDS vote they knew had never taken place.

But if the boycotters are free to spin this non-BDS vote as a victory for them, what is to prevent someone else from spinning it as the boycotters’ latest humiliating defeat? In fact, what’s to prevent anyone from declaring that the vote was really Students for Justice in Palestine finally showing concern for non-Palestinian human rights, including the rights of those suffering under the racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary dictatorships that represent every government in the Middle East, save Israel? After all, if they can pretend a vote means whatever they want it to mean, why can’t the rest of us?

In general, I am in agreement with Ben Cohen that defeat of BDS is best left to folks at ground level, rather than making humiliating the boycotters a priority for national governments. And if it turns out they are falling prey to the same mischievous “one working part” that powered Wile E.’s UNIVAC electronic brain, why should we stand in the way of their racking up the next set of self-inflicted fiascos?

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