BDS and International Law, part 3 (Divest This!)

(In case you missed it, here are Parts 1 and Parts 2 of this series.)

Continuing the discussion of international law from where we left off, it’s easy to criticize and even condemn multi-national institutions, even the most successful of them.

For example, today historians agree that NATO represents one of the most successful political and military alliances in human history.  But during its entire history, many leaders (American and European, Right and Left) complained bitterly about the institution, decrying it as a “military occupation” or asking why US taxpayers had to pick up the tab for European countries that continually wobbled on which side to be on in the Cold War.

Yet despite these critiques (some of which were legitimate), this remarkable multi-lateral organization managed to keep at peace a continent that had been at war for centuries.  And given how many people during the Cold War insisted that the only options for the West were capitulation or nuclear annihilation, NATO (plus patience) showed that there was an acceptable alternative to this false choice. 

Given its size, pretentions and corruption, The United Nations is an easier target for similar criticism.  Yet it too has played an important role in the post-war world. 

Take the Security Council, a part of the UN often criticized as undemocratic (given that it preserves in amber outdated international power relationships, giving the victors from World War II veto power over binding decisions made by the UN as a whole).  If you think of the Security Council as presiding over a global democracy, this is clearly unfair.  But if you look at it as means for facilitating communication between superpowers at odds with each other (like the US and USSR during the Cold War), the Council provided a way to diffuse tensions by presenting compromises that might be rejected if originating from one or the other Cold Warrior as UN proposals brought by “neutral” third parties.

In exchange for this important mediating role, it was required of participants to act as though the UN had more international authority than its actual clout would dictate.  But this was OK for those who felt that organizations like the UN might eventually evolve into an organs of global governance.  For by creating informal powers for such an organization and getting nations to act as though these powers were legally enforceable, there was hope that this informal legalism would formalize over time (much like many common law traditions eventually evolved into enforceable binding law within nations).

But for such fiction to eventually become reality, it was necessary that these informal practices perform a useful function (as they did during the Cold War) and that the leveraging of international organizations for narrow national purposes did not go too far.

Unfortunately, the temptation of powerful states to use newly emerging international institutions (not just the UN, but also NGOs working to create codes of international and human rights law) for their own partisan purposes was just too great.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in the exploitation of these weak institutions by Israel’s political enemies.

Much of the “rap sheet” BDSers routinely read out regarding Israel’s alleged violation of international law is made up of accusations brought before organizations like the UN to be voted on by what has been called the “Automatic Majority.”  This term originally referred the UN General Assembly where the fact that every nation (small or large, democratic or not) got a single vote, allowing ruthless actors (like the Soviet Union) to stitch together a coalition that could be counted on to condemn the behavior of the USSR’s democratic enemies while ensuring that the human rights spotlight would rarely if ever be turned on the members of this automatic majority.

Sadly, this exploitation did not go away in the post Cold War world but instead was picked up by other powerful groups (such as the Arab League and Organization the Islamic Conference) which, via their numbers and a corrupt bloc voting system within the UN, can be assured that any accusation they make against Israel will become “law” (or at least an official declaration that Israel is in breach of law). 

At the same time, these very organizations (which represent the greatest human rights abusers on the planet) are careful to never bring the crimes of members of the automatic majority to the floor, thus keeping the finger pointing eternally at Israel (and, on occasion, the US). 

Yes, there are occasions when the accused rouse themselves to fight back (as when the US got the UN’s infamous 1975 Zionism = Racism resolution reversed in 1991).  But for the most part, this exploitation of weak international institutions by powerful national interests has become the norm in international affairs.  To restate a simple example I’ve used before, how much more likely is it that Saudi Arabia will obey UN resolutions regarding human rights for women vs. the UN following Saudi Arabia’s lead regarding the passing global blasphemy laws?

When the 1975 Zionism = Racism resolution was debates in the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (then the US ambassador to the UN) prophetically warned that the vote would send a message to the world that international institutions created after World War II to keep the peace were becoming tools to help the powerful wage war by other means. 

Many remember his famous quote that “The United States...does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”  But fewer remember the prophetic warning he gave to smaller nations (including many voting Yes on this “infamous act”) that they were destroying the very institutions they might one day need to turn to if they ever found themselves targeted by powerful predators.

Israel will likely survive the slings and arrows thrown at her by accusers using international organizations, human rights institutions and human rights itself as tools of propaganda.  It’s not entirely clear that the same can be said for the institutions that have allowed themselves to be turned into weapons of war for someone else’s benefit.  

---

---

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.

Read More

BDS and International Law – 2 (Divest This!)

Continuing the discussion from last time, until very recently, “international law” consisted of agreements such as treaties, alliances and trade deals negotiated between individual nations to cease hostilities, form alliances, or define political and economic spheres of influence.  While “nations” might refer to tiny city states of a few hundred thousand people or empires ruling millions, the treaty – a binding contract between the specific parties to the contract – was the cornerstone of internationalism.

While some broader “internationalist” principles such as diplomatic immunity evolved over time, these were primarily means to facilitate, rather than transcend, inter-state communication and negotiation.  The notion that there might exist a distinct body of law that bound all nations, and institutions separate from and above nation states (other than empires) that could interpret and possibly enforce such law on a global basis, is a very modern concept.

With the emergence of the nation state (itself a recent phenomenon), political activities - including war - primarily took place between countries.  And as new weapons and ways of waging war entered national arsenals thanks to the industrial revolution, these inter-state wars became particularly brutal. 

It was after what people felt was the most brutal war that could ever take place, World War I - “The War to End All Wars,” that the notion of an international organization that all nations would defer to - a League of Nations - was born. 

This first attempt to lay the foundations for a broader international order was based on the assumption that no nation wanted to go through anything like the First World War again, and thus national interests and international interests would forevermore be in aligned with the goal of preventing such a war.  All that was needed was an institution to facilitate communication, interpret emerging “international law” that transcended the laws of nation states, and work together as a global alliance to ensure the peace was kept.

There are a number of reasons why this experiment failed its first test: the challenge of an emerging Fascism which led to World War II, but at its core the assumption that national interests and international ones would naturally fall into alignment was at best utopian, at worst delusional.  For once a nation capable of projecting power and mobilizing international diplomacy towards its own ends emerged, what was to stop it from making demands on the new international order, rather than accepting dictates from it?

After World War II, a new international peace-keeping organization – the United Nations – was created.  And since the fall of the Soviet Union, hundreds, if not thousands, of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have emerged, many of them dedicated to laying the foundation to a new set of rules – a  new truly international law – that will bind all states to behave in ways that do not disrupt global peace, prosperity and progress.

We’ll dive more deeply to the glass-half-empty side of this development next time, but even if you consider this trend to be all for the best, this newly emerging international law runs into an immediate problem in that it does not rest on the two pillars discussed previously that undergird the successful legal systems you find within nation states: consent and enforcement.

Like treaties negotiated between states, membership in international organizations is not derived from the consent of the governed, but by the decisions of national leaders to negotiate a treaty or join an alliance.  And while one can claim that elected leaders are empowered to make such decisions on behalf of the governed, most nations - including most nations in the UN and other international bodies - are not democracies which means that decisions to participate - and how to participate - in international institutions are being made by an unelected individual or a ruling elite.  

Regarding enforcement, even the largest and most powerful international agency, the United Nations, has virtually no military power of its own and must call upon nation states, which still remain the only actors able to exercise and project power, to volunteer to implement UN mandates.  In theory, it does this by moral suasion: by convincing “members of the international community” (i.e., nation states) to demonstrate their commitment to global stability by providing the manpower and resources needed to keep the peace and prevent war and genocide.

Glancing through the last few decades, one can make an argument that this system has been effective with UN-initiated action stopping a Communist takeover of Korea or an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, and UN peace-keepers deployed to separate warring parties in places like Yugoslavia.  But if you look a bit closer at each of these examples, enforcement of UN-interpreted international law only seems to have taken place when it was in the interest of a nation or set of nations to do so.

It was in the interest of the US and its allies to prevent Communist encroachment in Asia, just as it was in the interest of the US, Europe and many Middle East states to prevent Saddam Hussein from adding oil-rich Kuwait to his dominion.  And thus the inviolability of national borders was enforced in the case of the 1991 Gulf War, even though this principle was not enforced, or even invoked, when powerful nations such as the US, USSR and China penetrated borders in placed like Panama, Hungary and Tibet.

Similarly, ending genocide on the European continent was in European interests, and thus the UN intervened in Yugoslavia but only stood by impotently as Rwanda descended into murderous chaos.

Some people have noted that the emergence of a global legal system is bound to encounter growing pains, but that it must be supported and nurtured if we are to ever evolve away from a system where only nation states get to call (and fire) the shots. 

This is a fair argument, but if and only if those who make it are willing to answer - or at least ask themselves - the key question of what is to prevent an international order that is not based on consent or enforcement from becoming dominated by the very state actors they are meant to impartially judge, limit or control?

To be continued…

---

---

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.

Read More

BDS and International Law - 1 (Divest This!)

Champions of legislation in Ireland calling for a boycott against Israel (and Israel alone) for the crime of “Occupation” struggled to craft a measure that would define “occupation” so narrowly as to exclude every other dispute in the world (from China’s domination of Tibet to Turkey’s conquest of half of Cyprus) where one nation is in control of another’s territory.

While the legal response to Ireland’s boycott legislation has interesting ramifications, the attempt to create law specifically to punish one nation for an alleged crime that could easily be directed at many others, and justify this injustice using the language of “international law,” got me thinking about whether the concept of international law truly exists. 

In previous postings, I’ve written about how BDS supporters would like to turn the Middle East conflict from a political dispute to a legal one since political disputes can only be solved via compromise (which they’re not interested in) while legal ones require no such compromise but simply the demand that anyone acting illegally stop doing so.

But to get beyond the politics to the core of the matter, we must look first not at international law, but at law itself.  And the first thing we need to recognize is that rule of law rests on two critical principles: consent and enforcement. 

As Hobbes pointed out centuries ago in his Leviathan, agreeing to live under the rule of law requires one to give up a certain amount of freedom in exchange for important benefits (such as the ability to live free from anarchy).  And given the anarchy of the religious wars in Europe that Hobbes was living through, he felt it necessary to give up nearly all individual freedoms to live under a state that could keep the law of the jungle at bay.

We seem to have reached a point in history when the freedoms we must relinquish to live at peace are not so all-encompassing.  But they are our freedoms, which is why members of a society must consent to live together under a set of rules (laws) for a law-based society to function.  Now one can make the case that a child born into a society of laws doesn’t get the chance to make such a choice him or herself.  But the pact described above is a multi-generational one in which citizens agree not just to live by certain laws but to raise their children believing that living under these laws is the right thing to do.

Enforcement is the other requirement for the rule of law to function, specifically the existence of an entity with a monopoly on the right to use violence to enforce the law as well as sufficient power to exercise this monopoly.  Absent an entity to take on this role as sole enforcer of the law, you end up back with the aforementioned anarchy (or, at best, a society where the blood feud becomes the means of seeking legal redress).

Despite various historical attempts to prove otherwise, one cannot have a law-based society based solely on consent without an enforcing power.  Attempts at creating such consent-based societies (such as various communal experiments) either degenerated into violent struggles for power (i.e., the law of the jungle), petered out over time, or existed (and may even continue to exist) as novelties under the protective umbrella of the state.

Interestingly, one can have a law-based society based only on enforcement (not on consent).  But these tend to be tyrannies where the rules that are harshly enforced originate from the caprice of the rulers (be they kings or Politburo members), rather than by consent of members of the state.

I mentioned states in the last two paragraphs since, in our modern age, the only institutions that have been able to effectively implement the rule of law are nation states.  In democratic societies, both consent and enforcement exist together, while in totalitarian states the rule of law is implemented by enforcement alone.  But outside of a cohesive political entity within defined borders and a citizenry that understands themselves to be members of a society within those borders, how one defines the rule of law becomes much less clear.

This becomes particularly apparent when you start to discuss international law which neither emerges from the consent of the governed nor exercises (or even possesses) the kind of enforcement mechanism needed to implement its judgments.

So in an era when nation states are still the primary political actors on the world stage, what are the origins and what is the significance of what we call international law?

To be continued…

---

---

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.

Read More

What the Presbyterians Lost (Divest This!)

Well it’s another even-numbered year, which means the Presbyterian Church in the USA (or PCUSA) got together for their bi-annual conclave (called a General Assembly) to (1) condemn Israel while ignoring virtually all other suffering in the Middle East; and (2) put a brave face their latest membership decline as their denomination continues towards oblivion.

Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, I was somewhat obsessed with the ups and downs of the Presbyterians, documenting preparations for each national conference as divestment came onto the agenda even-numbered year after even-numbered year.

The saga began in 2004 when the organization first passed a divestment measure, which was rescinded in 2006 after the church came under attack by both Jewish groups and their own members who were appalled over what was being said and done in their name.

But, as BDS-watchers know all too well, once an organization makes any move towards boycott or divestment, the boycotters have already decided the group belongs to them and exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to pass resolutions encapsulating their propaganda directed at the Jewish state.

And so, despite being rejected by the membership, BDS came back onto the organizations agenda in 2008, 2010 and 2012, being voted down each time, despite efforts by church leadership to box members into having only one choice (their preferred one) of returning the church to its 2004 divestment position.

Now a normal political movement might have gotten the message by then, or might have seen all of the damage their endless campaigning was doing to the church in terms of wrecking internal harmony and destroying the church’s reputation within the wider American society.  But, as we all know, BDS is not in the normal business.  And so the campaign continued as more and members left PCUSA (either as individuals or as whole congregations which defected to other Presbyterian branches not so obsessed with politics), and as the reputation of the church for fairness and faithful witness also headed into a tailspin.

When divestment was passed in 2004, it was possible for PCUSA leaders to convince the public that this was the democratic vote that represented the will of the membership.  But after watching the corrupt leadership of the organization ally with BDS advocates to stack committees considering Middle East issues only with divestment supporters, remove anyone who could make trouble from positions of leadership, refuse members access to information and voices that contradict the BDS narrative, and insist that any “No” vote was just a postponement of an inevitable “Yes,” it became clear well before divestment was restored in 2014 that these votes demonstrated nothing but the lengths to which a degenerate organization would go to hand its reputation over to someone else.

When divestment was voted back in that year, the Jewish community decided enough was enough, refusing bad-faith calls to enter into interfaith dialog with a church dedicated to slapping Jews in the face every two years (all while claiming such slaps were given out of love and concern for their Jewish brethren). 

In the meantime, the steady decline of the church continued as PCUSA coupled passage of new anti-Israel calumnies at their bi-annual events with tracking losses of another 5% of its membership.  Issues of anti-Israel animus and collapse of the organization are actually linked.  For as members died or left the church in disgust, those that remained represented a higher concentration of Israel haters.  This was represented by a tendency we see in all organizations where the BDSers think they have the upper hand: overreach.  And so, with divestment in their back pocket, the church moved on to condemning Zionism and those that support the Jewish national movement, adding slurs like “Apartheid” to the mix once they realized there were no longer enough fair-minded members ready to stand in their way.

But as the Israel haters wallowed in their “victory” within PCUSA, no one seemed to notice that their pronouncements no longer made news, or even a ripple in the pubic consciousness.   Two decades ago, one could claim that a major religious organization making proclamations and condemnations represented moral statements informed by faith that should be taken seriously.  But seeing how sausage (in the form of the aforementioned corrupt votes) gets made at General Assemblies for more than 15 years, who could possibly see their statements as expressions of sincere love and faith, rather than the output of venal politics?

Given that the number of Presbyterians nationwide is about to fall below the number of Jews just in New York, it’s also not clear why we need to take what they say any more seriously than they listen to us.

When I was more directly involved with helping those fighting anti-Israel bigotry in the church, I was frequently accused of being an outsider with no real concern for PCUSA and its members, beyond what they were saying about Israel.  As I responded then (and continue to respond now): while it’s true I never would have come into PCUSA’s orbit had they not chosen to get into my face in such an aggressive manner, I’m perfectly comfortable that Israel will survive the slings and arrows of a hypocritical and dying organization.

But as someone who appreciates the important role Mainline Protestantism has played in American history, my fear is not for my own tribe but for what it means when this important pillar of national identity gets shattered with the pieces being dragged into the swamp, just so a bunch of anti-Israel bigots can claim to speak in someone else’s name.

---

---

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.

Read More

The Virtual War (Divest This!)

This recent story on Tablet, which laments that Israel is losing on the important social-media battle-front, got me thinking about why a “movement” like BDS - which has accomplished so little with regard to actual boycotts, divestment and sanctions - seems to continue to capture headlines.  How does a project that has found it virtually impossible to win any genuinely significant victories still manage to get its self-characterization of “unstoppable momentum” into the news?

A credulous media (including US and European papers ready to print BDS press releases verbatim) might provide some explanation for this phenomenon.  And we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the BDSers’ relentless inconsiderateness which allows them to barge into anyone else’s space they like to gain attention (those other peoples’ needs be damned).

But there is one aspect of the competition between Israel’s defenders and detractors that needs to be highlighted, one area where Israel’s foes have traditionally outclassed its friends: the use of the new media (including blogs, social media and other Web 2.0 communication tools) to get their message out.

This disparity hit home a few years back when dueling stories regarding BDS success and failure (the latter written by me) appeared in the online Israeli news daily Ynet.  This piece (written in an emotional frenzy by an Israeli supporter) managed to generate over 1000 Facebook recommendations and was Tweeted close to 250 times.  My rejoinder, in contrast, barely broke the hundred mark on Facebook and never got past low double digits on Twitter.

Assuming every connection generates another round of re-forwarding and re-Tweeting, it’s safe to say the ten-to-one disparity between the two stories meant the original tale of BDS success found a home in thousands of more places than the corrective.  And thus, another BDS-preferred storyline got to travel around the world at the speed of light while the truth was still trying to find its socks.

Given how every BDS debate attracts at least one argument about how people truly interested in boycotting Israeli will have to give up their computers, their cell phones and the Internet as a whole (since much of that technology is based on Israeli inventions), I’ve often wondered why we marvelously inventive Jews haven’t managed to use all this technology half as well as our opponents.

Part of this might be an age issue.  While there are plenty of young people involved with pro-Israel activism, my sense is that average age skews a bit higher on this side of the divide vs. the other.  If this is the case, you’ve got a pro-Israel community comfortable with some aspects of online communication (such as blogging and e-mail blasts) but not others (such as social networks, Twitter and other technologies that are in the process of replacing mail as the prime communication vehicle for young people).

I can sympathize since I am part of that older cohort, someone who is happy to spend more than an hour writing a blog entry who is not ready to spend 10 minutes recommending and relinking stories (mine and others’) in order to elevate them in Google search rankings.

Fortunately, there has been some movement in the right direction over the last several years.  Grassroots activists and organizations have always been nimble and fierce warriors on social media platforms, and that skill set seems to be moving up the food chain of Jewish activist organization and even the Israeli government.  For example, the IDF’s Twitter feed has actually managed to influence some news cycles – at the expense of our enemies - a key component of today’s InfoWar tactics that, until recently, was the monopoly of Israel’s foes. 

At the same time, attempts by BDSers to exploit the openness of new online platforms demonstrates one additional advantage Israel’s foes have over its friends.  For just as our opponents steadfastly demand we open every conceivable forum to them or face accusations of “muzzling” and censorship, they will never reciprocate by opening their online spaces up to potential critics (in the form of maintaining open or unrestricted comments sections or any other option that would give critics the same freedom they demand for themselves).

Thus Web 2.0 savvy combines with general BDSholiness provides the forces of boycott, divestment and sanctions a bit of an edge.  But given that we’ve been winning so many other battles over the boycotters, there’s no reason to believe we won’t figure out a way to win this one as well.

---

---

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.

Read More

The Network (Divest This!)

The Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy just published research that describes the links between various BDS-promoting entities and terrorist organizations such as the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Hamas.   The report confirms (as if more confirmation was necessary) that – far from being the grassroots human rights movement it poses as – BDS is in fact an operational asset in the ongoing war against the Jewish state.

The infographic that accompanied the report, which has been making the rounds over the last week, reminded me of other illustrations of how propaganda and “direct action” (i.e., terrorism) fit together into an integrated militant strategy. 

This work represents two strands of public diplomacy being carried out by the Israeli government that demonstrate their seriousness with the propaganda as well as kinetic battlefield: high-profile exposing of war organizations posing as peace groups, and keen use of communication methods (in this case infographics) that cut through the word clutter often characterizing pro-Israel commentary. 

Given how well organizations much less resourced than government agencies have made use of such tools (I’m thinking especially about NGO Monitor and its BDS Sewer System animated graphic that eloquently communicates the way politicized NGOs launder accusations against Israel to fuel BDS and other propaganda campaigns), it’s nice to see Israeli political leaders leveraging modern communication techniques to spread the truth as well as our opponents use them to spread lies.

While specifics are always vital when planning strategy and tactics, it is equally important to keep in mind the big picture into which these specifics fit. 

For instance, the prime movers in the war against the Jewish nation state are the other nations who declared war on that state at its birth, a war that continues to this day.  As I noted when describing the odds Israel faces in her military situation:

A majority of countries that make up the Arab League are in a formal declared state of war against Israel and, taken together, these states have a combined population of close to 350 million and combined armies of over a hundred million soldiers.  This number does not include irregular forces like the terrorist armies of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.  If we also want to take economics into consideration, Israel’s economy (with a GDP of approximately $300 billion) is one twentieth the size of the economies of her combined enemies.

The years 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 (and possibly 1982) are often invoked to mark times when this long-term war erupted into actual shooting between national armies, but every year in between these dates can also be characterized as periods when formal military clashes were replaced by irregular action (referred to as guerilla warfare and terrorism, depending on who you talk to and when).  This supports the notion that 1948, 1967 et al should not be considered distinct wars, but rather seen as battles in a long-war that stretches back almost a century.

Alongside kinetic actions involving people actually shooting at one another, there has also been a parallel propaganda effort that again begin with Israel’s nation-state enemies (i.e., the countries making up the Arab League).  Coupled with allies, including another 20+ non-Arab Muslim states and states who once described themselves as “non-aligned”) this “automatic majority” exercises power inherent in numbers to corrupt organizations like the United Nations, turning them into a propaganda arm for a war against a member state. 

The purpose of the propaganda branch of the war against Israel is to (1) make Israel’s destruction seem virtuous vs. horrifying; and (2) provide support to military actors by limiting Israel’s options with regard to allowable military responses.  Again quoting previous analysis of this situation, current activity by BDS and similar anti-Israel propaganda campaigns can be characterized as follows:

·         When there is not a shooting war going on, BDS advocates run Israel Apartheid Week events and other similar programs designed to paint Israel as so hideous that any action taken against it should be considered moral.

·         During “quiet” periods when groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are readying for the next war (by collecting weapons, building rockets or digging terror tunnels) these “peace advocates” say and do nothing to limit that war preparation.

·         Once a shooting war breaks out, they take to the streets condemning Israel’s counterattack and demanding a ceasefire as soon as the aggression of Israel’s enemies start bearing a price.

Taken together, these actions demonstrate not just a political movement playing a military role (by justifying attacks against Israel and then trying to limit the Jewish state’s military options once those attacks begin) but a foe with clear-cut and militant goals: to see Israel destroyed or weakened to the point where someone else can handles the trigger pulling.

If we keep these fundamentals in mind, details regarding the actual makeup of the network providing this propaganda support to the ongoing war against the Jewish state put vital flesh on the skeleton outlined above.  And such knowledge can help us better understand what we’re dealing with when we deal with BDS and make sensible decisions regarding what to do about it.

---

---

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.

Read More

SMART Goals for fighting BDS (Divest This!)

Whoops!  Guess I forgot to follow up on a piece I wrote a few weeks back that ended with a promise to describe ways we might frame our own goals when it comes to fighting BDS.

In that first post, I listed the genuine goals of anti-Israel activists which include (1) poisoning the minds of the young against Israel while (2) colonizing and completely controlling the Left end of the political spectrum.

An obvious description of our own goals would include seeing our opponents’ efforts defeated.  But this is simply a surface-level tactical choice (one often dictated for us).  And if we want to be guided by anything other than the goal-driven decisions of our enemies, we need to have well-understood goals of our own to help define our decisions and actions.

Goals were a frequent topic of discussion when I ran a business years ago, with a variety of techniques pushed by a variety of gurus promising to help organizations articulate the right sort of goals they should pursue.  

“SMART Goals” is a popular method still in use is with “SMART” sanding for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.  While a few too many conversations about EBITDA and similar ungainly abbreviations left me cool to strategy-by-acronym, SMART Goals stuck with me, given how well they apply to organizations with limited resources – which includes the tiny minority of Jews/Israelis and their activist supporters.

If you look at the list of adjectives making up the SMART acronym (Specific, Relevant, etc.), they all point to goals that are realistic and concrete.  For example, the desire to dominate an industry in five years might be inspiring and energizing, but could also be a flight of fancy.  At the very least, it does not provide a roadmap for how to achieve such an ambition.  In contrast, the goal to win eight new clients of a certain size by the end of the year is SMART, rather than just aspirational.

Similarly, many of us long for a world in which the Israeli (and Jewish) condition are “normalized,” by which I mean the hatred and attacks that have been visited on the Jewish state for decades and the Jewish people for centuries goes away as the form of insanity known as anti-Semitism fades from history.  But having such an aspirational goal provides nothing specific to work from. 

Turning the tables on our foes by “giving them a taste of their own medicine” is a popular goal often discussed by activists disgusted by the Israel haters seeming to always have the initiative.  Unlike ridding the world of Jew hatred, this goal is concrete and achievable.  But it does not explain what such table-turning is meant to accomplish (other than embarrassing hypocrites) which makes it more of a tactical choice than a goal in its own right.

The metaphor of the siege I’ve discussed before can be used to frame some SMART goals we have already achieved and can continue to work towards. 

That siege metaphor sees Israel as the equivalent of a walled city being attacked by besiegers (in this case, the nation states at war with Israel – including their terrorist surrogate and proxies and supporters and apologists abroad).  Since a strong and disciplined besieged city often wins out over those trying to penetrate its walls, we can have as a goal the continued strengthening of the city (Israel) and weakening of those besieging it.

Maintaining an edge against opponents through military commitment and training is the investment Israelis make in their own defense.  But maintaining the vital relationship between Israel and the US is probably one of the most important goals for both Israelis and non-Israelis alike.  

These goals are specific and measurable (for example, US military aid and votes in support of the Jewish state in Congress or US vetoes in the UN can be detailed and quantified). 

Such goals are obviously achievable since they have been achieved (even if the work of maintaining them is ongoing). While ambitious and challenging, they are also realistic, given that they involve decisions over which Israel and her supporters have the most control.  And while it’s difficult to time-bound efforts that are continuous, this overarching goal provides organizations (such as the IDF or AIPAC) the ability to plan what they want to achieve each year. 

Speaking of time, long-term sieges often end with the besieger not just going away but being destroyed (or destroying themselves) which means time might be on our side, rather than on our opponents’. 

For example, as the Arab siege of Israel enters its second century, look at the difference between the besieged Jewish state – now growing stronger in every way year by year – and her enemies which are either imploding or, sensing ruin, starting to come to their senses. 

While it would be folly to assign ourselves the goal of curing the world of its longest hatred, a common commitment to “protecting the city” might also have the pleasant side effect of diminishing that hatred by demonstrating the price it exacts on those who embrace it. 

---

---

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.

Read More

The Worthy Life – II (Divest This!)

Last time, I talked about what it means to live a worthy life and how Israelis’ existential condition – in which each of them is responsible for defending and building a nation – has made them some of the happiest people on the face of the earth.

For those of us who do not live under similar conditions, which includes most of Israel’s friends and supporters, her enemies and detractors, and huge swaths of humanity both friends and foes are trying to reach, might there be something about human nature we all ignore as we settle on strategies to communicate our messages, persuade others, and build alliances?

The list of things mentioned last time which add up to a worthy life (meaningful work, a loving relationship, genuine friends, and a life committed to truth and beauty) was informed by the ancient philosopher Aristotle whose writing on ethics identified happiness as the ultimate goal all our efforts drive towards.  Why do we want money?  To live in comfort.  Why do we want comfort?  Because comfort makes us happy.  Why do we want happiness?  No answer is needed to this question because happiness is the “final cause,” the end point where all other efforts and ambitions lead. 

But by “happiness,” Aristotle wasn’t talking about simple giddy joy.  Rather, he was using a Greek term better translated as “flourishing.”  And if you build into your life the components needed to call it worthy, you can live a happy (in all senses of the word) flourishing life.

Getting back to Israel advocacy, as we argue our cause are we offering listeners anything that might help them achieve the ultimate human desire to be happy and flourish?

Within the pro-Israel community, discussions of strategy and tactics still tend to boil down to a debate over offense vs. defense (or “going on the attack” vs. “positive messaging”).

Advocates for “going on the attack” argue that we cannot perpetually take punches from Israel haters who relentlessly assault and malign the Jewish state and its friends with the most outrageous calumnies, accompanied by outrageous behavior no one should have to tolerate.  This strategy can be boiled down to: Let’s tell the truth about Israel’s enemies (including their bigotry, misogyny and violent intolerance) as aggressively as they tell their lies about us.

In contrast, calls for “positive messaging” highlight how little impact shouts and insults have on crucial undecideds who can be swayed by getting to know Israel and its people, culture, food, and marvelous gifts to the world (in the form of cures for illness and high-tech wonders as well as progressive values).

I’ve written a number of times about pragmatic reasons why each of these approaches is flawed.  A complete treatment of the subject can be found here, but the key problem with an attack strategy is that we as a Jewish pro-Israel community lack the militant goals needed to sustain what would need to be a decades-long, non-stop smearing of our foes.  And if we were really playing by BDS rules, we would have to drag innocent third parties into our fight, without any concern over what harm that might cause others. For better or worse (better, in my opinion) our community lacks the ruthlessness needed to give our opponents a full taste of their own medicine.

Positive campaigning seems to be a way out of this dilemma, but the things that tend to be highlighted in such campaigns (whether it’s High-Tech Nation, Gay Pride parades, hummus recipes or Eurovision Song Contest victories) aren’t much of a shield against an enemy arguing on behalf of freedom, justice and international law (regardless of how much they have drained all three terms of any meaning).

Beyond these practical considerations, the big problem with both the “Offense” and “Positive” positions is that neither offers listeners anything that talks to the human need for meaning and purpose.  I’ll admit to a certain glee when I see Israel haters forced to flee when faced with an argument they can’t counter or their latest BDS failure.  But such emotional satisfaction on the part of the activist is not the same as providing others the satisfaction derived from striving for a flourishing life (meaningful work, loving relationships, etc.).

Similarly, while I’m in awe of the technological prowess of the Israel people and the openness of their society, a strategy based entirely on telling these stories strikes me as a continuation of the Diaspora tradition of endlessly having to prove to the majority culture our worthiness as a minority.

But there is another story the remarkable achievement of Israel taps into, one that can spill over from giving Israelis a life full of purpose to providing the same satisfaction to all who support or just befriend the Jewish state.  

Few would argue that the nadir of the last century (if not all centuries) was the Holocaust which exterminated six million men, women and children for the crime of being Jews.  But too few follow this up by seeing the rebirth of the Jewish state just three years after that disaster as one of the most monumental achievements in human history.

Ingathering exiles, making the desert bloom, defeating larger and more powerful enemies again and again and – yes – building a tolerant nation with a growing population and economy are all part of this magnificent story, the story of that much maligned word “Zionism.”

And, with all due respect to those who see us as a “Chosen People,” Israel’s accomplishments have nothing to do with Jews being special in any way.  For if a people at death’s door can achieve such wonders, anyone can do it.  And many have (think about South Korea that built a flourishing state by investing in their own people after national ruin in war).

This dynamic tale, the Zionist story of what a society can achieve if its citizens have purpose and are ready to live for the future as well as the present, is what stirs many of us to genuine love for (not just appreciation of) the Jewish state – more so than the defeat of enemies or the latest Israeli-built microchip or app.

And why shouldn’t it?  For this move turns our pro-Israel advocacy into meaningful work, creates bonds of true friendship between fellow Jews (including happy Israelis) and other Jewish and non-Jewish activists.  It dedicates us to fighting for the truth and enjoying the beauty of one of history’s most inspiring tales.  In short, it provides us many (although by no means all) of the things necessary to live a worthy, flourishing life.

In contrast, the demented behavior of our foes is a testament to where a life dedicated to destruction and ugliness leads.  And for those our opponents demand follow their lead (such as intersectional allies in minority communities, biased journalists and partisan scholars) the price of abandoning reason, ethics and professional standards to join the cause are sources of suffering.  For deep down, even the most corrupt journalist writing about “peaceful marchers” on the Gaza border know they are communicating a lie, just as academics committed to spreading ignorance and bigotry understand they have not just abandoned the quest for truth or beauty but are actively fighting against it.

This explains why Israel’s foes spend so much mental effort blocking out and shouting down reality they want to avoid.  For their lives are dedicated to things that are the opposite of what brings happiness, which is why they are so damned miserable.  In a way, the contrast between flourishing Israel and the basket cases that represent the rest of the Middle East is a macrocosm of what can be achieved at the societal level by embracing the quest for a worthy live vs. battling to live an unworthy one.

So we friends of the Jewish state should offer not slams against our enemies or hummus parties, but steps towards living a meaningful life – a sharp contrast to the slavery and self-loathing on offer from our enemies.   Put in such terms, is there really a contest?

---

---

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.

Read More

A Worthy Life (Divest This!)

I’m reading a book that again reminds me how much we’re leaving unused our most potent argument for creating attachment to Israel among not just Jews but everyone else in the world.

Leading a Worthy Life by Leon Kass is not about Judaism, Israel or the Middle East (although the author is the child of Jewish immigrants). Rather, it distills decades of thinking and writing by its remarkable author into a set of essays that tries to establish what it means to live, truly live, rather than just exist in modern times.

Kass is most well known as a bio-ethicist who warns about promises made by bio-tech utopians offering brave new worlds of human advancement, oblivious to what Aldous Huxley had to say on the matter of Brave New Worlds. But Kass is also a self-educated humanist who “pivoted” later in his career to teaching literature and philosophy at the University of Chicago and the “great-books” centered Saint John’s College.

Like others intimate with his cultural legacy, Kass understands that the components of time on earth worthy to be called a life are unchanging: work that allows you practice and experience excellence; a meaningful and loving relationship (preferably leading to children); genuine friendship; commitment to something greater than yourself (a community, nation; and/ or higher order); and life of the mind dedicated to seeking out truth and beauty.

In our present age, the choices leading to a worthy life are under assault by the wider culture. Work has become a means to an end (usually involving making enough money to live in comfort). Commitment to marriage is diminishing, even as the right to marry has expanded, with many couples not bothering to seal a life-long bond or breaking that bond once made. In such a world, Eros has been separated from love through emotionless “flings” or steady diets of pornography.

Regarding life of the mind, an abandonment of the very texts that inspired Kass in favor of not just trendy multicultural replacements, but pragmatic subjects like business and computer programming, means most students today are not striving to understand what it means to be human, but are rather lost in a sea of ever-expanding life choices all leading nowhere. It is this “lostness” that creates openings for snake-oil salesmen offering politics in the classroom as a replacement to genuine thinking and reflection, or radical experiments in lifestyle that further deteriorate the culture while bringing participants no closer to living vs. merely existing.

Despite what he’s seen happen to our culture over the last half century, Kass is actually an optimist. For in teaching young people over the decades, he has not seen any diminishment in their hunger for all the things he sees as adding up to a worthy life. Despite easy availability of one-night-stands and Internet porn, they want a life where their intellectual, emotional and erotic selves are tied to those of someone else. They understand that Facebook friends are not the same as real ones. And they are ready to ask (and attempt to answer) tough questions such as “What is true?”, “What is beautiful?” and “Who am I?”

This list of components of the worthy life helps unravel mysteries surrounding the topic near and dear to readers of this blog. Why, for example, are Israelis so damn happy despite living under existential threat few of us in the comfortable West even understand, much less experience? They are happy because their life has purpose, for each one of them is responsible for building and defending a nation, rather than just living off unearned inheritance. Such purposefulness equates to happiness that no level of threat or insult from Israel’s enemies seems able to shake.

Existence defined by worthy purpose might also explain why Israel’s high-tech nation (with its focus on life-saving technologies) seems so much more serious than even our own robust start-up culture which tends towards giving consumers ever more choices and pastimes. The fact that Israel is the only westernized nation where parents are committed to having children beyond replacement level also demonstrates an ongoing commitment to something more than the self and the now.

That’s good news for our Israeli cousins. But what do these observations provide to those of us who fight on the behalf of the Jewish state who may not live under similar existential conditions?

Some thoughts on that next time…

---

---

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.

Read More