The Coddling of the American Mind – Part 1 (Divest This!)

One of the best books of 2018 provides some answers to those bewildered by the crazy happenings on college campuses, Israel-related and not, over the last few years. 

The Coddling of the American Mind, written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt expands on an article the authors wrote for The Atlantic in 2015, proposing an explanation for anti-free-speech phenomena they then saw metastasizing on college campuses.

Lukianoff is the President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization created to fight attempts to stifle free speech at colleges and universities.  Historically, the group supported students dealing with campus speech codes being imposed by college administrators. But starting in the early 2010s, Lukianoff began to notice that many demands to limit what people could say or think were coming not from those attending, rather than running, schools.

Such attacks on free speech have taken on many forms, from attempts to label impolite or insensitive behavior as “microagressions” that required redress (and sometimes punishment), to “trigger warnings” alerting students that dangerous ideas were about to be read or discussed, to “de-platforming” speakers with controversial things to say.

Lukianoff also noticed how explanations students provided in their demands for controls of (and over) what could be uttered were couched in the language of safety.  “Safe spaces” where students could protect themselves against ideas they didn’t like is one example of what he observed, but he also noticed how controversial ideas were being branded as a form of violence, against which students needed protection.

In addition to his professional work, Lukianoff spent years working through depression with the help of a technique called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).  Part of CBT involves identifying “cognitive distortions” that adversely impact reasoning.  These include “catastrophizing,” magnifying the significance of small setbacks in ways that maximize personal psychological damage, or “jumping to conclusions” interpreting other people’s behavior in the worst possible light. As anti-speech activists on campus talked about words as a form of violence, or interpreted simple rudeness as punishable bigotry, Lukianoff and his co-author began to see destructive cognitive distortions playing out within whole communities, rather than individuals.

That co-author was Jonathan Haidt, best-selling author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis, who was just the person to elaborate on the broader meanings behind the kind of misbehavior we have seen unfold at school after school during the last decade.  A thoughtful social-science researcher struggling to help society move past the “we vs. they” mentality that is destroying individuals and institutions, Haidt shares his co-author’s goal of containing and, ideally, turning back the tide of horribles currently infecting centers of learning.

“Why now?” the authors ask as they searched to discover the source of behavior not seen before start of this decade.  What happened that might explain not just student actions but the language of danger, violence and safety ascribed not to acts but to ideas?

The generation of students who entered college during this period were not Millennials, but a post-Millennial generation that had grown up with different historical touchpoints than most of you reading this.  Infants and toddlers at the time of 9/11, this generation understood the War on Terror as a slogan that seemed to have gotten American into intractable, inexplicable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The Cold War was history, not a living memory, much like World War II is to my generation.  If political identity begins to form during adolescence, this generation’s identity evolved during an era of increasingly heated rhetoric and uncompromising ideology Haight warns could destroy democracy. 

This generation also grew up when parenting practices were changing to embrace what the authors call a culture of “Safety-ism” in which keeping children safe at all cost spread from protecting them from physical harm (such as being kidnapped or hurt in a fight) to protecting them from psychological dangers (like poor grades or the fallout from interpersonal disputes between peers).  Previous generations had to suffer the consequences of their actions, but in an age of Safety-ism, adults and authority figures were there to smooth the way if anything went wrong in a young person’s life.

Changes in parenting behavior led to changes in what this generation experienced during childhood as free, self-organized play was replaced by “playdates” scheduled between parents, and activities where children got together to engage in sports, arts or other fun planned and supervised by adults.

The Internet fits into the story as well.  As careful researchers, Haidt and Lukianoff are not ready to propose theories beyond what early research shows about the impact smartphones and social media are having on the young.  But it’s hard to not notice how many stories they tell involving “thought-crimes” originating in Facebook postings and mobs being organized on Twitter.

Moving from this background, the authors tap a number of ideas I’ve written about previously, such as a Culture of Victimization trying to supplant a Culture of Dignity.  For in a victimhood culture, people are fighting for as high a position in the hierarchy of victimhood as possible, while also being ready to turn to authority figures (such as college administrators) to provide them the protection other adults have afforded this generation their entire lives.

In addition to providing cogent analysis, the authors also include a detailed appendix of recommendations for parents, universities and the wider society to help kids develop the kind of anti-fragility that should be the nature of all young people hoping to become genuine adults. 

Fights over Israel and the Middle East that have roiled campuses for several decades are not addressed specifically in the book, but the insights of Coddling can be combined with other analysis to help better flesh out what’s happening on campuses and, ideally, what can be done to solve this problem.  And it is to this analysis that I shall turn to next.

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To Life! (Divest This!)

Over the last week, I noticed that horror over the recent Pittsburgh synagogue massacre did not lead to the kind of partisan finger-pointing which usually accompanies outrages of this type.

Certainly there was a fair share of finger-pointing at the current administration, coupled with counter-accusations that those who wanted to use the tragedy of Pittsburgh to further their own political agendas were dishonoring the dead.  But such Internet-fueled rages were fewer than one might have expected, given how quickly other mass killings turned into clashes over guns vs. mental illness I described last time.

This may be because the communities most affected, including the Pittsburgh and wider Jewish communities, urged those who needed to “do something” to reflect on their faith (in the case of Jews) and commitment to one another when responding to the outpouring of support from non-Jews around the world.

The power of such a response was brought home to me when I attended services at my synagogue on Friday night, the first ones held since Pittsburgh.  At that event, the clergy addressed the overflow crowd of Jews and non-Jews with a message of hope, rather than despair or anger. 

Helping those who were directly impacted by the crime was obviously first priority, and anyone with a connection to Tree of Life through family, friends or personal history, were asked to stand so that the community could show their love and support.  But the rest of the service was dedicated to life, and not just life going on after a tragedy, but to the life-affirming, celebratory moment Jews are privileged to experience once a week in the form of Shabbat. 

No doubt there were members of the audience able to find fault in some of the things that were said that evening.  Even I couldn’t help but think about Elder’s warning against taking the murderer at his word that he targeted Tree of Life due to their embrace of refugee issues when our rabbi highlighted the killer’s excuse for why he did what he really wanted to do, which was to kill lots of Jews.  Upon reflection, however, it seemed more than uncharitable to characterize this story of solidarity as anything other an attempt to illustrate the open heart of a Jewish community which has decided to use its resources to help others now that our own refugee issues are largely behind us.

More importantly, the embrace of life-affirming principles, represented by the #ShowUpForShabbat effort embraced by millions across the globe, got me thinking about not just Jewish tragedy, but Jewish strength and longevity that has allowed us to survive for Millenia while other peoples vanished into history.

A natural – and understandable – tendency, after all, is to sink into despair when confronted with murderous anti-Semitism coming to America, especially in the context of the skyrocketing of attacks on Jews worldwide, accompanying (and excused by) the war against the Jewish state.  But despair can easily turn to fatalist expectations of doom.  But there is a cure.  For Shabbat in general, and the most recent Shabbat in particular, demonstrates Jewish faith in week-by-week renewal that has kept us around fifty-two weeks a year for countless centuries.

Another natural response to the attack would have been boundless rage.  But, as we have seen in societies that have devoted themselves to stoking and exacerbating such rage (especially societies who blame the Jews for their own failings and crimes), anger untempered by hope can lead to not just despair but to trillions in wasted dollars and, far more importantly, millions of wasted lives.

So, as tempting as it might be to turn our enemies’ tactics against them, especially when they ruthlessly and relentlessly assault the most important Jewish project of modernity, we must avoid anything that might turn us into those enemies.  One need only look at Gaza to see where that can lead.  Similarly, one need only look at Jerusalem – ancient and modern – to see what we can accomplish when we play to our strengths, and act like the people we are. 

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Thoughts on Pittsburgh (Divest This!)

Outrage, Reason and Art

When a horrific attack like the one that took place in Pittsburgh this weekend occurs, especially when your own community is the target of murderous hate, first instincts turn towards comforting the afflicted coupled with feelings of outrage. Analysis, at such a time, can seem almost in bad taste.

Fortunately, comforting the afflicted comes naturally to our people (and, by “our people” I mean Jews, Americans, and all decent human beings), and one needs no guidance on whether or not to feel outrage when bodies are still being counted. But if we want to understand what happened, with the goal of preventing it from happening again, some attempt to determine what the hell is going on is required before default explanations begin to kick in.

The Tree of Life Synagogue is obviously not the only vulnerable target to suffer homicidal gun violence in recent years with school shootings dominating the news alongside attacks on other targets chosen largely for high concentrations of members of a particular group (students, Jews, blacks, or victims chosen at random) that have neither the means to shoot back, nor the expectation that returning fire was their responsibility.

When the dust settles, arguments will largely turn on traditional causal explanations for these sorts of mass killings with many fingering the wide availability guns while others asking us to focus on the shooter as an incarnation of evil or a victim of mental illness.

Both explanations are reasonable, given that these murders are committed with something (guns, usually powerful ones) by someone (a killer who is only comprehensible as someone whose moral and mental makeup makes him different from the rest of us). But each fails to explain why these sorts of mass killings are happening so frequently now versus some other time in the past.

Starting with firearms, shooters have always outgunned the kinds of the communities subject to attacks, such as public schools and houses of worship, going back to the days of the one-room schoolhouse and blunderbuss. This doesn’t mean that the availability of modern, powerful weapons doesn’t increase the lethality of such attacks, but it does raise the question of why schoolrooms and other vulnerable locations have not been shot up, even with less merciless firearms, for centuries. Unless one wants to claim that increases in firepower cause increases in frequency of shooters targeting the innocent, there must be some other explanation as to why so many of these kinds of mass murders are being committed at this point in history.

Mental illness, including the need to spot and treat the mentally ill (or at least get them off the street) before their affliction can lead to butchery is often brought up as a retort to the “guns are responsible” explanation. Since focusing our attention on the person who committed a crime is just as intuitive as a focus on the tools he used to commit it, there is a logic to trying to get into the head of a killer, even if we are not ready to excuse the anti-Semitic hate that motivated this weekend’s shooter as resulting from a mental disease beyond the trigger-puller’s control.

Once again, however, we need to ask ourselves if some new forms of mental illness have emerged in recent years that have as their symptom the transformation of people into school and synagogue shooters. Mental illness, after all, has been with us far longer than guns which leaves us asking the same questions as before: why this form of violence, and why now?

I had the opportunity to think about this earlier this year when a murder spree slightly less close to home (the Parkland School shooting) took place right around the same time I sat through Steven Sondheim’s most challenging musical Assassins.

The play is built around a fantasy scenario in which presidential assassins (Booth, Oswald, Leon Czolgosz who killed President McKinley, Charles Guiteau who shot Garfield) and wannabes (such as Reagan’s attempted assassin John Hinkely as well as Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore who failed to plug Gerald Ford) are hanging out together in some unexplained netherworld, waiting for the moment to commit their crimes and experience the consequences before returning to ongoing dialog (set to music) with their fellow assassins.

The question permeating the script is why a group from different backgrounds and living in different eras all came to the same conclusion: that shooting the President of the United States was a reasonable course of action.

“I will be remembered!” shouts Charles Guiteau, just before he falls through the gallows after his successful assassination of Garfield, and many other lines of dialog point to these murderous acts as providing a purpose or point to the lives of men and women who would otherwise die forgotten losers. In other words, their murderous acts were motivated by an existential desire to have their lives mean something, anything, regardless of the cost to them, their victim, and the nation.

When reason fails to provide explanations to the inexplicable, art can sometimes fill the void. In the case of Sondheim’s Assassins, the answer to “Why now?” might come down to living in a society and age when everyone desperately wants to be noticed, remembered, admired, even for acts of heinous brutality. As we grow to more and more measure our self-worth in hits and Likes, or compare ourselves to the famous and infamous and perceive ourselves as wanting, well “why not shoot a President?” (as a narrator in Assassins asks) or someone else?

These thoughts should in no way be perceived as an attempt to divert attention from gun violence and the fight against its causes, or the need to ensure the deranged and hateful are locked away or put underground (or at least disarmed). But they do point to a factor we should be considering before retreating to our usual corners to debate what to do next, namely, what is it about the world today that makes mass murder seem a reasonable answer to the question “Who am I?”

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Manufacturing Dissent (Divest This!)

I tend to see a difference between the controversies that arise whenever a major event (such as wars in Gaza or Lebanon) break out in the Middle East, and ones that are more typically triggered by a BDS initiative, such as a campus divestment or retail boycott conflict.

While both types of protests usually involve the same people and slogans, in the case of reaction to a Gaza War (for example), protestors against Israel are taking to the streets in reaction to an actual controversial event.  And while those who rally to support Israel might disagree with their opponent’s characterization of the situation (for example, highlighting Hamas rocket attacks that Israel’s critics ignore), both sides are engaged in real politics about genuine, impossible-to-ignore crises.

But when a divestment battle breaks out on a university, for example, it is always the result of a BDS group first deciding to drag the Middle East conflict onto campus, then finding the pretext to do so. 

Remember that one of the primary goals of BDS is to get their message that Israel is an Apartheid state, alone in the world at deserving economic punishment, to come out of the mouth of a well-known and respected organization.  And, if they can’t accomplish that by actually convincing a college or other institution to divest (which they never have), at least they can brag that hostile accusations against the Jewish state are now part of the fabric of campus life.

Under this formulation, almost anything can be used as a hook to hang a controversy that will immediately divide an institution into armed camps, a dynamic that only serves to heighten tensions still further and make the Arab-Israeli conflict the Alpha and Omega of political/human-rights debate within a community.

Now BDS advocates will claim that a school’s ownership of this share of Caterpillar, for example, or that share of Motorola means they are currently “taking sides” in the conflict, and thus BDS is a proper response to an institution that is already making a political statement by holding such equities in their portfolio.  But couldn’t that same argument be made to turn any investing organization of any size into a warzone?

After all, for every dollar these institutions invest in companies that in some way benefit the Jewish state, they invariably invest ten, twenty or even a hundred dollars in energy stocks such as Exxon that (by BDS logic) could be construed as a school or other organization “investing” in the Arab side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

So why are protests not breaking out on campus to get schools to “divest from Saudi/Arab/Islamic Apartheid,” with posters littering the campus of Islamic slave traders in Sudan buying and selling black Africans, women being stoned to death in Iran or homosexuals being hung in Egypt?  Simply because those of us who stand against BDS refuse to ruin the communities to which we belong just so we can score points against our political foes. 

It’s the same reason we are not hounding artists to cancel tours to countries hostile to Israel, or placing photos of broken bodies on the sides of public busses, or inviting partisan speakers to present on the perfidy of Israel’s political foes to elementary school classes.  For even the most aggressive campaigners on our side, this kind of invasion of public spaces is impossible to sustain for the simple reasons that: (1) we are not ready to make the lives of our neighbors miserable for our own political gain and (2) ultimately, our goal is for Israel to live in peace with its neighbors, which means we don’t want to spend morning, noon and night portraying those neighbors as demons.

BDS advocates take a completely opposite position.  For them, setting members of a once-friendly community at each other’s throats is a small price to pay for their own political aggrandizement.  And as for “peace” being their end goal, their behavior highlights the fact that just as organizations whose names included “The People” usually involves the smallest number of them, organizations that proclaim themselves “peace groups” while endlessly demonizing their political opponents look suspiciously like the propaganda arm of a war effort.

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Not By Might (Divest This!)

Not By Might

Each year, I am reminded about what an unfair fight we face when battling against BDS and the other manifestations of the propaganda attack on Israel when my temple holds an annual service in celebration of Scouting (Boy and Girl) and alumni of Jewish summer camps.

At a mock campfire after services (complete with s’mores), a folk singer leads the kids in the room through the canon of Jewish camp tunes, including one I remember when one of my boys was involved with the temple singing group: “Not by Might and Not by Power” based on a passage in the Book of Zechariah. (The song was written by Debbie Friedman, a pioneer who helped transform the music of the Reform and Progressive Jewish movements.)

Now I have some friends and allies who dismiss the sentiments in songs such as “Not by Might,” with its chorus of: “Not by might and not by power, But by spirit alone shall we all live in peace” as one more example of “kumbaya thinking,” the tendency of many Jews to try to find common ground and avoid conflict at all costs, even when faced with situations when conflict is unavoidable or a foe who is teaching their children to fight until victory over those hoping to prevail by spirit, rather than might.

Like so many situations in the real world, the duality of compromisers vs. militants misses some critical points, starting with the experience of Jewish history. Once again, I am in the debt of Professor Ruth Wisse who summarizes and reflects on the challenging relationship Jews and Power in her masterful short book of the same name.

Jews, after all, were once citizens and rulers of a political entity, the original Jewish state, and (like all small powers in antiquity) had to contend with the continual encroachment of numerous imperial neighbors such as the Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans. The lessons of most of these conflicts were mixed, with the fall of the first Hebrew kingdoms to Babylon by a failure of Jewish arms, followed by a restoration of that nation due to the act of generosity by a Persian king (which many thought acted as an agent of God).

The Greek conquerors both captured the land and tried to force Hellenized culture onto the monotheistic Jews, only to repelled (again, by arms) by the Brothers Maccabee. But it was the experience with Rome which provided a unique historical lesson to the Jews, setting up a struggle between compromise and force that informs us millennia later.

For in various revolts against Rome in the First and Second centuries AD, the Jews faced off against the superpower of the day, a foe whose legions had made Rome the undisputed ruler of the world. And despite the hopelessness of their cause, the Jews fought on and rekindled their revolt again and again, each time deciding that the imbalance of power would be rectified by having their own one true God on their side.

The failure of this quasi-religious, but ultimately political conflict was total, with the Jews first defeated, then defeated again and disbursed throughout the empire, their political homeland erased from the map (until the last century). Now some Jews still take heart in the courage and steadfastness of their ancestors in the face of odds that probably ensured defeat before the first battle began. But many more internalized another more significant lesson that might (in the form of armed Jewish revolt) led to near destruction, while spirit (in the form of Judaism recast in the new Diaspora in religious rather than political terms) kept the Jewish nation alive for centuries after Rome was just a memory.

Given this background, who can blame Jews for their peculiar relationship with any sort of power, political, military or especially state? If recent history demonstrates that spirit alone will not save Jews from the ovens or give birth to a state, older history shows that might and power do not provide all the answers either and, indeed, might create the very problems (such as lack of Jewish independence) it tried to solve.

This debate between might and spirit has been going on so long with sides so hardened that little light is shed when proponents of each side argue their positions, which today use the terms (or, more often, accusatory labels) of “Left” and “Right” as the foundation for sterile debate.

Lost in all of this history, however, is an example worth thinking about: that of Rome. While it might seem odd to look at our historic enemy and destroyer for lessons, keep in mind that Rome was not an empire that simply pillaged and enslaved, enjoying war for its own sake and caring little for anything but spoils. Rather, Rome’s success (especially its military successes during the Republican era) came from the careful deliberation it took before entering a conflict (bordering on hesitancy) coupled with a resolution to never back down once conflict began.

Today, Jewish might (while nowhere near as huge as in our enemy’s imaginations) is not inconsiderable. Yet part of that might derives from the hesitancy with which it is applied. As needs to be pointed out again and again, the people who sing “Not by Might and Not by Power” have created for themselves a pretty decent homeland. Precarious certainly, but a state with which those who built it (and those of us who support it from the sidelines) can be justly proud.

At the same time, the people who have been teaching their children for decades to fight on until their enemy is vanquished either live in squalid holes, or in states on the verge of civil war between totalitarians and fanatics, each claiming to be able deliver victory by the sword more quickly and thoroughly.

Food for thought as we all make our own decisions of how to interpret and act on the words of Zechariah.

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Whataboutism (Divest This!)

One of the great frustrations when dealing with BDS propagandists is the difficulty getting them (or anyone else) to acknowledge the yawning chasm between their zeal to fight for “Justice for Palestine” when said Palestinians come under Israeli jurisdiction and their complete indifference to the suffering of those same Palestinians (or anyone else) at the hands of non-Israelis.

“Syria is that way!” taunted the Israeli Prime Minister a few years back when a crop of Flotillists tried to break the quarantine of Gaza with their pretend load of “humanitarian aid,” summing up the question many of us ask regarding why those who storm the streets the second the Jews shoot back can’t bring themselves to even run a pancake-breakfast fundraiser for the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria’s civil war – especially since that number includes more Palestinian casualties than were generated in 60+ years of war with Israel.

As always, if you confront a BDSer with this seeming inconsistency/hypocrisy, they will simply ignore you in favor of continuing to spew their own propaganda messaging, regardless of what you have to say.  But if they get backed into a corner, one of their most frequently used counter-moves is to attack their opponent for practicing “whataboutism” (also pronounced “whadaboudism” – preferably with a Sylvester Stalone accent).

Unlike “Pinkwashing” – a fake phenomenon the Israeli haters baked up in order to have something else to talk about whenever the gap between gay rights in Israel vs. the Arab world is pointed out – whataboutism is an actual argument, which means there is a surface logic to the BDSers using it to defend their own glaring inconsistency with regard to human rights concerns.

The term describes a fallacy which assumes if you support one cause then you are being inconsistent (or even hypocritical or neglectful) by not applying the reasoning behind that support to all similar (especially similar but far worse) cases with equal or greater verve.   As an example, claiming that someone fighting for civil rights of African Americans is a hypocrite if they don’t put even more energy into fighting for black lives in Sudan’s Civil War is a clear example of “whataboutism.”

The reason this is a fallacy is that it assumes everyone is obliged to be perfectly consistent regarding what they choose to care about, and that not applying their energies based on the rank order of need translates to indifference to that suffering.  But here on earth, we all make choices that prioritize some goods vs. others.  If you support your local Boy Scout troop or help create a community farm, are you a good citizen or an uncaring monster for not putting that energy into “worthier” causes such as rescuing orphan boys in far-off civil wars or feeding the starving (vs. well-fed locavores)?  And if you claim to fight for general principles like “human rights,” there is always someone worse off than the particular group you have chosen to be the recipient of your support.

This is why there is a certain logic for a supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions directed at Israel to claim that someone asking them why they don’t BDS China or Sudan might be practicing whataboutism since, in those instances, China and Sudan are distinct issues (even if they all fall into the general category of human rights abuse cases).

The reason I described this as “surface logic” earlier is that the crude: “You can’t fight for Palestine if you don’t also fight for Tibet” argument is not really what critics are saying when they ask for consistency with regard to places like Gaza, Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East.  For human rights abuses in those places are not peripheral to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but central to it.

Take Gaza where Hamas came to power by killing off their Fatah rivals, stay in power through terror directed at their own population, and trigger repeated wars with Israel after securing their own safety in tunnels built below hospitals, schools and mosques while forcing the civilian population to stay above ground to serve as cannon fodder for the propaganda component of their ongoing war effort.  Given this, pointing out the BDSers indifference to Palestinian suffering in Gaza is not peripheral but central to the question of whether they really stand for human rights at all (vs. shielding their militancy behind a human-rights vocabulary).

Syria is another example where asking why such “human rights supporters” don’t seems to give a damn about the hundreds of thousands of people killed there since the start of the Syrian Civil War is central vs. tangential to any discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  For Syria is and has always been a key player in that conflict, having participated in conventional wars, terror wars, and proxy wars against the Jewish state, not to mention participating in nearly a century of economic warfare (Damascus was HQ for the Arab League’s boycott office for decades, for example).  So highlighting that this progenitor for the BDS movement is currently killing more Palestinians than Israel ever has is not a distraction but a perfectly valid question that the BDSers simply would prefer to not have to answer.

In fact, one could make the case that the entire Arab war against Israel represents whataboutism on an industrial scale never before seen in human history.  For – as is playing out today in a Middle East aflame – the problems of the region have always been about the dysfunctional government, fanatical politics and instability that characterizes virtually every nation in the Middle East save Israel, embodied in states which are by any measure the world’s worst human rights abusers.

But bring any of this up and you’re sure to be met with a photo of a dead Gaza child (or, just as likely, a photo of a dead Syrian being laundered as a Palestinian) or loud demands that we talk about the latest bathroom addition to an apartment in Gilo – anything but the human rights catastrophe that characterizes those nations that have been at the forefront – and are thus the de facto partners – of the propaganda war current traveling under the name of BDS.

Going further, the transformation of the United Nations and virtually every organization and entity created for fight for human rights across the planet into weapons directed at the Jewish state is meant to ensure that whataboutism never needs to be invoked by Israel’s foes since a refusal to look at the vast crimes of Israel’s enemies is now hard wired into the system.

Back in the 1980s, someone toted up million+ people killed in the Middle East since 1948 who died in wars and other violent acts that had zero to do with Israel’s existence or continuation.  And it would not surprise me if contemporary calculations brought that number well above the two-million mark.  Which leaves us at the question anyone genuinely interested in human rights should be asking: whataboutthem?

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BDS and South Africa part 2 (Divest This!)

Continuing from last time, a BDS debate involving South Africa usually follows certain predictable patterns.  BDS advocates claim that those involved in the struggle to topple Apartheid in SA see the Arab-Israeli conflict in the same terms with Israelis serving as stand-ins for the Boers.  Various names are dropped, but since most Americans are unfamiliar with the cast of characters (and because most students at schools targeted for BDS campaigns weren’t even born when Apartheid existed or ended), the only two names with any resonance are Desmond Tutu and, of course, Nelson Mandela.

Because Reverend Tutu is a four-square champion for BDS, his support for a boycott or divestment program can only be trumped by invoking the name of Mandela whose relationship with Jews and Israel is more ambiguous.  One of the reasons an attempt a few years ago to break ties between the University of Johannesburg and Ben-Gurion University in Israel failed was because of Mandela’s involvement in the relationship between the two centers of learning.  This is why the endorsement of Mandela is so sought after that BDS advocates are not beyond using fraud to pretend to obtain it. 

Like most things, the actual relationship between Israel and South Africa (like the relationship between South Africa and every other country in the world – including Israel’s loudest critics) was a complicated affair.  As is usually the case when $$$s mix with global politics, few hands are clean when it comes to international affairs vis-à-vis pre-Mandela SA.  And South Africa’s relationship with Israel since Apartheid fell is as multi-faceted as one would expect between two such intense and vibrant societies.

But when BDSers lay down their Tutu card (as they do in nearly every BDS battle) or supporters and opponents of boycotts try to read the Mandela tea leaves, they are taking for granted the assumption that the South African experience gives those that fought against Apartheid unique moral weight in discussion on other topics (notably the Middle East).  But, without diminishing the courage and patience of all those involved with the successful overthrow of Apartheid, is this a reasonable assumption?

After all, if suffering and courage lent all who practiced it unquestioned moral authority, why are Jews (who suffered one of history’s greatest mass murders only to revive and build a thriving nation and Diaspora) treated by BDSers as uniquely damaged by these experiences?  Apparently, if the South African experience created saints who cannot be criticized in any way (lest critics be banished from decent society), the Holocaust turned Jews into proto-Nazis who learned nothing from the experience other than how to behave like their former tormentors.

This knot can be untangled if you look at the world not through the lens of ideological need, but of actual human experience.  As has been pointed out before, the BDS “movement” is part of an “Apartheid Strategy” designed to brand Israel as the inheritor of the mantle of the late 20^th century’s most reviled nation and political system.  But on its own, the “Apartheid Strategy” is simply an accusation, one that can be counter by facts and blunted by counter-accusation of the Apartheid-like nature of Israel’s most vocal critics.

Which is why the endorsement of those involved with the original fight against the original Apartheid becomes so critical.  And just as importantly, we are asked to take it on faith that any South African endorsing the Israel=Apartheid analogy must be doing so based on nothing more than an unvarnished quest for justice. 

But South Africa is a real place containing real people involved with real political (now geopolitical) decision-making.  Yes, they won a marvelous victory against a vile and bigoted political system, and projects like Truth and Reconciliation commissions showed the world that there were options other than vengeance when old orders make way for new.  But why were the Arabs states who supplied Apartheid with the oil it needed to run its machinery of repression given a unique pass from this Truth and Reconciliation process?  Why do South Africa’s leaders, considered saints when they hurl their barbs at the Jewish state, behave with the same mix of vision, patriotism, virtue, venality, greed and hypocrisy seen in every other political leader in human history?

The voice of South Africans with regard to the Middle East (as with any other issue) are many and varied and the motivation behind some South Africans (including Tutu) endorsing BDS projects can and should be subjected to the same scrutiny as any political statement made by any other political leader.  No supporter of Israel I have ever met has demanded that all political discussion stop because a Jew (even a Holocaust survivor) has spoken (quite the opposite, in fact).  And without in any way diminishing the valor of those who helped bring down the Apartheid system, it is well past time that the same approach be taken with regard to South Africans.

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BDS and South Africa - 1 (Divest This!)

I’ve always been curious whether certain words create their own power or simply draw upon the power of that which they describe.  The term “Holocaust,” which starts with soft vowels implying vastness and ends with knife-sharp consonants, seems like it would be evocative regardless of what it describes.  Yet once this term came into general use to describe the Nazi’s extermination of European Jewry, it drew upon the massiveness of that event, eventually pushing out other terms (some foreign like “Shoah,” some euphemistic such as “Final Solution” – a simple phrase which itself can mean only one thing to today’s ears) to become synonymous with history’s most horrific crime.

Fights over the term simply demonstrate its unique power to move people emotionally.  As horrific, vast and mind-numbing as other historic mass murders have been (such as the Armenian genocide, which many see as an historic “warm up” for other 20^th century ethnic exterminations), there is a reason we describe these as the “Armenian Holocaust,” the “Rwandan Holocaust,” etc., rather than describing the Shoah as the “Armenian genocide of the Jews.”

“Apartheid,” meaning “separateness”, resonates as a word, even to those unfamiliar with the Dutch dialect used by South Africa’s white Afrikaans population, implying as it does the English terms “Apart” and “Hate.”  And yet the ugliness of the system it describes, a form of mass racial discrimination masquerading under formal legalism, certainly contributes to this term becoming synonymous with bigotry as state policy.

As with the term “Holocaust,” there are legitimate fights over whether the term “Apartheid” belongs to the world, or just to those who experienced the original phenomenon.  Anyone looking over the past century will see enough political murder and racism to shake their faith in humanity.  But are all murders of any scale a “Holocaust,” and is all institutionalized bigotry a variant on “Apartheid?”  Many (but by no means all) Jews and South Africans would argue that by allowing these terms to be used to describe anything remotely smacking of large-scale killing or racism, one is not universalizing them but draining them of any meaning whatsoever.

In the cauldron of debate over the Middle East, arguments over the use or misuse of these terms are particularly acute.  While some attempts have been made to describe the Palestinian experience as a new “Holocaust,” this runs into a problem when you realize that, unlike other historic genocides, the Palestinian population has skyrocketed since Israel’s birth (especially in the disputed/occupied territories that are supposed to be serving as stand-ins for Hitler’s concentration camps).

“Apartheid” is by far the more frequent term of abuse hurled at the Jewish state for its alleged “crimes.”  Thus the barrier built to stop mass bombing campaigns originating from the West Bank is not a fence, a wall or even “the New Berlin Wall,” but the “Apartheid Wall.”  Jimmy Carter’s book “Peace Not Apartheid” has basically been translated to the single phrase: “Jimmy Carter says Israel is an Apartheid State,” (even if the author himself has tried to weasel out of the implication of his chosen title).

Web sites with names like “It Is Apartheid” are dedicated solely to the purpose of making Israel synonymous with Apartheid South Africa (especially in the mind of people too young to remember the original), with BDS itself simply a component of a wider “Apartheid Strategy” whose practitioners believe that by replacing the term “Israel” with “Apartheid Israel” in all of their communication and correspondence they can, over time, turn their preferred version of reality into common wisdom.

But who gets to draw boundaries around where the term “Apartheid” is used, even in debate over the Middle East?  Some supporters of Israel have responded to the “Israel Apartheid” slur by charging Israel’s accusers of practicing, supporting or ignoring crimes of “Gender Apartheid,” “Sexual Apartheid” and “Religious Apartheid” within the wider Arab world.  And unlike some of the more fanciful charges against the Jewish state, repression of women, homosexuals and religious minorities by Israel’s neighbors is undisputable. 

But who gets to decide if they are all variations on “Apartheid?”  If enough people started using the phrase “Apartheid Saudi Arabia,” “Apartheid Syria” or “Apartheid Gaza” in their daily communication, does that legitimize an accusation masquerading as a descriptive phrase (a la “Apartheid Israel”)?

This is why the involvement of South Africa and South Africans in this debate is so significant.  Absent the ability to characterize the Middle East conflict in Apartheid terms, it becomes a less charged (and, as an aside, potentially more solvable) political dispute.  That being the case, is it as clear as BDS advocates would like everyone to believe that South Africans who participated in the fight against the original Apartheid see the Arab-Israel conflict in the same terms as their own struggle?

To be continued… 

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BDS and International Law – Conclusion (Divest This!)

This concludes a series, the rest of which can be read at: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

One of the most powerful objections one could raise to the critique I’ve been making regarding Israel and international law would be that it is a “shooting the messenger” – style argument.  “So what if the institutions condemning Israel as being in violation of international law are flawed or even corrupt?” the argument goes.  “If Israel is guilty of what they say, then it shouldn’t matter who is making the accusations.”

This is actually a strong argument, which also implies another one that says it doesn’t matter if other nations (including Israel’s accusers) are guilty of even greater human rights “crimes,” since the question under discussion is Israel’s guilt (or innocence) of the charges.

Israel’s supporters need to treat this argument with respect since Israel does not stand alone with regard to the developing framework of international institutions and rules, so should not be quick to dismiss the entire edifice as illegitimate.

In order to counter this argument, one would need to demonstrate that there exist objective standards for judging whether these accusations are unfair or not.  And fortunately, we can go back to our original discussion of the nature of law to find such standards.

If you recall, this analysis began by describing the rule of law based on consent and enforcement representing a pact between generations to believe, and raise their children to believe, that the law is fair and thus worth preserving.  And there are some situations which have reasonably shaken this belief, regardless of the societies in which these situations have emerged.

The first is inequality before the law.  After all, the law is meant to be impartial (and blind), applying equally to rich and poor, aristocrat and worker, well-connected and isolated.  But if can be demonstrated that law is applied unequally on a systematic basis, that is a strong foundation for challenging its legitimacy.

Inequality before the law can take two forms: a law that can clearly be applied to many instead being applied to just an unfortunate few.  Alternatively, law can be written so selectively and precisely that it is designed to prosecute just a few specific individuals or groups.  The non-stop (and systematic) condemnation of Israel by international bodies made up of nations far more guilty of the crimes they accuse Israel of committing falls into the former category.  And the increasingly narrow definitions of “Occupation” (something we saw in the Irish boycott example that kicked off this series) is an example of the latter.

The other principle that can be used to demonstrate the fairness vs. unfairness of law is the notion of selectivity, in this case selectively enforcing parts of a law while ignoring important components (such as context, qualifiers or additional obligations) found elsewhere in the same law. 

For example, Israel’s accusers routinely claim the Jewish state is in violation of United Nations Resolution 194 which states that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date," to support the so-called “Right of Return” of Palestinian refugees.  But even within this sentence, 194 is meant to apply only to those refugees wishing to “live at peace with their neighbors,” which immediately highlights that it might not apply to refugees who refuse to this day to acknowledge their neighbor’s (Israel’s) right to exist (much less live at peace with her).  The resolution also does not indicate a specific set of refugees, meaning it could be used as the basis for Jews kicked out of their West Bank homes after the 1948 war having a legitimate right to move back there (not quite what the BDSers have in mind, no doubt).

Similarly, Article 13 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which states that "(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state; and (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country") is also frequently invoked to “prove” Israel is in violation of the law by not allowing Palestinians an unlimited right of return.  But, again, the legal ambiguity of the territory under dispute in the Arab-Israeli conflict (coupled with the fact that “Palestine” is not a state, and thus cannot be a party to the Declaration), means that this freedom of movement and return can equally be applied to both Jews and Arabs, rather than selectively applied to Arabs alone.

Both strands of unfairness (inequality and selectivity) come together when you look at the aforementioned Declaration of Human Rights in its entirety.  For reading through all 30 articles of the Declaration, one is struck by how one region in the world more than any other: the Arab Middle East, exists in contravention to almost every one of these principles: from freedom of the individual to representational government to freedom of religion, peaceable assembly, and equal rights before the law.  Yet those who most aggressively flog the distorted reading of just one article of the Declaration are the most passive with regard to the clear meaning of the Declaration as a whole applied outside of Israel's borders.

BDS advocates making this or that accusation of illegality are free to use their free speech rights to do so, as long as they don’t mind other people using their free speech rights to point out the BDSers inaccuracy and hypocrisy.  But accepting newly-devised or newly-developing international law that is supposed to transcend the laws of nation states requires that evolving legal framework prove itself to be at least as good as the national law (especially national law based on the twin pillars of consent and enforcement) it is meant to replace.

Israel, its friends and supporters obviously have their work cut out for them ensuring that new laws are not invented or selectively enforced at their expense.  But those who truly believe the emergence of international law to be a positive trend have an even greater obligation to fight the exploitation of this emerging field by ruthless state actors.  For if international law turns out to be just another means by which the powerful and numerous can torture their smaller and less powerful rivals, it will join the League of Nations as an even greater and costlier noble failure.

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