Monday, January 23, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
Before going on hiatus, I published an extended essay called
Like Romans that looks at the fight
against BDS (and pro-Israel activism generally) through the lens of warfare.
The starting point for that work was not academic analysis
based on abstract principles. Rather, I
tried to connect dots between the results of work done by heroic on-the-ground
activists who have been experimenting with different ways to defeat the
propaganda campaign traveling under the banner of Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions. And few experiments have been
as successful (and thus as informative) as the recent defeat of academic
boycott resolutions at the Modern
Language Association (MLA).
As most readers probably know, academic associations have
become a battleground for BDS activity, ever since the American Studies
Association (ASA) became the largest academic group to pass a resolution
calling for a boycott of their Israeli counterparts. Some very tiny associations (including those
representing Asian-American, Women’s and Native American studies) have passed
similar resolutions before and since.
But their victory with ASA gave BDS activists the belief that it was
just a matter of time before their program swept through large swaths of the
academy.
Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for us – as well as
for academia in general) all efforts to drag fields like history, anthropology,
and even Middle East studies into the BDS swamp have failed. But the large (25,000-member) Modern Language
Association, professional home to professors of language and literature, has
been the boycotter’s coveted prize for years.
The strategy the BDSers pursue within academic associations
is a variation on what they do everywhere else (a playbook outlined in Chapter 9
of Like Romans): take over the
decision-making machinery of an association, propose anti-Israel resolutions
before the wider membership knows what’s going on, restrict communication so
that only supporters of a boycott get access to members, and do everything possible
to rig a vote so that the barest majority of a minority can pass something that
can then be passed off as the will of the organization (if not the entire discipline).
And if the boycotters fail, then it’s try try again as the
same resolutions (possibly with superficial variations) are proposed year after
year until members finally do what they’re told.
While there are a number of strategies and tactics one can
choose when dealing with an enemy that outnumbers your own forces (as was the
case at MLA), it is generally impossible to defeat a foe if you’ve got nothing
on the ground. Fortunately, years of
battling BDS within MLA (and academic associations generally) provided a small
but highly skilled force (which travels under the banner MLA Members for Scholar’s Rights)
which managed to not just defeat this year’s proto-boycott resolutions, but get
an anti-boycott resolution passed in
its place.
The number of things this group did right began with the
nature of the group itself. Members were
internal to the organization (which gave them credibility and deep
understanding of MLA’s culture), and having battled the BDS plague within
academia for many years, they were skilled veterans able to
leverage previous experience and contacts.
Their background knowledge included understanding their own
strengths (the aforementioned credibility and experience) and weaknesses (like
limited influence over the administrative machinery of MLA), as well as those
of their enemies (such as fanaticism, predictability and a tendency towards
overreach). Most importantly, they
understood the field of battle: an academic association where the majority of
members don’t have strong opinions about the Middle East (even if the general
zeitgeist of the academy might go against Israel), but who do care about
scholarship and the reputation of the humanities in the wider culture.
With this understanding in place, their communication
strategy focused on the appalling
lack of scholarship represented by pro-BDS “research,” and the impact an
academic boycott vote would have not on Israel, but on MLA, the fields of
humanities, and the academy as a whole.
Thus they were able to avoid getting dragged into a debate on the Middle
East (the BDSers preferred terrain), and make the vote a referendum on MLA’s
own scholarly reputation.
Clever tactics also allowed the group to use their minority
position to advantage, finding alternative mechanisms to communicate with MLA
members that avoided going through leaders who had already proven themselves to
be dishonest brokers. They were then
able to use their need to find these alternative communication channels to
illustrate those leaders’ lack of integrity, while fitting themselves into a
storyline of rebels speaking truth to power.
Finally, the choice to propose both an anti-boycott resolution
and a second resolution condemning Palestinians for violating academic rights meant
that voting against boycotts generally became the middle-of-the-road (usually
preferred) position. While there were
some complaints when the proposal condemning the Palestinian Authority and
Hamas was withdrawn after the anti-boycott measure won, in terms of tactics
that second proposal was serving as a feint,
withdrawal of which positioned anti-boycott activists as both moderate and
magnanimous.
Not every anti-BDS effort has the fortune (and misfortune)
of fighting a fight you know is coming years in advance against a foe whose
tactics (and personnel) are well known and understood. But any individual or group can learn lessons
from the experience of other civic organizations fighting the same fight
against the BDS propaganda war against Israel.
Like names, faces and personalities; strategies and tactics will be
different from situation to situation.
But there are common elements to fighting a war, the first of which is
to recognize you are in one.
