I’m guessing that many people reading this are dedicated
activists with experience battling Israel haters in the endless physical and
virtual communities where those battles take place.
People who do Jewish or pro-Israel politics for a living
tend to refer to ground-level activists like many of us as “the grassroots,”
indicating a separate source of people, resources, strength, wisdom, pressure,
or criticism they need to take into consideration as they make their own
decisions about which battles to fight.
Historically, these two groups (professionals and the
grassroots) spend a great deal of time analyzing or second-guessing each
other’s priorities. But as a couple of
news stories over the last few weeks point out, as much as all of us want to
think otherwise, there are people in positions of power who get to make the
decisions that ultimately set our activist agendas.
For example, the only people who got to decide that the
United Nations would put dozens of international companies on a blacklist for
doing business in territories disputed between Israel and Palestinian Arabs were
the leaders of nation states who dominate that organization’s Orwellian “Human
Rights Council.”
Given that the countries driving this decision are
dictatorships at war with the democracy they want destroyed, there was little
outnumbered democracies like the United States and Israel could do to prevent
the blacklist from happening. And so,
once again, our activist agenda was driven by actors well beyond our control.
Now once such an agenda has been triggered, there are things
we can do about it. For instance, the
raft of anti-BDS legislation at the state level in the US gave friends of
Israel the opportunity to show what they think of the BDS “movement.” But meaningful and substantial changes to
federal anti-boycott regulations passed in the 1970s was required to deal
specifically with non-government organizations like the UN stepping into a boycott
space previously occupied by the nation states behind the original Arab boycott
of Israel.
As this dynamic plays out, the role for we activists is to
frame such legislation as (1) an example of sanctions (the holy grail of the
BDS movement) being applied to the boycotters and not to Israel; and (2) a
direct response to UN misbehavior (thus assigning responsibility for new US law
where it belongs: to the UNHCR).
A second story-in-the-making will demonstrate what can be
accomplished when an activist makes the transition to powerful decision-maker. I’m speaking, of course, about Kenneth
Marcus, one of the most successful and well-known legal activists on behalf of
Jewish rights, being named to the senior civil rights post within the US
Department of Education.
If you wanted to prioritize dealing with the harassment Jews
and pro-Israel supporters face on campus, there is no more effective path for
action than to put into a position of power a thoughtful and strategic thinker like
Marcus who is ready to give Jewish students the same civil rights consideration
given automatically to every other minority group.
For years we’ve seen college administrators ignore
complaints by Jewish students who have seen their events shut down and members
harassed, at the same time those administrators take long lists of demands by
mobs representing other minority groups with the utmost seriousness. Such sheepish leaders tend to select who to
ignore and who to focus on based on how much damage the complainers can
cause. And with someone finely attuned
to this issue deciding who gets sued for discrimination, expect attitudes of
those administrators to change sharply and quickly.
In the final analysis, every war, every terror attack, every
boycott motion or propaganda campaign directed at the Jewish state has the same
origin: the dozens of wealthy and powerful states who have decided to bring
their war with Israel to every forum on the planet.
As the conflagration that is the Middle East makes clear,
such political cynicism can be lethal to those who practice it. Which means the best way we protect against
these toxins is to do whatever we can to help create and support an Israel that
is militarily powerful, economically vibrant and allied with nations not coming
apart at the seams.
In short, we must make up in quality what we lack in
quantity (once again).