It recently dawned on me that those behind the aptly named BDS
“movement” must have gotten their hands on that computer Wile E Coyote used in To Hare is Human.
Fellow Bugs Bunny fans will remember that episode as the one
in which the aforementioned villain decides to supplement his “super genius”
with a build-it-yourself, cave-sized, UNIVAC electronic brain, complete with my
favorite cartoon interface of all time: a mammoth keyboard in which each key
features one word in the English language (including contractions), allowing
him to give commands such as:
ROCK + FALLING +
WHAT’LL + I + DO?
Given the consequences of following the machine’s
suggestions, it occurred to me that our buddies in BDS-land might be falling
victim to the same technology.
For example, they could have typed the following command
into UNIVAC earlier this month to hatch their latest self-detonating scheme:
NEW + ORLEANS + CITY
+ COUNCIL + TRICK + INTO + SUPPORT + BDS
One would think that the failure of the BDSers to gin up any
enthusiasm for municipal divestment since Somerville
kicked them down the stairs in 2004 might have sent them the message that
cities and towns are not interested in participating in their poisonous,
propaganda project. But perhaps this
long drought just gave the boycotters time to let a new generation of
representatives come to power with no memory of the tricks that had been played
on municipal leaders over a decade ago.
The BDS playbook has been put into practice so often and so
routinely that I was recently able to boil it down to a simple set of endlessly repeated
steps, but the New Orleans version can be summed up as: (1) find a
progressive organization concerned over, but not hugely informed about,
international affairs; (2) ask the group to pass a generic divestment proposal
that claims to support general human rights, without mentioning BDS (or even
Israel) specifically; and (3) once said generic proposal passes, take to the
airwaves declaring that the institution is now fully aboard the BDS “Israel =
Apartheid” bandwagon.
This is exactly what happened in New
Orleans in early January and, as with similar debates in the past, local
leaders who had been duped were not amused that anti-Israel activists were
blanketing the world with anti-Israel propaganda, claiming support of city
leaders. So, within days of being
passed, New Orleans’ divestment declaration was rescinded – leaving the
boycotters with soot-covered punims as their latest self-made roadrunner trap
detonated in their collective face.
Or how about Ohio State University, a school where
divestment has been rejected by both student government and the student body in
the past?
But by plugging the following into UNIVAC, a new scheme
emerged:
GET + STUDENT +
GOVERNMENT + TO + PASS + ANYTHING + REMOTELY + RESEMBLING + BDS + AND + DECLARE
+ VICTORY
You may have seen dueling stories regarding the latest vote
at Ohio State, one which claims
victory for BDS the other declaring that anti-Israel divestment was defeated. The reason for this confusion is that the
boycotters agreed to a measure that said nothing specific about Israel; leaving
them to peddle the generic human rights initiative they had just helped to pass
as actually a successful BDS vote they knew had never taken place.
But if the boycotters are free to spin this non-BDS vote as
a victory for them, what is to prevent someone else from spinning it as the
boycotters’ latest humiliating defeat?
In fact, what’s to prevent anyone from declaring that the vote was
really Students for Justice in Palestine finally showing concern for
non-Palestinian human rights, including the rights of those suffering under the
racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary dictatorships that represent every
government in the Middle East, save Israel?
After all, if they can pretend a vote means whatever they want it to
mean, why can’t the rest of us?
In general, I am in agreement with Ben
Cohen that defeat of BDS is best left to folks at ground level, rather than
making humiliating the boycotters a priority for national governments. And if it turns out they are falling prey to
the same mischievous “one working part” that powered Wile E.’s UNIVAC
electronic brain, why should we stand in the way of their racking up the next
set of self-inflicted fiascos?