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.