I recently encountered the term titling this piece in the
comments section of an
article about how an organization become politicized when leaders of the
group started taking stands on controversial matters. When some members protested, these same
leaders recruited enough like-minded new members to confirm their authority
over the organization.
The term “entryism,”
which describes such institutional takeovers, originated in the early 20th
century to describe Communist partisans trying to get a foothold, and
eventually take control of, labor organizations or political parties that were
left leaning but did not subscribe to this or that flavor of Marxism.
While past labor groups and left-but-not-Marxist parties historically
found the means and backbone to kick out those who had join with ulterior
motives (the most notable example being the expulsion of the Trotskyite Militant
Tendency from the UK’s Labour Party in the 1980s), the end of global Communism
did not spell an end to entryism. In
fact, the democratic spirit reignited with the fall of the Soviet Union had the
ironic effect of bringing a tactic once embraced by only a small conspiratorial
fringe into the mainstream.
One could actually look at the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) “movement,” if not the entire anti-Israel project, as entryism turned
up to eleven, dwarfing any version that has come before in both its scale and
success.
When student governments rejected divestment measures
earlier this decade, proponents of those measures simply ran for office with
the sole purpose of turning those “No’s” into “Yes’s”. On the surface, this might seem like a
democratically elected majority doing what it was elected to do, but in many of
these elections pro-BDS candidates deliberately hid their divestment priorities
during their campaigns for office, meaning their real goal for obtaining
student council seats was hidden from voters.
In other words, they successfully took advantage of a political
situation (in this case, student council elections with very low voter turnout)
to practice a bit of entryism.
The way BDS has played out in other communities, such as
churches and academic associations, has followed a similar entryist pattern,
with members who are anti-Israel activists first, Presbyterians or American
Studies professors second, taking leadership positions and forcing the
organization to take stands that reflect their preferred views, the spiritual
or professional needs of the organization be damned. And
when internal protests against those decisions erupted, steps were taken to
limit the number of voices who could participate in discussions of those choices,
or new members were found to shore up the power base of anti-Israel voices in
charge.
Entities not bound by democratic politics have been even
more ripe for entriest-style infiltration.
For example, the descent of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
ostensibly dedicated to human rights into Israel-hating madness reflects a pattern
in which every organization from Human Rights Watch to the United Nations, has
been targeted for successful takeover by anti-Israel forces, dramatically
limiting their ability to engage in genuine human rights practice anywhere in
the world.
With regard to NGOs, problems of entryism can be seen in the
category as a whole as hundreds of freshly minted anti-Israel “human rights”
groups have formed (or been created, with financial support from the world’s
great human rights abusers) creating a “community” in which horrific displays
of anti-Jewish animus (like the 2001
Durban conference where BDS was born) became the sea in which once noble and
effective groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International must swim.
Unfortunately, our side lacks the ability to meet fire with
fire. There are not, after all, 50
Jewish states able to exert control over bodies like the UN or finance the
creation of hundreds of NGOs dedicated to smearing our enemies. We also lack what is needed to turn the
entire human rights project into a weapon to be pointed exclusively as our
enemies. But this might be a source of
strength for our side, rather than weakness.
This is because the tendency of entryism to cripple an
organization can impact even the organizations practicing entryism against
others. The most illustrative example of
this is the Palestinian
Solidarity Movement (PSM), a group that led divestment efforts in the early
2010s. Because their efforts earned them
such a high profile, they became a target for takeover by every political and
religious faction involved with left-leaning and Middle East politics. After years of fending off such hostile
takeovers, they eventually shut their doors, unable to both do their work and
keep entriest forces at bay.
It would represent justice if other groups like Students for
Justice in Palestine (SJP) met a similar fate.
But it would be even more preferable if today’s progressive organizations
found the spine their progenitors exhibited when they kept infiltration by
yesterday’s enemies of freedom and democracy at bay.