Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Divest This

Showing posts with label Divest This. Show all posts

Monday, February 04, 2019

Big Tent (Divest This!)

A dustup within the organized Jewish community here in Boston helps clarify who genuinely represents “The Big Tent” when it comes to coalition politics.

In many major US cities, Jewish Community Relations Councils (or JCRCs) bring together Jewish communal organizations (some religious, some cultural or political) in coalition. Boston’s JCRC has historically been one of the largest and best-organized institution of this type in the country which means their decisions (which can take a long time to make, given the opinions that need to be balanced) tends to establish precedent followed by other communities.

The Boston JCRC’s “Big Tent” policy has caused controversy in the past, notably when J Street was given membership without formal organization-wide approval after they had “acquired” an existing member organization called Brit Tzedek V’Shalom.

During debates over that earlier controversy, J Street and its allies made the case that – regardless of what you thought of their politics – the organization has positioned itself as an opponent of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel. In a coalition with remarkably few red lines, support for BDS was and still is one of the few things that can get you left outside the “Big Tent.”

Although some organizations have danced close to that red line, none had ever crossed it. At the same time, organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, which exists primarily to support BDS, understand their positions place them outside looking in.

The wisdom of such exclusion was made clear when JVP finally said out loud what anyone paying attention to the group has known for years: that they are an anti-Zionist organization dedicated not to improving the Jewish state or finding peaceful compromises between Israel and her enemies, but to denying to the Jews a right to their own nation.

As JVP’s mission expanded to include the spreading of anti-Semitic canards channeling the nation’s racial tensions towards hostility towards Israel, the wisdom of keeping distance between them and an organization (JCRC) that represents the vast majority of Jewish opinion on the Middle East seems wise indeed. But one group, the Workman’s Circle (a founding JCRC members) decided to take a step over the red line right when JVP’s anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish animus hit high gear by officially signing onto a petition, created by JVP, that condemned the equation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

I’ll leave it to readers to decide if denying Jews rights given without question to hundreds of other peoples, or telling African Americans that the Jewish state is responsible for cops killing their children constitutes “legitimate criticism of Israel.” But JCRC, in a vote of 62-13, decided that the support lent to an anti-Zionist, BDS-supporting organization like JVP was enough to get Workman’s Circle removed from the Council.

In typical Jewish-organization fashion, a vote was only taken after endless discussion and deliberation, including months of direct talks with Workman’s Circle members. But, in the end, the rest of JCRC decided overwhelmingly that anti-Zionism and BDS were positions that others were free to take – but not in the name of the rest of the community.

It is worth comparing the extended discussions, debates, editorials, offers of compromise and, ultimately, democratic voting that led to the anguished choice to ask a member to leave with the behavior of those who criticize JCRC’s decision as an attack on inclusivity.

As I’ve noted before, Jewish Voice for Peace has been very careful to insist that anyone joining its ranks, and certainly anyone who speaks in their name, tow the organization’s political line, especially with regard to support for BDS.

Pulling the lens wider, political coalitions that have formed in the last few years under the banner of “intersectionality” (based on the premise that all oppressed groups have an affinity to one another and should thus work together as a united front) have rapidly developed their own sharp red lines separating oppressed from oppressors, as well as rigid internal hierarchies to determine whose oppression counts most.

Progressive Jews find themselves in a double-bind within such intersectional boundaries and hierarchies, excluded if they show any type of support for Israel (whose role as an oppressor must remain unquestioned), and stuck on the bottom of the oppression hierarchy (as “white Jews”) even if they abandon enough Jewish identity to satisfy intersectional gate keepers.

Do choices of who is in and who is out of an intersectionality club, and who is up and down within them, bear any resemblance to the extended deliberation, search for understanding and compromise, and democratic decision-making you just read about in the story of Boston JCRC’s decision to say goodbye to a member that made the conscious decision to embrace positions rejected by the rest of the community?

Hardly. For these intersec-coalitions are driven by ruthlessness, not be conversation or democratic values. Hostility to the Jewish state has become the hallmark, if not the defining element of “the movement” not because people have agreed to it, but because those who have clawed their way to the top are ready to see the organizations they lead destroyed, rather than allow any opinion that contradicts their world view to be heard, much less gain purchase. The recent implosion of the Woman’s March is just the latest example of this toxic dynamic in action.

So, in one of the many great ironies punctuating history (especially Jewish history), it is the parochial organization trying to carefully and thoughtfully police its boundaries that represents genuine universal values, such as the virtues of negotiation, compromise and democracy, while those who insist they (and they alone) represent progress that behave the most narrowly and tyrannically.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Stunning victories for "DBS" (Divest This!)

In a stunning victory for the Divestment, Boycott and Sanctions (DBS) movement against Apartheid Palestine and its partners in the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) “movement,” a federal judge threw out attempts by anti-Israel partisans to quash sanctions imposed against their illegal and bigoted project by democratically elected legislators across the United States.

US District Judge Brian Miller made it clear that discrimination, whether against blacks, women, LGBTQIA, or those choosing to do business with the world’s only Jewish state, is discrimination – an illegal activity – not protected speech.

Making clear what anyone involved with fighting bigotry directed against any minority group already knows, the judge pointed out that an organization can “call upon others to boycott Israel, write in support of such boycotts, and engage in picketing and pamphleteering to that effect,” but that this did not mean “its decision to refuse to deal, or to refrain from purchasing certain goods, is protected by the First Amendment.”

This victory preceded by just a few days the unprecedented decision by the International Committee for the Paralympics to pull their upcoming qualifying event from Malaysia after that country’s right-wing government refused to allow Israeli Paralympians to participate in the event.

As stated by the organization, the decision “reinforces the IPC’s [International Paralympic Committee’s] commitment to our fundamental moral and ethical principles that encompass inclusivity of all eligible Para athletes and nations to compete at IPC sanctioned events.”

Just two more examples of how your commitment and efforts are leading to more sweeping successes for DBS!

I thought I’d take a break from measured prose to recount a few recent events in the kind of breathless verbiage made famous in BDS press releases that inflates every tiny (or pretend) victory into world-shattering significance.

The irony is that the real victories noted above are each orders of magnitude greater than anything the BDSers have accomplished in the last decade and a half in the category they consider most significant: sanctions.

Consider for a moment the kind of hyperbole and fireworks that would accompany even one state passing anti-Israel divestment or boycott legislation, not matter how trivial. In fact, you don’t have to imagine it since the boycotters have routinely touted “victories” offered by must smaller political entities such as Somerville MA (where they failed) or local government councils (where victories have been, at most, miniscule or fleeting).

Yet in just the last few years, a majority of US states have passed or floated anti-BDS “sanctions” bills which were passed nearly unanimously by democratically elected bodies (vs. the back-room, last-minute deals the BDSers rely on for their “wins”).

Similarly, the international Paralympics Committee didn’t just slap Malaysia on the wrist or find some common ground between their principles and Malaysia’s anti-Semitic policy, but instead refused to allow their event to continue if it was to be marred by anti-Israel bigotry.

Three lessons we can draw from these events and the contrast in coverage of pro- and anti-BDS votes and measures include:

(1) Honest and sensible people still understand the difference between virtuous principles like free speech and the fight against discrimination, and those who engage in bigotry while claiming the mantle of anti-racism

(2) There are ways to present events that make us look defensive (by stressing, for example, our opponent’s free-speech arguments against anti-boycott legislation) vs. casting these same events in terms that put opponents in the dock (by calling them successful sanctions by democratically elected bodies against racists and right-wingers, for example).

(3) That the Israel haters are playing a long game that can absorb these sorts of setbacks, a strategy I’ll discuss more next time…

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Predators and the Women's March (Divest This!)

By now, the rise and decline of the Women’s March – once hailed as the most important mass political movement in a generation – is well documented.

Interestingly, it was a piece of investigative journalism by the online publication Tablet that pulled the thread which began the unraveling. Rumors of anti-Semitism within the national leadership of the March had been a staple of criticism of the organization’s leadership, as were questions regarding how those leaders were dealing with the millions of dollars earned through sponsorship, product sales and donations. But the detailed Tablet story added the names, dates and quotes needed to create a groundswell that couldn’t be swatted away as the work of racist critics by the March’s flawed and corrupt leadership.

I’m guessing most readers are aware of the sponsor withdrawals (some public, some quiet), failed attempts at explanations and apologies, too-weird-too-late shots at adding Jews back into the leadership fold, that led to movement’s main event (a March on Washington) declining precipitously this year. But I’d like to focus on a dynamic that Divest This readers are well aware of: how the infiltration of a high-profile, fast-moving, progressive organization by anti-Israel activists always leads that the host’s corruption and ultimate demise.

I wish I could find the quote where one of the women who began the March talked about how the organization’s openness to new blood and eagerness to include diverse names and faces left them vulnerable to predators. For if you look at the three women who have become the flashpoint of controversy regarding the March, you can see that their agenda was not to move the fight for women’s rights forward, but to channel the momentum created by others towards their own political ends.

Phyllis Chesler highlights how little the agenda of the March has to do with issues specific to women. Women obviously make up half the planet’s population, so a focus on immigration, economic justice (whatever that means), and international affairs is going to impact women as well as men. But the point Chesler is making is that the concept of intersectionality (which links every injustice with every other) is so broad and amorphous that it allows anyone to claim the mantle of feminist leadership regardless of which issues they are actually fighting for.

Similar infiltration of progressive groups by anti-Israel activists is so well documented as to almost be a cliché. When the Occupy Wall Street project popped up a few years ago, one of its most well-known features was lack of leadership and direction. This was intentional, given that Occupy wanted to avoid hierarchy, relying on consensus to decide what would happen next (even if that turned out to never end in a decision).

The Israel haters would have none of this. As usual, their involvement in consensus building involved insisting that any consensus that did not embrace their agenda represented treason to the progressive cause (defined – by them – as an unquestioning embrace of the anti-Israel project). And so an organization that could barely rouse itself from camp somehow managed to march on a single consulate – guess which one – increasing suspicion of the entire project (which eventually made it easier to shut the whole thing down).

Infiltration of other people’s institutions can be seen wherever progressive politics is ascendant, notably college campuses where intersectional coalitions somehow always include support for BDS. BDS champions insist that this is simply a matter of justice, but as I’ve noted before, intersectionality seems to have ended up a one-way street where feminists and gay rights activists (to pick a couple of examples) must embrace an assault on Israel while shutting up about the abominable plight of women and gays everywhere else in the Middle East save Israel.

Why must everyone in a college intersectional coalition – including feminists and gay activists – submit to the will of mostly male, mostly straight BDS leaders far from campus? Because the boycotters are ready to do anything, including destroying any organization they join, in order to get their way.

Within the Women’s March you are seeing a similar drama play out as predators who have taken over a project they did not start seem ready to see it go down in flames rather than free it from enslavement to issues of their choice.

I suppose it is good news that so many women are voting with their feet by abandoning the national organization and either running events of their own or exploring other ways to make womens’ rights a higher priority in the US and around the world. But if any of these other groups find themselves taking off, best they learn a lesson on how to protect any institution they build from those who are ready to join it for the sole purpose of turning it towards different ends.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Hundred Years War (Divest This!)

The term headlining this post refers to a century-long conflict in European history when England and France fought what were really a series of wars over the course of more than a century (from 1337-1453).

The phrase “100 Years’ War” was later applied by historians to cover a period in which the cause of specific flareups varied (succession battles, fights over lands, military ambition and hubris) as two powerful and dynastically entangled European powers battled for dominance, forming distinct national identities as “England” and “France” in the process.

Remind you of anything?

When most people describe the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict (or, as Ruth Wisse prefers, the Arab War Against the Jews), they tend to highlight specific armed conflicts between nation states that broke out in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 (occasionally including the 1982 Lebanon war against the PLO in the mix), with skirmishes and terrorism marking every year between “real wars” involving the armies of nation states.

Over the last two decades, full-scale wars attached to specific years and ongoing small-scale assaults on civilians have been supplemented by organized non-state militaries in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Gaza (Hamas) attacking Israel with missiles and – most recently – attempting at large-scale infiltration through tunneling. Because clashes between the Israeli army and Hezbollah (2006) and Hamas (2008, 2012 and 2014) did not involve wars between states, these fights tend to not be grouped in with 1948, 1967, etc.

Our tendency to use the term “war” to describe certain types of conflicts blurs the reality that the war between Israel and its neighbors should really be seen as another 100 Years’ War, one declared against the Jews decades before Israeli became a reality in which even major wars like 1967 can be seen as battles in a single, large, ongoing conflict.

If you use the term “war” not to describe any event involving people shooting at one another, but reserve it for a specific conflict or set of conflicts designed to accomplish political goals, then wars can only end with the victory of one side over the other or, in some cases, reconciliation between belligerents (often motivated by exhaustion or a new internal or external threat).

When clear victory and defeat is not present, the end of one conflict is better thought of as a cease fire, during which belligerents take a time out to repair damage, heal wounds, and prepare for another go when timing is right. In the case of England v. France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there was very little reason to end the war entirely, given that no victory was ever definitive enough to cause one or the other party to surrender. So it continued generation after generation until civil war in one nation (England) led to new leaders finally calling it quits.

Such unending multi-generational conflict can seem unworldly in a modern age when not squandering resources and lives in warfare confers so many human and material benefits. Who would sacrifice not just themselves but their children, their children’s children and their children’s children’s children in a century of military conflict when ending it would increase prosperity and hope for so many?

But as we have learned over the centuries, the ambition of leaders – especially in unfree societies – tends to trump factors such as the good of citizen/subjects.

And why not? Kings and tyrants tend to be the last ones to lose their fortunes or lives in the wars they instigate – and only when they are defeated. In the case of every war that’s racked the Middle East over the last century (including those that did not involve Israel), how many Middle East kings, military dictators or mullahs fell in battle, or even fell from power after losing the many wars they began? With the possible exception of Saddam Hussein, I’m hard pressed to think of a single tyrant who started a war dying of anything other than a coup or natural causes.

As we learned in the last century, ideology (both secular and religious) can motivate a population to continue a multi-generational conflict. If you think of the Cold War as an actual war, with so-called “wars” like Korea and Vietnam (as well as surrogate superpower conflicts between Israel and the Arab states) serving as battles in that larger conflict, then it was ideology – good and ill – that motivated the parties to fight it out until one of them collapsed.

The reality that we might be in a conflict ready to enter its second century can be both bewildering and disheartening to those of us who can easily see how much suffering would end if Israel’s enemies simply accepted the fact that a non-Arab, non-Muslim polity was destined to continue on a tiny sliver of land in the region.

This dynamic distorts perception, leading to the situation we are in now in which a subset of Israelis, American Jews and non-Jews (and others) are unwilling to believe in the true source of a century-long conflict, instead adopt false “narratives” (such as the war being the result of the Jews not allowing an Arab presence in the land they control) to avoid having the contemplate being at war with societies ready to throw a fourth generation onto the bonfire.

Given all this, the most powerful weapons Israel and her friends can bring to the battlefield are patience and historic understanding, psychological resources ultimately more important than the latest military gadgetry.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

WIXing BDS (Divest This!)

Do As I Say

I recently created a new web site using the Wix platform, a nifty little system that apparently has over 100,000,000 users. Over the years, I’ve used Google Blogger and WordPress to create sites, including different incarnations of Divest This. And while Wix is not as infinitely expandable as WordPress, it was the preferred choice to get a good looking, simple site up and running fast.

Why the product placement? Well Wix is an Israeli company (Booga! Booga! Booga!) and thus should have a place of prominence on the BDS blacklist, given the millions the company brings into the dreaded Zionist entity (far more than other Israeli products, services, concerts et all that the boycotters insist be shunned by the world).

Except it’s not! In fact, it was just a few years ago that a brief dustup occurred once it was pointed out that a Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group at Cornell was using tainted Jewish (I mean Israeli) technology, i.e., WIX, to create their “why we should boycott all things Israeli” web site.

As long-time readers know, I tend to avoid the whole “if you want to boycott Israel, give up your computer/cell phone/Wasserman Test” theme, given that it’s used so much (by those better at presenting it than me), and because the boycotters tend to turn to their preferred tactic (ignoring you) when presented with this argument.

But, for some reason, the BDSers at Cornell took great offense at accusations of hypocrisy that flooded the Twit-o-sphere once they were outed as WIX users (i.e., Israel non-boycotters). And their OUTRAGED response demonstrates the rhetorical atrophying that takes place when you spend time shouting at your opponents, rather than actually debating them.

If you sweep away all the usual accusations of distortion and insincerity directed at critics, and wild (unsubstantiated) claims of growing success of the BDS “movement,” the nut of Cornell SJP’s argument can be summed up in their statement that “BDS is a tactic, not a principle, let alone a call for abstention.”

You might be surprised that I’m actually in sympathy with part of this argument, in that I’ve pointed out for years that BDS is simply a tactic (albeit the Cornell SJP does not explain the Apartheid Strategy propaganda campaign this tactic supports, nor the ultimate goal of the “movement”). And their reference to not being required to be “beautiful souls” was a welcome philosophical reference (even if they used rock lyrics rather than Hegel to explain the concept).

Now I could point out that throwing away every piece of technology that makes use of Israeli components or code requires genuine effort and sacrifice, while selecting one free (non-Israeli) web hosting service vs. WIX does not (implying that the boycotters are too lazy to live by even the simplest application of their alleged principles). But I think this lighter argument (which they actually address) missed a more important point (which they ignore).

As I have pointed out again and again on this site and elsewhere, the BDS goal/strategy/tactic is built around getting their accusations to come out of the mouth of a third party, be it a university, church, municipality, academic organization, food coop or other civic institution. And in order to do this, they must first claim that this university/church/municipality, etc. is already “taking sides” in the Arab-Israeli conflict by investing in companies or selling products somehow tied to the Jewish state (or, as they prefer to put it, “The Occupation”™).

Why kick off a divestment campaign at a college or university? Because the school’s investment portfolio includes stocks on the BDS blacklist (maybe). Why target this or that food coop? Because they sell Sabra Hummus or Israeli ice cream cones. Why protest in front of some hardware store in San Francisco or Cambridge? Because they sell SodaStream drink dispensers.

Now in each and every case, the BDSers have detailed explanations as to why these particular stocks or those particular products are the target of their ire. And, even when they don’t, they are ready to make up new excuses when the situation requires it.

But this brings up the question of why are they the only ones who get to choose which use of Israeli anything is evil vs. non-evil? After all, if a store selling hummus made in New Jersey is fair game in their battle against “Apartheid Israel,” why should use of a web hosting service that brings millions of dollars in investment into the Israeli economy (and thus the tax base of the state they so loath) be similarly sinful?

Indeed, the BDSers have given themselves license to create mayhem in community after community based on links to Israel far more tenuous than their own use of WIX. If they are so ready to declare themselves innocent, how can they then turn around and declare everyone else guilty unless they do what the boycotters say is their only moral choice?

This gets back to the claim of BDS as a tactic. For this tactic is designed to allow the BDSers to speak in someone else’s name, no matter what the cost to that someone else. And the basis for their demand that every civic organization they target give into their demands is the choices those organizations make regarding where to invest or what to buy and sell. But as the Cornell SJP informed us, involving yourself with the Israeli economy is perfectly OK/innocent/unavoidable – as long as you’re them, and not the people they have chosen to torment for their own political gain.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Changing Your Mind (Divest This!)

I’ve become a big fan of Jonathan Haidt, co-author of the best-selling Coddling of the American Mind and a social-science researcher committed to bringing political balance and reasoned discourse back into academia and everyday political life.

Haidt is a scholar who practices what he preaches, including one of the key virtues of a truly free and independent thinker: the ability to say “I’ve changed my mind,” especially about something he once believed deeply.

In Haidt’s case, he revised his thinking about the role intuition plays in human reasoning between his first best-selling book (The Happiness Hypothesis) and one I just finished reading (The Righteous Mind).

Given that Happiness Hypothesis put Haidt on the map as a public intellectual, I can only imagine what it took to put into print an admission that that book contained a thesis the author no longer buys. But the ability to both change your mind and admit you have done so has strategic as well as intellectual benefits.

For instance, when I first got into the fight against BDS, I repeatedly argued against turning to authority figures (such as lawmakers, courts or college administrators) to deal with demonization/delegitimization campaigns targeting the Jewish state.

This stance was based on the fact that, back then, BDS was largely taking place within civic organizations, such as colleges and universities, churches, municipalities and food coops, with anti-Israel activism driven by small groups of insurgents within individual institutions. Since the majority of members of these institutions were either hostile or indifferent to the boycotters’ political agenda, the best strategy was to help that majority organize and find its voice so it could effectively beat back BDS (which they did again and again over the course of more than a decade).

Yes, the Israel haters are relentless which meant they kept coming back those organizations again and again to demand a revote, refusing to take “no” for an answer. But such behavior meant that, by the time a handful student governments or church votes started going the BDSers way, the public had internalized how unrepresentative or corrupt such votes were, which meant the boycotters either lost or – at worst – acquired tainted victories no one took seriously.

Given how effective grassroots politics was at turning back BDS, I saw turning to authorities as a less effective and riskier short-circuiting of more effective, democratic processes. But as the fight moved from these small communities to large and powerful institutions, such as the United Nations, I’ve had to revise my thinking regarding the best course of action to take in response new forms of the BDS threat.

As most readers know, the UN’s Orwellian Human Rights Commission is preparing a blacklist of companies doing business in Israel, the publication of which will put pressure on those companies to sever ties with the Jewish state. Given that this blacklist effort is driven by wealthy and powerful states that dominate the UN and have subverted it to their will, local activists have no way to influence what happens in the halls of that body.

Understanding this reality, the most effective counter-measure to a UN blacklist is the anti-BDS legislation passed or on the way to being passed in most US states and the federal government. If one ignores partisan hyperbole regarding such legislation, these laws simply update rules that have been in place since the 1970s that make it illegal for US companies to participate in the Arab Boycott that goes back to the 1920s now that those same boycotters have hijacked the United Nations to give this age-old form of partisan warfare a veneer of global legitimacy.

Once anti-boycott laws are passed, companies (especially those more concerned with the large Arab market vs. the small Israeli one) considering participating in a UN-led boycott will have another factor to take into account: the impact such a choice will have on their relationship with the large US market. We’ve already seen what happened to one corporation (AirBnB) that thought it would face no consequences for joining the latest version of the Arab boycott. Given that companies are generally conservative, turning to US state and national legislators to add a counter-weight to the UN blacklist is not just a last resort, but our best choice.

In science, there is a principle which says you should try to understand a problem in terms of the right level of scale. For example, while the weather can be studied at the atomic level, there is more insight to be gained by studying the subject at a macro vs micro scale.

Similarly, grassroots fights are still the way to go when the battle is taking place at a local food store or student government. But when powerful forces are arrayed against you, it is best to marshal equally powerful forces to counter them.

Sticking with an old formula when new situations require new tactics tends to lead to calcification and failure. This is why I have changed my mind about enrolling authority figures in our fight, but only in situations where that option makes the most strategic sense.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Getting a chance to respond to anti-Israel accusations (Divest This!)

I had an interesting experience recently that gave me direct exposure to many of the dynamics you’ve read about on this site regarding the behavior of anti-Israel activists on college campuses and the reaction they generate.

Without naming names or places, I was asked to present “the other side” at a college-level class in response to a student’s previous two-day class-time harangue directed against the Jewish state.

Apparently, students in this psych class were given the opportunity to lead class discussion on one of the themes of the course, which gave one person the opportunity to present on “discrimination” with you-know-who presented as the Apartheid-level discriminator (with intersectionality-laden accusations against the US thrown in for good measure). Since the teacher was out at a conference for the period this student presented, as well as the following class, this gave our local advocate the chance to spend two days inveighing against Israel.

The experience was disconcerting enough for one student that she reached out for help and advice and, long-and-short, this led to me coming to class to present an alternative point of view.

Presenting “the other side” implies that responding to someone else’s allegations was what was expected, although an alternative would have been to spend the class period telling the truth about Israel’s enemies as aggressively as the original presenter shared her lies. But taking into account the audience (in this case, older undergrads and graduate students at a prestigious university), I thought it better to actually provide them a lesson in social psychology with the war against Israel used as an example of toxic behavior that can infect entire societies (including Israel’s enemies).

Now I did include a number of important truths in the discussion, including humanizing both sides in the conflict while also pointing out facts that confound “the narrative,” such as the Palestinian alliance with Hitler in World War II, the support the British Empire provided Israel’s foes – including splitting Jordan off from “Palestine” and leading Jordanian troops in 1948 – and the expulsion of Jews from the Arab world. Each one of these facts was unknown to the students in the room, which allowed me to challenge the credibility of the original presenter without attacking anyone directly.

Such behavior was not a two-way street, however. For almost from the start the student who had been given the floor previously began to insert more of her accusations into the discussion, in the form of “innocent” questions. But when I responded sternly, but politely, that such questions could wait until the end of my talk (the same rules she insisted on when she had the floor) and did not let her dominate Q&A at the expense of her classmates, she resorted to the old fallback of getting upset and breaking into tears over the fact that any side other than hers was allowed in her presence.

This tactic is called “Argumentation from Outrage” and is an old staple of BDS “dialog,” although in this age of “coddling,” it has been used to increasing effect to shut down debate through what has been termed “crybullying.”

One thing that became apparently pretty quickly is how discombobulated Israel’s accusers become when they don’t have complete control of the microphone. It may just be that this particular person was not an effective partisan, at least with regard to challenging someone who knew what they were talking about and was ready to stand his ground. But it may also represent the sort of atrophying of argumentation skill among those who insist that no dialog can take place with anyone not ready to agree with everything they say in advance.

Did my presentation sway anyone? Hard to tell. While I was surprised how little these older college students knew about the Middle East beyond what they were told in this class, I remembered someone once pointing out how little many pro-Israel advocates know about other hotspots (how much do you really know about the situation in Burma, for example?), which suggested we should approach educating others on topics of importance to us with humility.

I’d like to think that exposure to truth presented respectfully, coupled with watching the rude behavior of a classmate who fell apart when she could not dominate the discussion to spread her false narratives got them thinking that maybe the world was not as black and white as they’d been told.

Time will tell…

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Personal Boycotts (Divest This!)

During a decade and a half of helping fight the BDS “movement,” I’ve been asked many times if I have ever personally boycotted any person, institution or product for political reasons. Looking back, I can’t think of a single instance when I practiced or participated in any boycott of any kind.

Previous to my battles with anti-Israel boycotters, it actually never occurred to me to make boycotting part of my political life. But once I saw how the boycott weapon was being misused as a bludgeon to attack Israel, it definitely became a personal decision to avoid using that weapon myself, despite many understandable requests to do so in hope of taking the fight to Israel’s foes.

The choice not to fight fire with my own boycotts directed at Israel’s enemies is definitely a personal one, and not the only reasonable option. For example, many years ago a commenter left a story about his decision to boycott Arab shops in Jerusalem as a statement against BDS targeting Israel. And while he and I (or he and anyone else) are free to agree or disagree with that decision, it must be pointed out that his decision was personal and thus profoundly different than the choices BDS is asking others to make.

That’s because this person chose to deprive himself of the goods he might have bought at the prices he might have received. He also chose to announce clearly that he made the economic decision he did for political reasons. Finally, he was willing to accept the consequences of the choice he’s made. Those consequences might be good (word getting out that boycotts go both ways) or bad (increased hostility between Israeli Arabs and Jews). They can also be internal (from feelings of satisfaction to discomfort regarding the targets he chose for his boycott action). But they are consequences that he was prepared to bear.

Contrast that with the BDS “movement” that is all about getting other people to choose boycott and divestment and (although rarely mentioned by BDS advocates) bear the consequences.

Think about it. If a college’s branch of Students for Justice in Palestine sent out a press release saying that their members were divesting from Israel, that announcement would, at best, lead to a blog entry asking what they were divestment beyond their allowances. But if they can claim their school has joined some perceived divestment bandwagon, well now that’s news. Which is why they’ve worked so hard to get the school to do so and, when failing to succeed, worked even harder to get others to join them in pretending that it did.

In terms of consequences, BDS leaves that to others as well. If their activity rubs ethnic and religious tension raw or puts intuitions in legal jeopardy, what do they care? All they want is the “brand” of a well-known organizations associated with their squalid little political program. And if a community is turned into a war zone or a company or other organization gets sued over the position the boycotters manipulated or bullied them to take, it’s the institution (not the BDSers) who have to deal with the wreckage.

Considering the pose the divestment cru routinely strikes with regard to their supposed courage and boldness, just once I’d like to see them put anything of their own on the line. I recall a film where a father blasted some young people for playing at Third World radicalism with the statement “poverty is fine if you’ve got a return-trip ticket.” But if I were to craft a similar message for BDS it would be “boycotting is easy, so long as it’s others that pay the price.”

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

BDS NewsBytes (Divest This!)

BDS Newsbytes

Another BDSer Runs Amok

By now, many of you have probably seen this video of a “prominent” ~~human-right~~ BDS activist Simone O’Broin going nuts on an Air India flight when the flight attendants refused to give her more alcohol than the huge amount she had already clearly consumed.

Her tirade, including expletives and racial slurs directed at those denying her booze, was also wrapped in a drunken version of the sort of self-righteous outrage O’Broin and her ilk tend to serve up to anyone who challenges their demand to be given the moral high ground immediately and unconditionally.

This is just the latest example of boycotter misbehavior we have seen in recent years. Just a couple of years ago, for example, Husam El-Qoulaq (who played a central role in organizing student government divestment votes as an undergraduate) won Internet fame as the Harvard Law School student who told Israeli political leader Tzipi Livni that she smelled. Despite best efforts by El-Qoulaq and the school to erase this misbehavior from personal and public records, and best efforts by apologists to put his infantile comments “into context,” El-Qoulaq now stands alongside O’Broin as exemplars of what is really going on in the mind of the BDSer.

Keep that in mind the next time they try to feign reasonableness before an audience they are trying to sucker.

AirBnB

Speaking of suckers, the decision by the online travel firm AirBnB to delist properties in the disputed territories (but only the ones owned by Jews) can be seen as the latest attempt by political activists to go around the political process by targeting the Internet firms that control access to goods, services, news and interpersonal communication.

Given how much time I and others have spent debunking BDS hoaxes, it is in our interest to admin when the BDSers score a rare win, if only as a point of contrast. But it should also be acknowledged that this win, which came at the end of a two-year bullying campaign supported by wealthy and high-profile organizations like the increasingly contaminated Human Rights Watch, ended not with the crippling of the Jewish state’s economy but rather with a few dozen houses no longer being included in one of many online travel sites.

This story can also be seen in light of the traditional BDS tactic of demanding someone else take action with no concern for the consequences that someone else will have to bear. Already, AirBnB has faced stiff criticism for their hypocrisy, given how many human rights abusers – including genuine occupiers of other people’s territory – they continue to include in their listings. The inevitable lawsuits are beginning to kick in, and it’s just a matter of time before the company is asked to explain why their decision should not trigger action by the many, many US states that have anti-boycott legislation on the books.

As those consequences gel, I suspect that the many compliments AirBnB received for caving to BDS pressure will not translate to a scintilla of support for a company that must now bear the brunt of a choice forced on them by others. Freiers.

University of Leeds

Having just mentioned a BDS win, it’s worth noting that the boycotters are still trying to pull fast ones on the public when they announce their latest “victory” on a BDS web sites or in some breathless press releases.

Most recently, we’ve seen the Hampshire Strategy play out in the UK where the decision by the University of Leeds to change its investment strategy based on issues related to climate change was transformed into their joining the BDS “movement.”

How did this come about? Well, as at Hampshire, Leeds has been targeted for years by anti-Israel activists demanding investments in several large and prominent companies pulled from the school’s portfolio. And, like every other similarly targeted university on the planet, they have refused to do so. But given the scale and diversity activity of their portfolio, it was just a matter of time before some of those investments got moved in and out, either for purely financial reasons (like the stock not doing well) or for political reasons having nothing to do with the Middle East.

As I’ve noted before, divestment is a political act which means taking a financial step without announcing publicly that you are doing so for a clearly stated reason means political divestment has not occurred. In the case of Leeds, as at Hampshire, the school has actually stated explicitly that they did not do what the BDSers say they did, making it even more clear that divestment has not occurred.

Given that Hampshire is still trotted out as a BDS “win” nearly ten years after this ur-BDS hoax was exposed, don’t expect Leeds to get dropped from Omar Barghouti’s slide deck anytime soon.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Coddling of the American Mind – Part 2 (Divest This!)

As I mentioned at the end of the first part of this review of Lukianoff and Haidt’s 2018 Coddling of the American Mind, the book does not specifically deal with the how the conflict over Israel is playing out on campuses, apart from some examples of pro-Israel speakers being disrupted at talks given at certain colleges.

While their choice to provide a general analysis, rather than diving into one particular controversial issue, is perfectly reasonable, I suspect the role anti-Israel forces have played on campus over the last few decades helped catalyze what we’re now seeing in many places today.

New forms of behavior rarely spring from nothing, nor are they the result of careful analysis then translated into action. Rather, they tend to rely on precedent. For when someone behaves in ways no one else would have ever considered previously, that makes something once unthinkable thinkable. It is only after people start doing things that criticisms as well as justifications of what they are doing get formed, leading to misbehavior either getting shunned or establishing new norms.

Precedent can provide an explanation for many phenomena, such as mass shootings like the horror show in Pittsburg last month. If places like schools, synagogues and other places of worship have been outgunned since the invention of the gun, where did the idea of shooting up lots of innocents in such places originate? This response provides some potential answers based on individual psychology and societal change. But another factor is that it only became possible for an unstable individual to consider opening fire on a schoolyard when someone else had already set the precedent.

If you look across the increasingly radicalized campus landscape, featuring intersectional mobs making demands on administrators, faculty and fellow students based on allegations of systematic racism and other crimes, an eerie familiarity kicks in the more attention you have been paying to how the assault on Israel has proceeded on campuses over the last several decades.

The aggressiveness of the campus campaigns covered in Coddling is one source of such déjà vu. I’ve lost count of the number of incidents of violence that accompanied pro-Israel events, especially during the era of BDS. Where did this form of behavior spring from? At some point (maybe Michael Oren at UC Irvine), a group of anti-Israel activists got it into their heads to try a new innovative tactic of shouting down a speaker they didn’t want anyone else to hear.

Once that precedent was set, justification followed in the form of claims that the protestors were simply taking advantage of their free speech rights, ignoring the fact that those “rights” were being used entirely to shut down the free speech of everyone else. When those responsible for preventing such travesties decided to sit out making hard choices (i.e., when school administrators soft peddled responses to the behavior of SJP and similar groups), a precedent was fully established that said disrupting others through tactics that dance right at (and occasionally over) the line of criminality was justified and would go unpunished.

Today, the mobs are falling on many more than Jews and non-Jewish supporters of Israel. But if precedent had not been set beforehand it is not clear where they might have gotten the idea to do so.

The language, and psychology behind the language, used to explain modern radical politics also owes a debt to the Palestiniaization of campus political discourse.

To begin with, there is the unwillingness to entertain (or even listen to) any fact or opinion that falls afoul of “the narrative.” This reaches extremes in anti-Israel politics, up to and including the need to invent pretend phenomena (like Pinkwashing) to avoid and prevent any thought about the chasm between Israel and her foes regarding treatment of homosexuals. But whole swarths of history, countless demonstrable facts and one of history’s most enormous paper trails detailing Palestinian responsibility for their own fate must also be dumped down the memory hole, or buried beneath mountains of propaganda (some of it written by PhDs) that says black is white, and anyone who disagrees is a bigot.

Does America have a lot to answer for regarding it racist pass? You bet it does. But is racism and white supremacy more prevalent today than ever before? There are fact of the matter and arguments to be made that could be brought in to answer that question. But those touting the narrative underlying today’s campus protests are unable to listen to facts or engage in arguments that conflict with their beliefs, and are ready to stop anyone else from doing so.

Then there is our old friend ruthlessness that needs to be brought into the equation. When the concept of intersectionality (which says all oppressed people are fighting a common struggle and thus should unite) first came on the scene, questions came up regarding who gets to join the struggle (can Jews who support Israel partake, for example?) and what standards will be used to determine a hierarchy of more vs. less oppressed groups.

Today’s campus coalitions provide answers to those questions by establishing which oppressed people and issues can and cannot be discussed. As I’ve noted a number of times before, feminist groups joining such coalitions must fully embrace the Palestinian cause, while the treatment of women throughout the Middle East (including “Palestine”) seems to be permanently off the table.

In discourse I once heard used about the topic of intersectional priorities, the phenomena I just described was boiled down to “Palestine trumps woman,” an especially ironic twist, given that the ruthless actors from SJP and elsewhere who women activists must submit to are mostly men.

I was completely convinced that the psychological and social phenomena Lukianoff and Haidt describe in Coddling are real, and the mechanism they lay out to describe changes they observed is compelling. But remember that there are always ruthless actors ready to take advantage of developing trends, including unhealthy ones, to magnify their own power.

The Palestine Uber Alles cru has managed to establish themselves as the arbiters of what constitutes true belief within this new order, and they have every reason to want damaging trends to continue and spread, regardless of the cost to the rest of the world.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.