Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Divest This

Showing posts with label Divest This. Show all posts

Monday, May 13, 2019

Entryism and NGOs (Divest This!)

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 20^th 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.

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"Israel Studies" and fighting words (Divest This!)

If you want to see an example of what “fighting back” looks like in the rarified environment of academia, check out the latest edition Israel Studies, a journal published by Indiana University Press.

Actually, you’ll only be able to look at the whole thing if you have access to JSTOR, the online source for major academic journals and articles, or can find a print copy at a university library (although you can look at the first and last essay in the volume with a couple of extra mouse clicks). But even this glimpse sets the stage for long-overdue analysis of the corrupt language that has infested Middle East studies and now threatens to take down other disciplines.

As regular readers know, Israel’s enemies have not just twisted the language of history, scholarship and human rights towards their own political ends, but have so monopolized discourse that any attempt to take back the language (by claiming that words like “genocide” and “occupation” have actual meaning, beyond their selective use to slur a single state) is met by hysterical resistance.
I’ve seen this on a small scale whenever I have used the word “settlement” to apply to both Jewish and Arab communities in Israel or the disputed territories (or simply used the word “disputed” – rather than “occupied” to describe Judea & Samaria/The West Bank). Invariably the response is either aggression (usually involving shouts of “racism” for not handing an opponent control of the vocabulary immediately and unconditionally) or avoidance (i.e., my “debating partner” fleeing to find someone uninformed to propagandize).

Given this auto-response by those who live by BDSthink, one can only imagine the response to the latest issue of Israel Studies where credentialed scholars subject each and every one of the boycotter’s favorite terms (“colonialism,” “apartheid,” “the Israel Lobby”) to honest analysis fueled by sound scholarship.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine since the response to publication of that journal was as immediate as it was predictable.

Within days of the Word Crimes issue of Israel Studies hitting the streets, dozens of professors petitioned the organization sponsoring the journal to denounce and withdraw it, calling it a political propaganda exercise not worthy to be treated as genuine scholarship. This from “scholars” who have spent decades publishing the most outlandish fabrications and gobbdygook about the Middle East, awarding honors and prizes to whoever can make the most absurd accusations against the Jewish state, usually based not on fact but on post-modern claptrap.

Some of the most hilarious accusations came from academics “concerned” over the areas of expertise of by some contributors to the Word Crimes journal. Again, this is coming from groups ready to welcome academic birthday clowns like Stephen Salaita into the fold of Middle East studies solely based on his embrace of the anti-Israel narrative.

Fortunately, those behind Word Crimes are standing their ground, labeling their opponents as academic thugs who want to shut down discourse they don’t like, and can’t respond to (a nice use of language on its own).

Giving credit where it is due, the co-editors of the volume, Professors Miriam Elman and Asaf Romirowsky have found the right pressure point and a tactic to press it that does not involve sacrificing an ounce of academic integrity. Yes, the essays that make up the volume are all trying to counter misuse of specific terms coopted and corrupted by the forces of BDS. But the only reason the exercise is necessary is because proponents of the “Israel Must Go” narrative have made such a correction imperative.

Those who spend lots of time anguishing over lack of punch-back by Israel’s defenders might see the publications of a relatively obscure journal insufficient to turn back the tide of anti-Israel invective engulfing the academy. But battles on campuses are primarily being waged with words (at least for now), which makes seizing back the language one of the most powerful and effective ways to bring the fight to the enemy in a war where ideas count.

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Origin of the Left-Right Split on Israel - 4 (Divest This!)

Finishing up discussion of the origins of the Left-Right split on Israel, there are two types of problematical reaction from two different audiences when confronted with information like the history presented in Robert Wistrich's From Ambivalence to Betrayal.

The first reaction comes from those whose political disposition is liberal or otherwise left-leaning who might acknowledge this history but relegate it to the past or to a non-mainstream fringe that has little to nothing to do with them.

For those who primarily label themselves "liberal" or "progressive," this is a problem for "The Left." And for Israel supporters who consider themselves "Of the Left," the history outlined in Wistrich's book is something you might encounter on the "Far Left," a marginal group that they claim no one listens to or cares about.

Paired with these attitude is the suspicion that attempts to brand liberals and Leftists as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic is really just a tactic of the real enemy of the Left: the Right (or, more frequently, the "Far Right") which is just interested in cherry picking facts and stories from the darker side of the Leftist political tradition in order to smear progressives in front of Jewish and non-Jewish Israel-supporting audiences.

This suspicion is nurtured by genuine anti-Israel Leftists who insist that anyone who not doesn't hew to their agenda is not just a "Progressive for Everything but Palestine" (i.e., a traitor to Progressive values), but probably a closet conservative/reactionary/Republican/Likudnik just posing as a liberal in order to make "true liberals" like themselves look bad (claims which basically accuse liberal critics of the Israel bashers as being not just hypocrites, but liars and frauds).

But while we can dismiss the self-serving positioning of the Israel haters, we cannot pretend that conservatives do not try to draw political advantage by portraying anti-Israel opinion within the Left as being more widespread than it actually is. And then there is the phenomenon of lifelong liberals who justifiably lash out against anti-Jewish attitudes within their own tradition who, unable to get genuine Israel-haters to respond to their accusations, turn their wrath on more moderate liberal voices that should be seen as friends, rather than foes.

So where to begin to untangle such a mess of accusation, divisiveness and suspicion and is there a solution that can lead to genuine understanding (not to mention constructive interaction leading to successful action)?

Well first off, we need to acknowledge that diminishing suspicion between Left and Right involves coming to grips with the Left-Right paradigm that defines (and, in my opinion) over-defines nearly every aspect of our political discourse. I say "coming to grips with" vs. "eliminating" since it's unrealistic to expect a framework so widespread to be put aside after nearly two-and-a-half centuries of use, especially since this Left-Right framework is useful, providing as it does a meaningful way to fit positions on a range of political subjects into a belief system imbued with important human values.

Which acknowledging that the Left-Right axis we use might be meaningful, we need to avoid shaping every issue in a way that focuses entirely on our most extreme differences, especially with regard to subjects containing large areas of agreement (such as support for Israel).

Even with this even-handed backdrop, I need to point out that those embracing a left-leaning worldview have the most heavy lifting to do since, for better or for worse, it is their tradition that is being co-opted and corrupted by ruthless totalitarians.

Claiming that Wistrich's history of ambivalence and hostility towards the Jews and their state is part of the Left's DNA (and thus unchangeable) is both inaccurate and unfair. But denying that it has been part of the Left's tradition since the birth of that tradition would be equally inaccurate. And denying its relevance to the current debate (or relegating it to a marginal fringe) is not going to stop the totalitarians from continuing to use the language of the Left to continue to attack the Jewish state on the way to their real goal: The dictatorship of themselves.

These would-be totalitarians have their heroes and stories (the revolutionists of yore who used the language of progress to pave the way for their own total rule) which propels their world view and dictates their actions (which explains why they can ignore their own illiberal behavior and allies, since such questioning is of no concern to a revolutionary vanguard whose only goal is power).

But Progressive Zionists have their own heroes and stories to turn to: including those courageous liberals who stood against Communism, even while being accused of hypocrisy, class treason and every other imaginable crime. And then there are the founders of the Jewish state itself who were as much creatures of the labor movement as they were committed Jews and Zionists, commitments that provided them the faith and courage to overcome enemies far more ruthless than the lame, faux-liberal BDSers we confront today.

And as the many liberal Zionists it has been my pleasure to work with (and the many more I have never met) come to this understanding and fight this fight, it is the obligation of those not holding a liberal world view to distinguish friend from foe and support progressive allies (or, at least not denigrate them), in their fight for the soul of the Left. For it is the huge overlap between Left and Right with regard to belief in and support of the Jewish state that defines our strength, not the shrill and self-serving arguments of those who fall outside this consensus.

And to give us all some perspective (and perhaps an ounce of humility); consider other traditions that have historically grappled with their own relationship to Jews, Judaism and – most recently - Zionism. Christianity, for example, is now split between growing Evangelical churches whose devotion to Israel is second only to that of American Jews and dying Mainline Protestantism (Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.) who maintain - at best - an ambivalent attitude towards the Jewish state which frequently descends into hostility (although not yet outright betrayal).

Or look at America's mainstream conservatives dedicated to Israel's safety, security and success who can win at the ballot box vs. the "Blame Israel First" Buchannanist Right that can barely manage to maintain itself as a cult of personality.

And even within the Progressive tradition, who would you rather associate with: the Israel-loving American industrial Labor movement that gave us safety and fair wages for workers (not to mention the weekend) or the self-righteous, ends-justify-the-means tradition represented today by pro-BDS "Leftists" which has spent much of the last two centuries delivering nothing but tyranny, death and despair?

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Origin of the Left-Right Split on Israel (Divest This!)

Continuing the discussion of the origins of Left-wing anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism (informed by Robert Wistrich From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel) an obvious objection to tracing the phenomenon back to Marx (and the Bolshevik revolutionaries who did so much damage in his name) is that it continues to allow current inheritors of this ideology to claim to speak for the Left as a whole.

This is actually not just a strong, but a profound argument which I plan to get to shortly. But not before covering the Betrayal portion of the story described so well in Robert Wistrich's book.

Wistrich traces the ambivalence theme in the first two sections of his book (which covers the hundred years between Marx's On the Jewish Question and the birth of the Jewish state) through a series of stories of the people who set the agenda for these ideological and political disputes.

Through brief intellectual histories of people such as Franz Mehring, Bernard Lazare, and Karl Kautsky (not to mention more well known names such as Karl Marx, Rose Luxmburg and Leon Trotsky) we can see how different individuals and groups grappled with Jews insisting on expressing their political aspirations by carving out their own portion of the labor movement (the Jewish Bund) or by developing a national consciousness (the Zionists), rather than just folding themselves into a theoretical classless society through assimilation.

Many (although by no means all) of these revolutionaries were, like Marx, estranged Jews, which might explain the extreme hostility they displayed when having to confront specific Jewish concerns. But simple politics can explain other elements of Left-wing hostility to Jewish particularism, such as Lenin's willingness to entertain the national rights of Czechs and Poles (but not Jews) since national agitation among the former could help him achieve his goal of overthrowing the Russian Czarist state, while the later were more useful providing assimilated foot soldiers for the Revolution.

The fact that almost all the Jews who threw their lot in with Communism were murdered either before, during or after the Soviet takeover of Russia (mostly by their Comrades) demonstrates just how wrong they were with regard to the fate of the Jews after the Revolution. But while Stalin relied as much on Russian nationalism (which included deep-rooted anti-Semitism) to force industrialize the USSR and get the nation through World War II, there was a brief window where state-sponsored anti-Jewish bigotry was not allowed to impact the Soviet Union's Machiavellian geopolitics.

This is why the Soviets supported creation of the State of Israel in 1948 (and allowed their emerging satellite of Czechoslovakia to provide the Jewish state with its few arms). For at the time, the Jews seem most poised to disrupt the status quo in the region, a status quo that involved an exhausted Britain trying to hold onto an Empire it no longer had the power, resources or will to continue controlling.

To a large extent, this bet paid off. For while Zionism is no longer talked about as a revolutionary movement amongst the Left, it was the example of Israel throwing off the yoke of imperial rule (while Arab opponents such as Jordan continued to ally themselves with the fading British Empire) that inspired other Third World peoples to similarly reject European rule and form their own nations.

The irony is that once those nations were formed, many threw their lot in with the new empire on the block: a Soviet Union that had mastered the ability to propagandize about creating a worker's paradise at home and liberating people abroad, while they were actually building the world's largest prison camp nternally and exporting their soldier's, propagandists and secret police forces around the globe to create a new imperial holdings.

It was during this post-war period that we get to what Wistrich refers to as "Betrayal." For once they had pocketed their gains by exploiting Israel's usefulness in cracking British rule in the region, the Soviets quickly switched their allegiance to Israel's Arab foes (as well as many other emerging states) to create the world we know today where cynical exploitation of the language of human rights and freedom is coupled with brutal repression at home and aggression abroad.

For the first two decades after 1948, the language of hostility was still driven by the fading monarchs and emerging military dictators of the Arab world who insisted their goal was to "throw the Jews into the sea." But after the 1967 Six Day War, the propaganda we see today took full flower as the real issues in the region (human rights abusing Arab tyrannies refusing to allow a Jewish presence to exist in the Middle East) was turned on its head to claim that it was the Jews who were refusing to allow an Arab (Palestinian) presence in their midst.

Given that discussion of Palestinian and general Arab responsibility for their own fate is now off limits in discussion of the Middle East within far-Left circles (a mode of discussion that has, to a certain extent, gone mainstream), we can see how successful this new propaganda message has been.

But the sheer vehemence of hostility towards the Jewish state expressed by the Soviets, their allies and (today) the post-Soviet far Left, cannot entirely be explained by opportunism or realpolitik. Annual condemnations of Israel in a Soviet (and now Arab League/OIC) dominated UN are one thing. But turning such condemnations into an hourly ritual, and coupling these with political language and imagery that would have found a home in Der Stermer represents something else entirely.

This something else might simply be the mutation of the anti-Semitic virus which once condemned Jews as a religion then as a race, now turning on them as a nation.

But as the core of the Communist belief system (the imminence of world revolution driven by the working classes) vanished as those working classes refused to budge (or – as in Germany – joined decidedly un-Marxist mass movements), something had to fill this void.

For a while, there were attempts to have the masses of the Third World take over the role that was originally to be played by the industrial proletariat (even if this meant turning that industrial proletariat from the engine of progressive revolution to part of the machinery of global repression).

But as even this hope evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was little left for Marxist believers to actually believe in. Which may explain why a certain vanguard continues to deny so much objective reality and use the aggressive and ruthless tactics that emerged during the Age of Ideologies to propel forward the only thing left of their once eternal and global agenda: that Israel Must Go.

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Origins of the Left-Right Split on Israel – 2 (Divest This!)

Most of the kids marching against Israel on college campuses today were not even born in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, meaning they have little to no idea how much their rhetoric and actions are built on nearly 150 years of political tactics honed during the near 150 year "Age of Ideology" that began in the mid-19^th century and ended with the demise of the USSR.

But the behaviors we see among anti-Israel activists today did not emerge from thin air. For just as current Students-for-Justice-in-Palestine types insist that any true liberal must embrace their agenda (the PEP argument noted previously), Marxist ideologues in previous eras scoffed at progressives who "merely" wanted to improve the lives of workers or solve pressing social issues, rather than replace the entire capitalist system through a spasm of revolutionary violence.

And once it turned out that the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was only ever going to be a dictatorship, the ruthlessness of Soviet action was matched by a ruthlessness of language in which their every crime was denied and every accusation against it buried in a mountain of rhetoric insisting that the Marxist cause by judged solely by its theoretical goal of creating heaven on earth.

In service to the cause, nothing was off limits: not civic society within the USSR and not multi-national institutions outside of it, which is why tyrannies allied with the "movement" were so successful in corrupting virtually every organization dedicated to human rights and international law, turning them from potential moderating influences in an increasingly interconnected world to weapons of war.

Accusing those that created and perpetuated this system of cynicisms would be an error, for the people who split progressive and labor movements for their own ends, who ardently rejected any criticism of their crimes (while perpetually attacking their opponents) were driven by fanaticism that more resembled religious fervor than rational calculation.

The Jews played an unusual set of roles during this Age of Ideologies. While Medieval religious anti-Semitism was still rife when the political terms "Left" and "Right" were first coined (they applied to which side of the king one sat at the National Assembly at the time of the French revolution, BTW), by the time Karl Marx was writing what would become the sacred texts of the Marxist faith, negative reaction to Jews were being cast in economic and political vs. religious terms.

To Marx (a German who had long ago abandoned his own Jewish heritage), the continuation of the Jews for nearly two Millennia after the fall of the Jewish state was a political aberration growing out the need of powerful Christian elites for a class of moneylenders, rent collectors and economic middlemen to do their financial dirty work. This allowed kings and clerics to gather their rents and borrow the cash needed for their lifestyles and wars. And when their own loans came due, they could always sick the mob on these despised Jewish landlords and "loan sharks," and begin the cycle anew with a new set of Jews ready to play the game of politically powerless financial middlemen.

This novel description of Jewish history was fleshed out in Marx's famous essay On the Jewish Question, a work that today seems rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes, portraying Jews as congenial "hucksters" whose One God is actually Mammon. But when he wrote it, Marx had a different agenda in mind. For, according to the theories he was developing, the capitalist system was in the process of replacing the Jewish middlemen of antiquity with a class of capitalist (consisting of people of all faiths) which (according to Marx) meant the economic deformities once managed by a persecuted Jewish minority was now becoming the cornerstone of the modern political system.

Thus his call to free Europe from the Jew was really a call to free society from the "hucksterism" represented originally by the Jews but which now infested all of capitalist society. And what of actual Jews who (like Marx's parents and grandparents) were not simply economic abstractions? As with most human beings, they had a role to play within Marx's developing theoretical framework. In this case, they (meaning the Jews as a distinct people) were meant to disappear once their economic role became irrelevant as man passed into a new post-capitalist era.

To someone like Marx, this proposition was not entirely fanciful. For hadn't many people born into Jewish families (including Marx himself) shed their religious identity once they encountered European enlightenment? And if Marx and others he traveled with were able to successfully toss aside their Jewishness, wasn't that the ultimate solution to "The Jewish Problem" once a classless society freed from capitalism eliminated the need for Jewish middlemen and Jewish "husksterism" (whether practiced by Jews or Christians) entirely?

In one of his last works, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel, Robert Wistrich uses "ambivalence" to describe Leftist attitudes towards Jewish questions, given Marx’s predictions of the historic inevitability of Jewish assimilation and disappearance. In theory, this meant outright hostility towards Jews as Jews did not need to play much of a role in the political movements inspired by Marx’s works.

But this also meant that actually defending Jews against the racism being directed against them (especially by purely anti-Semitic political parties emerging in countries Germany and France in the decades following Marx's death) was equally irrelevant to the Marxist-informed Left. This is why you began to see condemnations of anti-Semitism (insults and violence directed at the Jews) balanced by equally vehement condemnations of "philo-Semitism" (attempts to defend Jews from these racist attacks), with arguments that Jews defending their own interests were guilty of parochialism and selfishness echoing to today.

As already noted, Marx's theories about the redemptive power of Jewish assimilation and disappearance were confirmed by his own experience, as well as the experience of other hyper-assimilated Jews attracted to various Socialist movements. But as these "enlightened" Jewish and non-Jewish Socialist began to encounter unassimilated Jews (especially those of Eastern Europe) and as Eastern and even Western Jews began to advocate for distinct Jewish political and even national rights, ambivalence turned to hostility which became more and more virulent as the "inevitable" world revolution never materialized, shaking Communist faith to its core.

Like so many disappointed millennialists, the revolutionary Left had someone to blame and a new cause to believe in (hostility to the Jews and their state) once their original Messiah failed to appear. How this played out will be covered next.

To be continued…

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Origins of the Left-Right Split on Israel - 1 (Divest This!)

One of the reasons why fights over the Middle East (whether they involve BDS or some other propaganda effort) tend to immediately be cast in terms of Left vs. Right is because the majority of attacks on the Jewish state these days come wrapped in Left-leaning vocabulary.

This is not to say that card-carrying right wingers like Pat Buchannan or outright fascists like David Duke don't also hurl thunderbolts at the Jews and their state on a regular basis. But even they tend to use terminology that has long become familiar to both Israel's defenders and defamers.

For instance, with a few exceptions you will no longer even hear Israel's most ardent foes talk about throwing the Jews into the sea or readying for a massacre that would rival the Mongols (language Israel's hostile neighbors used repeatedly during the first two decades of the state's existence). Instead, complaints (which range from reasonable-sounding to hysterical) draw upon the language of human rights and international law to make the case that Israel is the world's greatest violator of both.

In fact, individuals and groups who use this terminology to make their case against the Jewish state do not simply see themselves as Progressives but insist that their issue defines who does and who does not deserve this label.

This is why those traveling under the BDS banner routinely accuse liberals who do not follow their lead of being PEPs ("Progressives for Everything but Palestine"), encapsulating in a single inelegant phrase the assumption that support for anything other than Palestinian demands (whatever they happen to be this week) represents an abandonment of liberal principles.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is seeing how ineffective it is trying to use this same accusation in reverse. For instance, I don't think I've met a single Israel supporter who, at one time or another, has not expressed the notion that Progressives who claim to champion the rights of women and gays (for example) can possibly favor the Arabs (who crush the rights of both) as opposed to Israel (which probably has the best record with regard to gender and sexual equality in the world).

Activists with this mindset (which I once had and still possess to some degree) are perpetually shocked to find out how ineffective such "reverse-PEP" arguments are when directed against Israel's most ardent foes. Gay rights are the perfect example of an issue that should demonstrate both the yawning chasm between Israel's approach to human rights vs. its opponents, and the hypocrisy of anyone claiming to champion liberal values who fights to expand the territory in which the murder of gays is politically and religiously sanctioned.

But try to bring this contradiction to the attention of self-styled, pro-Palestinian, "progressive" groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and you will soon find yourself being accused (and accused and accused and accused) of "Pinkwashing," a fake phenomenon invented by JVP types to avoid this issue entirely by casting it as part of an evil plot by Israel's friends to "change the subject" from whatever it is the Israel-dislikers insist is the only thing we're allowed to talk about.

The reason behind this strategy of avoidance (as well as the shrillness that accompanies it) is that Israel's foes (who have no answer regarding the glaring contradictions of their claimed ideology) assume that if they simply ignore their opponents and shriek their own accusations ever louder, eventually others will tire of trying to get a response out of them, leaving the field open for debate to continue on the Israel-haters own terms.

The behaviors we see from Israel's loudest accusers (dividing the Left into "true Progressives" who toe the BDS party line and fake ones who do not, ignoring all facts and arguments that they cannot respond to, and never relenting from perpetual attack mode) all have precedent in the argument which framed the Left during the last century as much as hostility to Israel defines it for this one: the role of the Soviet Union (and support thereof) as the touchstone for commitment to revolutionary change.

It is to this subject that I shall turn to next.

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Thinking Fast and Slow (Divest This!)

One of my favorite reads of the last several years, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, documents why our reasoning faculties – which should be protecting us from making bad choices based on emotion or instinct – contain flaws that make them the source of many human errors.

The book title refers to a model developed by Kahneman and his fellow researcher Amos Tversky (both Israelis, BTW) in the 1960s that posited a human mind driven by two processes: one fast, one slow.

The slow process is effortful and gets turned on when we engage in deep contemplation or perform other activities requiring heavy cognitive work (such as solving a mathematical problem, or writing something – like this blog entry). In contrast, our fast process takes in information from our senses and processes it very rapidly, taking charge of everyday activities like driving a car, or listening to or reading something (again, like this blog entry) spoken or written in a language you already understand.

Because our slow process is rather lazy, it tends to defer to the fast process to do as much work as possible. This makes sense, given the sheer amount of thinking/processing that must take place to get through a single day. But deferring to a fast process to make sense of the world comes at a cost.

For example, the fast process performs its sense-making role by looking for patterns and then fitting those patterns into a storyline, one which takes a lot of deliberate (i.e., slow process) work to unlearn. In many cases, this is not a bad thing. Unlearning that a loud noise signals danger, for example, might not be such a wise idea (which may explain the evolutionary benefit – and thus origin – of this fast-process/slow process duality).

But flaws in our reasoning, notably the many biases to which all human beings are vulnerable, are a side-product of this brain structure with considerable downside. For example, Confirmation Bias which leads us to believe information that confirms existing beliefs and reject information that does not, is just one of many cognitive biases that result from letting our fast process take the first cut at story formation.

You see this theory play out in the context of politics all the time. For what are candidates for office doing when they try to “define” themselves and their opponents if not creating narratives they hope will get taken up by the story-loving fast process of a majority of voters? Even those endless rows of lawn signs bearing only a candidate’s name (no policy positions, no slogans) can be seen as a means to embed that name into the non-deliberative component of a voter’s brain, hoping it will be top of mind when a majority of them walk into voting booths.

The BDS propaganda campaign is doing something similar with its endless repeating of their beloved “Israel = Apartheid” equation, regardless of how many times that and all their other accusations have been debunked. Given that many of the constituencies they address (like college students) were not even born during the era when Apartheid South Africa stood, the BDSer’s hope is that their mantra will result in those who know nothing about either Israel or Apartheid will build a fast-process connection before any slow-process cognition (i.e., thought) can interfere.

The narratives the BDSers spin for themselves offer an even clearer set of examples of cognitive biases at work. That’s because many of the manipulative techniques used by Israel-haters (and hyper-partisans of all stripes) are targeted not at opponents but supporters.

Spending a little time on the #BDS Twitter feed (or do some lurking on BDS sites like Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada, if you can stomach it) to see what I mean.

When the BDSers score a win with a student government vote (like they did at Brown last week), that is portrayed as the latest example of their unstoppable momentum. And when they are rejected (as they were by at Columbia the week before last) that simply shows that their eventual embrace by all is just a matter of time.

When a handful of college professors (from a pool of tens of thousands) sign onto an academic boycott campaign, this news is treated as demonstrating wide acceptance of their position within academia. But when hundreds of college presidents condemn such boycotts, suddenly the BDSers discover the concept of percentages, declaring that these hundreds represent just a fraction of every college president in the country (never mind that they’d be screaming from the rooftops if even one such president embraced their cause).

As with many partisan political projects, the trick is to find an angle to fit any news (good or bad) into the storylines already established in the boycotters own heads (which they would like to insert into everyone else’s). Thus news about financing of anti-BDS efforts is turned into a story about Sheldon Adelson (a Right-leaning macher who gets to play the role of bête noir in their narrative), ignoring the involvement of Left-leaning Israel supporters like Haim Saban in that same effort. Yet when Hilary Clinton publically trashed the BDS “movement,” Saban is suddenly rediscovered but only to the play the role of pro-Israel moneybags pulling Hillary’s strings.

“Look over there!” might be a proper label to slap onto a strategy that involves scouring any news story for an element – no matter how tiny or irrelevant – that might conform to the boycotters' view of the world, and then blowing up that detail and screaming that it must be considered the Alpha and Omega of the tale. If you want to see what I mean, just check out how quickly Mondofada declares “case closed” whenever they can find a members of AIPAC or StandWithUs in the vicinity of a civic organization that has just told them to drop dead.

It’s easy to declare everyone involved in such efforts to be knowingly peddling falsehoods. But that misses the point that the boycotters should be seen as both pushers and junkies for the dopey lies (or, better, fantasies) they are peddling.

The BDS fantasist, after all, must continually build and reinforce their self-image as noble knights and warriors, the vanguard of a new world order, owners of the Left end of the political spectrum, battling dark forces that represent evil incarnate. How can they continue to chant “Free Gaza” as Gaza descends into a murderous hell hole and the rest of the Middle East goes up in flames? Because the slow process that might have once had the power to revise the storyline making up their primary identity has atrophied from long disuse.

All of us, by virtue of being human beings, routinely fall prey to Confirmation Bias and other frailties of reasoning. But under normal circumstances, competing aspects of our identity (represented by competing storylines in our own heads) allow us to occasionally engage Mr. Slow Process to impose some reality onto our view of ourselves and the world.

Failing that, we are also surrounded by other people who are likely to have other narratives floating around in their fast processes, creating a check on any one falsehood or fantasy dominating a group or society. But what happens when large groups of people (perhaps an entire self-declared “movement”) have decided to not just stop using its slow process entirely, but surrounds themselves only with people who have performed a similar self-lobotomy?

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The Long Game part 4 (Divest This!)

Imagine if not 26, but just one US state passed legislation condemning Israel using language similar to the slurs the boycotters routinely pack in their BDS resolutions. Actually, let’s paint an even less-unlikely scenario. Imagine if just one small town in rural Vermont passed such a measure. Do you think we’d be having a debate over what such a vote might mean for free-speech?

No! For if the Israel-haters ever got their way by getting any government anywhere to parrot their views, they would be bazooka-ing the planet with bellows of triumph, insisting that such a vote was proof positive that Israel is as horrid as they claim and that they were a hair’s breadth away from total victory.

Yet here we are several years into a bandwagon in which one state after another has passed legislation condemning BDS as a form of bigotry and telling those who practice it that they can kiss state contracts goodbye, with the federal government supporting the effort through legislation saying such state action is perfectly legal.

Unlike BDS votes that tend to take place in the dead of night, behind closed doors, state anti-BDS measures were passed by overwhelming bi-partisan majorities in the full light of day. But, instead of talking about what it means when vast democratic majorities pass BDS votes against the BDSers, we are instead arguing over whether the very kinds of votes the boycotters have been lobbying people to pass for years represent assaults on free speech.

The reason for this is that the boycotters are much much better at framing an issue than we are. If we had more of their talent, we would incessantly communicate that every state anti BDS vote is proof positive that the majority of the nation agrees that BDS=bigotry, and demand our opponents answer our accusations (while ignoring theirs), rather than sitting on our lead and then acting surprised when enemies end up dictating how the story plays out in the media.

Keep in mind that “America agrees that BDS = bigotry” and “anti-BDS legislation is a threat to free speech” are both tag lines that can agreed upon or be contested. So why are ignoring one advantageous to us, while engaging with the enemy on the turf they want to fight on? No self-respecting BDSer would ever tolerate being put on the defensive, and it’s not something we should tolerate either (especially from the moral midgets who demand we debate them solely on their terms).

Here is one way we can act like our enemies in order to progress our cause without selling our souls. For the person who frames the debate tends to win it (or at least not lose it), which means picking a storyline beneficial to our cause, focusing on that storyline and nothing else, and insisting our opponents respond to us vs. vice-versa is a winning tactic, one we seem too insecure to use.

There are other storylines we could also be advancing, beyond the one I’ve used to illustrate my point regarding the failure of Israel and her supporters to frame issues and news to our advantage. Startup nation, for example, is a nice, elevating topic – one many friends of Israel like to embrace since it (alongside multiculturalism, tolerance for women and gays, and decent cuisine) seems uncontroversial.

But how about pushing these positive narratives in a direction that might generate a little controversy? Israel’s economic success story is wonderful news, but bigger news is how a people at death’s door after World War II managed to not just bring themselves back to life, but bring back into existence their ancestral homeland, along with a reborn language, one ready to provide a home for Jews (including millions of refugees) from around the planet.

If the Holocaust was the nadir of human history, the emergence of the state of Israel might represent history’s pinnacle achievement of justice. How’s that for a truth that will set some people’s teeth on edge?

Claims about the staggering success of our people need not be wrapped up in hubris or acclimations of “chosen-ness.” Rather, they can be presented with humility and generosity, pointing out – for example - that if a nearly murdered people could achieve such stunning success, anyone can do it. All that is required is the readiness to create a society dedicated to the needs of its members, rather than wandering off into utopia (where no one cares for anyone since we’re all abstractions) or creating a people or nation that prioritizes wallowing in victimhood and revenge fantasies over improving the lives of actual human beings.

Positive messaging is often condemned by some Israel supporters who see it as an attempt to ward off assaults on the character of the Jewish state and Jewish people with dance performances and hummus parties. These critics have a point, but one that highlights the ineffectiveness of focusing on surface manifestations of the miracle that is the Jewish state, rather than the miracle itself.

If we instead embraced Zionism, rather than let others define it as a dirty word, as a model for every nation in the world that actually wants to see its people living in peace, happiness and prosperity, we would no doubt piss off people who already hate us. But we might just inspire those who have not chosen a side to pick the “strong horse” that also happens to be the true embodiment of justice and morality.

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.

Long Game 3 (Divest This!)

Continuing a series that started here and continued here, I hope by now that readers appreciate the difficulties Israeli and its defenders face if we decided to “fight fire with fire” by mirroring enemy tactics. But presuming our only choices are to ape our foes or sit back and take a beating represents a failure of imagination, born from a failure to think through our choices from a strategic perspective.

Fortunately, we already have the most important starting point needed to approach our problems strategically: a well-understood goal we are heading towards. In the case of Israel and her friends, that goal can be summed up as seeing the Jewish state free, safe and strong.

Seeing the Israeli and Jewish condition normalized, so that we are treated with the same respect automatically given every other nation and people, is also a worthy goal, albeit a more difficult one to achieve given how much that would involve changing human hearts. That said, people tend to treat those they are impressed by better than those they consider weak or inferior. So focusing on a free, safe and strong Israel might have positive knock on effects regarding wider normalization goals.

With a free, safe and strong Israel as our North Star, we need to think of the most effective ways of achieving this end. Maintaining strong, bi-partisan support for Israel in the US has been a strategy American Jews have pursued successfully for decades. Indeed, one of the reasons AIPAC is so ferociously demonized by Israel’s enemies is those enemy’s correct perception of how successful the organization has been in staying on and accomplishing its mission.

The passage of dozens of resolutions at the state and national level condemning BDS is another instance where our side has played to its strengths, which includes broad support among legislators who understand the popularity of Israel among the public at large. If you consider the years and years of effort the BDSers have put into unsuccessful attempts to get even one small municipality to officially condemn the Jewish state, the fact that half the nation’s legislatures have instead condemned the boycotters is testament to what we can accomplish without having to develop the fanaticism and pathologies of our foes.

Continuing to be able to succeed with such audacious tactics will involve maintaining bi-partisan support for Israel within the US, which today means fighting with all our might the continued attempted takeover of the Left end of the political spectrum by the forces of BDS. This work will be thankless, and painful, and will require us to put aside our own partisanship in order to achieve a higher good. But from a strategic perspective, better to have both sides mostly in our camp (including the one we never vote for), rather than see Israel become a wholly owned issue of one party, a party that – as history shows – will not always be in power.

These are all illustrations of what US Jews and non-Jewish supporters can and should do domestically. Abroad, the situation is bleaker with anti-Semitic politicians close to power in parts of Europe, and the war against the Jewish state continuing in international political and NGO forums. Without minimizing such challenges, success only comes to those who show up, rather than give up. Remember that a few years ago, the Third World (including most of Africa) seemed similarly lost to the enemy until outreach (i.e., “showing up”) by Israeli diplomats opened doors that were previously closed.

On the Israel front, a nation that can send a vessel to the moon is likely to retain its technological and economic edge over those whose greatest achievement is to replace kites with balloons as the most effective way to burn neighboring farmland. Because military adventures outside the nation’s borders have never been an Israeli political priority, Israelis can focus their technological, economic and military superiority on the task of defending fixed borders, a much easier strategic challenge than conquest outside those borders.

If you compare where Israel was in 1948 vs. where it is today and contrast that with how neighboring enemies have done during this same period, one can see how maintaining siege walls both succeeded in keeping foes at bay, while forcing those foes to live with the consequences of their choice to prioritize Israel’s destruction over the creation of healthy stable societies. In fact, the greatest blunder in Israeli political history – the Oslo Accords – failed specifically because it traded those consequences for rewards that the Palestinians squandered years ago, condemning their people to live lives far worse than the ones they had when under the dreaded “Occupation.”

The greatest risk to our side achieving our ends (vs. our enemies achieving theirs), outside of an Iranian atom bomb, is a failure of will. If young Israelis start losing confidence in the virtue of their cause to the point where they stop making sacrifices in the form of military service, that’s a game changer. Similarly, if active support for Israel in the US loses out to a combination of hostility and indifference, that could threaten both the Jewish state and the American diaspora.

If faith in one’s cause was generated solely by libeling one’s enemies, those who have attacked Israel militarily over the years would have done much more advancing than retreating. So next week, in the final segment in this series, I’ll talk about what a campaign might look like that leverages all that is right with the Jewish state without making our side come off as wusses.

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.

Long Game – 2 (Divest This!)

Continuing from last time, if you are an aggressor, then it is easy to come up with an enact strategies and tactics involving being an aggressor against your enemies.

This observation should be obvious, yet we so often fail to appreciate its converse: that lack of an aggressive goal limits one’s ability to behave aggressively against others, especially those you have not branded as enemies.

There are many explanations as to why Israel’s friends have failed to meet the challenge of BDS and other anti-Israel propaganda campaigns with adequate force, from weak will among Jewish institutional leaders to historical factors that lead Jews to value accommodation with non-Jewish majorities over sticking up for ourselves.

Such criticisms are certainly well founded, but they fail to take into account that even if we were disposed or led to fight rather than get along, we would still need a destructive end-point to guide strategies and tactics that would get us to that destructive goal.

But if you were to ask even the most vocal critics of the Jewish community’s response to BDS, I suspect you would find almost no one who wants to see the world’s Muslim’s disbursed, Arab states dismantled, or other outcomes likely to get large numbers of people killed, despite the fact that dismantlement, disbursement and death are the fates hoped for and worked towards by Israel’s enemies.

In fact, both militant and non-militant defenders of Israel are united in the desire to see Israel left in peace, its citizens unthreatened and unmolested, and the Jewish condition normalized. But if these are the goals we seek, how can we be expected to attack those that attack us with matching levels of ferociousness?

Even if such levels of attack could be initiated, possibly through campaigns designed to tell the truth about the Arab world (including their treatment of women, gays and minorities) as incessantly and aggressively as they tell lies about us, BDS has taught us that such campaigns would need to go on not for months or years, but decades. Can a community that longs to live at peace with others be realistically expected to put in the time, effort, resources and organization into behaving in such a way for a century?

But it actually gets worse. For, as readers of Divest This know, BDS does not limit the damage it causes to Jews alone. Whenever they import the Middle East conflict onto a college campus, or drag an academic association, church, municipality, or even a humble food coop into their campaigns, they do untold damage to everyone making up those communities, creating needless strife and conflict over an issue that is only on the agenda because the boycotters want to leverage other people’s reputation for their own political gain.

Are we ready to do the same? And how about all the effort the Israel haters have been putting into ginning up hatred between races and religions in their war against the Jewish state? Are we ready to stop trying to heal rifts in our society and instead exacerbate the pathologies driving the world to ruin, just to see enemies harmed?

In addition to our lack of militant goals, another reason we’re not ready to harm others to get our way is that it is wrong, and even if we (like our foes) are able to delude ourselves into thinking a descent into evil represents virtue and courage, is this really who we want to become?

Finally, even if we can distort our souls enough to fight fire with fire for decades in hope of seeing someone else destroyed, our foes already have a fifty-year head start on us, not to mention alliances with dozens of powerful nation states controlling vast wealth and a stranglehold on organizations like the United Nations and other major institutions. If anyone can explain a strategy for generating another 49 Jewish states or finding other ways to dominate global organizations, I’m all ears.

Our inability to take on Israel’s enemies by becoming more like them should not be considered a weakness, but an opportunity since it forces us to look for alternative strategies that meet our goals while limiting our enemy’s ability to achieve theirs. This is in fact what Israel and, to a large extent, its supporters have done (however imperfectly) since Israel was founded seventy years ago.

What are the strategies that have left Israel sending spaceships to the moon while its would-be destroyers sink ever deeper into genocide, ignorance, poverty and weakness? They involve manning the walls, celebrating life over death, and making every Israeli and every friend of Israel count, while not standing in the way of Israel’s enemies having to live with the consequences of their own choices.

Thoughts on the strategies and tactics associated with those four ideas 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.

Long Game - 1 (Divest This!)

Over the years, the most frequent questions I have been asked on the subject of BDS and other anti-Israel campaigns are variations on whether our response to Israel’s enemies should mirror the strategies and tactics our opponents use against us.

Since strategy and tactics are a means to an end, my position has always been to better understand what our ultimate goals might be, then select strategies aligned with those goals, after which we will be in a better position to select tactics that can help us execute those strategies.

For reasons I’ll soon get to, I don’t believe aping our foes is the best choice for a number of reasons. But the Israel haters do provide a useful template of how to put the horse (goals that define a desired end point) before the cart (choice of strategy and tactics).

The goal of Israel’s enemies, easily understood if you look past their insincere (but tactical) claims to represent peace, justice and everything virtuous, is to see the Jewish state eliminated. This goal is somewhat obscured by the fact that groups advocating BDS and other measures contain many innocent dupes who sincerely believe they are doing good. The leaders duping them also obscure things further since they, with a few exceptions, rarely participate in or advocate violence themselves.

They do, however, offer vital protection for those who not only advocate but regularly visit violence on the Jewish state, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, terror groups within the Palestinian Authority, and Arab states still at war with Israel. This protection comes in the form of ignoring all of the preparation for war militaries and militants engage in (despite claims to represent “peace”) then roaring to life once those groups’ actions trigger the inevitable Israeli military response.

Protests against Israeli military activity (and only Israeli military activity) can take the form of organized condemnations – locally and globally (through corrupt and coopted organizations like the UN, also posing as peace advocates), demands for an immediate cease-fire once their preferred side is losing, and street protests that increasingly end in attacks on any Jews the mob can get their hands on (thus creating a price tag for non-Israeli Jews in hope of getting the IDF to stand down).

With the goal of Israel’s elimination as their North Star, the boycotters have an end clearly in mind which makes the selection of strategies to achieve that end straightforward. Their successful march through the Left end of the pollical spectrum, leaving submitted Progressives of all stripes in their wake, is testament to their ruthlessness (since they are the only party ready to destroy anyone and anything that gets in their way), but also their clear understanding where they want to go.

Those of us on the receiving end of the other side’s Long Game are justifiably concerned (if not frightened), and left pondering whether we should try to replicate our opponent’s behavior in hope of achieving comparable success. If that were the case, the first question we should ask is what is the end point we are driving towards?

If our goal was to see the Palestinians destroyed, or to see Arab or Muslim nations wiped from the map, that would constitute a militant goal comparable to the goal of our enemies. But does anyone, including the most militant pro-Israel activist, long for such an outcome?

I have never seen any sign of such destructive desires. In fact, if I were to distill decades of listening to Jewish and Israeli leaders talking about their hopes and dreams, I would say our goal is Israel at peace with everyone around her, and Jews left unmolested anywhere they reside.

Sometimes this goal gets wrapped up in utopian visions of an end to violence and bigotry everywhere. But shorn of such wishful thinking, a practical end point for the Jews and their state would be normalization ending with Israel treated with the same respect automatically given every other nation (regardless of behavior) coupled with seeing antisemitism, if not eliminated entirely from the human heart, limited to bigoted thought instead of discriminatory and violent action.

While not as aggressive as the militant goal of our enemies, seeing Israel at peace and the Jewish people no longer assaulted in word and deed is a concrete goal we can and have been striving for. Like most ambitious goals, it is audacious and possibly unachievable. But it does represent a concrete end point no less useful to us as our enemy’s equally ambitious (if destructive) goal is to them.

Given this, what strategies can we pursue that will simultaneously help us achieve our goal while making the goal of our enemies ever more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve?

Tune in next time for some thoughts…

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.