Divest This

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from covering and writing about the BDS “movement” over the years is how to deal with setbacks.  And, ironically, this is a lesson that’s been taught to me by the BDSers themselves.

For example, when students in Oxford overwhelmingly voted down BDS by a margin of 7:1 last week, did the BDS Movement’s official web site fly into outrage and despair over this setback for their academic boycott project (in that decidedly non-Zionist environment of British academia no less)?  Did Mondoweiss express deep disappointment at this resounding defeat (never mind use the vote as a moment of reflection on the current state of BDS “momentum”).

No, they simply ignored the fact that the vote ever took place.

But if later this week the University of California at San Diego Student Senate joins a handful of other student governments who have passed toothless and largely ignored divestment measures over the years (remember that big vote at Wayne State in 2003?  I thought not), as sure as night follows day this story will break across the BDS ether with pronouncements that this is just the beginning and that students across the country should join their comrades in San Diego in denouncing “Apartheid Israel.”

More importantly, supporters of Israel are not likely to follow the course the BDSers generally take of simply pretending that any setback never occurred.  Rather, we are likely to condemn the decision, fight to have it reversed, and argue about it for weeks on end (at least in the Jewish mainstream and online press).

But is it incumbent upon us to always rise to the boycotter’s bait?

This is not a simple question since, unlike members of the BDS “movement,” supporters of Israel are not wired to throw their latest wins in the faces of our opponent day after day, week after week, month after month, all the time demanding that they respond to our taunts.

Even in a situation like Oxford (where it was the boycotters -  not us – who demanded a vote on this issue), beyond a few news stories celebrating a rare moment of sanity within British academia, our side’s coverage of this event all but died out within a few days.

And if you look at the real stories that provide insight into how well BDS is faring, stories of Israel’s massive economic expansion, the success of Israeli brands like Ahava and SodaStream in global retail markets, the stampede of colleges and universities to build ties with their Israeli counterparts (all of which took place during the period when the boycotters were working tirelessly to bring the Israeli economy to its knees and isolate its academic institutions globally), you find a similar reticence on our part to portray these as political victories for pro-Israel forces.

This is because few (if any) of the thousands of decisions leading to Israeli economic and academic success have anything to do with politics.  Rather, they represent the benefits that accrue to an inventive, energetic, academically minded people who have managed to overcome adversity and win in some of the toughest competitive arenas in the world: academia and the high-tech marketplace.

And while it would be easy to play the BDSers game and portray each and every investment decision (by companies such as Intel, Apple and Google) in the Jewish state as a slap in the face of the Israel haters, there is an understandable reluctance to drag business partners and colleagues into a political debate against their will.  And thus we find ourselves in a situation where the boycotters can still kvell about  some dopey food co-op in the top left corner of the country no longer selling Israeli ice cream cones while we keep the fact that the world’s most important companies have made Israel their second home out of the political arena.

Now we are faced with that ongoing dilemma of whether to respond to BDS taunts (and thus get caught up in an argument that the boycotters control) or ignore them completely (and thus allow the boycotters to define the story to their advantage).  But this is just another variation on the current Jewish dilemma of whether to strike out against Israel’s defamers (which could give them the publicity they crave) or not mention them at all (and leave them free to do whatever they like at our expense).

Which is why I have chosen, after years of dealing with this issue, to engage directly with the boycotters, but to do it on my terms rather than theirs.

They, after all, want the discussion to begin and end with their accusations (whether based on context-free facts or invention) that they claim prove Israel to be “Apartheid state” (after having assigned themselves the role of prosecutor, judge and jury).  Or they demand we respond to their latest trivial accomplishment, while all the time ignoring any facts making up the counter-narrative described above.

But just because they have assigned the rest of us the role of the accused, does not mean we have to play it.  For there are other subjects that need to be brought into the discussion, such as the BDSers long history of failure, fraud and manipulation, their cageyness with regard to their ultimate goals, and their hypocrisy with regard to assigning themselves the mantle of human rights champion while they ignore the human rights of everyone on the planet that does not serve their immediately political needs.

In fact, as far as I’m concerned these should be the first and only topics that come up in any debate about BDS.  And only when our questions have been answered (rather than shouted down or ignored) should we be ready to listen to whatever they have to say.

Hey guys.  I’m thinking of auditioning for The Onion.  What do you think?

A group from Northeastern University’s Self-Righteous Asshole community made their presence known last night as they marched in front of Max Brenner’s restaurant and chocolate shop in downtown Boston for close to two hours, demanding that people not buy chocolate on Valentine’s Day in protest of something or other.

“We came to make a statement,” said Joshua Amarilla, a student from Stoughton, MA currently studying comparative literature and a leading member of the Self-Righteous Asshole organization at Northeastern.  “This chocolate shop is involved with evil, EVIL I tell you.  And if you look through this seven page flowchart I printed up, you’ll understand why buying cocoa here contributes to repression, Apartheid and other acts of evilness.”

“This protest has our full support,” says Anna Federman, a long-time leader in the wider Boston-based Self-Righteous Asshole community.  “For, as a Jew, I want to loudly condemn all other Jews – including Jewish chocolatiers – who don’t do what we say, and don’t immediately acknowledge that we are both right about all things and morally superior to them in every way.”

“Oh, and did I mention I’m Jewish?” Federman continued.

When asked why the event turned out just 15 people, Amarilla responded angrily.  “Hey, we had 80 people say they’d show up on our Facebook page, so that should count for something” he bellowed.  “After all, 80 is a lot higher than 15!”

The protest did not proceed without incident.  “At least one patron at Max Brenner’s actively tried to muzzle my freedom of speech by telling me to ‘fuck off’ when I handed him some of the literature I spent all night Photoshopping,” said Thomas Herman, a visiting Self-Righteous Asshole from Tufts.  (Waiting times to get into the Max Brenner’s grew to an hour during the period the protesters were insisting a boycott was the patrons’ only moral choice.)

The patron involved with the incident, Anthony Capone (a part-time physical therapist from Somerville) had this to say about what occurred: “After six weeks of effort, I finally got the girl from the office next door (26 year old Alison McNeeley, also from Somerville) to go out with me – on Valentine’s Day as luck would have it.  And just when I was about to make my move, this douchebag stuffs a leaflet into my hand and starts talking about Apartheid.  Honestly, he’s lucky I didn’t smack him across the street.”

“Whether we had 15 people protesting or 50 or 500 doesn’t matter,” responded Amarilla to continued questioning of why their weeks-long call to action ended in a protest barely noticed by the passers-by (much less the hundreds of people inside Max Brenner’s).  “After all, the point is to get people talking about issues that matter to us, specifically about how cool and edgy we are.”

And as it turned out, the event did generate more than twenty tweets during the 12 hours since the protest began, at least four of which were not written by the protestor’s themselves.  Typical of the level of conversation the protest triggered was this one in which a local Bostonian, responding to another tweet that Brenner’s was being picketed, asked: “Gosh, is the food really that bad?”

Apparently not since, in a related story, Max Brenner’s in Boston reports that yesterday was the most successful day in its two-year history and may represent the highest level of Valentine’s Day sales at any Max Brenner’s in the world.

Among the customers who flooded the shop during the course of the day were many Northeastern students who were not available for comment due to the fact that they were all sleeping off a chocolate high.

Members of Northeastern’s Self-Righteous Asshole community were also not available for a follow up interview, having chosen to celebrate their “victory” by locking themselves in their rooms.

It’s not often the forces of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) decide to put their sour souls on display on the sweetest day of the year.

Apparently, someone got it into their head that it would be a brilliant idea to picket Boston’s Max Brenner restaurant and gourmet chocolate shop on Valentine’s Day (i.e., tomorrow) at just the hour when the place will be packed with forgetful husbands and boyfriends trying to head off conflicts far more terrifying than anything the Middle East has to offer.

But a picket of Max Brenner (something local BDSers imported from a failed similar effort in Australia) does accomplish the boycotters single most important goal: showing their Facebook friends that they can act naughty in public.

While I don’t expect hundreds of people to show up at Max Brenner’s in the next 36 hours to buy them out and hold a chocolate party on Boylston Street (similar to the wine bash that began the Buycott movement in 2009), it would certainly be nice if anyone in, near or planning to be around Boston today or tomorrow stop by 745 Boylston Street (across from the Prudential) and show Max Brenner some love.

I’m happy to get things started:

Send me your pix if you’re able to make a purchase.  I recommend the chocolate covered nuts (far preferable to the non-chocolate covered ones that will be chanting incoherently outside tomorrow night).

I’ll admit to being of mixed mind with regard to how to respond when Omar Barghouti (or any of his clones) comes to town.

On the one hand, if we just shut up about it, then he’s likely to draw a crowd no larger than the two dozen or so people who went to see him at UC Irvine earlier in the week.

And this “crowd” (made up primarily of the like-minded and the few brave souls who hope they can pin him down during Q&A) would quickly discover that he’s not just a bore, but a PowerPoint bore who, if stripped of clichés that have become part of the BDS catechism (“Apartheid, “Worse than Apartheid,” “colonialist imperialism,” “imperial colonialism,” “Gandhi!,” “King!” “99%”) would be rendered speechless.

On the other hand, when the BDSers do something that attempts to make their program, their agenda and their doofus of a speaker look like they represents the opinion of the wider community (vs. just their narrow cult), it seems perfectly reasonable for members of their wider community to say what they think about the subject.

True to form, the BDSers stand ready to nail themselves to the cross the second anyone begins to “suppress” them (even if such suppression consists solely of describing them accurately).

I’ll admit that in the current Brooklyn College controversy, a number of political leaders have gone overboard in calling for the school to face punishment for the irresponsible behavior of one department.  But as we saw during the UPenn BDS event last year, the boycotters are ready to strike a pose of martyrdom, even if “attacks” upon them consist of nothing more than an angry letter written by a single middle-aged prof.

The role of free speech champion and martyr is particularly rich coming from groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that policies its own events and shuts down any discussion (especially questions of its speakers) that get too close to the truth, or from Jewish Voice for Peace who have hermetically sealed off every platform they control from contamination by alternative voices (while simultaneously demanding immediate access to everyone else’s venue).

But here we are, with a sell-out crowd planning to listen to Barghouti bellow his tripe for an hour, followed by Judith Butler spewing post-modern gibberish to cover up the fact that neither really has anything to say, certainly not about the real human rights abuses in the region.  (Did you know the number of Syrians killed in the last few years is now greater than the number of Palestinians killed in clashes with Israel since 1948?  Don’t’ expect that topic to make it to the stage in Brooklyn tonight.)

And once the fawning has finished, the challenging questions from the audience shouted down and the book signing completed, Barthouti will cash his check and move onto the next locale in his tour.  Nice work if you can get it (especially if you’ve got a nice safe, warm, comfortable perch at an Israeli university to return to when you’re done shaking down the crowd).

I seem to be struggling to work up a good head of stem about this week’s BDS brouhaha in Brooklyn, partly because it’s just the latest January gathering of the Israel-hating like-minded (does anyone remember anything about last year’s PennBDS weekender?  – I thought not), but mostly because of its headliner: Omar Barghouti.

Why is it so hard to take seriously this uber leader of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions crusade?  It can’t just be because he looks as though he’d fit in comfortably with the cast of Big Bang Theory, or that he continues to buy his clothes from the same Good Will costume rack I take my kids to every Halloween.

Perhaps it is his stunning level of hypocrisy, one which makes him an asset to both sides of the BDS wars, that makes it difficult to feel threatened by him or the “movement” he claims to lead.  For as much as he and his followers insist we should not talk about the fact that Barghouti leads the cause to have Israeli academics (among others) globally shunned while he himself enjoys his perch in Israeli academia, there is no getting around the fact that he exemplifies the “Do as I say, not as I do” mentality that is the Alpha and Omega of BDS.

I’ve often wondered how Barghouti gets away with continuing his dual role as perpetual Tel Aviv University graduate student and leader of the movement to have people like himself boycotted.

When people on our side point this out, the obvious response from Barghouti and his supporters is to simply ignore what we say (just as they ignore any criticisms or questions they cannot answer – which pretty much includes all topics of substance related to the Middle East).  But given that the Dear Leader of the BDS Internationale swims in the shark-infested waters of anti-Israel politics, it’s been pretty amazing that none of his rivals have managed to land a glove on him over this issue.

If I were to guess as to what might provide him this coating of Teflon (at least among the BDS ranks – like those who will swarm to Brooklyn to swoon over his stock speech on Thursday), I’d probably zero in on the one skill he has ably demonstrated  over the years: the ability to break into outrage at a moment’s notice.

He’s outraged that you would bring up his private life in a political conversation (despite the fact that he’s trying to meddle in the private life of his fellow Israeli student by having them boycotted).  He’s outraged that Israelis would lobby to have him kicked out of TAU for his global campaign against Israeli academia (thus proving how Apartheidy Israel really is).  But he’s even more outraged that the school refused to punish him (thus demonstrating the ends those foul Israelis will go to hide how Apartheidy they really are).

If these and all the other inconsistencies that barnacle Mr. Barghouti bewilder you, keep in mind that his ability to burst into flame at the merest mention of anything he doesn’t want to hear (or have others hear) represents the BDS leader’s one asset and the key to his success.

I’ve talked before about Argumentation from Outrage as a tactic that is the cornerstone not just of BDS but of anti-Israeli rhetoric generally.  For whenever the BDSer is confronted by a fact or argument they cannot ignore, the next (and only other) arrow in their quiver is to work themselves into an hysterical rage in hope of raising the emotional temperature so high that a reasoned argument (which they were sure to lose) cannot continue.

The trouble with outrage politics is that it also becomes the vehicle through which Israel-haters engage in their own internal dialogs.  Which explains why practitioners of this particular tactic seem to rise to the top of most anti-Israel organizations, and why there is so little reflection among anti-Israel activists about why some tactics work and others do not.

BDS is the perfect case in point, given that it’s gobbled up over a decade worth of anti-Israel activist energy, only to deliver embarrassment and failure at every turn.

A normal leader and movement might reflect on these facts and change course (or at least look for alternative strategies that might prove more successful).  But to Omar Barthouti and his worshipers, mention of such things (even from fellow Israel-haters) is an outrage.