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.

Some current goings on in the world of academic divestment (at Oxford University as well as the University of California system) provide insight into the next lesson I learned while studying the BDS “movement,” a lesson regarding the nature of the organizations supporting and opposing BDS propaganda programs.

I’ve already talked about the sociopathic and fantasy-laden nature of individuals pushing boycott and divestment projects.  But those individuals make up groups, including the alphabet soup of BDS champions (JVP, SJP, PACBI, et al), and these groups also have a nature.

The key power of such groups is their willingness to continue pushing their agenda ruthlessly and relentlessly, regardless of the cost to themselves and others (best exemplified by their demand for an umpteenth student council divestment vote at the University of California at San Diego next week).

Over the years, many people have asked me where BDS groups get their money.  And while anti-Israel activists obviously need a source of funds to fly Omar Barghouti and other BDS/Israel Hate Week speakers around the country (never mind leasing flotilla ships to sail across the Mediterranean), most of the anti-Israel campaigns we have to deal with at schools, churches, etc. are led by smaller, networked groups whose most important resource is not money but their own fanaticism.

This fanaticism comes at a cost, however.  For just as BDS-proponents will use underhanded tactics to subvert third parties (such as student councils or food co-op boards) they also use these same tactics to try to grab power within their own organizations.  This tale from someone once involved with the now-defunct Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM) is extremely telling with regard to how a once-successful political organization dedicated to anti-Israel divestment fell apart in the process of repelling non-stop attempts at internal subversion that leveraged the same tactics BDS uses to subvert others.

This is why anti-Israel organizations tend to be unstable, breaking apart and reforming under new names every 8-10 years (with Students for Justice in Palestine being the current flavor of the month).

In contrast, the pro-Israel community suffers not from instability, but from too much stability.  Specifically, we need to deal with a political landscape made up of: (1) grassroots activists working at ground level; (2) entrepreneurial pro-Israel groups (such as StandWithUs, CAMERA and The David Project) who focus on specific types of activism, and; (3) very large organizations (JCRC, Hillel, AIPAC, AJC, etc.) with multiple missions who have taken an understandable interest in fighting against BDS.

A network of small to large institutions provides grassroots activists expertise and resources to fall back on when needed.  But as anyone who has ever worked within an institution understands, getting big (or even medium-sized) organizations to move or change course can require a lot of effort, especially since these institutions have their own long-term goals that will generally take priority over responding to the crisis of the day.

Despite the complex nature of the pro-Israel community, over the last 5-6 years a consensus has emerged regarding how to deal with the issue of BDS.  First, there is now a common understanding that regardless of how open the “Big Tent” is going to be for Jews with different opinions about Israel and the Middle East, support BDS remains a bright red line separating those inside the tent vs. those outside of it.

Just as importantly, an informal consensus has emerged which says that the best people to deal with a particular BDS problem are those on the ground (student groups on college campuses, anti-divestment organizations within churches, etc.).  So rather than descending on a campus and telling students what they should and shouldn’t do, the network of pro-Israel organizations have contented themselves to let the locals call the shots, providing support and resources only when they are asked for.

This approach comes at a cost, especially in situations when a well-organized and/or well-informed set of activists are not available at a particular institution.  This is common on college campuses where high student turnover means pro-Israel (like anti-Israel) organizations may be strong or weak during any particular year.  But it’s also common in places like food co-ops where I’ve only seen local members organize themselves to repel a boycott project about half the time.

But as we saw with the recent Brooklyn College blow up (where, absent a locally organized response, politicians jumped in on their own), letting anyone run their own anti-BDS effort without a local focal point can cause more harm than good.

And so activists up and down the pro-Israel food chain (from the leaders of 100-year-old Jewish organizations down to individual activists like myself) have had to learn to keep our peace, even in situations where we can think of a hundred ways that this or that community could repel a BDS attack, unless and until the people on the ground reach out to ask for our help.

While this hands-off approach can be frustrating, it does provide a healthy dose of perspective.  For example, when BDSers got a divestment resolution through the UC Irvine and UCSA student government organizations last year, this barely made a ripple in the media (outside of hyperventilating BDS web sites for whom any achievement, no matter how irrelevant or trivial, represents impending triumph).

This lack of panic on our side grew out of an understanding that the militancy of the BDSers and their endless search for new categories of institutions to subvert means we are always going to win some (like Oxford) and lose some (like, potentially, UCSD).

More importantly, with three years separating the UC Irvine (and potentially UCSD) votes from a similar vote at Berkeley (which did make international news), most of us now understand that student council BDS resolutions demonstrate nothing more than the ability of BDSers to subvert or morally blackmail student leaders into striking an irrelevant pose that (1) will never be acted upon by the grownups who run the university; and (2) in no way represents the opinion of the students these leaders are supposed to be representing.

Perhaps because BDS has been with us for so long, most people now understand that, regardless of whether they win or lose this or that particular vote, they have yet to demonstrate that their Israel=Apartheid hate message represents the opinion of anyone other than themselves.  And it is to the subject of who gets to speak for whom that we shall turn to next.

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).

As many of you know, I tend to take a pragmatic approach to dealing with BDS related issues as they come up.  Which is why it’s worth revisiting the two big divestment stories that reared their head before the latest blow-up in Gaza.

First, you had the story of the University of California Student Assembly (UCSA) surprising virtually every student they claim to represent by passing a resolution that seemed to be a goodie bag of BDS talking points packaged as a protest against a recent piece of non-binding California legislation.

Given the bait-and-switch nature of the resolution, it was no surprise to learn that the only campus group allowed into discussions of the matter was Students for Justice in Palestine or SJP (with the meeting to decide the issue somehow falling on the Jewish holidays, ensuring no one would interfere with one of the most underhanded processes I’ve seen in almost a decade of dealing with BDS underhandedness).

And on the heels of that student vote, another surprise arose within the University of California system when the Student Senate at UC Irvine passed a divestment vote similar to the one shot down at Berkeley two years earlier.  And, once again, SJP was there, video cameras in hand to record the “historic event,” which apparently was not so historic that anyone else on campus needed to be informed that it was being discussed, much less voted on, until the story had become a fait accomplis.

Starting with Irvine, while the usual BDS talking heads declared this was an “important step on the way to full divestment,” (one going so far as to declare the vote requires the campus to divest)  campus administrators made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the BDS propaganda program, even if SJP types had managed to corrupt student government to get their way this year.  And so this vote, like the long forgotten student divestment vote at Wayne State in 2003 and the just-about-forgotten 2011 student vote at U Mass Boston, stand as testament to how impotent student government makes itself when it decides to ignore those they are supposed to represent in order to strike a pose demanded of them by a war movement like SJP.

In fact, given the unsurprising blow-back over yet another student council voting in one-sided pronouncements on international affairs, pronouncements they have absolutely no mandate to make (something the boycotters themselves understand, which is why they did everything in their power to ensure such a vote took place in secret), it is now the student government at UC Irvine which faces a tarnishing of reputation, not Israel or its supporters.  For how seriously does the administration of a university (or anyone else) have to take such a group when student leaders voluntarily detach themselves from their only genuine source of authority: the claim to represent student opinion?

So might the Irvine vote end up just another impotent pose struck by a student group that will be forced to backtrack once they realize the consequences of their irresponsible action?  And, if so, what might that backtracking look like?

Well it might resemble what’s been going on at UCSA over the last few weeks once they realized that the first time most people had ever heard of their group was in the context of discovering how UCSA foolishly allowed themselves to be manipulated into passing a resolution loaded with language that hundreds of thousands of UC students demonstrated time and time again that they loath.

For starters, they tell us (in a statement that was forwarded to me) that “We want to clarify that UCSA has not endorsed BDS,” repeating this sentiment by declaring that “We regret that the language implies that UCSA endorses the BDS campaign, however, we assure you that this is not the case.”

It’s also good to know that “Similar to our constituency, UCLA’s UCSA Board Members also represent diverse, conflicting opinions on this issue. We recognize that it is not our responsibility to endorse divisive campaigns without consulting the students that we are charged with representing” (although it might have been better for them to take that sentiment to heart before taking a vote that seemingly provides such endorsement).  Similarly, their statements that unwittingly including SJP in their discussions and excluding Jewish voices “undermines the democratic process,” is welcome, even if it begs the next question of what they are going to do next to rectify the damage their thoughtlessness has caused.

While I don’t expect the boycotters currently blanketing US campuses declaring “The UCs agree with us that Israel is an Apartheid state which means you should divest too!” to change their song in light of any changes UCSA or Irvine make to their policies in the coming months (given that they are still trying to pass off their original Hampshire divestment hoax as genuine), both stories provide yet another example of what student governments can expect if they let the smiling manipulators of SJP in through the door.

Getting back to pragmatism, the reason both UC stories went off the front burner was, of course, Israel’s decision that it would no longer live with hundreds of rockets fired indiscriminately at its towns and people.  And, like night follows day, groups like SJP (which remained somnambulant when those missiles all but guaranteed the recent war) suddenly found their voice and “Marched for Peace,” once bullets were firing in more than one direction.

As is generally the case, BDS battles (like all anti-Israel activism) is 100,000% more correlated with events on the ground in the Middle East, vs. success and failure at this college campus or that church or food co-op.  So if we see an uptick in student council votes and other forms of protests for the rest of the academic year, that’s because it provides people waving photos of bloody Palestinian babies something to do (other than explain why so  many of those images are actually victims of Hamas or Syrian terror which SJP naturally ignores at all cost).

Fortunately, SJP et al have also provided we supporters of Israel with new ammunition to prevent them from dragging the Middle East conflict into yet another civic organization: their own behavior.  This behavior includes remaining mum while Hamas missiles flew, but not up shutting once they were being countered (demonstrating BDSer to be nothing more war partisans masquerading as a peace activists).  And the lame attempts at manipulation used during this year’s Gaza crisis demonstrate the boycotters to be not just cynical, but to hold in contempt everyone they are trying to recruit as allies who they perceive as suckers and fools.

Let’s hope their assessment of the public continues to be proven wrong.