Divest This

Continuing with some catch up…

In the zero-sum world of BDS politics, last summer’s Eurovision Song Contest could not be perceived as anything but a massive defeat for the boycotters.  Their extreme efforts to get the program moved from Israel, their strong-arming of artists to now show up, and their incessant calls for boycott could not prevent the thousands of people who visited Israel for the event or millions watching the song contest on TV from seeing the actual Israel, rather than the dystopia of BDS fantasies and *gasp* making up their own minds, rather than let the BDSers think for them.

The one bright spot for the boycotters were the antics of the Islandic band Hatrio Mun Sigra which did not misbehave during their performance, but did engage in politics by sneaking out a Palestinian flag during the announcement of the winner (it wasn’t them, BTW).

What little heat their “reveal” generated was soon forgotten, except for some BDSers looking for a fix and the Icelandic government which may punish the band for not playing by the rules.  But I got re-interested in the controversy when this piece appeared in Tablet revealing that – for all their goth, outsider posing, the members of Hatrio Mun Sigra are part of a hereditary caste of Iceland’s elite – the sons of diplomats and bankers – playing at punk while demonstrating their wokeness in the way all European aristocrats do these days: by dissing the Jewish state.

One need only look at the pale, scrawny members of the band to combine their appearance and background into a single well-worn phrase: white privilege.  In fact, if that term had any meaning among the people who use it the most, one might be led to think that anti-Zionism is the touchstone of the most melanin-deprived elite.

This fits nicely with the concept of Palestinian privilege that titles this piece.  For example, sixty million of the world’s refugees (including those from Syria for whom the world shows such concern) are supported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) whose budget is comparable to the money spent on a UN agency, UNWRA, dedicated solely to not solving the problem of five million Palestinian “refugees.”

Many commentators describe Palestinian behavior such as refusing tax revenue from Israel unless it includes sums they have committed to pay those who killed Israelis or doing everything possible to derail an economic conference dedicated to their economic improvement as the acts of “spoiled children.” But another way to look at those choices is as the acts of an outraged elite doing everything in their power to preserve their wealth, power and position in society.

The poverty such choices might cause the average Palestinian might seem to counter any discussion of privilege, but keep in mind that the elite making these decisions are not impacted by them.  The wealth they have skimmed off foreign donors is not likely to be seized, and their positions of power is not threatened by those below them (unless the masses organize under the rule of a new elite of fanatical Islamists).   Similarly, the privileged Palestinian elite has no fear that parents of members of Hatrio Mun Sigra or their pals in the European diplomatic core will hold Palestinian members of their caste to account.

The privilege model also helps explain why members of this elite in “Palestine” are so quick to lash out at fellow Arab tyrants who seem to be distancing themselves from “the sacred cause.”  After all, with dozens of Arab nations allied with even more Islamic ones within the halls of the United Nations, having their way internationally has been taken as a given by Abbas and Company.  So condemning Arab leaders for not sacrificing their own interests is the equivalent of the rich and powerful condemning President Roosevelt as a traitor to his class.

Given how much our own intersectional elite demands they get to decide who gets to speak and who does not based on their own ever-changing ranking of privilege, it’s interesting how the power relationships described above: where European hereditary castes prove their progressive bone fides by embracing the anti-Israel cause, all in support of the least progressive regimes on the planet, is not mentioned (or shouted down when someone else brings it up).

Interesting, but not surprising.  After all, rank does have its privilege. 

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 entrism 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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remind you of anything? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing to catch this site up with stuff published earlier this year…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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