PennBDS - Community Coalition Building

Today, we're blessed with a guest article by someone on the BDS front lines.  Nycerbarb organized successful opposition to boycott efforts at her Park Slope food coop, and blogs at the site Stop BDS Park Slope.  She's also a frequent visitor and commenter at Divest This and an all around cool person.  Today, she provides her take on the next item on the PennBDS agenda, BDS and Community Coalition Building.

I have learned much about communities, coalition building and BDS in the last year.

For more than 22 years I have been a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, in Brooklyn, New York. About one year ago, a small group within our Coop began an effort to have the Coop remove from the shelves the 4 or 5 Israeli products the store carries, and more importantly, to publicly endorse the BDS movement. I began an effort to oppose this, forming an anti-boycott group More Hummus Please, as well as the blog Stop BDS ParkSlope.

People join food coops for the food. They want to buy healthy, fresh, local food at excellent prices. People do not join the Coop to have their politics decided for them. While some members may want to use the Coop to promote their pet political project, the vast majority of members ignore those efforts, including efforts to have the Coop participate in a boycott of the Jewish state.  Like most people, members of the Park Slope Coop just want to finish their shopping, go home and take care of their lives. And if the Coop’s political capital is to be used for anything, the general feeling is that it should be used to support local issues that affect the food supply (such as opposition to fracking for natural gas in New York State).

Our food coop requires all members to contribute labor. This keeps our operating costs and mark-up extremely low. I estimate my family saves over $3000 a year by shopping and working at our food coop. The work requirement also contributes to the coop’s friendly and accepting atmosphere. Our collective involvement in our unique grocery store makes it possible to walk up to someone and begin discussing recipes, cold remedies or baby carriers. At the same time, the Coop’s cooperative spirit depends upon respect for people’s boundaries, which includes political boundaries. Imposing your own political view upon the membership is a violation of that respect.

Our pro-BDS members could not care less about boundaries, respect or the needs of anyone beyond themselves.  With their constant letters to our biweekly newspaper (many of which abuse those who disagree with them) and their unwillingness to take no for an answer, they have turned the Coop into a battleground, trying to import the Middle East conflict into our community. They have made it clear that they don’t care if members quit the Coop because of BDS and - in a supreme twist of logic – they blame those who want to get their self-centered politics out of the organization as being responsible for tearing at the fabric of our community.

But their movement is responsible for successful community building, specifically a community of people dedicated to ensuring that the co-opting of the Coop does not take place.  So far, over 200 Coop members have added their names to our calls for the BDS group to leave the Coop alone.

But while BDS advocates have succeeded in creating communities opposing them, do they know anything about genuine community building themselves?

Genuine peace makers demonstrate the commitment to peace and justice by working to "normalize" the relationships between people previously in conflict. They encourage people to participate in joint projects and cultural exchanges, thereby opening channels of communication with the hope that these efforts will result in opponents becoming reconciled to mutual co-existence and tolerance.

This represents the polar opposite of what BDS champions.  Time after time, the leadership of the BDS movements has made it clear that it opposes any normalization of relations between Palestinians and Israelis.  And those fighting against normalization (which means communication and reconciliation) are fighting against peace.

Food coops, like ours, engage in community building by providing a shared neutral civic space for diverse groups to obtain local, organic, healthy foods. Members benefit from lower costs for items that might otherwise be unavailable to them. Through shared investments contribution of labor, and cooperative effort directed towards a single goal, our community is created and sustained

This is not the type of community building BDS is interested in.  Across the country, BDS activists have tried to get food coops to participate in their boycott and while they have been rejected time and time again these efforts have torn communities apart, as their memberscan attest.

Universities also engage in community building. In an environment of mutual respect and acceptance, young people from diverse backgrounds come together to pursue knowledge, to investigate and to exchange ideas.

BDS is not interested in this type of community building, either. When BDS activists - whether via divestment campaigns or ugly, dishonest propaganda programs like Israel Apartheid Week, come to campus they create hostile environments.  Apart from the harassment of Jewish students on a number of campuses (which has led to students transferring from some colleges), the noisy and dishonest arguments that form the backbone of BDS or Apartheid Week propaganda campaigns represent the opposite of what college and the college community are all about. 

Awareness movements, such as LGBT or Occupy Wall Street, also build communities. Relationships are created not only between their participant members, but between themselves and the general public. By raising awareness of their situation and concerns, they invoke sympathy and understanding.

BDS, in contrast, doesn’t build a movement so much as it tries to hijack the movements of others, injecting themselves into real communities (such as the LGBT or Occupy) in order to bend it to their agenda.  In addition to drawing attention away from important causes such as gay rights, this type of subversion ends up alienating many who might otherwise support grassroots political organizations dedicated to other issues.   But for BDS champions, there is only one issue of importance, and if important political projects need to suffer so that the BDS message can be stuffed into their mouths, that’s a sacrifice the boycotters are willing to make.

The BDS community is built on a rigid ideology and does not tolerate dissent. Read any pro-BDS literature and you will find the same logic-defying talking points repeated over and over. Introduce any fact to counter a BDS assertion, and it will be dismissed. Any respected voice showing less than full support for the BDS program will be ostracized from the movement.

It is a community obsessed with Israel. They work full-time and overtime to find ways to vilify the Jewish State. They have no compulsion about abusing organizations built on trust (such as our coop) to promote their cause. Yet, for all those efforts, they have failed to convince any organization to endorse them.  So ultimately, BDS is a community of losers.

PennBDS – The Academic Boycott

This is part of a series of articles based on the program of the upcoming PennBDS conference. Check out this landing page to find out more.

On a couple of previous occasions, I’ve mentioned some name changes to items in the PennBDS agenda, mostly as by-the-by asides.  But in this instance, it’s worth highlighting the fact that a session once entitled “Debate on the Academic Boycott” is now simply called “The Academic Boycott.”

Now it may be that this is a simple name change and that the speakers for this event represent the strongest voices the PennBDS folks could find on either side of the issue, which means the audience will be exposed to a genuine debate over what the conference organizers consider to be a subject of great importance.

But if this name change represents a decision by these organizers to eliminate any part of their program that would even pretend that two sides of an issue existed, that would fit their choice to avoid debate at all cost, despite their constant assertions that they are dying for dialog with their opponents.

When BDS advocates have organized “debates” in the past, their preference is to choose choose both sides (usually recruiting a Jewish “anti-BDS” speaker who can be assured to laud the goals of the BDS “movement” but simply question their methods, with general agreement over the “Israel = Apartheid” propaganda message known in advance).  But if even a contrived, lopsided debate of this type is too much for the PennBDS cru to accept, I think we can all guess where they are coming from.

And if someone was to give them a real debate over “The Academic Boycott,” it would have to begin by pointing out that of all the boycott, divestment and sanctions activities advocated by PennBDS speakers and organizers, none is more loathed and despised than calls for international academics to boycott their Israeli colleagues which would involve refusing to invite them to conferences (or to attend their conferences), refusing to publish their papers, engage in joint research projects or even talk to them (lest you be found guilty of “normalizing” the Jewish condition - whoops! I mean “The Occupation”).

Consumer boycotts probably come in a close second with regard to the amount of disgust they generate, especially in the US where people don’t take kindly to being told what they can and cannot buy. But even if arguments have been found that take on product boycotts on principle (Davis Food Co-op’s highlighting that such boycotts would represent a betrayal of the Rochdale Principles upon which the co-op movement was founded springs to mind), the principle of academic freedom is woven into the fabric of every educational institution and (with a few exceptions) everyone who educates others for a living.

To cite a few examples of how these principles have motivated action, when the leadership of a UK teacher’s union proposed a boycott of Israeli universities several years ago, the reaction of college and university presidents around the world was to declare that for the purpose of any boycott, their institutions should be considered Israeli universities and also boycotted.  It was a noble gesture, but ultimately unnecessary since the union’s membership (which was never consulted on this boycott decision – par for the course with regard to BDS “victories”) revolted upon hearing what was being said in their name and the boycott resolution was quickly withdrawn.

It’s interesting to note that it was Columbia University which spearheaded this campaign, the very Columbia that has been accused in the past of allowing teachers to inappropriately politic in the classroom, the Columbia that provided a platform for Iranian President Ahmadinejad to spew his bile to the community.  But when the question of a boycott came up, academic freedom easily trumped all other considerations.  Similarly, San Francisco State College has historically been one of the worst campuses in the country for pro-Israel activists, with an environment where this lovely poster (not to mention a near riot) didn’t rouse the administration to action.  But when faced with calls for an academic boycott, the President of SF State issued a resounding denunciation.

While BDS advocates highlight the few hundred American instructors who signed a petition calling their fellow academics to boycott their Israeli colleagues, they never mention that the 1.5 million strong American Federationof Teachers union that made it abundantly clear what they thought of calls for an academic boycott of Israel (which is not much, beyond hostility to it).

Those in favor of academic boycotts like to highlight the plight of students at Palestinian universities to make arguments that it is their position that represents true calls for academic freedom.  Needless to say, the fact that these very universities were built by Israel during the dreaded “Occupation” and only faced problems once they had been turned into cesspools of propaganda and violence after they came under PA administration during the Oslo years will never cross the boycotter’s lips.

But even with this history all but forgotten, the vast majority of academics react viscerally to the notion of shunning their Israeli colleagues, even with BDS advocates incessantly claiming that this is their only moral choice.

With Israeli academics winning Nobel Prizes and American and European colleges and universities fighting to create joint programs with Israeli institutions, it’s curious why the BDSers continue to press for academic boycotts, rather than putting their energy into efforts like their TIAA-CREF divestment campaign that (while failing) at least don’t come tinged with an assault on academic freedom.

The reason for this has to do with boycotters’ insistence that anyone joining their “movement” must sacrifice all to prove their devotion.  In the case of the churches, it’s not good enough for the Presbyterians or Methodists to make moral statements on secular political issues.  Rather they are asked to stake their positions on “Christian Witness,” declaring (in effect) that their political statements represent the will of God.

Academic boycotts follow a similar pattern, asking educators to place what they hold most sacred (academic freedom) on the sacrificial alter. And this makes sense once you realize that someone making a simple political decision can always change his or her mind.  But someone who has been maneuvered to sacrifice all they believe in for the sake of someone else’s cause can never turn back.

Now that’s something worth debating!

PennBDS – The Zionist Response

This is part of a series of articles based on the program of the upcoming PennBDS conference. Check out this landing page to find out more.

Building momentum from small victories is a time-honored tactic for political activist groups.  And BDS proponents have been more effective at this than most, anchoring two years of heavy-duty campaigning on their 2004 victory in getting the Presbyterian Church to pass a divestment resolution (an admittedly not small, but ultimately ephemeral win). 

The trouble is that defeat also creates momentum, and as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions “movement” closes in on twelve years without being accepted by a single major institution they have been courting for over a decade (indeed, with massive rejections by previous supporters, including the aforementioned Presbyterian Church, in their wake), the need to redefine what victory looks like becomes paramount.

This is what’s behind all those “by losing the vote, we actually won” -type statements that accompany each boycott or divestment rejection, whether high profile (like Berkeley) or lower profile (like every food co-op, save the one in Olympia).  While claiming that “lack of concrete victory is incidental to the movement’s success” may seem idiotic or self serving on the surface, it allows the BDSers to claim nothing more than their continuing existence as a form of victory (with BDS campaigns positioned as simply the means to an end, the end being the injection of the Israel = Apartheid propaganda message into public discourse).

Absent “concrete victory,” the other metric the boycotters have gravitated towards to prove their importance is the reaction of Israel and its supporters to their program.  This is the focus of the PennBDS session entitled “The Zionist Response to BDS.”

At one level, this choice for defining victory seems to resemble a bad pickup artist using his rejection by every woman at a bar and being laughed at on their Facebook pages as “proof” he’s making progress (“Hey, at least they’re talking about me!”)  But at another level, redefining anything done by your political opponents as another example your own accomplishments serves two important purpose: (1) giving the “movement” something (anything) upon which to hang claims of success; and (2) getting your political foes to question what they do (lest they “hand you another victory” by publically opposing you) while all the time allowing the BDSers to do whatever they like, whenever they like. 

This conundrum says more about the psychology of pro- vs. anti-Israel activists than it does about the actual political issues being debated.  For if you pointed out to members of PennBDS that, by their own standards, the fact that they are holding a BDS conference just demonstrates the success of Israel and the effectiveness of its supporters (otherwise, why run a conference against them?), they will do what they do with every challenging question and simply ignore it.  Similarly, highlighting the many reasons why Jewish organizations openly condemn BDS that have nothing to do with the program’s alleged effectiveness is greeted with total silence.

Now I’m happy to admit that there have been excesses in Israel’s response to the alleged BDS “threat,” (some grandstanding anti-boycott legislation being the best example).  And even here in the US, I’m not a big fan of some of the legal or governmental remedies people have flirted with regarding dealing with anti-Israel political activities (particularly on college campuses).  Not that these actions can’t be justified, but it’s not entirely clear why they are needed, given how well we seem to be doing countering the BDS “movement” politically.  And, the Internet being what it is, it’s always just a matter of time before someone posts something complaining about this BDS activist or event and says something incorrect or inappropriate.

But here we get to the biggest challenge facing divestniks who want to use criticism by their opponents as a demonstration of their own strength.  To illustrate this challenge, take a look at this hysterical response to the fact that people who don't agree with the BDS agenda have organized their own modest counter-program.  Or the anger that greeted this obscure blog where the writer mistakenly claimed that the PennBDS conference was sponsored by the organization Penn for Palestine vs. a different anti-Israel group on campus called PennBDS.  Rather than take this as a simple, understandable error (along the lines of Brian’s mistaking the Judean People’s Front for the People’s Front of Judea), it is treated as proof the dishonest nature of the Zionists.  And naturally, the BDSers will blog, tweet and Facebook these and other accusations over and over for days, claiming them as proof of the impact they are having.

At the same time, when presented with a series of specific arguments that respond point-by-point to every item on the PennBDS agenda, these same indignant poseurs have clearly made the decision to pretend that these arguments do not exist.  And I’m not just being self serving here.  I’ve mixed it up with an organizer of the conference here and here, so they clearly know someone has been giving them the debate they claim to crave.  And they are obviously Googling “PennBDS” on a regular basis so that they can post comments on other sites that do no more than mention them in an unflattering light. 

Given that Divest This postings vie for position with PennBDS’s own public statements on Google, it is painfully obvious that the this allegedly triumphal “movement” – a “movement” that claims a monopoly on truth, virtue and courage – has decided to avoid addressing any genuine criticism while simultaneously striking an indignant pose and jumping at every mild error or sloppy condemnation they find anywhere else on the Internet.

And this demonstrates the greatest problem with using your opponents’ political activity as the basis for proving your own success.  For only if you are actually engaging with those opponents and challenging their strongest arguments (rather than just hunting down and jumping on the weakest ones you can find) can this tactic be effective.  Absent this, the folks gathering in Philadelphia next week come off looking cowardly and hypocritical, two adjectives a “movement” trying to build a reputation for strength and devotion to justice cannot afford. 

PennBDS: BDS and Community

This is part of a series of articles based on the program of the upcoming PennBDS conference. Check out this landing page to find out more.

The PennBDS talk entitled “BDS as a Community-Wide Political Campaign” originally had the word “Winning” or “Victory” in the title (I can’t remember which).  I can only guess why a word indicating progress was removed from the talk’s name, but as with this discussion that hung on the word “Beginners,” the key term in the newly crafted title mentioned above is “Community.”  And by “Community,” I’m talking about a very specific, very unique community: Olympia Washington.

To provide some background, as I’ve noted before support for Israel tends to hover at around 60-70% in the US and wherever it lands in that range on any particular day, it tends to outpoll support for Israel’s foes by a factor of 3:1.  But this does not mean that two-thirds of the US population (which would add up to 200,000,000 people) is active in pro-Israel organizations or that a third of this number supports BDS.  While these numbers indicate general support levels, the number of Americans actively involved with fighting (politically) for one side or the other in the Middle East conflict can probably be measured in the tens of thousands.

And these activists are not spread out evenly across the country.  In fact, they tend to bunch up in cities (notably places like Boston, New York and San Francisco), especially cities with large university populations (colleges and universities being places where supporters and defamers of Israel are fairly evenly matched).

In most of these places, Israel’s supporters still tend to outnumber their opposition and even if we are less aggressive in our political activism than are BDS proponents, when we decide to get off our duffs and do something, the result tends to be defeat and humiliation for anti-Israel forces.

But there are a few isolated places where anti-Israel activists are in the clear majority (or at least have the unquestioned upper hand).  These places tend to be college towns where Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) types easily outnumber their opponents AND such college activists can count on heavy support from the broader community.  In fact, I can think of only two places that fit this description: Western Massachusetts (home of Hampshire College, which may explain why Hampshire’s SJP group feels entitled to runamok) and Olympia, Washington.

In the case of Olympia, this formula of a strong anti-Israel presence on campus (in this case, the campus of Evergreen College) plus well-organized anti-Israel activists outside of campus is supplemented by the “Great Big Thing” that comes up whenever one discusses Olympia: Rachel Corrie.

Corrie was an Evergreen student recruited by a group called the International Solidarity Movement (or ISM) to enter Israel for the purpose of staging militant protests.  And while in Israel, she placed herself between a Caterpillar bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian house built on top of a tunnel used to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip.  And while standing in this position, she was hit by the bulldozer and killed.

Now whenever the issue of Rachel Corrie comes up, one must maneuver carefully to avoid the trap being laid by supporters of her cause.  For the ISM (and like-minded individuals and organizations) make endless political use of Corrie’s “martyrdom,” making all kinds of political statements and judgments based on her tragic death.  But if one responds by making political statements the BDSers disagree with, you quickly find yourself staring at photos of Corrie as an infant or young teen and accused of gross insensitivity to the death of a young girl and her family.

I’ve actually mixed it up with one of the people on this PennBDS panel over this very issue, and to avoid the whole thing becoming a focal point for debate again, suffice to say that there are various people and organizations to which you can apportion responsibility for Corrie’s death including: Israel, the Caterpillar bulldozer company, the International Solidarity Movement which brought her to Israel and convinced her to put herself in harm’s way, Corrie herself (who agreed to go this route) and the Palestinians (who decided to build weapons tunnels under civilian structures and ally themselves with folks like the ISM). Corrie’s supporters assign 100% of the blame to the first two members of this list, while the rest of us tend to spread the numbers out a bit more broadly.

But getting back to Olympia, this is one of the few places where a mix of numbers, aggressiveness and (in Olympia’s case) the Corrie factor (in the form of a foundation named after her and run by her parents) means that you can’t walk down the street without condemnation of Israel staring you in the face (literally).  Anti-Israel films and cultural events are almost weekly occurrences in the town and Evergreen College (even more than Hampshire) is a school so unwelcoming to people not willing to toe the anti-Israel line that students have actually transferred out to avoid harassment. 

But the straw that broke the camel’s back happened in 2010 when the local food co-op decided to become the first (and, so far, only) co-op to pass a boycott motion stripping Israel-produced products from their shelves.  Now I’ve written about Olympia so many times that I won’t dwell in the details here (although feel free to punch "Olympia Co-op" into the search box to the right or just look at  “Tale of Two Co-ops” in the Divest This manual to read a synthesis of the discussion of how boycotts have played out in the co-op community).

But in the case of Olympia, the result was not a “Community-Wide Political Campaign” but an assault on the community (in this case members of the co-op) which woke up one morning to discover that a bunch of partisan activists had worked behind their backs in order to speak in their name.  This was followed by a revolt of that same community against the co-op featuring resignations, a vigil of protest and, now, a lawsuit.

We’ll be joined by a guest writer later in the week to talk about another co-op impacted by BDS partisans.  But for now, its worth remembering that in one of the few places where the BDSers have the muscle to get their way, they were more than ready to shaft their neighbors in order to create and maintain a trivial victory, regardless of the pain it has caused to everyone around them.

PennBDS: BDS Mind, Beginner’s Mind

This is part of a series of articles based on the program of the upcoming PennBDS conference. Check out this landing page to find out more.

Regular readers may have picked up on my fondness for words.  And while I’ve sometimes been (legitimately) teased for using more words than may be necessary to make a point, it’s often the case that a single word is all that’s needed to clarify an important issue.  And for the PennBDS program event entitled “Talking to Beginners About BDS, Israel and Zionism,” the key word worth discussing is “Beginners.”

It’s easy to understand why college campuses are the places that BDS (and similar propaganda efforts) are so easy to create, revive or continue.  For unlike institutions such as Mainline Protestant churches (where the same people tend to hear the same arguments year in and year out), in college and universities at least 25% of the population is turning over each year, and 100% will come and go within 4-5 years (generally).

This perpetual turnover means there will always be a new group of “Beginners” towards whom local BDSers can target their message (that Israel is an “Apartheid State,” alone in the world at deserving economic punishment). And while kids coming out of high school and entering higher ed are quite sharp and accomplished, they are not likely to be as worldly at the beginning of their college career as they will be by the end of it.

It is exactly this kind of “Beginner” audience that the boycotters hope will be attracted to their simple-minded, black-and-white storylines of Israeli villainy and pristine Palestinian innocence. And while pro-Israel groups are increasingly trying to counter anti-Israel propaganda with accurate portrayals of the Middle East, they are limited by their (appropriate) choice to tell the truth. And since the truth is more complicated than an immorality tale of Israeli witches and Palestinian virgins, there will always be some “Beginners” who prefer a simple falsehood to a complex and morally ambiguous reality. 

But while willingness to ruthlessly push a simplistic, easily-absorbed storyline works to the boycotters’ advantage in some cases, the BDSers run into problems elsewhere when trying to recruit “Beginners” into their fold (even if they only plan to use them as “loose change”).

One of their biggest challenges is that among the 90% of students who enter college without strong opinions (or any opinions) regarding the Middle East conflict, there is a general feeling that dialog is good, with those perceived as being interested in dialog looked upon more favorably than those who are not.  This raises a challenge for those pushing BDS who – as the PennBDS conference proves – are ready to talk at an audience, but not particularly interested in talking with them.

I harp a lot about the fact that pro-BDS organizations scrupulously avoid allowing comments on their Web sites, even as the people who run those sites routinely comment at places like Divest This where comments are open and uncensored. In fact, I’ve even provided a place at this site where the PennBDS folks (or their supporters from anywhere in the world) are free to post a response to each and every one of my critiques of the items on their agenda.

Now I understand that people are not obliged to maintain comments on their web sites, and I certainly don’t feel that PennBDS (or anyone else) owes me a debate (or even a response).  But it is telling that even when given open access to take on someone who has made the effort to discuss each and every issue they have identified as important – point by point – that their response is to simply pretend that such arguments do not exist.

The obvious reason behind this type of behavior is that, despite claims by groups such as PennBDS or Jewish Voice for Peace that they hunger for dialog (especially with their critics) in fact they will go to almost any length to avoid genuine discussion, preferring instead to talk just to each other, and to find “Beginners” who may not be aware that alternative opinions are out there.

Interestingly, even pretending to be in favor of dialog rubs a number of BDS-types the wrong way, as attested by this weird comic in which the Israel-dislikers take it upon themselves to depict both sides of the “debate,” drawing and writing themselves as dedicated, thoughtful and thin (natch) and their opponents as bloated, doltish and manipulative.

Putting aside the infantilism such a “work” represents, it certainly highlights the BDSers strong preference to be allowed to select or represent both sides of what they consider to be a “genuine” discussion or debate.  This dynamic reached absurd heights in thislist of “normalization” demands which translates roughly to “only after you agree to everything we have said, say, or will say in advance will we consider you ‘pure’ enough to engage with in ‘normal’ dialog with us.”

Back to the original point of how to “Talk to Beginners about BDS, Zionism and Israel,” (why do I suspect the word “Israel” is going to disappear from that title before the conference begins), if history is any guide, the way attendees at PennBDS will be directed to engage in such “Talk” is to:

(1) Accuse Israel of every imaginable (or simply imagined) crime;

(2) Pretend alternative viewpoints and arguments don’t exist;

(3) Accuse Israel’s supporters of trying to stifle or “muzzle” debate whenever they try to contribute to it;

(4) Flush all information that contradicts the BDS world view down the memory hole;

(5) Accuse student or university leaders who don’t agree with you of being in the back pocket of the Zionists;

(6) Ignore or deflect any efforts dedicated to genuine (vs. faux) dialog; and

(7) Accuse, accuse, accuse.

The gang at PennBDS (and any of the BDS luminaries who will be speaking at their event) are more than welcome to tell me if I got anything wrong.  And given that they have ample opportunities to respond to this analysis directly, let’s all assume that silence = assent.

PennBDS – Consumer Boycotts

I’ve written a number of times on the subject of consumer boycotts, and anyone interested in more information and case studies can read about them in the Divest This Guide.

To start off, boycotts were rather slow in coming to the US where BDS campaigns focused on divestment for most of the last decade, specifically trying to get well known institutions such as colleges and churches to buy into their Israel = Apartheid propaganda program.  Consumer boycotts played out much more in Canada during this period, but they traveled south and got built into the overall BDS target set, especially once divestment proved to be such a bust.

An irony of consumer boycotts directed at Israel is that the only reason the BDSers have so many products to target is the very success of the Israeli economy the boycotters working for over ten years to undermine.  Twenty or even ten years ago, an Israel hater would have to drive for hours to find an Israeli product not to buy, and even then they would struggle to locate anything beyond wine and oranges.  Today, however, not only is Israeli technology behind the scenes in virtually every computer the boycotters use to build their web pages and write their press releases hailing the latest tuba player and puppet troupe to boycott the Jewish state, but Israeli brands are starting to find an established home on the store shelves of major retailers.

Some of these continue to be food items (such as the Israeli couscous you’ll find at Trader Joe’s), but brands such as Ahava and SodaStream have been increasingly finding premium positions at upscale retailers such as Williams Sonoma, Macys and Best Buy. 

As mentioned previously, consumer boycotts can be either personal or institutional.  In the case of personal boycotts, consumers are encouraged to not buy particular brands of products for political reasons.  Generally, this is not a direction the BDS folks tend to go, not least because announcements that an individual or group of Israel haters is no longer buying Israeli products would elicit a “so what else is new” response, rather than a headline.  And this makes sense since one person making individual decisions not to buy Israeli couscous for political reasons is no more remarkable (although certainly no less so) than ten Israeli supporters deciding to buy the same couscous for opposite political reasons.

But since BDS is essentially a tactic to try to make news, the targets of consumer boycotts have been retailers, such as Bed Bath and Beyond (which sells Ahava beauty products) and Trader Joe’s (which sells the aforementioned couscous).  The trouble for BDSers begins with the fact that these retailers are sophisticated institutions with their own legal and marketing departments who understand full well that they are being asked to affix their name (i.e., their brand) to someone else’s political agenda.  Which is why the rejection rate of boycott requests directed at such retailers currently stands at 100%.

With retailers unwilling to play along, the boycotters have chosen a strategy of protests and stuntwork to try to draw people’s attention to their cause, organizing pickets and song-and-dance protests outside of retail shops or taking their clothes off and smearing themselves with mud inside department stores.  The problem with this approach (in addition to bewildering or appalling the public) is that it is easily countered by the effective tactic of Buycott (i.e., Israeli supporters shopping en mass to buy out Israeli goods targeted for boycott).

The beauty of the Buycott tactic is that it allows Israel supporters to undermine a boycott protest through the simple and low-risk tactic of asking people to go shopping (vs. the effort the boycotters have to go through to organize an event and the risks they take if they decide to become disruptive or even break the law).  Nowhere was this contrast more apparent than in downtown Toronto in 2009 where an attempt to picket a liquor store selling Israeli wines turned into a street party where Israel’s supporters danced in the streets drinking “boycotted” wine they had just purchased en mass while the BDS types were forced to slink out into the night in defeat.

With direct and indirect attacks on major retailers proving so problematical, the boycotters did stumble upon one subset of food sellers they could try to work their will upon: food co-ops.  These are smaller, cooperatively owned retailers, many of whom serve and are run by the type of progressive-minded thinkers for whom the BDS message has been crafted. 

But even here, efforts to get food co-ops to strip Israeli products from their shelves has been rejected again and again by co-ops in places like Seattle, Sacramento and Davis, California (i.e., by the very progressive communities the BDSers insist must support their boycott agenda).  In fact, the only co-op that ever enacted a boycott (the Olympia Food Co-op in Olympia, Washington) did so only because the BDS cru managed to get the organization's leadership to pass a boycott vote behind the backs of the co-op’s membership. 

We will be talking more about Olympia once we get to a PennBDS session dedicated to that community.  But the final take-away from that boycott (which is still in place) is that it has served as an iconic example to other co-ops throughout the nation of what not to do when BDS comes knocking at the door.

PennBDS: Hamsphire Conference Planning Transcript

I’ve been attempting to generate all new material in this month’s series of postings paralleling the PennBDS conference agenda, rather than fall back on a “clip show” of previous postings.  But the next item up on their program (entitled “BDS On Campus I: Divestment Workshop”) didn’t really provide an issue to which I could hook a response.  But it did remind me of a more light-hearted parody piece I wrote right before the last big BDS conference at Hampshire College in 2009.

Now the piece below was originally posted on a friend’s site, so technically I’m keeping to my original plan of only adding things now that have never appeared at Divest This before.  So with apologies to people who’ve seen this previously, I now give you what our divestment friends might call an example of “BDS and Literary Expression,” the secret transcript of the planning meeting for Hampshire BDS:

Hampshire BDS Conference Planning Meeting (2009)

A friend from Northampton slipped me a transcript of a recent planning meeting for next weekend's divestment conference at Hampshire College. Apparently some of the original audio recording was garbled, so forgive any dead patches.

Freddy (Student for Justice in Palestine leader): OK gang, we've got to start this conference off with a bang. Now we're still hoping Omar Barghouti can give the opening speech addressing the compelling need for a comprehensive boycott of Israeli academia. But in case he's still taking his finals at Tel Aviv University, I thought we could begin with a stemwinder about the outstanding successes BDS has had this year.

Unknown Student (Female): Yeah! We could talk about the Norwegian government's decision to pull out of Elbit!

Unknown Student (Male): Norway! Give me a break. They've already got squishy on us, highlighting the fact that they continue to invest in over 40 Israeli companies. Besides, who gives a sh*t what Norway thinks. Whoever heard of Norway?

Sven: I have. I was born there.

Unknown Student (Male): You know what I mean.

Yakov: As I Jew, I understand where you're coming from. So why don't we skip Norway for now and focus on university divestment. After all, most of the attendees will be college undergrads, and many of them - like me - will be Jewish.

Freddy: Yakov's right. So who's got the list of colleges that have divested from the Zionist Entity? Carlos - you're head of the academic subcommittee of the action committee of the steering committee. What's the number of wins have we had on the college front?

Carlos: [Sound of shuffling papers]. Well, according my latest research and calculations, the number of schools that have heeded our call and divested from Israel stands at [coughs].

Unknown Student [Female]: What was that Carlos? I didn't hear you.

Carlos: [Coughs a few more times.] Well, zero actually.

Freddy: You mean after eight years of BDS committees working tirelessly on every college in the nation, not one school has actually divested a single dollar from the NaZionist Colonial Power?

Carlos: Well it sounds bad when you put it that way.

[Unintelligible arguing. Sounds of papers being thrown in the air and doors slamming.]

Freddy: OK, OK so we know what to say if the subject of academic divestment comes up. Here on the East Coast, we would have won a series of unending triumphs except for the ugly intervention of Lawrence Summers who tried to muzzle us at Harvard by calling us anti-Semites.

Sven: Actually, I am an anti-Semite.

Freddy: Sorry, Sven. I was just making a point. OK, so by invoking knee-jerk accusations of bigotry, that tired old misogynist "Sexism Summers" censored us by having the gall to state his opinion about what Harvard should or shouldn't do, just because he as the college's President at the time. And then his lackey Alan Dershowitz forced our own President here at Hampshire to say he'd never divest from Israel.

Carlos: Actually, the President of Hampshire said he'd never divest a year before Dershowitz showed up.

Freddy: That's beside the point. After all, who gets to decide the school's investment policies, the administration and investment managers, or us? Of course they're going to use the excuse that we're just a bunch of undergraduates who don't speak on behalf of the college. But do any of them even know how to Tweet?

Yakov: I've got to agree with Freddy's interpretation of events. While we may not have won any actual "victories," I think it's fair to say we've already won the war on campus. Oh, and did I mention I'm Jewish?

Freddy: OK, we have our storyline. While we may not have won any actual "victories" in the campus BDS wars, that's just because of the stranglehold on discourse by the You-Know-Whos. And besides, it's just a matter of time before some Left Coast college goes our way. After all, look how successful we've been at San Francisco State where we get to shout our message from the rooftops as well as shout down (I mean disrupt the Zionist narrative) whenever any ZioNazis dare to express their point of view.

Carlos: Actually, the President of S.F. State just condemned BDS as a "campaign to limit other's free speech and reign in the free exchange of ideas [that] runs counter to everything S.F. State stands for."

Unidentified Male Student: Carlos, can you please stop being such a killjoy. As we just discussed, it doesn't matter if no colleges or universities actually divested. If a group of undergraduates like us just pretend they did, shouts loud enough and sends out enough press releases, then we can call it victory.

Yakov: Exactly. In fact, I just wrote a paper for my Physics and Class Conflict in the Middle East course entitled "Objective Reality is Whatever I Say it is" which clarifies this very topic. I brought some copies if anyone wants to read it now [sound of papers being pulled out of a knapsack].

Freddy: We'd better take that offline Comrade Yakov. We've still got a lot of ground to cover. OK, we have our storyline for declaring victory on campus, and - as usual - our friends at Sabeel have been working tirelessly to bring the Mainline Protestant churches in our camp.

Sven: Religion is the opiate of the masses!

Unidentified Female Student: That's true Sven, but we should keep that to ourselves, especially since the Presbyterians and Methodists are just about the only major organizations that have squarely come out in favor of divestment. Carlos - has anyone else been added to this list in the last couple of years? I heard that the United Church of Lasertag has been flirting with a BDS resolution.

Carlos: Can I go to the bathroom?

[Door slams.]

Freddy: OK Carlos, come clean. Before you can take a bio-break, what are you trying to avoid telling us?

Carlos: Well, it's just that...

Sven: Out with it.

Carlos: OK, the Presbyterians rejected their 2004 divestment vote in 2006. And they reiterated that choice in 2008, the same year that the Methodists rejected divestment unanimously. And with all due respect for our comrades at Sabeel, just this summer, the United Church of Canada voted down divestment, even after Sabeel made a passionate plea to stay on the BDS bandwagon. So basically, we've got nothing in the churches either.

[Long silence.]

All: Religion is the opiate of the masses!

Unidentified Female: To hell with those Bible thumping Presbyterian rednecks.

Freddy: OK, calm down everyone. Now we can't start next month's meeting just pretending that we've won on colleges that have rejected us, or shitting on the churches we were celebrating just two years ago. We've got to have some real victory to boast about, or everything will think we're a bunch of ineffectual losers holding celebratory meetings as a substitute for real wins.

Yakov: Well we can't talk about municipalities. Somerville and Seattle are the closest we ever got, and BDS was rejected unanimously in the former, and didn't even get onto the ballot on the latter.

Unidentified Female Student: And US unions are out, they're the most Zionist institution in the country outside of Evangelicals (unless you want to count the Lawyer's Guild).

Yakov: My Dad told me that the last member of the Lawyer's Guild just resigned.

Freddy: OK, scratch the Lawyer's Guild. But come on guys, we've got to have one victory to talk about, just one. Is that too much to ask for by a movement like ours which has been on the march and in the ascendency for the last eight years?

[More silence.]

Unidentified Female Student: Norway?

[More silence.]

Unidentified Male Student: How's this: Our brave Scandinavian comrades have boldly stood up to the Zionist pressure from the massive, all-powerful Norwegian Jewish lobby, creating a bold vanguard which will soon sweep that brave nation, and then the world!

[Sound of cheers, loud whoops and singing of Abba songs.]

Sven: Guys! Guys. First thing, Abba is Swedish. And second thing, I've got a little more bad news...

End of transcript.