A commenter (and National Lawyer’s Guild member) posted an excerpt from one of the many long-winded NLG resolutions condemning the Jewish state for every crime ever conceived (including a re-affirmation of the UN’s infamous and odious Zionism=Racism resolution).
I’ll leave it to readers to determine how much this and other trillion-word tirades written by the likes of NLG Middle East Committee Chair Charlotte Kates represents the view of the legal profession. But for now, it’s interesting to note how little the Guild’s “legal advice” to divestment advocates or any of their Middle East resolutions has anything to do with actual (vs. imagined) law.
Their divestment brief is a good case in point. On one level, they do spell out legal issues divestistas need to be aware of (such as Department of Commerce regulations on participation in the Arab boycott of Israel, or the fiduciary responsibilities of investment managers). But from there, they take off in a direction that can only be described as political opinion.
I’ve already mentioned that the view of a fringe lawyer’s organization on what constitutes a safe vs. unsafe investment is, at best, an uninformed financial opinion, no more or less worthy than those of anyone off the street when compared to the informed opinion of actual investment managers (informed, one would expect, by their own professional council).
But looking through the Kates/NLG tirade, one is hard pressed to find anything resembling historic fact, much less sound legal reasoning. In fact, the thing that stood out most to me about the Guild’s divestment piece was its willingness to get into minute legal detail when arguing that divesting from Israel did not contravene US laws or regulations, only to swallow whole (or at least to ask their readers to swallow whole) the conclusions of one of the most notorious extra-legal documents of the day: the UN Human Rights Commission’s Goldstone Report.
Different people can have different concerns over the strength and weaknesses of this and other UN documents in terms of accuracy, fairness, et al. But for an alleged legal “guild” to embrace legal discourse when it suits its purpose, only to sacrifice the precise language of the law for uninformed partisan posturing when that gets the job done simply points out that the National Lawyers Guild, despite its name, is not actually the legal association it pretends to be. Rather, it’s a political organization (and a pretty fringe one at that) that uses its status and the legal skills of its members to get the political job done, regardless of whether or not that strengthens or subverts the rule of law.
The landscape is littered with organizations that have gone down the tubes clutching onto their anti-Israel animus as their head goes under for the third time (anyone remember the Green Party?) The NLG seems to have some staying power, even if only as an irrelevancy, or at minimum an example of the kind of illegitimate husk that remains of an organization once the cancer of divestment has spread completely through it.
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3 comments:
"The landscape is littered with organizations that have gone down the tubes clutching onto their anti-Israel animus as their head goes under for the third time"
Interesting observation. The Guild has become so saturated with anti-Israel sentiment, and this has proved so divisive, that some members have speculated that this discussion is a government conspiracy meant to fracture the Guild and reduce its effectiveness.
Um...I'm not sure what effectiveness they might be referring to.
Interestingly enough, the Guild is more just lawyers- it includes legal workers, and that definition has expanded to include those who organize and work with mass movements. This no doubt contributes to the proliferation of anti-Israel memos, referendum and activities.
Several years ago, the Guild sent a delegation to Egypt to meet with the Muslim Brotherhood, and came back with a glowing report. That when I gave up on the NLG.
While I don't know the full history of the Lawyer's Guild, my suspicion is that it is neither the Light Unto the Legal Profession that it professes to be, nor is it the Marxist front group described by its harsher critics. Given it's origins in the 1930s, I suspect it's one of many left-leaning organizations of that period which went into business hanging a "Please Infiltrate Me" sign on its front door.
The broadening of its membership to an amorphous category of "legal workers" probably opened it up to the current crop of infiltrators with an anti-Israel bent, but the organization clearly lacks the anti-bodies to resist being infected by viruses like divestment, to the point where the organization is now little more than a rotting corpse with people like Charlotte Kates trying to work it's dead skull like a hand-puppet.
Shame.
the kind of illegitimate husk that remains of an organization once the cancer of divestment has spread completely through it
Please return to this issue again and again. You are absolutely right that once BDS enters a movement, its only real interest is the total miopic manipulation of the movement into the most radical anti-Israel activity. BDS has absolutely no interest in the organization's stated mission, and if it achieves domination, that stated mission dissolves in the general apathy of the BDS leadership to all things non-Israel, driving away the membership. It is important to flesh this point out, repeatedly and in detail.
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