Sanction What?

While this site has been pretty busy tracking the failures of Divestment and the success of counter-Boycott, the S of BDS (“sanctions”) seems to have gotten short shrift. Partly, this is because no institution that could apply sanctions (economic or otherwise) against Israel is even remotely considering doing so. But it’s also because an analysis of what sanctions could include leads to some discomforting facts for BDS advocates.

The holy grail of the “Israel is Always Guilty” crowd would be the US ending financial support for the Jewish state. Before divestment became such a fad, ending US military and economic aid to the Jewish state was considered top priority since – according to Israel’s critics – US military aid was the only thing that gave Israel an edge over its neighbors and US economic aid was all that kept Israel from financial ruin.

This analysis ignores the fact that Israel’s most impressive period of nation building, between its founding in 1948 through the late 1960s, was during a period when Israel received little to no aid (financial or military) from the US. During this period Israel managed (without Uncle Sam’s help) to build its national institutions, integrate millions of citizens (including over a million Jews expelled from the Arab world), and win three major wars in ’48, ’56 and ’67.

It was only in 1973 that the US realized that Israel (which repeatedly defeated the Soviet Union’s Middle East clients) was an asset rather than a liability and began investing accordingly. Eventually, the US Foreign Aid budget included an annual $3 billion line item for Israel, one which critics pointed out meant the largest recipient of US foreign assistance was a modern thriving nation. But, as A. F. K. Organski’s intriguing book The 36 Billion Dollar Bargain pointed out:

* Aid to Israel was primarily directed at giving it a qualitative military advantage to make up for its numerical inferiority (much as our $50 billion per year NATO investment was designed to give Europe the edge over the Soviets). But by putting its annual donation to Israel in the Foreign Aid budget, the US could maintain the fiction with key Arab allies (such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States) that they did not have a military alliance with the Jewish state

* Because foreign aid has historically been unpopular with the US Congress, putting Israeli aid into Foreign Aid bills helped get those bills passed. In other words, far from taking money out of the mouths of starving Bangladeshis, Israel defense aid (disguised as general foreign aid) was the only way to ensure those Bangladeshis got anything at all.

Fast forward to today and the notion that cutting Israel off from US aid is the key to the Jewish state’s collapse is even more fanciful. For, over the years, US military aid has been earmarked for spending in the US (creating a domestic constituency for such spending). With the vast sharing of security-related intelligence and know-how between the two countries, during a period of war with common enemies, US money put into Israeli security channels continues to look like a wise investment indeed.

As for economic aid, this was generally used by Israeli governments to mask their own economic failings and would probably have begun a phase out years ago, but for the fact that US aid to Egypt (which is in dire need of such financial support) is directly tied to grants to Israel.

The changing financial relationship between the US and Israel has only become more stark in the last year when the Israeli economy continued to surge while the US continued to accumulate more and more debt. Just recently, talk of using US loan guarantees to put pressure on Israel induced giggles between Israeli and US negotiators who realized that today it is Israel that is helping to support US deficit spending, rather than the other way around.

So, as with so many things, those who talk of sanctions or US financial pressure on Israel are demonstrating nothing more than their ignorance, as well as their wishful thinking that an Israeli economy that today receives more venture capital from Europe than any European country is in imminent danger of financial destruction due to the noisy, but increasingly irrelevant, efforts of BDS.

It's All About Me!

A commenter at this site pointed the latest giggle-inducing “action” of our old friends Code Pink who struggled through most of 2009 trying to get anyone to notice them and their campaign against skin products from the Israeli firm Ahava. They recently claimed a new “success” in getting a Seattle Cosco to remove an Ahava Christmas display from the store. They apparently decided to not post this reader’s comment that such a “deshelving” might have something to do with the fact that it’s January.

This tale can be considered a cousin to a more serious one told by Rachel Giora, a tireless Israeli BDS activist who recently posted a 21-page document entitled “Milestones in the history of the Israeli BDS movement: A brief chronology.”

I lump these two stories together since they both share a common feature of relying almost exclusively on descriptions of activities by BDS activists themselves as proof of the momentum behind their “movement.” In the case of Giora’s piece, we are provided a pretty decent run down of petitions generated and signed calling for BDS projects within American and European universities, unions, churches and other civic institutions.

Putting aside the fact that these letters and petitions tend to re-circulate the same names over and over again (I’m often curious as to how Israelis like Ilan Pappe and Jeff Halper have time to do anything else beyond signing such documents), they all tend to be part of campaigns that either failed or never got noticed. For example (quoting Giora):

“In May 2006, the feminist organization, New Profile, sent a letter of support to the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), initiated by new Profile activist Dr. Dorothy Naor, for contemplating adopting a policy of selective divestment as a means of bringing peace to Palestinians and Israelis.”

Not mentioned (and, I suspect, not noticed) by Giora, is the fact that 2006 was the year when the Presbyterians voted down divestment by a margin of 95:5. In other words, New Profile’s letter was part of failed attempt to get PCUSA to maintain a divestment stance they took in 2004 but overwhelmingly rejected in ’06.

Again and again throughout her history, Giora talks about letters sent to organizations like the British teacher’s union AUT (now UCU), supporting a boycott of Israeli academics that never got made official union policy. The message in all of these cases seems to be that as long as you’ve got people like Giora and her friends and allies acting as busy bees to promote BDS across the globe then BDS is on the march, even if the author never points out a single actual success for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

I’ve well aware of the notion of politics acting as a surrogate for certain types of social bonding, and there is nothing wrong with agreement on important issues being the starting point of what turns into real friendships.

But in the case of the BDS movement, we seem to have a phenomenon where a decade of failure has created the need to posit a new metric for success: the enthusiasm of divestment adherents. After all, people like me who fight against BDS can expose divestment hoaxes at Hampshire, Motorola, TIAA-CREF and the like. We can point out that not one university has divested a single dollar from Israeli companies since the BDS project began in 2001. We can highlight the enormous reversals divestment has had in the few places where it briefly saw success (like the Mainline Protestant churches), or publish facts detailing the explosion of investment in Israel since the BDS project began.

But how can we argue with people like Giora when she makes the claim that she and her like-minded colleagues have put a lot of time and made a lot of noise over the last ten years promoting the case of boycott and divestment? We can’t since there is no disputing the time and energy they have invested into making BDS a reality. We can only point out that all of that effort has led to nothing but failure, and hope to God that they continue to put their chips down on this loser strategy for the next ten years.

Life is Complicated

A short-lived hoax made the rounds in the UK after the Gaza Freedom Marcher’s disastrous experiences in Egypt. It claimed that a newly created Jewish organization, Jews for Boycotting Egyptian Goods (or J-BEG) was being formed to serve up some BDS on Egypt’s behind in response to the Egyptian government’s decision to reign in the Freedom Marchers out of a completely unjustified fear of “hooliganism” (that was right before the Marchers managed to get an Egyptian cop killed at the Gaza-Egypt border).

As it turned out, the press release was fraudulent. J-BEG doesn’t exist, and the entire story was simply a parody of the countless press releases issued by “real” UK anti-Israel divestment organizations who love to include the word “Jewish” in their names. The hoax may have originated by a peculiar prankster/crankster named Charles Edgbaston, but this too seems to be just speculation.

The interesting point of the whole bizarre episode is just how easy it is to create fraudulent “news” in this Internet age, using techniques that were used again and again by the BDS “movement” itself throughout 2009. I’ve talked about the “Hampshire College Divested” hoax that broke in February, but smaller fictions regarding Motorola, TIAA-CREF and Blackrock Investments seemed to serve as the Alpha and Omega of divestment “successes” last year.

There’s no denying that there have been some wonderful benefits to the “Citizen Journalist” movement represented by, among other things, blogs that report on and analyze the day’s events without the financial or institutional overhead of TV networks and daily newspapers. As economist Arnold Kling has noted, the number of professional jobs in journalism (like the number of tenured college professorships) has always been much lower than the number of people qualified for those positions. So why should we be surprised that the Internet is full of stuff as good or better than what you find in the dailies?

At the same time, the Web provides a barrier-free mechanism to publish any fool thing you want regardless of whether or not it’s coherent, interesting or true. And given that the mainstream media struggled with double-checking facts on complex stories or stories on peripheral issues even before their budgets were slashed, the ability to get a newspaper to believe a fraudulent press release has never been higher. And once a hoax has been picked up by “the media,” new armies of partisan bloggers are waiting to pounce, pushing this now “verified” story in a hundred different places, all in an attempt to give the perception of fact to an accidental or intentional fiction.

In the case of the aforementioned BDS hoaxes (Hampshire, CREF and the like), the desire to push these stories as true seems to have welled up from (1) a desire to deceive the public that the stalled BDS movement was actually surging with momentum; and (2) a desire of BDS activists to deceive themselves that their activities were bearing fruit. In the case of Hampshire, where the behavior of student activists taught every college administrator the perils of giving BDS a hearing, the second desire (to feel politically potent) seems to have overwhelmed the need to do things that don’t sabotage your cause.

I thought about this while reading a friend’s piece on a recent decision by the Canadian government to deny a grant request by KAIROS, a political-religious organization that has been involved with BDS activities in the past. This story got picked up last month by people on both sides of the Arab-Israeli political divide, Palestinian supporters decrying the Canadian government’s “muzzling” of KAIROS, with Israel partisans celebrating Canada’s decision to stop providing taxpayer dollars to organizations that use the money to spread defamations of the Jewish state.

But once you engage with the details of the story, the situation becomes murkier. After all, KAIROS was not defunded, but simply had a grant application rejected (something that happens to most organizations that rely on grant-driven funding). And the reasons behind the decision may have had nothing to do with the Middle East, even if the Canadian government was aware of KAIROS’s activities in this area.

So here is a case involving no fraud, simply the tendency for partisan reaction to quickly take the place of reality. And if our blinders prevent us from understanding something as simple as the everyday rejection of a government grant request, it makes you wonder how much else we think we know that is actually not so.

Out and About

Well, I've been blogging lately, although doing so at other sites. Since the topics are loosely related to divestment, I thought it best to link to them, rather than repost them here.

Apparently, our old friends at Muzzlewatch have decided that they are ready to take their message to the people! Given that a large part of that message is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement supported by Muzzlewatch's "parent company" Jewish Voice for Peace, I have fun with this newly-discovered populism here.

Meanwhile, the rump of the Gaza Freedom March crew in Boston decided they desperately needed to make themselves seem relevant, given the various fiascos they are still trying to cover up (including stranding thousands of activists in Cairo due to incompetent planning and helping seal the Egyptian-Gaza border even tighter than before they decided to visit and trigger a murderous riot). So what did they do? Why picket the Israeli Consulate of course! A run down and analysis of that event appears here and here.

Thank you Mr. Galloway! May I have another?!

Apparently, a link I provided to an account of the Gaza Freedom March (GFM) fiasco in Cairo was edited once the author discovered that his post “was being used by an idiotically raving Zionist blog in order to discredit the movement to free Palestine.”

Who moi?

The author goes on to state: “It was my intention to offer a frank and entirely subjective appraisal of our failures and successes, in order to learn from our mistakes, not to aid the enemies of common decency. Therefore, I have removed this post.”

First, an observation. I can’t count the number of times that the Jewish community has been accused of marching in lockstep in their support of Israel, silencing all American Jews who dare not toe the party line. (Interestingly, these accusations are frequently made by Jewish critics of Israel in columns that routinely get published in major American newspapers, or broadcast nationwide on television, cable, radio and the Internet.)

But as the quote above demonstrates, it seems as if it’s Israel’s critics who feel the need to not just hide, but to burn and bury their dirty laundry in some kind of “not-in-front-of-the-Zionists” show of false unity that suppresses any public display of disagreement.

In this particular case, here you an activist who (putting aside my disagreement with his chosen political positions) provided thoughtful commentary on some serious problems that attended an ill-conceived protest in Egypt that, among other things, helped seal off the Egypt-Gaza border even more tightly than before and even managed to get someone killed.

But once that criticism got picked up “outside the family” out came the eraser, and away went any trace of internal reflection, to be replaced by the new official party line (that Israel and the US were to blame for the GFM fiasco(s) by muscling their Egyptian ally to treat the Gaza Freedom Marchers as a bunch of troublemakers). Apparently, if it’s a contest between “learn[ing] from our [the GFM’s] mistakes” and providing ammunition to the “enemies of common decency” (i.e., people who disagree with the GFM party line), then it’s “No Thanks” to learning anything, followed by “Thank you Mr. Galloway, may I have another!”

As a final note, while I’m sure this site contains its fair share of idiocy, it’s a little light on the “raving Zionism” if only because the focus of my blog is not Zionist politics per se, but the fight against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). And remember that BDS is a fight that I did not start. BDS came to me in my former hometown of Somerville, Massachusetts trying to turn a friendly community into their political plaything. BDS has attempted to insert itself into universities, churches, unions and community organizations, usually gaining nothing for their effort, but managing to create chaos and ill-will in their wake.

Despite the pose struck by its proponents, BDS is a militant attack that twin targets the state of Israel and peace itself with the recent chaos at the Egyptian-Gaza border (where GFM protestors got to maintain their self-perception as “peace activists” because someone else pulled the trigger that got an Egyptian cop killed) a perfect microcosm of where this warped ideology leads.

As long as people make it their business to use this tactic, regardless of the wreckage it causes, they will find people like me using what resources we can muster to make sure their squalid little BDS project enters its second decade with nothing but failure to show for itself.

The Gaza Freedom March Witches Brew

Boy, you miss a couple of days of action with the “Free Gaza” peace caravan and – lo and behold – they’ve finally managed to kill someone!

Given that the riot George Galloway and his Gaza Freedom Marchers triggered only did in an Egyptian policeman, don’t expect Alan Rickman to produce a play featuring this now-dead Egyptian lounging on his childhood bed reading excerpts from his diary. Alas, international “peace groups” like Gaza Freedom March (GFM) or the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) only bestow sanctified martyrdom on those they manage to get killed if it serves some “higher” (i.e., useful) political purpose.

But just maybe there is method in Galloway’s madness. Having succeeded in pointing out to the world that Gaza does indeed have two borders, perhaps by heating up the Egyptian-Gaza supply line (which will no doubt lead to increased closures and tighter security), the Freedom Marchers have ensured that their meager, symbolic deliveries to Gaza will be among the last.

Or perhaps there is no method to any of this, just the desire of several hundred political tourists to feel like they’re part of an action-oriented political vanguard (with First Class accommodations and return trip tickets, of course).

During the last couple of weeks when the global Israel-hating community has been trying desperately to recreate the hysteria that accompanied last year’s Operation Cast Lead, I’ve been thinking about why 100% of the attention has been heaped on Gaza with virtually no concern left over for Palestinians living on the West Bank.

There are, of course, simple answers to this question (which may be true, even if they’re pat). Gaza clearly suffers scars of the recent conflict, and Gazans do face security measures that have since been lifted in Palestinian territories less interested in exporting howitzer canisters and suicide bombers into Israel. But, then again, West Bank Palestinians certainly have needs and increased freedom of movement means the peace caravaners could easily get a percentage of their aid gifts to Ramallah if they wanted to.

There is also talk about Hamas as a “democratically elected government” vs. the “corrupt” Palestinian authority. But this seems to ignore the enthusiasm these Friends of Palestine had for the Godfather of the current corrupt government in the region, Yassir Arafat, who still found Western supporters flocking to pay homage to him ten years into his five-year elected term.

There is another explanation, one that forces us to confront the fact that the sympathies of “peace activists” of the Galloway, GSM, ISM, Code Pink variety tend to fall disproportionally not on those suffering the most, but on those most likely to pull a trigger, fire a rocket or self detonate. Paul Berman, quoting Camus, points out that “the sinister excites,” and that the “transgression of suicide murder” can arouse a vicarious thrill that is as passionate (and occasionally sexual) as it is perverse.

Those locked in a fantasy of their own unquestionable virtue and political potency don’t only open themselves up to manipulation by con artists like George Galloway. They also help dramatically increase the amount of suffering in the world by combining: (1) a fetishistic desire for the thrill of vicarious violence; (2) a willingness to encourage such violence (under the guise of supporting the weak); and (3) an impenetrable shield of self righteousness that prevents them from comprehending the notion that they might possibly be responsible for creating (rather than alleviating) the suffering of those they claim to care about.

Could even Severus Snape come up with a nastier and more volatile witches brew than that?

GFM/BDS – Screwing Your Allies

In Boston, the Gaza Freedom Marchers came, they annoyed some New Year’s celebrants, they gathered under a banner asking “AMERICA STOP FIGHTING FOR THE JEW” (later, slightly modified with the addition of “ish STATE” – possibly written using a large red crayon).

In San Francisco, they donned foam-rubber puppet heads and frightened children walking by the Israeli consulate. And in solidarity with their fellow Gaza Freedom Marchers in Cairo, they held a series of two-hour hunger strikes (no doubt forgoing appetizers once the hunger strikers took a break for lunch).

But it was in Cairo that the true believers gathered in force, having spent thousands of dollars each to travel to Egypt, only to wind up making their “historic” Gaza Freedom March around their hotel lobbies. And what was the message they delivered to the world? Only the now-obvious fact that Gaza has two borders (which means that the “siege” the GFMers were protesting could end immediately once Hamas started using their Egyptian border to import food rather than missile parts).

Given the self-congratulations ringing in the Israel-bashing corners of the blogosphere, one would have thought that the GFM’s attempt to re-ignite the anti-Israel hysteria that accompanied last year’s Gaza conflict consisted of more than a concentrated fiasco in Cairo and some self-indulgent street theater in major metropolitan areas like Waterville, Maine.

But it all begins to make sense once you realize that theater is the point of it all. There is a reason the Internet is filled with photos of Code Pink “activists” stripped to their underwear, smearing themselves with Ahava mud in department stores, despite the fact that this particular form of “direct action” has barely ever taken place. It’s because those photos are the first and foremost goal of such activities. The purpose of Code Pink is to make its members feel significant, important, edgy. And if over a thousand people have to go broke dragging themselves to Cairo only to get arrested, beaten or ignored, that’s a small price to pay to let the Code Pink crew continue to dwell in their fantasy world.

It’s become more and more clear with each passing year that participants in BDS (including the Gaza Freedom March leadership now looking for a new activity to distract the world from their recent Cairo fuck-up) could not care less about Palestinians or any of the “downtrodden” in whose names they claim to speak. But with the GSM/Galloway/Code Pink fiasco starting out the year, we’ve turned a new page where the BDS mixture of self-indulgence, indifference to others and complete lack of any sense of consequence for their decisions is now primarily targeted at the rank and file participants in their own movement.

BDS: The Last Refuge of a Loser

If AIPAC, Alan Dershowitz and the Mossad were make a wish for what they hoped Israel’s opponents would kick off the year with, they would be hard pressed to come up with anything better than last week’s Gaza Freedom March fiasco.

From across the Atlantic, leadership for the scheme was provided by none other than George Galloway, the legendary British loudmouth who so pleases foes of American foreign policy that they continually fail to notice that he’s picked their pockets for the umpteenth time.

And providing leadership and logistics from the American end was Code Pink, a group whose operational abilities currently extend to getting six people into a department store to smear themselves with mud and take photos of each other before getting arrested.

With such an able crew at the helm, what could possibly go wrong when they convinced over 1200 anti-Israel activists from around the world to fly to Egypt where they were told they could march to the Egyptian side of the Gaza border and join protestors in Gaza (as well as other GFM events around the world) in a massive demonstration of solidarity?

Well, to begin with, no one seems to have gotten all of the I’s dotted and T’s crossed with the Egyptian government before asking over a thousand people to spend their vacation time and cash flying to Cairo in hopes that they’d be allowed “go mental” at the tense Egyptian-Gaza border.

And so, protestors were left cooling their heels in their Cairo hotels for days on end. Absent planning or leadership, some activists simply started harassing Egyptians, going down the usual checklist (hunger strikes, sit-ins, etc.), only to discover that the Galloway/Code Pink axis had sold them out by cutting deal with the Egyptian government to let 100 leadership-chosen activists enter Gaza after all.

I’ll have more on the GFM over the coming days (including its hilarious attempt to crash First Night celebrations in Boston), but given the focus of this blog, the point of bringing up GFM is the resolution that this intrepid vanguard created to try to salvage the wreckage they caused in Egypt, their masterly Cairo Declaration.

And what new, innovative, brilliant tactics form the basis of this new gauntlet they are throwing down to the world: why none other than Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), with a focus on international trade unions.

As noted, I’ll have more to say on GFM and BDS in the coming days, but for now I’d just like to invite Code Pink to embrace their Cairo Declaration and begin right now to get the AFL-CIO (or any American labor union) behind their squalid little project. And their success or failure in this endeavor will allow us to directly measure the capability of their leadership and popularity of their cause (or lack thereof).