Interlocutor

Interlocutor – Definition

One who takes part in dialogue or conversation

Having blogged about BDS for close to three years now, one of my greatest disappointments is the lack of BDS advocates ready to engage in a serious discussion or debate over their political project.

Sites of organizations that advocate for BDS rarely allow comments, and even when they do, comments challenging their opinions tend to quickly disappear or get caught in moderation forever. 

I still hold out hope that Young Jewish and Proud will answer the invitations I’ve sent them to debate this issue publically (especially since they announced a plan to engage in dialog through their upcoming Go and Learn program).  But given historic refusal of Jewish Voicefor Peace’s (parent organization to Young, Jewish and Proud) to share their civic spaces, even as they demand entrance to everyone else’s, my hope to find a good set of interlocutor’s within that group is dimming.

Of course, this site has always been open to comments, and a number of BDS proponents have visited us over the years.  To date, however, these visitors have scrupulously avoided discussing any issues brought up on this blog, preferring instead to show up, hurl an accusation (or leave a link) completely unassociated with anything mentioned in my posting, and demand we debate that subject instead.  And even when we follow their lead, they tend to make themselves scarce once their accusations or opinions are effectively challenged.

We recently had an above-average visitation from a young man involved with the big BDS conference that will take place at the University ofPennsylvania in February.  On the plus side, he provided us interesting information on his new organization (PennBDS) and how it relates to at least one other pro-Palestinian group on campus. 

Now a number of Divest This regulars came at him from a number of directions, but my biggest issue with him was the initial attempt he used to try to put me on the defensive. 

As many of you know, I’m quite interested in the use of political language, and the rhetorical technique he attempted falls into the category of red-herring fallacy coupled with some judgmental language.  This combination is a fairly typical in any heated debate (especially online) and starts with finding some point in an opponent’s argument that is vague or ambiguous.  In this case, he fixed on a statement I made that Penn BDS advocates were working “morning, noon and night” to get U Penn to divest, which I claimed put into question statements of the conference organizers that they don’t care about the University distancing themselves from the event.

My opponent pointed out that his group, PennBDS, is new and is focused primarily on this upcoming conference, and thus the statement that they were working “morning, noon and night” on an actual Penn-based divestment effort was false.  More than that, he claimed that this was an outright lie, a lie he demanded I admit to (which would no doubt help him make the broader case that, as the author of this site, I am an admitted liar whose words cannot be trusted on any matter).

The loaded language comes in when insisting that a rhetorical flourish not necessarily meant to be taken literally (was I really claiming that he and his organization worked every morning, every afternoon and every evening on just one BDS-related effort?) was an act of deliberate dishonesty and refusing to accept other more-likely interpretations.

And when I pointed out that the broader point (that as a BDS organization at Penn, PennBDS does indeed care if the university shows interest or disinterest in the BDS agenda) is more than valid, he retreated to an unrelated argument (that BDS must be successful, otherwise why would I and other pro-Israel activists put so much time into fighting it?).

This is an argument we have heard before, especially from a “movement” that has so few actual victories to hang their hat on and must thus look to the existence of opponents to demonstrate their effectiveness.  While there are many plausible reasons why people like me do what I do that don’t necessarily require us to be frightened of the stupendous success of the boycott and divestment “movement,” his original argument is another example of an effective rhetorical strategy, given that it puts Israel’s defenders in a lose-lose situation of either staying silent and letting Israel’s defamers run wild, or challenging them (at which point we become the basis the BDSers use to demonstrate their success).

As usual when talking about rhetoric and argumentation, I am probably going on too long about too little.  Still, it would be nice to find an interlocutor ready to stay the course in what I promise will be a respectful, if challenging, dialog with someone whose passion on this subject is at least as great as that of any BDS champion. Absent that, we seem to be dealing with a “movement” that is willing to do anything to push forward their cause short of actually defending it.

Headlines

In case you haven’t visited there yet, I recommend you stop by and bookmark the new BDS Global Digest site which is doing a job this site’s never been able to do adequately: providing ongoing reports of BDS and BDS-related stories in the news. 

Two of their stories seem to point to the Israeli economy reaching a tipping point with regard to the relationship between the Jewish state and the rest of the world. 

This piece highlights Apple Computer’s decision to open its first development center outside of the US in Haifa, Israel.   If you add this remarkable accomplishment to decisions made by two other technology behemoths – Intel and Google – to double down on Israel, we have at last gotten to a point where a BDSer can’t touch a mouse or keyboard without busting their own boycott (and, in effect, becoming a scab to their own cause).

The second story tells of a $100MM+ partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion Institute which will create a new applied sciences campus in New York City.  This bid beat out proposals by other major institutions, all of which brought plenty to the table, albeit without an Israeli partner.  So far from being an albatross around the neck of Cornell, academic linkages with the Jewish state have proven to be the source of fantastic success.

Which brings up this interesting headline regarding the University of Pennsylvania’s decision to distance itself from a major BDS conference that will take place there in February.  In this case, the school is not preventing the event from taking place but is simply making it clear that the opinions of the Penn BDSers and their guests are not shared by the university itself in any way, shape or form. 

Needless to say, the organizers of the event are blaming this dissing on the usual bogeymen, while all the time claiming that endorsement of the university means nothing to them anyway (a strange claim indeed from a movement which exists solely to get its words to come out of the mouth of major institutions like the U Penn).

In a way, Israel’s foes are also trying to create their own tipping point, hoping if they can get enough schools, churches, rock stars and food co-ops to join their little boycott that this will create precedent which (they hope) will lead to similar groups signing up for the BDS program automatically.  This need to create an illusion of momentum is why they play up every win (no matter how tiny) and ignore every loss (no matter how huge).  It’s why they today claim to not give a damn about what U Penn thinks, even though PennBDS (sponsors of next year’s conference) are allegedly working morning, noon and night to get that school to share their opinion on the Middle East (and act accordingly).

There will be more (a lot more) to say about the U Penn event in the new year, but before wishing everyone a happy Kwanznukamas and signing off, I wanted to end with this final headline I stumbled across during my semi-regular Google search for BDS-related news:

OK, OK, in this case “BDS” refers to the dental examination, not the “mass movement” designed to bring the Israeli economy to its knees through song, dance and kvetching.  But still, it’s got nice ring to it so I thought I’d leave it with you to savor for the rest of the holiday season.

Hampshire BDS Revisited

If there’s one article I’ve linked to internally more than any other since starting this blog, it would definitely be this piece on Hampshire College.

Part of this is due to the fact that Divest This got started in reaction to the (false) story that Hampshire College had become “the first US college to divest in Israel” in early 2009. More specifically, it started as a reaction to the attempted rekindling of a BDS tactic that had been dormant for several years before the Hampshire story put it back into play.

Hampshire was also the original BDS hoax which led to several similar frauds during the three years since then (most of which consisted of attempts to pass off generic business decisions by third parties as being examples of politically motivated divestment choices targeting the Jewish state). So whenever a new boycott hoax broke out, it was easy to reach for Hampshire as the Ur-example of BDS dishonesty and excess.

Well Hampshire College’s investment portfolio is back in the news (or at least in my friend Jim Wald’s blog). After some discussion and debate, the school revealed a new policy regarding socially responsible investment which it declares to be the most rigorous in the country.

While the critical thinker in me has questions regarding what measurement is used to test the rigor of ethics, regarding the politics of the new policy the college seems to have come up with a way to balance its need to be socially responsible with the need to avoid the irresponsibility of certain parties it had to deal with two and a half years back.

Now some people have pointed out that the new policy does provide the local Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group an opening, given that the criteria it specifies for considering an investment/divestment target as “controversial” involves taking into account the opinion of a number of institutions that have long since been co-opted by the Palestine-uber-alles brigade (such as the UN or human rights NGOS) as well as reports in the media (which we all know bend over backwards to double check every story coming from the Middle East to guard against inaccuracy and bias).

But these potential loopholes (which are pretty minor and manageable, especially with grownups in the cockpit of decision-making), create a much bigger dilemma for the SJP types than they do for Israel’s defenders.  After all, SJPers have just two choices now that the new guidelines have been published: (1) don’t appeal to the school to place Israel-related companies on the Hampshire blacklist (which means Hampshire divestment won’t be an issue for anyone) or (2) do make such an appeal and ask the school to apply the new guidelines and divest from Israel.

The trouble (for them anyway) is that SJP has spent the last two and a half years announcing that Hampshire College has already divested from the Jewish state.  And they didn’t just make this claim once a few years back.  Rather, in press releases, conferences, speaking gigs, and even a movie, they have celebrated over and over their “success” in getting Hampshire to become “the first US college to divest from Israel.”  So if they now go back to that same administration and ask them to actually do what SJP just pretended they did in 2009, that would represent nothing less than an outright admission of what we already know: that SJP lied about Hampshire’s action in 2009 and has been lying about it ever since.

There is precedent (TIAA-CREF) where the BDS “movement” made a false claim about an alleged divesting institution one year and then appealed to that same institution to actually divest the year afterwards.  But in the case of TIAA-CREF, it was the boycotters original hoax that got dumped down the memory hole before they began a multi-year (so-far failing) campaign to get CREF to actually do what the boycotters just faked they did previously.

In the case of Hampshire’s, however, the only reason SJP is on the map (and has become the focal point of campus anti-Israel activity for the last several years) is because of their claims that they succeeded in getting a school to actually divest.  If they now go back to the administration with new divestment demands, that would constitute nothing less than a full admission that they have been lying to everyone for two years, something that needs to be taken into account when evaluating any claim about any subject made by this group (or any other BDS organization for that matter).

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon a reflection by a Hampshire BDSer on his experience in 2009 which contains this extremely telling quote:

“To me, our failures were serious but understandable. The largest of these failures, obviously, was our inability to get the college to release an official statement alongside their divestment from the State Street mutual fund, which held six companies profiting from Israel’s occupation. This put us in the vulnerable position of having to fight back against not only the massive political force of the defenders of Israel’s atrocities but also our very own college, who quickly buckled to outside pressure. Essentially, we had prepared to be called “terrorists,” “terrorist sympathizers,” and “anti-Semites” – and we knew how to respond to those accusations. What we didn’t prepare for was being called liars. This forced us to spend a good amount of time, energy, and resources defending ourselves and our story, rather than simply using the platform to educate the public about Palestine as well as the BDS movement.”

As I’ve noted in the past, the boycotters have a ready store of stock answers when accused of anti-Semitism et al, but are rendered dumb when they are characterized (accurately) as losers or, in this case, liars.  While the Hampshire writer seems to think that SJP’s failure was the result of not getting the administration to officially sanction their fraudulent claims, I think there is a more obvious reason why the group was accused of lying, which I submitted in a comment to the story last April (a comment that still seems to be stuck in moderation for some reason):

Nuff said...

Go and Learn - Take 2

Well this is weird. While my comment was posted last week at the Jewish Voice for Peace/Young Jewish and Proud/Go and Learn web site, not much else has happened there since. So I decided to post an opening question in order to get the conversation going. But then it seemed that the ability to post comments on their site was gone.

Continuing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, I decided to send my comment directly to the e-mail address they have on their site. Here's my note in its entirity and I'll keep you posted regarding whether they respond.

Just an FYI – The comments section of your Go and Learn web page seems to have disappeared (at least on Internet Explorer). I’m assuming this is either a technical glitch, or some problematical (and possibly rude) commenters required you to screen polite (even if challenging) comments from inappropriate insults before posting them.

If that’s the case, I hope you’ll be able to post the message below on your site, hopefully with a response so we can get this conversation you are clearly eager to have started.

COMMENT:

It’s been close to a week since I posted my invitation to debate the plusses and minuses of BDS with folks at JVP/YJP. Given the holidays (and the time it might take to pull together a response from all the material you are gathering for your March program), I thought it might be easiest to post something on a relatively simple specific BDS-related issue to start the conversation you so clearly desire. Until I hear otherwise, I’ll keep posting things here and my http://www.divestthis.com/ web site.

For the first topic, let’s start with something small and seemingly clear cut: when did the BDS project begin? Yours and similar BDS sites trace the origin of your movement to the July 9, 2005 “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS,” indicating that BDS efforts in the US and abroad represent a response to this 2005 event.

But if you do a little Googling, you will see that divestment was first making headlines not in 2005 but in 2002 when BDS efforts were underway at many US college campuses (with a petition-driven divestment campaign at Harvard and MIT putting the program on the media landscape). In fact, my own involvement in fighting against BDS began in 2004 when a divestment campaign came to Somerville, MA right after a successful effort by your predecessors to get the US Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) to pass a divestment resolution that same year.

Unfortunately, a factual timeline traces BDS back not to the 2005 Civil Society call but to the now-notorious Durban Conference in 2001 when (at an associated NGO conference) anti-Israel NGOs met to launch a coordinated “Apartheid Strategy” campaign with BDS as its prime tactic. I say “unfortunately,” because this would create an origin for your efforts not in a call from Palestinian civil society but in a constellation of organizations originating in the US and Europe (as well as in the states of the Middle East).

Claims that BDS began years after its actual 2001 start date also allow you to ignore what happened after 2004 when BDS was nearly unanimously rejected across civil society, including every college campus as well as by other members of the country’s most progressive institutions (including PCUSA which rescinded its 2004 divestment resolution in 2006 by a margin of 95%-5%).

A 5-6 year vs. 10-11 year time horizon also lets BDS advocates claim a degree of newness to their program which makes the near complete lack of actual tangible boycott or divestment successes seem more the result of this still being an early stage of your campaign. It also helps obscure the fact that during the actual BDS decade (not half decade), other divestment campaigns (notably against Iran and Sudan) were both launched and succeeded. Finally, it helps avoid the fact that the Israeli economy doubled in size and the popularity of Israel in the US shot up 20 percentage points during the very years boycott and divestment champions were trying to get both numbers to go down.

I look forward to hearing your perspective on seemingly simple, but actually quite informative issue.

Jon

Veterans

One brief note to start this piece: My invitation to debate BDS published here and on Jewish Voice for Peace/Young Jewish and Proud’s new Go and Learn site was recently released from moderation. I eagerly await their first response, which will give them the chance to participate in that discussions the rest of the Go and Learn site indicates JVP desires above all else. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, my mind recently began wandering to the subject of veterans.

In our modern age, we tend to think of the outcome of warfare being decided primarily by technology and logistics, with armies able to deploy and utilize complex weapons systems in the land, sea and air being superior to those who cannot. And even when you look at asymmetrical warfare, which tends to utilize roadside bombs, terror tactics and propaganda instead of aircraft carriers and robot drones, success in this field requires mastery of technical and political skill, rather than fighting experience.

But if you look back throughout the thousands of years of history when war was conducted primarily with the same hardware (swords, spears, bows, shields, armor and the like), the factor marking the difference between a successful and unsuccessful army was the experience of the soldiery.

Troops loyal to Julius Caesar, for example, were not referred to as “Caesar’s Soldiers” or “Caeser’s Legions,” but “Caesar’s Veterans,” highlighting the fact that soldiers who spend decades fighting side by side provided the edge in battle even against far larger armies.

Even the strategic genius of a commander is frequently the result of a general himself being the veteran of numerous campaigns, providing him the chance to try different things at different times and experience both victory and defeat.

I bring this up since another strength BDS warriors bring to battle (along with Web 2.0 communication skill and complete indifference to the needs of others) is their experience waging their propaganda campaigns over many years and even decades. For most of us, the thought of engaging in a divestment debate in our student union or town hall is appalling not just because of the nature of the subject matter, but because few of us have experience engaging with (in this case) aggressive political warfare that is likely to create tension and conflict (the very things many of us spend our lives trying to avoid).

But years of experience battling against the boycotters eventually provides us the veteran’s perspective, helping turn what might have originally felt like distasteful conflict into a battle we eagerly anticipate for the thrill it provides (especially in victory – the familiar result for pro-Israel activists engaged in a BDS fight).

I can attest to this personally as someone addicted to the rush of watching a BDS vote (even on Twitter- which I still barely know how to use) go down to defeat. And my eagerness to mix it up with folks like Young, Jewish and Proud derives from longing to engage in arguments I’ve been writing about for years with no interlocutors ready to engage in some serious intellectual jousting.

But the veteran’s experience can also be seen in the wider Jewish community, best exemplified by this report from the Reut Institute on how 2011 was the year Israel’s supporters fought back (successfully and unapologetically) against the still-more-experienced defamers of the Jewish state. As time goes on, more experience should drive more success and success will drive our desire to obtain more experience, creating new generations of vets capable of continuing to stare down the BDS threat, regardless of the ruthlessness of our adversaries.

As a final note, I’d like to pay a brief tribute to a veteran of many wars who finally lost out to the one enemy none of us can avoid forever. Christopher Hitchens may have never been a great friend to the Jewish state. But he was a great friend to others who earned his sympathy (such as the people of Iraq) and Hitchens fought for their cause, regardless of what previous friends and allies had to say on the matter. While I am sad that this iconoclast of great wit and letters passed away without embracing the justice of Israel’s cause (or the Jewish world of which he was a part), I shall miss him and his words, even (or especially) the ones with which I disagreed.

Go and Learn

As regular (and even irregular) readers may know, I have been a harsh critic of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), one of the main proponents of BDS (at least in certain parts of the US). And I have been particularly harsh on them for their insistence on having access to other people’s public forums while simultaneously controlling or eliminating discussion in thier own civic spaces where debate over BDS and other issues could occur in public.

Well good news! It looks like the youth wing of JVP (named Young, Jewish and Proud) has decided to engage with critics (and supporters) of BDS in a new program they entitle Go and Learn. Now this program is scheduled to begin in March, but given the clear importance JVP/YJP put on this issue, I have invited them to begin the debate immediately on their new Web site and just posted the following invitation in this comments section:

Why Wait?

I’m thrilled to learn that you are interested in an open discussion and education project surrounding the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) project.

As some of you may know, I represent one of those people “actively opposed to [BDS]” your invitation above is asking to engage with you. As the creator of the web site www.divestthis.com, I have been eager to discuss and debate with people like yourselves who are supportive of BDS. Until now, however, there have been very few supporters of BDS ready to engage directly on this subject in a sustained and constructive manner.

I’m glad to discover that JVP is interested in remedying this situation and recommend that we begin this debate right now on the Internet (where the world has access to our exchanges), rather than wait until March to discuss what the Young, Jewish and Proud organization obviously considers to be such a pressing topic.

I will post information on your invitation and my own at Divest This (along with any follow ups), but I recommend we have this public discussion right here since, unlike the forums you claim to not have access to, your organization is in full control of this online space. And using it to provide a globally public forum for our conversation would not just provide everyone with the discussion you clearly crave, but would also demonstrate JVP’s openness (in contrast with those places you feel you have been excluded from).

I look forward to hearing back from you and let the conversation begin!

This invite is awaiting moderation, but given the eagerness they are showing to have an open conversation on the subject we will no doubt hear from them soon.

I’ll keep you posted.

Trends

Team BDS has developed a bit of a track record with regard to discovering or anticipating economic trends, then claiming credit for business decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with their boycott and divestment efforts (or any other political issue, for that matter).

Exhibit A: In 2009, Motorola’s decided to get out of a certain line of defense business, selling off a $20MM unit that had just one customer (the Israeli Defense Forces) to its Israeli partner.

“Motorola Divests from Israel!” was the announcement that went out via the BDS megaphones, ignoring the fact that this divestment “victory” was nothing more than a business decision by a huge company to sell off a small subsidiary with no political implications whatsoever (unless you want to draw some from the fact that Motorola was more than happy to sell valuable defense technology to the dreaded Zionist entity).

Exhibit B: Africa-Israel, an Israeli holding company which was highly leveraged and heavily invested in property, found it stock crashing to the ground when the real estate market went bust in 2008-2009. To no normal person’s surprise, this led to a selloff of Africa-Israel shares by institutional stockholders (with many of those decisions made by software programmed to automatically sell company shares that dropped a certain percentage).

But as major investors like TIAA-CREF and Blackrock did what they do normally (dump shares of plummeting stock), the BDSers were right there announcing that each and every one of these decisions arose from their political pressure.

Exhibit C: During a decade when the boycott and divestment brigade were working tirelessly to bring Israel’s economy to its knees, that economy instead doubled in size eventually leading to Israel’s acceptance into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – again over the boycotter’s objections – giving Israel membership into the club of first-world economies.

The only thing was that shares of many Israeli companies were held by investment and retirement funds that were only chartered to buy and sell in companies in emerging markets. But once the Israel market was no longer emerging but emerged, these funds had no choice but to sell off those equities.

“We win again!” Rang from the rooftops of BDS-land, this time claiming Harvard (a university that has vehemently rejected divestment entreaties for years) had followed their recommended path and divested from “Apartheid Israel”.

Now in many of these cases, members of one or more sub-division of the “Israel is to Blame for Everything” cult did make calls for Motorola, TIAA-CREF, Blackrock, Harvard and other investors to divest from the Jewish state. And in most of those cases, these calls did precede the selling decisions noted above. But like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise, team BDS seems to have a penchant for the Post Hoc fallacy of claiming a win for everything that happens anytime after they open their mouths (even when the people allegedly doing all this divesting vehemently deny any political motives in their decision making).

I bring this up because another target of anti-Israel protest, the European industrial giant Veolia, has decided to pull up stakes and get out of the Israeli transportation industry (a role that caused them some controversy earlier this year). What the BDSers might fail to mention however (presuming they decide to use this story to anchor another round of “We Win Again” press releases) is that Veolia is not just getting out of the Israeli transport industry, they are fleeing the transportation industry worldwide.

Like other European countries bracing for an expected financial meltdown on the continent sometime in the next few months, Veolia is going through a major retrenchment, attempting to reduce it size by 20%, partly by getting out of fields not central to its core water and environmental business.

Like Motorola, Veolia is more than happy to sell off its Israeli business to Israeli partners. And like all of the companies mentioned above, Veolia’s decisions vis-à-vis Israel have nothing to do with politics, BDS or otherwise. In fact, the company plans to remain in Israel, albeit just focusing on the aforementioned water and environmental business they have decided to stay in.

Now I may simply be speculating that BDS printing presses are getting set to spin yet another purely financial decision in political terms. If this is unfair of me, then I apologize to any boycotters out there in advance. But given their track record, I suspect the only thing keeping the divestment cru from taking credit for this particular sunrise is knowledge that we’re onto their tactics and are looking forward to exposing the next BDS fraud the minute they try to perpetrate one.

Fantasy Island

A couple of weeks back, I was sitting with some friends at work talking about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) forces that had set up camp within about 15 minutes from our office. Apparently, the day before the OWS group had obtained a court order that would temporarily prevent their forced eviction. And, in celebration, they decided to block traffic on a key bridge causing major disruption for everyone in the city, including several of my work companions.

Discussions broke along the lines you’d see in the next day’s news headlines, with some people sympathetic to OWS’s political stances ready to forgive the movement’s excesses, while others condemning them as a bunch of quasi-Marxist no-goodniks. But I absented myself from judgment, since in the back of my mind I suspected that we were not discussing a political movement at all.

To understand this, we need to go back to my favorite political writer Lee Harris whose work on fantasy politics is still required reading for anyone trying to understand 9/11 and its aftermath. His essay on fantasy ideology that put him on the map began with this personal anecdote:

"My first encounter with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability."

So why would participants in a project like OWS take action sure to alienate potential supporters? For the simple reason that those people they were inconveniencing were not seen as potential converts, but as props in a drama taking place within the protesters’ own heads.

This phenomena explains many, if not most, of the outstanding questions regarding the strange behavior of BDS activists that have been documented here for close to three years.

Why on earth would they perpetrate a hoax on the campus of Hampshire College and then harass Hampshire’s President for not playing along when such behavior was sure to spread the word among college administrators across the country that BDS was radioactive and shouldn’t be given the time of day?

Why fabricate stories about TIAA-CREF divesting from Israel one year, only to start a campaign the next year pleading to the same organization to actually do what you just pretended they did the year before (and then strike an indignant pose when CREF management tells you to fuck off)?

Why erect the same tired cardboard walls, and hold the same Apartheid Week events, and harass another generation of college students year after year after year despite the fact that this only helps galvanize pro-Israel forces to fight against the BDSer’s by-now-completely-predictable tactics? Why push for boycotts when they only invite humiliating BUYcotts in their wake? Indeed, why continue to embrace the BDS tactic that has gobbled up a decade of anti-Israel resources and only left Israel more wealthy and popular than ever before?

The answer can be found in Harris’ conception of the political fantasist. For, at the end of the day, the goal of the boycotter is not to achieve actual political success. If they catch a break (as they did briefly with the Presbyterians in 2004), they’re happy to take advantage of it. But in the meantime they can take satisfaction in achieving a far more important goal of convincing themselves that they are part of a momentous, world-historical project, indeed that they are the only people (unlike the stooges and villains they are forced to interact with) who see the world as it really is.

Within this context, college administrators, students, food co-ops, churches, Israelis, Israel supporters, even the Palestinians the BDSers claim to care so deeply about are not really organizations or individuals. Rather, they are props that inhabit the stage of the boycotter’s own personal drama, inanimate objects that exist solely to support the BDS persona as a gallant, virtuous knight fighting against insurmountable forces of infinite villainy.

Why should we care about the internal motivation of participants in the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment “movement” (especially since their excesses tend to work to our advantage over time)? Because when such fantasies move from the individual to the collective, they develop enormous destructive power, a subject about which I will give Lee Harris the final word:

"For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. It is, to be frank, something like “Dungeons and Dragons” carried out not with the trappings of medieval romances — old castles and maidens in distress — but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems. The difference between them is that one is an innocent pastime while the other has proven to be one of the most terrible scourges to afflict the human race."

Post-Modern Politics

The BDS “movement” seems to be entering its post-modern phase.

I suspect this has something to do with the fact that its participants have gotten quite good at Web 2.0 media communications, but struggle to find any news worth pushing through that pipeline.

After all, the last real serious BDS victory I can think of was the Presbyterian Church in 2004 (i.e., SEVEN YEARS AGO). “Victories” since then have involved an obscure food store here, an aging rocker there, neither of which inspired much copycatting (quite the opposite in fact).

They could, of course, try to spread more faux information through various online channels and hope that their next BDS hoax gets picked up by the media (as happened with Hampshire College in 2009). The trouble with that strategy is that so many of us are onto it that it’s usually just a matter of hours before the latest BDS hoax is exposed, making the BDSers’ own dishonesty and embarrassment the story of the day.

Without the ability to spread either true or false information about boycott and divestment wins, the BDSers are stuck talking about “Colossal Victories” in the abstract (without making mention of what these consist of) or claims that cannot be proven to be either true nor false.

For example, their latest breathless press releases are about the French financial company BNP which has apparently shut down its operations in Israel. Now the company itself has said that this decision was made for purely financial reasons (the need to consolidate with the European financial meltdown looming). And even the boycotters are not claiming that this decision followed anything they ever did.

Ah, but apparently there are Israeli officials who fear that BNP decided to shut down their Israeli operations due to fear of boycott pressures. Now these officials are unnamed, and we are given no indication how the boycotters know what’s been said in private meetings between BNP and the Israeli government. But even if this speculation turns out to have a grain of truth behind it, so what?

If there was any suspicion that BDS had a role to play in the matter, BNP itself has denied it. And as we’ve noted many times in the past, divestment is a political act and thus makes no sense if it is done in secret. In fact, the whole point of divestment as a political tactic is to establish that the BDS message of “Israel = Apartheid” represents the opinion of a large, respected organization, rather than a small, marginal fringe. But if such a message is not forthcoming from such an organization then by definition, the political act of divestment has not taken place.

You see similar post-modern responses to the decision of Israel’s supporters to hold successful Buy Israel campaigns which the boycotters portray as proof positive that BDS activity is having such an impact that Israel’s friends are embracing such tactics out of terror at divestment’s unstoppable success. Alternative explanations, such as the fact that friends of Israel can easily foil any boycott by simply going shopping, never seems to occur to them.

Looking back on the last few years, I’m starting to realize that the whole “when we lose, we’ve actually won” argument that the boycotters trot out whenever they get their head handed to them is simply a long-standing aspect of this post-modern phenomena. For the rest of us, losing a fight (political or otherwise) means losing a fight. For the boycotters, however, defeat is just another form of victory (usually wrapped in declarations of pride that they at least got their propaganda message onto the agenda of whatever organization they have targeted for manufactured controversy). It reminds me of a line in a long-cancelled sitcom about an unctuous self-help guru who tells audiences “’No’ is just ‘Yes’ to a different question.”

When you’ve got an audience hungry for tantalizing signs of imminent victory and a means of communicating with them, it can be hard not to use the latter to send messages to the former. But when those channels are clogged with trivia, fabrications or nonsense it becomes harder and harder to treat BDS as anything other than an increasingly irrelevant public nuisance.