By Alex Joffe
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Among the enduring strengths of the Israel boycott
movement are its ability to convince certain types of people that the cause is
not only just but successful. But with whom are those arguments effective?
There is a strong contrast between institutions governed by rules and evidence
and those controlled by emotion.
Negative examples are ample: the European Commission’s
relentless demands that products from Israeli communities in the West Bank be
specially labeled, the refusal of the student government at Vassar College to
fund a J Street group on the grounds that “Zionism is an inherently racist
ideology,” violence directed at Jewish participants at the National LGBTQ Task
Force’s Creating Change conference, the demand that singer Matisyahu denounce
Israel as a condition for performing at a Spanish reggae festival. Many more
could be cited.
A look at the boycott movement’s failures, and successes,
tells us much about the worlds in which it is embedded. Those diverse worlds—of
universities and academic associations, liberal Protestant denominations, the
European Commission, far-left protest movements and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), far-left Jewish groups, and Islamists—is failing, in the
sense of intellectual coherence, the ability to persuade, and basic morality.
Some, like liberal Protestants, are actually shrinking fast. But that doesn’t
mean they will lose in the end.
Few Organizations
Are Discriminating Against Israel
Reality is different from how the movement portrays
itself. Successes, in terms of convincing institutions to boycott, divest from,
or legally sanction Israel, are meager. Global industries are uninterested in
excluding Israel. Investment in Israel is rising, especially from Asia. Even
trade with Europe is unimpeded. No university or corporation has sold its stock
in companies, like Intel or Caterpillar, for doing business in Israel. Claims
of the movement’s success are therefore misleading; misrepresentation is part
of its tradecraft.
For another thing, backlash against boycotts is growing,
particularly at the state level. Legislators in Florida and California have
followed the lead of Ohio, Illinois, and South Carolina in proposing laws that
would prohibit anti-Israel discrimination by state agencies, including pension
funds. Remarkably, similar controls are under consideration in Britain, where
the Conservative Party has proposed to restrict the ability of local councils
and pension funds to discriminate against Israel on political grounds.
Even at universities, where pro-boycott activists have
occasionally managed to manipulate or coerce student governments into passing
boycott and divestment resolutions (while harassing
Jewish and pro-Israel students), in no case have university administrations,
much less boards of trustees or investment managers, followed suit. To the
contrary: Israel boycott and divestment resolutions are regularly denounced. It
is one of the few signs that universities remain under the control of
responsible adults.
Where Israel-Hating
Thrives
But the opposite is true in student governments, which
are regularly co-opted by pro-boycott forces and their far-left allies. So too
are campus politics at large, increasingly dominated by retreaded New Left
politics of pique, the Black Panther revivalism of Black Lives Matter and
Ferguson, the Occupy movement’s watery socialism, and neo-Victorian anti-rape
protests, against a backdrop of incoherent rage over cultural appropriations
and grievances, many so small as to be labeled “micro-aggressions.”
It is also not surprising the anti-Israel movement also
finds limited success in local “human rights commissions” and city councils—but
only in places like Cambridge and Portland, where students who never fully grew
up maintain the adolescent tone of local politics.
A similar attitude of wide-encompassing anger applies to
academics, particular academic organizations. The Israel boycott resolution adopted
by the National Women’s Studies Association is especially notable in this
regard. Their resolution is motivated ostensibly by “intersectionality” and the
“interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” predictably personified
by Israel. Such a complex formulation of a traditional animus is neither a sign
of clear thinking nor a healthy discipline.
These are signs of intellectual and moral failure, the
collapse of any ideal animating the very idea of education and the mission of
the university beyond the politics of rage. They portend ill for society, for
there is no doubt that the activism of professors and students alike has
poisoned countless classrooms.
In contrast, the rejection of an anti-Israel resolution
by the American Historical Association is heartening. It suggests, unlike in
women’s studies, “American Studies,” or anthropology, that an academic
discipline which is still actually about something
academic may be salvageable, before it descends down the rabbit hole of
“relevance” and “social justice.”
The Borders
Between Rationality and Rage
But campus radicalism and “social justice” also have
their limits. Despite decades of anti-American agitation, America has not still
been transformed into a socialist paradise. Reality burns away many collegiate
fantasies and idylls, and the sheer hysteria and accompanying intimidation of
campus protests today is likely to alienate as many students from causes as
attract them. That alienation is quantifiable in plummeting enrollments in the
humanities and social sciences, the epicenter for anti-Israel and anti-American
agitation. Another index is rising anger from parents, although skyrocketing
costs play an equal role with politics.
It is also worth pointing out that calls for boycotting
Israel have not impeded the actual mechanism of the university, the daily life
of operations and finances, the churn of students and flows of money. Giving to
universities, including, paradoxically, by Jewish donors, remains at record
levels. Apparently the body and certain higher functions remain alive even as
large parts of the brain have turned rabid. Of course, a university comprised
of administrators, “diversity coordinators,” and part-time instructors hardly
deserves the name. But rules and procedures associated with the profitable
business of being a university are not easily overthrown in the name of “social
justice.”
The recent decision by a Spanish court to award damages
to an Israeli university, located inconveniently across the “Green Line,” when
a Spanish agency illegally excluded its students from an international
technology competition, is also notable. It suggests that certain higher social
functions, namely the judiciary, have not been completely infected by the virus
of anti-Israel bias. In this respect it will be interesting to see the result
when the European Commission’s blatantly discriminatory labeling regulations
for Israeli products from communities in the West Bank enters court or World
Trade Organization arbitration.
The Flight from
Responsibility Accelerates
There are striking contrasts between how Israel boycotts
are treated by rules and results-based institutions, like legislatures, courts,
and pension fund managers, and institutions ruled by emotion that have no
oversight, like academic organizations, student governments, the European
Commission, or the NGO sector. By exempting themselves from rules, and in some
cases from the political process as a whole, the latter are often uniquely in
synch with Israel boycotters, and the pro-Palestinian movement, which put the
Palestinian cause above examination and exempt it from criticism.
But the fact that some institutions with real
responsibilities, like British councils and labor tribunals, could contemplate
Israel boycotts in the first place is another sign that politics have been
infected. While the Labour Party continues to deny it supports Israel boycotts,
numerous members of Parliament believe the opposite, both to pander to
constituents and as a matter of personal conviction, economic consequences and
morality be damned. Similar trends are evident in the progressive wings of the
Democratic Party.
The flight towards ideological politics and away from
practicality and responsibility is a growing problem in the West. This will
intensify, precisely as a function of cascading social and political disasters,
especially the collapsing Middle East and social unrest resulting from mass
immigration to the West. Pressure to focus on the unique evil of Israel and
away from these self-inflicted wounds and their progressive policy causes will
be enormous.
But in a world of human rights abuses by ISIS, Russia,
Iran, and others, the health of institutions can be measured in part by how
they stand up to calls to boycott Israel. Corporations and judiciaries, and
occasionally even academics, each with greatly differing mandates, have the
potential to stem the flows of bias and hatred. There may even be hope for
universities. The trends are not positive, nor are they so terrible to give up
all hope that with strong leadership from above sense may prevail.
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