Radical Thoughts on Fighting BDS

By RICHARD LANDES, The Augean Stables

I was just on a panel at the IDC Herzliya Conference about BDS and Europe. [My remarks made to the panel treated BDS as a cogwar campaign to destroy Israel, one of the most coveted desires of the apocalyptic millennial set (and many other Arabs and Muslims, alas).]

This is the second such discussion I’ve been in (the previous one, on Wednesday past is here in French), and below are some of the thoughts they both have inspired.

If Others Think It’s Our Fault, It Is.

People who identify themselves as “left” consistently pooh-pooh the problem on the one hand, and then turn around to say, “and if we [Israel] weren’t so bad, if our behavior didn’t seem so close to South African apartheid, then we wouldn’t be having these problems.” So on the one hand, “it’s not a big deal,” and on the other hand, “it’s our fault.”

Of course what they mean by “our fault,” is not their fault, but the “right’s” fault – Bibi, Hotovely, Bennett, the settlements, the occupation, and any other Israeli action that provokes anger among outsiders, whether they be Arab or Western. “As long as the ‘right’ keeps talking and acting the way it does, it’s impossible to win the fight against BDS. If we uprooted the settlements, then the BDS advocates wouldn’t find so sympathetic an audience.” To paraphrase Roland Freudenstein, a foreign panelist, most sympathetic to Israel, “explain and defend everything you do, including the wall, including the occupation. But building settlements?!? Seriously, Settlements?!”

As for disagreements with figures like Obama and Kerry, their perception, even if false, trumps our sense of reality. One Israeli panelist at the IDC actually dismissed the Levy Commission’s ruling on the legality of the settlements, by invoking Ban Ki Moon, “certainly no anti-Semite” (and also, no lawyer). The invocation of Moon was not about legal reasoning, but about international perception. If that’s the way the world thinks, don’t fight it. If the world sees the settlements as an illegal move that prevents peace, then it’s up to Israel to bend. As one of my (former) colleagues once said to me during the early years of the intifada, “I support Israel, but Sharon! ShaRON!.”

The situation, as I see it, is the opposite. It’s not the right that’s responsible for the loss to BDS, but the progressive left, which should have won this particular battle against the demonization of Israel handily. Indeed, the attitude of submission that it argues we Israelis should take – if the “vast majority” (apparently a favorite meme inmore than one place) believes we shouldn’t have settlements, then so be it – is the reason why progressives have folded in the face of aggressive Islamist demands. 

Can the Whole World be Wrong and Israel be Right?

Nothing offers a more telling an illustration of how this concession to the consensus omnium than the Muhammad al Durah affair. We must have killed him. There’s no way that all the media could be wrong. As one Israeli journalist told me: “100% the Israelis killed him.” Anyone who denies the consensus omnium is a conspiracy thinker. The reflex is understandable, but not necessarily correct. On the contrary, it’s self-destructive, because it gives our foes (and they are rather merciless) the ability to define the terrain.

At Connecticut College, for example, Andrew Pessin’s initial post was deliberately and dishonestly misread as acall to genocide against the Palestinian people. Once that became the formal reading (with help from the editor of the paper who ran three articles pushing that reading and not letting Pessin even know what was happening), then all hell broke loose. Students outraged, hurt, crying in professors’ offices. And any effort on Pessin’s part to say, “wait a minute here… you’ve got this entirely wrong,” was greeted by students as an even worse form of outrage, and by faculty and administration as ill-advised (“unhelpful”) since it merely outraged the students further.

The logic of joining the parade of the emperor’s new clothes, especially when it’s a parade of hatred, is not, repeat, not in the interest of those who are the target of that hatred.

Take the case of another Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, who not only swallowed whole the “Jenin Massacre” but referred to the world consensus against Israel in the following classic (premodern) terms:

I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong.

In so doing, he unconsciously echoed the words of Ahad Ha’am who, writing in 1893, at the height of a wave of blood libel accusations, wrote that people responded to Jews claiming they did not make matzah from the blood of Christian children: “Can the whole world be wrong and the Jews be right?” If we cannot at least some times say “yes” to that – Jews despite their self-deprecation, gentiles out of a sense of modesty – then we’re all in deep trouble. And now is one of those times.

When Annan made his unconsciously ironic remark, he was trapped in the first, massive case of lethal journalism – the Jenin “Massacre” – and couldn’t know how much his media sources – the world’s media sources – had misinformed him. Only the Israelis knew that the tale was not as people heard, although few imagined that, when all the dust settled, Jenin would go down in history as one of the most careful urban campaigns in the history of war.

And even some Israelis and Jews seized on the rumors of terrible deeds to wring their hands over the moral decline of their people. If instead, they had understood what was at stake, and stood firm with their own people, rather than jump on the bad news to further their morally-pressing agenda of ending the “occupation,” then maybe Annan might have hesitated to make the assumptions he did. Instead, he (and many others) resembled nothing so much as the crowd in Life of Brian who, after Brian’s mother slams the shutters in outrage at being asked if she were a virgin,mutters with conviction, “she is… yeah, she is.” Israel massacred the Palestinians, they are responsible for that poor people’s suffering.

How to Deal with a Consensus Shaped by an Inverting Media?

The issue revolves around the following two statements about the problem:

1) European hostility to Israel (including European Muslims) is a response to what Israel does to the Palestinians.

2) European hostility to Israel (including European Muslims) is a response to the Mainstream News Media’s presentation of what Israel does to the Palestinians.

This doesn’t mean that Israel doesn’t cause the Palestinians suffering. It does mean that the causes of that behavior are not often what the media depict – gratuitous bullying; and it certainly doesn’t mean that the suffering of the Palestinians – even in Gaza – has any rightful claim in terms of severity, on the world’s attention over the kind of suffering that others, including other Muslims, are suffering the world over.

Most people, especially liberals who have a powerful commitment to trusting the liberal press, cannot imagine the second scenario. Maybe there’s some exaggeration, a double standard… but not an inversion of reality. I’ll grant you that the Israeli army is not as bad as it seems, but don’t go trying to tell me that it has far and away the best record in caring about – and, as at Jenin, sacrificing – in order to spare enemy civilians. That wrong, I don’t believe the MSNM would… could get.

But the stark truth (with a small “t”, and therefore open to correction) of the early 21st century, is that a school of lethal journalists, driven by some combo of advocacy journalism (pomo/poc0-underdogma), intimidation, and profiting (emotionally and economically) from moral Schadenfreude, has dominated coverage, and literally inverted reality.

The inversion is best symbolized by the inversion of the David/Goliath diad. Now of course, it’s a tempting move, despite (or maybe because) it’s so transgressive. As an occasional invocation to make a self-critical point within the community of self-critics, fine. As a dogmatic Procrustean bed into which everything – facts, events, narratives – must be mutilated in order to fit… not so good. And that’s precisely what the “left” has allowed to happen, indeedembraced.

You may hate the settlements, and the Jews who engage in such behavior. You may believe that if only we stopped such outrageously provocative actions, they might accept us. But you need to recognize that you might be wrong, and if so, dangerously wrong.

In fact, getting outsiders to think the settlements are crucial to peace because they are so important to the Palestinians, is a tremendous cogwar victory for the other side. In adopting it you (pl. both the Jewish and the outsider hypercritics of Israel) allow the Palestinians to disguise their unwillingness to make any concessions, you forward not peace, but the two-stage plane whereby we (allegedly paranoid) Israelis will find that concessions of land to “Palestinian” sovereignty are taken as signs of weakness and triggers to further aggression.

Thus the vast consensus, including Ban Ki Moon and Barack Obama, who believe the settlements are illegal and asine qua non, of peace, is actually a sign of a masterfully duped Western sphere, swallowing the cheapest bait offered by Palestinian demopaths. A first year graduate student in history or ethics, or criminal detection, could/should be able to uncover the inconsistencies and hypocrisy in the Palestinian claims about human rights and occupation (a hypocrisy even Palestinians object to). Somehow we have a generation of dysfunctional thinkers here.

The point, it seems to me, is not to say to the outside world (the one in need of clarification), “look, I understand you’re on my side, and I appreciate it, so I’ll adopt your opposition to the settlements, if you cover my back on BDS.” On the contrary, that’s operating in a world where you try and fight anti-semitism, so that Jew hatred is “no more than absolutely necessary.”

We All Impose Upon Each Other

I think we need to argue a far more radical and sane case, one that really addresses the problem rather than applying salve to the ancient and still-suppurating wound. “You – outsiders and even some insiders – have been misled. You are mistaken. The dynamic here is not the pomo-poco drama of the Palestinian David against the Israeli Goliath, the brave underdog against the bully. You’ve been spoon-fed by a herd of journalists. It’s a startlingly different scene here.

Indeed, if you understood our situation better, you’d understand your own situation better. You’d recognize thatconnecting Ferguson to Palestine is actually a degradation of your public sphere discussion, which will lead to the waxing of the forces of violence and irredentism (as they already have, and as happens to every international forum the Palestinians join, from the ICC to FIFA).

You’d understand that Intifada comes from the verb to shake off, as a great beast shakes off a fly. In other words, the Palestinians see themselves as part of, and fighting for, the honor of the great Arab people and, in the case of the Muslims, the Ummah. They are the part of the great beast’s hide that shakes off the Israeli fly.

You’d understand that for them, it’s not the settlements, it’s not the occupation, it’s not Green Line. It’s still the Shore line. We’re not ready for Peace, Now. Given what the Palestinians need to do in their own culture before we can live with them at peace, it’s Peace When, ???? ??????. I’m for two states, where both are civil polities. But it’s murder/suicide for Europe to force Israel to make peace with an irredentist, pre-modern, belligerent (whom they also face); it’s murder/suicide for Europe to support the creation of an Apartheid, Sharia-ruled, Genocidally-driven state.

You’d understand that your susceptibility to lethal narratives, the Wormtongued pipeline of hate-mongering Palestinian war propaganda that you fill your public space with makes you weak and incapable of understanding the danger you are in.

You’d understand that we all – Christian, post-Christian, secular, Bhuddist, Hindu, civic Muslim –  face a remorseless foe on many fronts, a pre-modern movement of powerful sweep, an imperialist expression of raw libido dominandi so severe, that none of the gifts of modern self-abnegation, the  very things that make it possible to dream progressive dreams and have societies dedicated to freedom and prosperity, can survive their violence, hatred, contempt, and rage.

And you’d also understand that we need to confront that rage, and contempt and hatred and violence. Those are all matters we have a right to make demands about, things we can legitimately impose upon our Muslim neighbors, as we impose it upon ourselves. Nor need that confrontation be violent, at least on our part. This is a cognitive war, and it can be won on cognitive terrain – the public sphere, our Western public sphere.

As Blake says, we impose upon each other. Gentiles certainly have imposed on Jews, and Jews, despite deeply-set inhibitions, impose on gentiles. As in the Arab case since the Holocaust, generally we impose far less on others than others impose on us, indeed far less than others impose upon themselves.

So, every once in a while, we Jews have a right to impose on the gentiles and say, “I’m really sorry, you got this completely wrong. And your desperate need to have me admit to mistakes and faults and responsibility for the suffering of our sworn enemies (which will be the first instinct of anyone on the “left” hearing this), is part of the reason you’ve been duped. Stop sucking at the teat of judging Jews – especially sovereign Jews – guilty.

So gentiles, throw off your addiction to moral Schadenfreude, Jews, renounce your addiction to masochistic omnipotence fantasies, and start paying attention! The times demand nothing less.