PennBDS: Economics of BDSers Preoccupation

Economic discussions by BDS supporters tend to focus on just two subjects:

(1) The amount of foreign aid received by Israel from the US (which, depending on which BDSers you talk to ranges from three-billion to eleventy-jillion dollars per year), and;


(2) A pigeon-Marxist analysis that begins with the assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute fits perfectly into the framework of European colonialism, and selects facts to interpret accordingly


There is some slight variation in the analysis with groups like WhoProfits? (whose head will be covering this topic at the PennBDS conference) pretty much offering Orthodox “class analysis” based on Israelis playing the role of “white” colonial power and Palestinians as the exploited “brown” natives.


Minor deviations can be found in the writing of Noam Chomsky (for whom all roads lead to American imperialism) and Naomi Klein (whose eccentric views of economics, while wrong, at least seem like something written since the 19th century). But on the whole they all share the same narrow focus on Israel, the Palestinians and maybe the US, with every other economic player in the conflict erased from the boycotter’s spreadsheets.


Now I could take on the aid issue by highlighting that money the US provides to Israel to defend itself should be compared to much higher sums Americans pay to defend Europe directly, or that no US foreign aid budget would get passed if not for the presence of Israel-related assistance in it (two topics taken up at length in the terrific book The $36 Billion Bargain).


Similarly, I could point out two Middle East peoples (the Egyptians and the Palestinians) who receive a least two dollars in foreign aid for every three received by Israel (from the US in Egypt’s case, and from the US and Europe in the case of the Palestinians) and ask who’s gotten more or made more out of this largesse.


And with regard to the narrow “Israel-imperialism” focused political messaging masquerading as economic analysis, I could simply widen the lens to include other players with economic skin in the game (including close to two dozen Arab League states that control a majority of the world’s oil wealth) and ask Who Profits? in keeping the Arab-Israeli conflict at a perpetual boil.


But for this piece, I’d like to spend time looking at a little-discussed but important economic element: that of waste.


For example, consider the amount of money and human capital Israel has to expend to ensure it can defeat any number of opponents who remain in a declared state of war against it. (Israel is often criticized for maintaining this level of military power, although, as Ruth Wisse has pointed out, if Israel wasn’t in this position we would not be having these conversations since the country would have ceased to exist long ago). Now it’s true that this need to focus on things military have had some spill-over positive effects in terms of national cohesion and a growing high-tech industry. But I suspect that nearly every Israeli would trade these all to put their money (not to mention their children) to other tasks.


Comparable billions spent to “support” Palestinian refugees over the last 60+ years can probably be characterized as something worse than wasteful since those dollars have gone into perpetuating conflict and misery, in contrast to money spent on every other refugee population on the planet which is directed towards solving rather than extending global problems.


Looking at indirect costs, the terror industry requires two critical components: people ready to kill and people ready to apologize for the killers. And the first other industry that these two evils converged on was air travel where hijackings were pioneered by enemies of Israel and then elaborately justified by terror’s apologists in (among other places) the halls of the United Nations. So consider everything from the cost of airport security, to the time you spend checking through security, to the human and financial cost of 9/11 as a tax those dedicated to Israel’s defeat place on the world.


Then there are opportunity costs, including joint projects that could marry the benefits of resources and know-how throughout the Middle East to solve problems in areas such as water, energy, the environment and health, instead of squandering precious dollars and human effort on the perpetual war against the Jewish state. And let’s not begin to add up the costs of impoverished and embittered men, women and children across the Middle East who could be busy solving the world’s problems, rather than creating new ones.


Taken together, the waste caused by this war against the Jews and their state (whether a shooting war from Hamas or a propaganda war from the attendees at PennBDS) climbs into the trillions of dollars (which itself is small, compared to the value of a single human life).


So please forgive me for not taking the self-serving economics of BDS proponents any more seriously than their moral pronouncements. In both cases, their cause comes at too high a price.

this st5atement speaks a volume.
"
By withholding the university’s imprimatur from BDS and its boycotts, President Gutmann reflects the Penn community’s strong and long-established ties with Israel. "

another words, the trick is to buy off the head and declare that this represents the 'community'.
The popular BDS movement is causing the israeli lobby to scramble for its authoritarian clamp-down of free speech.
why is this news?
With the israeli state now again threatening its Palestinian prisoner population with another wave of genocide, public outrage must be quashed with the previous BS counter movement.

Is this the same university president who presided over all the pedophilia incidents now emerging?
These are real moral individuals.
No wonder they bend over for the israeli rat state...

Nope, the scandal ridden penn state is the school you are thinking of

The first two posts in this thread are samples of the same threadbare propaganda we have seen from the israeli 'information' services for many years.
Obviously the israeli lobby is concerned about the BDS movement due to its potential to overcome the well financed lobby's myths of a 'threatened' state, rather than a colonial ethnic cleansing of the native populations in a brutal, strangling occupation and aggression. Replete with periodic massacres towards these walled and imprisoned native people with a modern military. And with the use of forbidden, horrific weapons they like to test on these people.
But.
There is a major problem also in trying to cover a turd the size of israel with powdered sugar.

They recently added a new session to the PennBDS program on “Palestine and the Occupy Movement” (speaker still TBD). (Just as an FYI, I’m doing my best to write these responses in the order as the Penn schedule, but since that schedule is a moving target I’ll probably wait until the end to arrange them to fit the final program.)
Housekeeping aside, what is there to add to this short piece I wrote on the subject of the interaction between the Occupy Wall Street purposeful un-organization and the highly-organized, highly-motivated and totally ruthless anti-Israel “movement” that today travels under the BDS banner?

Now that “Occupy’s” tents have been un-pitched, it’s worth asking what chance any political project that dedicated itself to avoiding hierarchy had against not just “The Man,” but against ostensible political allies with a far more highly focused set of priorities?

Movements like BDS have a term for people like last year’s Occupy protestors: “Loose Change.”

Generally, this refers to people who show up at a political march or rally, not because they are life-long members of an organization dedicated to that issue, but because they feel a burning need to “do something,” especially in the face of what they perceive to be an injustice. The fact that anti-Israel rallies can attract hundreds or thousands during a period of conflict, but shrink back down to dozens between crises is that during a shooting war ranks temporarily swell with people disturbed by suffering and desirous to “do something,” – anything – to make a difference.

On the whole, these passions are a good thing (even if we might not all agree on the causes the passionate flock to). But this frustration tends to be directionless – much like the directionless-ness that was frequently commented upon by those trying to figure out what Occupy stood for or wanted. In fact, the Occupy project’s attempt to build their movement around principles of political anarchism (in which every man and woman was a leader) made it difficult for them to figure out for themselves what the point was of their program, other than to symbolize a general frustration with inequity in our society.

The Israel-haters who pitched their tents within the Occupy camps had no time for such murkiness and ambiguity. They knew what they wanted – to get the Occupy “brand” wedded to their “movement.” And they knew how to get it: by insisting that any organization or institution that claims to represent progressive values must buy 100% into the anti-Israel cause (which today includes an embrace of BDS) or be “exposed” as traitors to their own principles.

This is why it was only a matter of time before a subset of protestors left their camp in Boston and stormed the Israeli Consulate, all in the name of the “Occupy” movement as a whole. Never mind complains and protests within the Occupy group that these decisions were being made by a narrow few (rather than by consensus). Never mind the symbolism of alleged global activists storming just one consulate (the Jewish state’s) and leaving the rest of the world alone. Never mind that such an incident helped alienate potential supporters from the Occupy project and provided ammunition to enemies ready to cast it in a dark light.

The BDS crowd couldn’t care less about any of that since, at the end of the day, they got exactly what they wanted: YouTube videos showing off their edgy “direct action,” and the ability to say that they get to speak in the name of the Occupy movement in its entirity.

Remember that this is what the BDS “movement” is all about: not peace, not justice, not human rights, but (1) the ability to use those virtuous concepts as weapons against a political enemy and (2) the attempt to get those words to come out of the mouth of an institution more well known and respected than BDS itself (which pretty much includes everyone).

This is why BDSers sneak around in the dead of night to try to get their divestment and boycott resolutions passed by institutional leaders behind the backs of the membership (as in Somerville, Olympia and the PresbyterianChurch), regardless of the cost to communities. This is why drag their squalid little divestment resolutions before college Presidents and student councils again and again, regardless of how many times they say no. This is why they boast of big names like Hampshire College and TIAA-CREF as divestment successes, even though stories of boycott and divestment by those institutions were exposed as fraudulent years ago.

Occupy is not the first progressive movement that’s been co-opted by anti-Israel forces ready to bend other people’s missions to their will. Look at the Green Party which once managed to field a successful Presidential candidate, now reduced to endlessly trying to shove Israel boycott policies down the throats of an increasingly diminishing membership. Or the Lawyer’s Guild which, when not acting as consigliere to BDS groups, resembles little more than a rotting corpse with ruthless Israel haters working its skeletal mouth like a hand puppet.

In theory, you can have an organization in which everyone is the leader and everyone the follower. But in practice there usually ends up being someone ready to insist that their priorities take precedent over everyone else’s. In those latter cases, what term best describes those who “hang in there” hoping that the virtues upon which their political project was founded will overcome the ruthlessness of those trying to co-opt and manipulate them?

“Optimist” would be generous, and “loose change,” a bit obscure. But the word “sucker” certainly (and sadly) comes to mind.

this is also good:
"Movements like BDS have a term for people like last year’s Occupy protestors: “Loose Change.” "
of course the israeli lobby knows what you or anyone else is thinking which makes it okay to interpret the minds of others.....
Without a grain of evidence to support it.
These individuals are absolutely frightened of the BDS movement.
Maybe the effort in trying to suppress everyone's right to know about the racist brutal israeli state is too much of an effort... you should just declare equal rights in Palestine for all.
This would be more cost effective. It could even be done, unlike the prospect of covering the entire israeli turd with powered sugar.

We've been working very hard to convince the #ows movement that Americas financial problems will end when Americas support for Israel ends. Don't even try and tell me that's anti Semitic.

As I’ve described a number of times before, BDS is essentially a branding exercise, marketing-speak for a program designed to associate one thing with another. When you reach for a Kleenex to blow your nose, buy a Coke to quench your thirst or use the browser you’re currently reading this blog on to Google for more information, your use of brand names (instead of “tissue,” “cola,” or “search engine”) is the result of successful efforts over the years to get you to use the name of a company’s specific brand instead of a generic noun.

While techniques for getting you to associate one name with another can be sophisticated and expensive, one of the simplest and cheapest methods for achieving this goal is constant repetition. This is why the branding exercise associated with the BDS “movement,” to get you to associate the words “Israel” and “Apartheid,” consists first and foremost with never writing a sentence that includes one of those words without the other.

If you look at some of the back-and-forth on the PennBDS conference that took place in the comments section of this article, you’ll notice this marketing trick playing out with near perfect discipline. Regardless of the quality of thought put into any posting by a BDS proponent, they will never fail to write, speak and even shriek “Apartheid! Apartheid! Apartheid!” at every possible opportunity.

If you understand BDS to be a branding exercise, you will also understand why it is difficult – if not impossible – to get BDS advocates to respond to any arguments that claim Israel is nothing like an Apartheid state or why places like Hamas-ruled Gaza are (at least with regard to attitudes towards women, gays, and religious minorities – including Jews). For expecting BDSers to defend their opinions with facts and arguments (as opposed to cherry-picked links and shouted accusations) is like expecting the Coca Cola Company to give Pepsico a space for rebuttal at the end of every Coke commercial. Simply put, discussion and debate, which are part of any legitimate political process, have no home in the type of political branding exercise that is BDS, an exercise more commonly referred to as “propaganda.”

If you read this statement by the person who will be speaking on this subject at the PennBDS event, you will see that “Apartheid” is not the only word in his vocabulary (although it is the one he seems to use most frequently). In addition to the “A-word” (and “Jim Crow” which is also in his session title), you have a whole panoply of terminology and names meant to associate the Israel-Palestinian situation with the repression of darker-skinned people by lighter-skinned ones. The speaker’s credentials as a union leader, an activist against Apartheid South Africa and – yes – an African American who has been involved with both African American and anti-Israel organizations also helps to cement the link between the struggle for justice for blacks in the US and South Africa with the Palestinian cause.

We will get to the subject of BDS and the Black community in a few days when we get to the Penn agenda item with that title. But for now, I’d like to analyze this linkage with the context of another marketing concept: market segmentation.

Not just the article linked above, but virtually the entire BDS vocabulary is designed to reach a very specific section of the political marketplace: progressive audiences. In fact, the reason why anyone choosing to defend Israel and counter these accusations (including this blog) is frequently condemned as “right wing” is because the BDSers want to claim full ownership of the left end of the political spectrum.

Beyond just trying to gain adherents to their cause among progressive individuals and organizations, the boycotters make it very clear that their agenda item is not just one among many but is the single defining issue for left-leaning audiences with anyone who disagrees cast out as a member of the “racist right.”

Now I have friends and colleagues that are driven to distraction by the fact that anti-Israel polemics are cast entirely in progressive terminology, including actual progressives bitter at the hijacking of their vocabulary and conservatives who use this phenomenon to prove that the left is intrinsically anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic.

I tend to avoid these two extremes of bitterness, knowing something about the history of how anti-Israel politics nested itself in progressive circles, but also knowing about the damage caused by using the Middle East conflict and Peace Process as surrogates for other partisan political issues (especially in the US and Israel itself).

It’s also worth noting that because boycott and divestment advocates have chosen to sink their talons into progressive organizations (colleges and universities, Mainline Protestant churches, unions, etc.), that this is where the BDSers have fought and lost all of their major battles, meaning that their message has been actively looked at and rejected almost entirely by left-leaning audiences.

These marketing tricks (repetition, staying on message and ignoring responses, market-segmentation, etc.) work for products that actually do what they are supposed to do. Kleenex effectively wipes tears and mucous, Coke refreshes a parched throat, and Google will find what you’re looking for (based on just tying a few letters – a gift of Israeli technology, BTW).

But no matter how frequently or effectively they are employed, these techniques can’t convince most people that a sow’s ear is actually a silk purse. Simply put, they are not that helpful when trying to sell a lie (such as the “Israel = Apartheid” formulation).

Given the rejection of BDS by virtually every audience to which it has been targeted, it’s safe to say (so far at least) that the BDSer’s belief in Barnum’s adage that “a sucker is born every minute” has yet to be proven true.

"a sow’s ear is actually a silk purse."
how about a sugar glazed turd the size of israel?
Or a jewel encrusted horse apple?
What not simply stop the genocide towards your occupied prisoner populations and have a free state with equal rights, with no walls, wars or massacres?
Israel chooses to be an asshole rat state and it doesn't deserve to have the largess of an informed public.
You simply cannot justify the decades of horror the invaders from Europe have given these farmers and ranchers and fishers. The zionist state came in with a terrorist army and built their 'self determination' over the mass graves of the people who lived there once before 1947-8
Boycott Divestment Sanction the pirate israeli terror state.

The Hamas and Fatah ruling class still explot the Palestinian as they get richer and richer. Its easier to blame Israel than the palestinian leadership, but the Palestinian leadership is at fault here

This is the house of President Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza City.

The Palestinian leadership keep the Palestinian people in Poverty while they enjoy a western lifestyle.

This is the home of Abbas in Gaza city. Haniyeh has also built himself a 4 million dollar villa

oh yeah, we always take what the israeli ministry of truth feeds us as a fact..
We would 'never' think that they would LIE to us....

We do know that the real truth is not a friend to these occupiers from Europe and that without the thick layer of lies, the world would shun this colonial enterprise.
Boycott Divest and Sanction the rabid israeli state of terrorists.

PennBDS – Hillel and Questions of JVP
This is part of a series of articles based on the program of the upcoming PennBDS conference. Check out this landing page to find out more.

With a panel discussion entitled “BDS, Hillel and the Question of Anti-Semitism,” our old friends at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) finally take center stage on the PennBDS agenda.

As regulars reader know, JVP has been the topic of several serious and not-so-serious discussions here at Divest This. But since these PennBDS-related postings seem to be evolving towards capstone essays on subjects I’ve been writing about for several years, it’s worth taking time to highlight the significance of the JVP organization and the subjects it has chosen to talk about at the upcoming national BDS conference.

Starting with the obvious, Jewish Voice for Peace is an organization made up primarily (although not entirely) of Jews who advocate for BDS and engage in other activities which are anathema not just to people like me but to the bulk of the American Jewish community (organized and disorganized).

Now some people I know get totally bent out of shape that in any BDS debate the leadership of both sides will likely be Jewish. Personally, I simply take this as a fact of life and while I’ve touched on the subject of Jewish involvement (and even leadership) in anti-Israel activity, getting into a frenzy about the phenomena is about as effective as a Medieval general complaining that his enemy’s cavalry make use of horses.

Like any political group, JVP is free to organize, take positions on issues and engage in the age-old branding exercise of putting the words like “Peace” and “Justice” in their name and mission statements. They are also free to advocate for thing like BDS and all kinds of other goals that other Jewish community members and organizations oppose, although they must live with the reality that as a group pushing a minority opinion, they are obliged to win over others via the force of their arguments and the willingness to engage with their critics.

But this is the very thing that makes JVP stand apart from what I would refer to as “normal politics,” and what makes them such a perfect representative of the BDS phenomenon as a whole.

For it you look at their track record, JVP is not willing to accept its role as representatives of minority opinion, but rather desperately seeks to speak in the name of people who do not share those opinions. This is why they gate crash at events like San Francisco’s Jewish Film Festival or the Federation’s Community Heroes Project (sometimes days or weeks after organizing disruptions at events sponsored by the same community they insist they be allowed to join).

This is why they complain endlessly that they are not given immediate membership and equal status to other Jewish groups I places like campus Hillels, despite taking positions that are diametrically opposed to what those groups have chosen to stand for. Rather than live with the responsibility (and the freedom) of speaking just for themselves (which, as someone representing no one but himself, I can attest has plusses and minuses), their entire project is based on creating the illusion that they speak for a “silent majority,” knowledge of which is being repressed by sinister forces that snuff out all debate about the subjects JVP holds dear.

This is how JVP serves as such a good stand in for BDS as a whole. For just as JVP is trying to barge into the broader Jewish community in order to get into a position to speak in the name of others, so too does BDS use any means necessarily (such as moral blackmail and back-room maneuvering) to try to get their Israel = Apartheid accusations to come out of the mouth of prominent institutions such as schools, churches and municipalities. And when they fail (which is always), their response is not to reflect on how they might be able to actually win the argument, but rather to claim anyone who stands in their way (even by simply criticizing their positions) is guilty of censoring (or “muzzling”) them.

The irony is that just as JVP desperately covets everyone else’s civic space, no organization I can think of is more protective of its own. Joining JVP requires signing of a pledge (which some have deemed a “loyalty oath”) requiring agreement with the overall JVP agenda (including BDS). And while I have light heartedly played with the idea of doing to them what they try to do to everyone else (i.e., joining their group solely for the purpose of claiming to speak for them), the folks at JVP know full well that those of us who criticize them would never sign such a pledge with the sole purpose of subversion.

I’ve talked quite a bit about how JVP’s (like all BDS organizations) refuse to allow comments (i.e., free-flowing discussion) on their many Web sites (including their Muzzlewatch site which they claim was created specifically to open up dialog). And even after they announced a program specifically designed to engage in the conversations they claim Hillel is repressing, they remain stone silent when offered the chance to engage in a real dialog, as opposed to the type of conversation they would prefer in which they get to set themselves up as a rabbinic authority handing down wisdom to the uninformed.

Just like any BDS organization (including, or should I say, especially PennBDS), the last thing groups like JVP want is the discussion and debate they claim desperately to crave. Rather, they demand that they unconditionally be handed the moral high ground based solely on their claim to stand for “Peace” just as they insist that they be given unquestioned access to community spaces and resources.

And when they don’t get what they want, they scream “censorship,” or claim that their opponents do nothing more than hurl empty accusations of anti-Semitism at them, knowing full well that it is their opponents who truly stand for the openness (not to mention commitment to peace and justice) that single-issue partisan groups like JVP only feign.

Boycott, Divest and Sanction the lying murderous, Jewish only state of israel.
Nothing else makes any sense if we want to have peace.

You call the previous Stienfield episode of innuendos, inferences and just plain gossip, a rebuttal?
More like a truck-load of worn and overused israeli crap.
Boycott Divest and Sanction the dangerous nuclear israeli state.
Before they turn our world to a cinder and drive the world into a horror of massacres. Something they have learned to do very well against an unarmed prison population which are being starved and strangled behind the razor wire walls and sniper towers of their occupiers.
As they train our police forces to become more like an arm of the IDF. in order to prepare for another brutal occupation right here in America.
This is a home issue of israeli rule