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April 15, 2011
Insights on the boycott fight
Israel and Diaspora Jews find common cause against global assault.
ANDY LEVY-AJZENKOPF CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS
D.J. (David) Schneeweiss, Israel’s former deputy ambassador in China, who is now a representative of the Foreign Ministry, co-ordinates Israel’s anti-boycott strategy. He spoke with reporters earlier this month while on a visit to Toronto.
Schneeweiss said it’s important for people to know that the boycott movement is not something being driven by any one group or central command post.
“It’s not just someone sitting in Tehran saying, ‘OK, now we’re going to activate this [BDS] cell on this campus.’ It’s students and people getting brought into this thing which has a life of its own now,” he said.
Schneeweiss added that BDS organizers dress up their cause by attempting “to own the most powerful terms of the Western lexicon. Words like ‘human rights,’ ‘war crimes,’ ‘apartheid’ and ‘justice’ ... are terribly powerful terms.” So when BDS organizers cloak themselves in these terms, they’re able to connect with and “mobilize, or at least make themselves more conceptually available, to ordinary people.”
While Diaspora communities have been dealing with the BDS campaigns for years, Schneeweiss said, domestically, Israelis are finally starting to understand the scale of it.
“Israeli media tend to play up the movement such that Israelis begin to think that the whole world is against them,” he said. “And while there is, I think, a distorted view of this phenomenon in Israel, we have to remember that there is a hostile campaign against Israel and we do well to be aware of it.”
According to him, however, there is a positive side to it all: rebuking the BDS movement has given Israel and Diaspora communities more common cause and is strengthening the relationship between the communities.
Schneeweiss also had words of hope for Israel supporters who fear the BDS wave cannot be countered effectively because they are seemingly outnumbered. “Numbers don’t have to work against us, because the same tools are available to [pro-Israel] activists. Ordinary people can be involved in promoting Israel. That’s how the other side is doing it,” he said. “It’s not that difficult to be empowered. Information is available on anything and everything. Knowledge is power – all you have to do is build a community around that.”
From Israel’s point of view, one of the lucky things about the BDS movement is that it’s a “completely zero-sum agenda,” he continued. The BDS movement is “completely out of sync” with dominant Western values, he said, even though it seeks to portray itself as part of this value system.
“They’re against dialogue, reconciliation, engagement and working together. They’re even against having a conversation. They talk about blacklisting Israelis for being Israeli, in not having academic exchange in any shape or form. They talk about not allowing cultural icons, who may be critical or not, from coming to Israel. So all we have to do is own these values – engagement, reconciliation, dialogue – ourselves. Our people can fight the good fight with good ideas and the truth.”
Schneeweiss believes that, as long as Israel doesn’t lose sight of its national goals, then it will naturally succeed in countering the BDS campaign.
He cited Israel’s recent decision to apply for membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – it was granted membership in May 2010 – as “the right thing to do” both for political reasons and economic objectives to harmonize Israel’s legislation with other economic world powers.
“That is a great response to the BDS agenda, which seeks to untether us [from the community of nations]. But we didn’t do it [join the OECD] because of BDS, we did it because it was the right thing to do for Israel.”
As for BDS’s impact on Israel, on the whole, the results of the campaign have come up short, he said.
“If you look at the ‘success’ in the inverted comments of the BDS movement, they haven’t achieved any kind of economic effect whatsoever [on Israel] nor have they achieved any practical boycotts. There are no declared boycotts by any serious pension funds or institutions that these guys have tried to target.
“But what they are trying to do is create the image of Israel being boycotted and of being an apartheid state because, if they do, they know ordinary people will do the math [and conclude,] ‘If Israel is an apartheid state and being boycotted by so many people, then maybe I should join that movement, too.’”
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