Though the boycott-Israel movement remains mostly on the fringes of American life, serious efforts are under way to put it firmly in the mainstream, with a heavy focus on fighting the battle for college campuses. Last year the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker group relentlessly hostile to Israel, teamed up with the anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic Jewish Voices for Peace, to host summer institutes dedicated to teaching students how to agitate against Israel. Last week the same two groups announced they are hosting similar training again.
According to the announcement, the summer institute
will be co-led by student participants and BDS movement leaders, including Rahim Kurwa of SJP-UCLA, Dalit Baum of AFSC, Palestine Solidarity Legal Support, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others. Student participants will have the opportunity to share their skills and act as peer mentors.
The SLT is for student activists who wants to deepen their skills at:
* Building the base of support on campus for BDS!
* Researching corporate targets and university endowments!
* Fine-tuning your messaging!
* Growing & sustaining your group for the long haul!
Since the aim of these camps is to organize anti-Israel protest movements on campuses for the long haul, it is important to note that this past week alone saw three efforts to pass a pro-boycott resolution, two of which failed. Anti-Israel boycott resolutions at Arizona State University and the University of Michigan were both tabled indefinitely.
The resolution that passed was at Loyola University of Chicago. But as Loyola graduate Brett Cohen wrote in a column at the Times of Israel, the victory was not as clear cut as its supporters — the anti-Zionist group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), would claim.
According to Loyola’s student government’s (USGA) bylaws, a bill can be presented during a meeting if it has 5 USGA members as co-sponsors. Obviously for SJP this was a fait accompli.
SJP was able to steamroll this latest incarnation of the insidious BDS movement, which seeks to destroy Israel, by playing the worst kind of undemocratic political maneuvering. Because there was no public announcement that this bill will be presented, there was no debate and not one word was heard in opposition, and that was by design.
Cohen noted that, in contrast, at Michigan and Arizona State, there was “vigorous” debate before the motions were tabled.
In similar fashion, as has been noted, the American Studies Association (ASA) passed its boycott resolution by using bylaws to ensure that a minority of members could impose its will on the larger organization, “only 826 (16% of the total membership) actually voted to boycott Israel.”
In addition to manipulating rules to their advantage, the anti-Israel movement benefits from a disinterested or indifferent press who are unimpressed by the “Destroy Israel Movement” and its relentless hateful rhetoric. Writing this month in The Tower Magazine, Howard Wohl observed of the media and others who might object to the hatred and hypocrisy of the effort to boycott Israel, “In the name of free speech, they have undermined free speech by ignoring, censoring, or white-washing uncomfortable and inconvenient truths.”
For an in-depth look at how the American Friends Service Committee turned against Israel, read When did the Quakers stop being friends? by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander Joffe in the December, 2013 edition of The Tower Magazine.
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