[sc:graybox ]The following guest post is written by Elijah Granet, HonestReporting’s Blankfeld Award winner for 2014-15. Elijah is currently majoring in Political Science and Talmud at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.
The truth about Israel, of course, matters enormously. I don’t mean that in a philosophical sense, but in the sense that consistent lies about Israel can hurt it, while the facts make a powerful case for Israel’s side. Discussions about Israel ought to be honest, fair, and accurate, particularly in the media, due to its enormous influence.
To overcome the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and other entrenched anti-Israel groups, however, the truth is not enough.
The BDS movement may rehash many of the same, tired old canards about Israel, but it does so to promote a distinct goal. The proponents of BDS seek not only to discredit Israel in the public eye, but also to make people afraid to raise Israel even in conversation.
The vast majority of the world’s population doesn’t care that much about Israel, and knows even less. Indeed, the vast majority of people don’t keep up with the finer points of the political situation in their own country, much less in the Middle East. I would even go so far as to say that the vast majority of people couldn’t even find Israel on a map.
It is because of this ignorance that the truth is not enough. At a time when all things Israel are mired in “controversy,” and anything even marginally related to Israel is subjected to protests and boycott, the result is that most rational, uninformed people would rather ignore Israel-related topics altogether. After all, if one neither knows nor cares about Israel, the smartest thing to do is to stay away from topic altogether, and avoid a whole lot of nastiness connected to a seemingly irrelevant issue.
This has very real consequences when BDS tries its usual tricks. When a store is protested, boycotted, and harassed for stocking Israeli products, the truth is unimportant to its owners. All that really matters is that the store can go on running as normal, and the best and quickest way to do that is to give in to BDS pressure. As a rule, BDS is louder and more aggressive than the friends of Israel are, and thus BDS wins, in a case of the “heckler’s veto.”
My point here is not that Israel’s friends ought to become as loud and disruptive as the BDS crowd is, but rather, that to an uninterested party, the truth about Israel is irrelevant. All that matters is how that party will be affected by dealing with Israel, or even Israel-related topics. On the other hand, an interested party, who has studied the facts about Israel, will stand up for his or her views, regardless of the noise the BDS movement makes. We live, however, in a world of largely apathetic people, and thus, noise, rather, than truth tends to win out.
The way then to make the truth matter is to make people care about Israel and the issues surrounding it.
First, and most importantly, we must turn uninterested parties into interested parties. Public education on all aspects of Israel, including those utterly unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is one of the best ways to foster emotional and intellectual connections to Israel. Even better, BDS protests against such efforts to raise awareness about Israel are utterly ineffective. First, they reveal how very petulant the BDS movement is. For example, at Columbia University, where I am a student, pro-boycott groups flyered the campus in protest of an effort to raise awareness of Israel’s humanitarian efforts abroad. Even an uninterested and uneducated party can see how utterly ridiculous such “protests” are. Second, the response of anyone intrigued by public debate or “controversy” over Israel is to Google “Israel.” Here, the truth once more becomes important, and HonestReporting’s efforts pay the greatest dividends. Our hypothetical Googler will undoubtedly stumble across many different articles on Israel, and it is crucial that he or she finds facts, not bias.
Of course, there are some people who will never be reached by educational efforts, but they too can be swayed. Since we can’t bring Israel to the foreground for these people, we must instead bring it into the background, to make it so normal and pedestrian that boycotting or demonizing it becomes outlandish, rather than the default position. Put another way, no store owner would give the time of day to anyone asking for a boycott of say, Portuguese products, no matter how loud the boycotters were. Uninterested parties must see Israel as just a normal highly-developed Western country, before BDS starts its aggressive demonization efforts. BDS wants to make Israel “special;” we must work to keep Israel normal. This is a subtle and difficult effort, which can range from ensuring the widespread availability of products with the “Made in Israel” label, to things as subtle as making sure Hebrew, or an Israeli flag, is featured in any display of flags or languages. As silly and odd as it may sound, this sort of background messaging is perhaps the only way to keep uninterested parties from being swayed by loud lies.
Neither of these two efforts detracts from the fact that, as mentioned before, the truth about Israel is incredibly important. Honesty, accuracy, and fairness in discussions about Israel are essential in protecting the country from the pernicious and persistent efforts to slander and destroy its image, and without the truth, no amount of effort can protect Israel from its enemies. Equally, however, the truth on its own is not enough in a world that largely doesn’t care about a tiny country with a small population. Only by combining the truth with education and normalization can friends of Israel arrest the tide of demonization and slander against the Jewish state.
