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Probably the best thing to come out of this weird incident with NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies is the end of an unofficial two-track policy on Israel. With the statement from Thomas Mulcair, the NDP’s other deputy leader, the idea of Israel as an apartheid state is definitively ejected from mainstream political discourse in this country.

Let’s take a quick look at Mulcair’s statement as recorded in the National Post:

“No member of our caucus, whatever other title they have, is allowed to invent their own policy,” said Mr. Mulcair. “We take decisions together, parties formulate policies together, and to say that you’re personally in favour of boycott, divestment and sanctions for the only democracy in the Middle East is, as far as I’m concerned, grossly unacceptable.”

If the NDP caucus truly believes this, then it’s a sea-change for public discussion of foreign policy vis a vis Israel and the Palestinians in this country. The ideology behind boycott and divestment campaigns against Israel are firmly relegated to the land of 9/11 Truthers, Creationists and the more nefarious minds behind the Rhino party.

For political pragmatists like myself, the BDS campaign has always been an extreme phenomenon that never carried any official support from any legitimate political party or their rank and file, or at least shouldn’t have. Yet there’s no question that NDP rank and file were far more likely to have sympathy with the “Israel Apartheid State” view than their Liberal or Conservative party counterparts (and nobody really cares what Bloc members think about this stuff, anyway).

Now, many NDP members, particularly those a little higher up in the food chain, are forced to confront the reality that the BDS ideas they’ve flirted with for years are simply not part of the NDP platform — and really never have been. If NDP supporters want to retain ties to BDS, it will have to do so in a fairly clandestine manner; in the same way that when some Conservatives decide to make a statement about pro-life abortion politics, they do so in a private venue amongst their close colleagues. The days of NDP MPs like Libby Davies coming out overtly in favor of a controversial BDS campaign are now over.

That is to say, those days are over if the NDP really do mean what they’re saying.

Libby Davies Puts Her Foot In It

We must help the Kurds! Let’s bring an aid convoy to Kurdistan and martyr ourselves against the Turkish aggressors! Free Kurdistan!

See the awful suffering of the Kurdish people under the oppressive war criminals of the Turkish nationalist entity.

There is only one solution: we shall unite peace activists, journalists, professors and ordinary people from around the world to give relief to the oppressed Kurdish people, the indigenous people of the region. The Kurds will rise, one nation, through all the land of historic Kurdistan!

These international criminals cannot be allowed to exist any longer. The Turks’ crimes are recorded from time immemorial. Remember their genocide of the Armenian people!

How many genocides will the world allow the Turks to perpetrate upon this planet? The state of Turkey will disappear, for it is illegitimate.

As we give aid to the Turks’ victims, who are the true inheritors of the land, the Turkish nation will be assailed by our campaign of boycott and and divestment. Don’t buy Turkish… uh, coffee. And, er, Turkish Delight!

No to neo-Ottoman Imperialism! Yes to the free people of Kurdistan!

The Palestinian-run territory of Gaza is now essentially a pre-industrial state, where pack mules ferry smuggled goods on broken streets in the midst of ruins that have not been cleared since Operation Cast Lead. But as bad as things are now, it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. It doesn’t help when Canadian politicians like the NDP’s Libby Davies, the Bloc Quebecois’ Richard Nadeau and Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj give the downtrodden Gazans incentives to keep doing the exact same thing they’ve been doing, while hoping for a different result than what they’ve been getting.

It’s not just dishonest. This perverse strategy is helping keep Palestinians in a world of hurt. It’s time for the do-gooders of the world to level with the Gazans and give them some real incentives for change – in this case, the dismantling of Hamas – that will give them a real chance at a future.

Freakonomics and Middle East Politics
What’s this about incentives? In Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner collaborated to help explain how the world works by applying economic theory. One of the main premises of the book is that given the right incentives, you can change behavior. It’s not exactly a new idea. But the entertaining examples made this book an international bestseller.

Professional baseball players will juice up to hit more home runs so they can boost their salary by millions of dollars. When you give bonuses to high-performing teachers, some of those educators will simply inflate grades. On a more dire note, if the incentive to act like a second-class citizen is to avoid a lynching, terrorized citizens will avoid polling stations at election time and bite their tongues as they are ordered to the back of the bus.

Change the incentives and you’ll change the behavior. Institute an ironclad testing regimen, clawback of wages and automatic jail time for athletes using steroids, you just might see the end of juicing. Find an algorithm to figure out which teachers are cheating and get rid of them; the other teachers will get the message. Put boots on the ground to enforce the rule of law and provide real support for civil rights and a formerly brutalized population will happily make use of their freedoms.

The people of Gaza are not immune to the economic laws that govern the behavior of the rest of us. Give them incentives to do what they have to do to end the blockade — namely the rejection of the fascist, thuggish regime of Hamas — and they will do it. Conversely, if respected leaders from the West go in and tell them that they don’t have to do anything, and eventually the Israelis will cave, Palestinians will take that free lunch.

Canadian Politicians Helping Perpetuate Palestinian Misery Through Dishonesty
Today, the motley crew of Canadian MPs mentioned above will attend Toronto’s Ryerson University to deliver a report on what they saw on a fact-finding mission to the West Bank and Gaza, subsidized by stalwartly even-handed organizations including the Canadian Arab Federation, Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid and Code Pink.

The main recommendations to parliament from the report? No surprises, here. Canada should hand over a big bag of cash to UNRWA, an agency that could be argued has only perpetuated Palestinian misery. Our diplomats should formally register our opposition to the security barrier, originally put up to protect Israelis from a wave of suicide bombings in restaurants and nightclubs.

In regard to Gaza, these MPs want the government to “assert that an end to the blockade on Gaza is an urgent and necessary means by which to normalize the day to day living conditions of people living in Gaza and to restore the civil and economic infrastructure of Gaza.” And finally, these politicians support a policy roughly akin to that asked for by the multi-headed boycott Israel campaign.

These recommendations are ultimately meant to provide incentives for Israeli leaders to change their behavior. Most immediately, this would mean ending the blockade and take down the wall. That would be a perfectly ethical and reasonable position to take if these barriers were put up purely to make Palestinians miserable. But as we know, the blockade was put up by the Israelis for the same reason that Canadian soldiers put up walls around their compounds in Afghanistan — when the walls aren’t there, psychotic losers are more likely to wander in with a rifle or belt of dynamite and try to kill everyone. As regards the hardships experienced in the “day to day living conditions of people living in Gaza”, well, that’s what the blockade was meant to do, as a means of pressuring the Palestinian people to reject their thuggish, torturing fascist overlords. The basic idea behind blockades and sanctions has always been to squeeze the other side until they crack. Undermining the blockade only makes it easier for Hamas to claim victory and carry on with business as usual; meaning a modicum of power for the top thugs and misery for everyone else.

Where’s Hamas?
But where are the incentives for Palestinians to change their behavior? There are none mentioned in this report. In fact, the one key solution that stands a very good chance of getting the blockade lifted is studiously ignored.

Hamas is mentioned just once in this report to parliament: “We wish to make it clear that during our visit we did not meet with representatives of either the Government of Israel or Hamas.” In contrast, Israel is mentioned 79 times.

How do you provide real incentives for change when the stumbling block for progress is treated as though it doesn’t exist?

Get rid of Hamas – or just get Hamas’ leadership to stop calling for the destruction of the Jewish state – and the misery for Palestinians starts to end. The blockade goes away. The economy gets back to work. Poor Palestinian kids who had the awful luck to be born in a permanent refugee camp don’t go hungry anymore. People start thinking about a future that doesn’t involve sleeping rough in missile-blast craters beneath a torn plastic sheet.

What’s Taking Them So Long?
When you don’t present incentives for Palestinians to change their behavior, the implicit understanding is that Palestinians are not masters of their own fate. Democratically-elected Canadian dupes continue to burnish this lie, treating the Palestinians as unthinking pawns who must be patient as others help them behind the scenes:

“Just be patient… we’ll make your oppressors go away. The ICJ is keeping Israeli politicians and soldiers sleepless nights. The United Nations Human Rights Commission is condemning Israel on your behalf every other week. We’re keeping the pressure on. Just you wait…”

Why do the Palestinians not act? Getting a job, being able to provide for your family, enjoying freedom from thugs and torturers are obvious incentives. But for years, politicians and activists have been lying to the Palestinians, telling them they don’t need to change — that they can’t change, that it is the oppressor who must change. Believing these lies, they have no incentive to act:

“You can have freedom, prosperity, a state of your own. Look at your proud legacy of resistance. If your enemies haven’t broken you yet, how can you give up now? Don’t give an inch. Don’t change a thing. You are an inspiration to us. In return, we will win your freedom.”

Truth Be Told
But the game is up. Those who truly want to advocate for the Palestinians have to be willing to tell them the truth:

“The Israelis are exhausted. They’re tired and demoralized from constantly getting slammed as the new Nazis. Some of them really are concerned about these talks of boycotts and extraditing their leaders.

“Anyway, those are your options. Good luck with that, because I really can’t help you. As usual, you’re on your own.”

Those who call themselves friends to the Palestinian people, including our own parliamentarians, now need to tell them the truth. They need to make sure they understand their incentives to get rid of Hamas and to do it quickly. When the Palestinians stop waiting for the international community to pressure Israel to subvert its own security and instead are prepared to do what is necessary to give their children a future, they will take charge of their own destiny.

There’s a forum tonight in Vancouver called “Responding to Antisemitism: Are We Too Thin-Skinned?” Sounds like a neat topic and I wish I could attend, but prior commitments are keeping me away. That said, I do have a platform conveniently handy in the form of this blog to get my word out, so here we go:

First of all, what is antisemitism? In Canada, you’ve got the extreme and obvious examples, like shouting “Jewish child, you are gonna fuckin’ die!” at a public protest. Spray-painting swastikas on Jewish cemetery walls also is clearly antisemitic. You get the idea.

Then there’s intimidation of Jewish students on North American campuses.

All of the activities described above are already dealt with under our existing laws (uttering threats, vandalism, assault). Not just Jews, but the vast majority of Canadian society already sees these things as beyond the pale.

Things get a bit more insidious when it comes to Israel. Ideological enemies of the Jewish state are always careful to preface their arguments by saying that “criticism of Israel is not by definition antisemitic” — which of course, is quite true, and I’m not aware of any supporter of Israel who has argued the point. Anyone can criticize Israeli policies, just like one can criticize Canadian policies, or Chinese ones, or Pakistani ones. Criticizing China for allegedly using prisoners to profit from organ transplant businesses is clearly not a racist slander against all Chinese; likewise, criticism of Israel for, say, building settlements in the West Bank, is also not a slander against all Israelis or all Jews in Israel for that matter.

But when Canadian “human rights” organizations, cultural representatives and other informal groups undertake continual letter-writing campaigns, boycotts drives, unending calls to prosecute Israeli politicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, or more chilling calls to action that all Israeli citizens over the age of 18 are valid targets for killing, and do so without any corresponding calls to action on ending the brutal human rights violations of Israel’s neighbors, such as suicide bombings or torture carried out in Hamas jails (or in Egypt, or Syria, etc) — indeed, without any discussion of the context for behavior by the Israeli state — it seems clear that antisemitism likely plays a part in these types of campaigns. Antisemitism can be inferred, but is virtually impossible to prove — hence, it is that much more difficult to combat.

The event this evening is not about whether antisemitism exists (as it clearly does), but how one responds to it. Whether the antisemitism is overt (eg. shouting “Jews to the gas!“) or obfuscated in human rights jargon and letters-to-the-editor, the obvious answer is that it should be answered — in editorial pages, speeches, blogs and such, without relying on legal constraints such as human rights commissions that trample on our hard-won Western freedoms.

But if the end goal is to reduce antisemitism in Canada by shining a light on antisemitic acts and words, then the way to do it is not through a tribal, “let’s-stick-together-because-no-one’s-going-to-help-us” mentality of Jews as besieged victims.

A far better strategy for Jews in Canada is to reach out more robustly to fellow Canadians from all ethnic and political stripes; it is clear that so much of the modern antisemitism is also tied to an anarchic and extreme (mostly left-wing, but also far-right) movement that is at odds with Western democracy, civil rights (particularly freedom of speech) and what one used to call “Canadian” values.

When protesters shout slogans like “long live Hamas”, Jews should be helping Canadians from other groups to understand that these chants are not merely offensive to Jews (whom the Hamas charter advocates murdering — an odd clause for a legal constitutional document of a proto-state). These actions are offensive to all those who support real democracy, respect for the rule of law, respect for life — all those things which Canadians take for granted in their own country.

The offensive of boycotts and other activities against Jews, not just in Canada, but worldwide has gained a following not just among the predictable cultural centers of the Palestinian and Muslim diaspora, but across a wide range of groups. To put it bluntly, when Operation Cast Lead protests came to Canadian cities, those demonstrating were white, brown, black and every shade in between, representing a similarly diverse background of professions and politics. Sure, they seemed to be organized with the help of the taxpayer-funded Canadian Arab Federation and other groups, but the point is that they got their troops out.

In contrast, the failure of both Canada’s “official Jews” and other Jewish organizations to organize an effective, cross-cultural, pro-democratic response to antisemitism, particularly in open and public gatherings — without calling the cops, lawyers or HRCs — just isn’t working. Don’t help the other side present the debate as an intractable ethnic conflict with ancient roots — Canadians will simply tune out. And if it does become a slug-fest between two diasporas, the Jewish community will eventually lose, probably sooner than later. Simple demographics will see to that.

But if the Jewish community makes their response to antisemisitm about politics, with concrete calls to action, about something that transcends ethnic groups and victim-hood, about siding with a group that supports the Canadian way of life, freedom from war and violence, civil rights and all the rest, I believe Canadians will respond positively.

The “BUYcott Israel” counter-demonstration on Sunday outside the Mountain Equipment co-op in Vancouver drew a fair amount of attention, signatures of support and of course, many new co-op memberships for MEC. I’m happy to say I attended Sunday’s festivities, meant to counter the previous day’s shenanigans by what I’m told was a drenched and ignored group of Israel-bashers.

I’d intended to just sort of drop by as a sympathetic observer, but soon got politely shanghaied into holding a sign saying “Support MEC Ethical Sourcing Policy” and hobnobbing front and center with pedestrians (Indeed, the record of the event produced by Aha Media, with so many shots of yours truly, might leave many to assume I was the organizer!). I stayed for a while, enjoying the chance to talk with others about the issues and the motivations behind the boycott campaign, which seem to be less about human rights and more about a very cynical and one-sided view of Middle East politics.

One interesting note from Canada-Israel Committee rep Dan Schloss about the unintended irony of Saturday’s boycotters, who advocate buying Palestinian products at the same time that they condemn the purchase of Israel-made products (even if they meet stringent ethical purchasing standards): “The boycotters assume that because we’re pro-Israel that we’re ‘anti-Palestinian,’ ironically and tragically showing the real bigoted and hateful motivations behind the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Actually, by asking their supporters to buy Palestinian products, they essentially have the exact same policy Netanyahu does with regards to supporting the Palestinian economy.”

In case you were wondering, I did actually pick up a MEC membership yesterday. A small show of support for the cause.