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You are here: Home / Readers Forum / Asking the Kids to Clean their Parents’ Mess

Asking the Kids to Clean their Parents’ Mess

June 5, 2015 By eJP

what a messMost of the folks fighting BDS have the best intentions at heart, and many are doing great work, but collectively, our impact is limited and, sometimes, counterproductive.

By Andrés Spokoiny

We know it’s not always wise, but we often clean up after our kids. Yes, we tell them that they won’t have dessert if they don’t help clear the table, or they won’t get the new PlayStation if their rooms are a mess, but in most cases, we relent and just clean up for them. I guess that’s part of what being a parent is all about, kind of the natural order of things.

Now, if the situation was in reverse, and we compelled our kids to clean up after us, or if we forced them to do our dirty laundry, we would probably be reported to Child Protective Services and charged with child abuse.

Yet, when it comes to campus and BDS, this is exactly what we do.

There is no doubt that BDS is one of the big issues affecting the Jewish People around the world. It is one of those issues that define a generation, in the same vein that Soviet Jewry was in the 1980s and 1990s. Campuses around the United States are “ground zero” for the BDS movement, a well-funded and well-organized political machine that is as bigoted as it is morally bankrupt. The BDS movement is particularly pernicious because it veils its true objective (the destruction of the State of Israel) and because it hijacks the values and the discourse most cherished by students – human rights, anti-racism, freedom of speech, etc.

While the situation is not the same on all campuses (plenty are free of BDS), at many universities across the country, Jewish students are literally on the frontlines of a complex battle, fought with asymmetrical warfare.

But these kids are not soldiers, they are students. They go to school to study, party, and meet girls and guys (perhaps not necessarily in that order). They are not there to carry the weight of the Jewish People on their shoulders. Moreover, they are not there to fight one of the best organized political movements in the world on their own.

And many times we, instead of helping, make their task simply impossible. In other words, we make a mess and we ask them to clean it up.

First, we have a surprisingly patronizing way of dealing with students. We call them the “boots on the grounds,” the “soldiers in our fight,” etc., implying that, we, the all-knowing geniuses, are the generals and they are the foot soldiers, the cannon fodder, there to execute our brilliant strategies. We pontificate to students; we don’t engage them so as to find out what they truly need. Moreover, we don’t involve them in crafting the strategies that they need to implement. We give them “talking points,” implying that they can’t develop their own.

I’m not free from fault here, either. I once gave a group of students a brochure that listed “ten things that students need to know about the Middle East conflict.” The students retorted, “let us tell you ten things you need to know about college students.” They taught me a big lesson. I haven’t been a student in more than twenty years! What do I know about college life in 2015? When I hear people in their seventies, who haven’t been on a campus for fifty years, lecturing about what must be done, I get skeptical, to say the least. Probably, if we like a particular campus campaign, we shouldn’t fund it, because we are not the barometer. We are the furthest thing from a twenty-year-old student in arts and humanities that exists. Today, there are scores of campus advocacy organizations – designed and funded in our offices and boardrooms – that bombard students with messages that they have no hand in crafting. We tell them what to think and say. We don’t ask them; we don’t let them wrestle with the issues; we don’t give them enough oxygen to have true conversations and ask the tough questions. We don’t leverage the unique knowledge that these young people have about campus, a knowledge that most of us utterly lack.

Second, we tell students that in order to fight the BDS battle, they need to build bridges and coalitions with many groups, especially minorities. This is critically important because BDS activists are very strategically (and maliciously) lumping the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with struggles of racism and inequality in America. The latest “From Palestine to Ferguson” banners that can be seen on many campuses attest to that dangerous trend. To an under-informed minority student, those analogies are easy to identify with and hard to resist. It is vital not to let them fall prey to those manipulations. Moreover, working with these groups is also critically important because of mere demographics: white Protestants are already a minority in America, so any strategy that ignores minorities – that are actually majorities – is bound to fail.

But at the same time that we ask Jewish students to build bridges with, say, African American and Latino students, we make their work impossible. It is us, not them, who need to build those bridges. It is us, not them, who let the alliances we had with those groups erode to the point of disappearing. How successful can Jewish students be in reaching out to their Latino friends after we gave the “Jewish Values Award” to a senator who advocates the deportation of huge numbers of Hispanics? How do we expect “La Raza” to stand with us against BDS when our communal leadership was deafeningly silent on immigration reform? How can we expect African Americans on campus to help us when, collectively, we said nothing about the “Blacks Lives Matter” campaign? How do we expect them to be sympathetic to our cause when we demonize the president they idolize?

It is our personal choice to support or not support immigration reform, or to participate or not participate in the “Black Lives Matter” campaign. I’m not arguing that we should, but we simply can’t have it both ways. Furthermore, we can’t expect students to build bridges that we destroy; we can’t ask them to clean up a mess that we made, even if that mess was, in our opinion, worth making.

Third, we ask students to stand for Israel, but we don’t demand that Israel make their lives easier. Students across the country fought BDS using the two-state solution narrative. They would say, “BDS wants to destroy Israel and install a single multi-national state; we fight for two states, for two peoples living side-by-side in peace in security.” When the Prime Minister of Israel says that there won’t be a Palestinian state on his watch, hedramatically undermines the credibility of the anti-BDS activists and their capacity to defend Israel. We use the argument that, “boycotts aren’t a tool to solve political problems,” and then, during the Gaza War, the Foreign Minister of Israel called to boycott shops owned by Arab Israelis. This is not about whether those statements were correct or not. Israeli leaders make their own political choices based on their own considerations, and it’s up to Israeli voters to reward or punish them for it, but we can’t send our “boots on the ground” to fight for a message that the top Israeli leadership disavows. If we want to support our students, we need to send a clear message to Jerusalem that we can’t stab our “soldiers” in the back every time that it’s politically expedient.

Fourth, and probably most important, we can’t ask students to fight for a Jewish cause when we haven’t invested enough into giving them a meaningful, and affordable, Jewish education. The biggest problem on campus for Jewish students is not BDS, but apathy. We have failed our students by asking them to fight without giving them compelling reasons to do it. We fail our students by asking them to be our “soldiers,” but not providing them avenues to joyful and meaningful Jewish experiences. For many, campus Jewish engagement looks like, “fight for Israel (on our terms) or else.” Jewish apathy on campus is not a student’s problem; it was created by how we failed in Jewish education. To make the anti-BDS fight the gateway to Jewish Life is a self-defeating proposition, both in terms of Jewish Identity and in terms of BDS.

I’m an eternal optimist, but the sad truth is that, besides some worthy exceptions, we are both losing the battle against BDS and failing our students. Most of the folks fighting BDS have the best intentions at heart, and many are doing great work, but collectively, our impact is limited and, in sometimes, counterproductive. In some cases, we obtain victories that students describe as Pyrrhic, for they leave them exhausted, demotivated, and traumatized. Students feel they need to fight BDS with one hand and the Jewish Communal establishment with the other. If we are to prevail against this challenge and not drive our students away, we need to radically rethink our strategy.

First, BDS as a movement goes beyond campus. It has found on campus a fertile ground to thrive, but it’s directed from the outside by professional political activists, in many cases funded by shady overseas sources. While we need to empower students to craft their own campus strategy, we need to fight the “head of the hydra” with equally trained, properly funded, and fully equipped professionals, not with amateurs. It’s unfair to demand that students alone defeat the BDS movement because much of that fight needs to be done outside of campus by legal experts, cyber-experts, and, in many cases, Homeland Security. It’s not just about expecting our students to “change hearts and minds on campus” (a very tall order at this point); it’s about helping students come up with their own solutions on the campus level while we fight the shrewd political operatives at the head of the BDS movement with adequate tools.

Second, we need to engage and build bridges with minority populations so that they don’t fall prey to false analogies. It is up to us, not only the students, to build those bridges. We need to understand that the alliances we forge have consequences on campus. We need to realize that there’s a cost for students when we take the political positions that, as a community, we are taking. It’s a legitimate political choice – that I don’t contest – to convert Israel into a right-wing wedge cause, but we need to be aware of the consequences that choice has on campus, and not ask students to do things that we have made virtually impossible.

Third, as senior leaders, we can send a clear message to Israeli leaders about the effect that their actions and statements have on campus. A negative statement by an Israeli minister undoes, in one blow, much of the work that students do in campus. Without a more keen awareness, and without better policies out of Jerusalem, students on campus will continue to fight an uphill, even impossible battle. Maybe a portion of the resources we spend on campus advocacy could be better used on advocating to and training Israeli officials.

Fourth, we need to help students build a positive Jewish identity before and during their college years. Students need to feel that being Jewish is more than fighting the BDS battle; it’s first and foremost about joy, purpose, meaning, and spiritual richness and fulfillment. We sometimes approach campus Jewish outreach as if we were a club seeking new members with the slogan, “They hate us. Join!.”

Most importantly, however, we need to engage with students on their terms, not ours. We simply can’t tell them, “fight for Israel exactly as we tell you or you are a self-hating Jew.” We need to stop lecturing and start listening. We need to let them wrestle with the issues, express their own views, and ultimately come up with a narrative that represents them. Instead of giving them talking points, we need to let them talk to us. Instead of teaching them, let’s try to learn from them. We need to trust them to do the right thing instead of demanding that they fight our fight and clean up our messes.

Above all, we need to let them enjoy those unique years in which their identity is being formed, and have joyful and meaningful Jewish experiences.

We need to rethink our way of doing campus advocacy because the evidence suggests that much of what we have done until now hasn’t worked. Most of us aren’t expert political operatives, nor are we students, so we are hardly qualified to do this alone and come up with all of the answers. Moreover, the BDS epidemic continues to spread unabated, so we haven’t earned the right to lecture and pontificate.

On BDS, we need to be humble because we have a lot be humble about.

Andrés Spokoiny is President and CEO of Jewish Funders Network.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ra'anan says

    June 5, 2015 at 2:49 pm

    Andres, the minute you mentioned a 2-state “solution” you went to the side of the Obama V-15 side which sent much personnel & funds to defeat the JEWISH RIGHT in the last Israeli elections. In a recent poll less than 9% of Israeli high school students identified as leftist. Israeli kids went to battle in the last Gaza War. In that war, Gazan Arab rockets landed just outside of Ben Gurion Airport. Obama’s Eric Holder subsequently BANNED American airplanes from landing in Israel, remember that? That means that HAMAS CURRENTLY HAS THE ABILITY to REACH ISRAELI CIVILIAN CENTERS WITH THEIR ROCKETS. If Israel would implement ANY PART of the 2 state “solution,” then Gazan Arab rockets would be able to murder Jews ANYWHERE in the COUNTRY! With your support for a 2 State “solution” you sound, Andres, like a TROJAN HORSE! You are trying to cajole American Jewish college students to support a 2 state “solution” that takes Israel back to what former Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban called “Auschwitz Borders,” & that was before there was a Hamas or ISIS. What American Jewish students REALLY NEED is a JEWISH “narrative” that supports Israel’s right to exist & prosper. On that list you might want to mention that G-d told Moses to lead us into the land. Both Black & Latino Christians subscribe to this as a matter of faith. BTW, Islam does, too, see Qoran Surahs 5:21 & 26:59. Who knows, you might even convince a few nonorthodox Jews, too. Then, if the world turns on us again, & NO ONE WOULD TAKE US IN, like it did during the Holocaust, people such as yourself may be able to flee & settle in Judea & Samaria. Some other reasons to not give Judea & Samaria to Arabs is that the same Hamas that is rocketing Israel from Gaza already has personnel in Judea & Samaria & is constantly trying to take over there as well (don’t forget, Hamas was DEMOCRATICALLY elected in Gaza by the will of GAZAN ARABS). Also, ISIS, which grew into the monster it is now because Obama pulled US troops out of Iraq & left state-of-the-art weapons for them to take, is now in GAZA & threatening HAMAS! A 2 State “solution” is FAR more dangerous than BDS & BSD is far stronger than BDS.

  2. Andres says

    June 5, 2015 at 4:15 pm

    Raanan,
    Thanks for your feedback. I’m afraid you miss my point. I’m not arguing in favor or against the two states solution, not against or in favor of Obama. There are valid reasons to renounce the 2 states solutions and to criticize the obama administration. My point is that when we do that, we need to be aware of What effect this has in campus. It is students in campus who bear the brunt of our political decisions. We need to be consistent between the message that we sent out to our students and the political decisions we make

  3. Ra'anan says

    June 5, 2015 at 5:12 pm

    Andres, why are you saying that when we renounce the UNVIABLE & DEADLY 2 state “solution” that American Jewish students will not be able to successfully argue against BDS? The consistency is that the Torah is our legal deed to Israel from G-d. All American minorities share in this belief. They also all believe that G-d’s law is above man’s law.

  4. Jonathan Woocher says

    June 5, 2015 at 7:07 pm

    Bravo, Andres, for your courage and cogency in challenging those of us in senior leadership positions both to have some trust in our youth and to make sure we are not the obstacles to their success. I am much further than you from my campus years – even if you count those spent teaching there. But, I agree entirely that we do too much hand-wringing and preaching, and too little listening to and supporting the students in their struggles with complex realities. Just as in Jewish education generally, our goal should not be to have young people replicate our ways of being Jewish or connecting deeply with Israel, but to develop their own. That’s what my generation sought to do, and I think we owe today’s the same opportunity and the respect we sought then.

  5. bob hyfler says

    June 5, 2015 at 7:49 pm

    I can only echo Jon’s kudos on what is one the most thoughtful articles on the topic I have read in recent times. Students on campus deserve “authenticity” defined first as the ability to develop their intellect in an honest, free and self-directing manner, and second the opportunity to interact with others, peers, mentors and instructors, whose authenticity is equally unquestioned in their own search for the essence of complex truths. If Jewishness, zionism and the legitimacy of Israel has currency (as we believe they do), then we must go beyond hasbara and promote an open conversation worthy of our cause. If BDS advocates have perverted the nature of free inquiry we get nowhere sinking to their level. The human mind and spirit must be convinced not conquered.

  6. Melissa Andelman says

    June 5, 2015 at 8:41 pm

    It is clear from the responses to this post that there is no single viewpoint among Jews on the State of Israel, the Netanyahu Government, the two-state solution, or the appropriate role of the Diaspora. Failure to recognize and respect this diversity of opinion is a serious problem separating the Netanyahu government and American Jews.

    The question that needs asking is whether the State of Israel is a Jewish State or an Orthodox State? Questions regarding marriage, intermarriage, descent, identity, and so forth, are commentary, but also important.

    The BDS movement is dishonest, exploitive, and, at times, anti-Semitic. That does not mean that American Jews will run to support an Israeli government that is also dishonest and that seeks to exploit or exclude them.

    It would be good if we could find a way to push back against BDS while remaining true to who we are as Jews.

  7. Ra'anan says

    June 6, 2015 at 10:22 pm

    Bob Hyfler, I don’t like your definition of “authenticity.” I think that authenticity means going to the sources & not what people “feel.” If people can’t deal with the sources (like the BIBLICAL deed to the Land of Israel for the Jewish People), then that’s a different issue, but that should be the starting point. Who on campus is going to mention such sources? Israeli political emissaries probably won’t mention it because they push a secular agenda & are afraid such ideology with push voters towards religious parties. Nonorthodox religious groups probably won’t mention it because they’d feel it’s too “fundamentalist.” The truth is, though, that’s the only way to combat BOTH the BDS AND the EXTREMELY DANGEROUS 2 state “solution” that would send Israel back to WORSE than Auschwitz Borders.

  8. Ra'anan says

    June 6, 2015 at 10:35 pm

    MELISSA ANDELMAN Just as nonorthodox Jews in America are voting with their feet & running into irreversible destruction through intermarriage & are quickly becoming irrelevant by the day, so are nonorthodox Jews in Israel not marrying in great numbers, yes divorcing in great numbers, experiencing low birthrates & emigrating from Israel. Israeli Orthodoxy, on the other hand, APPEALS to great numbers of secular youth, plus both national religious orthodox & charedi orthodox promote early marriages & high birthrates & low divorce rates & IMMIGRATION TO ISRAEL. The writing’s on the wall. The experiment of nonorthodoxy has failed miserably. The question isn’t one of Bibi respecting a “diversity of opinion” of American Jews because nonorthodoxy is rapidly dying. The question is when America & Israel we be majorities of ORTHODOXY will YOU respect them. I’m betting you won’t. But you know what? When Khomeni rose in Iran & Hitler rose in Germany, Jews in those countries put cultural & religious considerations aside & looked for a place to survive. Israel may one day be that place to you, even though its orthodoxy is not to your taste.

  9. Mr. Cohen says

    June 7, 2015 at 9:49 am

    Learn how to defend Israel from unfair media bias
    and refute inaccurate Israel-bashing reporting:

    http://www.algemeiner.com

    http://www.camera.org

    http://www.HonestReporting.com

    http://IsraelLawCenter.org/

    http://www.JewHatredOnCampus.org

    http://www.memri.org

    http://www.memritv.org

    http://www.PalWatch.org

    Joining pro-Israel organizations might help Israel.
    Pro-Israel organizations include:

    http://www.aipac.org

    http://www.HonestReporting.com

    http://www.rza.org

    http://www.zoa.org

    May I humbly suggest that because Orthodox Jews are increasing as a percentage of American Jews, they should also increase their participation in pro-Israel organizations, to compensate for the declining numbers of non-Orthodox Jews.

  10. Paul Shaviv says

    June 8, 2015 at 2:42 pm

    Excellent, common sense article. An extension of this is the constant belief that Jewish schools can teach their students – most of whom have never set foot on a college campus – a) how to be political activists (when the adult Jewish community itself is not politicized) and b) can teach them “the answers”….. when even the Israeli government does not have “the answers”. We face a very, very tough situation, which does not in any way lend itself to simplistic or easy solutions.

  11. Robert says

    June 8, 2015 at 5:30 pm

    Dear Ra’anan,

    I think you may misunderstand something here. You see, there’s no such thing as God. So your whole argument doesn’t really hold up because you seem to believe — as many do, to be sure — that there’s an invisible being who lives in the sky and makes real estate deals. The dispute Andres writes about is a dispute of humans and nations, of politics and borders. Its resolution and effects can only be addressed without falling back on arguments based on these outmoded superstitions..

  12. Ra'anan says

    June 8, 2015 at 6:18 pm

    Hey Robert, sorry you got lost in Hollywood. An atheist is someone who has examined all of the evidence there is a G-d & all the evidence there isn’t a G-d & after carefully weighing them, has decided the evidence proves there is not a G-d. Remember, without G-d, there are no Jews & certainly no Israel. Now since we both know that you’ve never examined the evidence there is a G-d you might want to start here: http://www.aish.com/jl/h/h/48965856.html Yeah, Aish is one of those articulate sites. I’d LOVE to read your refutations to the provided evidence. Ra’anan in Jerusalem

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