Does The Anti-Israel BDS Movement Stand For Bluff, Deception And Scam? (Updated: More Funny Business)

The major Dutch pension fund Pensioenfonds Zorg en Welzijn (PFZW), which has investments totaling 97 billion euros, has informed The Electronic Intifada that it has divested from almost all the Israeli companies in its portfolio.
Electronic Intifada, in "Major Dutch pension fund divests from occupation", November 12, 2010

Ben S. Cohen, Associate Director of Communications, AJC, read this post in Electric Intifada, crowing about this alleged divestment from Israel and decided to ask about it himself. As it turned out, what Cohen was told was different from what Electronic Intifada had been 'informed'. There was no divestment in the Netherlands from Israel:

Back in May, Israel's economic vibrancy secured its admission into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD,) which gathers together the world's developed countries. As a result, funds focused upon emerging markets were obliged to withdraw their investments from Israeli companies, who'd moved to the different benchmark for developed markets. Bottom line: this had absolutely nothing to do with politically-motivated divestment.

If you read the Electronic Intifada piece closely, you'll notice the giveaway line "...divested from almost all the Israeli companies in its portfolio," begging the question of why, if you've embraced the BDS gospel, would you not divest from every single one? Again, the answer is that the Dutch fund didn't divest in the first place. 

Why "again". Because if you follow the news about Israel in general--and the news on stories of divestment from Israel in particular--you know that claims of success by the proponents of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) are a fairly regular, and inaccurate, occurrence:

This isn't the first time that BDS advocates have clumsily spun purely financial decisions as divestment. As Jon Haber [of Divest This!], a particularly tenacious critic of the BDS movement, has observed, a pattern of hoaxes is clearly visible. In February 2009, Hampshire College officially denied the claim of a pro-Palestinian student group that it had divested from Israel. Up next was Blackrock, the UK investment firm, whose Vice President informed pro-BDS activists that its decisions regarding investments in Israel had nothing to do with political considerations. Then it was the turn of academic retirement fund TIAA-CREF to depress the mood at the BDS party by denying that it, too, had divested.

We're not done yet. There was the Motorola hoax. And perhaps most famously, Harvard University, which found itself thrust into the public eye as the latest champion of BDS this past summer. "The University has not divested from Israel," a spokesman calmly explained. "Israel was moved from the MSCI, our benchmark in emerging markets, to the EAFE index in May due to its successful growth. Our emerging markets holdings were rebalanced accordingly."

Harvard worked with the same set of considerations which informed the Dutch pension fund's decision - maybe, when the BDS campaigners failed to co-opt the jewel in the Ivy League's crown, they resolved to try their luck in Holland.

To anyone encountering the BDS issue for the first time, it must seem odd that a campaign that touts its moral integrity resorts to willful dishonesty as a strategy. If anything, the BDS movement's reliance on lying is a reflection of its manifest failure.

Over a year ago, Jon Haber pinpointed the deceptive method used by the BDS movement--a methodology that is as prevalent and as indicative of the movement then as it is today:

Having failed to get a single college or university to divest in the Jewish state, having lost their few attempts to win a divestment victory with municipalities and unions, and now having lost the support of the Mainline Protestant community (once the flagship for the BDS enterprise), “Team Divestment” has been reduced to manufacturing pretend victories where none exist. The strategy seems to be to anticipate likely financial decisions (such as companies trying to get rid of their Israel-Africa shares as fast as possible, given the company’s huge losses and exposure in the real estate markets), send out press releases claiming that these normal business transactions actually represent political choices on the part of large institutions, and hope someone in the media takes the bait.

As I’ve noted before, inflating small victories is a reasonable way to try to build political momentum. But what is one to make of a “movement” that is trying to be built on pretend victories (Hampshire, Blackrock, Motorola, TIAA CREF) to cover up the real losses divestment has faced in every institution where it has been tried?

Apparently, some among the BDS [Bluff, Deception and Scam?] movement is trying to score points by lying to their fellow proponents.

UPDATE: Apparently, the BDS movement has decided to set its sights higher. Alana Goodman writes that now the latest area of BDS contention is...Hummus!:

Apparently realizing that traditional boycotts haven’t caught on, some BDS activists at Princeton University have launched a new campaign to increase “consumer choice” in the college food court. They say they want to expand the number of hummus brands sold on campus, arguing that the current product, Sabra, supports “crimes” against Palestinians

Once again, we see that the 'D' in BDS stands for deception--it's all about creating the impression of student support against. The wording of the referendum is:

On behalf of the student body, the USG will make a formal recommendation to University Dining Services that it offer an alternative to Sabra hummus in all University retail locations.

In other words, the group behind this has no interest "on behalf of the students" of making it clear what they are trying to do.

As it is there is a group calling itself Tigers for Israel that has a Facebook group opposing it, with nearly 2,000 members as of last week.

Goodman writes:

And even though this campaign isn’t an actual boycott, expect BDS activists to make overblown claims about Princeton’s successful “divestment” from Israel if the referendum actually passes. Over at MondoWeiss, Adam Horowitz has already declared “another win” for the BDS movement, after DuPaul University announced that it would stop selling Sabra two weeks ago. (Alas, his enthusiasm was premature, as the school reinstated the sale of the hummus a few days later).

And so it goes...

Technorati Tag: BDS.