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Conference in Los Angeles details strategies to combat BDS

The second annual StandWithUs “Combating the Boycott Movement Against Israel” conference drew hundreds of people from across the country to Los Angeles to learn more about — and develop a strategy to fight — the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).
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April 13, 2016

The second annual StandWithUs “Combating the Boycott Movement Against Israel” conference drew hundreds of people from across the country to Los Angeles to learn more about — and develop a strategy to fight — the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). 

“We have to make every college student understand that being for BDS is like being against the environment, it’s like being against gays, it’s like being against civil rights, it’s like being against feminism. We have to make it unacceptable in the minds, hearts and souls of every open-minded student at colleges today,” said former Harvard law professor and renowned defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, the conference’s keynote speaker. “Nothing short of that will be a victory.” 

StandWithUs, a pro-Israel organization that conducts advocacy work on college campuses, at high schools and elsewhere, organized the conference. 

The April 9-11 gathering at JW Marriott Los Angeles at L.A. LIVE drew more than 350 attendees, including 70 college students. It featured more than 50 speakers and 50 partner organizations coming together for approximately 25 panel discussions, lectures and breakout sessions focused on combating BDS on the legislative level, through legal means and through education.

The gathering’s Sunday night dinner featured remarks by Dershowitz as well as Judea Pearl, father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. 

The conference took place on the heels of a March vote by the University of California Board of Regents to approve a “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance,” which denounces “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination” on UC campuses. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a UC Santa Cruz lecturer and the founder of AMCHA Initiative, which investigates instances of anti-Semitism on college campuses, called the vote a step in the right direction.

The regents “came out with a statement that is aspirational. … It is a necessary but not a sufficient [step],” she said, appearing Sunday morning on a panel titled “BDS in Academia/Faculty.”

California Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach) called the BDS movement a “global scourge” while appearing on a panel titled “Legislative Approaches to BDS.”

“This issue transcends politics, it transcends religion. This is about right and wrong,” he said.

Allen, who is not Jewish, introduced an anti-BDS bill earlier this year that, if passed, would force the state to stop doing business, in most instances, with companies that participate in a boycott of Israel. Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) recently introduced similar legislation. 

How does one combat BDS? Michael Harris, a co-founder of San Francisco Voice for Israel, which is now the San Francisco chapter of StandWithUs, attempted to provide some answers during a Sunday panel titled “BDS in the Community.” He said there are five ways to combat BDS, and they include using “positive language” in materials that speak about Israel. 

Robert Jacobs, Northwest regional director of StandWithUs, joined Harris on the panel and discussed what he called the rapid growth of “anti-Israel organizations” such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). This, he said, is reflected in an increasing number of anti-Israel speakers, including at high schools, college campuses and beyond. 

“We see anti-Israel speakers spreading rapidly,” he said.

(StandWithUs, for its part, conducts pro-Israel workshops in high schools across North America, and, during the conference, the organization’s CEO and co-founder Roz Rothstein announced plans for the organization to begin working in middle schools.)

Jacobs also said that the “BDS movement has overreached … [and] crossed into anti-Semitism. … It’s bad, but it’s also good. … It’s getting the Jewish community engaged in a way that it wasn’t before.” 

At the conclusion of “Combating BDS Through Social Media,” Harris asked Rothstein why SJP has been able to make anti-Zionism synonymous with support for the Palestinians. 

“Why do we need to let them define ‘pro-Palestinian’ as ‘anti-Zionist’?” he asked. 

“SJP is not pro-Palestine,” Rothstein replied. “They are just anti-Israel.” 

Speaking to the Journal on Sunday afternoon, Rothstein said she hoped attendees would leave the conference ready to fight BDS. 

“Everybody is very, very stimulated, they’re enjoying it,” she said. “For me, it will all be in the follow-up.”

Breakout strategy sessions took place throughout the weekend, but StandWithUs declined to allow members of the media to join them.

The organization works with a broad cross-section of organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and this was reflected at the conference. Christians United for Israel Campus Outreach Director David Walker appeared on Sunday during a panel titled “BDS on Campus.” He spoke of a recent phenomenon in which the pro-Palestinian movement is attempting to apply the issues raised by Black Lives Matter to its cause.

“They’re hijacking the message of the Black community,” said Walker, who is Black.

Alex Schieber, 21, a political science and Judaic studies double major at the State University of New York at Albany and president of the school’s Great Danes for Israel, said he is all too familiar with the trend.

“Last year, [my school] had the ‘From Ferguson to Palestine’ rally and my friend put up a sign that said, ‘Jews believe Black lives matter, too’ or something like that, and [anti-Israel students] took a picture of it and made a meme out of it saying ‘Zionists be like lives matter. What a joke.’ 

“And it immediately blew up. It had thousands of anti-Semitic comments, anti-Israel comments, racist comments, bigoted comments, and that was a great shock for me, because my university is 28 percent Jewish. I never expected anything like that to happen at my university,” he said. 

“I had just come into the pro-Israel movement and it was a shock for me and I immediately wanted to figure out how to stop them on our campus and how to prevent stuff like this from happening … to make sure it never happens again.”

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