The title doesn’t rhyme, but it does allow me to carry on two themes of last week’s post–late 80s hip hop, and unintended consequences of purportedly benevolent movements.
First, the good stuff:
KRS-One is my pick for greatest emcee, dead or alive. From BDP’s earliest stuff, which more or less started both gangsta rap and the diss track to the post-Scott LaRock albums which focused on historical political and social discrimination–including police violence, the whitewashing of history, and the cocaine connection to the Iran-Contra scandal.
You can’t beat that.
To the topic at hand, though. The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) movement is a “global movement” that seeks to punish Israel for what BDS considers to be its crimes against Palestinian people, and to use economic pressure to encourage Israel to withdraw from lands it has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War and to recognise greater rights for Palestinians.
For several years, BDS has encouraged “a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights.” The “boycott” part of that “target[s] products and companies (Israeli and international) that profit from the violation of Palestinian rights, as well as Israeli sporting, cultural and academic institutions.”
SodaStream is an Israeli company that makes home-carbonation equipment. Until February, SodaStream had a factory in the West Bank, at which it employed “up to 600 Palestinians.”
In October of 2015, in response to the economic pressure of the BDS movement, SodaStream began to close its factory in the West Bank, and in February of this year, it completed that closure and terminated its remaining 74 workers. To its credit, SodaStream appears to have made a concerted effort to try to obtain work permits for its Palestinian workers, who apparently cannot work within Israel without permission, but was largely unsuccessful. That’s a real shame.
What’s interesting here is that–similar to the last two issues I’ve written about (capping some ATM fees and California’s high gas prices)–the BDS movement has caused a result that seems completely at odds with its stated goals. Unlike ATM fee caps or high gas prices, which have predictable but indirect undesirable effects, the BDS movement has caused a harm to the very people it explicitly intends to help. The “help” that BDS is providing the Palestinians is not leading to some related harm; in this instance it is what is hurting them. And the BDS movement is celebrating this fact:
It’s hard to understand how causing hundreds of Palestinians to lose their jobs is “welcome news” to an organisation devoted to improving the lot of Palestinians. BDS rationalises the discrepancy thus:
Palestinians are forced to work inside settlements in sub-standard conditions because of Israel’s deliberate destruction of the Palestinian economy. There’s an urgent need for the creation of decent and dignified jobs within the Palestinian economy.
I don’t doubt that there is an urgent need for jobs within the Palestinian economy, but BDS just cost 500 of them. That will increase competition in the labour market and thereby drive down wages, which will make “the creation of decent and dignified jobs within the Palestinian economy” much less likely than had BDS done nothing.
What’s to explain the difference between BDS’ stated goals and its actual effects? I emailed a conservative legal blogger who frequently writes about Israel (after our initial contact, I asked if I could quote him and he never responded) and asked for his opinion on the matter. His answer:
Using Occam’s Razor, one might think the point of BDS in such cases is to make the Palestinians so miserable that they will engage in violence and prevent a peaceful solution.
To me, that’s the opposite of Occam’s Razor. There’s a part of his response that makes sense: If BDS is causing harm to Palestinians, the simplest assumption is that they mean to cause harm to Palestinians. But it also imbues BDS with a host of hidden motivations and machinations. Much more apt (and I told the blogger so) is Hanlon’s Razor–roughly: “Never ascribe to malice that which adequately is explained by stupidity.”
And here we have a pretty classic example of some form of stupidity or, at the very least, its more distinguished cousin: bias.
Putting aside the distinct possibility that some number of BDS supporters are motivated by anti-Semitism, it’s fair to take BDS at their word that they are fighting to restore the “fundamental rights of freedom, equality, and self-determination” of Palestinians. Might they be concerned, then, that they just put 500 Palestinians out of work?
Probably not. And they probably aren’t concerned because humans have a well-established tendency to discount information which conflicts with their beliefs. Most activists tend to hold fairly strong beliefs about the subject of their activism, and I imagine this is no less true for folks in the BDS movement. Faced with the fact that their advocacy is directly harming the people they are intending to help, they are unlikely to rationally analyse whether their activism is effective and far more likely to irrationally justify the negative effects they have caused. In fact, that’s exactly what they appear to have done in 2014 after SodaStream was forced to lay off hundreds of workers:
You know what else is difficult on Palestinian workers? Not having work. But it’s much easier to justify your actions if you can blame their harmful effects on others.
I’m sure BDS folks could come up with more explanations for why harming Palestinians is actually good for them. It’s a very common tactic among those justifying harmful social and political policies. My last post discussed how high gas prices impose very regressive costs on the poor. One of our many readers responded:
California’s anti-pollution standards help EVERYBODY live healthier lives – not just one income bracket. . . . I have long said that if America would quadruple the cost of gasoline to what an average price-per-liter is anywhere in Europe, we would have more efficient public transport.
Faced with the facts that California’s environmental policy overwhelmingly burdens the poor, the reader response was to suggest that California should charge even more for gasoline. Would that cause even greater harms for the poor? Of course! But that fact is inconsistent with the reader’s prior belief that high gas prices are good, so it is ignored or explained away.
Faced with the facts that their practices are hurting Palestinians, I have no doubt that BDS will continue to engage in those same practices. To not do so would first require a critical analysis of their own beliefs and behaviour and that, unfortunately, is beyond the comfort of most people.