 I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech, and that's the one o'clock block on a given Wednesday. We're here with Max Samaroff. He joins us from the east coast. He's with Stand With Us, which is an anti-bigotry organization, Jewish anti-bigotry organization. And the title of our show today is to get updated on BDS. And that stands for Boycott, Divest, and Sanction. And it means Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel. But it goes further than that. We'll talk about that today on U.S. college campuses and elsewhere here under the show we call Bigotry in America. Welcome back, Max. It's nice to see you. It's great to see you too. Great to be back. So let's talk about the status of BDS. First, let's define for anybody who doesn't know what it is, let's define what it is. Sure. So BDS stands for Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions. It's a global campaign to basically isolate Israel. And it's interesting because you'll see it described in media and on social media as a human rights movement or a movement to pressure Israel to change its policies. But if you look below the surface, the actual goals as stated by its leaders and also you look at its website and read between the lines, the goal is to end Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state to deny Jewish people the right to self-determination. Most people don't support that goal. But they sometimes will get behind a BDS campaign because it's not being sold to them that way. It's being sold as a few human rights, you should support BDS. If you want to pressure Israel to change its policies, you should support BDS. But they're signing on to something that I think in many cases they disagree with, actually. Yeah. How much interesting about it, too, is that this is focused on Israel. Israel is a democratic state. It has the same kind of tumult, maybe too much of a tumult, in my opinion, as the U.S. has. People argue and debate things. They vote on things and records the side things. And sometimes it goes this way. Sometimes it goes that way. And so you can't say it's authoritarian in any way. And yet there are authoritarian governments all over the world that are racist, that are worthy of protest. But BDS doesn't care about them. Do you understand that, Max? I mean, what is the situation where you have Israel, a democratic state being heavily criticized by BDS, where these other places, I'll give you Saudi Arabia, where they dismember anyone who gets in the way, why doesn't BDS go after them? Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, people are allowed to be especially passionate about one issue. They're allowed to be especially passionate about something like ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bringing a better future to people in that region. On the other hand, there is absolutely a completely disproportionate, I think, obsession both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world in some corners with this particular issue and an obsession in a way where it's not like the Israeli government should change this or that policy. But again, that Israel should cease to exist. It's so fundamentally evil that it shouldn't exist, which you don't really see with any other country and certainly countries that are much, much more repressive than Israel is. But I think the deeper issue here is really that not only do you have this basically destructive movement getting well-meaning people behind it who are very passionate about this issue, it's also fundamentally not helping. This is a movement that actually tries to shut down cooperation and dialogue, any kind of meaningful cooperation and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. So not only do you have something focusing a lot of people's attention on a very, frankly, it's a bad situation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy for so many people involved. It's a bad situation. You have this movement focusing all these people's attention on it, but not in a way that makes it better that actually makes it worse. That's the really unfortunate thing about all of this, I think. What do they do? I mean, what I've heard is you're going to be the expert, not me, but they will, for example, boycott any exchange of students or academics between the two countries. People who might engage in a constructive conversation are being separated and that the exchange is being boycotted. So from a college campus, kids can't go to Israel and Israel, people can't come to the campus. And so you're shutting it down. The vest is equally summary and destructive, as you said. And sanction, I mean, sanction is a real blunderbuss of things that can happen, which, as you said, don't really help. So how do they actually operate? What do they do to achieve the BDS aspect of their mission? Yeah. So you have something known as the Boycott National Committee, which is located in the West Bank. And they coordinate the BDS movement globally, but you've got a lot of international organizations that are really leading the charge. Important to note, according to the New York Times, the Boycott National Committee includes terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And so again, you have this movement sold as sort of civil society, human rights organizations, but includes representation from groups who are very much not that. And so you've got some activists and groups operating within the actual region where the conflict is happening. But then mostly you have a lot of international organizations focusing on campuses, focusing on sometimes city councils, churches, other institutions. And they're all pushing the same general kind of campaigning message, which is, again, to isolate Israel from the rest of the world to turn international public opinion against Israel with the ultimate goal of ending its existence and denying Jews the right to self-determination. Interesting to note that while on some campuses you have these BDS campaigns gaining traction, as you're saying, even going so far as to call for ending study abroad programs, like ending educational programs, the reason universities exist is for education and to increase understanding of the world around us. And you have these campaigns that are the opposite of that. So you have these types of things increasing in momentum on some college campuses. And at the same time, the very opposite thing is happening in much of the Arab world. For the longest time, so much of the Arab world boycotted Israel to really no benefit. It was only harmful. And now you have increasingly more countries signing peace agreements with Israel, or if they don't have open peace agreements, they have some kind of behind-the-scenes relations or economic ties with Israel. And it's a fundamentally good thing that is trending in the absolute right direction. And even with public opinion, there are still very serious issues with anti-Semitism in the Middle East, but it's going in the right direction there. But it seems to be going in the wrong direction, at least in some circles here in the United States and in Europe. It's a bizarre time. It's a strange, strange time. Yeah. You mentioned Hamas and other terrorist organizations. And I recall, when you and I last spoke a long time ago, I read some articles that suggested to me and books that these organizations were not only involved, but they were funding BDS. In other words, it wasn't they were expressing opinions, maybe fashioning policy and organizing the activities of the organization. But they were actually funding it. Is there any truth to that now? Are they funding it now? We don't have evidence that terrorist organizations are giving funding to groups in the US to promote BDS campaigns. We do have evidence, though, that there are organizations that have either ideologically support these terrorist groups or have some ties from the past when groups like Hamas were a little bit more brazen about trying to gain political influence in the US, let's say back in the 90s. You have some similar players who are still involved in various organizations that promote BDS campaigns in the states who were involved all the way back then and had these ties to actually people who are still major leaders in Hamas. We can't say that for first certain at all that right now there is Hamas money flowing to BDS campaigns on college campuses or anything like that, but the ideological ties and sometimes the personal ties are certainly there. Let me ask you this, Max. If BDS were completely honest and legitimate and didn't have this kind of double mission that you described, it had a single mission of establishing better relations between the Palestinians and the Israelis, how would that change what it is doing? If you were the president of BDS and you wanted to be sincere and legitimate about achieving a legitimate mission to make peace in Israel, how would you change what they do, their activities? Well, you'd basically be a completely different organization and campaign and movement if you wanted to do that, but I think it starts with any and every effort that can be made to build trust between Israelis and Palestinians on the ground. One of the biggest tragedies that has come out of really the last 20 plus years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that after an initial wave of hope that there would be a peace agreement in the 90s and an increase in direct relationships and trust building between the two communities, that has been completely shattered. If you look at polls of Israelis and Palestinians, their trust for each other is at an all-time low and there's overwhelming pessimism that there is going to be a peace agreement anytime in the near future. It's very difficult to make significant progress and establish a true and lasting peace without trust. That's where it starts. Certainly, for citizens of Israel and for Palestinians ruled by the Palestinian Authority in Hamas, there's an immense amount that they can be doing to hold their own governments accountable for various things and try to change the way their own leaders approach relations with Israel or in the opposite direction. At the same time, we have to also understand that if you're not actually living in the conflict, if you're not a citizen of Israel who's voting for an Israeli elections, if you're not Palestinian and have leaders that are representing you domestically and internationally, there's certain limits to what you can actually accomplish. At the end of the day, you have to support people on the ground who are actually experiencing whatever consequences there are from what you're going to do. That's a foremost responsibility that we feel certainly, but the BDS movement certainly does not. As I said, they're only making the situation worse. What is it that drives the people who fashion the policies, the activities of BDS to do this kind of divisive publicity, this attempt to make the two sides effectively, to make the two sides further apart, to divide them? What's in it for them? Why do they do that? Is there a long-term mission or a long-term goal of dividing people? Something that's been at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the beginning, since the early 1900s, is this narrative that Jews are foreigners, are colonizers in that land who have no right to be there or at least who have no right to have their own state and self-determination there. This has been a message coming from the Palestinian leadership and has been ingrained in that way since very, very early on. It is really at the core of what BDS, in the story that BDS movement activists and groups tell about this conflict, they view it as the Israelis are the evil European colonizers and the Palestinians are the indigenous victims and it's completely a zero-sum game, no in between. Palestinians have to win, Israelis have to lose and there's no compromise there. There's no compromise that's possible if that's what your ideology is and that's what you truly believe. The main reason, the main tragedy and all that, aside from the fact that it's just blatantly false to the notion that Jews have no connection to that land, that is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, that's a historical fact. People want to write it off as some biblical story note. It's history and archaeology that proved that. So you have an ideology and a narrative that's based on a lie and it's a tragic lie because the more that they promote the delusion that the Israelis are foreigners there and they can be somehow pressured to leave or can be pressured to give up their rights to their own independent state, the more that they're fueling this conflict, the more they're just pushing the Israelis into a defensive stance where they look across from them and they see a message that you don't belong here, you're a foreigner here, you have to leave or you don't deserve a country here and what's the conclusion from that, that this conflict will be endless. That the only way we can exist here is the way it is now, which is tragic. It shouldn't be like this. Well, so I'm asking now about the dynamic of it because my recollection is that back in the early 20th century, there was a relative peace between the Jews and the Arabs. They made deals, contracts, they bought soul things, they collaborated in business, but somewhere along the line it went off the side, I guess because of the leadership of the Palestinians who wanted their land back. But what's the dynamic now? You imply that it's getting worse. Is that true? Well, it depends how you slice it, basically. Within Israel, you have about, let's say, 20% of the population, maybe a little less, who are Arab citizens of Israel. In some ways, their integration to the Israeli economy and to Israeli society is improving. The current Israeli government includes a party that represents primarily religious Arab Muslim citizens of the state. In large part, because that party is in the government, they just allocated $16 billion to improving the prosperity and security of Arab communities in the state. You look at polls of Arab citizens of Israel over time, and there's positive trends in terms of their feeling of belonging. There's certainly plenty of challenges still despite that, but there's some positive trends there, increased education, attainment, things like that. They go to school, they graduate school, they're doctors and lawyers and the like. Scientists, it seems to me that my view when I just see the media is that there are Arabs in every picture. Yeah. There's ways you can slice it where there are very positive trends also in terms of relationships with a number of Arab countries, like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Morocco and others. These relationships are increasing and they're not just at a government level. They're also at a more grassroots people-to-people level, and that's huge. It's really never been like that until very recently. But between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and in various refugee camps around the region, trust, ties, cooperation have decreased overall, and that's where it's- It's tragic and it doesn't go to a good place. I will say that there are efforts underway right now by the current Israeli government to, at least on an economic level, try to increase some of that cooperation and try to help the Palestinian Authority improve standards of living in the areas where they govern. So it's not that there's no efforts happening. There's also plenty of grassroots organizations that try to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. So it's not that no one's trying, but certainly it's not in a great place. Yeah. So I've seen articles, one recently struck me and said, the mask is coming off BDS. And when you take the mask off BDS, what you get is anti-Semitism. And indeed, if you look at the BDS protest, pictures of the protest, you'll see Jewish stars at the wrong end of the protest signs. I mean, they're protesting Jews and not Israel. They're saying Zionism is Judaism. It's synonymous. Is that correct? Is that what's happening? Has it always been like that or is it becoming more like that? There's always been a strong element in when people say, well, anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. Well, first let's define Zionism. Zionism is a liberation movement. It's about the right of Jewish people to self-determination in their homeland. The right to self-determination is a universal right that all people have under international law. So if you're saying that you oppose this right for Jewish people, there's almost virtually no situation in which that's not discriminatory on some level. Now, people start to come up with different definitions and interpretation of what Zionism means. Some people just think it means that, oh, you support the government of Israel and its policies. That's not what it means. But if people think that's what it is, then they're saying, oh, I'm not anti-Semitic. I just oppose Israeli government policies. In which case, they're right in a sense, but they're also wrong about what Zionism is, so it gets confusing. I think with the types of protests you're talking about and some of these campaigns, what we're seeing happening is that, and it was always, I think, the inevitable result of these BDS campaigns that they say, oh, we're just targeting Israel and its institutions, but the damage is always falling on Jewish students and Jewish organizations. Just recently, we saw multiple resolutions on different campuses where, like Yuki said, they take the mask off and they start directly targeting the major Jewish organizations on campus or trying to deny vendors for kosher food on campus, the ability to do business there unless they meet some ridiculous political litmus test of opposition to Israel's existence. That's just beyond the pale because the vast majority of Jewish people support Israel's existence and, in fact, think that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of anti-Semitism. I think these groups aren't really living in reality, frankly. It's a fantasy world, but unfortunately, it's a fantasy world that has some really negative real-life consequences. I mean, we saw hate crimes on the streets of American cities driven by some of these hateful narratives only a few months back in May and June. Including murders in Pennsylvania. Yeah, well, so that's interesting. You have now anti-Semitic violence coming from different sides of the political spectrum. I'd say the murders in Pittsburgh, that was a white supremacist who had this ideology, was like a far-right version of anti-Semitism, which is extremely dangerous. But then you have these physical assaults that were happening in New York and Los Angeles and Toronto and other places in European cities too that were driven by either far-left forms of anti-Semitism or forms of anti-Semitism that exist among extremists in the Muslim world, let's say. That's part of the challenge with this form of bigotry is that it comes from a lot of different places. It can take a lot of different forms. Many times driven by ignorance, not people having malicious intentions, but sometimes it rises to the point where people are motivated to engage in violence. Yeah. I wondered who would push back on that because it's irrational, it's hateful. Seems to be these days growing. A lot of my Jewish friends tell me they think it's growing even here in Hawai'ine. I wonder if there's an organization or a place and whether it's effective and we stand with us to deal with the problems in public opinion because I think BDS is very good. That's why they run the campuses. They know that if you train a student into your way of thinking, the student is like to carry that into his or her life and career and social experience. What is the countervailing force, if any, that says, no, no, no, this is wrong. You shouldn't do this. The force that says BDS is wrong. You shouldn't do this. Is it effective? Yeah. Well, I think the first thing if you're talking about campuses is there's so many really courageous and committed student activists who they stand up for their communities, they stand up for what's right, and they push back and they say, no, this is wrong. A huge part of what my organization stand with us does is we support those students. We provide them with resources. We make sure that they have everything they need because it's not easy at all to stand up to this kind of hate. Depending on the school, it can lead to negative social consequences, all kinds of things, but we're here to support students like that and activists in all kinds of communities and institutions, really, we're here as a resource for anyone who wants to educate about Israel, about the conflict and also fight anti-Semitism. We know that our organization on its own, we certainly, we can't fight this fight by ourselves, but we can really do so much good by providing resources to people who care and want to educate and also to bring more people into that fold, to grow the number of people who want to educate others and also push back against this bigotry. So we're doing that work every day. We have many partner organizations that we're thankful for that are doing that work every day. Do we need more help, of course, always? Can we use more allies in this fight? Always. It's difficult. You and I have known each other for about three years or so, and I wonder over that period, this is something you do observe and study, whether this is getting more shrill on American college campuses and for that matter, Canadian college campuses, because the fact is that BDS, from whatever source, has the money, it has the people, and it is dedicated to try to bring down Israel and taking the mask off is dedicated to bringing down the Jewish people. It's very active in that regard, and it's in the press and it's on the campuses trying to sell its bill of goods. And my question to you is say over the past three years or maybe five, has it become more active and more effective on the campuses? Have these BDS groups on the campuses of the United States grown? Have they grown during the Trump administration, for example, because there's been a lot of divisiveness, a lot of hatred, a lot of racial strife, if you will, in the country and especially on the campuses? Does that include the BDS issue? Yeah, I think it has grown. I mean, it's important, though, to understand that you can have a campus where one year it's really, really active and causing a lot of damage and dividing students and creating a lot of hate. And the next year or the year after that, it won't be that way at all. So that's an important thing to understand about campuses. What is that? Is that a function of media? Is it a function of campus administration? Is it a function of the weather? What makes that change that way? It can be, you know, administrations taking the issue more seriously. It can simply be the fact that, you know, the students who are leading the charge on some of this stuff just, they graduate, they leave, and, you know, maybe other students come in who have a different perspective and different motivations. So, you know, there's a lot of nuances to it, but yeah, I would say there's an increase, really, there's an increase in sometimes how blatant and brazen the hate is. You know, sometimes, you know, in the past, some of these campaigns would be more cautious and the types of claims they would make, but now you have these crazy conspiracy theories being promoted on campuses that, you know, Israel is somehow responsible for police brutality in the United States, which is like, I mean, that echoes some of the oldest anti-Semitic smears about, you know, Jews being to blame for all these awful things that different societies were experiencing from like the Black Plague to, you know, wars and any number of different things. It's the same pattern just applied to, you know, one of the biggest, not the biggest social injustice that exists in the United States today. So, it's unfortunately a familiar anti-Semitic tactic that we now see translated to campuses to this issue that so many people, you know, really rightfully feel so passionately about. And, you know, these situations like we talked about before where it's these Jewish organizations targeted and kosher vendors and all these things. You didn't see this stuff so, you know, blatantly publicly stated in the past as it is now. You know, one thing I've noticed, and this is my last question for you, Max, one thing I've noticed is the conflation of the Palestinian issue, which is, I guess, treated as a liberal cause. I mean, it's been cast as a liberal cause by BDS and other groups on similar lines, conflating that liberal cause with other liberal causes, with every liberal cause. I mean, stop the pipeline. I mean, with environmental issues, racial issues, or all kinds of government initiative issues goes on and on. And it falls into what do you want to call it, the liberal bin of liberal issues. And sometimes there's no connection whatsoever. But it's handy. It's handy to conflate all the liberal issues and throw the Palestinian issue in there. So that's false. It's a false analysis. It's a false connection. But, you know, you have to think of these issues, you know, separately, and you have to apply critical thinking and all that. So my last question to you, Max, is, so here you have an impressionable student, freshman, sophomore, maybe junior, even senior in a college campus. He's approached with someone who would love to have him conflate every single, you know, liberal issue, including especially the Palestinian issue. What do you say to him? You're meeting him on the campus. You know what they're saying to him. You know the conflation problem. What do you say to get him off that track? Well, I think that something that is increasingly, I think a focus for a lot of people, especially on college campuses, is, you know, not always following what is sort of like a dominant narrative or a narrative that's focused on your own perspective of what you personally see of the world, but trying to understand things from other people's point of view. Right. And so what's happening here is that all these issues that are, you know, at front of mind for people in the United States and how we view these things in the United States, that's all getting projected onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a completely different issue that's thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away and has a completely different history instead of dynamics to it. And so in some ways it's the same message as, you know, is being sent about so many different issues here in the US on campuses, right, where people are being told, don't, you know, check your privilege, right, like don't assume that your experience is the same as someone else's, try to put yourself in other people's shoes, listen to others, because, you know, they probably have something to teach you that, you know, you don't understand because you're from a different community or different experience for any number of different reasons that should apply just as well to a conflict thousands of miles away that, you know, as much as it's easy to think about it as if it's, you know, in the same box as, you know, Native American issues, issues that so many different communities face, why would you, why would you equate those things, you know, with a conflict thousands of miles away if you don't equate, you know, everyone's, all these different communities experiences here, if you wouldn't equate your own experiences with someone else's here, why is it different? I would try to get people to think about it that way. Yeah, to see the nuance, not to throw it all in the same bin, so when Stand With Us goes out and talks to these impressionable students, is that what it says? How do you handle that issue? How do you handle getting the word out to clarify their way of looking at things to clarify their critical thinking? Like I said, we work with students on, you know, at this point, hundreds of college campuses who are themselves passionate about educating their peers about these issues. And so we're really about empowering people, empowering students and others who care about these issues to first, you know, be as educated as they can themselves and then have these, you know, interesting, sometimes difficult conversations with their peers on the ground. And so, you know, we're always, we're always trying to provide factual information also, help people really lead with empathy and, you know, not assume things about whoever they're talking to and always, you know, try to drive towards some kind of respectful and ultimately positive vision of the future where it's not, you know, this zero-sum game where one side has to win and one side has to lose, but that we're trying to ultimately do what we can to help bring about a better future for both peoples. Yeah, it always helps if you take the hate out. That's been the problem of the country. You know, Max, these people that you're talking about, these people on the college campuses, if you ever want to set up a show with Think Tech Hawaii, we can zoom in in every city, every campus in the country. We love to talk to some of them with you. So I just want to plant that seed with you that we love to do a show with some of the people you're talking about. In any event, I greatly appreciate you coming on and answering my questions and talking about the subject. In many ways, people don't want to talk about it, but I really appreciate your coming on and talking about it. Thank you, Max. Thanks for having me. Aloha.