I was at the NYU event Qadir wrote about and several things he wrote bothered me.The David Project folks didn’t arrange seats at the front, but took the existing empty front row seats (I was in the 2nd row). They were not disruptive, even though one of them was about ten years old. Qadir exaggerated their influence, although I think he was right about their comprising maybe a quarter of the audience.The native American whose name he did not get (Melissa Franklin) is a college senior at Haskell University and frankly admits to being new to the issue. The first question was directed to her — the absurd one that "Palestine" is a Roman term for an area that was originally called "JEWdea." Her response — "I don’t know Arabic and can’t speak to the name, but I do not understand how people who have suffered so much oppression can turn around and oppress others" — drew the largest applause of the evening. More effective, I would say, than burying them in facts. If anyone got short shrift in the Q and A, it was Melissa. Why would Qadir want to discredit her voice because she and the other panelists didn’t answer as he would have done?
From where I sat, which was closer to the back of the room, there were constant interruptions by the David Project people, and it made the first speaker pretty hard to hear. Maybe I’m off about this, but I was surrounded in a "U" shaped pattern by those people, about four behind and one on my right and left, and their regular jump-ups and outspoken interjections and sneering made it difficult for me to hear the first speaker at all, until the crowd was basically instructed to remain civil by the university monitor. This was only a portion of the total group of the overall "Buy Israel" crowd, but their behavior was impossible to ignore from where I was seated, and they were not the only members of this group reacting like this. I think plenty of the other attendees around me were really put off by their actions as well, and I think I’m right in assuming that the resentment in the rear in the beginning of the session about their display led to the escalation of clap-offs and woo-hooing later in the evening.
To my recollection there was no row of chairs at all in the front of the room where the late arrivals took their places. The initial first row seemed to be filled with organizers and paper carriers, until the entrance and "standing show" of the David Project folks, and they took their place at the forefront (and I believe this was deliberate) though it may have been organizers who provided the seats to accommodate them.
Emotional points are fine, and often necessary. However, when 2 of the 3 speakers trafficked mostly in gentle heartfelt fuzziness, in the absence of facts that reshape the vague and mainstream story in the US of an embattled democracy doing all it can to combat subhuman terrorist monsters bent on destroying their state, I see the entire effort as having self-neutered its potential by de-emphasizing hard evidence.
Most of the mainstream of the lobby politely claims to sympathize with some suffering of the Palestinians, before moving onto the standard corollary of the blaming their leadership for their plight, or the few Palestinian extremists that ruin it for the rest of them. But, unless this session was, in fact, intended just as an opportunity to reinforce solidarity and refuel the fire in the hearts of people already on-board for justice for the Palestinians, I really don’t see the point in holding such a meeting, in an academic setting, open to the public, if persuasion was not the primary goal. If this were a tactical meeting discussing boycott strategies, then maybe these kinds of emotional appeals would be helpful for refreshing the consciences of the already converted, and keeping them motivated. However, there was *zero* discussion of boycott strategies, or specific companies to target or methods at all, so that clearly could not have been the intent of the event. Also, if tugging heartstrings and emotional appeals were the goal, this also could have been done much more sharply. I don’t recall any pictures of corpses, checkpoints, any recollection of local testimonies of life under occupation/siege that could have enhanced the spirituality in the room. Again, the format implies that this was in fact meant to be an informative meeting, the session was open to a general audience for a reason, and it certainly wasn’t publicized by accident.
If changing the narrative and dispelling the vulgar propaganda that passes for history on this issue were important, then I think this meeting could have done much better. When I concluded that The David Project won by default, I’m saying this because right now, in 2010 in the United States, *their* story is much closer to the picture of what the average American believes about the conflict, and is the true conventional wisdom in this country, perverse as it may be. When taking into account the number of factual-sounding, reasonable-sounding-to-the-uninformed lobby talking points that went unanswered, I think I’m correct in saying that very little of this conventional wisdom was dispelled for any audience members in the crowd undecided on the issue. There is absolutely nothing to look forward to but a guarantee of failure for this movement if this battle of information is not engaged with full force. Look at the information sheets handed out at any campus pro-Israel meeting, for f—’s sake. We’re currently on the fringe of the fringe of the fringe of the left in America, and our personal refusal to buy Sabra Hummus is not going to alleviate the suffering of any Palestinian, nor provoke a response from any American elected official, nor bring this issue into the public discourse.
Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I remain unconvinced that nothing but extreme scrupulosity on the facts and laws, *followed* by the outrage knowledge of them provoke, is our only chance of taking on our much better-funded adversary and convincing an otherwise unaroused and ignorant public.
