When institutions make life uncomfortable for Jews, there is usually a simple reason for it: Those with influence within the institution want fewer Jews hanging around.
This is often treated as incidental. People say, for example: If Columbia doesn’t change its behavior, the number of Jews applying to Columbia will drop. But that has the order backwards. Columbia wants fewer Jewish applicants, and so it is behaving in such a way as to bring that about.
Sometimes you can see people having this realization in real-time. In a long, detailed piece in the Telegraph on the British Medical Association’s descent into an unhealthy fixation with Israel and Jews—10 percent of the resolutions at its recent annual conference concerned the topic—one retired doctor who was a BMA member for 45 years is quoted musing about the fact that the union “doesn’t involve itself much now in Ukraine, or Sudan, or with the Uyghurs, or any other oppressed minority. It doesn’t comment on US aid cuts. No, it is absolutely obsessed with the Palestinian cause.”
So if the motive isn’t actual concern for those caught in medical distress within global conflict theaters, what is the motive?
A former BMA member who resigned last year in protest of the union’s anti-Semitic turn ponders the question: “They will end up having an organization with very few Jewish doctors. And maybe some people in the BMA want that, I don’t know.”
Ah, but I think you do know. That was the correct answer, was it not? Form follows function, and all that.
Same answer for former Rep. Kathy Manning, a two-term Democrat from North Carolina who left the House and took the reins of the party’s lone pro-Israel affiliated group, the Democratic Majority for Israel.
On Saturday, the North Carolina Democratic Party’s executive committee passed a resolution accusing Israel of “genocide” and calling for the U.S. to institute a defense embargo against the Jewish state. The vote was a long time coming, and Manning, who was the head of the Jewish Federations before running for Congress, excoriated the party ahead of the vote: “Time and time again, the Jewish Caucus of North Carolina has attempted to unify and collaborate with the leadership of the North Carolina Democratic Party, which seems unwilling or unable to reciprocate. Instead, Party Chair Anderson Clayton and First Vice Chair Jonah Garson have continued to tolerate extreme anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitism from within the party on social media, in executive committee meetings, and even in the exclusion of Jewish members from Interfaith Caucus meetings.”
In the classic sense, it’s a symbolic move, of course. The North Carolina Democratic Party’s executive committee, thankfully, has no power over national-defense policy. But is it still a symbolic move if it achieves some other, intended goal? The point of such resolutions isn’t to influence the war against Israel but to make the institutions voting on the resolution even more hostile to Jewish members.
Just as the term “Zionists” is used by its critics exclusively to mean “Jews,” an increasing number of institutions bring anti-Israel politics up for the sole purpose of alienating Jews in their midst. The resolution has no effect on Israel because it’s not about Israel; like the BDS movement in America, its entire purpose is to make Jews uncomfortable and unwelcome.
BDS is a failure only on the terms on which it pretends to want to be judged—isolating the world’s Jews from global commerce. If that were really its goal, donors would stop wasting their money on it. If the BMA’s goal had anything to do with the health of Palestinians, their approach would have to change. But it doesn’t, so it won’t. And if the North Carolina Democratic Party were intending to sway an international conflict, it would try to find a way to do so. But it has a different goal, and it has found the perfect process to carry it out.
Institutions that spend their time and capital designing ways to make Jews feel uncomfortable are not actually focused on Israel. We should keep that in mind as these “symbolic” tactics proliferate.
