Boycott VS ‘Buycott’

During the 1960s, when I was a kid in New York City, my parents were both members of labor unions—my mom was a sewing machine operator in the “rag trade” centered around 7th Avenue in the West Forties at the time.

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I remember going with her to department stores and specifically picking out items of clothing without union labels. Once at the cash register, my mom would “remember” to look for the union label, and when she couldn’t find it, would refuse to buy the item, citing fair wages and decent working conditions as the reasons for buying union-made clothing. Of course, she wasn’t the only one—hundreds of union members all around the New York area did this in their free time—and changed the buying policies of major department stores in the area: Macy’s. Sears-Roebuck, Gimbels, Alexander’s and others—and forced non-union factories to allow the unions in and hire union members.

This was a “just” boycott, with the intent of trying to guarantee the average working person a living wage and decent working conditions. It was not a political boycott.

Political boycotts have nothing to do with social justice—they are all too often false flags of “support for a cause” in lieu of real activism. They’re also generally failures and can even have an effect the exact opposite of their original intent. Here’s an example:

‘Buycott’ challenges Israel boycotters

A new Web site set up by pro-Israel Canadians seeks to defy anti-Israel boycotts by encouraging subscribers to deliberately buy Israeli products that are being boycotted.

The campaign, titled “Buycott Israel,” was organized by the Canada-Israel Committee together with the Jewish federations of Vancouver and Toronto and the Canadian Jewish Congress, Pacific Region, to counter the increasing number of boycotts in Canada over the last year.

Aiming to turn a disadvantage into a strong advantage, Buycott Israel’s Web site asks readers, “Are you fed up with calls to boycott Israeli goods and services? Want to do something about it?” and then calls on them to sign up for “Buycott alerts.”

The enterprise promises to alert users “when a boycott initiative needs to be countered,” and lets subscribers know the results of every Buycott action.

“These boycotts have been going on for while, but we’ve seen a real uptick in activity lately, and as a result, members of the community decided to push back in a very serious way,” Sara Saber-Freedman, chief operating officer of the Canada-Israel Committee, told The Jerusalem Post by phone on Thursday.

Saber-Freedman explained that the campaign was in the process of “creating a database of people and items. The Web site is an interactive tool that will allow our subscribers to notify others when they find out about an attempt to boycott a particular [Israeli] item, and in turn the Web site will ask the subscribers to go out and buy that item.”

She added, “We are making a statement to the people who seek to isolate Israel that we will see to it that Israel is less isolated, and we will do this because of those actions. And if you seek to limit access to Israeli academics, we will let these voices be heard.”

Saber-Freedman told the Post that the worrying trend had been “cropping up in the commercial sector, in labor movements and even in churches.”

“The United Church of Canada entertained a boycott notion recently, but it was defeated,” she noted. “But even though it was generally defeated, it was deferred to next year for consideration, so we know that this problem is one that will keep on coming back.”

Over the last year, there have been three public attempts to boycott Israeli wine in Canada: two protests in Vancouver, and one in Toronto. In the Toronto boycott, protesters led by the anti-war group Not In Our Name picketed liquor store LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) to protest the sale of Israeli wine there.

Dismayed and disgusted by the protest, Toronto’s Jewish community rallied, and hundreds of Jews arrived at the scene to buy all the Israeli wine in the store. Activists claimed to have led LCBO to sell out of Israeli wine - over 500 cases in just over half an hour - and to have caused the boycotters to leave in defeat not long afterward.

Although there have been a number of anti-Israel boycott campaigns in Canada recently, “in each of them, it comes out of our experience that [buying the product that is being boycotted] has been effective, successful and sends out an absolutely unequivocal message,” explained Saber-Freedman.

“We even caused the store owners to stock up in anticipation for one of the boycotts,” she recalled triumphantly. “We used our internal mail list to ask our members to specifically go and purchase Israeli wine, and as a result the wine sold out.

“What's more, in Vancouver, the second time the anti-Israeli protest happened, the store went out and stocked up on Israeli wine, because they knew that, ironically, if there was a picket, they'd do more business.”

But turning serious, Saber-Freedman added that “in our experience, consistently, whether it's store-owners or organizers of cultural festivals, people are annoyed and irritated by people attempting to assert their political agenda on them and on the public… they are tired of being taken hostage by people whose agenda is so narrow and so unthinking.”

The reversal of the boycotts appears to have galvanized the Jewish community, and with the advent of the Buycott Israel campaign, Saber-Freedman’s hopes for the future are now brighter.

“We’re very keen to see where this takes us. It’s an exciting step in citizen-based advocacy for Israel,” she said.

“As much as anything, we’re thrilled that people are as interested in it as they seem to be. The news of the campaign is spreading across the blogosphere,” she went on.

“People are just fed up. What we’ve been seeing in Canada over the last 12 months is an increase in the number of cases and instances where Israel is being boycotted, and we needed to do something against that.”

Saber-Freedman stressed that “there’s nothing ‘stealth’ in our approach. It’s open and in-your-face. We’re doing this in a very conscious way – we’re not hiding anything.

“Ultimately, this campaign is part of what we all want - for Israel’s right to exist in peace behind internationally recognized borders and not to be challenged at every turn.

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Here’s a sample talkback from a reader:

29. You know what? I support the BUYcott campaign. Kid you not. I’m Lebanese and anti-Zionism, but I believe in normalization with Israel, the only democracy in that region. Those who are calling for a boycott of Israel are ignorant and corrupt thugs. Let’s start working, Arabs and Jews, to fight the haters and evil people in the Arab world.

Angry Arab – As’ad - USA (09/26/2009 11:22)

Whether this is the same ‘Angry Arab’ that Marco Villa loves to [selectively] quote or not, he has the right idea.

Politically-motivated boycotts are not only failures, they often backfire and come back to bite the boycotters on the ass. They’re also hypocritical, because these “activists” only boycott the products that don’t affect their own comfort zone.

Has anyone seen a call to boycott Intel processors? From the MMX technology all the way up to the QuadCore, they were all developed and manufactured at Intel Israel. What about Windows? No call to boycott Windows, even though most of it was written by Microsoft R&D in Israel… The list is long—instant messengers, third-generation cell phones, drip irrigation, medicines, medical procedures, solar energy applications, sewage treatment, recycling processes and more… where are the calls to boycott these?

These self-styled “activists” are willing to boycott right up to the first bit of inconvenience to themselves. My grandfather had a name for such wishy-washy “idealists”—he called them “parlor pinks”. I call them cowards—people without enough courage in their convictions to get up off their ample derrieres and actually DO something, instead of spouting hate from behind their safe keyboards thousands of miles away from any confrontation actually related to their “cause”.