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D-EVOLUTION |
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They tell us that JOCKO HOMO, DEVO (1988) There is something noticeably different between this year's anti-Israel divestment campaign and the one that was so soundly defeated in 2004. For all of their cynicism, those pushing divestment last year knew how to frame a debate to their advantage. As lopsided as their resolution was, it contained that single passage condemning killings "on both sides," an escape hatch useful to deflect legitimate criticism of lack of balance. Their argument that the Somerville retirement funds' holding of Israeli Bonds and shares in Caterpillar Tractor somehow translated into the city's "investment" in Israel's role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, turning divestment into a means to "level the playing field" was a masterstroke. It transformed their efforts to get our city to attach its name to a worldwide boycott and propaganda campaign into a simple issue of "fairness." While appalled at the time, I find myself becoming nostalgic for the creativity and political acumen of divestment supporters of yesteryear, especially looking over the crude petition that is currently being circulating around the city in hope of getting divestment onto this year's ballot.
Gone from their presentation is any pretense of fairness, even-handedness or pretensions of peacemaking. In its place are vile slurs of "Apartheid" ( What can explain this "d-evolution" of political skills on the part of Israel's Cambridge (whoops! I mean Somerville)-based critics? I suspect the answer has something to do with the nature of the team. We've all been involved with team-based activities, with companies, volunteer groups, sports teams, theatrical productions, etc., in which the total result was far greater than the sum of the parts. There is something immensely satisfying about working in a group and seeing "it all coming together" to create something no individual could do on his or her own. Unfortunately, for every successful team effort, one can list dozens of failures: the product fiasco, the company bankruptcy, the 0-19 baseball drubbing, the theatre or film flop, in which many fingerprints could be found on the same turkey. In most cases, group catastrophes can be blamed on groupthink, the lack of enough leadership or followership to make decisions or set priorities. Thus, every choice is subject to an endless (and often fruitless) drive for consensus, with all output gravitating towards the mean. "It looks like it was designed by a committee," is the critique one often hears about a group project that has gone off the rails in this familiar way. But there is darker dynamic that affects some groups, particularly ones that require members to possess a high degree of passion, such as political organizations. In these types of organizations, it is often the people who are the most aggressive, who exercise power most ruthlessly that rise to the top, using their own passion and uninhibited commitment to an issue to create a hierarchy based on ideological purity. The Middle East is rife with this type of dynamic (which is why compromise has been so hard to obtain there), as are fringe political movements of the Right and Left in America and elsewhere. While I am not privy to the inner workings of the So-Called Somerville Divestment Project (SC-SDP), their most recent output has all of the earmarks of groupthink in a group where ideologues have driven out the practical political activists who almost got their will made law last year. Whether I wax nostalgic for the return of the skilled operators, or simply bid them "good riddance," there is an upside to this transformation of Somerville's branch of the anti-Israel global coalition. For in many ways, this year's petition, with all of its dishonesty and crassness, represents the true face of divestment, one which they only chose to show us in their defeat. |
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© 2005, Jon Haber