It was an incongruous sight: The United Nations General Assembly hall filled to capacity with 1,500 cheering people waving miniature Israeli flags and singing “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem.
No, hell hadn’t frozen over.
The occasion was a one-day conference hosted by Israel’s U.N. mission devoted to fighting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against the Jewish state.
It turns out any U.N. member state can reserve space at the world body’s headquarters in New York — even the iconic General Assembly hall — for events. On May 31, the Israeli mission stacked the seats of the great hall not with delegates representing countries from around the world but with pro-Israel and Jewish activists, many of them college students and high school seniors.
The irony of holding a conference to combat BDS at a site notorious for producing lopsided resolutions against Israel was not lost on anyone.
“Today here in this room we are making our voices heard,” Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said to a standing ovation. “BDS has already infected the United Nations — yes, the United Nations. When the U.N. is opening the door to BDS, we have to respond.”
The conference was part pep rally and part strategizing session, aimed both at making a statement and educating, motivating and advising pro-Israel activists about best practices to combat BDS on campus and beyond.
It included a short video message by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a brief performance by reggae-pop singer Matisyahu, who sang “Jerusalem” and “One Day,” a ballad about ending war.
Though the conference was called Ambassadors Against BDS-International Summit at the United Nations (its Twitter hashtag was #stopBDS), the main panelists at a discussion devoted to fighting BDS on campus said the negative approach most anti-BDS activists adopt is counterproductive.
“Defensiveness is not effective,” said David Sable, global CEO of Young & Rubicam, an international advertising firm that has done extensive research on Americans’ sentiments about Israel.
“Theirs [pro-BDS] is a positive message, ours is negative. We’re anti, they’re pro,” said Sable. “We look like a corporate brochure. What they’ve put out is a creative platform for self-expression. If you were a college student, which one would you go for?”
Sable suggested activists instead focus on winning over people who don’t favor one side or the other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with positive messages about Israel that can resonate with young people.
Frank Luntz, the Republican political consultant and pollster, said pro-Israel activists need to speak in language that appeals to the demographics least sympathetic toward Israel: women, 18- to 29-year-olds and Democrats. And don’t be afraid of expressing sympathy for the Palestinian people, he advised.
Indeed, while the crowd at the conference was pro-Israel, speakers who expressed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians were greeted with warm applause.
Among them was SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum, whose West Bank factory in Maale Adumim, which employed Palestinians alongside Israelis, long was a target of the BDS movement. When SodaStream shuttered the factory in 2013 to consolidate its operations in Beersheba, the move was falsely cited as a victory for the BDS movement. In fact, it was to accommodate the company’s rapid growth, Birnbaum said.
The conference included two Palestinian presenters: “Son of Hamas” author Mosab Hassan Yousef, who for years served as a Shin Bet informant and whose life story has been made into a film, and Bassem Eid, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, a watchdog focused on Palestinian institutional malfeasance.
Eid criticized the United Nations for helping perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than resolve it.
“Not one country around the world tried to focus on the economic issues and economic prosperity,” Eid said. “We the Palestinians are the ones who are suffering not only from the foreign policies of the international community, but also from the policies of our own leadership.”