Tag: israel

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When Unilever acquired B&J’s, the agreement guaranteed the ice cream company the right to an independent Board empowered to continue B&J’s decades of social and environmental activism as they see fit. But apparently, Unilever, one of the largest consumer packaged goods (CPG) conglomerates in the world, disagrees with the Board’s repeated attempts to support the people of Palestine, a situation much more dire now after more than a year of constant Israeli attacks that have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and injured and/or made homeless hundreds of thousands more, including thousands who’ve had their replacement homes or shelters destroyed and had to flee multiple times.

Most of the time, Unilever is one of the better corporate citizens. It’s done a lot of good in the business world for environmental and human rights efforts. Many of its business units, beginning with Ben & Jerry’s in 2012, are certified B Corporations (a business structure that allows environmental and social good to be factored in alongside profitability)–and the parent company has been undertaking a Herculean effort (ongoing since 2015) to get the entire corporation B-corp certified.

But now, Unilever is censoring the B&J’s Board and threatening to dissolve the Board and sue individual Board members. And, once again, B&J’s is suing the parent company over censorship around Gaza.

Israel’s position is unusual because it is treated differently than other governments, in two different ways. Some people grant Israel special status because of its history, and some use that history to condemn it and even question its existence. Here are some of the reasons why Israel-Palestine conflict is treated differently than elsewhere:

 

The Pro-Israel Reasons Why Israel is Treated Differently

  • European and US guilt in the aftermath of World War II, when it became obvious that millions of Jews, Roma, lesbians and gays, people with disabilities, and political opponents of the Nazi dictatorship could have been saved by other nations and were instead murdered in Germany and the lands it occupied.
  • Extremely effective pro-Israel lobbying that has demonized Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians (overlapping groups, but not interchangeable) both within the Jewish community and in the wider culture. I recommend the film “Israelism” as the quickest way to gain understanding of how this has worked. This has been so effectively percolated into the culture that any attack on the Israeli government—even in its current super-brutal iteration—is labeled antisemitism.
  • The industrialized world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels from the Arab lands—and the widely-held view within the US government that Israel is our foreign-policy surrogate and enforcement agent in the Middle East (one of the most important strategic regions in the world: a crossroads of trade since ancient times and a place where political, energy, and military control conveys enormous influence over Europe, Africa, and western Asia).

 

The Reasons Why Others Condemn Israel

  • In the larger population, this role as US surrogate gets translated into accepting at face value the common belief that Israel is a bulwark of Western democracy in a region lacking in democracies. And that, in turn, causes conflict with those who criticize Israel’s appalling record of violence and subjugation in the Gaza war. The democracy meme is partially true. If you are a white Jewish citizen of Israel, you have rights under a democracy—but those rights are limited for your Israeli Arab neighbors and do not exist for your Palestinian neighbors in East Jerusalem and just outside Israel’s borders.
  • Pretty much every Israeli and Palestinian has experienced direct harm: the loss of loved ones, the destruction of and/or eviction from property, denial of human rights. For 76 years, Israel has oppressed Palestinians, dating back to independence in 1948—and Arab nations have repeatedly waged wars and nongovernmental attacks against Israel. More recently, Israel has initiated several wars. On my second trip to Israel and Palestine ten years ago, I listened to a man who had been only 11 years old when the Israelis told his family not to take a lot of their possessions because they would be back in a few weeks (scroll down in the linked article to the section on Bar-Am). He’s one of many whose story I’ve heard over the years that describe the oppression, loss, and bitterness —as the many Israeli Jews who’ve recounted their own losses through terrorism have also experienced. The gruesome toll affects people on both sides.
  • The denial of rights to ethnic and religious minorities within Israel and to majorities in the Palestinian Territories, the violence done to these populations, and the forced resettlement have all combined to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many.

Unfortunately, what should be anger directed at the government of Israel is often misdirected into attacks on Jews. And it doesn’t help that so many people who should know better equate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Mind you—antisemitism is real and it is not OK. But there’s a big difference between “Israel, stop bombing civilians, stop denying food access, stop destroying hospitals, stop killing journalists,” etc. and saying that the heinous Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 was justified or that the Jews as a people should be destroyed. Those latter constructs are antisemitic. The former are legitimate criticisms of a government gone amok.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the head of the rabbinic human rights organization T’ruah, has a helpful article on how to tell the difference.

But legitimate criticism of violent and discriminatory Israeli policies and actions, even those before October 7, cannot justify what Hamas did. There is NO justification for kidnapping, killing and raping innocents because they happen to be Jewish and living in Israel—just as there is NO justification for killing and torturing innocents because they happen to be Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim. And there is also no justification for treating Israel far more harshly in the diplomatic arena than other countries brutalizing occupied populations. If it’s wrong when Israel does it, it’s also wrong when other countries do it. Not to make that clear is another form of antisemitism.

 

And How Does This Relate to Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s

What Unilever is doing to Ben & Jerry’s is just a less intense version of the censorship and repression on college campuses last spring when Palestinians and their allies demanded justice and peace. What it says is “we espouse values of multiculturalism but we don’t actually believe it. In fact, we believe in demolishing entire populations based on ethnicity, religion, or other factors that we say shouldn’t matter. And we will bring repression down upon the shoulders of those who defend the groups we want to marginalize.”

To make real change, we have to make space for dissenting voices, especially from marginalized populations. That gets stripped away when criticism of Israel’s malignant actions are blocked. If you agree, click to tell Unilever to stop stomping on dissent at Ben & Jerry’s. You’re welcome to copy and modify my message:

As a proud Jew and an activist for 55 years who’s worked on peace, Middle East, the right to dissent, environmental, business as a social change agent, and immigration justice among other issues, I take strong issue with Unilever’s unilateral abrogation of Ben & Jerry’s right to protest genocidal policies in Gaza. With the Board’s independence written into the acquisition agreement, the umbrella entity of Unilever is not obligated to agree with their position and nor does that position have to be thought of as representing the whole corporation—but you are obligated to let them express it. Palestinian rights are compatible with Jewish rights, and the world needs to stop accepting the argument that criticism of Israel’s government is antimsemitism.

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Democracy itself is at stake in this election. If you choose not to vote, or you cast a vote for a 3rd-party candidate, you may never have the right to vote again. You’ve probably heard about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—but have you looked at the details? Fasten your seatbelts—this one’s scary! Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, actually said it out loud: he’s attempting to conduct “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be…There are parts of the plan that we will not share with the Left: the executive orders, the rules and regulations.”

But what they did commit to paper is bad enough: an approximately 900-page blueprint for a fascist takeover of the US including an agency-by-agency roadmap for the first six months of a second Trump administration. Project 2025, written with input from somewhere between 85 and 100 senior Trump advisors and endorsed by J.D. Vance in his foreword to the main author’s book, will attack our freedom in many directions. Here are five of the awful things they are planning to do:

  1. Viciously attack immigrants with massive deportations and detentions that would be far, far worse than the criminal cruelty of Trump’s first administration (this link outlines all the immigration points I summarize below)
  2. Attack women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and women’s equality—starting with banning abortion in all 50 states.
  3. Act as if the climate crisis doesn’t exist: wildly ramp up dirty energy sources like oil, coal and nuclear while destroying green energy programs. According to the Sierra Club, “Project 2025 is essentially a death sentence for federal climate and environmental protections.”
  4. Eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs—and further enable Trump’s long history of open and blatant racism, from the 1970s right up to his recent race-based attacks on Kamala Harris, to be just the outward face of seriously cruel policies..
  5. Eliminate the right to vote for millions of people, through obscenely difficult registration procedures, reduction of polling places in areas that vote Democratic, and even bringing armed thugs to polling places to discourage voters of color—and, from all appearances, try to maintain power indefinitely. Trump even publicly told a so-called Christian Nationalist audience (if you look at what Christ said, they’re not Christians), “You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Because this article is a project of Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice, let’s look more closely at the horror of Project 2025’s immigration proposals. You can find equally horrifying parts attacking civil rights, social equity, women’s reproductive freedom, the environment, and even education itself. According to the Niskanen Center, a centrist think-tank, Project 2025 would demolish legal immigration and make the US less safe while inflicting significant damage to the US economy

Specific policies within Project 2025 are a fascist’s dream and a progressive’s nightmare. To list just some proposals, it would:

  •       Choke off many types of legal immigration (even for survivors of crimes)
  •       Cut off federally funded student loans from up to 10.7 million US students at schools that grant in-state tuition to DACA recipients and undocumented students
  •       Ban most immigration from 13 countries that refuse to receive deported nationals
  •       Repeal ALL Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations (putting about 700,000 long-term US residents at risk of deportation)
  •       Stop processing refugee immigration applications
  •       Eliminate work permits for many immigrants, denying them jobs and creating a burden on taxpayers
  •       Require immediate expulsion if Customs and Immigration Service denies an application, even for simple paperwork errors, and even for people with valid Green Cards
  •       Force state and local governments to provide driver’s license and other data to the feds—pretty much ending Sanctuary communities around the country
  •       Eliminate ALL privacy protection for those without documents, leading to risk of harassment by private vigilantes and deportation or incarceration by federal agencies
  •       Evict from public housing mixed-status families that include citizens or green card holders and people without documents

Immigration justice activists will also be badly hurt by non-immigration-related parts of both Project 2025 and Trump’s own hate-filled speeches such as how to handle dissent and dissenters.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections…They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream…the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within…” 
—Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Claremont, NH, November 11, 2023

Note that the “vermin” wording is one of several times Trump has plagiarized from Adolf Hitler. That’s not a coincidence.

If Trump gets back into the White House, many progressives might have to organize from inside the walls of prisons and detention centers. Proposals to stop dissent from those who lean Democrat and other supposed “enemies” include:

Another deeply worrisome batch of proposals would centralize government power in the White House and eliminate even the weak protections against corporate greed that now exist: Project 2025 aims to:

  •       Move control of the Federal Communications Commission (which regulates TV, radio, telephone, etc.) and other public protection agencies directly under the White House while eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce entirely
  •       Permanently eliminate career managers and replace them with political appointees loyal to Trump

Coupled with the recent Supreme Court Trump v. United States decision giving presidents they like unlimited powers to quash dissent, including even assassinating their enemies, we need to take these threats—and all the other threats wrapped up in Project 2025 and in Trump’s own words—VERY seriously.

And to those who voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary to protest Biden’s way-too-enabling response to Netanyahu’s massive crime in Gaza, let’s not forget that Trump has not only called for detaining/deporting Pro-Palestinian students and their allies but has told Israel to “finish the problem,” encouraging the Israelis to continue on the path toward genocide.

Sitting out this election or voting 3rd-party is not an option if you want to protect democracy and prevent fascism. Without ranked-choice voting, any vote other than for the Democratic nominee is a vote for Trump and his brand of fascism.  Is Harris perfect? Certainly not. But elections in a two-party, winner-take-all election are not about getting the perfect candidate. They are about who we’d rather be organizing against or trying to impact!

Although on a number of key issues–especially immigration justice and the war in Gaza–Harris is far from where we want her to be, we activists across the country will have a much better chance to extract concessions from a Harris-Walz administration than from the fascist alternative. As Abraham Josephine Riesman wrote in Slate, progressives do influence the Biden administration: “They have, at times, responded to pressure from their left wing in Congress (the so-called Squad and others), as well as pressure from unions and advocacy campaigns…”

National partners in the immigration justice movement (led by those most directly impacted) confirm that progressive organizing campaigns have led to recent wins (e.g. TPS for Haitian asylum seekers, legal paths and freedom from deportation for undocumented spouses and children of US citizens).  Currently the ACLU and immigration justice groups are suing the Biden administration for their new anti-asylum executive orders.  Under a Biden-Harris or a Harris-Walz administration, these suits and advocacy efforts can move forward.  We don’t know what repressive steps would be taken if MAGA were to win.

As we continue to fight to save lives in Gaza and on the US/Mexico border, we must be assured of the best environment possible to continue to influence legislators and the administration, speak up and speak out, and push the news media to take stands in favor of peace and justice.   With Biden and Harris, we have been able to push for better policies and we have had some wins.  We need to elect Harris and Walz so that radicals will not be hunted down as they were during the McCarthy era and so we can build our movements to be as large and inclusive as possible.  This is a long-term fight, and electing Harris and Walz is just the first step.

In fact, we urge you to vote for Democrats for every contested office this time so that Harris and Walz can get things done without getting blocked by Congress, state legislatures, governors, and judges at every turn.  The choice this time is clearer than it’s ever been.

 

Lifelong activist Shel Horowitz wrote this on behalf of Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice, which unanimously endorses it and ran an abridged version in its newsletter. An author, international speaker, TEDx Talker, and expert in turning business into a force for social justice and environmental healing, his award-winning 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Download excerpts from the book at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com Shel acknowledges Holly Bishop and D. Dina Friedman, whose significant edits made this piece stronger.

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Jews, who were forced away from Israel/Palestine more than 2000 years ago, have the “right of return” automatically. They can come and instantly claim Israeli citizenship, and the government helps them resettle–even offering intensive Hebrew language instruction. But Palestinians, who were only forced off their land in 1948, have no such right–even though some of those people are still alive and no one is more than four generations into the exile. Meanwhile, in many parts of the country, Palestinians can’t get building permits from Israeli authorities. “But they still need places to live. They still have children.” So they build illegally, and when Israel wants to up the repression, the government bulldozes these houses.

That inequity made CNN political commentator and journalist Peter Beinart (latest book: The Crisis of Zionism) very uncomfortable. As he struggled with the ethics of this inequality, he began learning more. Beinart is Jewish, has lived in South Africa, Israel, and the US,  and is very aware of the ethical teachings in classical Judaism about treating the stranger well, doing good deeds, being a good guest when you travel to others’ lands, and treating people fairly.

Over 200 people gathered on Zoom June 8, 2021 to hear Beinart discuss the prospects for peace and justice in the Middle East in a program for Critical Connections entitled “Palestinian Rights, Jewish Responsibility.” At least five rabbis were in the room, as were large contingents from both the mainstream and progressive Jewish communities. A number of Muslims were in the audience, as well.

Originally a supporter of two separate states, Beinart now sees that as impossible because of the ways the Israeli government has carved up the West Bank into “Bantustans” with Jewish settlements separating once-contiguous Palestinian areas. Instead, he has joined many Palestinian thinkers in calling for a single multiethnic state, sharing power, with parallel more-or-less autonomous governments for internal governance within each community, and offering equality for all.

Both Israelis and Palestinians would be safer with this model–just as South Africa is safer for whites as well as blacks, and Northern Ireland is safer for both Protestants and Catholics, he says. Once the dominant group gives up its total control and need to dominate, the oppressed group starts to get less hostile because the repression has eased off.

He says the late Israeli writer Amos Oz is wrong in calling for a “divorce” between Israeli and Palestinian society. “The marriage will not be easy. But it is essential.” And just as activists in the US have begun to make land acknowledgements to the indigenous people who had the land before Europeans, “acknowledgments and apologies [for past wrongs] have great healing power.”

Beinart took many tough questions, particularly from mainstream Jews worried about the security of Israeli Jews under that scenario.

  • On antisemitism from the Left: “We cannot deny that some on the Left are antisemitic–especially in recent weeks [during the exchange of bombs and rockets between Israel and Gaza]. All the Palestinian intellectuals and activists I know condemned those acts. But virtually all Palestinians will be anti-Zionist,” because Israel has dispossessed their families. It didn’t help that major Israeli statesmen made incendiary remarks. Abba Eban, for example, claimed that a return to the 1948-67 frontiers would be “Auschwitz borders.” Beinart made this distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism several times, and pointed out that the Palestinian statesman Edward Said was on record as appreciating the impetus behind Zionism–though not its effects on his people. Beinart also stood unequivocally against antisemitism from any source: “If Jews are being dehumanized, as Jews, we should speak up.”
  • On whether either side had a right to call the other fascist: He did not feel that Palestinians should see Jews as Nazis. But he also recognizes that there is a massive power imbalance and had strong criticism for those Jews who see Palestinians as akin to the Nazis: “If you see Palestinians as Nazis, you erase the moral responsibility of power. You frame it as survival, but the issue is denial of basic rights.
  • On how to negotiate in good faith: Both sides have made offers, but their offers were unacceptable to the other side. NNo matter how many offers have been tendered, they haven’t been able to reach common ground for a meaningful agreement so far.
  • On the safety of Israeli Jews in a single multicultural state and the danger of falling into Lebanon-style permanent civil unrest: Growing up in South Africa, he noted there was great fear among whites about what would happen when apartheid ended and blacks took power. South Africa is only about 10 percent white, while Israel/Palestine would be much more Jewish. Jews, he said, have enough economic privilege and enough political and social organization to protect their interests. He also noted several important differences between Israel/Palestine and Lebanon: Lebanon had a weak economy, a weak government with weak restraints on executive power, low literacy, and multiple invaders (Israel and Syria).Israel/Palestine is in a much stronger position. It has much higher per capita income and literacy levels, including among Palestinians, which according to political science research is correlated with democratic stability. For Jews, it also has strong judicial, parliamentary and media institutions that check executive power—those are a foundation upon to build in a state that offers equality to Palestinians
  • On whether comparisons between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid-era regime are apt. He noted that Israelis and Palestinians have vastly different experiences on a whole range of situations, from border checkpoints to land claims to obtaining various types of permits–and that numerous Israeli groups have described the occupation as apartheid. I didn’t hear him directly take a position–but he did say, “Self-determination does not mean the right for a given ethnic, religious or racial group to have a state that grants it rights that are denied to people of other ethnic, religious or racial groups in that same state.”
    . And “to be stateless is to be under the power of a government but” not to have the rights afforded citizens, or to have any agency in dealing with state power.
  • On why American Jews need to get involved and not see the conflict as an internal matter that only concerns Israeli Jews: US Jews have skin in the game because our government has a long history of supporting and funding even very extreme Israeli government positions.
  • On how to end anti-Jewish terrorism: “You have to show that nonviolence can work. When you respond by criminalizing BDS [boycott-divestment-sanctions] and calling it antisemitic, you doom nonviolence. [PLO President Mahmoud] Abbas has cooperated on security for 15 years. When you continue building [Jewish West Bank] settlements [despite that cooperation], you strengthen Hamas.” He also praised organizations such as Encounter, that provide opportunities for Jews and Palestinians to meet in structured formats, in a society that makes meaningful contact quite difficult, noting that “Israeli media doesn’t do a good job of presenting the reality of Palestinian existence. He does see hope in social media connections, and described a Clubhouse room that attracted many perspectives and was going 24/7 during the Gaza conflict: “Many of the Israelis were exposed to the Palestinian perspective, some for the first time.” This is a bilateral problem, though; he expressed concern about an “antinormalization” movement among Palestinians..

Author’s note: I have done my best to render material within quote marks as accurately as I can, but they are from handwritten notes–and while accurate in substance and meaning, may vary from his exact words. Also, I’ve grouped comments that were thematically related; this article does not attempt to put Beinart’s remarks in the sequence they were presented.

To read or subscribe to Beinart’s blog, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Shel Horowitz is Editor of Peace and Politics Magazine and a peace activist for over 40 years. His latest book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

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Bernie Sanders said two things worth noting the other day, at the same event. When asked at a Town Hall meeting how to convince Bernie supporters to vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee, he responded, “it is “incumbent on her” to win over his supporters. Specifically, he pointed out that he doesn’t exercise control over his supporters and nor should he, and that many have a deep suspicion of a candidate with such close ties to Wall Street. He even gave her a road map: endorse his Medicare-for-ALL healthcare plan.

At the same event, he announced that he would do “everything in my power to keep the Republicans out of the White House.”

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders

Hillary responded only to the first, pointing out that she did not put any conditions on her endorsement of Obama in 2008. And analysts agree that she worked very hard for Obama after the convention. However, she didn’t seem to hear the second.

She still does not get that Bernie is not a politician in charge of a machine in the old style of politics. He finds himself at the forefront of a people’s movement that he does not control. Bernie can endorse and I’m sure will endorse Hillary if she is a nominee, but that doesn’t mean he is able to overcome his supporters’ massive and justified skepticism of her belief systems and her actions. Once again, he has spoken the truth; she does have to win them over.

And Hillary needs these people. Independents and left-leaning Democrats will be major factors in November. If they stay home, we get whichever monster emerges from the Republican convention. If they show up, we get a Democrat.

I have serious issues with Hillary Clinton, and particularly her foreign policy. I worry that she’s too much of a war-hawk and way too comfortable with the worst excesses of Israel’s ultra-right government. I don’t love her cluelessness about people’s movements and her coziness with Wall Street. And while she’s obviously extremely smart, she’s done some really dumb things over and over again. I don’t expect any significant progressive shift under a Hillary Clinton administration.

In the past, including in 2000, I’ve voted 3rd party. Of course, I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway. Knowing that Massachusetts was safely Democratic made it easy to vote my conscience and cast my vote for Nader.

Yet, if she’s the nominee, I will hold my nose and vote for her. The prospect of either a Trump or Cruz presidency is so distasteful that I want the margins of victory to be enormous; this year, I want to be counted in that victory margin, and not pushed off to the side with a Green Party vote that nobody pays any attention to. Under Clinton, I would expect some attention to economic policies that help poor people—as a sop to Sanders supporters, if nothing else—and some good stuff on women’s issues. I would expect excellent Supreme Court nominees.

And, unfortunately, I would expect once again to be out in the streets with thousands of others, doing my best to keep us from being sucked into whatever war HRC would get us into.

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I deeply resent Hillary Clinton’s message that we can’t go for what we really want. Barack Obama beat her in ’08 because his message was “hope” and “yes we can.” He made some of that a reality in spite of tremendous resistance–more than I’ve ever seen for ANY president’s policies. But he would have gotten much more accomplished if he’d continued organizing: bringing the same coalition that led him to victory into supporting his agenda and pressuring that reluctant Congress. As a former community organizer, he should have known this.

Bill Clinton’s presidency shows the dangers of the HRC approach. By dismissing any effort at real change right from the start, he allowed himself, over and over again, to back away from meaningful change and turn what should have been the post-negotiation fallback position into the starting gate, and then allow that to be whittled down further until the change was so small that Grover Norquist actually could drown it in a bathtub.

Obama made the same mistake. “Single payer isn’t on the table but we have a public option” turned into. “no public option.” And the ACA as finally passed was a giveaway to insurance companies. Yes, it made people’s live’s better and I’m glad it passed. But Obama squandered the potential for much deeper reform.

Isn’t it so much better to aim for what you really want and get only three-quarters of the way than to aim for what you think is “achievable”—and still get only three-quarters of the way? It’s a very rare football play that gets a touchdown from the kick-off point. Much more commonly, the team advances the ball, play by play, and starts again from the end point of the last play. Then they get the touchdown.

It took 100 years to eliminate slavery in the US. It took another 100 to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, and it may be another 100 before the cancer of racism is nothing but a memory. It has already taken about 80 years to get even the wimpy ACA; that doesn’t mean we say we don’t need to make more progress. And it certainly doesn’t mean you have to tear down the ACA before you have something better in place.

Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”

Muhammad Ali put it this way:

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

And I personally have taken on the “impossible” goal of showing the business community how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—at a profit. Taking my cue from Ali, when I speak on this, my talk is called “Impossible is a Dare!” I’ve also written a book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, that demonstrates how these future victories are actually quite possible. I’ve done “impossible” things before. Why restrict ourselves by thinking small?

I have other issues with Hillary besides her willingness to settle for less even before the negotiations start. HRC’s ties to Wall Street make me nervous. Her hawkish rhetoric, even more so. And her Middle East policy is just plain shameful. As an American Jew, I stand up and say “Israel right or wrong” is as misguided as “America right or wrong” was in the Vietnam era—and I further say that we progressives knew that going into Iraq as we did was a terrible mistake. I was out there in the streets with millions of other Americans, saying “don’t do this, it will be a disaster.” There is zero justification for her vote to support the worst foreign policy disaster in history.

I will proudly—excitedly—vote for Bernie in the primary. Nonetheless, if Hillary is the nominee—and she probably will, due in part to Party rules that allocate delegates to high-status mainstream Democrats over and above those allocated in elections—I would support her unequivocally over any of the Republicans running. I think she has a good heart, I’d much rather see her in charge of picking the next members of the Supreme Court than any of that bunch, and I would see her election—as I saw Obama’s—as getting us closer on the path from the kick-off to the goal.

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This may be a new level of stupidity. Murdoch-owned publishing behomoth HarperCollins actually prepared and started to sell an atlas that does not show Israel. At all. Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank are there.

No big surprise, there was lots of pushback when word got out, and HC removed the atlas from circulation and said it would pulp any remaining copies. Even the UK Bishops’ Conference Department of International Affairs condemned the publication as a blow against peace in the region.

The company sheepishly withdrew, saying,

HarperCollins sincerely apologises for this omission and for any offence caused.

But the company is talking out of two sides of its mouth. Earlier, as reported in the Washington Post, it tried to justify the omission:

Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that specializes in maps, told the Tablet that it would have been “unacceptable” to include Israel in atlases intended for the Middle East. They had deleted Israel to satisfy “local preferences.”

HarperCollins has quickly found out that it’s also unacceptable to abandon truth in a volume that claims to offer

“in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.” Its stated goals include helping kids understand the “relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”

Ummm, hello, and just how do you intend to put the region in context if you ignore the most conflicted issue it faces? Do you really think students in Arab countries haven’t heard of it? Did you really think this would stay a safe little conspiratorial secret just for the cognoscenti?

HarperCollins would have been totally justified in marking the West Bank and Gaza as disputed territory held by Israel, following conquest. But there’s no dispute about Israel being a nation.

This is a time when we all have social media at our disposal. That means it not only should have been totally obvious that this would backfire, but HarperCollins had the tools at its disposal to make the governments demanding this absurdity to be the ones looking ridiculous. If any governments insisted on refusing entry to accurate atlases, the company could have had a skilled social media manager explain why HC would no longer sell atlases into these countries, and create a pressure movement both from outside the country and from those inside who recognize that not knowing geography is a handicap in the global economic arena, and the Gulf states would have lifted the restriction.

Instead, what HarperCollins has done is to eliminate its own credibility. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the future trusting any reference materials from this publisher. Blatant and deliberate repudiation of truth is not a recipe for success in the world of reference books—especially reference books about the world.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

My 19-year-old niece, Miriam Clayman, made aliyah yesterday. In other words, she emigrated to Israel and as a Jew, instantly became a citizen.

Unlike the US, which seems to be hostile to immigrants these days, Israel actively recruits and encourages Jews from around the world to make aliyah, and honors them when they arrive. Unlike the US, where immigrants must find their own community and must struggle silently with homesickness and unfamiliar customs, in Israel they get language immersion and the resources of a grateful government.

As a marketer watching part of the welcome ceremony in Israel (on replay), I was struck by how well Israel does its marketing and branding for this project.

Instant Community

It’s quite remarkable to me that this group of 127 olim (people who have made aliyah)—strangers when they arrived at the departure ceremony in New York just a day earlier—had clearly formed a community as they flew through the night to their new lives. And this was deliberate.

Israel’s government and business community joined to make sure the olim felt welcome; you could see it in a dozen little touches, such as:

  • The special “aliyah plane” with its festive logos
  • The super-symbolic disembarkation on to an old-fashioned stairway to the tarmac, instead of a soulless mechanical jetway to an anywhere airport lounge
  • The ceremony with numerous dignitaries, including the minister in charge of resettling immigrants
  • The video feed of the entire event, plus commentary, footage from inside the plane, footage as the olim stepped off the plane, etc.—broadcast live to the eager family and friends around the world, and available for replay as a powerful persuasion tool

The two olim selected to represent the group and receive their certificates in front of everybody, shake hands with and hug the dignitaries, etc. happened to be my niece and  her boyfriend, Ben Yablon, who met  as gap-year-in-Israel students last year. Their love story is apparently quite appealing to the media; they had already been featured in a big article in a major Israeli newspaper and a radio interview last week.miriam and ben Yediot Achronot

Imagine starting life in a new country as an honored and welcomed community member whose new country is excited to receive you—imagine your own perception, and the perception of your friends and family back home, that you’ve finally “come home.”

Marketing by forming communities is certainly nothing new. Companies like Harley-Davidson and Apple  have built their whole brands around it. It’s part of why social media marketing has taken off. It’s part of why smart marketers often stage events. But rarely does a whole country say, “we’re so glad to have you as part of our community.”

The Wider Context

Of course, Israel’s welcoming committee has a lot of the groundwork already done. The new immigrants have already embraced Israel and the idea of an ancient Jewish homeland that has risen again. Diaspora Jews of European origin often feel a stronger pull to Israel than to the actual country where their parents or grandparents grew up. Jews in the US, at least, are often raised with intense loyalty to Israel; the idea of being pioneers building a new country is very strong even among American Jews who have no intention of actually moving. Even the Passover seder ends with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

And let’s not forget the wider regional context. Israel is not popular with its neighbors. Many in the region and around the world consider it a pariah state. And unfortunately, acts of violence and oppression on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have fanned the flames of this hatred. Both sides have rejected real opportunities for peace over and over again. Israel was founded in 1948, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as an almost utopian society, full of rhetoric of optimism and equality—and some of the people who were present at its founding are still alive. But the reality has not always lived up to the rhetoric.

It is worth asking what kind of reception do non-Jewish immigrants receive in Tel Aviv. But it’s also worth looking at the whole concept of building community, not just for a brand, but for a nation, as some of the most powerful marketing possible.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Marketing, Innovation, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

In the 1990s, the US had a 40 percent share of the world-wide solar market. According to widely respected sustainability consultant Gil Friend of Natural Logic (@gfriend), the current US share of the global solar market is a pathetic 5 percent, while China now has more than half the global market: 54 percent. And that’s 10 times as much solar as the US is producing.

Friend’s article doesn’t discuss such solar leaders as Germany, Brazil, and Israel, but I’d expect all of those are currently making more solar than the US is.

It’s really hard to take US government claims that they care about creating jobs and greening the economy very seriously when they let a plum like this slip away. Solarizing the US housing and commercial stock would create tens of thousands of jobs, lower carbon footprint immensely, and also reduce dependence on imported oil (while lowering oil bills too, of course) A trifecta win, and we let it get away! Earth to Congress: Get with the program, for goodness sakes! Erth to Obama: Press your agenda on this!

 

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

It is so amazing for me to watch a major foreign policy and development speech by a sitting US president and actually agree with more than 80 percent of it–yet that was the case for Obama’s speech in Cairo, Egypt. Even under Clinton, I was lucky if I agreed with him 25 or 30 percent of the time, and the number was far lower for speeches of the other presidents in my conscious lifetime.

As a progressive, I issue this challenge to other progressives: hold him to the grand rhetoric of peace, international cooperation, multicultural tolerance, and yes, feminism in the Arab world and at home…and to keep him maintaining his acknowledgment of the important roles of Israel and Iran as well as the Arab and Muslim countries.

But what was that he said about being in Iraq until 2012? Waaay too long.!

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