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How to Beat BDS at Its Own Game


(Times of Israel) Daniella Ashkenazy - A shot of street theater would be far more effective in combating BDS than polite, rational argumentation, which fails to reach the uninformed and presents an easy target for BDSers to sabotage and silence with heckling and harassment. BDS cadres have set up an "Apartheid Wall" on the campus green? They're staging street drama with Israeli soldiers harassing Palestinians at mock checkpoints? Let Jewish students respond by sending in activists dressed as school kids with a pipe bomb or a butcher knife in their backpacks, as a pregnant woman laying on a suicide belt in a mock ambulance, as a teenager disguised as a hawker selling snacks to drivers off a tray, to get close enough to knife those manning the BDSers' mock checkpoints. Drive this message home in the finale - with the actors holding up placards with a relevant news clipping with the real cases reported in the press, declaring: "This Really Happens in Israel." Screen footage of the same terrorist attacks on a wall - loops of carnage - under the banner: "What Forced Israel to Build a Security Fence?" We need to adopt the tactics of Jewish students and Israelis in Amsterdam during the 2014 Gaza War, who staged a flash mob demonstration in Leidse Square: A siren sounded and dozens of people strolling across the square hit the pavement and huddled there for 15 seconds as the siren blared, while two activists unfurled a banner saying, "Imagine: In Israel you have 15 seconds to save your life."
2016-03-04 00:00:00
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