Hacking Batsheva: Cultural Boycott In The Face Of Genocide

I first heard at the end of January 2009 that the Israeli dance group, Batsheva, was performing in Minnesota as part of a wider North American tour that would take it to Michigan, Chicago, California, New York and Vancouver. After Israel's brutal December 2008 attack on Gazan civilians and civilian infrastructure, it was definitely time to come out of hibernation, say the hard things, and organize some protest.

As a veteran of the student Anti-Apartheid Movement in London during the 1980s, the notion of cultural boycotts was not alien. After all, cultural boycotts were part of what brought the pressure that ended the Apartheid regime, along with divestment and product boycott campaigns.

Above: The announcement for the Batsheva performance on the website of the U of M's Northrope Auditorium.

I first heard at the end of January 2009 that the Israeli dance group, Batsheva, was performing in Minnesota as part of a wider North American tour that would take it to Michigan, Chicago, California, New York and Vancouver. After Israel's brutal December 2008 attack on Gazan civilians and civilian infrastructure, it was definitely time to come out of hibernation, say the hard things, and organize some protest.

As a veteran of the student Anti-Apartheid Movement in London during the 1980s, the notion of cultural boycotts was not alien. After all, cultural boycotts were part of what brought the pressure that ended the Apartheid regime, along with divestment and product boycott campaigns.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was launched in April 2004. Its precursor had been an internationally-disseminated August 2002 statement made by Palestinian academics and intellectuals—both in Palestine and around the world—calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in October 2003.

While people may be tempted to dismiss Batsheva as an inappropriate protest target because it is "only" a dance company, its link to the actions of the Israeli government is—and has been for years—a very direct one. As Michelle J. Kinnucan wrote in the Electronic Intifada:

The Batsheva Dance Company of Tel Aviv is touring the US and Canada in January, February, and March, 2009. A recipient of public financing since the 1990s, the dance troupe is clearly an Israeli apartheid cultural institution. Writing October 26, 2008, in The Independent of London, Jenny Gilbert reports that the dance company is "funded by Israel's government, its performers include none of Arab extraction, and it is 'proud to be considered Israel's leading ambassador.'"

Ohad Naharin, the dance company's current Director, served in the Israeli army. In a 2005 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Naharin stated that "I continue to do my work, while 20 km from me people are participating in war crimes... the ability to detach oneself from the situation—that is what allows one to go on." Needless to say, the victims of Israeli "war crimes" cannot avail themselves of the luxury of detachment.

ISRAEL'S SELF-WHITEWASHING

Israel has been involved in a process of self-whitewashing itself in the international arena for years, ranging from forays into tourism campaigns such as the early 1990s "It could only be Israel!" and 2007's "You'll love Israel from the first 'Shalom'!" at the top of this page.

It was seeing the "It could only be Israel" posters in the London Underground, with predictable images of the Muslim Dome of the Rock and an Israeli model on a beach that gave rise to one of the verses of a song I wrote in 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the creation of Israel:

I stand before a long-limbed girl
Stretched out on Eilat beach
Her warm poster smile
And all the while my scream is lost
In the tunnel, shouting "What's the cost
In body miles?"

--"The Fire This Time", Nigel Parry, 16 May 1998

In 2005, Israel hired both American and British advertising agencies to work on a campaign called "Brand Israel". In truth, this PR campaign has never stopped, and while advertising agencies and slogans may have changed along the road, the story remains the same. According to a 22 November 2006 article in Israel Today, entitled "Survey: Israel worst brand name in the world":

As if Israel’s position in the world in not bad enough, a new survey published in the US Wednesday says that Israel is suffering from the worst public image among all countries of the world.

The study, called the National Brands Index, conducted by government advisor Simon Anholt and powered by global market intelligence solutions provider GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.), shows that Israel is at the bottom of the list by a considerable margin in the public’s perception of its image.

The Index surveyed 25,903 online consumers across 35 countries about their perceptions of those countries across six areas of national competence: Investment and Immigration, Exports, Culture and Heritage, People, Governance and Tourism. The NBI is the first analytical ranking of the world's nation brands.

"Israel's brand is by a considerable margin the most negative we have ever measured in the NBI, and comes at the bottom of the ranking on almost every question," states report author Simon Anholt.

Not much has changed. Writing in the Jerusalem Post on 5 April 2009, former editor-in-chief Jeff Barak reported:

An international survey of 5,215 people in 13 major countries, conducted recently on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, whose results were released at the weekend showed that 35 percent of the people polled saw Israel as aggressive, 24% saw it as arrogant and only 27% said they supported it politically. The people polled by the way, all had at least a BA degree and earned above the average salary in their country.

Well, no kidding. The real problem Israel faces it that no matter how many advertising agencies it hires and no matter how many positive images of life in Israel it puts out there, the fact remains that its military occupation of Palestinian land will always be the primary association that people make with the country.

People make this association because they are concerned about what Israel is doing to—well—people.

Gaza was particularly hard to watch this time round because there was a sense that Israel has reached the point where it is prepared to do anything, so used has it become to living in impunity in the middle of an international community that would be going to war against, and leveling sanctions at, if it were Jews—not Arabs—in the gun sights.


AMERICAN COMPLICITY

Above: Human Rights Watch's report on American weapons used in Gaza. Read more here

Our complicity in the worst of it is now a matter of public record. Our M825A1 white phosphorus munitions were used in defiance of international legal norms, against civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israel quite literally cooked Palestinian babies in front of our eyes, with weapons we had given them for free.

The leaflet above was an early January creation that I made. The photo of the baby was taken on January 9th in Gaza. Its legs are missing because Israel was shooting at anything that moved and, as corpses could not be retrieved, many were eaten by dogs.

I've never been big on using dead baby pictures in any anti-war activism but after Gaza I wanted to stuff one down the throat of every U.S. politician who ever voted to approve military aid to Israel. Enough is enough.

Half of our taxes in the U.S. go to war to directly create monstrous realities like this cooked baby. What of the family of this baby, assuming they are still alive, and what of all the people who witnessed this man-made obscenity in reality? What will they think of us as they grow up? How much hate did Israel sow in a single month?

There is a video of the baby's arrival at the hospital. It is very hard to watch, but it's probably time you did.

The truly disturbing fact is that this video only represents the tip of an iceberg of horrors that Israel visited on Gaza last Christmas. With 1,400 Palestinians killed—only 16.7% of whom were combatants—5,000 injured, and 2,400 homes demolished, it could fairly be said that—according to international conventions—Israel is undertaking a genocide of the Palestinian people.

I hung the photo of the baby in my living room for a few days at one point, to force myself to live with it, as people in Gaza—who have nowhere else to go and nothing else to look at—are forced to live with such horrors.

It was with that image burned on my heart that I went after Batsheva. Anger is a gift.


ISRAEL AS ORIENTALIST PIMP

Israel loves to use its women's bodies to draw attention away from the bodies of the Palestinians that it kills, Palestinians just like the burned baby.

A New York Times blog entry in early January 2009 noted that the banner images that Israel uses on its army's website represented a form of sexual manipulation:



In past years, Israel's manipulation has been even more crass.

In 2007, Maxim magazine published a photo story featuring scantily clad female Israeli soldiers. The article was set up by the Israeli Consulate in Chicago, who were also promoting the Batsheva tour:




TRYING SOMETHING NEW

The activism we have been carrying out for years has not resulted in freedom for Palestinians. In fact, life has got far worse for Palestinians in the occupied territories over the last decade.

I therefore felt the need to try something new for the Batsheva protest but that absolutely did not mean abandoning traditional forms of protest—demonstrations, leafleting, and letter-writing:

Mr Ben Johnson
Department of Concerts and Lectures
109 Northrop
84 Church Street S.E.
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455

January 29th, 2009

Dear Mr Johnson,

Please cancel the scheduled Batsheva Dance Company's performance on February 18th.

It is entirely inappropriate that you bring government-funded, dancing Israeli soldiers to town as Gazan babies are being burned alive with white phosphorus munitions by Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli government funds such touring activities precisely in order to whitewash their deserved international pariah status. The University of Minnesota needs to honor the Palestinian call for boycotts of Israeli cultural activities: http://www.pacbi.org/campaign_statement.htm

Would you have held whites-only South African performances when the Apartheid regime was massacring black children? Do Arabs not deserve the same rights as black South Africans struggled for?

In the event that you choose to hold this event, many in the Twin Cities will make sure that every patron who walks through the doors of the Northrop auditorium will be informed as to exactly what they are supporting.

Sincerely,

Nigel Parry
Minneapolis, MN

HACKING BATSHEVA

Well, no response to the letter, so it was time to look at ways to hack Batsheva.

Primarily, I wanted the hack to be duplicable throughout Batsheva's tour. In the end, I settled on creating a poster campaign on the campus of the University of Minnesota a week prior to the Batsheva performance, followed by matching leaflets on the night.

I wanted anyone to be able to do it, so while I was perfectly capable of firing up Photoshop and creating something from scratch, I chose instead to fire up Apple's Pages application and start exploring the default template sets. Here's what I came up with.

THE POSTER

Above: Apple's Pages application served up a default poster template (L) which was customized for the Batsheva event.

THE LEAFLET

Same creation concept for the leaflet, using a default trifold template from Pages:

Above: Standard, out-of-the-box, outside flyer template from Apple's Pages application.

I realized that if the leaflet was to end up in the hands of the audience, it needed to be something that would slip under their radar. So the outside was customized to look like a real Batsheva leaflet:

Above: Customized with Batsheva's information. All of the information on the outside of the leaflet was genuine, including the dance company's blurb (L) and address (C).

For the inside, this was the time to break out the narrative. If people took these leaflets as they entered the auditorium, they would have time to read them in their seats before the show started.

Above: Standard, out-of-the-box, inside flyer template from Apple's Pages application.

Above: The customized version of the leaflet interior. On the left, information about what had just happened in Gaza. Top, Israel's Apartheid credentials and Batsheva's willing involvement. At the bottom, an extended look at how Israel uses cultural "fig leaves"—usually images of women—to redirect people's attention away from its nonstop human rights violations and war crimes.

NINJA DISTRIBUTION

To put the posters around campus the week before the event, I sought the help of a couple of friends. Let's call them "poster ninjas".

Above: Team of poster ninjas. If you're postering a university, make sure the group includes typically college age people, so as to be under the radar as possible. Turning up with 10 Grannies For Peace probably won't work as well.

Above: Sticking a few posters up where they won't be welcomed is always a good idea because it will provoke a reaction. A pro-Palestinian group at the University of Minnesota, who found some of the posters on campus, had a debate about whether they were pro- or anti-Palestinian, which amused me to no end.

Above: Posters were inserted into the university newspaper, the MN Daily, in racks outside the library and in the student union. Finding one in the MN Daily, it seemed likely that there was a good chance that someone would complain to the newspaper, possibly getting coverage for the campaign.

Above: The posters on the Northrop Mall on the University of Minnesota campus, in front of the performance hall.

AT THE MINNESOTA PROTEST

Above: Batsheva protesters in Minneapolis. The demonstration itself was very successful. Well-dressed protesters not wearing any pro-Palestinian messaging or scarves located themselves near the door smiled and handed the leaflets to arriving patrons.

Above: The weather was around 10°F/-12°C. Regardless, 60 people turned up.

Above: Israel's holiday slaughter in Gaza was the big motivator in this story.

At the Minnesota protest, I additionally created some signs for inside the venue. Before audience members entered the auditorium, venue toilets were hung with alternative "Please wash your hands" signs using the universal icon.

Above: One of the "Blood on your hands" flyers hung in the toilet of Northrop Auditorium during Batsheva's performance.

There was definitely some cat and mouse activity going on, with Northrop staff taking down the posters shortly after they were put up. Then activists would hang more. I had someone distract a guard so I could put a wad of leaflets in the auditorium's own dispensers, right next to the Box Office.

It was amazing to see people get excited about the protest, not just in Minnesota, but around the country. There was definitely a really good feeling of coming together to try a new angle. And it worked. It was no small thing to see 20 people at an outside protest of an Israeli dance company in 10°F/-12°C Minnesotan winter weather. It was obvious that Gaza had been the final straw for a lot of people.


SPREADING THE LOVE

Once the leaflets were made, I started seeking out people who would be protesting the Batsheva performances in other cities. For some cities, I already knew who to contact. For those I didn't have contacts, Google became a fantastic ally primarily through a Google Alert for "Batsheva Dance Company" that searched webpages, news sites, and blogs.

As protests were announced on various sites, I was able to contact people who were involved and explain the plan. By the end of the story, leaflets would be handed out to audiences in Michigan, Minnesota, California, and New York City.

Hearing from several people that they wanted ideas for protest banners, I began brainstorming and publishing rough concepts for protest signs. Some people in other cities took these and ran with them, creating some amazing images.

Above: A Batsheva protester in Michigan.

Above: Batsheva protesters in California.

REPORT BACK FROM CALIFORNIA

Everyone with whom I've spoken agrees that our boycott/protest/vigil was extremely successful, even though no one turned around and left, to our knowledge. However, I did get an email forward from a poet who decided not to go after reading about our call to boycott and carefully considering the issue.

There were 50-60 people there, about what we expected. We had the clothes line and people with various posters and signs spread out in front of the portico of Royce Hall, where the theater goers had to wait until the doors opened at 7:45. If they approached from that direction, they were greeted by our two "ushers" on the steps, who handed them the incredible tri-fold leaflet that Nigel Parry had prepared for the Minnesota event.

People in that area all agreed that the impact on the theater goers was obvious - their mood seemed to be rather sober/somber.

There was another cluster in the back that people had to pass who were streaming in the back entrance to the building. Xxxx, her son and I were greeting those folks with "enjoy the show" remarks as we handed them the tri-fold.

Between our visuals - both the posters and banners that Xxxx and her students made, the dramatic b&w signs that Xxxx Xxxxxxxxx of Cafe Intifada (another of the endorsing groups) made, and Nigel's flier, we had a definite impact on the theater goers.

There not more than 10 or so hostile reactions, and instead, we seemed to force people to reflect a bit. That's the power of images.

GRAND FINALE: THE NEW YORK TIMES

The end of the U.S. part of Batsheva's North American tour took place in New York City. By this point, activists had been handing out the leaflets at six different Batsheva performances across the country. In New York, even the New York Times had to acknowledge their presence:

Above: The New York Times blog that led with the story about the fake leaflet.

From the article:

The protest outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music last night, where the Batsheva Dance Company was performing, drew about 30 demonstrators, but it included an interesting twist: Audience members were slipped a seemingly official program that opened to reveal a flier heavily criticizing Israel’s actions in the 22-day war in Gaza last year.

The programs, which were adorned with images of the Israeli dance troupe, were the work of Adalah New York, an activist group that is calling for “boycotts, divestments and sanctions” of cultural and academic programs that, like the Batsheva Dance Company, receive funds from the Israeli government.

They drew both the attention and the disapproval of audience members at the Batsheva performance.

“I work in marketing and actually thought that it was kind of smart,” said Max Gelrud, who attended the performance. But he said he disapproved of being “purposely deceived into grabbing a pamphlet” which turned out to be fake.

The protesters said they were pleased with the reaction to the Playbills. “It caused an uproar,” said Andrew El-Khadi, who distributed the faux programs at the protest called “freedom dabke vs. Batsheva Dance Company.” Dabke refers to a traditional Middle-Eastern folk dance.

If you have the skills, which I tried to keep as modest as possible to allow this model to be replicated, there is definitely a lot of value in creating materials that can be used in protests across a whole tour.

That doubly applies to materials that slip under the radar and will get a larger take-up among the attending audience. If the Israeli regime will not listen to reason, it's time to start crashing their parties.


Nigel Parry is a cofounder of the Electronic Intifada, Electronic Iraq, and Electronic Lebanon. He lived in Palestine from 1994-1998 and worked at Birzeit University, writing A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict while he was there. Today he lives and works in Minneapolis, MN, which is as good a place to cause trouble as any.


Related Links

• Operation Cast Lead: Israeli War Crimes and Genocide, Nigel Parry (April 10th, 2009)
• Postcards of Hangings, Thoughts on Gaza, Nigel Parry (January 17th, 2009)
  
  Related Materials
• Spoof Batsheva tri-fold leaflet
• Spoof Batsheva poster
• Large version of crater/ballet shoes graphic used for Batsheva posters aimed at activists
• Flyer on Israel's use of White Phosphorus (less graphic and more appropriate/effective if printed/copied at half letter size in B&W -748.85 KB)
• Original image of Gazan baby (warning: very graphic) and the story. The original photo was taken on January 8th by a Palestinian photographer in Gaza. Other photos of the baby later surfaced, along with a video.