Answer The Hate

Message templates

Opposing a boycott motion

The note you send members before a boycott motion is voted on, and the amendment you put, both written for the people in the room who have not yet decided anything.

  • An evening
  • Israel advocacy
  • Anti-antisemitism
  • motions
  • institutions
  • procedure
  • bds

The vote is not decided by the two people in the room who care most about this. It is decided by everybody who came for the other four items on the agenda, has no strong view, and would like the evening not to turn into a fight.

Two things make the difference. The instrument. Straight opposition asks the undecided to vote against a room full of their own colleagues, and at seven in the evening most people will abstain rather than do that. An amendment asks them to vote for something instead, and it lets somebody who agrees with the motive still take the costly clauses out. Reach for the amendment first and keep outright opposition in reserve. And the arithmetic of length. Whatever you circulate is read against the motion it answers, so it comes in shorter, or the room decides you are the complicated one.

Assemble the three blocks below. Change the wording so it sounds like you, a note that reads as a template will be treated as one.

Where this backfires: an amendment that passes commits nobody unless it names a post holder and a date, and a room that has already voted for your version will have little appetite for hearing about it again. Keep a report-back clause in, and expect to be the person who chases it.

Read when a BDS motion lands in a body you belong to first if you haven’t. It covers the deadlines, marking up the operative clauses, and what to do if the vote is tomorrow.

Block one

Describe the situation

Use this as it stands, or change whatever doesn't sound like you.

Copy this

I am writing to members once, before the meeting on 12 March, about Motion 7. I am not asking anybody to change their view on the politics, and I am not suggesting the members who tabled it have acted in bad faith. What I would ask is that we read what the operative clauses instruct us to do rather than what the preamble says we believe, because only one of those commits this body to anything. Clauses 3 to 5 place obligations on our officers and, as drafted, apply to some of our own members personally. I have circulated a two paragraph amendment that keeps the concern the motion is raising and takes those three clauses out, so that anybody who shares the concern can still vote for something on the night.

Block two

Say why you are speaking

Pick one. Being straightforward about fear or isolation is not a weakness here. It is often the most persuasive thing you can say.

  • I am speaking because I am Jewish, and whatever the motion says it is about, a good number of people in that room will hear it as a motion about us.
  • I am speaking because of how this arrived. It reached members eleven days before the vote, with no costing and nobody consulted, and I would object to any motion that came to us that way.
  • I am speaking because I do not think we are the right body to hold a foreign policy at all. We were not elected on it, our members genuinely disagree about it, and it is not what we were formed to do.
  • I am speaking because I want Palestinians to have rights and a state, I have said so in this room before, and I do not believe this motion moves that a single inch. What it changes is the standing of people who are here.
  • I am speaking because we have done one thing well for a long time, and I think a vote that splits us down the middle costs us more than either side of it stands to gain.
  • I am speaking because two members asked me privately whether they ought to resign, and I would rather be able to tell them the question was at least put.
  • I am speaking because I would prefer not to, and nobody else has, and letting it go through unremarked seemed worse than being the person who stood up.

Block three

Make your ask

Ordered from easiest to hardest. Choose what you can actually stand behind.

Ask how it will runEasiest
Ask the chair or the secretary, privately and about a fortnight out, when amendments close, who may speak and whether the clauses can be voted separately. Process only. Take no position and make no argument.
Circulate a short noteStraightforward
Send members one page before the meeting setting out what the operative clauses instruct, what they would cost and who they would fall on. Shorter than the motion, and signed in your own name.
Put a narrowing amendmentBolder
Submit an amendment that keeps the motive the motion states, deletes the clauses carrying cost or landing on individuals, and puts in one dated thing this body can do by itself.
Speak, and move it formallyHard
Take two minutes in the room, accept the motive out loud, move the amendment and sit down. Give the undecided something to vote for rather than a case against their colleagues.
Ask for it to be deferredHardest
Ask the meeting to defer the vote to the next ordinary meeting so that members the motion would affect can be consulted first. Name the date you want it back on the agenda.

Rules worth holding to

  1. Write every line for the members who have no strong view and have not decided. They are most of the room and they are the entire audience. Neither committed end is moving tonight.
  2. Never impugn the motives of the people who tabled it. Question a motive and the undecided stop hearing the argument and start hearing an accusation.
  3. Do not argue the whole conflict. The question in front of the meeting is this text on this evening, and anything wider is a debate you cannot finish in the time you have.
  4. Come in shorter than the motion you are answering. Whoever files the longer paper is the one the room decides is making this difficult.
  5. Put your name on it. Nothing anonymous, no unsigned notes, and nothing passed round by somebody else on your behalf.
  6. Attack a clause by its number, never a person. A numbered clause can be amended. A motive can only be denied.
  7. Assume your note reaches the proposers within the hour. Write it so that is fine.
  8. Say what you want the meeting to do. A note that only objects leaves one option on the table, which is the one you are objecting to.