If you’ve been researching the question of Palestine, then I’m sure you’ve heard of the BDS movement in one form or another. However, between the debates regarding its efficacy as a tactic, and the wild accusations hurled at its promoters, some confusion is bound to arise. Consequently, we’ve prepared this short BDS primer for you, with basic information as well as answers for some of the more frequently asked questions.
What is BDS?
The Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a non-violent human rights campaign formed in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian non-governmental organizations, unions and civil society groups. The aim of the movement is to campaign for and protect the rights of Palestinians through the application of international pressure on Israel until it complies with international law. While the BDS movement is decentralized, and functions through local organizations, groups and grassroots efforts in each area, the BDS National Council (BNC), along with The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) serve as a compass for the movement. They introduce guidelines and revisions, as well as deliberate on particularly tricky cases.
How does BDS function?
The call of the BDS movement can be understood through its acronym: B(oycott), D(isinvestment), and (S)anctions.
The act of Boycotting, is to refuse to buy, use, or participate in (something) as a way of protesting: to stop using the goods or services of (a company, country, etc.) until changes are made. Simply put, the movement encourages people to, for instance, stop buying Israeli products, or engaging with Israeli services as a form of protest until the goals of the movement are met.
The act of Disinvestment is the withdrawal of investments. In our context, this means that the movement encourages different institutions and organizations to sell their stock in any company that profits or benefits from Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, or to refuse to invest in any company or organization which does.
The act of Sanctioning is an action that is taken to pressure a country or an organization towards a certain goal. For example, in the context of BDS, this means pressuring Israel to obey international laws by limiting or stopping trade with that it, or by cutting off economic aid, etc. Perhaps the most extreme, but if carried out, the most effective form of pressure. Discussing sanctions against Israel, especially until it shows serious good will and intentions about the two-state solution has been happening at an increased rate in parliaments around the world.
What are the goals of BDS?
The BDS movement has three goals, which can be found in its call to action:
1. Ending Israeli occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
As you can see, the goals of the BDS movement are simply the consistent application of international law. Any other intentions or objectives attributed to the movement are the result of projecting them onto it, and is often by bad faith actors intent on smearing any kind of Palestinian resistance.
Why BDS?
Since its inception, Israel has been the target of dozens of UNSC and UNGA resolutions calling on it to cease its violations of international law. In the absence of any real pressure from the international community, Israel saw no reason to comply. For example, its settlement enterprise in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan heights is but one instance of its brazen contempt for international and humanitarian law.
A prominent case of this noncompliance was the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice which deemed the construction of Israel’s wall illegal. Based on the courts findings, it called on Israel to: A) Cease all construction of the wall, including in East Jerusalem. B) Dismantle the sections already constructed. C) Re-appeal all legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto. The importance of this opinion was reiterated when the United Nations General assembly voted overwhelmingly on August 2004 in favor of resolution A/RES/ES-10/15 which called on Israel to comply with the findings and opinion of the International Court of Justice.
One year after this event, and in light of no effective pressure on the Israeli government -from within or without- to comply with the UN resolution or the court opinion, the organizers of BDS sought an effective way to push Israel to change its policies. This would be accomplished through the application of non-violent, international, legal and popular pressure.
In their own words, the founders of the BDS movement wrote that:
“..since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies; and Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine.”
The inspiration for the movement comes from the successful BDS campaign carried out against Apartheid South Africa, which played an instrumental role in cornering the regime.
Historically, preaching to Palestinians about the “proper” form of resistance has always been a pretext to delegitimize Palestinian resistance as a concept. Despite the legitimacy of armed resistance to colonialism being enshrined in international law, you will not be surprised that those who commented on the necessity of the Palestinians finding a peaceful way to resist would find various other pretexts to oppose BDS. It very quickly becomes clear that these “sympathizers” issue is the resistance itself, lip service notwithstanding. This mentality can be observed where even approaches as toothless as turning to the ICC were deemed “counterproductive” and even called “legal terror” by some.
As with anything Palestinian that rises to prominence, it becomes a magnet for anti-Palestinian sentiment. BDS is no exception, yet due to its non-violent nature it has been slightly harder to dismiss as outright terrorism. Therefore, elaborate interpretations and readings have been undertaken to frame the movement as the embodiment of evil, going as far as to ridiculously suggest that it is a prelude to genocide and a new Holocaust.
Naturally, much of the misconceptions about BDS stem either from bad faith attacks such as the above, or from a lack of research on the movement and its goals. Some are simply the result of unfamiliarity with the Palestinian question. The following section will inspect some of the most prominent criticisms and misconceptions regarding the BDS movement.
BDS calls for the destruction of Israel
This is perhaps the most common baseless smear directed against the BDS movement. As you saw from the goals of the movement, as well as its call for action, nowhere does it call for destruction. This is a bad faith reading of the movements third goal:
“Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
Since this calls for the return of Palestinian refugees, this would mean threatening Israel’s Jewish majority. Naturally, the fact that this majority is only artificially maintained through expelling the natives is never brought up. I suppose it is an inconvenient fact to face that Israelis only have their homes because millions of Palestinians don’t have theirs.
Regardless, if Israel were truly an egalitarian and democratic state, as its defenders so often insist, then it wouldn’t matter what the demographic make-up of the country is. A citizen is a citizen. However, Israel is not a democracy, but an ethnocracy built around privileging Jewish Israelis over everyone else [You can read more about this here]. This pushes Israel to instate racist laws that discriminate against Palestinians, even those it begrudgingly calls citizens. This ethnocratic logic animates much of Israel’s demographic obsessions, and gives credence to the utterly dehumanizing view that Palestinian babies are demographic threats, because they endanger an absolute Jewish majority.
Could you imagine any other state saying “we need to maintain a majority of X ethnic group” and instating racist laws to make it happen, and still be considered a liberal first world democracy?
However, the return of refugees would effectively end the Israeli regime which has historically organized itself through discriminatory and colonial Zionist policies of ethnic supremacy. It is intellectually dishonest to claim that dismantling this racist system is tantamount for calling for the genocide of all Israelis, as it is often claimed. When the Apartheid regime in South Africa was defeated, this did not mean the physical destruction of South Africa as a state, or the genocide of the Afrikaner. However, critics of the ANC constantly falsely accused them of calling for the genocide of the white population, similar to how Israelis do today against Palestinians.
It should be noted, however, that the BDS movement takes no position on political solutions. It is purely a human rights movement, no matter what intentions are projected onto it. Naturally, its various members do have political positions, but these are not representative of the movement as a whole which has only the three objectives discussed above.
BDS singles out Israel for punishment, and applies a double standard towards it
This is also a prominent argument put forward by critics of BDS. The argument is as follows: There are human rights violators out there much worse than Israel, yet there are no campaigns aimed at isolating them and putting pressure on them. Therefore, the BDS campaign is practicing a double standard as it does not call for the boycott of other human rights violators and singles out Israel specifically.
A more extreme version of this argument posits that since Israel is the only Jewish state, and this movement singles out Israel specifically, then the movement itself is de facto antisemitic in nature and is fueled by hatred for the Jewish people.
This criticism -if we assume good faith- betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what BDS is. The BDS movement was started by Palestinians specifically regarding their very own issue. It is not a universal scale of justice that metes out punishments on a global scale, rather it is an issue specific movement that focuses on the Palestinian question. People all over the world choose to answer this call for solidarity.
Furthermore, this argument is an implicit admission of guilt. The objection does not even attempt to deny Israel’s wrongdoing, but rather seeks to distract from the fact by pointing fingers at others. This is a laughable attempt at shifting blame, could you imagine this argument in any other context?
Was the Black Civil Rights movement full of hypocrites for boycotting the Montgomery Bus Company while their fellow Africans were being slaughtered in Algeria under French colonial rule?
Of course not, and it is ridiculous to even suggest such a thing.
Notice, however, how these violations in other countries are instrumentalized and wielded as a cudgel with no real interest in their impact. The latest spate of normalization with absolutist Arab monarchies shows that this concern was nothing more than a distraction tactic, as the Gulf countries used to be a favorite example for this maneuver. I’m certain they’ll be shifting to less friendly cases soon enough.
However, if we wish to discuss Israel being singled out it should be noted that although Israel is one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to violating and ignoring UNSC resolutions, it is still afforded a special place among the nations and considered a democratic civilized first world country and is afforded special privileges, trade offers and partnerships not available to any other serial violator of human rights. If Israel is being singled out for anything, it is for its impunity to any real consequences for its violations.
The BDS movement harms academic freedom
This argument is as follows:
There are moderate voices within Israeli academia that sympathize with the Palestinians. By expanding the campaign to include academic targets for boycott, these voices are also damaged and silenced to where they cannot help create a just peace. Furthermore, it damages academic freedom which should be above politics.
Israeli academia, like virtually every sector of Israeli society, has a long history of not only complicity with Israeli colonialism, but active support for it. For example, part of Tel Aviv university lies on the ethnically cleansed ruins of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis. Israeli medical schools store Palestinian bodies which are then used as bargaining chips against their families. Israeli universities help develop the weapons which are then tested on Palestinians, and the tech which control Palestinian lives. But this is hardly the only ways in which Israeli universities aid in the dispossession of Palestinians; as institutions of ideological production and reproduction, they contribute to the maintenance of colonial thought in Israeli society, creating moral justifications for the colonization of Palestine and repression of Palestinians.
Anti-Apartheid South African activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asserts that:
“Israeli Universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice…. Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation. BGU is no exception. By maintaining links to both the Israeli defence forces and the arms industry, BGU structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation. For example, BGU offers a fast-tracked programme of training to Israeli Air Force pilots.”
Despite all of this, the BDS movement does not target individual Israeli persons, whether academic or otherwise, but targets mainly Israeli institutions and those representing them in an official capacity. An Israeli professor would not be boycotted purely for being Israeli.
However, there is good reason to suspect that these champions of academic freedom are not sincere in their assertions. For instance, never once during both Intifadas which saw the closure, bombing and raiding of Palestinian universities, did the:
“..senate of any Israeli university pass a resolution protesting the frequent closure of Palestinian universities [by Israel], let alone voice protest the devastation sowed there during the last uprising.”
This silence on the violation of Palestinian academic freedom was hardly a one-time occurrence. Israeli professor Menachem Fisch et al. designed a social experiment in the aftermath of the bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza during the war in 2008, where he circulated a petition among Israeli academics to denounce this attack against academic freedom and Palestinians right to education. Out of the 9000 academics contacted (5000 of which were senior faculty academics), a mere 4% of them agreed to sign the petition.
This sudden interest in academic freedom should only be understood as an insincere and cynical pretext to demonize the BDS movement, and nothing more.
The BDS movement harms sympathetic Israelis
As mentioned earlier, the BDS movement does not target random Israeli individuals. BDS targets the Israeli government, as well as institutions, organizations and their representatives which are complicit in the repression and dispossession of Palestinians.
The BDS movement is one sided and assigns all blame to Israel
Settler colonialism is by definition asymmetric and one sided.
It is disingenuous to appeal to a false equivalence or a “both sides” approach when it comes to the Palestinian question. It is the Israelis who are colonizing the Palestinians, and it is the Israelis who are building settlements and annexing Palestinian land. Israelis hold the power between the river and the sea. We are not speaking of a conflict between two countries, but an expansionist settler colony versus a native population.
The target of the BDS campaign should be restricted to the illegal Israeli settlements
Some argue that the scope of BDS is too indiscriminate, and that we should focus our attention instead on the illegal Israeli settlements themselves, rather than Israel. There are multiple issues with this line of thought; most glaring of which is that settlements and other illegal policies are not self-perpetrating, and neither are they occurring in a vacuum. Settlements need to be built, maintained, protected, developed, and all this is performed gleefully by Israel, which has always sought to maximize its land-grabs.
Israel actively incentivizes the transfer of its population into the settlements by declaring them “National Priority areas”, meaning that they are the recipients of generous state subsidies in multiple areas, such as housing and education. Furthermore, Israel’s violations of international law are not related only to the areas it occupied in the 1967 war, but to the entirety of the land it controls, including inside the green line.
However, even if you were to remain unconvinced by all of the above, this type of targeted boycott is unfeasible for practical reasons as well. From a distance, looking at static maps it might appear that the green line neatly dissects Palestine into 1948 and 1967 territories, on the ground the green line simply does not exist for Israelis. Hundreds of thousands of settlers commute to work every day over the green line, and it is not a factor in everyday Israeli life. For all intents and purposes the settlements are part of Israel, and not a neat separate entity that can be easily singled out for boycotts.
BDS should not include a boycott against Israeli culture
BDS does not target individual Israeli artists, but institutions or those complicit in the oppression of Palestinians and the whitewashing of Israeli crimes.
Israel has always been very public about using cultural means to improve its image abroad, and to divert attention away from its oppression of the Palestinians. A recent example is Israel hosting Eurovision in Tel Aviv in an attempt to put a pluralistic and “pretty face” on the state, and whitewash its human rights violations. It should be noted that Israel is not unique in this regard, as Apartheid South Africa also hosted music festivals and cultural events in an effort to change perceptions of the racist state.
In this context, cultural activities gain a new role, one that is complicit in oppression. Even things that seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things all contribute to whitewashing Israel’s image. For example, Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces” article was deemed so benefecial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication.
The BDS movement harms Palestinian workers
When all other pretexts for why Israel shouldn’t be held responsible for its violation of international law fail, critics of BDS become fierce advocates of the Palestinian worker. Suddenly, the welfare of the Palestinians is their chief concern, and we cannot boycott Israel because many Palestinians who work in settlements and inside the green line would lose their jobs. Similar to those who suddenly discover the sanctity of academic freedom when boycotting Israeli academia is mentioned, the sincerity of these claims is questionable at best.
However, should anyone actually care about the plight of Palestinian workers, supporting BDS to end the occupation is a much better way to accomplish that. While approximately 120,000 Palestinians work in settlements and inside the green line, it is estimated that these settlements and occupation policies cost Palestinians 110,000 jobs per year according to UNCTAD. Meaning that had there been no Israeli stranglehold on the Palestinian economy, and had there been no settlements stealing the most fertile and resource rich areas, Palestinians could have created nearly two million new jobs for themselves since the year 2000. This would have gone much further towards improving the lives of Palestinian workers than maintaining their status as exploited labor in an ethnocracy that sees them as inferior.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that the BDS call to action came from Palestinian civil society, which includes its labor and trade unions who remain proud signatories to this day. Support for BDS among Palestinians is virtually unanimous, and any qualms about it are due to concerns over effectiveness, rather than thinking it would cause harm.
Interestingly enough, this is a carbon copy of the argument used against boycotting Apartheid South Africa, where the people benefiting from exploiting cheap Black labor suddenly became concerned about worker wellbeing. It remains as transparently cynical today as it was back then.
“There are some pretty powerful elements in the world that are active in the matter – within countries, including friendly countries, in various organizations of workers, academics, consumers, green parties…and this drive boils down to a large movement called BDS, which is what they did with South Africa. It won’t happen at once. It will begin, like an iceberg, to advance on us from all corners.” – Ehud Barak, 2011.
When it comes to the effectiveness of BDS, you will find that arguments range from calling the movement “flimsy” and ineffective, all the way to calling it an “existential threat” to the very survival of Israel.
Concretely measuring the effectiveness of the BDS movement is difficult, because many of its effects are non-material in nature. For example, how does one quantify the cancellation of a concert or conference in Israel? Simply looking at the loss of potential income is inadequate to reflect the psychological or discursive effects of such an event. Even more complicated is measuring the reluctance to host Israelis or any other action involving Israel simply due to a desire to avoid controversy, rather than actually being part of the boycott movement.
On the economic front, there are more tools to measure losses. For instance, a study carried out by the RAND corporation, entitled “The costs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” estimates that if the current trends continue, BDS would escalate in the next decade to cost Israel close to 2% of its GDP, around 9 billion dollars per year. It should be noted that this was calculated mainly in opportunity costs rather than in direct damage. However, it is once again important to stress that there are many aspects and potential loss of business that cannot be anticipated or accounted for.
We can argue at length about these points, however, there are signs that Israel’s fear of the BDS campaign is genuine. The responsibility for combating the campaign has been moved from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. This is the same ministry responsible for tackling urgent matters relating to Israel’s “national security”. Pro-Israel mega donors have hosted secret conferences to come up with and fund strategies to combat BDS all over the globe. Israeli lobbying groups have worked hard to push for the criminalization of BDS in some American states.
Why go to all of these lengths if Israel perceives BDS as powerless and ineffective?
Because the real power of the BDS movement lies outside its material effects. Yes, some economic pressure on Israel is good, but nobody was arguing that the BDS movement was going to topple the Israeli economy, nor were they arguing that BDS alone would liberate Palestine. The effectiveness of BDS stems from its ability to raise awareness, speak truth to power, and bring to light parallels that Israel cannot combat. The discursive ability of BDS to shift the conversation, as well as its grassroots mass participatory nature, makes it a much bigger threat to Israel than the loss of a few billion dollars. This is where its strength lies, and as it becomes more mainstream among activists and campuses all over the world, this strength will only grow.
