Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions facts for kids
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| Abbreviation | BDS |
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| Formation | 9 July 2005 |
| Founder | Omar Barghouti, Ramy Shaat |
| Type | Nonprofit organization |
| Purpose | Boycotts, political activism |
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General Coordinator
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Mahmoud Nawajaa |
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Main organ
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Palestinian BDS National Committee |
| Website | bdsmovement.net |
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel. Its objective is to pressure Israel to meet what the BDS movement describes as Israel's obligations under international law, defined as withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and "respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties". The movement is organized and coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee.
BDS is modeled after the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Its proponents compare the Palestinians' plight to that of apartheid-era black South Africans. Protests and conferences in support of the movement have been held in several countries. Its mascot, which features on its logotype, is Handala, a symbol of Palestinian identity and "right of return".
Some critics accuse the BDS movement of antisemitism, a charge the movement denies, calling it an attempt to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism. The Israel lobby in the United States has made opposing BDS one of its top priorities. Since 2015, the Israeli government has spent millions of dollars to promote the view that BDS is antisemitic and have it legally banned in foreign countries. BDS supporters see it as a human rights movement.
Contents
Background
Many authors trace BDS's origins to the NGO Forum at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in South Africa (Durban I). At the forum, Palestinian activists met with anti-apartheid veterans who identified parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa and recommended campaigns like those they had used to defeat apartheid. The forum adopted a document that contained many ideas that would later reappear in the 2005 BDS Call; Israel was proclaimed an apartheid state that engaged in human rights violations through the denial of the Palestinian refugees' right of return, the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. The declaration recommended comprehensive sanctions and embargoes against Israel as the remedy.
In March 2002, while the Israeli army reoccupied all major Palestinian cities and towns and imposed curfews, a group of prominent Palestinian scholars published a letter calling for help from the "global civil society". The letter asked activists to demand that their governments suspend economic relations with Israel in order to stop its campaign of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. In April 2002, Steven and Hilary Rose, professors at the Open University and the University of Bradford, initiated a call for a moratorium on academic collaboration with Israeli institutions. It quickly racked up over 700 signatories, among them Colin Blakemore and Richard Dawkins, who said they could no longer "in good conscience continue to cooperate with official Israeli institutions, including universities." Similar initiatives followed in the summer.
In August, Palestinian organizations in the occupied territories issued a call for a comprehensive boycott of Israel. The majority of the statements recalled the declarations made at the NGO Forum the year before. In October 2003, a group of Palestinian intellectuals called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Attempts to coordinate the boycotts in a more structured way led to the formation of the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in April 2004.
Colin Shindler argues that the Oslo peace process's failure created a political void that allowed what had been a marginal rejectionist attitude to Israel to enter the European far-left mainstream in the form of proposals for a boycott. Rafeef Ziadah also attributes BDS to the peace process's failure. She argues that BDS represents a rejection of the peace process paradigm of equalizing both sides in favor of seeing the situation as a colonial conflict between a native population and a settler-colonial state supported by Western powers.
Others argue that BDS should be understood in terms of its purported roots in the Arab League's boycott of Zionist goods from Mandatory Palestine. According to the archaeologist and ancient historian Alex Joffe, BDS is merely the spearhead of a larger anti-Western juggernaut in which the dialectic between communism and Islam remains unresolved, and has antecedents in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the General Union of Palestinian Students and the Muslim Brotherhood. Andrew Pessin and Doron Ben-Atar believe that BDS should be viewed in a historical context of other boycotts of Israel.
Philosophy and goals
BDS demands that Israel end its "three forms of injustices that infringe international law and Palestinian rights" by:
- Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in 1967 and dismantling the Wall;
- Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
- Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.
These demands, enshrined in a declaration named the BDS Call, are non-negotiable to BDS. Co-founder of the movement Omar Barghouti, citing South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has written: "I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights." Barghouti has also written:
Ending the largely discernible aspects of Israeli occupation while maintaining effective control over most of the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 "in return" for Palestinians' accepting Israel's annexation of the largest colonial blocks ... has become the basic formula for the so-called peaceful settlement endorsed by the world's hegemonic powers and acquiesced to by an unelected, unrepresentative, unprincipled, and visionless Palestinian 'leadership.' The entire spectrum of Zionist parties in Israel and their supporters in the West, with few exceptions, ostensibly accept this unjust and illegal formula as the "only offer" on the table for the Palestinians—or else the menacing Israeli bludgeon.
BDS sees itself as a movement for all Palestinians, whether they live in the diaspora or in historical Palestine. BDS believes that negotiations with Israel should focus on "how Palestinian rights can be restored" and that they can only take place after Israel has recognized these rights. It frames the Israel-Palestinian conflict as between colonizer and colonized, between oppressor and oppressed, and rejects the notion that both parties are equally responsible for the conflict. For those reasons, BDS opposes some forms of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, which it argues are counterproductive.
According to BDS, "all forms of international intervention and peace-making until now have failed" and so the international community should impose punitive measures, such as broad boycotts and divestment initiatives, against Israel, like those against South Africa during apartheid.
BDS uses the framework of "freedom, justice, and equality", arguing that Palestinians are entitled to those rights like everyone else. It is therefore an antiracist movement and rejects all forms of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. More generally, BDS frames itself as part of a global social movement that challenges neoliberal Western hegemony and struggles against racism, sexism, poverty and similar causes. Its struggle for Palestinian rights should be seen as a small but critical part of that struggle, BDS argues.
Methods
BDS organizes campaigns for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Boycotts are facilitated by urging the public to avoid purchasing goods made by Israeli companies, divestment by urging banks, pension funds, international companies, etc. to stop doing business in Israel, and sanctions by pressuring governments to end military trade and free-trade agreements with Israel and to suspend Israel's membership in international forums.
Global targets for boycott are selected by the BNC, but supporters are free to choose targets that suit them. The BNC encourages supporters to select targets based on their complicity in Israel's human rights violations, potential for cross-movement solidarity, media appeal, and likelihood of success. It also emphasizes the importance of creating campaigns and events that connect with issues of concern in their own communities.
Activities
Campaigns
In addition to the campaigns listed in this section, a number of local campaigns have been created by BDS-affiliated groups and endorsed by the movement, including Code Pink's Stolen Beauty campaign launched in 2009 against Israeli cosmetics manufacturer Ahava, an Australian campaign against Max Brenner, whose parent company, the Strauss Group, sent care packages to Israeli soldiers, and a campaign by the group Vermonters for Justice in Palestine (VTJP, previously known as Vermonters for a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine) against ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry over its sales of ice cream in Israeli settlements. In June 2021, VTJP called on Ben & Jerry's to "end complicity in Israel's occupation and abuses of Palestinian human rights." VTJP describes itself as "a strong supporter of the...[BDS] campaign". On 19 July 2021, Ben & Jerry's CEO announced the end of sales of ice cream in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank: "Although Ben & Jerry's will no longer be sold in the OPT [Occupied Palestinian territories], we will stay in Israel through a different arrangement". Ben & Jerry's Independent Board of Directors complained that the decision had been made by the CEO and Unilever without their approval. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said, "Over 30 states in the United States have passed anti-BDS legislation in recent years. I plan on asking each of them to enforce these laws against Ben & Jerry's", and called the decision "a shameful capitulation to antisemitism, BDS and everything bad in the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish discourse".
- Derail Veolia and Alstom (2008–present)
Since November 2008, BDS has campaigned against the multinational French conglomerates Veolia and Alstom for their involvement in the Jerusalem Light Rail because it runs through the Israeli-occupied parts of East Jerusalem. According to BDS, the boycott had cost Veolia an estimated $20 billion as of 2015. In 2015 Veolia sold off its final investment in Israel, a 5% stake in CityPass owned by its subsidiary Transdev. BDS attributed the sell-off to its campaign, but Richard Dujardin, a member of Transdev's executive committee, said: "I will not say that it is pleasant to be chased by people saying we are not good guys all the time but really it was a business decision."
- Stop G4S - Securing Israeli Apartheid (2012–present)
Since 2012 BDS has campaigned against G4S, the world's biggest security company, to get it to divest from Israel. As a result, G4S has been targeted by many BDS supporting groups, including Who Profits?, Addameer, Jews for Justice in Palestine, and Tadamon!. The campaign's first victory came in October 2011, when the student council of the Edinburgh University Students' Association adopted a motion to ban G4S from campus. In April 2012 the European Parliament declined to renew its contract with G4S, citing G4S's involvement in violations of international law. In 2014 the Gates Foundation sold its $170 million stake in G4S, a move BDS activists attributed to their campaign. The same year activists thanked officials in Durham County, North Carolina, for terminating its contract with G4S, though it was not clear that BDS's campaign was the cause. In February 2016, the international restaurant chain Crepes & Waffles terminated its security transport contracts with G4S.
G4S sold off its Israeli subsidiary G4S Israel in 2016, but BDS continues to campaign against G4S because it maintains a 50% stake in Policity, an Israeli police training center with presence inside Israeli prisons where thousands of Palestinians are detained.
- Woolworths (2014–2016)
BDS South Africa undertook a boycott campaign against the South African retail chain Woolworths in 2014 over its trade relations with Israel. It was the first comprehensive consumer boycott of a South African retailer since 1994. The campaign used the Twitter hashtag #BoycottWoolworths which rapidly became one of the top trending hashtags on South African Twitter. The campaign attracted international media attention and was covered by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Al-Jazeera. The activists organized flash mobs, die-ins, and placed "Boycott Israeli Apartheid"-stickers on Woolworths' Israeli merchandise, all of which they published on social media. Consumers were encouraged to write to the company's store managers questioning the stocking of Israeli goods.
The campaign ended in mid-2016 when Woolworth informed its annual general meeting that it would no longer purchase Israeli products from the occupied territories.
- Boycott HP (2016–present)
BDS runs a boycott campaign against the multinational information technology company Hewlett-Packard's two successors, HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which it says are complicit in "Israel's occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid regime". According to the campaign, HP supplies Israel with a biometric ID card system used to restrict Palestinians' freedom of movement and provides servers for the Israel Prison Service.
In April 2019, Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging, the Netherlands' largest trade union, dropped HP in its offer to its members. According to a spokesperson for the boycott HP campaign, the union used to offer a 15% discount on HP products and this would no longer be the case. In June 2019, Unite, the UK's second-largest trade union, joined the boycott against HP.
- Orange (2016–present)
In January 2016, French telecom operator Orange dropped its licensing deal with its Israeli mobile operator, Partner Communications. According to BDS, the deal was the result of its six-year campaign by unions and activists in France, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.
- AXA Divest (2016–present)
The French multinational insurance agent AXA has since 2016 been the target of a campaign urging it to divest from Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems and five major Israeli banks. AXA has, according to BDS, a responsible investment policy that forbids it from investing in, among other things, manufacturers of cluster bombs, and Elbit Systems makes cluster bombs. According to a report by corporate responsibility watchdog SumOfUs, AXA's involvement in Israel's occupation could expose it to criminal prosecution.
- Red Card Israel (2016–present)
Red Card Israel is BDS's campaign to get Israel expelled from FIFA due to alleged violations against Palestinian football and because several Israeli teams from the Israeli-occupied West Bank are allowed to play in its national league, the Israel Football Association. In 2018, it scored a victory as Argentina's national football team canceled an upcoming friendly game in Jerusalem.
- Puma (2018–present)
In July 2018, sportswear manufacturer Puma signed a four-year sponsorship deal with the Israel Football Association (IFA). The IFA includes six football clubs based in Israeli settlements. BDS wrote an open letter signed by over 200 Palestinian sports clubs urging the brand to end its sponsorship of teams in the settlements. The sportswear manufacturer did not, and BDS therefore launched a boycott campaign under the slogan "Give Puma the Boot".
In October 2019, activists placed unauthorized posters in the London underground urging people to boycott Puma. Transport for London said that it was flyposting and that it would immediately take action against the posters. In February 2020, Malaysia's largest university, Universiti Teknologi MARA, announced that it would end its sponsorship deal with Puma due to its involvement in Israel.
- Boycott Eurovision 2019 (2018–2019)
BDS attempted to get artists to boycott Eurovision Song Contest 2019 because it was held in Israel. BDS accused Israel of using Eurovision to whitewash and distract attention from alleged war crimes against Palestinians. It also accused Israel of pinkwashing, due to Eurovision's popularity among LGBTQ fans. Although none of the acts scheduled to appear pulled out, activists considered the efforts successful due to the media coverage generated.
American pop star Madonna was one of the artists BDS urged to cancel her appearance at Eurovision. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd also tried to get her to cancel, saying that it "normalizes the occupation, the apartheid, the ethnic cleansing, the incarceration of children, the slaughter of unarmed protesters." Madonna refused, saying that she would neither "stop playing music to suit someone's political agenda" nor "stop speaking out against violations of human rights wherever in the world they may be."
In September 2018, 140 artists (including six Israelis) signed an open letter in support of a boycott of Eurovision. In response to the calls for boycott, over 100 celebrities, including English actor Stephen Fry, signed a statement against boycotting Eurovision in Israel: "We believe the cultural boycott movement is an affront to both Palestinians and Israelis who are working to advance peace through compromise, exchange, and mutual recognition".
Hatari, the band representing Iceland in the contest, held up Palestinian banners in front of the cameras at the event's finals, defying the EBU's rules against political gestures. BDS was not mollified: "Artists who insist on crossing the Palestinian boycott picket line, playing in Tel Aviv in defiance of our calls, cannot offset the harm they do to our human rights struggle by 'balancing' their complicit act with some project with Palestinians. Palestinian civil society overwhelmingly rejects this fig-leafing," it said.
Divestment resolutions at U.S. universities
In North America, many public and private universities have large financial holdings. Campus BDS activists have therefore organized campaigns asking universities to divest from companies complicit in the occupation. These campaigns often revolve around attempts to pass divestment resolutions in the school's student government. While few universities have heeded the call to divest, activists believe the resolutions are symbolically important. The discussions of divestment spur campuswide interest in BDS, which movement organizers use to their advantage by advocating for an unfamiliar cause.
In 2009, Hampshire College became the first U.S. college to divest from companies profiting from Israel's occupation as its board of trustees voted to sell its shares in Caterpillar Inc., Terex, Motorola, ITT, General Electric, and United Technologies. Hampshire's president said that SJP's campaigning brought about the decision, but members of the board of trustees denied that.
In 2010, the UC Berkeley Student Senate passed a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies that conduct business with Israel. The resolution was vetoed by the Student Body president, who said it was "a symbolic attack on a specific community." In 2013, another divestment bill passed but the university stated that it would not divest.
Many divestment campaigns began in the early 2000s, years before BDS was founded. In some cases, it has taken them over a decade to get resolutions passed. For example, at the University of Michigan, a student group called Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) began campaigning for a divestment resolution in 2002. It was brought up for the eleventh time in 2017 and passed 23–17 with five abstentions. Reportedly, the hearing on the resolution was the longest in student government history. In December, the Board of Regents at the university rejected the resolution, stating that "we strongly oppose any action involving the boycott, divestment or sanction of Israel."
In 2002, students at Columbia University began promoting a divestment resolution; a non-binding student resolution passed in 2020. The resolution called for the university "to boycott and divest from companies that "profit from or engage in the State of Israel's acts towards Palestinians". Columbia rejected the resolution ; explaining this decision , President Lee Bollinger wrote that Columbia "should not change its investment policies on the basis of particular views about a complex policy issue, especially when there is no consensus across the University community about that issue" and that divestment questions would be resolved by the university's Advisory Committee.
In 2019, Brown University became the first Ivy league university whose student government passed a non-binding divestment resolution, with 69% of the students (representing 27.5% of the student body) voting in favor and 31% against. Brown rejected the resolution; explaining this decision, President Christina Paxson wrote: "Brown's mission is to advance knowledge and understanding through research, analysis and debate. Its role is not to take sides on contested geopolitical issues." Nevertheless, on 9 March 2020, the university Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies confirmed an official recommendation to Paxson and the corporation, the university's highest governing body, to divest from "any company that profits from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land" and referred to the United Nations Human Rights Council's list of possible criteria for divestment contained in a report on the List of companies operating in West Bank settlements.
BDS opponents often focus on the supposed divisiveness debates about divestment resolutions cause. According to Nelson, the primary effect divestment resolutions have is the promotion of anti-Israel (and sometimes antisemitic) sentiment within student bodies, faculty, and academic departments.
Some opponents argue that activists promoting divestment resolutions often cheat or operate clandestinely. They claim that resolutions are often sprung with minimal notice, giving the opposition no time to react, that activists bring outsiders to influence opinion or to vote on university resolutions even when this is unauthorized, and that activists change the text of resolutions once passed.
Judea Pearl believes that to BDS supporters it is irrelevant whether a particular resolution passes or not because the real goal is to keep the debate alive and influence future policymakers to find fault with Israel.
Israel Apartheid Week
Groups affiliated with BDS hold events known as Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) in February or March each year. IAW began at the University of Toronto in 2006, but has since spread and in 2014 was held on 250 campuses worldwide. IAW aims to increase public awareness of the Palestinians' history and the racial discrimination they experience and to build support for BDS. IAW allows activists to frame the issue as one of racial oppression and discrimination rather than a "conflict" between two equal sides. According to BDS's opponents, IAW intends to link Israel to evils such as apartheid and racism.
Academic boycott
Universities have been primary targets of the BDS movement, according to English professor Cary Nelson, "because faculty and students can become passionate about justice, sometimes without adequate knowledge about the facts and consequences. ... [U]niversities also offer the potential for small numbers of BDS activists to leverage institutional status and reputation for a more significant cultural and political impact."
BDS argues that there is a close connection between Israeli academic institutions and the Israeli state, including its military, and that an academic boycott is warranted. Modern weapon systems and military doctrines used by the Israeli military are developed at Israeli universities that also use a system of economic merit and scholarship to students who serve in the army. Like the BDS-led cultural boycott, the academic boycott targets Israeli institutions and not individual academics.
The events and activities BDS encourages academics to avoid include academic events convened or co-sponsored by Israel, research and development activities that involve institutional cooperation agreements with Israeli universities, projects that receive funding from Israel or its lobby groups, addresses and talks by officials from Israeli academic institutions at international venues, study-abroad programmes in Israel for international students, and publishing in Israeli academic journals or serving on such journals' review boards.
Cultural boycott
According to PACBI, "Cultural institutions are part and parcel of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of Israel's regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid against the Palestinian people." Therefore, they argue, Israel should be subjected to a cultural boycott like the one against apartheid-era South Africa. According to BDS, most but not all Israeli cultural institutions support "the hegemonic Zionist establishment" and are thus implicated in Israel's crimes and should be boycotted.
BDS distinguishes between individuals and institutions. Unlike the cultural boycott against South Africa, BDS's cultural boycott does not target individuals. BDS supports the right to freedom of expression and rejects boycotts based on identity or opinion. Thus, Israeli cultural products are not per se subject to boycott. But if a person represents Israel, aids its efforts to "rebrand" itself, or is commissioned by an official Israeli body, then their activities are subject to the institutional boycott BDS calls for.
BDS also argues for a boycott of "normalization projects", which it defines as:
Cultural activities, projects, events and products involving Palestinians and/or other Arabs on one side and Israelis on the other (whether bi- or multilateral) that are based on the false premise of symmetry/parity between the oppressors and the oppressed or that assume that both colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the "conflict" are intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible forms of normalization that ought to be boycotted.
The only Israeli-Palestinian projects BDS favors are those in which the Israeli party recognizes the three rights enumerated in the "BDS Call" and that also emphasize resistance to oppression over coexistence. BDS strongly discourages "fig-leafing" by international culture workers—attempts to "compensate" for participating in Israeli events using "balancing gestures" that promote Palestinian rights. BDS argues that fig-leafing contributes to the false perception of symmetry between the colonial oppressor and the colonized.
Palestinian reactions
BDS enjoys overwhelming support among Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territories. In a poll from 2015, 86% supported the boycott campaign and 64% believed that boycotting would help end the occupation.
The number of Palestinian civil society organizations that support BDS has been rising steadily since its inception in 2005. Some of the Palestinian NGOs supporting BDS are umbrella organizations, such as the Palestinian NGOs Network, which has 135 members as of 2020. According to Melanie Meinzer, many Palestinian NGOs refrain from endorsing BDS because their dependence on donors constrain their politics. According to Finkelstein, BDS is exaggerating its level of support and many Palestinian NGOs endorsing it are small, one-person NGOs.
Palestinian trade unions have been very supportive of BDS; the 290,000-member Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions was one of the original signatories of the BDS Call. In 2011, the Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS was created with the objective of promoting BDS among trade unions internally.
Leading voices in the Palestinian diaspora, such as Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, and Linda Sarsour have thrown their weight behind BDS, as have several Palestinian members of the Israeli parliament, including Haneen Zoabi, Basel Ghattas, and Jamal Zahalka.
The Palestinian leadership's position on BDS is ambivalent. President Mahmoud Abbas does not support a general boycott against Israel and has said that the Palestinians do not either. Barghouti has disputed Abbas's statement, saying that "[t]here is no Palestinian political party, trade union, NGO network or mass organization that does not strongly support BDS. Abbas does, however, support a boycott of goods produced in Israeli settlements, and the Palestinian Authority has at times used boycotts to gain leverage on Israel. For example, in 2015, it imposed a boycott on six major Israeli food manufacturers to retaliate against Israel withholding Palestinian tax funds. The second-highest authority of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian Central Council, has meanwhile announced its intention to:
Adopt the BDS movement and call on states around the world to impose sanctions on Israel to put an end to its flagrant violations of international law, its continued aggression against the Palestinian people, and to the apartheid regime [Israel has] imposed on them.
A handful of Palestinian scholars have opposed the academic boycott of Israel. Examples include former Al-Quds University president Sari Nusseibeh, who acknowledges that his view is the minority viewpoint among his colleagues. Some Palestinian academics have criticized Nusseibeh's collaboration with Hebrew University, seeing it as a form of normalization. Matthew Kalman speculated in The New York Times that opposition to boycott is more widespread among Palestinian academics but that they are afraid to speak out.
Palestinian-Israeli video blogger Nas Daily has expressed opposition to boycotts of Israel. BDS has in turn denounced him for engaging in normalization.
Jews and the BDS movement
Only 10% of American Jews support the BDS movement, according to a 2020 Pew Research poll, but almost a quarter of American Jews under 40 support boycotting Israeli products, according to a 2020 J Street poll. Arnold believes that the difference signals that young progressive American Jews identify with Israel less strongly than older generations.
Jewish activists have often played central roles in BDS campaigns, something Barghouti argues refutes the antisemitism allegation against the movement. Maia Hallward attributes BDS's Jewish support to two factors: the long history of social justice activism among Jews and the desire among activists to defuse allegations of antisemitism. Sina Arnold calls it a "form of strategic essentialism", where Jewish activists make themselves visible or are made visible by others.
Philip Mendes distinguishes those Jews who recognize Palestinian rights and support Jewish-Arab dialogue from those "unrepresentative token Jews" whom BDS use as an alibi. David Hirsh has written, "Jews too can make anti-Semitic claims ... and play an important, if unwitting, part in preparing the ground for the future emergence of anti-Semitic movement." Noa Tishby wrote, "As Judaism always takes sides with human rights and encourages dissent, I am all for speaking against the Israeli government's policies when you don't like them. But when [Jewish university] students ... cry in support of BDS, I'm not sure what the goal really is, and I am pretty sure they don't know either." The ADL has written that Jewish Voice for Peace "uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and provide a greater degree of credibility to the anti-Israel movement". JVP replies that its activism is grounded in Jewish values and traditions. Judith Butler sees her BDS activism as "affirming a different Jewishness than the one in whose name the Israeli state claims to speak."
Jewish BDS activists have had their Jewish credentials questioned by other Jews and some have reported being called "self-hating Jews", "Nazis", or "traitors". The rabbi David Wolpe has said that Jewish BDS supporters should be shunned:
Those Jews who support BDS, or deny the legitimacy of the State of Israel, have no place at the table. They should not be invited to speak at synagogues and churches, universities and other institutions that respect rational discourse. They should have the same intellectual status as Klansmen: purveyors of hate.
See also
In Spanish: Boicot, Desinversiones y Sanciones para niños
- Anti-BDS laws
- Criticism of the Israeli government
- Disinvestment from Israel
- List of boycotts
- Reactions to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
- Writers Against the War on Gaza
