Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions


Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions is a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel. Its stated objective is to pressure Israel to meet what the BDS movement describes as Israel's obligations under international law, which it defines as withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and promotion of "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. Supporters describe it as a human rights movement and compare Palestinians' situation under Israeli policies to that of black South Africans under apartheid. Protests and conferences in support of the movement have been held in several countries.
Some critics accuse the BDS movement of antisemitism, a charge the movement calls an attempt to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Since 2015, the Israeli government has allocated significant resources to campaigns portraying BDS as antisemitic and has encouraged legal measures against the movement in other countries. Multiple countries, as well as a majority of U.S. states, have passed laws aimed at countering BDS.

Background

Many authors trace BDS's origins to the NGO Forum at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in South Africa. According to the Socialist Workers Party's Tom Hickey and Philip Marfleet, 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 appeared in the 2005 BDS Call; Israel was proclaimed an apartheid state that engages in human rights violations by denying Palestinian refugees' right of return, occupying the Palestinian territories, and discriminating 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. Separately, Colin Blakemore and Richard Dawkins 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 in April 2004.
Colin Shindler said 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 said 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 say that BDS's roots are 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:
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:
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 says 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", saying that Palestinians are entitled to those rights like everyone else. It is therefore an anti-racist movement and rejects all forms of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. More generally, BDS says it is part of a global social movement that challenges neo-liberal 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 says.

Israel

According to BDS, Israel is an apartheid state as defined by two international treaties, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It says that while there are differences between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa, such as Israel's lack of explicit racial segregation laws, the systems are fundamentally similar. One of the main differences between South African and Israeli apartheid, BDS suggests, is that in the former a white minority dominated a black majority, but in Israel, a Jewish majority discriminates against a Palestinian minority in Israel and also keeps Palestinians under military occupation. It further contends that South African apartheid depended on black labor while Israeli apartheid is grounded in efforts to expel Palestinians from "Greater Israel".
BDS also sees the Israeli legal definition of itself as a "Jewish and democratic state" as contradictory. According to BDS, Israel upholds a facade of democracy but is not and cannot be a democracy because it is, in Omar Barghouti's words, "a settler-colonial state".
Opponents have said that comparing Israel to South Africa's apartheid regime "demonizes" Israel and is antisemitic. Supporters say that calling Israel an apartheid state is not antisemitic. To support that view, they cite prominent anti-apartheid activists such as Desmond Tutu and South African politician Ronnie Kasrils, who both have said that the situation in Gaza and the West Bank is "worse" than apartheid. Eric Goldstein, acting executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, which neither supports nor condemns a boycott, said that the Biden administration would probably not counter the first Trump administration's attempt to label BDS antisemitic. He considers the movement maligned. In his view, "To campaign or boycott solely on behalf of Palestinians under Israeli rule no more constitutes anti-Semitism than doing so on behalf of Tibetans in China is in itself anti-Chinese racism."

Right of return

BDS demands that Israel allow the Palestinian refugees displaced in the 1948 war to return to what is now Israel. According to BDS's critics, calling for their right to return is an attempt to destroy Israel. If the refugees returned, Israel would become a Palestinian-majority state and Jewish dominance of Israel would be in jeopardy. They say this would undermine the Jewish people's right to self-determination and that calling for it is thus a form of antisemitism. Former Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman has called it "the destruction of the Jewish state through demography."
Nadia Abu el-Haj has written that, indeed, BDS supporters believe that "the Israeli state has no right to continue exist as a racial state that builds the distinction between Jew and non-Jew into its citizenship laws, its legal regimes, its education system, its economy, and its military and policing tactics." BDS supporters further note that the Palestinian liberation movement has always rejected the idea that Israel has a right to exist as a racial state. While BDS deliberately refrains from advocating any particular political outcome, such as a one-state or two-state solution, Barghouti says that a Jewish state in historical Palestine contravenes the Palestinians' rights:
Norman Finkelstein, a vocal supporter of the two-state solution, has criticized BDS on this issue. Like Foxman, Finkelstein believes that BDS seeks to end Israel through demography, something he believes Israel will never acquiesce to. He therefore considers BDS a "silly, childish, and dishonest cult" because it does not explicitly state that its goal is to end Israel and because, according to him, that goal is unrealistic and broad public support cannot be found for the return of the refugees. Still, he believes that BDS's tactics, boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, are correct.