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Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
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Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) 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.
Many authors trace BDS's origins to the NGO Forum at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in South Africa (Durban I). 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 (PACBI) 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.
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Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) 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.
Many authors trace BDS's origins to the NGO Forum at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in South Africa (Durban I). 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 (PACBI) 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.
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