BDS is a movement whose stated objective is to cripple Israel’s economy by advocating for (and exerting a lot of pressure on) international companies to boycott Israeli companies and exports (including academics), divest their Israeli investments, and impose economic sanctions on Israel.
BDS claims to be a “Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.” Founded in 2005 "in reaction to Israeli policies in the occupied territories," its purported purpose was to put economic pressure on the Israeli government to push through the creation of a Palestinian state. This message and mission appealed to many liberals and caught on particularly well on university campuses across the western world. But like the Free Palestine movement whose true mission has revealed itself in all of its stark ugliness this week (“from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “gas the Jews” apparently mean the same thing), BDS is the proverbial wolf, luring sheep everywhere with illusions of greener pastures.
If you’re a young student away at university and happen to pass through the main student activity building during the annual well-funded “Israeli Apartheid Week” you may stop to gawk at the images of Israeli soldiers with machine guns standing over tearful young Palestinian children in broken down alleyways. Well-spoken and sympathetic people your age will hand you a flyer and ask you if you support freedom and equality for all; they’ll tell you stories of friends and family members who have been living in fear of the brutal colonial apartheid regime, deprived of rights and freedoms, subject to imprisonment or death without warning or cause. Your heart will skip and your face will fall; how did you not know this was going on? How could you not know that this is what “Israel” really was? You want to learn more. You want to do something about this human injustice. You want to right the wrongs of hundreds of years of settler colonialism and the indigenous people who have been terrorized, brutalized, and wiped out simply for being there, and for being powerless, all over the world – including where you live and work, something you’ve only recently become acutely aware of thanks to your Monday afternoon sociology class. But how can you help? You’re just an 18 year old starting out on your own in the world. The nice lady who gave you the flyer will tell you. You can boycott, divest, and sanction; and you can spread the word so that others more powerful than you will follow suit. YOU can make a difference. And now you are all too willing to get to work on behalf of this patently just cause, another social justice warrior having some small impact for good in this cruel world of oppression.
I can’t blame the SJWs. I’m sure if I had been an undergrad in the last 18 years who knew little to nothing about Israel or the Middle East (and why would I, if I weren’t Jewish?), I would have marched right alongside that young woman, and I would have derived a great deal of personal satisfaction from knowing that my actions were having even some small effect. What a glorious thing, to be part of an international group trying to help the underdog! I like to think that it might have occurred to me at some point to wonder exactly what solutions for peace this BDS movement offered (there are none on their website or in their literature). I like to think I would have done a little research to examine their claims and question their motives. But it is very likely that my classes, my social life, figuring out my place in the world, and all of the other pre-occupations of a young student would have occupied most of my brain-space. And really, why question the narrative? Clearly the university has sanctioned this event, so the information I was getting was obviously legit, the photos that were wrenching my heart told the whole story, and this nice lady was devoting her time and energy to freeing her own people, so honestly, where would my doubts have come from?
The goals that BDS advertises are: “Ending [Israel’s] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands 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.”
The casual sprinkling of “apartheid” “settler” and “ethnic cleansing” throughout the ensuing “explanations” would have told me everything I needed to know. Why would I question any of it? How would I know that Arab-Israeli citizens of Israel already have full rights, that Gaza was not occupied by Israel but self-ruling, that the wall around the West Bank was there to stop suicide bombers from blowing themselves up throughout Israeli towns, and that the “ethnic cleansing of more than half of the indigenous people of Palestine” in Israel’s “violent establishment in 1948” was actually commanded by the Arab states that attacked Israel?
But since we do, now, know this – if you’ve been reading my other entries – let’s take a closer look at these goals. First, what exactly do they mean by “all Arab lands” when they want to “end Israel’s occupation and colonization” of them? Well, go ahead and ask them – or read their responses to others who have already asked, here. Some samples: “Ending the occupation doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t mean upending the Jewish state itself…BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state.” Or, from the founder of BDS himself, Omar Barghouti: “Definitely, most definitely we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.” (Mr. Barghouti also peddles such gems as: “Jews were never persecuted in Arab countries.” He also has a PhD from Tel Aviv University.) You can witness his eloquence here for yourself if you can stomach it. But make no mistake: “The real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel…. That should be stated as an unambiguous goal. There should not be any equivocation on the subject. Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel.”
As for the second goal, refer to my entry on Palestine & Palestinians. Arab-Israeli Palestinians already have full rights; in stark contrast to the Palestinians in the West Bank, living in fear both from their own PA government and from the Israeli soldiers who keep a sharp eye on the fomenting of would-be suicide bombers, and in even starker contrast with the Palestinians in Gaza living under Hamas, who execute PLO sympathizers, enact honor killings of women, and arrest and torture people rumored to be gay.
And the third goal, of promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties? I would love to know how this could be effected at this point without goal #1 being achieved. I know that’s a harsh reality, completely unhelpful to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but it’s true. From the initial 700-750,000 refugees who fled in 1948 to the protection of Jordan (West Bank) and Egypt (Gaza), there are today 5.6 million “refugees” who have inherited this refugee status. Yes, you read that right – Palestinians are the only refugees in the entire world who are legally understood under international law to pass on this status to their descendants (i.e. Bella and Gigi Hadid are also legit “refugees” – just to expand your understanding of what this term means). How is this possible? Stay tuned for my upcoming post on the UNRWA.
What the BDS goals and explanations leave out:
When they say “Israel was established in 1948 through the brutal displacement of nearly 800,000 Palestinians… This premeditated cleansing is known as al-Nakba” they omit the part where the UN granted the Jews a right to return to their ancestral homeland after the Nazis systematically exterminated 2/3 of the Jewish population of Europe. They also neglect to mention that while Israel agreed to the UN Partition Plan, the Arabs not only refused it but attacked the new Jewish state upon its founding in order to destroy it. They demanded that all Arabs currently living there, flee in advance of this attack. Who were the ethnic cleansers, exactly?
When they say “the majority of Palestinians are the 7.25 million refugees who have been forced from their homes to make way for Jewish Israelis and are denied their right to return to their homes” – well I don’t even know where to start with that one. It’s just an absurd lie in multiple delusional dimensions.
When they say “Israel carried out horrific massacres of Palestinians in Gaza in 2008-9, 2012, and 2014… Israel deliberately attacked Palestinian civilians, schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure,” they leave out the 9000+ rockets and 5000+ mortars fired on Israeli civilians by Hamas from Gaza between 2005 and 2014, and the inconvenient fact that Hamas deliberately locates its military headquarters and rocket launchers under hospitals and schools. They also fail to note that after having their own civilians fired on, before Israel's army fires back they go to incredible lengths to warn civilians to clear the area by air-dropping leaflets, phoning people’s homes, and broadcasting the details of upcoming attacks with megaphones and over the radio. Inevitably though, as we’ve seen again this week, Hamas orders their civilians to stay put, precisely so that organizations like BDS can describe Israel’s attempt to eliminate rocket launchers from Gaza as “horrific massacres of Palestinians.”
I could go on all day, but hopefully you’re starting to see a fuller picture here. BDS claims that it is anti-Israel, not anti-Jewish, and asserts that it stands for human rights and equality for all. But the organization stands in a long line of movements to boycott Jews and Jewish products. I'll skip over the anti-Jewish economic sanctions, formal and informal, that are inseparable from the past 2000 years of world history wherever Jews have lived, and focus on recent history: five months after the end of WW2, with hundreds of thousands of homeless and stateless Jews, bereft of family murdered by Nazis and with no country willing to take them in, the Arab nations of the Middle East formed an Arab League whose first act was a formal boycott of the Palestinian Jewish community’s products under the British Mandate. This boycott continued through the founding of the state in 1948, and by 1951 over 8500 companies around the world had been convinced not to do business with Israel.
The BDS movement does not hide its denial of Israel’s right to exist, nor its denial of Jewish historical claims to the land. According to Barghouti, Jews have no “moral claims on the land.” They do hide all references to Hamas terror, Sharia law, suicide attacks, rockets, mortars, balloon- and condom-carrying bombs floated across the Gaza border into Israeli villages, and Palestinians as human shields. They never once mention the plight or human rights of Palestinians elsewhere in the world, like in Lebanon where 489,000 Palestinians still live under horrific conditions in refugee camps and continue to be denied Lebanese citizenship, even though most of them were born in Lebanon.
On October 8, one week ago to the day that I'm writing this, the BDS website proudly stated that they actively: “support the Palestinian freedom fighters in their struggle against Israeli apartheid. We believe that the heroic actions of Hamas fighters against the occupying forces are reasonable in their quest to liberate their stolen lands. The aggression of the Zionists occupiers has been met with a deserved response – Justified use of armed resistance against the oppressors’ military and civilians. We support the armed resistance of the brave Palestinian fighters. The BDS movement calls on all its supporters to spread this information and continue to support the BDS and the Palestinian people in their efforts.” (note: this statement has recently been removed, but was recorded by this website while it was still up – along with an overwhelming number of other NGO official statements lauding Hamas’ heroism and cheering for the final take-down of Israel.)
The sick, stomach-churning, and vicious irony of all of this is that BDS has not actually done anything to improve the lives of Palestinians anywhere; in fact, BDS' hard work has kept Palestinians in poverty and desperation in an economic echo of Hamas’ use of Palestinian human shields. What do I mean? There have been many private companies and NGOs who have tried to facilitate opportunities for Palestinians to form personal and professional relationships with Israelis and Israeli companies that are trying to bring them out of poverty and improve the Palestinian economies toward self-sustaining futures, but the BDS movement has made it a priority to stop this at all costs. You don’t have to take my word for it – see for yourself what Palestinian-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has written about this. Or read about the tragic story of SodaStream, and the hundreds of Palestinian workers who lost their jobs (with salaries 2 to 3 times higher than they could earn in the territories) because of pressure from BDS. And now that places like the UAE and Bahrain have normalization and peace agreements with Israel, BDS has turned its attention to boycotting Arab companies that venture to do business with Israel as well. What effect has this had on the Israeli economy? GDP and international investments have been steadily rising. And on the Palestinian economy? Some estimate that BDS pressure is costing Palestinians about $2 billion per year.
So why is that nice young woman, a sympathizer for the Palestinian cause, standing in front of heart-wrenching images and handing out leaflets in your university student center? Maybe she thinks she’s helping – I can’t speak for her. But I know – because it has been exposed, though no one seems to care – who is paying her. Ostensibly, the US headquartered company American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), who trains and sponsors Students for Justice in Palestine. They are a highly organized, well-funded, and sophisticated political machine with representatives on every campus in North America and in Europe who pull down pro-Israel posters, heckle and harass pro-Israel speakers, intimidate and even assault Jewish students, and invented the highly successful annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” information tables and events. Money flows through them to support SJP, BDS, and other affiliated groups. The precise path remains unclear, but what has become patent is that the sources of this sponsorship include the same sources that send money to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other terrorist organizations that have the annihilation of Israel as their main goals (see for yourself here).
You may know that such prominent personalities as congresswomen and Roger Waters actively support BDS and often serve as its spokespeople. They have successfully pressured artists and businesses alike to pull out of engagements in and with Israel (though happily, even Arab performers have defied them).
I would love to talk about the success that BDS has had in driving a wedge – now widened into a canyon – between Jews and Blacks in the United States. Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched together from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, would roll in their graves if they saw where the BLM movement has gone. But this entry is already way too long, and I have more to say that you can’t already find easily on the internet.
We live in countries where freedom of speech is a basic right. So when BDS sets up its tables for Israeli Apartheid Week in the heart of our student centres, we have every right to set up our own tables and provide a counter-narrative. Some do, but most don’t, for good reason. University administrations simply refuse to take any action to protect them, citing freedom of speech for the libellous and simply flat-out distortions and lies that are presented by the nice men and women handing out flyers across the way. Where is the counter-narrative? Why don’t Jews, who don’t support BDS, stand up and say something? I don’t mean individuals like the brave Ofir Dayan (her story is linked above). I mean organized, professional responses to hate-mongering and anti-historical indoctrination.
I have been searching the internet and my own soul for an answer to that question. I found this ironic apologetic for the Jewish principle of defending freedom of speech. But speaking for myself, I always felt that I was not, and still am not, an expert on modern Israel, so didn’t feel qualified or respected enough in that field to raise my own podium. I didn’t want to harm the credibility of my courses and my scholarship by meddling in modern politics: I always maintained a strict line between my own complicated relationship with Judaism and the education of my students about its origins in my classes precisely so that I could have some credibility, so that my students could see that I held the subjects of my inquiries and teachings at the same arms-length, whether teaching about the origins of Judaism, of Christianity, or comparative literature and archaeology of the pre-monotheistic ancient Near East. There were lots of reasons not to get involved, though I often thought about it.
But if I’m being perfectly honest, the real answer is: fear. It's the same reason why I'm being careful about who is reading this blog. As some of you know, I took a very long road to securing myself permanent employment as a professor in Canada (through no one’s fault but my own). I have seen posters advertising anti-Israel public lectures, rallies, documentaries, panels, and I have read and heard stories about colleagues in other departments in whose classes Jewish students knew better than to register. I walked by Israeli Apartheid Week tables year after year and turned a blind eye, because my overwhelming sense was – and still is – that my scholarship and my integrity as an historian would be publicly and irreparably damaged. I didn’t want to gain a reputation for being one of those dirty racist Zionist Islamophobes inculcating and perpetuating a white settler colonialist oppressor’s doctrine in impressionable young minds. And the lies about apartheid, ethnic cleansing, white colonialists, and all the rest were already so firmly entrenched in the university consciousness, so much a routine and normalized part of campus life, that I feared my fight against them would be lonely and short-lived.
Why lonely? There are many other Jewish faculty members across my campus and in universities across North America. But most of them didn’t speak out either. Or if they did, it was to lend their support for the BDS movement itself, something I still can’t understand, nor can I simply dismiss based on their own impressionable ignorance or even a SJW mentality, for reasons discussed in this post. Being educated intellectuals with full knowledge of how to do their own research and think their own thoughts, theirs are mentalities and justifications that I can't fathom and have given up trying to.
And now, watching students around the world waving Palestinian flags this week and chanting slogans about the extermination of Jews has served as an appalling indictment on my own past cowardice. It is my hope that my research and writing here in some small way can be redemptive for myself and helpful to others who similarly find their voices this week and stand with Israel in more than word and aspiration.