BDS — the Boycott, Divestment, and

Sanctions movement against Israel —

explained
Israel’s violence in Gaza is giving new life to the movement.

With gruesome images of Israel’s lethal crackdown on Gaza spread across

the world, Palestinian activists are calling for a renewed push around a
hard-hitting pressure tactic against Israel: Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions (BDS). European and Arab leaders are harshly criticizing Israel
for killing dozens of Palestinian protesters in Gaza. Now Palestinians and
their supporters are hoping the outcry will lead to more support for their
campaign to boycott Israel and turn the country into an international pariah.

At issue is the pro-Palestinian BDS movement. Its supporters, who take

inspiration from the campaign that international activists used to pressure
South Africa to end apartheid, work to punish Israel economically and
isolate it politically because of its continued occupation of the West Bank,
de facto control of Gaza, and mistreatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

BDS has had some high-profile successes in recent months, such as when
the pop star Lorde canceled a concert in Tel Aviv in December in response
to pressure from BDS activists.

Now pro-Palestinian activists online are calling for an escalation in

international BDS campaigns in response to the killings in Gaza. Mustafa
Barghouti, a member of the central council of the Palestinian Liberation
Organization, told BBC’s Newshour on Monday that BDS and popular
nonviolent resistance are “the best two instruments to force Israel to
change its policies.”

BDS is highly controversial in Israel and the American Jewish community.

Some of its critics describe it as anti-Semitic, arguing that it unfairly singles
out Israel for human rights violations when other countries have worse
records, or that it’s a crude tool that can alienate people sympathetic to its
cause. Its defenders argue that since BDS arose in response to Israel’s
treatment of Palestinians, its focus on Israel is logical, and that its criticism
is rooted in the country’s violations of international law, not Israel’s
character itself. The movement officially condemns all forms of bigotry,
including anti-Semitism.
Experts have estimated that BDS could lop anywhere from $15
billion to $47 billion off the Israeli economy over the next decade. That
financial toll could grow if the Gaza killings lead to a spike in support for
BDS efforts globally.

“Every time Israel blatantly violates Palestinian rights, there is another BDS
victory,” Noura Erakat, a Palestinian-American legal scholar of human
rights at George Mason University, told me.

BDS is a sprawling movement that covers a lot

The BDS movement says its goal is to push the Israeli government to
meet three main demands. In its own words, these are:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the
Wall. International law recognizes the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,
Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights as occupied by Israel.

2. Granting Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel their right 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

BDS has been around for more than a decade, and it enjoys high levels of
support among Palestinians, in part because it seems to have better
prospects of effecting change than the divided and anemic Palestinian
political leadership. But it’s really in the past few years that it’s begun to
gain international prominence, evolving from a fringe movement to one that
worried Israeli and Jewish leaders are condemning more and more
strongly.

“Those who wear the BDS label should be treated exactly as we treat any
anti-Semite or bigot. They should be exposed and condemned. The
boycotters should be boycotted,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) in 2014.

The BDS movement has some wins on the world stage, including the
European Union’s creation of guidelines that require goods exported from
Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories to be labeled as such
(as opposed to simply being labeled as from Israel), a policy that’s
expected to hurt Israeli exports. Norway’s $810 billion Government
Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth
fund, blacklisted two Israeli companies over their involvement in
settlement building in East Jerusalem.
The movement’s impact in the US has been more mixed. The United
Methodist Church’s $20 billion pension board, the biggest pension fund
asset manager in the US, blacklisted the five largest Israeli banks.

The student councils of most of the University of California campuses have

voted for divestment from companies making money from the settlements,
as have student organizations at New York University, George
Washington University, and Barnard College. The National Women’s
Studies Association and other academic groups in the US have voted to
boycott Israeli universities. In 2013, legendary physicist Stephen
Hawking refused to attend a conference in Israel in solidarity with BDS.

In the aftermath of the Gaza violence, the White House didn’t echo
its European allies in condemning Israel or calling for an international
probe; it instead put all the blame on the Palestinians.

BDS is targeting companies where it hurts

There are signs that BDS can do more damage to companies by harming
their reputations than by getting large numbers of people to boycott their
products.

Take the Israeli company SodaStream, which manufactures a kitchen

appliance for carbonating water at home. BDS supporters targeted it for
operating a factory in the West Bank, and the company ultimately shut
down down the facility in 2015. Its CEO, Daniel Birnbaum, said the move
was a financial decision that wasn’t tied to the BDS campaign, which he
said had only a “marginal” effect on its business.

But according to testimony Birnbaum submitted to Congress, the BDS

movement hit the company squarely in the pocketbook. “There is
absolutely no doubt that our reputation as individuals and as a company
was compromised because of our association with the lies and allegations
directed at us from the BDS,” Birnbaum said.

SodaStream’s experience gets to the heart of the matter here. While BDS’s
actual financial impact on foreign and Israeli businesses in Israel so far is
extremely small, its campaigns can deal a significant blow to a brand’s
reputation over time. And that’s enough to change the behavior of
institutions that want to maximize their bottom line.

So while BDS campaigns aren’t yet close to capable of bringing Israeli

businesses to their knees, in the aggregate, they could easily become a
substantial factor in the calculations that investors worldwide make about
Israel’s business climate.
Many Jews see BDS as anti-Semitic

Steven M. Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College Jewish

Institute of Religion, told me that to the average Jew, BDS is threatening
because it comes across as “anti-Israel.”

Although BDS has a formal mission statement, in reality, it serves as a

banner for a number of groups and individuals with a wide variety of views
and motives. And the movement has attracted members who push for
goals that go further than getting Israel to comply with international law.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has written, “While the movement takes no

official position on how to end the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of its co-
founders, Omar Barghouti, has called for unifying them into a single
state, which would mean dissolving Israel as a Jewish state.”

That’s fed concerns among some Israeli observers that the thrust of BDS
is ultimately at odds with a two-state solution. “Chief spokespeople for the
state of Israel argue that the Palestinians and their supporters are not
looking for freedom and to live peaceably within Israel, but that they’re
trying to take over all of Israel or wipe out the Jewish state,” Cohen says.

BDS advocates argue that the movement doesn’t stand by any specific
political future, and instead focuses on compliance with international law.

Many supporters of Israel have also been dismayed by the BDS

movement’s successes in, for instance, getting Lorde to cancel her planned
concert in Tel Aviv amid public pressure from BDS activists and fans.

“I’ve received an overwhelming number of messages and letters and have

had a lot of discussions with people holding many views, and I think the
right decision at this time is to cancel the show,” Lorde said in a statement.
“I’m not too proud to admit I didn’t make the right call on this one. I’m truly
sorry to reverse my commitment to come play for you.”

After she pulled out of the concert, a prominent American rabbi, Shmuley
Boteach, ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post calling her a “bigot,”
while a group of more than 100 musicians, actors, and directors signed a
public letter supporting her.

Israel’s recent victory in the Eurovision Song Contest — its first since 1998
— caused dismay among BDS advocates, some of whom basically
hoped that Israel would be barred from participating.
The fact that Israel, as the defending champion, will host next year’s
competition is angering them further.

“Israel will use next year’s Eurovision to try to legitimize its occupation,
ethnic cleansing and illegal annexation,” Ali Abunimah, founder of the
website Electronic Intifada, tweeted on Sunday. Europe, he writes, is
“giving this propaganda its full Trump-like support.”

Sometimes specific one-off boycotts by artists have been confused with

support for BDS, — like when Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman
canceled her visit to Israel to receive the Genesis Prize, a prestigious
award sometimes referred to as the “Jewish Nobel,” in April.

The Genesis Prize, in a statement, said that “recent events in Israel have
been extremely distressing to her,” adding that “she does not feel
comfortable participating in any public events in Israel.” This was widely
interpreted as a reference to the crisis on the boundary between Israel and
the Palestinian-populated Gaza Strip, in which Israeli troops have shot a
number of Palestinians during occasionally violent demonstrations near a
border fence.

Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev blasted the decision, saying Portman
had “fallen into the hands” of the BDS movement; Oren Hazan, a member
of Israel’s parliament from the Likud Party, called for Portman’s Israeli
citizenship to be stripped.

But Portman soon clarified that her action was targeted at Israeli
leadership, not the state of Israel as a whole.

“I chose not to attend because I did not want to appear as endorsing

Benjamin Netanyahu, who was to be giving a speech at the ceremony. By
the same token, I am not part of the BDS movement and do not endorse it,”
Portman wrote in a statement on Instagram. “Like many Israelis and Jews
around the world, I can be critical of the leadership in Israel without wanting
to boycott the entire nation.”

BDS supporters hope hurting Israel’s economy will change Israeli policy

Israel has a strong economy, a large part of which is driven by a booming

tech sector that houses a number of premier Western tech firms. It’s
difficult to see how even a massive surge in BDS campaigns could destroy
that reality. And so far, BDS’s successes haven’t prevented Israel from
seeing a steep increase in foreign investment in recent years.
But the country’s biggest concern is similar to that of Israeli businesses
being targeted by BDS — the cost to its reputation.

“It’s not just an impact of dollars and cents, but it’s an impact that is
psychological as well,” Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the US
Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told me in an interview in 2016. “It’s about
the effect of knowing that there are costs in the form of international
isolation to continuing down the road Israel is on.”

Israeli leaders are deeply concerned that an uptick in successful BDS

campaigns and increased enforcement of EU guidelines would isolate it in
the global arena. That’s why politicians from across the political spectrum in
Israel have begun to describe BDS as an existential threat in recent years,
and argue that its chief goal is “delegitimization.”

For both critics and supporters of the BDS movement, that level of Israeli
concern may be the clearest evidence that the campaign is picking up
momentum. Whether it will be able to change Israeli policy is a different
question entirely.