The Spectre of Boycott

Marc Daalder ’18

—

A spectre is haunting college campuses—the spectre of boycott. All the powers of the United States have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Christie and Cuomo, AIPAC and J-Street, Republican PACs and Democratic platform committees.

American-Jewish newspapers ruminate on the dangers of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS), and the susceptibility of young college students to its wiles. AIPAC defines it as a “nefarious effort,” and supports the laws passed by eleven states to outlaw the campaign. But is BDS really as horrible as AIPAC and Hillary Clinton and the Republican Jewish Coalition all want us to believe? What is this movement that is regularly characterized as anti-semitic, or as “a campus movement to destroy Israel masquerading as a political critique?”

Officially, BDS is an explicitly non-violent movement to boycott products manufactured in Israel, divest the endowments of schools and other institutions from Israel, and to push for state-level sanctions of Israel until three core demands are met:

1. End Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem
2. Recognize the fundamental equal rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel
3. Respecting, protecting, and promoting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties in Israel proper

BDS draws from opposition to South African apartheid as a historical precedent. The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) was a Britain-based campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction South Africa until the apartheid policies were ended. By the time apartheid was dismantled in the 1990s, the AAM had had an extraordinary effect, making sanctions a core political issue in most Western powers, pushing numerous universities and other influential institutions (including, in 1988, Amherst College) to divest from the country, and initiating a number of consumer boycotts.

Whether or not Israel meets the requirements for an apartheid state is certainly debatable. Given that there are two systems of law in the occupied territories, one of military tribunals for Palestinians and another of civil courts for Jewish settlers, that Palestinians regularly suffer from unfair restrictions on their freedom of movement, and that the Israeli Knesset is considering passing a law that would effectively instate the death penalty only for Palestinian terrorists and not Jewish ones, it is certainly inching towards that direction. Regardless, BDS is not founded on anti-apartheid principles, but rather anti-occupation ones, and even Israel’s most stalwart ally, the United States, recognizes its occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza as such.

As with every movement in the political firestorm that is Israel/Palestine, the BDS campaign is a source of great controversy and has come under heavy criticism since its initiation in 2005. Some critics go so far as to argue that BDS is inherently and entirely anti-Semitic—that by deploying what AIPAC calls “economic warfare,” BDS seeks to delegitimize the fundamental existence of the state of Israel.

However, none of the movement’s three demands express any sense of such delegitimization—only a legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. The opposition to the occupation is widely supported not just by dozens of UN resolutions, but also by the stated foreign policies of a vast number of nations, the United States included. Recognizing equal rights of all citizens is a basic tenet of a democratic state. While it is true that recognizing the right of return for Palestinian refugees could fundamentally alter Israel’s demographics, rendering it no longer a “Jewish” state by numbers alone, that is not an effective argument to deny people the personal property that was illegally seized from them or their families 68 years ago. The only way to enforce Israel’s Jewish character would be to implement a number of anti-democratic and ethnocentric policies in support of Jewish nationalism. Israel can be a democratic state for Jews, but it cannot be a democratic Jewish state.

Critics of BDS also assert that, by boycotting Israel but not other states that have committed international crimes, the BDS movement is applying an unfair—and anti-Semitic—double standard. Yet, oftentimes BDS activists are also vocally opposed to brutal regimes in other countries, and people cannot be expected to treat every issue in the world with equal and passionate attention. Why Israel, then? To begin with, the United States and other Western nations have such close-knit economic and military ties with Israel that an economic approach such as that advocated by the BDS campaign is an extremely effective form of nonviolent resistance.

As well, many BDS activists have a personal stake in anti-occupation work. Some are Palestinian, or have relatives or friends who are. Many others are Jews, such as myself, who see ending the occupation as an integral part of making Israel the greatest and most democratic nation it can be. In fact, Israel’s military-intelligence establishment has explicitly argued in recent years, most poignantly in the documentary The Gatekeepers, that the occupation is actively harmful for Israel’s national security. To truly care about Israel as a state with potential for a democratic future, and not as an ultra-nationalist occupying force, is to oppose the occupation.

This is not to say that the BDS and anti-Zionist movements are completely free of anti-Semitism. It’s not hard to find a plethora of incidents involving anti-Semitic attacks springing from activists involved with BDS, and this is a serious problem that these campaigns face. These hateful impulses must be unequivocally condemned, rooted out, and cast aside in favor of an intersectional movement based in Jewish-Muslim solidarity. This would embrace the principled critique that lies at the core of the BDS movement—that Jews and Palestinians can live side-by-side in peace and cooperation.

At Amherst, at least, pro-Palestine and BDS-oriented groups do not in my experience have a problem with anti-Semitism. In part, this is because these groups are rather ineffectual—besides a few tense clashes in spring 2015, and the semi-frequent bringing of various pro- and anti-occupation speakers to campus, Israel/Palestine dialogue is more or less invisible.

Hampshire College, one of the members of the five-college consortium, was the first US school to divest from Israel, but no others in the area have followed suit. However, there is a strong network of pro-Palestine organizations in the area, from Jewish Voice for Peace Western Mass and Students for Justice in Palestine at a number of schools, to UMass’ International Socialist Organization chapter and the much more centrist J-Street U.

Is Amherst likely to embrace BDS any time soon? I would imagine not. When the American Studies Association (ASA) moved to endorse BDS, President Biddy Martin released a statement strongly opposing the ASA’s decision. She grounded her opposition in terms defending academic freedom, writing that “it is the very definition of academic freedom that freedom of inquiry should not be constrained by political pressures.”

And yet, dismissing even Biddy’s implication that academia and politics are mutually exclusive, Amherst still chose in 1988 to divest from South Africa, and in 2006 from Sudan while under pressure from activists. Clearly, it will be a while until the “political pressures” condemning the Israeli occupation reach whatever pitch Biddy deems sufficient to warrant a threat to academic freedom—in the meantime, we can only work to heighten those pressures through our activism and, yes, through our academics.