BDS Movement Research Articles

The Academic Question of Palestine

This article provides theoretical and contextual background to The Academic Question of Palestine. Building on the work of Edward Said, we maintain that Palestine constitutes a unique question with special status in international academic spaces, particularly in the West, because of its entanglement with other imperial and settler colonial forms of dispossession. We argue that the special place that Zionism and its defence has occupied for decades in academia has rendered Palestine one of the thorniest and most divisive issues of our time. In the new millennium, the birth of the BDS movement; the emergence of new solidarities with global anti-racist movements; the scholarly and human rights consensus that Israel constitutes a regime settler colonial apartheid; the acceleration of Zionist violence, until the Gaza genocide, have generated new forms of repression and resistance in the academic space. This Special Issue offers the tools for understanding these recent transformations of the question of Palestine.

Political imaginaries of solidarity: the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in Toronto

ABSTRACT This article discusses the impact of political imaginaries in facilitating or hindering sustained solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto, Canada. It conceives of the BDS movement as a space traversed by differentiated forces, actors, practices, and subjective dispositions that coalesce around a goal and constitute solidarity relations across time. In so doing, this article highlights the interplay of the multiple political imaginaries shaping the movement’s trajectory and analyses the ways these imaginaries facilitate or hinder the movement’s efforts to sustain solidarity. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2019, the article analyses activists’ political imaginaries as sites of contestation structured through what Mbembe terms ‘entangled temporalities.’ It argues that the plurality of political imaginaries animating solidarity practices among BDS activists in Toronto significantly contributed to the attenuation and scattering of the movement relative to its unity and synchronicity a decade earlier. Specifically, the article identifies the continuum between an anti-colonial Third World Internationalist imaginary and a pragmatic rights-based imaginary as central to the trajectory of the movement.

Economic diplomacy and conflict resolution: Harnessing the economic peace leverage theory in the Palestine-Israel context

The Palestine-Israel conflict, commencing on October 7th, has led to significant human and economic repercussions, with Palestine facing dire economic challenges exacerbated by multiple factors, and Israel experiencing disruptions in sectors such as construction. The paper delves into the Economic Peace Leverage Theory (EPLT), positing that economic tools can foster peace and reduce conflicts. The global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, aiming to influence Israel's policies towards Palestinians, aligns with EPLT's principles, drawing from historical instances like the South African anti-apartheid struggle. Despite Israel's resilient economy, BDS holds symbolic significance, influencing global narratives. The paper emphasizes that the real impact of BDS lies more in its perceptual influence than economic setbacks for Israel. To harness EPLT's potential and address the root concerns of the BDS movement, a collective global effort is vital. Such collaboration can pave the way for sustained peace and prosperity in the region.

Hasbara Revisited: Israel, the New Left, and Diaspora Jewry, 1967–1973

Abstract In the years between 1967 and 1973, the younger generation of Diaspora Jewry in the West was torn between its sympathy for the State of Israel and its identification with New Left politics and ideology. In response, Israel conducted a wide-ranging campaign of Hasbara—the Hebrew word for explaining the justice of the Israeli and Zionist cause—to this cohort in order to gain its support. Until now, scholarship on Israeli hasbara has not given any attention to how Israel grappled with the New Left in general and with its Jewish supporters in particular; similarly, studies of the encounter between Jews and the New Left lack any discussion of the role played by Israeli hasbara. This article connects the two, revealing the unknown history of the relationship between Israel, Diaspora Jewry, and the New Left. But it is of more than mere historical interest, as in the last decade Israel has been deeply concerned about leftists and liberals in the West (who today largely term themselves “progressives”), many of them are young Jews who have allied with pro-Palestinian forces, first and foremost the BDS movement. This article offers a possible model that could be used to mobilize these progressive Jews in support of Israel.

“Migration Background” versus “Nazi Background”: (German) Debates on Post-Nazism, Post-Migration, and Postcolonialism

The politics of history and memory culture have recently been the topic of increased discussion again—and this discussion has by no means been cool-headed, but hot, with a high potential for conflict. An argument is ongoing in the public sphere over which (hi)stories are present and visible and which are not, who is being recognized and who is not, as well as what is being forgotten, repressed, or tacitly accepted in this context. Corresponding to this general development, a debate is currently ongoing in the German press that has been dubbed “Historikerstreit 2.0,” or “the historians’ debate reloaded.” The controversy was initially sparked by a discussion about the Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe, his position toward the State of Israel, and his involvement with the BDS movement, before continuing on to a discussion about Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory when it was published in a German translation. Finally, the debates deepened with the controversy surrounding Dirk Moses's polemics concerning an ostensible “German catechism” with regard to Holocaust commemoration.

Diasporas as Audiences of Securitization

Abstract This study conceptually develops and analytically examines the role and function of diasporas as audiences in the securitization process by examining the American Jewish Diaspora in Israel's securitization of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). It argues that Israel's use of antisemitism as a metanarrative for the securitization of the BDS movement incorporates diasporic Jews as internal audiences in the securitization process. Audiences, however, are not monolithic. While homeland Jews, including both elites and the public, tend to support Israel's securitization process, American Jews are split; the elite support the process but public opinion is far less sympathetic to Israeli constructions of BDS as a threat. The disparity between audiences’ reactions weakens the support for Israel's counter-BDS policies and undermines its securitization process.

Penal populism and the BDS Movement after Security Council Resolution 2334

Penal populism and the BDS Movement after Security Council Resolution 2334

Evolution of the International Movement Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – BDS

The article describes insight into the factors and conditions influencing the formation of the international movement BDS including its key subjects and its most effective strategies for achieving all the goals identified. From the authors’ point of view Israel itself, by its extremely cruel and asymmetric measures against the Palestinian resistance to occupation during the second intifada stimulated the rise of the BDS movement popularity and as well as anti-Israeli tendencies in Western democracies. Another, no less important reason for the formation of the BDS is the failure of the peace process for the solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in accordance with the agreements reached in Oslo. Under these complicated circumstances, Palestinian Arab civil society has called on the international community to end the Israeli occupation. The study provided a thorough overview of the main financial sources of the movement. The use of funds from the EU community budget, national budgets of a number of Western states, the largest charitable foundations, etc. is stated. The authors analyze the reasons for the popularity of the movement at the beginning of the 21st century, including in some structural divisions of the UN and the European Union. Special attention is focusing on measures to counter the movement by Israel, the US and some European states. In the conclusion, the study identifies and characterizes the current status of the movement, which is steadily losing its adherents at all levels, including academic and confessional spheres.

Queer Politics of Boycott at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine

AbstractIn 2012, Palestinian anticolonial-queer activists organized a workshop and conference at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine in Porto Alegre, Brazil, titled “Queer Visions at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine.” Queer Visions brought different activists together who had been organizing against Israel’s state-sponsored pinkwashing campaign and for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Since 2010, Palestinian queer activism has publicly engaged with the Palestinian Call for BDS and has urged the Palestinian BDS movement and those in solidarity with it to mobilize around Israel’s pinkwashing campaign and work to better understand Zionism’s underlying settler-colonial sexual politics. Taking the WSF: Free Palestine as a crucial moment in queer engagements with the politics of boycott, this essay reflects on the challenges faced by anticolonial-queer activism in the context of Israel/Palestine and the challenges it poses to Zionist settler colonialism and normative understandings of queer politics and Palestinian liberation.

The Emergence of the BDS Movement through an Israeli Mirror

Abstract One of the stated goals of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is “equality in Israel.” This might imply a partnership between Palestinians and Israelis in promoting the movement’s goal. Yet core Palestinian BDS activists diverge in their perspectives on the role of dissident Jewish Israelis in the movement. Officially, The Palestinian BDS National Committee considers such Israelis as allies. However, some core BDS activists have repeatedly raised reservations about this partnership, as illustrated by the case of Israeli journalist Amira Hass’s expulsion from a conference at Birzeit University. To understand these divergent viewpoints, this article looks at the spatial trajectories of BDS campaigns, and especially at the movement’s implicit acceptance of the “boomerang model.” This model assumes that pressure exerted in the West will eventually come back to be applied on Israel. To that end, the article focuses on the history and cultural capital of core BDS activists, and particularly on their split habitus and distinction from other actors.

The End of Intellectuals

Abstract In 1979, Edward Said attended a colloquy on Middle East politics hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Les Temps Modernes in the apartment of Michel Foucault. He would later go on to publish his reflections on this experience in a short piece titled “Diary.” Reading this piece alongside Said’s larger oeuvre, as well as those of his predecessors Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, this article attempts to offer a theory of intellectual responsibility that may be applied to the BDS movement today. In turn, Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, published in the same year as the colloquy, offer a salient political allegory for the relation of the United States to the question of Palestine writ large when read as a dyad as they are intended to be. In closing, the article attempts to apply the theory of intellectuals derived from Said’s work by reflecting on the potential for the particular case of BDS to speak to a set of universal concerns on the Left.

Brief of Amicus Curiae Zachor Legal Institute in Support of the State of Arizona in Case 3:17-Cv-08263-Djh Jordahl Et Al V. Brnovich

Brief of Zachor Legal Institute as amicus in 3:17-cv-08263-DJH Jordahl et al v. Brnovich, a challenge to Arizona's anti-discrimination law by the ACLU. This brief debunks the ACLU's claim that all boycott activity is protected by the First Amendment and further exposes the BDS Movement as a front for terror groups. Filed in the Federal District Court for the District of Arizona.

Reflections on BDS

Reflections on BDS

Boycotting the Boycotters: Turnabout Is Fair Play Under the Commerce Clause and the Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine.

This paper is a review of the constitutionality of state laws that prohibit the state from investing in, or contracting with, parties engaged in certain boycott activity. In particular, as the boycotts subject to state regulation are often connected to the so-called “BDS movement” that has been active in promoting commercial and academic boycotts of Israel, the paper focuses on the background of BDS and how the nature of BDS impacts the analysis of Commerce Clause and Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine applicability.

Between tikkun olam and self-defense: Young Jewish Americans debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

In this study, we examined processes associated with ingroup members’ break from their ingroup and solidarity with the outgroup. We explored these processes by observing the current dramatic social change in which a growing number of young Jewish Americans have come to reject Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. We conducted a yearlong participant observation and in-depth interviews with 27 Jewish American college students involved in Israel advocacy on a college campus. Findings suggest that Jewish Americans entering the Jewish community in college came to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a lens of Jewish vulnerability. A bill proposed by Palestinian solidarity organizations to divest from companies associated with Israel (part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions or BDS movement) was also interpreted through the lens of Israel's vulnerability. As the college’s Student Union debated the bill, a schism emerged in the Jewish community. Some Jewish students who had a strong sense of their Jewish identity and grounded their Judaism in principles of social justice exhibited a greater openness to the Palestinian narrative of the conflict. Understanding of Palestinian dispossession was associated with the rejection of the mainstream Jewish establishment’s unconditional support of Israel. Moreover, dissenting Jewish students were concerned that others in the campus community would perceive them as denying the demands of people of color. We discuss our observations of the process of social change in relation to social science theories on narrative acknowledgment and collective action.

50 Years of Occupation

50 Years of Occupation

FIGHTING WITHOUT WEAPONS: PALESTINIAN DOCUMENTARY FILMS AND ACTS OF RESISTANCE

Film production has for a long time been a prominent medium for Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation and create a cultural memory. Though there are some academic studies on the subject, a critical framework of analysis for such films remains underdeveloped. This article argues that Palestinian film production has surged particularly in recent years as part of an increasingly globalised dimension to Palestinian resistance, alongside such initiatives as the Electronic Intifada and the BDS movement. Early Zionist rhetoric asserted the non-existence (or invisibility) of Palestinians. Several decades later, when the Arab revolt was shut down, the Israeli official propaganda largely shifted to a discourse of “emergency”, which decontextualizes the anti-colonial nature of Palestinian resistance. The films 5 Broken Cameras (2011) and Private (2004) both engage with Israeli colonialism and the state of emergency by acting as tools of witnessing, laying bare the occupational strategies the Israelis use under emergency law and revealing the arbitrary nature of such practices as the Separation Wall. The films challenge Israeli authority through their depictions of predominantly non-violent forms of resistance, which counters their historically constructed invisibility as a people, as well as the colonialist narrative of “terrorism”. Non-violent resistance makes the recognition of Israeli authority problematic, as the settlers cannot use brute force to drive out the Palestinians if there is no documented incident in context to justify violence. Furthermore, the article argues that the form of the films – pseudo-documentary and especially “talking witness” documentary – enables their emotive content to reach out to an international audience, which could potentially respond. Thus, the films not only contain acts of resistance, but they significantly are tools of resistance in the conflict.

Is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement Tainted by Anti‐Semitism?

If one disagrees with the actions of company, an organization, or country, boycotting that entity is an acceptable form of protest. Campaigns to boycott table grapes because of labor practices and Coors beer because of their antigay policies achieved their desired results. While divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign can have measurable and positive impact in certain situations, successful result is not guaranteed: witness that one can search online the name of just about any company, and the word boycott, and find campaigns waged against almost every major corporation--and almost none of them have produced any impact. For more than ten years, there has been global campaign to effect boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. This campaign has had little success, in part because, as we argue in this essay, it was born of an ideology hostile to Judaism and Jewish nationalism, and remains steeped in that hostile ideology to this day. The Palestinian people are not united behind this effort. The Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, Palestinian NGO, shows support down ten percentage points from 59 percent in March 2015 to 49 percent in August 2015 (www.jmcc.org). Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, while supporting the boycott of goods produced in West Bank settlements, has opposed of Israeli products not from those settlements. The movement was informally initiated in late August 2001 at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. An array of anti-Israel groups campaigned for language equating Zionism with racism and opposed the inclusion of language that would define anti-Semitism as form of racism. Israel, these advocates said, was an apartheid and its defensive security barrier an apartheid wall. They posited that could impact this protracted conflict in the same way as it had been effective with the South African regime. The final document from accused of genocide and apartheid. This was the opening salvo of what has become known as the BDS movement, an effort born, in effect, in the shadow of anti-Semitism, and unable to this day to shed intolerance of Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish state from its core values. The Conference's final declaration described as state that was guilty of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Durban Strategy promoted a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel, the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel (1) While it is clearly not true that all proponents of are anti-Semitic, the record of the conference, and the campaign for that has unfolded, have been mired by anti-Semitic tropes and in many instances by outright anti-Semitism (ADL 2015). This essay provides several examples of and its anti-Semitic nature: the cultural case of Matisyahu in Spain; the case of attempts at by academic associations; and the case of the boycott of commercial companies, particularly Caterpillar and SodaStream. CASE STUDIES: IN CULTURAL EVENTS Matisyahu (born Matthew Paul Miller), an American Jewish (but not Israeli) reggae rapper and alternative rock musician, was targeted by members of the Movement simply because he is Jewish when he was scheduled to perform at the Rototom Sunsplash festival in Spain in August 2015. Representatives of the movement demanded that the singer release public statement stating that he endorses Palestinian state. He was the only performer of which this demand was made. When he refused, pressure to cancel his performance came from pro-BDS group in Valencia and the performance was initially cancelled. Spain's government and the European Jewish Congress condemned the group's action and the decision of the concert promoters. …

Social Media Rhetoric of the Transnational Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement

This article uses rhetorical analysis to determine the effectiveness and characteristics of social media usage by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel. Hundreds of local student, community, and religious groups in the United States use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to promote BDS discourse and organize local BDS-related events. Even though social media platforms are important for an international movement composed of a very dispersed population, with millions of Palestinians also living under military occupation, the history of traditional media use during the First Intifada also suggests that social media are not necessary for mobilizing Palestinians at the local level. A preliminary rhetorical analysis of several BDS-related Facebook pages and Twitter accounts reveals that the BDS movement’s social media usage functions similarly in some ways to other contemporary mass movements by facilitating on-the-ground actions and delivering useful information to supporters. BDS movement social media discourse, however, does not establish the same level of emotional connection or interactivity with audiences as some other recent movements have, but these limitations can be partly explained by the unique political, material, and rhetorical constraints of the situation.

BDS, Israel, and the World System

This article analyzes Israel's actions and policies within a predominantly neorealist framework. Accordingly, it argues that U.S. domestic factors as well as Israeli domestic factors and political culture play little to no role in Israel's foreign policy decisions, which are instead largely determined by John Mearsheimer's five neorealist principles that drive all states. Additionally, the article discusses political economic factors and specifically addresses the claims made in Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's The Global Political Economy of Israel. Here the argument supplements neorealism by focusing on economics as a historically specific vehicle of modern power. It concludes that the root of Israeli violence and impunity is the international system itself and criticizes the Left and the BDS movement for not adequately grappling with this fact.