BDS Movement Research Articles

The Inapplicability of First Amendment Protections to BDS Movement Boycotts

The paper has been derived from, and is an expansion of, certain arguments the author made in an earlier legal study of the BDS Movement under United States law, “The BDS Movement: That Which Is A Foreign Boycott By Any Other Name, Is Still Illegal” (hereinafter, the “BDS Legal Study”, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2531130) and is meant to rebut recent misleading assertions that the First Amendment protects participation by United States persons in foreign boycotts of Israel. The “BDS Movement” is a Palestinian Arab organization with supporters and affiliates throughout the world. This movement, publicly operating under the false banner of promoting civil rights, seeks to destroy the State of Israel through coordinated international commercial and institutional attacks consisting, in part of, a boycott and divestment campaign against Israel. As the BDS Legal Study demonstrated, BDS Movement activity in the United States violates a number of federal and state laws and support for the BDS Movement subjects participants to significant risks, including monetary penalties and criminal liability under federal anti-boycott, anti-trust and anti-racketeering laws. As part of its public relations campaign to lure unwitting American citizens and entities into support for unlawful BDS activity, the BDS Movement, through affiliated groups, has published a number of quasi-legal memoranda that wrongfully deem BDS support as being protected by the First Amendment. While it is true that commercial boycotts have a storied history in the United States, as with any other right, the right to boycott is not without limitations. When the desire of individuals to effect change through boycotts intersects with the legitimate goals of government, the right to boycott is often inhibited, if not suppressed in its entirety. This is particularly true for boycotts that conflict with established government policy.

“We,” Palestinians and Jewish Israelis: The Right Not to Be a Perpetrator

Assuming that the BDS is the largest civil movement today claiming to change the Israeli political regime, what type of “we” does it enable? In this essay, I try to answer this question, based on the premise that the response of Jewish Israeli citizens to the crimes and abuses perpetrated by their own regime cannot be based on external solidarity. Jewish Israelis are governed alongside Palestinians, and they are subjects of the same political regime. Their citizenship is a constitutive element of a regime of differentiations and hierarchy in which Jewish Israeli citizens are the privileged group. Not being able to endorse the boycott from the outside, Jewish Israelis can—and should—participate in it; their participation turns the BDS movement's call into a campaign to redefine citizenship as co-citizenship based on the right not to be perpetrator.

On the Law, Politics, and Ethics of BDS

The BDS movement has cast its campaign in legal terms, successfully conceptualizing the regime currently in place in Israel-Palestine as one that violates international law and requires a measure of transnational enforcement. Yet, from the perspective of Jewish Israeli citizens, partaking in such enforcement may require stepping out of the existing community—both symbolically and materially. This essay examines the stakes of such a move, weighing its potential benefits and costs in terms of advancing an egalitarian democratic future in Israel-Palestine.

Boycotting Israeli academia

In recent years, a campaign run by the BDS movement to boycott and silence Israeli academics has gained some support worldwide. Academics choosing to take part in the boycott are often accused to be moved by a new form of anti-Semitism – an allegation they fervently deny. A recent case in Australia saw Jake Lynch, a professor at the University of Sydney, taken to court and accused of breaching Australia's Racial Discrimination Act for rejecting an application from an Israeli academic for a visiting professor position. In this paper, we want to analyse such situations from a philosophical and legal perspective. We will argue that apart from being anti-scientific and counterproductive, such boycotts are also unlawful and – indeed – anti-Semitic. Boycott supporters often replace a person’s nationality with a person’s “institutional affiliation” to avoid being accused of racism and discrimination. We argue that this terminological disguise does not succeed in hiding the fact that often such boycotts illegitimately discriminate against individual Jews.

The BDS Movement: That Which We Call a Foreign Boycott, by Any Other Name, Is Still Illegal

In recent years a movement advocating a program of boycotts, divestitures and sanctions against Israel has developed an increasingly visible position on the world stage. This movement, known as the BDS Movement, originated in the Arab League's boycott of Israel and has grown into a multi-faceted entity. On the one hand, it continues the Arab League's boycott of Israel; on the other hand, it is aligned with radical Islamist groups, including Hamas, and coordinates with such groups as part of an international campaign to attack Israel militarily and commercially. BDS Movement has begun to attract supporters in the United States, consisting of individuals, unions and business organizations. These supporters have been led to believe that their support of the BDS Movement is within the bounds of United States' law.This paper explores specific United States' laws, including the Export Administration Act's anti-boycott provisions, anti-trust laws, racketeering laws and anti-terrorism statutes, to show that there are a number of federal laws that apply to, and prohibit participation in, the BDS Movement's activities. This paper concludes that American individuals and organizations that participate in or support the BDS Movement may be subject to both government prosecution and private party litigation, exposing participants to monetary and criminal penalties. To the extent individuals or business organizations have experienced financial harm from the BDS Movement's activities, such damages may be compensable under applicable United States' laws.Furthermore, this paper argues that because the federal government's role in regulating foreign affairs and commerce is undermined by the BDS Movement's operations in the United States, and United States' policy towards foreign relations is at odds with the BDS Movement's objectives, the United States Department of Justice is warranted in commencing prosecution against the BDS Movement and its supporters under, inter alia, the Export Administration Act, anti-terrorism laws and RICO.The portion of this paper demonstrating that First Amendment protections are not applicable to BDS Movement boycotts has been expanded and developed into a separate paper, The Inapplicabiilty of First Amendment Protections to BDS Movement Boycotts, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2676307.

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman

Silencing Dissent: How Biased Civil Rights Policies Stifle Dialogue on Israel

Silencing Dissent: How Biased Civil Rights Policies Stifle Dialogue on Israel

Thinking in Butler

Thinking in Butler

Dangerous Associations

Dangerous Associations Jodi Melamed (bio) When Curtis Marez delivered his presidential address on November 22, 2013, he could not have known that days later, the American Studies Association would become the target of a hegemonic bloc of university presidents and regents, politicians and watchdog institutions connected through their condemnation of the ASA resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.1 Yet his speech that evening made a strong case for why American studies scholars should orient our interests in empire, racialization, settler colonialism, gender, political economy, and culture around a new critical framework: “an American studies version of critical university studies.” What are we to make of this co-incidence? Of the fact that Marez calls us to take up the contemporary university as a critical project at the precise moment when that dense configuration of forces takes hold of the association? In my response, I revisit “Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt” for the insights it yields into the complex strategical situation in which American studies—the field, we scholars, the association—now finds itself. At the outset, reviewing Marez’s speech beside the dominant discourse of academic freedom being articulated in reaction to the ASA’s boycott reveals the silences and exclusions—the productions of ignorance—required to make that discourse appear coherent and noncontradictory. The first of these, as many have noted, is the exclusion of Palestinian scholars and their routinely violated academic freedoms from consideration. Yet dominant academic freedom discourse also produces ignorance about student debt, the repression of campus protest, the administration of higher education according to market values, and all the other coercions Marez outlines in his speech. Not surprising, but worth noting is that, despite all the national media at the annual convention, and all the university presidents who decided to investigate their institutions’ relation to ASA, none of their defenses of academic freedom cast even a disparaging glance at any of the issues Marez discusses under the rubric of “the university of debt.” Instead, the rubric of academic freedom enables a kind of epistemological violence; it circumscribes knowledge so that a statement such as “the true essence of a university [is] to foster dialogue and develop solutions [End Page 289] without regard to political, racial, and cultural differences” can be isolated from Marez’s critique (which would readily reveal its hollowness and violences): That the university—a site that has held so much promise for the transformation of society and our collective imaginations—has historically been a key institution within racialized and gendered capitalism; it has been a main locus for the social reproduction of racial, class, and gender inequalities and normative morality; and now it has become center and transit for the ongoing neoliberal debt economy, controlling dissent, and perpetuating old and new forms of settler colonialism.2 Palestinian suffering must be made meaningless to uphold this particular definition of academic freedom, coincident with student debt being made meaningless so as to preserve the emancipatory ideal of the university. In sharp contrast to these exclusions, Marez’s presidential address both foregrounds and connects student debt and Israel–Palestine. This occurs strikingly in his penultimate argument, one that in the larger context of the speech provides an example of the “possibilities for comparative, transnational, and global critical thinking and action” opened by “the analytic of student debt.” Observing that a number of non-Palestinian groups focused primarily on student debt have posted boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) endorsements on a Birzeit University website, Marez provocatively argues that “the student-led BDS movement on college campuses [in the United States] could thus also be described as part of a broader effort to take some control over the student debt financing of settler colonial violence.” What enables Marez to make such a dangerous association between student debt and BDS? What enables him to boldly go where managerial discourses of “academic freedom” forbid us to tread? Methodologically, it is important to note that Marez is exceptionally attentive to social movement activism alive on college campuses right now. He describes his speech as an “attempt to center collective dissent to student debt in American studies,” and mentions it began amid “mass student protests against budget...

The “I” in BDS: Individual Creativity and Responsibility in the Context of Collective Praxis — an Interview With Omar Barghouti and Falastine Dwikat

Omar Barghouti and Falastine Dwikat reflect on the personal experiences and contributions of activists, artists, and academics in the Palestinian-led BDS movement, a vibrant example of a movement that embraces the dialectic between the individual and the collective, balancing individual responsibility and creativity with collective decision-making and action.

“War by other Means” or Nonviolent Resistance? Examining the Discourses Surrounding Berkeley’s Divestment Bill

This article explores the discourses surrounding the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although the boycott strategy is a form of unarmed resistance and thus nonviolent in scope, it has not been widely framed as a “nonviolent” movement. Furthermore, the boycott movement has often been framed in negative terms in Western media, and Israeli representatives have gone so far as to call the BDS movement anti‐Semitic, claiming it seeks to delegitimize the State of Israel. This article parses out how activists and opponents frame the movement and the extent to which these framings reflect actual practice and goals of the movement, through focusing on the case of the University of California, Berkeley student government’s effort to pass a divestment bill in spring 2010. The authors argue that supporters and opponents use different approaches to peace and conflict, which influences how they view the BDS movement.

Readers Respond

Readers Respond