Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

Based on Wikipedia: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

In 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations issued a call that would reshape debates about Israel and Palestine for the next two decades. They weren't asking for negotiations. They weren't requesting dialogue. They were demanding that the world do to Israel what it had done to apartheid South Africa: cut it off economically until it changed its behavior.

This was the birth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement—known universally by its acronym BDS.

The movement has since become one of the most controversial forces in international politics. Supporters call it a human rights campaign. Critics call it antisemitic. Some governments have passed laws against it. Universities have torn themselves apart over it. And depending on whom you ask, it's either the moral successor to the anti-apartheid struggle or a thinly veiled attempt to destroy the world's only Jewish state.

To understand why BDS generates such heat, you need to understand what it actually demands—and the ideological framework behind those demands.

The Three Demands

BDS makes three demands of Israel, which it frames as obligations under international law:

First, end the occupation of territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War—the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem—and tear down the separation barrier that snakes through the West Bank.

Second, grant full equality to Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 percent of the population within Israel's pre-1967 borders.

Third, allow Palestinian refugees displaced during the 1948 war—and their descendants—to return to their homes in what is now Israel.

These demands are non-negotiable. Omar Barghouti, one of the movement's co-founders, quotes South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to explain why: "I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights."

The first two demands are broadly consistent with liberal international opinion. Most countries consider the occupation illegal. Most democratic nations believe citizens should have equal rights regardless of ethnicity.

It's the third demand—the right of return—that generates the fiercest opposition.

The Arithmetic of Return

Here's why the right of return is so explosive: simple demographics.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel. Today, counting their descendants, that number has swelled to more than five million people registered as Palestinian refugees with the United Nations.

Israel's current Jewish population is approximately seven million. Its Arab population is about two million.

If even a fraction of those five million refugees exercised a right to return, Israel would cease to be a Jewish-majority state. The entire premise of Zionism—a homeland where Jews are the majority and can never again become a persecuted minority—would be undone through the ballot box rather than the battlefield.

Critics of BDS see this as the point. Abraham Foxman, former director of the Anti-Defamation League, called it "the destruction of the Jewish state through demography." From this perspective, the third demand reveals BDS's true goal: not reforming Israel, but ending it.

BDS supporters don't necessarily dispute this framing—they just don't accept that maintaining a Jewish demographic majority is a legitimate goal that should override Palestinian rights.

Barghouti puts it bluntly:

A Jewish state in Palestine in any shape or form cannot but contravene the basic rights of the indigenous Palestinian population and perpetuate a system of racial discrimination that ought to be opposed categorically. Just as we would oppose a "Muslim state" or a "Christian state" or any kind of exclusionary state, definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.

This is the philosophical core of the dispute. Is a state defined by one ethnic or religious group's majority inherently discriminatory? Or is Jewish self-determination, after millennia of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, a legitimate exception?

BDS answers the first question with yes and the second with no.

The Apartheid Framework

BDS doesn't just criticize Israeli policies—it claims Israel is an apartheid state. This is a specific legal and moral claim, not merely rhetorical.

The word apartheid comes from Afrikaans, meaning "separateness." In South Africa, it described a system where a white minority of about 15 percent controlled a country with a black majority of about 75 percent, using explicit racial classification laws to maintain power and privilege.

International law defines apartheid more broadly than its South African incarnation. The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court both define it as systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another.

BDS argues that Israel meets this definition, though with important differences from South Africa.

In South Africa, apartheid was explicit. Signs designated beaches, buses, and bathrooms as "Whites Only" or "Non-Whites Only." The Population Registration Act classified every citizen by race at birth.

Israel has no such laws. Arab citizens vote, serve in the Knesset (parliament), and sit on the Supreme Court. The differences, BDS argues, are in implementation rather than formal law—and in how Israel treats Palestinians in the occupied territories, who live under military rule without citizenship rights.

Another key difference: South African apartheid depended on black labor. The economy needed black workers in mines, factories, and homes. Israeli policy, BDS contends, tends toward separation and exclusion rather than exploitation—what critics describe as pushing Palestinians out rather than incorporating them as subordinate workers.

Several human rights organizations have since issued reports reaching similar conclusions. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli organization B'Tselem have all published detailed analyses arguing that Israel's treatment of Palestinians constitutes apartheid under international law. These reports remain deeply contested, but they've shifted what was once a fringe position toward the mainstream of human rights discourse.

Origins: From Durban to the BDS Call

The BDS movement didn't emerge from nowhere. Its intellectual and organizational roots trace to a controversial conference in South Africa in 2001.

The United Nations World Conference Against Racism convened in Durban just days before the September 11 attacks would reshape global politics. Running parallel to the official conference was an NGO Forum—a gathering of civil society organizations that operated independently from the government delegates.

At this forum, Palestinian activists met with veterans of the South African anti-apartheid movement. These veterans saw parallels between Israel's treatment of Palestinians and their own experience under white minority rule. They recommended the same tactics that had worked against South Africa: international pressure through boycotts, divestment campaigns, and governmental sanctions.

The NGO Forum adopted a declaration that contained many elements later codified in the BDS Call. It labeled Israel an apartheid state. It cited violations of Palestinian rights: the denial of refugee return, the occupation of Palestinian territories, discrimination against Arab citizens. It recommended comprehensive sanctions and embargoes.

The declaration was intensely controversial. Critics called it one-sided, noting that it ignored violence by Palestinian militant groups. Others said the focus on Israel—at a conference addressing racism worldwide—reflected antisemitic obsession rather than proportionate concern for human rights.

But for Palestinian organizers, Durban provided both a framework and international legitimacy. The anti-apartheid comparison became central to how they framed their cause.

The following years saw escalating violence. The Second Intifada was raging. Israeli forces reoccupied major Palestinian cities in 2002. Suicide bombings killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. The separation barrier went up, cutting through the West Bank. The Oslo peace process, which had promised a negotiated two-state solution, collapsed entirely.

In this context, Palestinian scholars and activists began issuing calls for international economic pressure. In March 2002, prominent Palestinian intellectuals published a letter asking "global civil society" to demand their governments suspend economic relations with Israel. In August, Palestinian organizations in the occupied territories called for a comprehensive boycott. In October 2003, another group of intellectuals called specifically for boycotting Israeli academic institutions.

These scattered initiatives coalesced in April 2004 with the formation of the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, known as PACBI. Then, on July 9, 2005—the first anniversary of an International Court of Justice ruling against the separation barrier—over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations issued the unified BDS Call.

Why Not Negotiate?

A reasonable question: if Palestinians want these things, why not negotiate for them? Why economic pressure instead of diplomacy?

BDS has a clear answer: negotiations haven't worked, and they're structurally unfair.

The Oslo Accords, signed with great fanfare in 1993, were supposed to lead to Palestinian statehood within five years. Three decades later, there is no Palestinian state. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has more than tripled. The Palestinians have less territory, less autonomy, and less hope than when negotiations began.

From the BDS perspective, the negotiation framework is fundamentally flawed because it treats both parties as equally responsible for the conflict—as if a colonizer and the colonized, an occupier and the occupied, have equivalent moral standing. Rafeef Ziadah, a BDS organizer, describes the movement as explicitly rejecting "the peace process paradigm of equalizing both sides" in favor of seeing "a colonial conflict between a native population and a settler colonial state."

BDS argues that negotiations should only happen after Israel has recognized Palestinian rights—not as a way to determine what those rights are. The current framework, they contend, asks Palestinians to negotiate away their rights in exchange for whatever Israel is willing to concede.

Critics respond that this position makes BDS not a pressure campaign for negotiations but a rejection of negotiations entirely. If Israel must concede the essential points before talks begin, what is there to negotiate?

This gets at a deeper question: Is BDS trying to change Israeli behavior, or is it trying to delegitimize Israel's existence as currently constituted?

The Liberal Zionist Critique

Some of BDS's most interesting critics aren't right-wing defenders of Israeli policy—they're liberal Zionists who oppose the occupation but also oppose BDS.

Their argument goes something like this: Both the Israeli right and BDS are leading toward the destruction of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, just by different paths.

The Israeli right, by continuing to build settlements, is making a two-state solution physically impossible. Eventually, the argument goes, Israel will have to choose: grant citizenship to millions of Palestinians (ending Jewish majority rule) or formalize permanent disenfranchisement (becoming openly apartheid).

BDS, by demanding right of return and refusing to endorse a two-state solution, is explicitly working toward ending Jewish majority rule.

Liberal Zionists propose a middle path: a "Zionist BDS" that targets only settlements and occupation-related activities while affirming Israel's legitimacy within its pre-1967 borders. Peter Beinart, a prominent Jewish-American journalist, proposed exactly this in 2012. The idea was to pressure Israel to end the occupation while making clear that Israel itself—as a Jewish state within legitimate borders—was not the target.

BDS supporters reject this framework entirely. They argue that liberal Zionists are more concerned with preserving Jewish demographic dominance than with Palestinian rights. Denying refugees the right to return solely because they're not Jewish, Barghouti argues, reflects the same ethnic discrimination that defines Israeli apartheid.

This dispute illuminates something important: BDS and liberal Zionism share a diagnosis (the occupation is wrong) but disagree fundamentally about what Israel should be. Liberal Zionists want a reformed Israel that ends the occupation but remains a Jewish-majority state. BDS supporters argue that a Jewish-majority state is inherently discriminatory and cannot be reformed into justice.

Anti-Normalization

One of BDS's more controversial positions is its opposition to "normalization"—a term that requires some unpacking.

In the BDS framework, normalization means any activity that treats the current situation as normal or acceptable. This includes dialogue programs that bring Israelis and Palestinians together without explicitly addressing occupation, discrimination, or refugee rights. It includes cultural exchanges that humanize "both sides" without acknowledging the asymmetry of power. It includes joint economic ventures that benefit from the status quo.

BDS opposes these initiatives because, they argue, they create a false equivalence. A dialogue between occupier and occupied, where both are asked to understand each other's perspective without challenging the occupation itself, normalizes subjugation. It makes ongoing injustice feel manageable, even comfortable.

Instead, BDS advocates what it calls "co-resistance"—joint Israeli-Palestinian efforts that explicitly challenge occupation and discrimination. The distinction isn't about whether Israelis and Palestinians should work together, but whether that work confronts or accommodates injustice.

Critics argue that anti-normalization sabotages exactly the kind of human connection that might build support for Palestinian rights among Israeli Jews. If you refuse to talk to people who haven't already adopted your position, how do you ever change minds?

BDS responds that true dialogue must be rooted in justice, not false symmetry. Asking an occupied population to make nice with their occupiers, without the occupiers first acknowledging the wrong of occupation, isn't dialogue—it's capitulation dressed up as peacemaking.

The Antisemitism Debate

No discussion of BDS is complete without addressing the antisemitism charge, which dominates public debate about the movement.

Critics argue that BDS is antisemitic for several reasons:

The "Israel apartheid" comparison, they say, demonizes the Jewish state by associating it with one of history's most reviled regimes. The focus on Israel, among all the world's human rights situations, reflects disproportionate hostility toward the one Jewish country. The demand for right of return is a polite way of calling for Israel's destruction. And the movement's rhetoric sometimes slides into classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and control.

Since 2015, the Israeli government has invested significant resources in campaigns portraying BDS as antisemitic. Many countries, and a majority of U.S. states, have passed laws restricting BDS activities—often by prohibiting government contracts with companies that boycott Israel.

BDS categorically rejects the antisemitism charge. The movement says it opposes all forms of racism, explicitly including antisemitism. It distinguishes between anti-Zionism (opposing the idea of a Jewish state) and antisemitism (hatred of Jews). Criticizing Israeli policy, they argue, is no more antisemitic than criticizing Chinese policy is anti-Chinese racism.

Eric Goldstein of Human Rights Watch, an organization that neither endorses nor opposes BDS, has argued that "to campaign or boycott solely on behalf of Palestinians under Israeli rule no more constitutes anti-Semitism than doing so on behalf of Tibetans in China is in itself anti-Chinese racism."

The debate is complicated by genuine instances of antisemitism within pro-Palestinian activism—and by genuine instances of the antisemitism charge being used to silence legitimate criticism. The line between opposing Israeli policy and harboring hatred toward Jews is real, but where exactly it falls is fiercely contested.

The Broader Movement

BDS positions itself as part of a larger global social justice movement. It explicitly links the Palestinian cause to struggles against racism, sexism, poverty, and what it describes as neoliberal Western hegemony.

This framing has helped BDS build coalitions with other activist movements, particularly on college campuses and within progressive politics. The Movement for Black Lives, for example, has endorsed BDS and drawn connections between Palestinian and African-American experiences of state violence and discrimination.

Critics see this as either strategic coalition-building or ideological capture, depending on their perspective. Some argue that linking Palestinian rights to every progressive cause alienates potential supporters who might care about occupation but don't share BDS's broader politics. Others see it as appropriating other movements' moral authority.

The coalition-building cuts both ways. BDS has gained supporters who might not otherwise engage with Middle East politics. But it has also inherited opponents who see it as part of a broader left-wing project they reject.

What Success Looks Like

Has BDS succeeded? The answer depends entirely on how you define success.

If success means forcing Israel to meet BDS's three demands, then no. The occupation continues. Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel do not have full equality. The refugees have not returned.

If success means changing the conversation, the record is more mixed. The apartheid framework, once considered fringe, is now employed by major human rights organizations. BDS resolutions have passed at universities and in some local governments. The movement has kept Palestinian rights on the agenda when they might otherwise have faded from international attention.

If success means isolating Israel economically, the movement has had limited impact. Some companies have divested. Some artists have canceled concerts. But Israel's economy remains robust, its trade relationships largely intact, and its security cooperation with other nations continues.

The anti-BDS backlash may itself be evidence of the movement's significance. Governments and institutions don't typically pass laws against movements that aren't achieving anything. The intensity of opposition suggests that at least some powerful actors consider BDS a genuine threat.

The Unresolved Question

At its core, BDS forces a question that most people would prefer to avoid: Can Israel be both Jewish and democratic?

Israel defines itself as a "Jewish and democratic state." BDS calls this a contradiction. A state that privileges one ethnic or religious group, even through demographic engineering rather than explicit discrimination, cannot be truly democratic in the BDS view.

Defenders of Israel respond that many democracies have ethnic or religious character without being apartheid states. Japan is an ethnostate. Many European nations have official churches. The question isn't whether a state can have a dominant identity but how it treats minorities.

But this response doesn't fully address the BDS critique, which focuses not just on how Israel treats its Arab citizens but on how it achieved and maintains Jewish majority status—through the 1948 displacement of Palestinians and the ongoing refusal to allow their return.

Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist who supports a two-state solution, offers an interesting dissent from within the pro-Palestinian camp. He agrees with BDS's tactics—boycotts, divestment, and sanctions work—but considers the movement "a silly, childish, and dishonest cult" because it won't explicitly state its goal of ending Israel as a Jewish state and because that goal, in his view, is unrealistic. Israel will never voluntarily accept demographic dissolution. Demanding it guarantees failure.

This critique from a sympathizer highlights BDS's strategic ambiguity. The movement deliberately takes no position on one-state versus two-state solutions. It focuses on rights, not outcomes. But the rights it demands, fully implemented, would likely end Israel as currently constituted.

Is that ambiguity strategic wisdom or intellectual dishonesty? Probably both, depending on your perspective.

The Historical Parallel

BDS constantly invokes the anti-apartheid movement. Is the comparison apt?

There are genuine similarities. Both movements use economic pressure to change state behavior. Both frame their cause as universal human rights against particular systems of discrimination. Both have faced accusations of being fronts for more radical agendas. Both have built international coalitions while remaining led by the affected population.

There are also significant differences. South African apartheid was a minority regime that could be transformed by democratic inclusion of the majority. Israeli Jewish dominance is majority rule, achieved through demographic means that BDS considers illegitimate but that Israelis consider defensive necessity. The South African transition could offer citizenship to everyone; the Israeli situation involves competing claims to the same land with irreconcilable narratives about who belongs there.

Perhaps the most important difference: the anti-apartheid movement ultimately succeeded because enough white South Africans concluded that change was preferable to indefinite conflict. Whether enough Jewish Israelis will ever reach a similar conclusion about Palestinian rights—and what "change" would even mean in this context—remains the open question at the heart of the conflict.

BDS bets that international pressure can shift that calculus. Its critics argue that BDS-style pressure will only harden Israeli resistance, convincing Israelis that the world is against them regardless of what they do.

The debate continues. The occupation continues. The conflict continues. And BDS remains what it has always been: a lightning rod for irreconcilable views about what justice requires in one of the world's most intractable disputes.