The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel is supported by a few New Zealand activists and has made headlines recently because of the pressure put on Lorde to cancel her Tel Aviv concert. It may be tempting to hear the BDS arguments and feel they are legitimate. However, the BDS campaign is inherently against, and deeply damaging to, the cause of peace, justice, equality, democracy, and human rights for all peoples in the Middle East. BDS is seriously flawed for seven major reasons:
- BDS seeks to destroy the Jewish state
- BDS is racist and discriminatory
- BDS distorts the truth to support its claims
- BDS wants rights but no responsibilities
- BDS fails to address the real concerns of Palestinians
- BDS is hypocritical and conveniently selective
- BDS selectively ignores International law
1. BDS seeks to destroy the Jewish state
BDS is a campaign to completely delegitimize the Jewish state through misinformation (see point 2) and meeting its demands would mean the destruction of Israel. BDS opposes the “two-state solution”, in which both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs would have self-determination and a secure society. The “two state solution” is preferred by the international community, and is favoured in polls of Israelis and Palestinians.
Norman Finklestein, a prominent Jewish critic of Israel, is quoted as saying that he “loathes the disingenuousness [of BDS] – they don’t want Israel (to exist)… they are a cult”. BDS leaders have publicly stated the true goals of their campaign is to wipe out the Jewish State rather than see a two-state solution 1 . New Zealand based BDS activists have also openly said they don’t think there should be two states for two people, denying the rights of both peoples to self-determination 2 .
Furthermore, a two state solution can only be achieved through dialogue, engagement and investing in peace. By pressuring only Israel, the Palestinian leaders have even fewer incentives to negotiate or seriously consider the Israeli peace offers (see point 4). Similarly, BDS activists oppose dialogue and ‘normalisation’ projects which bring Jews and Palestinians together for better understanding.
2. BDS is racist and discriminatory
BDS claims to be similar to the boycott of South Africa in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s but it is more akin to the German boycott of Jewish businesses in the 1930s or the Arab boycott of Jews in British Mandate Palestine that started in 1945. Despite claiming “BDS does not call for a boycott of individuals because she or he happens to be Israeli or because they express certain views” 3 , BDS has targeted individuals for being Jewish or Israeli or because they have certain views. BDS has been outlawed in some democratic countries because it is discriminatory and anti-semitic 4 .
3. BDS distorts the truth to support its claims
BDS draws a false equivalence between Israel and Apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany. In reality, 20% of Israel’s population are Arabs with full civil and religious rights, the third largest political party is an Arab party with representation in parliament and Arabs can be found at all levels of society, including supreme court judges. BDS also publishes other lies 5 , easily countered with fact; and omits historic facts that are not kind to the Palestinian cause; as well as falsely claiming ‘wins’ in order to inflate their limited successes.
4. BDS wants rights but no responsibilities
BDS asserts itself to be peaceful and to favor “nonviolent punitive measures,” while refusing to denounce anti-Israel, anti-Jewish violence. There is no mention of Palestinian Authority incitement and reward for terror, no condemnation of corruption or lack of democracy for the Palestinians, or of their human rights abuses. And BDS does not mention the Palestinian leadership’s failure to counter the Israeli peace offers of 2000 and 2008 (the latter included East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state) or the partition plan of 1947.
5. BDS fails to address the real concerns of Palestinians
A core principle of human rights is known as “the worst first”. Rather than attending to the worst human rights abusers, BDS targets Israel, which has one of the very best human rights records in the Middle East and elsewhere. BDS only promotes a boycott of Israeli companies, cultural figures, and academics and ignores the rights of Arab Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention the rights of other minorities in other places treated much worse than Arab Palestinians). There is no mention of the Arab Palestinians who have been left in refugee camps in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, or anywhere else for 70 years – where their standards of living are worse than Arab Palestinians under the governance of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. Furthermore, Egypt shares a border with Gaza and allows far less movement across that border than does Israel, yet this is ignored by BDS supporters.
BDS has also hurt Palestinians living in the West Bank. One of the “wins” that BDS claimed was the closure of a SodaStream factory in Mishor Adumim. Palestinians who had been employed by the Israeli company were laid off when the factory closed, losing their good-paying jobs and the opportunity to work alongside Jews and Israeli Arabs. The financial burden of losing a job has devastated families but BDS celebrates.
6. BDS is hypocritical and conveniently selective
BDS activists say they support freedom of expression for those people who refuse to perform in or deal with Israel yet eschew that same freedom when the ideologies are not aligned. BDS activists have harassed and intimidated artists, sportspeople, business owners, and scholars who do not share their ideology; including in New Zealand 6 . Similarly, activists are happy to use Israeli-developed technology 7 and make use of Israeli academic institutions (Omar Bargouti, founder of BDS, studied at Tel Aviv University). This selectiveness affirms that the campaign is not really about a boycott, but about publicity and attention to spread lies (see point 3).
7. BDS selectively ignores International law
The BDS campaign appeals to international law when it suits. Activists claim all Arab Palestinians have a “right of return” based on UN General Assembly resolution 194. However, even if a UN resolution were to constitute legislation, which it doesn’t, there is nothing in Resolution 194 which would grant Arab Palestinian refugees any “right to return” to Israeli territory. Furthermore, BDS advocates generally do not recognise Israel as legitimate (see point 1), and so selectively ignore the international law that establishes Israel as a State 8.
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- BDS began with the NGO Forum at the 2001 UN Durban Conference, where Zionism was falsely equated with racism and the stated goal of BDS was to achieve the “complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state.”
- The founder of BDS, Omar Bargouti, opposes the two state solution and has said “Definitely, most definitely we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine”, referring to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. He affirms this when he also says “If the occupation ends, let’s say, would that end your calls for BDS? No, it wouldn’t,” and “the right of our people to the 1948 lands is in danger, and even the right of our people to the 1967 lands…”.
- A leading BDS activist, As’ad Abukhalil has openly stated that “The real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel….That should be stated as an unambiguous goal. There should not be any equivocation on the subject. Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel.”
- John Spritzler, a pro-BDS author has said“I think the BDS movement will gain strength from forthrightly explaining why Israel has no right to exist.” and “BDS’s stated goals… logically imply the end of Israel as a Jewish state.”
- Roger Fowler, of Kia Ora Gaza, has likened Israel to Islamic State and expressed support for a one-state solution where Jews would be a minority in yet another Arab state.
- Justine Sachs, who co-wrote a letter pressuring Lorde to cancel her Tel Aviv show, has tweeted “Have to push back against the two-state nonsense” and “I’m quite literally a socialist, I hope to see borders and all nation-states abolished…”.
- John Minto has suggested that the internationally-favoured two-state solution with a Jewish State and a Palestinian state existing side by side would “formalise apartheid” and “cement in place racism and inequality.”
- BDS activists in Spain harassed and attempted to coerce Matisyahu into publicly denouncing Israel and declaring his support for a Palestinian state before a festival performance.
- On campuses, pro-BDS groups have targeted Jewish students, regardless of their feelings on Israel by attempting to shut down Jewish student events, accuse Jewish students of being unfit to hold office and urge their members to avoid interacting with Jewish students.
- BDS leader, Omar Bargouti, refused to debate Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz on the basis that Professor Dershowitz was on the list of those who should be boycotted.
- A High Court ruling in France imposed fines on a dozen activists who promoted BDS at a supermarket in 2015, stating they were guilty of “provoking discrimination, hatred or violence toward a person or group of people on the grounds of their origin, their belonging to or their not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race or a certain religion”
- Canadian ministers passed a motion condemning BDS in 2016 with bipartisan support. The motion says the BDS movement “promotes the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel” – two defined aspects of the new anti-Semitism.
- The United Kingdom has prevented public institutions from boycotting Israel because boycotts “undermined good community relations, poisoned and polarised debate and fuelled anti-Semitism”. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has opposed the decision despite BDS undermining Labour’s long-established foreign policy positions.
- American states have condemned BDS. Florida, California, and Indiana have gone so far as to pass legislation that explicitly stop BDS from discriminating against Israel and damaging the cause of peace in the Middle East. Hillary Clinton has also explicitly condemned BDS in a letter and Barak Obama, before he left office, approved anti-BDS provisions as a key objective in trade talks with EU.
- A Spanish court in Gran Canaria declared that a municipal boycott against Israel is illegal because it is “discriminatory and is not in accordance with the principle of neutrality and objectivity”.
- “Zionism is a colonialist movement that conquered the Palestinians” is a straight out lie; Zionism is a national liberation movement and it did not “conquer.” Many Jewish people, who were persecuted, especially in Eastern Europe and the Arab countries, started making their way to Israel in the mid 20th century partly because of the historic bond between the land and Jews, as the indigenous people. There was no entity called Palestine at that time. It was a piece of land extremely sparsely populated, under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and then the British.
- “Zionists drove millions of Palestinians off their land. That is ethnic cleansing.” In the first half of the 20th century, there were waves of population exchanges for the purpose of establishing Nation States. About 60 million people were uprooted from the homeland. In 1947 the U.N. declared the establishment of two States between the River Jordan and the sea – a Jewish State and an Arab State. The Jews accepted the decision. The Arabs rejected it, and declared a war of annihilation. Many Arabs fled and were driven out in the confrontations in the month leading up to the war, and others were driven out of the battlefields following the invasion of the Arab state armies into the newly born State. About 711 thousand Arabs became refugees. As a result of that conflict about 850 thousand Jews were forced to leave the Arab countries. Out of tens of millions of refugees in those years around the world, the only ones who remained as refugees are the Palestinians, and that is as a result of a conscious decision of the Arab countries to perpetuate their situation.
- “Israel murdered thousands of children in Gaza.” Israel has done more than any army faced with similar threats to prevent the loss of innocent life. This includes warning before bombs and calling off bombings due to civilians nearby. However, Hamas brutally uses children in building its terrorist tunnels; it uses children as human shields, and launches rockets out of schools and densely populated areas. This cynical use of civilians and children has resulted in unfortunate harm to innocent civilians. The blame is on those who support terror, not on those who fight it.
- “Israel is strangling Gaza in a siege with no reason.” Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in order to enable its people to flourish and prosper under self-rule. Hamas chose the path of violence and terror well before there was a strict blockade in place. The violence, the terror, the rocket launching on Israel are not because of any restrictions imposed by Israel; the restrictions were implemented because of the violence, the terror and the rockets. And even during war times, Israel only stops trucks with goods that could be used for building tunnels or rockets.
[…] The resolution might also breach laws of various democratic UN member states. In July, 2017, Lawfare Project fellow Prof. Eugene Kontorovich explained that “the old and existing [U.S.] anti-boycott law applies not just to the Arab League boycott, but also to the new foreign anti-Israel boycotts, such as those being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council.” Other countries also have laws against BDS on the basis that it is discriminatory and antisemitic. […]
[…] The New Zealand Institute of International Affairs is hosting University of Auckland Associate Professor of Dance Studies, Nicholas Rowe, who joined other New Zealand academics in praising New Zealand’s co-sponsorship of 2334 – a move that National Party leader, Simon Bridges, recently said was “wrong” – and urging the New Zealand government to sanction the IDF and actively support other BDS steps designed to destroy the Jewish state. […]
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