FAQ 5
Is BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Antisemitic?
The allegation
BDS is antisemitic. Its hatred for Israel is really a disguised hatred of Jews.
“[O]ne movement that’s definitely on the wrong side of the moral divide is the movement to boycott Israel, the so-called BDS… Those who wear the BDS label should be treated exactly as we treat any anti-Semite or bigot. They should be exposed and condemned. The boycotters should be boycotted.”
Benyamin Netanyahu, speech to the American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
4 March 2014
Brief rebuttal
BDS is a peaceful way of putting pressure on Israel to change its ways, to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and to register horror and moral outrage at the genocidal actions of Israel in its post October 7th war on Gaza. Central to its demands today is the call to “stop arming Israel” in the face of its genocidal assault on Gaza and its apparent desire to expand into a regional war. BDS would not be needed, or garner such widespread support, if Israel had not been deploying all the resources of the state to suppress the rights of Palestinians.
More detail
The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign was launched by all the major Palestinian civil society organisations in 2005. Over the ensuing decades its character and emphasis has changed in response to developments in Israel’s oppression. In earlier days popular support for BDS tended to focus simply on the occupation. Many Liberal Zionists, for example, favoured a boycott of settlement goods, but others felt that to achieve meaningful pressure for change the boycott should apply to Israeli goods more generally or specific institutions which had links to the occupation. Some sought to divest from companies profiting from the occupation. There were also calls for academic and cultural boycotts.
Time has moved on. Of course there remain important differences in international law between “Israel” and the occupied territories but opinion has shifted decisively in many quarters.
B’Tselem, Israel’s premier human-rights organisation founded in 1989 to document and report on human rights violations committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories, was forced to conclude in 2021 that the distinction was no longer tenable: the Israeli regime was “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”.
So, too, attempts to characterise a democratic Israel and a separate regime with apartheid tendencies in the occupied territories came unstuck as the interconnections between the two got ever deeper. Since 2022 virtually every human rights organisation, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, describe Israel as a regime guilty of the crime of apartheid.
BDS is directed against these realities, not against Jews.
Advocating for BDS would only be antisemitic if accompanied by evidence that it is motivated not by this purpose but by racially-based hostility towards Jews.
The occasional BDS advocate might be so motivated, but the movement is not, nor are the campaigns run by BDS supporters around the world. All evidence is that it is based on the realities of what Israel does and the racist ethnocracy it has come to represent.
Boycott is the most effective tactic to impress on Israelis that their actions have consequences. That is why it has become such a priority for Israel’s supporters to try to brand it as antisemitic.
The most powerful emotional appeal made by them is the allegation that BDS is calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. This isn’t really an argument about BDS but about any campaign for equal rights within Israel and, should the occupation continue, for equal rights for all who are de facto under Israel’s jurisdiction. It is an argument about whether there can in principle be a Jewish and democratic state. Recent developments seem to have given a definitive, negative answer to that question.
How can it be antisemitic to demand that Israel be “a state of all its citizens” in which there is no discrimination against Jews or anyone else? How can it be antisemitic to demand equal rights for all between the river and sea, whatever the political form of state or states that emerge?
It is worth noting that in August 1933 Rabbi Stephen S Wise, honorary president of the American Jewish Congress, urged support of the use of the boycott weapon by the Jews of the world against the Nazi regime in Germany. He wanted an absolute boycott of German goods as the “duty of all self-respecting Jews”.
He said: “As long as Germany declares the Jews to be an inferior race, poisoning and persecuting them, decent, self-respecting Jews cannot deal with Germany in any way, buy or sell or maintain any manner of commerce with Germany or travel on German Boats.”
Further resources
1. Larry Derfner, After Kerry, only BDS may save the two-state solution, +972 Magazine, 19 May 2014
2. Jerry Haber, Liberal Zionists Should Support BDS Daily Beast, 11 Feb 2013
An appeal for liberal Zionists to support the BDS movement and an attempt to deal with their reservations, particularly with regard to the right of return.
3. Peter Beaumont, Israel brands Palestinian-led boycott movement a ‘strategic threat’
Guardian, 3 Jun 2015
“Using language the Israeli government usually reserves for the likes of Hamas or Iran’s nuclear programme, senior figures – including the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and a key backer in the US, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson – have turned on the movement, which is prominent on university campuses and among international trade unions.”
4. Robert Cohen, What’s wrong with this picture? Writing from the Edge, Patheos, 7 Jul 2015
“What we are seeing is a deliberate attempt to make a direct link between those that follow the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and those that perpetrated the Holocaust.” It’s not simply cranks: Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton are at it but, as Cohen shows, “The use of the Nazi era photographs and the rhetoric of Bibi and Hillary is poor deduction, sloppy history, and appalling ethics.”
5. Stéphane Hessel, One of the original drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 supports BDS Huffington Post, 15 Jun 2010
Hessel, holocaust survivor, human rights activist and diplomat: “Israel’s illegal and immoral attack on the Freedom Flotilla humanitarian aid convoy, which left at least nine dead and dozens injured, has rightfully stunned the world. … The absence of meaningful action from governments to hold Israel accountable to international law leaves open one path for citizens of conscience: to take this responsibility upon themselves, as done against apartheid South Africa…I believe that the BDS initiative is a moral strategy which has demonstrated its potential for success.”