October 30, 2015
Since 2005, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has been on American college campuses recruiting students to join a movement to isolate Israel.
Much has been written about BDS and I will not revisit here the debate over its merits. Instead, I will home in one aspect of its character: its espousal of nonviolence. That BDS supporters call for economic, academic, and cultural boycotts, rather than for violence, has been among its most important selling points. As Corey Robin of Brooklyn College put it in a post challenging BDS critics, Palestinians “have taken up BDS as a non-violent tactic, precisely the sort of thing that liberal-minded critics have been calling upon them to do for years.”
But the nonviolent tactics of BDS may be nothing more than a smokescreen for its organizers’ real intention—to takedown Israel by any means.
Although the BDS movement is not centralized, the response of movement leaders to the recent increase in violence in Israel and the West Bank can illuminate what the BDS commitment to nonviolence means in practice. Consider the October 10 statement by the Palestinian BDS National Committee, which bills itself as “the Palestinian coordinating body for the BDS campaign worldwide.” Bear in mind that by October 10, the violence was targeting Israeli civilians, not only in disputed territories but also in central Tel Aviv.
That October statement, entitled “Solidarity with the Palestinian popular resistance: Boycott Israel now!” begins: “whether the current phase of Israel’s intensified repression and Palestinian popular resistance will evolve into a full-fledged intifada or not…a new generation of Palestinians is…rising up en masse.”
The Palestinian BDS National Committee, speaking for a movement whose mainstream acceptance depends on its commitment to nonviolence, concedes that the new generation it is praising is engaged in violence, then calls for solidarity via boycott. That is, the statement calls for boycott not as an alternative to violence but as a means of expressing solidarity with Palestinians engaged in violence.
Other organizations promoting BDS piled on with equally misleading propaganda. The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel promptly issued a statement that began:
“Palestine is in flames. At this moment, racist lynch mobs are marching through the streets of Jerusalem, chanting “death to Arabs,” and hurling threats and insults at terrorized and bleeding Palestinian children and youth, left to die surrounded by dozens of Israeli soldiers, when they are not summarily executed on their way to or from school.”
This overwrought and misleading beginning is followed by the observation that “Palestinians are rising up.” With breathtaking dishonesty, the Statement suggests that the uprising is a response to the unprovoked killing of young Palestinians, rather than the real reason young Palestinians, cheered on by their elders, are getting killed: not while walking to school, but while participating in deadly attacks on Israelis. Certainly, some Israeli actions have been deplorable, but if Palestine is indeed in flames, the U.S. Campaign is propagandizing for those who have set it on fire.
Indeed, the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, in full awareness that some Palestinians are trying to and sometimes succeeding in killing noncombatants, chose to justify these attacks as “the resistance” and call for solidarity with the resisters. Here, too, the purported nonviolence seems merely a strategy to complement, not a substitute for, violent resistance.
This should surprise no one. Some of the most violent groups in the Middle East are BDS backers. First among the endorsers of the 2005 Palestinian call for BDS is the Council of National and Islamic Forces (NIF) in Palestine, described as a “coordinating body for the major political parties in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
The NIF coalition was formed during the Second Intifada (2000-2005), the period of violence to which the present violence is being compared. It includes under its umbrella such groups as the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas that are committed to violence, including violence against noncombatants.
