Abstract
The movement to engage in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel has become a significant political force over the past decade. This commentary reflects on the importance of that movement, highlighting how it reframes Palestine as a political space. By making the political demands of Palestinian refugees in exile outside of historic Palestine, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza all BDS demands, the movement brings the three primary segments of the Palestinian population into the same political frame. By calling for global solidarity with Palestinians, by highlighting the complicity of many parties (government, corporate, individual) in Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and by insisting on the intersections of the Palestinian struggle with many others around the world, BDS undermines the language of exceptionalism that has long been an impediment to action.
Launched in 2005, the movement to engage in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel has become a significant political force over the past decade. Organizations as diverse as Jewish Voice for Peace and the Presbyterian Church USA, and people as varied as Roger Waters and Stephen Hawking have taken up the call for BDS. Evidence of its significance lies not only, perhaps not even primarily, in its victories—as significant as these have been. Such evidence also lies in the tremendous effort being made to defeat BDS. Enormous sums of money are being directed to this purpose, coming from individuals such as Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire gambling magnate who is also a major supporter of Donald Trump, and from the Israeli government.1 The effects of this money are evident in efforts by multiple state legislatures to ban BDS activity and in the proliferation of “blacklists” of BDS activists (the most insidious of these target undergraduate student activists as racists for their social justice work). All these efforts can make BDS activism more risky for vulnerable people and organizations, but they have not succeeded in stopping the movement.
As a scholar who has focused on Palestine and Palestinians for my entire career, I am interested in what BDS politics teaches us about the Palestinian experience and also in how it creates opportunities to increase reciprocity in research relationships. My first serious learning about Palestine began when I was a college student, during the early years of the first intifada against Israeli occupation, an uprising characterized by political creativity, grounded optimism, and widespread grassroots participation. During that same time, the divestment movement against apartheid in South Africa dominated the politics of US campuses, including my own. The lessons I took from both these movements included the importance of international solidarity, the effectiveness of boycott politics, and the necessity of recognizing that political change is a long-term process. More recently I have been part of a campaign to have the American Anthropological Association (AAA) adopt a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. My involvement in this campaign was guided by what I have learned—through research and politics—about Palestinian history, experience, and resistance.
In the face of Israel’s repeated assaults on Palestinians over the past decade—large-scale attacks on the Gaza Strip in 2009, 2012, and 2014, and, in 2018, mass shootings of Palestinians protesting near the border—increasing numbers of people feel it necessary to stand against Israeli policy. And BDS is the only real option on the table to do so effectively. When, amid the killing along the Gaza border in April 2018, Natalie Portman wanted to express her discomfort with “recent events in Israel,”2 she decided not to attend a ceremony to award her the Genesis Prize—an award intended to honor “individuals who have attained excellence and international renown in their chosen professional fields, and who inspire others through their engagement and dedication to the Jewish community and/or the State of Israel.”3 Even as she quickly tried to distance herself from BDS—saying that her boycott was directed at Benjamin Netanyahu, rather than Israel—the fact that boycott was the most effective means available to her to express her opposition is notable. And many others are not nearly as squeamish as Portman in acknowledging this fact.
As the Portman example makes clear, boycott activity can take many forms, not all of them undertaken with specific reference to the Palestinian BDS call. The BDS campaign itself, coordinated since 2007 by the BDS National Committee (BNC), rests on three fundamental demands. These are that Israel (1) end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, (2) recognize the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, and (3) respect the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.4 The impact of BDS and its demands lies not just in the particular claims that it makes for Palestinian rights, as important as they are. BDS, as both a Palestinian and a global project, also reframes Palestine as a political space.
The BDS campaign works against the fragmentation of Palestinian society that has been a hallmark of Israeli practice since 1948. By making the political demands of Palestinian refugees in exile outside of historic Palestine, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza all BDS demands, the movement brings the three primary segments of the Palestinian population into the same political frame. By calling for global solidarity with Palestinians, by highlighting the complicity of many parties (government, corporate, individual) in Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and by insisting on the intersections of the Palestinian struggle with many others around the world, BDS undermines the language of exceptionalism that has long been an impediment to action. The transformative effect of BDS on the politics and political space of Palestine is as significant as the outcome of any specific BDS campaign.
Background of BDS
The significantly different circumstances in which Palestinians have lived since 1948 have made a divergence in political mobilizations inevitable. For many years the center of Palestinian political life lay outside of Palestine, as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) organized refugees to fight for the liberation of their country. The peak of the thawra (revolution) was in the 1970s when the PLO, then based in Lebanon, managed a large resistance movement and a statelike institutional apparatus that operated in the fields of healthcare, economy, and the arts. After the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon in 1982, and especially after the start of the intifada against Israeli occupation in December 1987, the center of political gravity began to shift to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Oslo Accords—signed in 1993 and stipulating final status determination by 1999—created a further division between the diaspora and the occupied population. In signing the accords the PLO functionally disregarded the rights of refugees and focused the organization’s political energies on state building in the territories. Refugees understood and objected to these consequences of Oslo, launching the Right of Return movement to insist on their political claims.5 During the height of the Oslo period, when Palestinians in the territories believed the arrangement might lead to the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, the interests of Palestinians in the territories and those outside seemed to be divergent.
The last twenty-five years—since the signing and implementation of the Oslo Accords—have witnessed a degradation of Palestinian politics and a “developmentalization” of international support. There are a lot of reasons for this shift, but the Oslo structure, which established the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza and shifted the conditions of occupation, itself was key. As aid dollars poured in, Palestinian politics shifted from mass movements to NGO building. And international action in these years become more focused on “aiding” and “helping” Palestinians. There have always been countervailing practices (in Palestine and abroad), but this was the overall trend.
As the Oslo process failed to deliver a Palestinian state, and as the closure of the territories from labor markets inside Israel created economic hardship, widespread disillusion and frustration led to the outbreak of a second intifada in 2000. Everything that has transpired since then—the harsh Israeli crackdown, the massive increase in checkpoints and restrictions on movement not only from, but within the territories, the deepening division between the West Bank and Gaza, and the siege and repeated attacks on the latter—have contributed to a loss of faith in the traditional Palestinian leadership, both the PLO, the long-standing “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and Hamas, the more recent claimant to the banner of resistance. And Palestinians have no belief that Israel will cede anything without considerable pressure—pressure that has been largely absent. Perhaps ironically, faith in the international community has not entirely eroded. There is a high degree of cynicism about the proliferating human rights and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are one instantiation of that community on the ground, but the idea that international law and international solidarity can have an impact on the Palestinian situation continues to have a strong hold.6
The BDS call emerged out of all of these developments. Neither the PLO/PA nor Hamas has a strategic vision for political transformation. People needed to provide it for themselves. Also pressing was the need to create new ways of activating international solidarity. The past decade has not been a good one for Palestinian politics. The first target of BDS politics is Israeli policy, but it also highlights the failures of Palestinian political leadership. It therefore puts pressure on these parties to develop new and better strategies to promote Palestinian aims. That so far neither the PLO nor Hamas has been able to do so reveals the depths of the political crisis facing Palestinians. In recent years BDS activism has been one of the most lively arenas of activism among Palestinians, as well as international supporters. Without in any way undercutting the importance of this organizing, Palestinians vitally need to develop other political tactics and strategies that BDS can help support. BDS alone cannot solve the problems facing Palestinians, and no one imagines that it can. BDS is solidarity politics, and it will have its greatest effect when and if it is widely enacted alongside a vibrant political movement and strategy among Palestinians.
The struggle for Palestinian lives will not be, and has already not been, a short or easy one. BDS is just one part of that struggle. Its value is symbolic, in the withdrawal of support for Israeli oppression of Palestinians, as well as practical, in expanding the possible conversations about Palestine in the United States and elsewhere and in putting pressure on the Israeli government and population. It provides a clear means for people around the globe to stand in visible support of the Palestinian struggle. Crucially, it offers a mechanism to reject the fragmentation of the Palestinian political community and the apparent exceptionalism of the Palestinian political situation.
Rejecting Exceptionalism
The problem of exceptionalism—the view that the Palestinian, and related Israeli, experience is so unique as to render comparative analysis impossible—has long burdened both scholarship and political analysis. The refusal of comparison, which deprives observers of a vital tool of analysis, often leads people to misjudge which aspects of Palestinian experience are actually distinctive. In the twentieth and twenty-first century Palestine has been at the center of major historical trends. The League of Nations mandates that divided the territories of vanquished Ottoman and German empires after World War I were a late colonial governing form, one that anticipated the passing of an older colonial order and sought to exercise some control over the future that would come to these places. The Palestine mandate was distinct in its inclusion of a promise to a nonnative population (to support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine), but this was a distinction within, rather than beyond, the colonial framework.
The settler-colonial condition that began with Zionist settlement of the territory, and that continues today, connects Palestine to other settler-colonial societies around the world. Understanding the mechanisms of displacement, dispossession, and elimination at work in Palestine for the past century demands an analytic perspective that recognizes these connections.7 The language of exceptionalism has produced intellectual blinders for some, and has provided cover for politically motivated refusals by others, in rendering the framework of settler-colonialism radical when applied to Palestine. Fortunately this intellectual isolation has been increasingly breached in recent years.8 A growing body of scholarship places Zionist settlement, Palestinian displacement, and Israeli occupation in global and regional context.9 As Julie Peteet has underscored in thinking about similarities between Israeli occupation and apartheid South Africa, the analytic “work of comparison” is fundamental to undoing exceptionalism.10
Political solidarity movements such as BDS have to contend with related deployments of exceptionalism as block to action. In the political arena exceptionalism is frequently trundled out through the reference to “complexity.” In the face of calls for boycott and divestment on college campuses, academic associations, unions, and other organizations, Israel’s supporters frequently argue that the situation in Israel (they are less likely to say Palestine) is far too complex for any “outsider” to understand—suggesting that any action is likely to be misguided. There is an apparent irony in the fact that many people who make the argument about the impossible complexity of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” themselves betray limited understanding of its history and present condition. But the aim of complexity arguments is not to advance understanding. Its purpose is to seem to suggest that the only politically responsible position to take vis-à-vis Israel is to take no position at all. I say seems to suggest, because in fact most opponents of boycott want the global community to “stand with Israel” (as the name of one Israel advocacy group captures).
And although the tactic has worked in the past, its power seems to be wearing thin.11 Not only have Palestinians and their supporters worked hard to educate people about the situation—making sure that more people have a grasp of its genuine complexities—they have also effectively made the case that the distinctiveness of any circumstance does not render it immune to political comparison and judgment. By taking up time-honored and widely used means to exert political pressure and express solidarity (as the other essays in this issue illustrate), the BDS movement not only rejects the false claim of Palestinian exceptionalism, it directly participates in undoing it.
Recognizing the settler-colonial condition in Palestine does not automatically lead people to support BDS, though many do. It does, though, make it harder to dismiss this strategy out of hand. The most hysterical arguments against BDS—that it is necessarily anti-Semitic, because any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic; that it falsely designates Israel as a violator of Palestinian rights, when it should instead be celebrated for “making the desert bloom”—make little sense when considered in light of serious comparative historical analysis. This same kind of comparative analysis is also necessary to address important questions about the potential effectiveness of BDS tactics, about the limits of and challenges in solidarity politics, and about how to sustain political engagement across many decades, which will likely be necessary for substantial change.
Resisting Fragmentation
Fragmentation of Palestinian society and political community is both a product of concerted efforts—primarily by Israel, but also by Arab governments—and an effect of Palestinian history. And the fragmentation to which Palestinians have been subjected is itself multiple. Most obvious is the territorial fragmentation. Since 1948 the Palestinian population has been dispersed, living under the authority of different states, and often unable to reach each other across these boundaries. In Israel, Palestinians live as second-class citizens. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they are an occupied native population. And over the past decade the two occupied territories have increasingly been further separated, with Palestinians in the West Bank deemed targets for depoliticizing development and those in Gaza viewed as enemy combatants who receive punishment and humanitarian aid. Palestinians in exile—near and far—have lived with distinctly different opportunities and constraints, depending on the policies of the states where they reside.
As fundamental as this geographic separation has been, with as many consequences as it has had for Palestinian political life and organization, there have also been many policies of fragmentation within particular territories. The Israeli government, as a prime example, long sought to undermine the Palestinian subjectivity of Palestinian citizens of Israel. It governed this population as “Israeli Arabs,” and within that general category as multiple minorities. The turn in recent years for Palestinians living inside the Green Line to proclaim their Palestinian identity, and to make claims of the Israeli state precisely as Palestinian citizens, has been a significant political development. Other distinctions within the Palestinian community—between refugees and natives, between Christians and Muslims, and among urban, peasant, and Bedouin populations—have sometimes been exacerbated by state policies (the Lebanese government, for instance, gave citizenship to many Christian Palestinian refugees as a way of dealing with its own demographic concerns). And these lines of differentiation have sometimes impeded effective political action.
By placing the three primary geographies of Palestinian into the same political platform, the BDS call works directly to combat fragmentation. It makes the demands of one group of Palestinians the demands of all. It helps provide a means for differently located Palestinians to engage in a shared political project. It contributes to enabling a recognition of these different realities, while also disrupting the extent to which these differences become blocks to communication and community. It compels outside observers—both supporters and opponents—to engage the breadth of Palestinian political demands. The historical and political forces that have produced, and continue to produce, the fragmentation of Palestinian community and political society are not easily overcome. And BDS, of course, cannot undo this damage on its own. But in insisting on a political imaginary that works across these boundaries, it can play an important role in this struggle. By refusing an apparent political common sense that renders the needs of some parts of the Palestinian population outside the framework for realistic political engagement, it can help break through the ossified terms that have structured the “peace process” over the past few decades. A new vocabulary, a new imaginary, and a new political geography are all necessary for substantive political change.
Effective Solidarity Centers Palestinian Voices
The terms in which opponents of BDS make their arguments say a great deal about how they view Israelis, Palestinians, and their own responsibility. In the context of campaigns for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, a first objection that opponents (and even undecideds) often raise is a boycott’s impact on Israeli scholars. They worry about whether it will harm them and their academic freedom. This centering of concern about harm to Israelis is telling. Not only does it misconstrue, or even deliberately misrepresent, the features of the academic boycott—which has been structured to ensure the continued welcoming of individual Israeli scholars in international academic life—it displays remarkably little concern for the systemic and egregious violations of academic freedom to which all Palestinian academics are subjected by Israel. Even those who express sympathy for Palestinian suffering often view Israelis as “colleagues,” with professional concerns similar to our own, and Palestinians as distant others who can be cared for, but not necessarily listened to.
BDS politics works against these hierarchical relations of value. One reason to boycott is precisely that our Palestinian colleagues and compatriots have asked us to.12 Palestinians have asked for our solidarity in support of their efforts to end the fifty-two-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to gain equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to resolve the seventy-year Palestinian refugee condition, ongoing since the displacement and dispossession of the majority of the Palestinian population in 1948. Palestinians have asked the international community to join in nonviolent struggle against these violations, and to engage in campaigns of BDS against Israel. So it is first and foremost an action in solidarity with Palestinian society.13 It participates in shifting the terms of engagement with Palestine and Palestinians from hierarchical relations in a project of development to horizontal connections in a struggle for justice.
The Palestinian call to solidarity is not the end of anyone’s political deliberations, to be sure. But if “we” acknowledge Palestinians as compatriots, we will give this call the weight it deserves in those deliberations. By centering Palestinian voices, we can ask better questions about tactics, strategies, and political aims. We can think more acutely about international complicity in the conditions of oppression and dispossession that structure Palestinian lives. For those of us who are US citizens, we can recognize and work to redress our particular complicity as citizens whose government has provided the greatest support for Israel.
Probably the single most important thing an American citizen can do in support of Palestinian rights is to work to change US policy. This will not be an easy struggle, and it will almost certainly be considerably more difficult to change government policy than American public opinion, but it is a necessary one. BDS is a key part of this effort. One especially productive feature of BDS as a political tactic is precisely that it works in so many directions and has multiple audiences and effects. It speaks to the Israeli public—which is in a direct position to demand change from their government—and says that the world says no to occupation and injustice for Palestinians. It speaks to the American public and government, and says we refuse complicity in Israeli oppression and demand a change in US policy. And it speaks to our Palestinian compatriots, and says that we hear their call and support their cause.
Palestinians—inside and outside of Palestine—are struggling to reinvigorate their politics: to identify new strategies and better leaders. And this is not an easy struggle. Those of us in the international community who want to stand in support of Palestinian rights have an opportunity to move beyond our own impasse of the endless supply of aid that only supports a worsening status quo. We have the opportunity to join a movement that is already strong and is getting stronger. We have an opportunity to pursue tactics that are appropriate to our location—such as academic organizations enacting academic boycotts—whose effects are amplified by being part of an array of other located tactics. We can seek opportunities for “coresistance,” rather than the stale, counterproductive framework of “dialogue.”14 And in so doing we have an opportunity to engage Palestinians as our colleagues and compatriots, rather than as supplicants in need of our charity.
Notes
“The Genesis Prize,” genesisprize.org/. Accessed December 11, 2018.
BDS, “Palestinian BDS National Committee,” bdsmovement.net/bnc. Accessed December 11, 2018.
See, for example, the editors’ introduction to a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies on Palestine (Salamanca et al., “Past Is Present”).
I witnessed a particularly misguided attempt at the using the complexity argument when an advocate for Israel argued to an audience of Middle East studies scholars—many of whom have spent their careers studying the situation, all of whom have considerable knowledge of it—that they were ill-placed to take an informed stand on the matter.
As Noura Erekat puts it, “In contrast to the deployment of dialogue as an opportunistic tactic aimed at reinforcing and reproducing the status quo, dialogue must begin with an understanding and appreciation of Palestinian rights and demands, if it is to lead to co-resistance.” Erekat, “The Case for BDS,” 60. And see the other essays in Estefan, Kuoni, and Ricovich, Assuming Boycott.
