Nevet Basker is a political activist and blogger from the Seattle, Washington area. These two articles can be found on her website, the Broader View, and were originally published in the Times of Israel. They are an excellent summary of the reality of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) “Movement.”
BDS Fails (The Broader View)
The boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign is an effort to delegitimize the state of Israel and deny Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty. Its stated goals are to change Israeli policies with regard to borders and settlements, civil and political rights for Israel’s Arab minority (who in fact already enjoy full civil and political rights), and absorbing millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees who aim to overrun—and ultimately to destroy—the Jewish state.
Funded by Qatar, the European Union, church groups, and private foundations, BDS has extensive ties to terrorism. Contrary to its organizers’ claims, BDS is not a grassroots “movement” but a coordinated campaign. One of its leaders is a boycott hypocrite who received two degrees from Tel Aviv University!
BDS should in fact stand for bigotry, deception, and slander. Its adherents advocate for economic and diplomatic efforts to isolate and punish Israel. They promote commercial, tourism, academic, and cultural boycotts of Israel. They encourage companies and asset managers to divest their holdings from Israeli companies and from companies that do business in Israel. Judged against their own objectives and strategies, BDS activists have failed miserably.
Since the 2005 launch of the BDS campaign, the Israeli economy is up by 160%. Some of the increase is due to population growth; Israel has a positive net migration and the highest birthrate among developed countries. (Indeed, Israeli fertility rates are double the OECD average. And it’s not all due to the Arab and ultra-Orthodox minorities, secular Jewish Israelis also value large families—a testament to their resilience and optimism.) But even adjusted for population size, GDP per capita is up by 27% since 2005.
During the same time frame, Israeli exports are up by 43%, and tourism up by over 70%. Foreign direct investment—international companies acquiring Israeli assets (including other companies), launching Israeli subsidiaries, building facilities and infrastructure, and hiring employees—is up by an astonishing 277%. No boycott, no divestment, and no country or government has even proposed sanctions on Israel. A country with an area smaller than New Jersey and population smaller than Michigan is a major world economic power!
Israeli wine exports are especially revealing. Wine is a discretionary consumer product whose country of origin is highly visible. You may not know that the microprocessor in your computer and your smartphone’s navigation software are made in Israel. You may not be aware that the diamonds in your jewelry were polished in Israel. You may not realize that your life-saving medication is made in Israel—and even if you did, you may not have a viable alternative, so any ideological discomfort with using an Israeli-made product could be outweighed by its medical benefit. But there are plenty of alternatives to Israeli wines, whose origin is prominently displayed on every bottle. Moreover, many of Israel’s top wineries are located in the Golan Heights and in the northern West Bank (Samaria) regions—disputed or “occupied” areas under Israeli control. And yet these wines not only win international prizes, their exports are up by a stunning 161% in the last decade. Consumers, obviously, are undeterred by the hateful rhetoric, and enjoying their Israeli wines.
The bigotry, deception, and slander campaign has been an unmitigated failure in promoting actual boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Jewish state. So what—if any—are its concrete results or effects? We will turn to this question next.
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BDS Casualties
Nevet Basker
Times of Israel, July 18, 2019
Anti-Israel demonstration at the University of Washington, Seattle. (Photo: Nevet Basker)The anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS, more accurately bigotry, deception, and slander) has failed spectacularly. Israel’s economy is booming, exports are expanding, tourism and foreign investmentare thriving. But the misguided initiative has not been completely inconsequential. It has achieved some results and caused some pain—albeit not to its intended target. BDS efforts have hurt the Palestinian economy and people, the institutions weaponized against Israel, the cause of peace, and innocent bystanders.
Palestinian per-capita GDP has been flat for the past six years. It is less than one-tenth of that of its major trading partner (and occupier) Israel, and about one sixth of the world’s average. Under such dire conditions, the Palestinians should be eager to receive foreign assistance, cherish every tax shekel collected, embrace economic development opportunities, and cooperate with the much larger neighboring economy. But no: Their leaders reject U.S. aid and Israeli-collected tax proceeds, because both withhold, by law, “pay-to-slay” funds used to reward Palestinian terrorists. The people who perfected suicide terrorism have turned to suicide economics: Exploding buses and pizza parlorsas a political statement didn’t bring about the destruction of Israel, so now they’re trying to blow up their entire fledgling and fragile economy.
Further isolating and damaging itself, the Palestinian Authority boycotted the recent economic workshop in Bahrain. Having failed to get the conference canceled altogether, they rejected its ambitious proposals to invest $50 billionin Palestinian infrastructure, economy, and civil society institutions—threatening violence instead. Palestinian businesspeople who attended the summit—as individuals, not official representatives—were intimidated, denounced as “traitors,” or even arrested by the Palestinian Authority.
On a smaller scale, one BDS “success” has hurt hundreds of Palestinians and their families and communities. SodaStream, an Israeli maker of fizzy-drink machines, “bow[ed] to boycott pressure” in 2016, closing its West Bank factory. One BDS supporter crowed “There is power in collective resistance.” The upshot: Moving its factory out of the West Bank, SodaStream laid off hundredsof Palestinian employees, who lost their work permits. The increased brand awareness that followed culminated in Pepsi Co. acquiring the company for $3.2 billion. And that’s an example of a successful anti-Israel boycott!
A second set of victims are organizations that embrace Israel boycotts or divestment. Student governments, churches, co-ops, academic associations, and others are misled and manipulated by anti-Israel activists, enlisted in a hate campaign under the guise of fighting for social justice and human rights. They become cesspools of toxic debate, embroiled in controversy and accused of antisemitism. The boycott and divestment initiatives are mostly symbolic and toothless: one church couldn’t even abide by its proclaimed divestment, and no university has implemented (or even endorsed) an anti-Israel resolution passed by its student government. But the institutions that adopt them can still lose members and face discrimination lawsuits and fines.
In November 2018, Airbnb announced that it was removing Jewish-owned properties in the West Bank from its vacation-home listings. The company was swiftly and publicly denounced. It faced discrimination lawsuits in multiple states. Texas and Florida forbade employees from renting Airbnb properties. Six months later, the company admitted its mistake and reversed the ill-advised—but never implemented!—boycott policy. It even stated that “Airbnb has always opposed the BDS movement.” And it delayed its initial public offering of shares, possibly waiting for the public-relations disaster to subside. So much for another BDS “win”….
Other boycotting organizations have also suffered. After it endorsed the BDS campaign, the American Studies Association was widely denounced, lost members, and was sued. A civil-rights group warned a hotel that was due to host the ASA’s annual conference that it may be violating federal and state antidiscrimination laws if it allows the organization to exclude participants based on their national origin. Like Airbnb, the ASA quickly backtracked.
When the Olympia Food Co-op removed Israeli products, it faced a seven-yearlegal battle that reached all the way to the Washington State Supreme Court. Unprepared for the blowback, the Co-op admitted that “it was a challenging time for staff and Board, and also for the community” and vowed to “Establish a task force to create a structure for reconciliation.” Clearly, while Israel hasn’t suffered from BDS initiatives, the boycotters have.
The third and most tragic victim of BDS efforts is the cause of peace. Without dialog there can be no coexistence, and without coexistence there can be no peace. Rejecting and condemning any form of social, cultural, or commercial ties with Israel or with individual Israelis increases the disaffection, hostility, and alienation between the two peoples. Diehard Palestinian nationalists refuse to engage even with the most pro-peace, pro-Palestinian, anti-occupation Israelis. How can they possibly ever reconcile?
Even people who have nothing to do with BDS—or with Israel—can get caught in these ugly battles. Anti-Israel rhetoric doesn’t end with boycotts and divestment; it doesn’t even end with Israel. Alleged Israeli transgressions are projected onto individual Jews and the Jewish people as a whole.
BDS advocates “are making students feel unsafe” on American college campuses. In Britain, “discourse about Israel and Zionism on campus can often be aggressive, intimidating and toxic, leaving some Jewish students frightened, angry and confused.” In Europe, dissatisfaction with Israeli and American policies “was used as a pretext for stormy demonstrations accompanied by attacks on Jews” and “anti-Israeli attitudes [are] expressed in antisemitic terms.”
In 2006, a gunman burst into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, saying he was “angry at Israel.” He murdered Pamela Waechter z”l and wounded five others. The BDS campaign starts by delegitimizing the Jewish state and escalates to demonizing all Jews (and even non-Jews who support Israel), bullying, incitement, violence and even murder. It doesn’t hurt Israel—but it definitely makes life unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous, for Jews everywhere.
As Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has observed, the hate that starts with the Jews never ends there. The bigotry, discrimination, and slander of BDS may not hurt Israel, but it has other—unintended—victims and consequences.
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SFMEW is a beneficiary of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.