Just in the past week, the BDS movement made significant milestones in continuing to set precedents, such as a victory at Tufts University amongst its student body, a passing at a Cupertino California community college for the first time, and scoring its first victory at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, a campus situated in the US’s most concentrated Arab and Muslim community.
The initiatives have received no shortage of impassioned opposition, such as the vocalizations of “anger” and “hurt” from Jewish groups expressed at Tuft’s Passover-day resolution victory to an impassioned denunciation of the apartheid-era modeled initiative following its passing on the Dearborn campus by University of Michigan regent Mark Bernstein (D) as “an intellectually bankrupt, morally repugnant expression of anti-Semitism.”
The largely student-led victories in themselves cannot induce the same response from their University’s faculty boards to comply to their demands. Additionally, BDS did not levy a blow to Israel economically, evidenced by Bloomberg’s June 2016 report of foreign investment hitting a high that year of $285.12 billion.
Yet, city councils and state governments rushed to pass reactionary anti-BDS legislation in response. Numerous pro-Israel groups, lobbies, and foundations issued anti-BDS statements and campaigns into their movements and missions. A UN conference late last month opposing the movement drew in thousands in New York, with strong condemnations by US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley against the campaign’s alleged denial “of Israel’s right to exist.”
For a movement that in itself bears little legislative or institutional leverage, failing to directly made any sort of tangible economic impact on the state of Israel, its symbolic implications are nonetheless highly salient. For a nation whose leading US lobby, AIPAC, is a public relations organization and not a political action committee, positive press remains a top priority.
Israel’s premise rests on a story; the old adage of “a land without a people for a people without a land,” a single narrative whose ethos is recognizably reminiscent of Western neocolonialism that has waxed poetic a modern manifest destiny made palatable by rhetorical appeals to ‘democracy’ and human rights in an otherwise Orientalized region cast as inherently archaic and uncivilized.
If political movements begin with a story, they end when the plot holes can no longer be fissured by the fiction at its foundation. For a generation too young to remember either Intifada, a stark departure from the default Zionist preceding status quo is evidenced in a 9-month plummet in approval for Israel in 2016: coinciding with young liberals catching the fever of the Bern. Therein lies BDS’s true power as a movement victorious not through the succession of boycotts or divestments that it can accrue, but in its power to myth bust a dominant narrative that has directed and rationalized foreign policy for nearly seven decades.
As a statement against BDS on campus in an AIPAC pamphlet from May 2016 forewarns:
“… Despite the efforts of Israel’s detractors, no US college or University has divested from Israel or companies doing business with Israel, and none is likely to do so.
Rather, the real focus on BDS on campus is to create skepticism in the minds of students about Israel’s legitimacy. Seeds of doubt are intended to bloom decades later when graduates hold positions of power and authority-and can withhold tangible support or even contest Israel’s right to exist.”
Today’s young adults are less guaranteed to be tomorrow’s investors. Though a majority of Jews across all age groups in the US report at least some connection to the state, nearly one third agree that settlement building hurts the state’s security, a conviction that had been held by up to 44% of American Jews in 2013. They follow a trend unsullied from that of their other younger American, mostly liberal counterparts increasingly skeptical of offering an unconditional and pathological support for settlement building and militarization of a nation that bears no responsibility to their own nation’s social, economic, and political interest. Americans no longer have to be keffiyeh-donning ardent pro-Palestinian protesters to be less and less inclined to subscribe to the narrative that places American interests as contingent upon-and evidently subordinate to-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
Even Donald recommended Netanyahu slow down settlements, echoing Trump pick and Defense Secretary James Mattis’s caveats against settlements that could engender ‘apartheid.’
Five decades of US presidential opposition to settlement building–despite overall unconditional support to Israel, culminated into the US’s anomalous abstention from the December 2016 UN Security Council vote to condemn Israel on settlement activity.
The language and perimeters of the BDS movement recognizes the nuances, and attempted reconciliation, between Israeli support and opposition to its settlement expansion, yet expounds upon the opportunity to question a method of occupation that ultimately defines Israel’s existence. Then-State Department spokesperson John Kirby had no qualms in 2015 with BDS that specifically, and conditionally, soley targeted occupation and settlement expansion in a move to refuse enforcement of anti-BDS legislation on the West Bank.
Language remains BDS’s most powerful weapon. By targeting occupation, settlements, and issuing condemnation reminiscent of South Africa apartheid-era moral reprehensibility, BDS both convolutes Israel’s claims to modern democratic sovereignty as well as its tale of sanctified Jewish connection.
BDS, still the scourge of Zionists and Zionist apologists, is vilified as “the most serious threat to Israel” according to former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the 2017 AIPAC conference. In the same breath, he drew numerous appeals to the waning sense of “shared values” and “security.” It is the reflection and the reaction to the true source of Israel’s existential crisis, beholden in its overreach of settlements that have overstepped arbitrarily defined parameters drawn both rhetorically and empirically about its narrative that are far more significant than its physical ones.
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