At its core the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement seeks to put an end to Israeli oppression of Palestinians by urging for economic and cultural boycotts against Israel, financial divestment from the genocidal state, and global governmental sanctions to pressure the nation into abiding by international law.
It has existed as a grassroots, Palestinian-led movement since 2005, drawing heavy inspiration from anti-apartheid South African campaign that proved successful in the latter half of the 20th century.
Groups that have picked up the mantle to fight in the BDS cause range from trade unions, student and academic bodies, artists, climate justice groups, LGBTQ+ organisations, and Indigenous justice activists.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) — the largest anti-Zionist progressive Jewish organisation in the world with roughly 720,000 members — is a supporter of BDS. Rebecca Vilkomerson, the charity’s Executive Director until 2020, said that BDS is a: “[C]ritically important, nonviolent tool to bring about change. […] I totally understand why it’s not the right tactic for some people, but it’s a nonviolent tactic and it’s a pressure tactic, and it’s working better than anything else has worked over the past few decades.”
Public figures like writer Sally Rooney and musician Lauryn Hill are vocal supporters of the movement. Rooney famously denied an Israeli publisher the rights of her then new novel to be translated into Hebrew, citing Israel’s egregious violation of human rights and a report from the campaign group Human Rights Watch as her deciding factors. The New Zealand singer Lorde cancelled a concert in Tel Aviv in 2018 after her supporters urged her to join the artistic boycott of Israel. (A pro-Israel group would later place an advert in the Washington Post calling her a “bigot” for taking such action.)
In 2017, perhaps fearing the movement was gaining too much traction, Israel passed a law which would ban any foreign traveller from entering the country if that individual had previously shown public support for BDS. This makes visiting residing Israeli family members impossible for Brooklyn-based Vilkomerson. “I have aging relatives and people I love there, both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. The idea of not being able to return, even to visit family — I go at least once a year — is really distressing on a personal level.”
But this ban is not just limited to foreign nationals. In 2019 Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, was given two weeks to leave the country. An Israeli court ordered the expulsion because of “his actions publicly to advance a boycott against Israel.”
The BDS sights fall on many targets. From fast food giants like McDonald’s (one location in Israel offered free food to members of the Israel Defence Forces [IDF]) and Starbucks, who sued its US labour union after a union social media account showed support for suffering Palestinians, to more obvious targets such as the American tech company Hewlett Packard, responsible for providing computer hardware to the IDF. HP provided their services to operate the Aviv System, a computerised database of Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, which formed the backbone of Israel’s racial segregation and ethnic cleansing, which was eventually phased out after a decade of effective campaigning from BDS splinter groups. HP continue to provide computer and communication maintenance for the Israel Prison Service, despite grave human rights abuses that are ongoing against Palestinians within this system.
The efficacy of boycotts can be hit or miss. It helps to have your consumer boycotts be easily explained, have strong justifications for why the everyday person should avoid these companies, and maintain a wide range of appeal. Which is much easier said than done. Such is the nature of the 21st century capitalistic economy that you can guarantee there will be thousands of business with varying degrees of complicity in Israel’s violations of international law — impossible for the average citizen to keep track of. The BDS organisation encourage context sensitivity, meaning it is up to the individual to decide what is in their best interests (financially, realistically) to target, whilst always maintaining a boycott against the most egregious companies complicit in war crimes, of which Hewlett Packard, Siemens, and AXA fall under.
Fundamentally, money talks. It can be impossible to get corporations to care about moral injustices going on in the world but if consumers affect their bottom line, they’ll be forced to listen. Take, for instance, the beer brand Bud Light. It undertook a small-scale marketing campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in early spring of 2023, causing so much outrage from conservatives that the political right went so far as to call for a boycott — ultimately costing the company millions of dollars in sales and even knocked America’s top selling beer from its number one spot. Instead of speaking out against the hateful incitement of violence Mulvaney was receiving from the people who buy their product, Anheuser-Busch, the beer’s brewer, said it would be focusing its marketing campaigns on sports and music going forward.
Two months after Israel’s latest round of bombing began, the effects of the BDS movement are being felt. Starbucks’ shares have dropped by 8.9% over the previous month, equating almost 11 billion dollars. The corporation’s total value has been slashed by just under a tenth. It is the coffee giant’s biggest stock market drop since 1992, when it first went public. Not all of this will be due to boycotts, of course, but the large audience that the boycott has reached on social media has almost certainly played a part in Starbucks’ current downturn.
PUMA is another example. The sports brand has said it plans to cut ties with the Israel national football team in 2024, ending the long-term sponsorship between the two entities. Though the company claims this was decided before the current escalation of violence, it is likely just trying to save face. July 2018 saw Adidas remove its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association following an international campaign and the delivery of over 16,000 signatures to Adidas headquarters. The mounting BDS pressure on companies complicit in war crimes is strengthening; with the court of public opinion so strong, a prolonged social media campaign against a company like PUMA would be damaging for the brand’s revenue. Sustained consumer pressure can contribute through reputational damage, especially where a campaign elicits a great deal of media attention, something the company is surely aware of, hence why it has chosen to get ahead of the curve with the recent announcement.
A 2015 report from the global policy think tank Rand Corporation estimated that Israel’s gross domestic product would lose about $15 billion due to nonviolent Palestinian resistance (which includes the BDS movement)— but of Israel’s present-day GDP of over $500 billion, that is a drop in the water.
The tide is still turning in the right direction however, albeit slowly. The average citizen paying attention to these issues is taking a stand and no longer wants their money to go towards funding such atrocities. Tens of thousands of Americans recently marched in Washington, DC, voicing frustration with their government over its lack of support for Gazans who are currently living through this genocide. Most of the anger was directed at President Joe Biden, who refuses to draw red lines for Israel in their military onslaught against Palestinians. His administration has steadfastly resisted urging for a ceasefire and has proposed a $106 billion foreign aid package that would include $14 billion for Israel.
US financial and political support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine is based on joint economic interests and shared investments in military and weaponry sales. In any given year, the U.S will fund about 3.8 billion in military support to Israel. This funding comes with a stipulation— America’s military aid to Israel requires a percentage of the funding to be used to purchase US-made weapons at a later point, making the United States the single largest arms supplier to Israel. It paid almost single-handedly for Israel’s Iron Dome Defence System.
As can be expected from a country that has such a vested economic interest in Israel’s success, the US government shuts down any attempt to hold the nation-state accountable for its atrocities and war crimes against Palestinians, and will — without fail — continue to supply it with astronomical military funding packages, allowing Israel to invest in the latest and most devastating arms capable of shredding Gazans limb from limb, decimating their homes like deep rolling thunder striking down from above.
It is not going to be an easy fight to change these entrenched sycophantic systems. One movement BDS draws heavy inspiration from is the anti-apartheid boycott which over a number of decades eventually played a major part in changing South Africa’s racial segregation laws. Over a period of 30 years South Africans were increasingly confronted by a repudiation of their draconian system. Everyday Europeans pressured supermarkets to stop selling South African goods. Mary Manning, a Dublin shop worker for Dunnes Stores, refused to ring up a Cape grapefruit in 1984 in support of trade union policy which backed the boycott of produce from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Her action led to a strike and eventually a total ban on South African imports by the Irish government.
A major talking point of BDS-opponents is that the targets of the BDS campaign may inadvertently cause Palestinians working for these companies to lose their jobs. But again, this is not taking into account the broader image. Unemployment in the Gaza strip is over 40%. Work visas are doled out sparingly by the Israeli government. People who wish to leave Gaza and work across the boarder must pass stringent Israeli security checks, negotiate Hamas bureaucracy, and pay brokers 20% of their earning for connecting them with employers on the other side of the Erez crossing, the only way in and out of Gaza.
The Israeli government forces workers to arrive incredibly early at the crossing, around 3 or 4am, making them wait around for hours before allowing them to cross. It is a way to further dehumanise and break down those living in the Gaza strip. One worker in a Guardian article speaks about how he is not allowed to take anything with him through the crossing except for his phone, charger, wallet and the clothes on his back. Every time he crosses he will have to buy clothes and toiletries for the one or two weeks he will work in Israel. The worker says that he has no rights whilst there— “Once I didn’t get paid at the end of the day and there was nothing I could do about it. Another time I was hit in the face by a steel beam at a construction site but I couldn’t go to hospital because I do not have insurance.”
Palestinians working under Israeli ruling will only benefit from the dismantling of the settlement workforce enterprise, able to reclaim their land and natural resources — ending the exploitation of Palestinian workers by their Israeli employers. Any argument against this is fundamentally an anti-worker argument.
Both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia remain very real, pernicious mindsets plaguing the world. The BDS movement is against both. It exists to force an impact on material support for ongoing apartheid by pressuring governments and corporations to withdraw political and financial backing or else risk economic loss.
Until all are free, none are.
