“BDS has played a critical role in changing the discourse on the question of Palestine after more than two decades of a fraudulent ‘peace process.’” Omar Barghouti a co-founder of the movement

It’s a war that needed no recruiting.

When casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson issued a call to arms against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement — dubbed BDS — targeting Israel, dozens of wealthy Americans were ready to draw their chequebooks.

Those who answered the call at a closed-door meeting in Las Vegas last month are staunch supporters of the Israeli government. And all are convinced that the movement to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories and gain equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel is an existential threat to the Jewish state.

BDS, 10 years old and counting, has gathered steam in recent months. Norwegian and Dutch corporations have sold off shares from companies involved in the Palestinian Territories, student groups in Britain, the United States and Canada have thrown their support behind it and South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu called on churches to turn their backs on companies that profit from the occupation.

Although Israel’s finance ministry says that BDS has scarcely dented the economy, a recent Rand Corporation study warned that the country stood to lose $80 billion over the next decade if the movement continues to expand.

But it’s not just the economic damage that has prompted a growing backlash from BDS foes, who label it anti-Semitic, aimed at making Israel an international pariah and destroying it as a Jewish state. Some say it promotes violence against Jews and aids terrorism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has likened it to Nazism: he has also said it would ultimately fail.

But the fierce reaction underscores the success of BDS.

“In the 1980s it was absolutely marginalized,” says philosophy professor Mark Lance of Georgetown University, a longtime supporter of international social justice movements. “Now it’s endorsed by groups that are a lot more mainstream than in the past. The amount of money spent to fight the movement is a sign of its success.”

Telecom controversy

A ripple effect has swept universities and churches into its fold, as well as motivating individuals and corporations to cut their ties and trade with Israeli interests and to join a cultural boycott that includes arts and academic institutions.

In one of the most dramatic episodes, the chief executive of France’s partly state-owned mobile phone company Orange announced last month that the telecom giant would seek to cut ties with the Israeli company licensed to carry its brand.

In the resulting diplomatic firestorm, CEO Stéphane Richard flew to Israel, strenuously apologized, said he was totally opposed to a boycott of Israel. The decision, he said, was part of company brand development strategy and not due to BDS. Netanyahu called on France to condemn the announcement, and the French foreign minister said his country was “firmly opposed to a boycott of Israel.”

But the widely publicized set-to only served to boost the public profile of the BDS movement.

“BDS has played a critical role in changing the discourse on the question of Palestine after more than two decades of a fraudulent ‘peace process’ that served as a fig leaf for the expansion and entrenchment of Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid,” said Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the movement, in an email to the Star.

And he argued in the New York Times that Israel’s labelling of the movement as anti-Semitic is a “smear” on a movement that has taken an “unequivocal, consistent position against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.”

Parallels to South Africa

BDS took root in July 2005, as decades of peace talks foundered and Jewish settlements expanded in the occupied territories. Some 170 Palestinian civil society groups put out a call for non-violent action to isolate Israel until it complies with obligations under international law to end the occupation of territories it took in the 1967 war.

More controversially, they demanded an end to “racial discrimination which meets the UN definition of apartheid,” and return of Palestinian refugees displaced from their land in 1948 and thereafter.

Progress was at first slow. But widespread coverage of massive damage done by Israeli assaults on Gaza, in response to rocket attacks by Hamas and other Gaza-based militants, helped to turn the tide. So did Israel’s ongoing incursions into West Bank territory, and the hardships imposed by its barrier separating Israelis and Palestinians. The barrier reinforced the image of an apartheid society.

“The closest parallel is to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, because of the similarity of the underlying conditions,” says Lance. “And in both cases the country in question was the U.S.’s principal ally in the region, for similar reasons.”

He points out that 10 years is a short time for a BDS movement to take effect.

The South African boycott movement “began in 1959 with veterans of civil rights in the U.S. But it was a good 15 years before it had major traction in Europe or reached the consciousness of the U.S. It was roughly a 30-year period.”

Nevertheless, the Israel-targeted BDS movement has made steady gains in the past five years, even in America, where Israel is seen as the one true ally in the turbulent Middle East.

Campus battlefront

A generational shift has helped. Many of BDS’s supporters are young. And the Las Vegas meeting’s co-host, Hollywood entertainment mogul Haim Saban, was in no doubt that campuses are the storm centre of an “anti-Semitism tsunami” that threatens Jews and Israel.

His guests reportedly pledged millions of dollars to fight BDS, backing the creation of a pro-Israel cadre of “Campus Maccabees” — named for the Hebrew word for hammer, and a leader of a revolt against the Seleucid dynasty that succeeded Alexander the Great.

The fledgling Maccabee movement aims to draw in Jewish, Israeli-American and Christian Zionist students to do rhetorical battle against anti-Israel speech and actions and to “demonize the demonizers.”

Even before the Maccabees, pro- and anti-BDS tensions ran high on North American campuses. Last year in Toronto, a group of Jewish students walked out of a Ryerson University student union meeting to protest a vote for a motion to support BDS.

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BDS’s Jewish support

But most concerning for BDS foes, the boycott movement has a growing cohort of Jewish supporters. They have thrown a spotlight on the cracks in the community’s politics and insist that the Netanyahu government does not speak for them.

In Israel, a chorus of voices from the left contend that BDS is the least bad way of ending an occupation that is poisoning democracy.

“Everyone who understands the (BDS) movement knows that its recruits are progressives, and what tips them toward BDS is despair that there seems no other way to end Israel’s immoral, undemocratic control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” says American Jewish author and commentator Peter Beinart in the liberal daily Haaretz.

Nevertheless, some BDS sympathizers feel its aims are too broad, particularly a boycott of visiting Israeli academics by foreign universities, and refusal by foreign academics to appear in Israel — as happened when physics pop star Stephen Hawking cancelled on a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2013.

“To declare a kind of academic war on Israeli academics and universities is to attack the people who are fighting for freedom of expression on the front lines,” says Howard Schweber of University of Wisconsin in the Huffington Post. He added that he supports boycotting products made in settlements, and organizations that contribute to them.

The backlash

While the number of BDS supporters appears to be swelling, enemies of the sanctions movement have powerful backing. Not only millionaires, but governments have jumped into the fray.

Israel has passed a law enabling civil suits against people and organizations that boycott it or “regions under Israeli control,” and barring the government from doing business with companies that adopt the boycotts. Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said she was preparing to launch international lawsuits against activists who promote damage to Israeli trade.

The United States has long adopted laws to counter a 1948 Arab League boycott of Israel by barring American companies from co-operating with foreign countries that embrace it. Last month, Illinois was the first state to pass a bill to attack BDS directly by compelling public employee pension funds to dump investments in companies that participate in boycotts of Israel.

Two Canadian provinces — Ontario and Manitoba — have 1970s legislation prohibiting discriminatory business activity on the basis of nationality, which was sparked by the Arab boycott.

More recently, the Harper government signed a memorandum with Israel to “oppose boycotts of Israel, its institutions and its people” starting in 2015.

A UN speech by Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney alarmed BDS supporters when he declared “zero tolerance” for “anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination” against Israel, including the movement’s “attempts to delegitimize Israel.” The government later denied that hate crimes laws would be used against activists such as human rights groups.

But Ottawa’s unequivocal support for Israel has made BDS advocates wary.

“It is a concern,” said Patti Talbot, a United Church of Canada senior staffer for global partnership. “People of faith, and especially Christians, should be vigilant.”

The United Church does not support BDS officially, she said.

But it has “framed an economic action campaign that focuses on goods produced in the illegal settlements. It’s an invitation not to buy (goods from the settlements.) We are careful to make that distinction.” The church, she adds, has no tolerance for anti-Semitism.

Seeking a solution

Accusations of anti-Semitism, and the movement’s failure to explicitly recognize Israel’s right to exist, have made some democracy advocates queasy about embracing BDS.

And they worry that its call for the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and “full equality” of rights for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel would result in a single binational state in which Jewish Israelis would become a minority. The only solution, they maintain, is an increasingly elusive two-state agreement.

As bitterness grows, time may be running out. And the longer it takes to make peace and settle one of the world’s longest-running and most dangerous land disputes, the greater the cost for both Israelis and Palestinians.

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