The Case Against BDS
The 2019 Amnesty International report on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) begins with the following paragraph:
Israel continued to impose institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians living under its rule in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Israeli forces killed 38 Palestinians, including 11 children, during demonstrations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank; many were unlawfully killed while posing no imminent threat to life. Israel failed to ensure accountability and redress for victims of such grave violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. Israeli air strikes and shelling in the Gaza Strip killed 28 Palestinian civilians who were not directly participating in hostilities, including 10 children. Israel maintained its illegal blockade on the Gaza Strip, subjecting its residents to collective punishment and deepening the humanitarian crisis there. It continued to restrict freedom of movement of Palestinians in the OPT through checkpoints and roadblocks. Israeli authorities unlawfully detained in Israel thousands of Palestinians from the OPT, holding hundreds in administrative detention without charge or trial. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, including children, were committed with impunity. Israel displaced over 900 Palestinians in the West Bank as a result of home demolitions. The authorities used a range of measures to target human rights defenders, journalists and others who criticized Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights. The authorities denied asylum-seekers access to a fair or prompt refugee status determination process. Conscientious objectors to military service were imprisoned.
Clearly, Palestinians in the occupied territories have been the victims of severe human rights abuse for decades. As a response to these violations, many have proposed a program of boycotts, divestment, and sanction (BDS) leveled against Israel. I believe this policy is mistaken for reasons outlined below.
A Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this article are NOT intended as advice to Palestinians, especially those experiencing grave human rights abuses. Palestinians should be free to decide for themselves, within rules governing just warfare, how to conduct their struggle.
Rather, my comments are directed toward non-Palestinian Americans.
The crux of this article’s argument is that the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States puts Americans in a unique position in regard to the struggle for Palestinian rights and that for Americans, BDS is exactly the wrong strategy.
An Outline of This Essay’s Arguments
Political science research shows that sanctions rarely change government policies. The most optimistic assessment of their effectiveness indicates that sanctions work at most 1/’3 of the time. That means they fail 2/3 of the time. Worse yet, other political scientists estimate that even that 1/3 success rate disappears when controlling for other factors. Recall that more than a decade of sanctions against Iraq failed to dislodge Saddam Hussein. This article summarizes the academic research on sanctions.
If severe sanctions fail to achieve their stated objectives, the milder sanctions against Israel will almost certainly fail to achieve the desired effect.
Indeed, even left-wing Israeli politicians claim that since the BDS campaign began that Israeli trade with the rest of the world has increased.
Israel receives over 3 billion dollars in US aid per year in addition to private contribution that are often tax-deductible. Thus, not buying Israel hummus, not viewing Israeli movies, or refusing to engage in research with Israeli universities amounts to moral posturing that will have no real effect on government policies as long as billions of dollars are flowing into government coffers from abroad.
As an aside, while Israeli universities may be collaborating with the occupation by doing work for the government, there are also a great many members of the Israeli academy who have labored tirelessly to end human rights abuses in the occupied territory. Why undercut *them* by making it harder for them to engage in research and further their academic careers?
Boycotting Israeli businesses, cultural and sporting events, and universities will weaken the civil sector of Israeli society. Combined with massive US aid, the two policies together will serve to increase government power over its citizens, making it more difficult for them to resist the worst Israeli policies.
We should, in fact, be doing the opposite — working to strengthen Israeli civil society while weakening the power of the Israeli government.
Supporting sanctions against Israel make it difficult to argue against far more severe sanctions leveled against other countries because supporting BDS while opposing sanctions against Iran or Venezuela leaves peace activists open to charges of moral inconsistency. It is already difficult enough to oppose US sanctions against non-western countries. Supporting BDS will make it harder still when our political opponents ask, “Well, if sanctions are okay for Israel, why is it wrong to use them against Iran?”
While the relatively mild sanctions leveled against Israel seem to have had only modest effects, if any, on the Israeli economy, sanctions against other countries have devastated their civilian populations. The UN estimates that over 500,000 children under the age of 5 died unnecessarily because of the sanctions. The increased death toll for Iraqis of all ages may top one million.
While it is too soon to understand the impact of sanctions against Iran, inflation seems to have hit basic commodities like food the hardest, meaning that it is the poorest members of the population that are hurting the most.
If we care about the lives and welfare of people in Iran, Venezuela, and other countries targeted by the US, we should oppose collective punishments against ANY civilian population, no matter how much we hate the government that rules them.
Motes and Beams
Finally, there is the matter of the mote in Israel’s eye and the beam in America’s eye. The tragic fact is that the United States has killed far more Arabs and Muslims than Israel has — by several orders of magnitude. The total number of US-inflicted Iraqi deaths during two wars, a sanctions regime, and a prolonged occupation easily tops one million if one includes deaths due to disrupted medical care, the lack of clean water after purification plants were bombed, and other indirect causes.
Conclusion
If peace and human rights activists in America want to improve the position of Palestinians living under Israeli rule, they should do the opposite of what they are now doing. They should be campaigning to end US aid to the Israeli government while working to strengthen Israeli civil society, especially those organizations working to end the occupation and create a government that guarantees equal justice for every human being living in Israeli-controlled territories. BDS, alas, especially if not accompanied by a campaign to end foreign aid, will have the opposite effect.
