Efficacy of BDS The BDS movement, which just celebrated its ninth anniversary, is the most successful non-violent Palestinian liberation movement in decades. By their own admission, worries over the success of BDS are keeping Israel’s top government officials up at night. Netanyahu considers BDS a very serious “strategic threat.” Israel’s Justice Minister Tzipi Livni urged her government to take criticisms of Israel more seriously given the fact that BDS “is moving and advancing uniformly and exponentially,” warning that uncountered, BDS could reduce Israel to “a lone settlement in the world.” That is not to say BDS is an overwhelming success—far from it. While military sanctions seem like an unrealistic goal and the economic boycott has yet to be as successful as it was in South Africa, Israel’s top business executives are growing deeply concerned about the financial impact of even a partial boycott, estimated at a 5.7 billion dollar loss. As a result, many top CEOs of Israeli businesses, such as Google Israel, have broken their political silence and are pressuring Netanyahu to make peace. As of January, the European Union (EU) passed a pro-BDS directive that prohibits EU states from signing deals with Israel without an exclusion clause for Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. In the United States, economic divestment lags far behind Europe, but thanks to the efforts of the BDS movement, my own retirement provider, TIAA-CREF, recently divested over nine million dollars in Sodastream, calling their former investment “socially bankrupt, operating out of an illegal [West Bank] settlement.” In addition to state actors and corporations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Presbyterian and Methodist churches have committed to partial economic divestment. And as someone who has taught about the United States’ relationship to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on three different US campuses in the last ten years in classes that draw students from every side of the issue, there is no doubt in my mind that the BDS movement deserves enormous credit for dramatically changing the terms of the conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among American coeds. Furthermore, BDS activists have a proven record of successfully connecting their solidarity work with other grassroots activists and social justice struggles. For example, Detroit just witnessed its largest pro-Palestinian rally in years in part because BDS activists and organizers connected Israel’s racist and cruel denial of water to Gazans to the racism and classism behind the denial of water to the poor of Detroit, a predominantly black city where water is more expensive than it is in most of the country and almost forty percent of the population lives under the poverty line. jadaliyya/pages/index/18733/zionism-bds-and-american-muslim-leadership
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 17:53:50 +0000
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