What BDS is, in its founders' own words

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, known as BDS, asks consumers, campuses, churches, unions, firms and governments to isolate Israel until it accepts a fixed list of political demands. Its organisers describe this as non-violent pressure modelled on the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. A sceptical reader should start with those texts, then with the recorded words of the campaign’s best-known founder, rather than with slogans from either side. The documents do not describe a narrow protest against a particular cabinet or a particular settlement. They describe conditions that, if met as their authors define them, would end Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

What the 2005 call actually says

On 9 July 2005 a coalition of Arab groups issued the Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies records its three demands: ending occupation and colonisation of “all Arab lands” and dismantling the West Bank barrier; recognising “full equality” for Arab citizens of Israel; and “respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties,” language the call itself ties to a 1948 General Assembly recommendation (FDD).

The third demand is the hinge, and it is often the least explained to Western audiences. BDS treats return, including for later generations claiming refugee status, as a non-negotiable right of entry into Israel inside the 1949 armistice lines. Citing figures published on the BDS site itself, FDD noted more than 7.25 million people described as Arab refugees, against about 6.7 million Jews and 1.9 million Arabs who are Israeli citizens. Omar Barghouti, in his own book, insists on an unrestricted return for all who claim that status, including descendants of those who left in 1948. FDD’s conclusion is that such a return would replace a Jewish-majority democracy with another Arab-majority state. Barghouti dismisses the demographic objection as a defence of what he calls a colonial order. That is not a misunderstanding between the two sides. It is the dispute (FDD).

The first demand is also broader than “the West Bank.” “All Arab lands” is left undefined in the call. FDD notes that ending occupation of “all” such lands implies that Israeli control is illegitimate even within the 1949 lines. Ending Israeli control in the area Israelis call Judea and Samaria would not, on the campaign’s own three-part test, be enough.

Founders, and what they said about Israel’s existence

Omar Barghouti, born in Qatar to Arab parents, helped launch the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in 2004 and is the principal public face of BDS (Influence Watch). The Palestinian BDS National Committee was formed in Ramallah in 2007 to coordinate the work. Many researchers also trace the isolation strategy to the NGO Forum at the 2001 Durban conference, which called for “complete and total isolation of Israel” (FDD).

Barghouti has not been cryptic. The U.S. House of Representatives, in H. Res. 246 of 23 July 2019, quoted him as saying: “We oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine” (Jewish Virtual Library). The same library’s compilation of his remarks records that a one-state outcome would be “a unitary state, where, by definition, Jews will be a minority,” and that if refugees returned on BDS terms, “the Palestinian minority will become a Palestinian majority of what is today called Israel” (JVL). Ahmed Moor, writing as a BDS advocate, put the implication in one sentence: “BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state.” These are not hostile paraphrases. They are the speakers’ words.

The Anti-Defamation League has used that record to distinguish BDS from pressure aimed at a negotiated two-state outcome. When two self-described Zionist scholars endorsed boycott as a way to save a Jewish state beside an Arab one, Barghouti rejected the endorsement as an attempt to “appropriate” BDS. In his account, the problem is not only occupation after 1967. It is Israel’s existence as a Jewish state (ADL).

Results, reversals, and the economic record

BDS has had its tactical wins: student government resolutions, some church and union votes, pressure on cultural venues, and a few corporate decisions involving West Bank operations. Those episodes are real, and the movement advertises them. They have not produced the isolation the 2005 call requested. The Jewish Virtual Library’s history of the campaign concludes that it has had no impact on Israel’s policies and an insignificant effect on Israel’s economy, while U.S.–Israel trade has remained robust, with imports and exports totalling more than $38 billion in the period it surveys (JVL).

Where firms have moved plants, Arab workers in Judea and Samaria have sometimes lost jobs. SodaStream, which employed Israelis and local Arabs at a West Bank site, later shifted production to the Negev; BDS continued to target the company after the move. Israeli officials and some business leaders cite such cases as evidence that the campaign harms people it claims to represent (FDD). Academic associations have passed Israel boycotts, including a 2013 vote by the American Studies Association. Large numbers of universities refused to follow them: FDD notes that more than 450 college and university presidents signed a statement opposing academic boycotts in 2007, and the Jewish Virtual Library records that representatives of no fewer than 250 universities rejected boycotts of Israel or Israeli academic institutions (FDD). Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas said in South Africa in 2013 that he did not support a boycott of Israel itself, while asking others to boycott settlements. The PA and BDS are not the same project (FDD).

Why governments call it discriminatory

Western governments have treated nationality-based boycotts of Israel much as they treated the earlier Arab League boycott: as a form of discrimination in commerce, not as ordinary dissent. The Jewish Virtual Library counts 38 U.S. states with statutes, executive orders or resolutions that discourage public contracts or investments with companies that boycott Israel. In 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Arkansas Times v. Waldrip, leaving in place an Eighth Circuit ruling that Arkansas’s contractor-certification law did not violate the First Amendment as applied in that case (JVL). H. Res. 246 opposed BDS while affirming Americans’ right to criticise any government, including Israel’s, and passed 398–17 on 23 July 2019 (JVL).

Germany’s Bundestag, on 17 May 2019, adopted a resolution stating that the “arguments and methods of the BDS Movement are anti-Semitic.” The text said BDS tactics “inevitably arouse associations with the Nazi slogan ‘Kauft nicht bei Juden!’” — “Don’t buy from Jews!” The vote was political, not a criminal code, and was not legally binding (FDD). France’s highest court, on 20 October 2015, upheld convictions of activists who had urged a supermarket boycott of Israeli goods, treating the call as incitement to discrimination on the basis of national origin (AJC). National legislatures have not treated BDS as ordinary dissent.

The discrimination argument does not depend on forbidding criticism of Israeli policy. It depends on a double standard and on an end-state. BDS organises economic and cultural punishment of the Jewish state among the world’s occupiers, human-rights abusers and ethnically defined polities, and it treats Israeli universities, artists and civilians as legitimate targets. H. Res. 246 stated that the movement “does not recognize, and many of its supporters explicitly deny, the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination.” That is the line many governments are drawing: protest of policy is ordinary; a campaign whose founders reject Jewish sovereignty “in any part of Palestine” is something else.

After 7 October 2023 that line became easier to see. Hamas’s massacre and the urban war that followed were, in BDS framing, further grounds to isolate Israel. FDD recorded the campaign lauding the “justified use of armed resistance against the oppressors’ military and civilians,” rather than treating a movement committed to ending Israel as a Jewish state as a barrier to peace (FDD). Readers who want the Israeli targeting record, rather than the campaign’s summary of it, can watch the film and the separate note on the genocide allegation. The 2005 call has not been rewritten. It should be read as written.