Is the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Movement Feminist?
By: Dalit Baum & Merav Amir
This blog was previously published in 2016 and is republished with the following new introduction:
This blog post responds to the debate “Is BDS Feminist?” which arose after several academic and professional associations have voted to endorse BDS. Since then, the Israeli government’s efforts to silence advocates for Palestinian rights through the demonization of BDS and disinformation about it has swelled, metastasized into anti-BDS legislation internationally, and spread to embolden other silencing campaigns, most notably with attempts to label the political left in Europe and in the U.S as antisemitic. This increased targeting of individuals, organizations, and movements emphasizes the need to go back to the basics and clarify our perspective of BDS, as we did in this article. In these days of highly polarized political debates, it is good to go beyond the defensive response and remind ourselves of the capacity of BDS campaigns to create new and unexpected alliances and to be inspired by, and also inspire, other struggles for justice. In this article we focus on BDS as we know it and what it does, discuss our own history with it, and share some ideas about its potentials and limitations.
Editor’s Note (2016): Given the ongoing conversation around BDS, we invited several individuals to respond to the the Conversations piece by Simona Sharoni, Rabab Abdulhadi, Nadje Al-Ali, Felicia Eaves, Ronit Lentin, and Dina Siddiqi in the 17(4) issue of IFjP. This is the second response of two.
Israeli state propaganda often portrays BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) as a powerful transnationa organization, encompassing all opposition to the State of Israel, led by hateful and sinister forces that manipulate violent mobs. State agencies organize opposition to “the BDS” and initiate legislation penalizing “support for BDS” in Israel and many Western countries. In a similar fashion, progressive audiences around the world hold support for BDS, at times, as the one measure of solidarity with Palestine, the litmus test of a left-radical identity. But both of these conceptions are misconstrued. BDS is neither an organization or a movement, nor is it an ideology or a political program; it is no more than a loosely-framed set of tactics for grassroots civil engagement, and an old-fashioned liberal toolset at that, consisting mainly of open community conversations, legal and economic research, and lobbying for legislative initiatives.
The use of these tools have been growing in recent years around the world as part of a response to the refusal of the Israeli government to reach a just political agreement, and its increased use of extreme violence and repression against Palestinians. The opposition to Israeli state policies goes far beyond BDS, and even the use of various boycotts and anti-normalization strategies precedes and exceeds the BDS framework. The BDS toolset draws on these strategies, while channeling them towards pragmatic courses of action. Public debates for and against BDS often serve as a smoke screen, diverting attention from the main issue, the on-going vast economic, institutional and political support for Israeli state crimes. BDS tactics offer a limited, yet sometimes effective, grassroots intervention, when not many other courses of action are available for non-state actors concerned with Palestinian rights. Like other tactics, these should be debated in the context of a particular campaign and weighed against other possible tools.
BDS campaigns constitute a network of organized responses to the 2005 Palestinian BDS Call, which is a historically-situated appeal for action. It is directed at “international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world,” including, explicitly, “conscientious Israelis.” Importantly, the Call invites action, and not endorsements or approval. The targets of this action are not Israeli citizens, Israeli culture or even Israeli companies, but rather institutions and corporations in Israel and around the world which are complicit in oppressive state policies. These campaigns have been successful in mainstreaming the critique of Israeli policies around the world and at times in changing corporate and institutional policies regarding the Israeli occupation. The strategy is not punitive, but forward-looking: reforming institutions and corporations to comply with ethical and legal standards; and creating balancing mechanisms from below to counter institutional racism and war profiteering. This does not come at the expense of supporting the work in Palestine/Israel for justice, freedom and equality, but is aimed at helping to create the conditions for such work to gain ground.
The Palestinian Call has gained resonance with a wide-range of groups globally, from anarchist direct action groups to state pension funds and conservative churches, groups with otherwise very little in common. In other words, although this tactic can be taken up by feminist activists, it is in no way a feminist tactic. However, as a descendent of another lineage, that of nonviolent noncooperation, BDS can deeply intersect with anti-racist feminist analysis and practice. BDS initiatives around the world track complicity locally, and encourage individuals and civil society institutions to step away from their own cooperation in order to expose this complicity and contain it. Solidarity work is thus transformed, from supporting the oppressed from a detached objective distance, to an intimate engagement with our own complicity, accountability and privilege.
It is no coincidence in our view that the first Israeli organization to take action in response to the Call was the Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP), a radical feminist anti-occupation organization in which we were both active. CWP is an organization comprised of Jewish and Palestinian women activists from within 1948 Israel, formed as a national coalition of feminist peace groups during the second intifada. It has been haunted from its inception by the challenges of solidarity and respective privilege in the joint Jewish-Palestinian movement and by dilemmas of economic justice in regards to the occupation. CWP conducted a series of laborious discussions between 2005 and 2010 about our response to the BDS Call, leading to the formation of a grassroots research initiative in 2007, Who Profits from the Occupation. As two Jewish Ashkenazi middle class women ourselves, we felt that this research project made good use of our relative privileges: our freedom of movement, our cultural access, and our relative immunity to help promote a cause we believed in.
In the beginning we mainly wanted to educate ourselves about the economic underpinnings of the occupation, and could not imagine that ten years later this project would become an independent research center and the foremost authority on corporate complicity in the Israeli occupation. We started from scratch, collecting information from site visits and learning how to do the research on the go. But soon afterwards, the information published by Who Profits very quickly became crucial to a growing number of campaigns around the world, and these in turn increasingly succeeded in changing business policies and getting multinational corporations to withdraw from their involvement in the Israeli occupation.
For us, even if there was nothing inherently feminist about BDS, it was our feminist awareness, training and experience that helped us try to transform a complex political dilemma into action. Our experience as feminist activists taught us (the hard way, as always) that we could not simply will privilege away, and moreover, that this realization cannot serve as an excuse for inaction; that privilege is blinding, but it comes with a moral obligation and a responsibility to learn and take action; that learning requires listening to our bodies, our own positioning, our immediate surroundings, tracking our own complicity. It also taught us to question expressions of solidarity that overlook concrete power relations and privilege, and to be wary of endless sanctimonious discussions of identity which lead to paralysis. From our perspective, therefore, the more interesting question is not whether BDS is feminist or not, but rather, what BDS can teach us these days about white feminism, privilege, solidarity and action.
Dalit Baum, Ph.D., is AFSC's Director of Economic Activism. She has worked for AFSC since 2013. She is co-founder of Who Profits from the Occupation, and of the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel. Dalit is a feminist scholar and teacher, who has been teaching about militarism and about the global economy from a feminist perspective in Israeli and American universities. She has been active with various groups in the Israeli anti-occupation and democracy movement, including Black Laundry, Boycott from Within, Zochrot, Anarchists against the Wall and Women in Black. Dalit has headed the Economic Activism for Palestine Program of Global Exchange.
Merav Amir is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at Queen's University Belfast. Her research focus is on cultural and political geography with particular interest in critical perspectives on security, processes of border making, geographies of embodiment, critical cultural analysis and feminist and queer theory, with regional expertise in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Her Recent publications include: ‘In-Secure Identities: On the Securitization of Abnormality,’ Environment and Planning D (2018) (with Hagar Kotef) and ‘Revisiting Politicide: State Annihilation in Israel/Palestine,’ Territory, Politics, Governance (2017). Previously she served as a coordinator in the Who Profits from the Occupation research project, and in the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel and she is currently the President of the University and College Union (UCU) branch of Queen's University.
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