Another BDS Kerfuffle - And What It Means For Palestinian Solidarity

Understanding people you disagree with matters a great deal

On May 19th, Haggai Matar of the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine wrote about publishing a book in Hebrew that would be BDS compliant. Previous books by Irish author Sally Rooney were translated and published in Israel in the urual manner; but since her previous book, Rooney agreed to honor the cultural boycott of Israel.

To most people, honoring the boycott could have meant just not dealing with any Israeli institution whatsoever and letting the Hebrew audience that enjoys her books feel the sting of international exclusion. In contrast, the editors of +972 joined forces with an Israeli publisher that is explicitly pro-Palestinian. The cultural boycott’s main targets are those associated with the Israeli state in some manner. But a carve-out has always existed for Israeli organizations that meet certain political criteria and do not receive funding (directly or indirectly) from the Israeli state. This publisher, November Books, meets those criteria.

Matar makes it clear that in the run-up to announcing this first-of-a-kind endeavor, he consulted with PACBI, The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. For Matar, the point of all this extra work is to demonstrate that BDS is not antisemitic. It doesn’t reject out of hand any cultural exchange with Israelis or with Hebrew-speaking audiences. If Rooney, +972 Magazine, November Books, and PACBI can figure this out, so can others, paving the way for more BDS-compliant projects located in Israel that engage the Israeli public.

Not everyone sees it that way.

The Backlash

One prominent solidarity activist captured what many have said in response:

I find this a genuinely baffling move by Rooney, even if, technically, it’s BDS compliant. It clearly runs against a spirit of culturally isolating “Israel”. At this point positing a “dissident” “Israeli” public or public sphere does normalisation work & mystifies.

It would be easy to take a side and call it a day. I think it’s more interesting than that. For pro-Israel absolutists, any and all BDS activity is inherently antisemitic, so drawing various distinctions is actively harmful. Why create space for ‘some’ BDS activity when all of it is discriminatory and immoral? On the other side there are Palestinians and allies active in opposition to Israel who - surprisingly - are in agreement with part of their opponents’ logic. They say it is indeed pointless to draw various distinctions. The entire Zionist enterprise is racist and colonialist. Why bother carving out exemptions for this or that special flower sprouting in Zionist occupied Palestine?

The dynamic at play in both cases is inherent in polarized political struggles. At various times, elements of each side sees the benefit in erasing common ground and forcing political targets to decide between two sharply contrasting options. To those adopting this strategy, the introduction of nuance means deflating their momentum. Half-measures don’t mean anything. It’s all or nothing.

It seems fair to ask: to what extent is the Palestinian solidarity movement in the U.S. in agreement with the leaders of the BDS movement in Palestine? Who is supposed to represent who, and how are we to know? Does it matter?

Israelis For Palestinian Liberation

There are always delicious ironies if you know where to look. For example, the infrastructure of BDS in Palestine was created in large part by a citizen of Israel. Rana Bishara was born in Jerusalem and married Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the founder of Balad, one of the four major Palestinian parties represented in the Knesset. Rana Bishara became an Israeli citizen through marriage. Later, she became head of the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) the civil society formation that gave birth to the BDS National Committee (BNC) which governs and coordinates the overall BDS movement from inside Palestine.

She would know from direct experience that Israel has always had Jewish citizens active in support of Palestinian rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Even Balad, seen as the most nationalistic of the Arab parties in Israel, had Jewish Israelis involved from the very start. They still do.*

There have always been individual and organizational participants and political allies among Jewish Israelis. They have played, and continue to play, important roles. Without going into deep history, here are a few examples:

In 1956, during the Suez Crisis/Tripartite Aggression, Israeli troops committed a massacre of Palestinians the village of Kufr Qasim, in Israel. We might never have known about it were it not for two Israeli Knesset members, Meir Vilner and Tawfik Toubi, parliamentarians of Israel’s Communist Party. That same Communist Party was also the largest political force behind Land Day, a major protest against land confiscations affecting Palestinians in Israel. To this day it is commemorated by Palestinians on March 30. For as long as Israel has existed, the Israeli Communists defined themselves as a party of both Jews and Arabs; the first and largest binational political project in Israeli or Palestinian history.

During the 1980s, Palestinian leaders frequently worked with Israeli Jewish counterparts. These were efforts to protect higher education (The Committee to Defend Birzeit), to stop the IDF from using live rounds to against protestors, to help Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem access their rights, to challenge land confiscations in court, to protest extremist settlers, among other issues.

On the more radical side of things, we have Ilan Halevy, an Israeli who joined Fateh and later served as an ambassador for the PLO. Michel Warschawski, a leader of Matzpen-Jerusalem, spent time in prison for (allegedly) assisting the PFLP in publishing a leaflet. Members of Derekh Hanitzotz spent years in prison for belonging to the DFLP. Juliano Mer Khamis was a co-founder of the world famous Freedom Theater in Jenin. Neta Golan was a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, which brought thousands of people to Palestine for solidarity work. Yoav Bar was, and might still be, in the leadership of Sons of the Village. These are just a handful of people that I know of because I knew them personally and met them at protests and activist meetings.

Starting in the 80’s there has also been a vibrant refusenik movement. Initially it was focused on the war in Lebanon. But almost as quickly it spread to a refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories. In recent years, there has been a shift among young radicals to completely refuse service in the IDF. As individuals, the refusenik movement has been a key conveyer belt for solidarity work. Haggai Matar of +972 and Yishai Menuchin of November Books are both former refuseniks who spent time in prison.

In the 2000s, a new form of activism took root among radical Israeli Jews: protective accompaniment. As violence and official policy separated Israelis from Palestinians, activists began to visit Palestinian communities in an effort to reduce violence from the army and settlers. It was noticed that violence was reduced when Israelis (and foreigners) were present and documenting it. Over time, Israel made it very hard for internationals to engage in this kind of activism; they were deported or turned back at the airport. But Israeli citizens cannot be deported, which made their efforts even more important.

Not all of the people and groups listed above would meet every jot and tittle of the official BDS criteria. I’ve purposefully left out a significant group of sincere Zionists who also participate in solidarity work in Israel and the Occupied Territories. My point in listing all of these examples is to provide much needed context for why the BDS criteria made the effort to allow Israelis in Israel to participate in that movement.

The number of Israelis engaged regularly in this work might not be high as a percentage of the population, now or in the past. But just as in South Africa, their presence in the movement is both a lever for change and an example of how Israeli Jews and Palestinians can build relationships. They are the precious model that can be used to fend off criticisms that peace and justice will never be possible. There is after all, a relationship between scarcity and value.

Infighting Among Solidarity Activists

In contrast, many of the Palestinians residing in the diaspora have nothing to lose when it comes to excluding anything vaguely Israeli. Very few Israeli organizations active in the U.S. prioritize joint work with Palestinians. But of those that do, even fewer are interested in being part of the BDS movement. On the margins there have been some flashpoints when a ‘less than pure’ organization or Israeli are targeted by a solidarity movement. The official BDS rejection of Standing Together and the critcism directed at the Oscar-winning film No Other Land for being produced by a team of Israelis and Palestinians are examples of this.

The tensions between BDS leaders in the West Bank and the solidarity movement’s supporters in the U.S. have come to the foreground before. In 2022, an anonymous Boston collective launched The Mapping Project that was supported by the BDS movement in that city. They created a digital map listing entities guilty of supporting Israel.

Crucially, the map included not just defense contractors or universities, but local Jewish high schools, synagogues, Jewish arts groups, and a center for Jewish teenagers with disabilities. The creators explicitly wrote on the site that these physical locations could be “disrupted in the physical world.” This led to immense backlash, with mainstream politicians and Jewish organizations claiming that it was essentially a “target list” for antisemitic violence.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) agreed with that assessment. They took the unprecedented step of officially cutting ties with the Boston groups involved. On June 22, 2022, the BNC issued an official statement via their global channels stating:

“The Palestinian BDS National Committee... has no connection to and does not endorse the Mapping Project in Boston, Massachusetts. Endorsement of this project by any group affiliated with the BDS movement conflicts with this affiliation.”

The Palestinian BDS leadership strictly polices its guidelines. They argued that the Mapping Project associated itself with “resistance in all its forms” (un-vetted by BDS rules) and that targeting generic Jewish religious or youth groups violated their strict mandate to only boycott entities directly complicit in support for Israel. BDS Boston rebelled against the leadership in Ramallah, pinning the map to their profile and refusing to take it down.

In another well-publicized instance, some American activists began a campaign against Jamaal Bowman, a Congressman from New York who had gone to Israel with J-Street, a liberal pro-Israel organization. What amplified this conflict was the existence of internal conflict in DSA (The Democratic Socialists of America), an organization that Bowman was a member of and helped elect him. One side were those that prioritized electing socialists to higher office, even if some of them didn’t always follow DSA’s policy preferences. On the other were those that opposed using a Democratic Party ballot line to win elections and wanted DSA’s electeds to stake out more radical positions on multiple issues. Basically, a battle in the long running debate within DSA over strategy.

At first, the side railing against Bowman was encouraged by a statement from the BNC more or less taking their side. This was used to claim that Bowman was disavowed by ‘the’ Palestinian solidarity movement. Many demanded that he be expelled from DSA, although this did not happen.

After a few weeks of twisting in the wind, the BDS National Committee released a new statement affirming that local groups and leaders deserve more grace and flexibility, and effectively erased their first, condemnatory statement. They did this as a result of pressure from leaders of the Palestinian solidarity community who disagreed with the effort to denounce Bowman but were fearful of saying so publicly.

At the time Bowman was one of the most pro-Palestinian members of Congress based on his voting record. Treating him like an enemy was sending a signal that would weaken support for Palestinian rights in U.S. politics, instead of strengthening it.

Now we have another conflict between BDS leaders in Palestine (PACBI) and voices outside of Palestine centered on the publication of Rooney’s book. The real world significance of this is unclear. But as a political wedge issue among solidarity activists, it highlights a growing divide.

Which Way Forward For Palestine?

There are at least two options on the table. One of them is to center the voices in favor of the total exclusion of anything Israeli from the movement. This would be consistent with Thawabit, a set of principles of the Palestinian liberation movement articulated in 1977 by the PLO. The original PLO charter (1964) specified that Jews arriving in Palestine “after the Zionist invasion” would have to leave. This is sometimes referred to as the Algerian model, because the French colonists left after independence.

And yet. By 1977 the leader of the PLO and its largest faction, Fateh, was pursuing a two state solution. Palestinian citizens in Israel remain overwhelmingly in favor of a two state solution. During the Oslo period, polls were conducted asking if Palestinian citizens of Israel would be interested in redrawing borders so that majority Arab parts of Israel could be included in a future Palestinian state; almost no one was in favor, except for right-wing Israeli politicians.

For decades, the Palestinian right of return has been advocated for primarily as an additive right. Meaning that Palestinians have the right to return; but this doesn’t mean that Israeli Jews have to leave. Even Hamas, in it’s 2017 restatement of principles, said that its conflict is with Zionism, not Jews as a people. And there was no mention of forcing Jews to leave Palestine.

But for others, like well-known New York activist Nerdeen Kiswani, the dream of liberation is bound up with the goal of expelling Zionists from the land. And the strategy of Hamas prior to Oct. 7th seemed headed in that direction, in contrast to the 2017 statement.

On September 30, 2021, Hamas sponsored and funded an official, day-long convention in Gaza City called the “Promise of the Hereafter Conference — Post-Liberation Palestine.” Far from being just vague rhetoric, it was a granular, bureaucratic planning session for mapping out the economic, legal, and logistical management of the country after what they viewed as the inevitable military collapse of the State of Israel.

The conference was featured Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, prominently. It was led by an organization Hamas founded in 2014 called The Promise of the Hereafter Institute, a think tank for plotting the governance of a future Palestinian state. Among the details made public were those regarding the fate of Jewish Israelis:

• Israeli soldiers and fighters were to be killed or tried.

• Fleeing civilians were to be allowed to leave.

• “Educated Jews and experts”—specifically those in the fields of medicine, infrastructure engineering, modern technology, and civilian/military manufacturing—were to be forced to stay behind. The text stated they must be prevented from leaving so that their knowledge, systems, and institutional data could be extracted and used to keep the new state running.

Statements like these are utterly incompatible with BDS as a strategy for winning support in Europe and North America. But after Oct. 7, many activists came out in support of the al-Aqsa Flood, arguing that it represented a major advance and proved that armed struggle was working to advance the Palestinian cause.

The BDS movement took shape after the 2nd Intifada, a time when the Palestinian Authority (PA) was weak and ineffective as a vehicle for advancing solidarity movements outside of Palestine. It still is. The founders emphasized that they represented all of Palestinian civil society working in unity. In so doing they were offering an alternative both to the PA and to political parties and armed militias. They successfully competed with both in the Western world and forged solidaristic ties directly, without going through prior existing political or governance infrastructure.

For nearly 20 years the Palestinian solidarity movement was BDS, and BDS was the chosen strategy. It represented a nonviolent strategy based partly on the South African experience. And this means contemplating a future with Israeli Jews and at times cooperating with some of them, as PACBI has done regarding the Rooney book.

Right now the reality is that there are two Palestinian solidarity movements. One of them relies on BDS. Champions nonviolence. Works with some Israelis. And avoids anything that seems to target Jews more broadly. The other one fetishizes armed resistance with hanglider and red triangle icons. Celebrates the al-Aqsa Flood. Rejects any cooperation with forces inside Israel trying to participate in BDS.

Personally, I don’t think these two movements are compatible with each other. We’re likely to see more conflicts erupt into the open as various forces look for wedge issues to gain prominence for their side. More extreme views tend to perform better on social media. If I was running a covert operation to weaken the movement, I’d definitely amplify those more extreme views. But I’m not; I want to see Palestinians free and equal from the river to the sea. That’s a future some Israeli Jews want as well, and however few they are I want them to win.

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* Some well known activists associated with Balad include Yael Lerer, Einat Podjarny, Professor Yehouda Shenhav, Udi Aloni, and Orly Noy. That doesn’t mean they had a formal role.