A Response to "What Does B.D.S. Stand For?"
B.D.S. protesters and counter-protesters in London in 2017. Photo by Philafrenzy.
Arriving to the end of the recently-published piece, “What Does B.D.S. Stand For?”, readers might be surprised to find themselves walking away without any clear answer to the question beyond the enlightening fact that the three letters of B.D.S. stand for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.” Yet that is simply a list of tactics—and tactics can be wielded for any cause, from bigoted cake-makers boycotting gay couples to Black bus riders boycotting segregated public transit. So what does the B.D.S. movement really ‘stand’ for? And how is it related to the upcoming referendum on Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s campaign?
In order to answer that, it’s necessary to point out another omission in the article, one that is made quite clear when you search for “Palestinian” and find no mention of the word save for its appearance in the quoted referendum question. How can the Palestinian presence be so decisively erased, given that hundreds of Palestinian civil society organizations launched the far-ranging grassroots movement known as B.D.S., which is ostensibly the authors’ main topic of discussion?
By hyper-focusing on B.D.S. in the abstract, the article sidesteps the real issue at hand: the specific and evidenced claims made by colonized people demanding justice, and their growing international base of supporters. It would seem that partisans of Israel find it much easier to defend an apartheid state when its greatest adversary is a frightening acronym to which any number of accusations and mischaracterizations may be attached, rather than address themselves directly to the dispossessed.
So let’s start from square one. Campaigns based on the Palestinian-led B.D.S. movement aim to pressure the Israeli government to comply with international law by meeting three demands:
Ending the Israeli occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, in addition to dismantling the illegal wall cutting through the West Bank;
Recognizing the fundamental rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality and freedom from discrimination; and
Respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.
These are the bare minimum, non-negotiable principles for any just settlement to the question of Palestine. Yet the steadfast refusal to compromise on these preconditions has led detractors to paint Palestinians as intransigent fanatics—or dangerous, terrorist-adjacent radicals, as the authors of the original article go on to decry.
B.D.S. is the strategic framework, but the overarching movement aims to throw a wrench into the machinery of ongoing Zionist settler-colonization in Palestine. Israel visits regular atrocities and daily degradation upon the millions of Palestinians living under its control, and avoids accountability in large part through the backing of the United States. Receiving about $3.8 billion in military aid and $8 billion in loan guarantees yearly, Israel is the greatest recipient of American economic aid in the world, and promulgates its repressive policies and territorial-maximalist aspirations with near-total impunity. Faced with the complicity of international state actors, Palestinian activists have turned to the tried-and-true method of mass popular mobilization to apply pressure from the bottom up.
When Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace launched the divestment campaign against Israeli apartheid, it was not based on a vague evocation of the term. Like many crimes against humanity, apartheid has been codified into a generalizable rubric under international law. Our call for divestment accordingly targets multinational corporations invested in the policies and practices that amount to an institutionalized system of racial domination and control, in the eyes of an increasing number of political observers, human rights organizations, and civil society groups.
These days it feels strange to discuss any issue without reference to COVID-19. The pandemic has acted like an X-ray, exposing and exacerbating inequalities across the globe. Palestine is no exception. In the past few weeks, Israeli authorities have shuttered screening clinics, endangered precarious workers, neglected prisoners, and denied crucial medical supplies to the most vulnerable populations. The moral imperative for divestment has grown ever more urgent in the face of these developments.
The authors of the original piece suggest that the Columbia College Student Council is in violation of its mandate to promote campus “cohesion” by holding a referendum. Yet this demand to maintain the status quo further erases the experiences of Palestinian and Arab students on this campus, who watch their university president smear their fight for justice, witness the virulent racism of Israeli government officials in campus forums, and contend with Columbia’s decision to establish academic programs premised on their exclusion.
There are various other factual inaccuracies sprinkled throughout the rest of the article, such as the suggestion that S.J.P.’s anti-normalization policy regarding collaborations with pro-Israel student groups prevents any substantive engagement with pro-Israel talking points. Anyone who witnessed last semester’s hours-long student council meeting on the referendum, during which C.U.A.D. members responded to Zionist arguments at great length, would hardly be able to fathom the absurdity of this argument. In fact, C.U.A.D.’s principle objective on campus is to engage our peers on their received notions about Israel and Zionism, doing so from the Palestinian perspective that has seldom been the focus of mainstream popular discourse. It is this last point that seems to cause such opprobrium among Israel’s defenders.
Those who feel discomfort, even profound distress, at the prospect of divestment often interpret the challenge to their political orientation as an assault on their identity. But the unsettling process of reckoning with preconceived ideas about the Israeli state, especially when raised to defend its actions unequivocally, cannot be equated with the realities of Palestinian life and the material experience of dispossession. Nor can such unpleasant feelings be used to silence Palestinian voices or stifle the broader campus conversation.
The authors of the original piece neglect to mention the widespread support that C.U.A.D.’s campaign enjoys within our campus community, as evidenced by dozens of endorsements from progressive student organizations and affinity groups on campus, alongside the resoundingly successful results of the 2018 Barnard College referendum. Instead, the upcoming referendum, and C.U.A.D.’s campaign more broadly, are characterized as “hate-inducing rhetoric,” with the suggestion that supporting—or even considering—divestment from companies that profit off of collective punishment, drone warfare, and mass incarceration is somehow tantamount to endangering Jewish students on our campus.
Once again the omissions from the original article are helpful for illustrating the problem with this line of argument. The authors only reference Jewish identity when it is connected to the political ideology that they themselves subscribe to. For this reason they make no explicit reference to one half of C.U.A.D.’s coalition, the anti-Zionist student organization Jewish Voice for Peace. J.V.P. members are directly quoted twice, yet their Jewish identity is deliberately obscured and dissociated from their anti-Zionist stance because it runs counter to the central argument of the piece: that Jewish students are a monolith, and that Palestinian rights advocacy unilaterally makes them feel unsafe.
Such accusations of antisemitism must be understood in the wider context of efforts underway at state and federal level to redefine Palestinian rights advocacy as anti-Jewish, spearheaded by right-wing legal organizations and Trump appointees who view support for Israel as vital to U.S. foreign policy interests. Attempts to weaponize anti-discrimination laws using a warped definition of antisemitism are often discussed in relation to the grave dangers they pose to free speech protections and academic freedom. Crucially, what also must be emphasized is that they aim to render the Palestinian historical narrative definitionally illegitimate.
These increasingly censorious reactions reflect a growing concern among Israel’s supporters. On college campuses in particular, Israel no longer enjoys unconditional support and Palestinian voices have begun to enter mainstream consciousness. As a result, the militant defense of Zionism can only happen on increasingly broad and ill-defined terms of engagement. Campaigns are therefore waged not against “Palestinian rights” but against the floating letters of “B.D.S.,” abstracted from its origins in the Palestinian movement for historical restitution and decolonization.
Whenever we are able to return to campus, the referendum will proceed as planned. In the course of the inevitably fierce debates to follow, our university’s complicity with systems of global injustice will be called into question. Columbia College students will have the opportunity to consider the merits of divestment, and then voice their conscience with a vote. Members of C.U.A.D. will take part in these conversations, as a coalition of Palestinian, Jewish, and allied student organizers unified in our opposition to Israeli apartheid and colonization. Like B.D.S., we stand for something very simple: freedom and justice for the Palestinian people. Will you stand with us?
Nas Abd Elal is a senior in Columbia College studying Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. She’s still holed up in NYC, where she’s finishing her thesis on labor and industry in Haifa under the British Mandate.
Eve Glazier is a first-year at Barnard College who is interested in studying Urban Studies, Yiddish, and Education. She is a self-loving Jew embracing her full anti-Zionist Jewish identity as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.
This article was submitted to CPR as a pitch. To write a response, or to submit a pitch of your own, we invite you to use the pitch form on our website.