Commentary Magazine

Topic: BDS

Stephen Hawking Signs Up to the Academic Boycott of Israel

05.08.2013 - 2:00 PM

There was much relief when, earlier today, a spokesman for Cambridge University in England released a statement denying that Stephen Hawking, the renowned British physicist, had invoked the academic boycott of Israel as the reason for his decision to withdraw from the “Facing Tomorrow” conference, which will be hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem in June.

As it turns out, Cambridge spoke too soon. Tim Holt, the spokesman who said that Hawking had backed out for health reasons, was compelled to issue the following clarification:

“We have now received confirmation from Professor Hawking’s office that a letter was sent on Friday to the Israeli President’s office regarding his decision not to attend the Presidential Conference, based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott.

“We had understood previously that his decision was based purely on health grounds having been advised by doctors not to fly.”

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It’s Unanimous! The Association for Asian-American Studies and BDS

05.03.2013 - 12:55 PM

Academics don’t agree about much, but the members of the Association for Asian American Studies agree, at least, that a “boycott of Israeli academic institutions” is warranted. That is what they resolved, not by a mere majority vote, but unanimously, on April 20, the last day of the Association’s national meeting.

Reportedly, only 10 percent of the members were present for the vote. So when I learned of the resolution, I assumed that we would soon hear from professors of Asian American Studies, enraged, or at least perplexed, that the AAAS had become the first U.S. academic organization to support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. But although one can find almost anything on the Web, you will not find even one professor of Asian American Studies who has respectfully disagreed with, let alone denounced, this move. The Asian American Studies professor who diverges publicly from the party line is that rare a beast.

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Israel’s Bad Week on UK Campuses

02.22.2013 - 2:40 PM

It hasn’t been a good week for free and open debate about the Jewish state on campuses in the United Kingdom. Two separate incidents, one at the University of Essex and a second at Oxford University, have shown just how low opponents of Israel will stoop in order to delegitimize her and squash the free speech of Israel’s citizens and defenders.

Immediately following the announcement of a speech at Essex by Alon Roth-Snir, deputy ambassador of Israel to the United Kingdom, anti-Israel activists on campus began to organize. Their goal was simple: stifle Roth-Snir’s right to free speech on their campus. Avi Mayer, the director of new media for the Jewish Agency for Israel, created a Storify account of the incident and the university’s response. What Mayer describes speaks volumes about the opposition Israel faces on campus from both faculty and students. Mayer quotes the University of Essex Students’ Union President Nathan Bolton from the Facebook event organizing the protest:

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Hillel’s BDS Battle and Anti-Semitism

02.01.2013 - 4:40 PM

To listen to the arguments put forward by Harvard students to create what they call an “open Hillel,” their fight with the national Hillel group is about the right of young Jews to free association. The students say that rules mandating that the organization not partner with groups that support BDS—the anti-Zionist campaign that aims to boycott, disinvest and sanction the State of Israel—or host speakers that advocate such measures are unfair and limit their ability to have dialogue with Palestinians. To the thinking of the Progressive Jewish Alliance that is, according to the Forward, organizing the campaign against Hillel, such rules “stifle discourse” and discriminate against those who disagree with Israeli policies.

But this controversy isn’t about the deadening hand of a Jewish establishment determined, as leftists claim, to silence dissenters. Any Hillel branch that regards groups that are struggling to destroy Israel in this manner would in essence be declaring their neutrality not only about the continuation of the Zionist enterprise but that they can no longer be counted among those prepared to bear witness against the discriminatory ideology at the heart of the drive for BDS. Those who wage war on one people and deny the same rights they readily concede to any other group are advocating a form of bias. Such a bias when directed against Jews has a name: anti-Semitism.

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BDS Controversy Raging in Brooklyn

01.30.2013 - 5:50 PM

There’s another BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) controversy brewing in Brooklyn, this time at the publicly-funded Brooklyn College. Brooklyn College’s political science department has decided to co-sponsor an anti-Israel BDS conference, despite growing outrage at the school and department’s tendency to sponsor events that only portray one side of the Mideast debate. Yesterday Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee at the City University of New York (the larger network that Brooklyn College is a member of) wrote a scathing op-ed about the conference in Algemeiner in which he admonished the school for its decision to go ahead with the program:

I call upon taxpayers to draw a line here and make it known: taxpayer dollars should not fund illegitimate, racist and anti-Semitic activities by any academic department. Those of us who care about Israel would do no less if others were similarly treated. Indeed, the Jewish community in particular historically has done no less. Additionally, academic administrators should be reminded that Jewish students are no less entitled – under applicable federal law – than other students to an educational environment free of intimidation and prejudice.

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The Courage of Ronnie Fraser

11.01.2012 - 2:10 PM

I first met Ronnie Fraser, an unassuming lecturer in mathematics at one of London’s further education colleges, in 2002. Sitting at a table in a small central London cafe, Ronnie barely sipped the cappuccino in front of him as he laid out for me, in urgent tones, the growing support among British academics for a boycott of their Israeli colleagues, along with the vicious strain of anti-Semitism underlying their campaign.

I can admit, now, that a large part of me wanted to believe that Ronnie was exaggerating. The boycott was certainly wrong and definitely misguided, but could one really argue that British academics, six decades after the Holocaust, were trafficking in the kinds of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that would not have been out of place in the pages of Der Sturmer?

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South Africa’s Rulers Line Up Behind BDS

10.30.2012 - 3:50 PM

To the cheers of assembled delegates, the Third International Solidarity Conference of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, which met in Pretoria earlier this week, endorsed the call for a campaign of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targeting the Israel. A lone German representative who stood up and challenged the prevailing wisdom that Israel is the reincarnation of South Africa’s apartheid regime was roundly dismissed by the chairman of the ANC, Baleka Mbete, who said that she herself had visited “Palestine,” where she’d discovered that the situation is “far worse than apartheid South Africa.”

This is not the first time that a senior member of South Africa’s leftist political establishment has made that exact point. In a particularly noxious speech delivered last May, the Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu asserted that the Palestinians were “being oppressed more than the apartheid ide­o­logues could ever dream about in South Africa.” Tutu’s co-thinker, the Reverend Allan Boesak ­– best known for his conviction for defrauding charitable donations from the singer Paul Simon and others — has also declared that Israel “is worse, not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it.” And in an interview earlier this year, John Dugard, a South African law professor and former UN Rapporteur, approvingly referred to “black South Africans like Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu and others who have repeatedly stated that, in their opinion, the situation in the Palestinian territory is in many respects worse than it was under apartheid.”

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At UN Human Rights Council, Will U.S. Go Down with the Ship?

10.26.2012 - 1:00 PM

One of the reasons the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement has had trouble gaining adherents is that everyone knew the movement would never just target Jews. It would begin with Israel, but surely expand to anyone deemed insufficiently hostile to Israeli companies.

And soon enough it did so, targeting American companies such as Caterpillar, which makes the type of tractor that hit Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist attempting to shield terrorists’ weapons smuggling tunnels from the Israeli military. Since Corrie was attempting to aid those who wanted to kill Israeli civilians, you would think a “social justice” movement would spare Caterpillar its ire. But that’s not how BDS works. And so it is not surprising that such a movement has found a stalwart ally in the United Nations, an organization dedicated to protecting the world’s worst human rights violators while relentlessly targeting the Jewish state.

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How Do We Define “Pro-Israel?”

03.11.2012 - 1:51 PM

One of the standard arguments currently being employed against supporters of the State of Israel is that the true friends of the Jewish state are those who are doing their best to undermine its democratically-elected government and force it to submit to foreign pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians. It is an old and somewhat disingenuous ploy that is, at best, an effort by supporters of the losing side in Israeli elections to win back what their friends have lost in the ballot box. There are times when those who like the right-of-center parties in Israel have played this game.  However, since the evisceration of the Israeli left by the refusal of the Palestinians to make peace, it is the sole consolation of those who despise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies. But the anger and frustration of the Jewish left is such these days that some have expanded this tactic and taken to using anti-Semitic tropes about “Israel-firsters” which are straight out of the Walt-Mearsheimer Israel lobby thesis. To listen to people like Media Matters scribbler M.J. Rosenberg these days, it is hard to distinguish the bile he spews at AIPAC and liberal supporters of Israel (forget about what he says about conservatives) from that of out-and-out anti-Zionists.

Rosenberg’s old friend J.J. Goldberg writes in the Forward this week to defend his buddy. It is an unconvincing piece marred not so much by the frame of reference of friendship as it is by a refusal to come to grips with the way Rosenberg’s anger at his former employers at AIPAC and everyone who doesn’t share his opinion has distorted this debate. According to J.J., M.J. is still pro-Israel at heart but just doesn’t like the policies of its government and those Americans who back it. But Rosenberg’s willingness to adopt the rhetoric of Israel-haters undermines his defenders. That this apologia for Rosenberg ran in the same issue of the paper that also contained a flattering profile of Ali Abunimah, one of the leading advocates of the campaign to boycott Israel in the United States, only reinforces the impression that some on the Jewish left are so deeply invested in the effort to undermine backers of the pro-Israel consensus that they are seeking to erase any boundary between mere criticism of the government in Jerusalem and activity whose aims are clearly more sinister.

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Presbyterians Take Another Step Toward Hate for Israel

02.17.2012 - 4:05 PM

As we wrote last week, the Presbyterian Church USA is faced with a choice about the future of its relations with the Jewish community and, indeed, the vast majority of Americans who ardently support the state of Israel. Unfortunately, rather than listen to voices of reason, church leaders have today taken another step toward approval of measures that place the denomination in favor of economic war against the Jewish state when their General Assembly Mission Council voted to recommend a report that calls for “selective divestment” from Israel.

Though the PCUSA claims what it is doing is meant to encourage peace, it is doing just the opposite. By approving a call for sanctions on some companies that do business in Israel, the PCUSA  is not only doing something that will encourage Palestinians to persist in refusing to make peace, they have also done something that makes it impossible for Jews and others who care about Israel to continue to work with the church on any issue.

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Human Rights Watch Now Openly Endorsing BDS

12.20.2010 - 3:53 PM

Human Rights Watch doesn’t like Israel. No surprise there. But since the advocacy group still does important work on human rights issues in other countries, it continues to get taken seriously by the media and government officials. This legitimacy should end immediately in light of HRW’s latest report, which tacitly endorses the beyond-fringe Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. From the text of the study:

The report is based on case studies comparing Israel’s starkly different treatment of settlements and next-door Palestinian communities in these areas. It calls on the US and EU member states and on businesses with operations in settlement areas to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and that violate international law.

The report also asks the U.S. to avoid “offsetting the costs of Israeli expenditures on settlements by withholding U.S. funding from the Israeli government in an amount equivalent to its expenditures on settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank.”

That’s bad enough. But there was one recommendation that really caught my eye:

Congress should request a report from the General Accounting Office on the subject of tax-exempt organizations that support settlements and settlement-related activities. Such a study should include specific assessments of the amounts and types of donations involved and the actual end-uses of such donations in the settlements. The report should also address whether current laws and regulations regarding charitable organizations ensure that tax-exempt status is not granted to organizations that facilitate human rights violations or violations of international humanitarian law, are adequately enforced, and whether they are adequate or require revision.

Hmm. As we know from the Z Street case, the IRS has already been giving some pro-Israel groups a hard time on their tax-exemption applications — ostensibly because Israel has a “higher risk of terrorism.” But could the IRS also be concerned about tax-exempt groups giving support to Israeli settlements? And if not, will this be the next rallying cry picked up by the BDS movement?

In addition to those suggestions, HRW also recommended the following quasi-BDS tactics:

• The international community should tack on extra tariffs to products imported from Israeli settlements: “Ensure that policies do not promote settlement activity, such as the discriminatory violations of Palestinian human rights documented in this report, by enforcing tariff agreements in accordance with international law, such that Israeli settlement goods are not given preferential treatment, including by requiring and enforcing clear origin labeling.”

• Businesses operating from the settlements should cease involvement in any activity that HRW deems to be a violation of international law, “including where necessary ending such [business] operations altogether.”

The NGO Monitor has also denounced the report. In an e-mail, it called it evidence that HRW “endorses boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), disguised as opposition to settlements, but in reality seeking the destruction of Israel.”

“This is further proof of HRW founder Robert Bernstein’s conclusion that the organization has turned Israel into a pariah state,” NGO Monitor president Gerald Steinberg added, in a statement on Sunday.

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NIF Cuts Off Funding for BDS Groups

12.16.2010 - 8:26 AM

Some Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions groups are going to have to find a new way to bankroll their important anti-Israel endeavors (hummus boycotts, costume parties, impromptu choral performances) because the New Israel Fund is cutting off funding for organizations involved in the BDS movement.

NIF has been criticized for giving grants to groups that engage in anti-Israel boycott campaigns, such as Concerned Women for Peace, Israel Social TV, Mossawa, Machsom Watch, and Women Against Violence. The fund amended its website on Dec. 13 to reflect its change in policy:

The NIF opposes the global BDS movement, views the use of these tactics as ineffective and counterproductive and is concerned that segments of this movement seek to undermine the existence of the state of Israel.

NIF will not fund global BDS activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS programs.

I’m really pleased to see NIF finally come around on this issue. But as Jeffrey Goldberg noted at the Atlantic, NIF’s statement stopped short of rebuking the BDS movement as a whole. “I was slightly taken aback by [CEO Daniel] Sokatch’s statement that, ‘segments of this movement seek to undermine the existence of the state of Israel,’” wrote Goldberg. “I would say that undermining the existence of the state of Israel is this movement’s raison d’etre.”

And while the change in policy is still new, several of the boycott groups that NIF was funding have yet to remove their affiliations with NIF from their websites. Concerned Women for Peace, Israel Social TV, and Mossawa are still asking their donors to route contributions through NIF.

NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that has pressured the New Israel Fund to cut ties with BDS groups, asked for these links to be removed. “NIF now needs to implement these important new guidelines,” [NGO Monitor president] Professor Gerald Steinberg [wrote]. “Despite NIF’s new policy, CWP’s and Who Profits’ websites still provide links for donations via NIF.  These links should be removed immediately. We also expect NIF to clarify how and when the new grant guidelines will be enforced, and we are prepared to work with NIF and its donors in their implementation. As NIF severs ties with groups that promote BDS, it is on the same page as NGO Monitor.”

Also, while scrolling through NIF’s funding guidelines on its website, I came across another statement outlining the group’s policy on “lawfare” that (I think) is new:

As the leading organization advancing democracy in Israel, the New Israel Fund strongly believes that our job is to work within Israel to ensure democratic accountability.

With a free press, involved citizenry, a strong and independent judiciary, and a track record of officially constituted commissions and committees of inquiry, there are internal means to hold Israeli leaders accountable to the law, and we work to strengthen all those institutions. We therefore firmly oppose attempts to prosecute Israeli officials in foreign courts as an inherent principle of our dedication to Israeli democracy.

While it’s great to hear that NIF opposes lawfare, this statement means absolutely nothing unless the organization is willing to stop funding organizations that use lawfare tactics against Israel. The New Israel Fund practically is the lawfare movement — its grants basically keep the campaign alive. If NIF cut off financing to lawfare groups, it could cripple the movement.

So while these policy changes are an improvement, it looks like NIF still has a ways to go before it can be considered a respectable pro-Israel group.

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The BDS Movement’s War on Hummus

11.28.2010 - 8:36 AM

As I wrote last week, the U.S. version of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been a resounding failure since its inception. Even the most radical college campuses have ignored its calls to divest from Israel.

Apparently realizing that traditional boycotts haven’t caught on, some BDS activists at Princeton University have launched a new campaign to increase “consumer choice” in the college food court. They say they want to expand the number of hummus brands sold on campus, arguing that the current product, Sabra, supports “crimes” against Palestinians:

The Princeton Committee on Palestine has sponsored a referendum in next week’s USG elections that asks Dining Services to sell an alternative to Sabra hummus in all its retail locations on campus.

PCP started a petition in support of the referendum last Thursday. More than 200 students have signed it, the threshold for getting a referendum on the ballot.

“The Princeton Committee on Palestine objects to the fact that Sabra is the only hummus brand that is offered in most University stores and that students who wish to eat this traditional Arab food are forced to buy a product that is connected to human rights abuses against Arab civilians,” [PCP President Yoel] Bitran wrote in a statement concerning the issue.

“This lack of choice is particularly egregious and violent for Princetonians of Arab descent, who cannot eat the food that is quintessential to their culture unless they are willing to support crimes against their own people,” the statement continued.

According to BDS activists, Sabra contributes to “human rights violations” against Palestinians, since it is partially owned by a company that supports the IDF.

I see no problem with increasing the options of hummus brands at a university, but that’s not what this campaign is about — it’s about creating the false impression that Princeton students support the de-legitimization of Israel. Students voting on the referendum may not even realize that it has anything to do with the divestment movement, since its vague wording contains no hint of a political motive. The referendum reads that, “On behalf of the student body, the USG will make a formal recommendation to University Dining Services that it offer an alternative to Sabra hummus in all University retail locations.”

Despite the deceptive language, it looks like there is still a pretty sizable campus opposition to the referendum. A pro-Israel group called the Tigers for Israel has created a Facebook group opposing it, which had nearly 2,000 members as of last week.

And even though this campaign isn’t an actual boycott, expect BDS activists to make overblown claims about Princeton’s successful “divestment” from Israel if the referendum actually passes. Over at MondoWeiss, Adam Horowitz has already declared “another win” for the BDS movement, after DuPaul University announced that it would stop selling Sabra two weeks ago. (Alas, his enthusiasm was premature, as the school reinstated the sale of the hummus a few days later).

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More Lies from the BDS Movement

11.21.2010 - 2:13 PM

Since its inception, practically every major success claimed by the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has turned out to be either an outright lie or a massive exaggeration. The AJC’s Ben Cohen fact-checks the campaign’s most recent “victory” — its announcement that the largest pension fund in the Netherlands recently divested from Israeli companies — and finds this to be yet another hoax.

While the Dutch pension fund PGGM has reportedly withdrawn its investment from many of the Israeli companies in its portfolio, Cohen discovered that this was due to Israel’s recent admission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — and has absolutely nothing to do with any type of anti-Israel political movement:

I contacted the fund’s managers, the Dutch company PGGM, and they confirmed my suspicions. Back in May, Israel’s economic vibrancy secured its admission into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD,) which gathers together the world’s developed countries. As a result, funds focused upon emerging markets were obliged to withdraw their investments from Israeli companies, who’d moved to the different benchmark for developed markets. Bottom line: this had absolutely nothing to do with politically-motivated divestment.

This is reminiscent of the now-debunked claim that Harvard had divested from Israel over the summer. As the administration pointed out at the time, Israel had merely been re-classified as a “developed” market due to its economic growth. “Our emerging markets holdings were rebalanced accordingly,” said the school.

Other BDS movement “successes” that have been disproved over the past few years include Hampshire College’s alleged divestment in 2009 (which the school administration quickly refuted) and assertions that Motorola had joined the divestment movement.

In fact, the BDS campaign’s only actual victories seem to be getting B-list musicians to cancel concerts in Israel (which, in some cases, have arguably been more of a win for Israel).

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It’s Time to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction J Street

02.18.2010 - 6:26 PM

Solomonia has the details on the latest from the anti-Israel group J Street, which has organized a trip to Israel in partnership with Churches for Middle East Peace. CMEP is a leader in the so-called “BDS movement” — boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. These are the people who want to isolate Israel in the way that the world is currently isolating, say, Iran — which is a tremendous irony, being that J Street is opposed to anything resembling BDS when it comes to the Islamic Republic.

These guys have gone so far off the deep end that I think if Ismail Haniyah invited J Street on a solidarity mission to Gaza City, Jeremy Ben-Ami would have to sit down and think really hard about the offer.

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