(Image source: Vox)

All hell broke loose in New York City last May after a judge threw out a congressional map drawn by the state legislature as part of the 2022 redistricting process. A court-appointed “special master” drew a map that altered districts and created a new 10^th Congressional District that covers part of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. A month before the August 23 primary, there were six viable candidates for that Congressional seat. Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou who won the coveted endorsement of the left-of-center Working Families Party (WFP) and had a ground operation of more than 1,000 volunteers, including actress Cynthia Nixon, had a slight edge over the other candidates. If elected, Niou would strengthen the small but growing effort in Congress to prevent the federal government from writing blank checks for Israel to use in any manner they desire, including its ongoing effort to take land from Palestinians.

In the weeks before the primary, the race between Niou and her main opponent, Dan Goldman, tightened. Goldman, a multi-millionaire heir to Levi-Strauss, hardline Israel supporter, and former federal prosecutor, ran a narrow campaign that focused on his experience leading the first impeachment investigation of Donald Trump for the House Intelligence Committee.

But then Niou announced that she supported BDS – i.e., “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” of Israel – and my heart sank. I knew her campaign was toast.

Informed by the international boycott and divestment movement organized by the African National Congress (ANC) in the second half of the twentieth century to help bring an end to apartheid in South Africa, BDS calls for countries, businesses, and universities to sever all ties with Israel. But, unlike the ANC, which united different factions of political life – the Communist Left, trade unions, and even some Black nationalist organizations – BDS doesn’t have the support of a single major labor union inside Israel (or out), no government body, no major global corporation; not even a significant local government has endorsed it.

Another important difference between the two is that the ANC organized its boycott in order to force South Africa to dismantle apartheid and create a democratic state for all peoples living in the country. On its website, BDS issues a vague call for “Palestinian equality.” But it does not say equality with Jewish Israelis, which is what Palestinians say they want – and surely need if they are going to achieve any measure of self-determination. The implication is that BDS supports the abolition of the state of Israel so that Palestinians can be equal to other peoples in an abstract world.

BDS and its supporters need to question whether in the nearly two decades since the movement’s founding, the BDS tactic has succeeded in ending Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians; and if it has not, what could be done to accomplish that goal. Alarmingly, the rise of an ultra-rightwing reactionary Jewish nationalism in Israel whose intention is to annex all Palestinian land suggests that BDS has not been successful and that another approach is necessary.

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While Niou fully embraced boycotting Israel at the beginning of the short campaign cycle, she moderated her position leading up to election day, especially after taking heat from Jewish voters in liberal Park Slope and more conservative Orthodox Jewish voters in Borough Park. Ten days before the primary, in her endorsement interview with the editorial board of the New York Times, she side-stepped boycotting Israel and said she supported BDS’s right to boycott as a First Amendment issue.

Niou’s effort to extricate herself from backlash illustrates another problem with BDS. In an attempt to save her campaign, she shifted attention away from the victims of U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine to an unrelated topic – when she could have been talking about why, if elected, she would vote against U.S. funding for ongoing crimes against Palestinians.

Goldman, a Modern Orthodox Jew, says Israel is a “democratic beacon in the Middle East.” He supports two states: a secure state for Israel and a demilitarized state for Palestinians, which is more like one state with a colonial subject in tow, not so different from the status quo.

Goldman won the New York Times endorsement. And after pouring $7 million of his own money into the campaign and accepting donations from real estate developer and (ironically) major Trump donor Steve Ross, Goldman won the election with only 25 percent of the vote. He also had the support of the powerful lobbying group, American-Israeli Political Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) United Democracy Project. After the primary, AIPAC released a statement saying, “We are proud to have played a role in defeating Yuh-Line Niou – an anti-Israel candidate who endorses the BDS campaign against Israel.”

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While touting Israel as the “beacon” of democracy, Goldman said nothing about the illegal Jewish settlements that violate international law under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Jewish settlements are so rarely discussed in mainstream media that many Americans who stand on the side of justice for Palestinians – including BDS supporters – appear not to realize there is a difference between occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza; and the state of Israel, which has a population of some twenty percent non-Jewish Arabs, mostly Palestinians, living within its borders. Israeli residents live inside the “Green Line,” meaning the border decided upon in the 1949 ceasefire agreements between the armies of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria – a year after the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land (referred to by Palestinians and their Jewish supporters as the nakba, or “catastrophe”). Since 1967, the Israeli government has been taking land from Palestinians and giving it to Jewish settlers who operate as a colonial expansion apparatus. Entire Palestinian communities have been displaced by settlements. Settlers regularly provoke Palestinian residents, destroy their homes, murder them, and deny them access to their own water and agricultural land. Some 600,000 Jewish Israeli settlers living on occupied Palestinian land restrict the daily movement of some 4.9 million Palestinians.

Although Gaza does not fall directly under Israeli jurisdiction, Israel maintains a blockade that prevents it from trading freely with other nations. Historian Rashid Khalidi calls this occupation “control from without.” Because of this blockade, approximately 47 percent of Gaza’s population is unemployed, more than 64 percent of the population is food insecure, 71 percent live in refugee camps, and, according to the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 1.1 million refugees receive food assistance from the Agency, up from 80,000 in 2000.

Even Mondoweiss, the independent website devoted to U.S. foreign policy and the movement for justice for Palestinians, fails to grasp the difference between occupied Palestine and the state of Israel. On June 1, 2022 Mondoweiss announced a “BDS victory” when General Mills said it would “divest from Israel.” But as Mondoweiss itself noted, the divestment was from “an illegal settlement.” A year earlier, Mondoweiss made the same erroneous claim when Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream decided to stop selling its products in the occupied West Bank: it reported that Ben & Jerry’s was responding to BDS’s call for boycotting of Israel. Since 2005, the government representing the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, has been calling for a boycott of the settlements. Ben and Jerry’s and General Mills were, in fact, responding to the Palestinian Authority and not BDS. If Ben & Jerry’s intention was to boycott Israel, they would have pulled their products from places like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and West Jerusalem, which they have not done.

(Illustration by Mohamad Elaasar for Middle East Eye)

In 2015, the European Union, which does not support BDS, responded to the Palestinian Authority’s demand by issuing guidelines for the labelling of products from Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories so that consumers can make informed decisions about whether to buy products made by settlers. If activists in the U.S. want to organize boycotts against Israel’s illegal occupation, they could follow the EU’s lead. For example, in December 2022, the New York Stock Exchange signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, which could fast-track U.S. investment in companies tied to the illegal settlements. Imagine a divestment campaign targeting institutional investments, including municipal pension funds, universities, and the like – designed not only to undermine Israel’s settler regime but educate Americans about Israel’s heinous treatment of Palestinians living under occupation.

BDS says little about the settlements because to do so would affirm the existence of Israel and BDS regards Israel as an illegitimate state. This might be a logical position, especially after 2018 when Jewish supremacy in Israel was given legal sanction in the Jewish-Nation State Law making the right of self-determination in Israel exclusive to the Jewish people. While perhaps logical, it does nothing to address the ever-evolving crisis. Nir Evron who teaches English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University says Israeli Jews (who recently returned Benjamin Netanyahu to power as head of a new far-right coalition) have never been more united in their support for Jewish domination, adding that nearly half of Jewish Israelis “support the transfer or forced expulsion of Arabs from the country.” The new Israeli government plans to carry out one of the largest expulsions of Palestinians since it occupied the West Bank in 1967 if residents of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank refuse to voluntarily leave their homes.

BDS claims to represent all Palestinians in the region. But Ghassan Fawzi – a Palestinian activist who grew up in Umm el Fahm in Israel about 20 kilometers from the West Bank city of Jenin – says that BDS “denies the voices and the aspirations of Palestinian people living in Palestine who above all want to end the Israeli occupation and build a Palestinian state where they can live in peace and security and with international recognition.” Fawzi now lives in New York City and works in Arabic and Hebrew acquisitions at Columbia University Library. He learned Hebrew in the 1980s while incarcerated in an Israeli prison for seven years as punishment for his political activism – working in coalition with progressive Israeli Jews to advance democracy in Israel. BDS claims to be the “supreme leader of Palestinians,” said Fawzi, but in denying a difference between Israel and occupied Palestine they ironically share with the Israel’s rightwing government a refusal to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority.

“BDS is righteously anti-imperialist in its rhetoric,” says Susie Linfield who writes about left-Zionism in Israel, “but I challenge anyone to show how it has improved the life of even one Palestinian.” BDS is divorced from the day-to-day problems that Palestinians living in the region confront; including job security, protecting their homes from demolition, access to health care and to old age benefits, and outside the West Bank city of Ramallah – where Omar Barghouti, the architect of BDS, lives – the ability for Birzeit University to operate freely as part of an international intellectual community. BDS ignores the civil institutions created by Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel that seek to address these crucial issues.

Full disclosure: I knew Omar Barghouti and his brother Nasser in the early 1990s when we were all graduate students at Columbia University. The First Intifada, the popular uprising in the West Bank and Gaza that erupted spontaneously in 1987 after 20 years of Israeli military occupation, had not yet been squashed by Israel. To contain the uprising, Israel launched a war on Palestinian education, closing schools from kindergarten through university. I was the token Jewish member of Arab Students at Columbia. As university students, we identified with our counterparts in Palestine. We sought to compel Columbia to do the same by condemning the closure of Birzeit University, located not far from where Omar and Nasser were born and raised. We drafted a proposal and gathered signatures from a handful of professors, most notably Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian American public intellectual and literary scholar. After months of doing this work, Nasser and I went to the University Senate meeting (Omar – not one to get involved in the nitty-gritty of political work – did not participate). Nasser and I were young and idealistic and more than a little naive when we arrived at the meeting and took our seats in the balcony. We were completely unprepared to see our sponsor introduce our bill – that we had worked on so diligently – stay on the Senate floor for less than two minutes before it was summarily tabled. Without discussion. Criticizing Israel was beyond the pale on college campuses in those days. We were pariahs. I was called a “self-hating Jew.”

If BDS helps Palestinians and Palestinian Americans living in the United States feel as though they have not been entirely abandoned, it does nothing for the more than 1.5 million refugees and their descendants living in 58 UNWRA camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. and the occupied territories. Samia Hadi was born in the Am’ari refugee camp outside Ramallah. Am’ari was created in 1949 after the U.N. Partition of Palestine. Although her family left for Queens in 1970 when she was seven-years-old, Hadi was shaped by her experiences at Am’ari: open sewers instead of sanitation, schools that did not hold classes, no healthcare – and Israeli soldiers who entered any home they wanted on any pretext. There were “no laws to protect us,” she said. She now lives in Brooklyn with her first-generation Palestinian American husband and two grown children. She is convinced that nothing will change, that there will “never be laws to protect Palestinian rights.” She said that my efforts to encourage U.S. supporters of BDS to stop virtue-signaling and instead force our government to end its unqualified support for Israel – by writing this article — was wasting my time. After more than 40 years of U.S. politicians and journalists framing the Israel-Palestinian conflict as one between equals — and where if either party is a victim, it’s the Israelis – it is no wonder Hadi is so nihilistic.

My conversation with Hadi about Palestinian rights made me think of what political philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself a stateless refugee for some 18 years after fleeing Nazi Germany, wrote about stateless people demanding “the right to have rights.” In an elegant essay in a book by the same name, historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn parses this now famous phrase, calling it Arendt’s theory of “the preconditions in inclusionary citizenship.” Arendt, writes Moyn, regarded projects like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published in 1948 – the same year the U.N. recognized the Jewish state of Israel, which created yet another refugee crisis – as little more than a “set of pleasant normative assertions.” Making a list of “elaborate entitlements” for people without “citizenship,” he argues, was “like offering a detailed inventory of the courses to a lengthy meal in the presence of the starving.” Without a state, Palestinians will never have any of the rights BDS supporters living in the U.S. take for granted.

Omar Barghouti started BDS in 2005, two years after Edward Said died from leukemia. Had he consulted with Said about his plan to initiate a boycott of Israel, Said likely would have advised against it. Said  understood that American Jews wanted Palestinians to acknowledge what he called a “moral complexity” in “the politics of dispossession.” The tragedy for Palestinians, he used to say, was that they were “victims of victims.” American Jews want their suffering, especially during the Holocaust, to be recognized. Said would have said that boycotting Jews is a bad idea. Yet at the same time, he never retreated from decrying the Zionist project and what it means for Palestinians.

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Recent efforts by rightwing politicians to punish companies that boycott Israel is a disproportionate response to the modest number of individuals who embrace BDS. According to a recent Pew Research Study, only five percent of all U.S. adults support BDS. Two percent say they strongly support it, while 84 percent have either never heard of it or have no opinion about it. BDS enjoys its strongest support, a whopping eight percent, from Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) count among BDS’s strongest supporters beyond college campuses. But in 2021, DSA’s National Political Committee de-chartered its BDS Working Group, transferring the work to the organization’s International Committee. This came after months of infighting about whether to expel Representative Jamaal Bowman for not supporting BDS (in the end they did not), voting to approve $1 billion additional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and joining a J Street-sponsored trip to Israel and the West Bank. (J Street is a liberal Zionist organization that supports dismantling all Jewish settlements in the West Bank and creating two states).

In 2020 Bowman, an African American former middle-school principal, shocked the Democratic political establishment when he successfully primaried 16-term incumbent Eliot Engel, chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, an ally of AIPAC and a good friend to Israel (sometimes taking positions to the right of Netanyahu). Bowman won with the backing of the Hudson Valley DSA. Until the end of 2022, Bowman’s district included Riverdale in the Bronx, home to a sizeable Orthodox Jewish community. After court-ordered redistricting shifted the 16^th District to mostly Westchester County — including a mixture of working-class majority Black and Hispanic cities like Yonkers (where Bowman lives) and wealthier and more educated mostly-white cities like Scarsdale – Bowman handily won the Democratic primary against two barely credible candidates.

The Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a pro-Israel organization, which supported six other congressional candidates in New York City, would like nothing better than to defeat Bowman in a primary election. In 2021 Bowman was one of the original cosponsors with Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) of H.R. 2590, which, if passed, would assure that U.S. taxpayer money not be used to detain Palestinian children, destroy Palestinian homes, or persist in annexing West Bank land. During Israel’s most recent military assault on Gaza, in May 2021, Bowman joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to try and block the sale of $735 million in bombs to Israel. He was also a co-sponsor of the so-called Abraham Accords, the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.A.E., Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco written during the last year of the Trump Administration in order to politically isolate the Palestinian Authority. But after returning from Israel/Palestine, Bowman withdrew his co-sponsorship of the Israel Relations Normalization Act, saying that he originally supported the legislation because he believed it was “a path to a two-state solution.” But he said that his “experience on the ground” in the West Bank and “further conversations with constituents led [him] to see this is not the right step to fulfill these goals.”

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Niou’s campaign should be a cautionary tale for all who seek to support the aspirations of Palestinians within and outside Israel. It seems that Niou realized the folly of her well-meaning ways after the primary when her campaign posted an Israel Policy Position Paper on its website outlining her support of the McCollum Amendment, opposition to additional settlements, and the reinstatement of the Iran Nuclear Deal. There was no mention of BDS.

BDS will never achieve what most Palestinians say they want. Instead of boycotting Israel, U.S. activists could boycott settlement products. At the same time, they could educate Americans about the role the settlements play in Israel’s plan to annex all of Palestine. Rather than supporting BDS, advocates should re-direct their attention to forcing the U.S. to stop providing military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological cover for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. So long as the U.S. continues on the same trajectory, Israel will not abandon its brutal policies.

Adele Oltman is a historian, teacher, journalist, and activist. Author of Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow, she is working on an international history of public health and social medicine.