BDS and Anti-BDS Mobilization: Rational or Epiphenomenal?

In 2019, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank closely associated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, published an explicitly Gramscian analysis of the threat to Israel posed by the “Red-Green Alliance” (right-wing speak for leftists and Muslims who criticize Israel) and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The author, Eyal Lewin, attributed the strategies used by this alliance (“which, like a Trojan horse, threatens to destroy Israel from within”) to Antonio Gramsci's teachings about how to fight a “war of position,” a long-term struggle over the scope and vocabularies of contestation, advising that a “rightist pushback” means “embracing Gramsci's ideas” (Lewin 2019).¹ This exhortation to learn from BDS about how to fight against it became a regular theme within a panoply of Israel advocacy polemicists, foundations, strategists, NGOs, think-tank analysts, Israeli government officials, and consultants.

This recognition of similarities between BDS and Israeli efforts to fight it reflects an analytically and theoretically significant fact: the developmental trajectories of boycott and anti-boycott mobilization are incontrovertibly entangled. Evoking a strong response from its target is an important step for a transnational boycott movement in gaining political traction, and BDS activists have been well attuned to Israeli responses to their efforts.

In this article, we analyze patterns of BDS mobilization and Israeli responses within the same conceptual-theoretical framework and assess competing explanations for their trajectories. We ask how much can be attributed to experience and learning versus how much is explained by the outcome of struggles among rivals within Palestinian and Israeli politics to gain prominence, resources, and influence relative to one another. As a shorthand, we will refer to these two explanations as “rationalist” and “political competition” models.² In the rationalist accounts of BDS and anti-BDS mobilization, we organize our analysis around three successive “phases” of development with two inflection points. Each phase represents a dominant pattern of rationally guided mobilization, and movement from one phase to the next occurs through learning and adaptation to changing political circumstances. In the political competition accounts, since no rational process of development is assumed or imagined, no “progress” from “phase to phase” can be discerned, so instead of phases or stages, we discuss different “periods.” In each period, a distinctive pattern of competition is apparent, but movement across the two inflection points is attributed, not to the kind of learning process outlined in our rationalist treatment of “phases,” but to the changing outcome of competition among different groups whose positions, skills, and interests encouraged them to see the challenges they faced in very different ways.

We find that patterns of change in both BDS and counter-BDS mobilizations can be usefully depicted using both strategic learning and political competition frames. Politics is an important driver of policy within both Israel and the BDS movement, but the difference in balance of power between the state and civil society—as between Israel and its advocates, on one side, and the Palestinians, BDS, and their allies on the other—led to strategic convergence by Israel in its counter-BDS efforts but not (yet at any rate) on the Palestinian side. We end by suggesting why the crucial battles seem to be taking place in the United States and Europe and by pointing to opportunities to learn from other transnational boycotts and reactions to them.

Palestinian-Led Boycott Mobilization: A Rationalist View

Rationalist explanations for boycott mobilization are commonly advanced by both BDS organizers and by the movement's most vociferous opponents. They portray BDS as relatively unitary, consensus-based, and broadly representative of Palestinian society and national interests. They explain its development as strategic adaptation to changing circumstances guided by the movement's organizers.

The origins of BDS are commonly traced to a 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa (Diker 2016; Erakat 2010). At the conference, NGO participants drew comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa and the South African NGO Coalition, SANGOCO, advocated cultivating a boycott movement similar to that which had successfully challenged apartheid. At the end of the conference, the final NGO Forum Declaration called for “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state” with “comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel” (Durban Declaration and Programme of Action 2001; NGO Forum Declaration 2001).³

Meanwhile in the United States, at UC Berkeley, students began mobilizing for divestment as early as February 2001. Noura Erakat identifies this moment as marking the first university divestment campaign and the genesis of a movement that spread to other campuses, churches, and community organizations over the next few years, prior to the BDS call (Erakat 2010). By one count, in October 2002, petitions for divestment had circulated to more than fifty US campuses (Gerstenfeld 2003). At the height of the Second Intifada in 2002, a high-profile campaign was launched in the UK by Hilary and Steven Rose, who called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and are commonly credited with the initiation of the academic boycott, as distinct from the student-led divestment movement (Beckett 2002; “More Pressure for Mid East Peace” 2002; Rose and Rose 2002). This campaign advocated a moratorium on research collaboration and EU funding to Israel “unless and until Israel abides by UN resolutions and opens serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians along the lines proposed in many peace plans, including those most recently sponsored by the Saudis and the Arab League” (“More Pressure for Mid East Peace” 2002). These relatively narrow goals and loosely coordinated organizing techniques were driven by calls from different solidarity networks, one of the most important of which formed in Palestine itself. In Ramallah in April 2004, building on two years of prior organizing, civil society activists launched the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).⁴ Its organizers built on accumulating calls for academic boycotts and offered a statement of principles to guide dispersed activism.

Following this early experimentation with small-scale decentralized boycotts, in 2005 BDS itself emerged as a movement making a formal claim on behalf of Palestinian society and asserting leadership of a global campaign to realize Palestinian rights—end of occupation, right of return, and equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. From this point onward, the history of BDS mobilization may be divided into three phases.

Phase 1 in a rationalist account of BDS began in 2005 with the BDS call and ended in late 2008 with the opportunities for BDS expansion associated with Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip in Operation Cast Lead. In rationalist terms, the timing of the emergence of BDS was a Palestinian response to the shifting capacities of national organizations. As Abdel Razzaq Takriti argued in his analysis of the history of pre-BDS boycotts, “Boycott generally gained centrality in moments when national structures were seeking an alternative to timid diplomacy and negotiations but were unable or hesitant to carry out a more comprehensive extralegal strategy” (Takriti 2019: 85). Thus, at a moment of low capacity, foundering diplomacy, and exhaustion, ambitious Palestinian activists organized a transnational boycott movement as a nonviolent alternative, anchored in human rights, and international law, to carry forward the pursuit of Palestinian national aims. Its initiation can thus be explained as the result of learning about the failures of elite diplomacy and armed struggle that led to a strategic shift toward nonviolent and internationalized popular mobilization (Munayyer 2016). Looking to South Africa as an example and for intellectual and material support in planning, and building on arguments of the need for the Palestinian struggle to shift to a “rights-based” as opposed to objective-based approach, BDS organizers articulated a strategic program for political change.

During this first phase, the predominant focus was on building BDS into a movement by developing a core organizational structure, crystallizing its platform and methods, and extending its networks of support. The call was designed to provide an anchor for solidarity campaigns and a focal point for “glocalist” activists to unite around a common purpose and strategic vision. The first BDS National Conference in Ramallah in 2007 and the establishment of the Boycott National Committee (BNC) formalized the structure of the movement, coordinated its strategy, and channeled resources for growth and development.⁵ The BNC was designed specifically to protect the institution's autonomy from domination by any political party or faction (Morrison 2015: 185). From a rationalist perspective, the BNC can be figured as the center of strategic planning. Its purpose was less to orchestrate activities than to steer policy and channel resources across a series of interlocking campaigns (academic, cultural, economic, trade union) in a global network of advocacy for Palestinian rights.

Leaders of the movement sought to reverse national fragmentation and unite three core Palestinian constituencies: citizens of Israel, residents of the West Bank and Gaza, and the diaspora. By demanding fulfillment of rights claims for all three constituencies, BDS leaders sought to expand Palestinian political horizons beyond elite negotiations toward independent statehood. They offered instead a focus on rights, decolonization, and equality, not to be achieved directly via negotiation, but politically, by the sustained exertion of international pressure. From the outset, the BNC was clear that the boycott it advocated was “comprehensive,” meaning that its target was Israel and that it considered ending occupation, rights of refugees, and equality for the citizens of Israel to be indivisible issues. In contrast with “selective” boycotts that targeted the settlements and occupation, the “success” (and termination) of BDS would hinge on the realization of rights across all three constituencies.

In their efforts to mobilize broad sectors of Palestinian society, BDS leaders formulated a strategically ambiguous platform that could serve as a common baseline for resistance. Thus, although BDS branded itself as a nonviolent movement with the expectation that this framing would resonate with Western audiences, counteract portrayals of the Palestinians as violent extremists, and increase the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle (Makhoul 2013), the BNC also included members of groups that had not renounced armed struggle.⁶ Organizers cultivated a similar strategic ambiguity to overcome challenges that the comprehensive program posed for building the movement. Critics charged that BDS would undermine the international consensus on cooperation as the basis for a negotiated two-state solution and produce collateral damage on the ground that would hurt parties desirous of peace. BDS leaders learned that this criticism and their own comprehensive program could be a problem for recruitment, so its leaders demonstrated pragmatic flexibility and encouraged potential supporters to give whatever support they were willing to offer, even if that fell short of the full measures advocated by the movement. In practice if not in principle, they accepted that many international sympathizers seeking to act in solidarity with the Palestinians would, for the time being, only accept a selective boycott. BDS would thus announce “victories” whenever organizations voted to boycott or divest from settlement goods or when corporations canceled contracts in the occupied territories, even if these actions were only symbolic and often explicitly not endorsements of the BDS movement itself.

Phase 2, marked by dynamic expansion in the visibility of BDS and by opportunistic shifts of emphasis, lasted from late 2008 through 2016. This new period of opportunity arose following Israel's assault on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead and its horizons expanded greatly with Israel's seizure of the Mavi Marmora in 2010 (Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee 2010). BDS exploited the spectacular violence and civilian deaths of the successive Gaza Wars, the visibility of settlement expansion, and the absence of a peace process with realistic chances of success to advance arguments that were already part of the core BDS repertoire: the Israeli regime and fundamental denial of Palestinian rights, not only the settlements and occupation, were the core problems, and in the absence of effective diplomacy, building international pressure through civil society was the key to change.

In this context, BDS organizers rapidly intensified their campaigns, expanding the organizational infrastructure and capacities. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and Standing Rock protests in the United States provided further opportunities for them to build transnational alliances (Awad 2020). They identified strategically located networks of potential supporters and sought to cultivate relations of solidarity with left and progressive movements through an emphasis on shared values, anchored in claims to oppose “all forms of racism and discrimination, including anti-Black racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism” (Barghouti 2020: 10). These relations were then expanded into explicit alliances with race, gender, and climate justice movements, and with indigenous groups in the Americas that shared comparable experiences of discrimination, dispossession, and repression.

BDS organizers reported a sense of rapid growth during phase 2, yet its leaders were aware that the material impact of the movement was not substantial enough to make the prospects of putting real economic pressure on Israel more than a distant hope. One way they learned to rationalize this discrepancy was to explain that boycott advocacy accomplished essential pedagogical tasks in a long-term war of position. Thus US-based organizer Yousef Munayyer argued that in addition to any economic impact of BDS, “there are also educational and psychological effects that are perhaps equally important” (Munayyer 2016: 285). Scholarly analyses took a similar view, portraying BDS as part of a counterhegemonic movement (Bakan and Abu-Laban 2009) central to “shifting the terms of engagement” (Feldman 2019) around Israel and Palestine.

Illustratively, a BNC coordinator in Palestine, Hind Awwad, reported that by 2010 BDS had “ended the Israeli left's domination of the discourse which was limited to the occupation, dismissing the rights of Palestinians in Israel and the rights of the refugees. BDS has allowed us to set the terms of the discourse and define our rights” (Nieuwhof 2010). Similarly, Omar Barghouti claimed that the “most consequential achievement of the BDS movement in the first five years had been to expose the ‘essential nature’ of Israel's regime” and to have inflicted “irreparable damage” on “Israel's image as a ‘democratic’ state seeking ‘peace’” (Barghouti 2011: 11). In this view, BDS strategy was to “educate” audiences about the political situation facing Palestinians and Israel's violations of international law. This would be accomplished by reframing and narrating high-publicity events like attacks on Gaza to argue that the core problem was the fundamental denial of Palestinian rights. BDS would then offer nonviolent opportunities to mobilize in solidarity with Palestinians. BDS organizers emphasized these pedagogical arguments during phase 2 because they provided a narrative of success where discursive change was occurring, but material impact was clearly lacking.

Phase 3 was marked by intensified struggle between BDS and its opponents, as the movement faced the Trump-Netanyahu alliance and well-organized anti-BDS mobilization (detailed below). Although efforts to criminalize boycotts in the United States and the EU stumbled over violations of free speech, fighting these lawfare campaigns required substantial mobilization of resources by BDS supporters. BDS defended itself by redoubling alliance-building efforts with grassroots and civil society movements and exploiting high-profile controversies to generate positive publicity. The Trump administration's embrace of the Israeli Right and the increased visibility of the core issues in the conflict enabled BDS leaders to situate their cause effectively in the new political landscape, where US political polarization created space for BDS to use the boycott as a wedge issue in the Democratic Party and progressive civil society (Munayyer 2021). BDS was able to build alliances with groups that had not previously supported the movement but were concerned about the anti-democratic initiatives being pursued to fight it. In addition to highlighting the need for new strategies of resistance and asserting their central role in the struggle for Palestinian rights, BDS emphasized its intersectionality and anti-racist, anti-colonial credentials, thereby positioning itself within a political bloc opposed to a global new Right.

In this way the struggle with its opponents helped BDS by giving it publicity and bringing it, albeit partially, into the progressive mainstream, parts of which were becoming increasingly critical of Israel. BDS pushed the language of apartheid and the model for change represented by South Africa further into progressive spaces and championed the idea of a “rights-based” approach for Palestinian advocacy, which gained ground and indeed showed signs of displacing the “two-state vs. one-state” debate (Hassan et al. 2021). Where progressive civil society remained resistant to the full BDS agenda, smaller-scale boycotts (especially selective ones targeting the settlements and occupation) grew in popularity, discussions about conditioning aid to Israel proliferated, and during the height of the annexation crisis, threats of sanctions from the EU were prominent. The impact of these changes remained even after the Trump administration left the scene.

Traced through these three phases, the rationalist explanation for the trajectory of BDS mobilization demonstrates that the movement has displayed a reasonably high degree of learning and strategic adaptation to changing political conditions. It does not, however, account for how enduring divisions and divergent interests among Palestinians impacted the developmental trajectory of BDS. Palestinian analysts and activists often claim that BDS has broad, cross-factional support from Palestinian civil society. Yet the mantra-like repetition of this claim obscures the absence of sustained support for BDS from the official Palestinian leadership and the governing apparatus it controls as well as the reality of “creeping normalization” on the ground while BDS expanded abroad.

Political Competition and BDS Mobilization

The political competition approach addresses these limitations and frames the evolution of BDS as the result of competition among stakeholders within and attached to the Palestinian struggle. From this perspective we ask who and what interests benefit from advancing different strategies for pursuing Palestinian rights and who and what interests are hurt by them. This approach yields a tale, not of learning and the adaptive development of task-appropriate techniques, but of patterns of BDS activity changing as a function of competition among Palestinians over power, resources, and the direction of the national struggle. The central axis of division in this struggle pits grassroots civil society activists against the PA (Palestinian Authority), overlapping PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) leadership, and an allied capitalist class, although as the analysis will suggest, divisions within these groupings also affect mobilizational patterns.⁷

Despite the rhetoric and aspiration of galvanizing national unity, the reality is that some Palestinian interest groups would benefit from the BDS program while others would be hurt by it. Considering the three core constituencies represented in the BDS call, grassroots activists among Palestinian citizens of Israel and the diaspora see in the boycott opportunities to increase their political stature and representation after having been marginalized by the PLO and PA during and after the Oslo process. Palestinian citizens of Israel have been key contributors to BDS organizing because they are local but not within the jurisdiction of the PA, and thus enjoy a freedom of expression and action not available to those within reach of the PA's security apparatuses. The Palestinian diaspora has naturally been essential for organizing the networked power of BDS and fighting battles with opponents abroad. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have expressed consistent widespread support for BDS in principle, but in practice, their structural economic dependence on Israel presents distinct challenges for a sustained boycott.

From the origins of the Palestinian BDS movement, organizers have been aware that successful anti-apartheid mobilization in South Africa was built upon strong relations and complementary action between activists inside and outside the country. Anti-apartheid activists have advised Palestinians that international pressure was only one of the four pillars of the liberation struggle, that it was accompanied by noncooperation campaigns on the inside, and that it was most successful when coordinated with, and supported by, South African resistance organizations (Friedman 2013; Ngeleza and Nieuwhof 2005). Thus far, the Palestinian-led BDS movement has not mobilized such complementary “domestic” action nor obtained such support from the PA and PLO. The PA, threatened by young and ambitious civil society activists, has actively inhibited the growth of BDS and repressed popular mobilization. Instead of complementary action, national structures have constrained the scope and efficacy of BDS, both locally and abroad, and facilitated normalization on the ground.

Nathan Thrall's analysis illustrates the competition approach to understanding BDS, portraying it as a challenge to both Israel and the Palestinian leadership, one that reframes the national struggle, has “shamed” the PA as collaborationist, and “annoyed” the PLO by challenging its claim to be the exclusive and internationally recognized representative of the Palestinians (Thrall 2018). Taking this perspective, we locate period 1 in the evolution of the BDS strategy as lasting from 2005 through 2009. It began when the official launch of the BDS campaign in 2005 posed a challenge to the Palestinian leadership without renouncing diplomacy or the PA's state-building project. Instead BDS organizers stressed the need to expand and intensify Palestinian international diplomacy in pursuit of a post-Oslo strategy. Illustratively, they expressed frustration with the PA's failure to fully exploit the 2004 International Criminal Court opinion on the separation barrier/wall and insisted on using the language of international law and human rights as the touchstone for Palestinian advocacy. During period 1 the extent of the challenge BDS could pose to the PA was not yet apparent.

Throughout this period, the peace process carousel was still revolving, incentivizing the PLO and PA elites to negotiate with Israel under the pretense that they could thereby achieve statehood, even though many understood and admitted privately that the prospects of success were minimal or nonexistent (Lustick 2020). The PA had de facto supplanted the PLO in most of its functions, and the elites that occupied its offices were dependent on international aid for reconstruction after the Second Intifada and for the funds that enabled them to maintain clientelist networks and their privileged socioeconomic position. Also desirous of security coordination with Israel to protect against a growing threat from Hamas, the PA leadership remained reluctant to accept BDS demands to turn decisively away from pseudo-negotiations and cooperation with Israel. The conflict between these elites and BDS was heightened in 2009 by the internal Palestinian conflict over the uses of the United Nations’ Goldstone Report, which was sharply critical of Israel's attack on Gaza. BDS organizers saw the report as an opportunity to wage a major international campaign but the PA, under pressure from Israel and the United States, delayed its official adoption by the UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council). Omar Barghouti described this move as “nothing short of a betrayal of Palestinian civil society's effective … BDS campaign against Israel,” just as it was leaping “into a new, advanced phase … [and had] finally reached the mainstream” (Barghouti 2009). Barghouti's call for the dissolution of the PA signaled a new intensity in the antagonism between BDS and the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. This antagonism elicited a response from the PA that marked the beginning of period 2.

Period 2 lasted from 2010 to 2011. It was defined by a brief move toward convergence around boycott by both civil society actors and the PA. In late 2009, grassroots Palestinian activists renewed a local boycott of goods from settlements in the West Bank (Global Nonviolent Action Database 2012). They targeted the settlements and promoted Palestinian self-sufficiency by encouraging local (national) production. Both the PA and Hamas began to timidly support this selective boycott in 2010. PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad launched a highly visible campaign by publicly burning $1 million worth of settlement-made products in the West Bank town of Salfit and opening a “National Dignity Fund” to support local production and distribution (Prusher 2010; Waked 2010). Ziad Toame, then director-general of the Ministry of National Economy's Department of Industry, Trade, and Consumer Services, was assigned responsibility to report boycott violations and confiscate goods from the violators. This campaign included a ban on the sale of settlement products in local markets, but not, per the BDS call, a comprehensive boycott of Israel, as Israeli goods continued to be permitted to be sold in Palestinian markets (Sherwood 2010). These moves were a reaction to harsh criticism from the public. Leaders needed to demonstrate that they could provide more than stale diplomacy and rhetoric. Limited support of a selective boycott was a low-cost way to engage in a popular struggle without disturbing the PA's sources of economic and security aid. Politically, the importance of this campaign was its potential as a strategy that could unite competing sectors of Palestinian society and leadership. But convergence was partial and coordination scanty.

After a year of relatively strict implementation, the departments in charge of the PA campaign lost both the capacity and the will to continue enforcement. Occasional announcements of confiscations persisted, but the character of the local markets and their connections to Israel made it easy to circumvent regulations. This episode suggested that although in theory BDS could be invigorated without governmental participation, its “real success” would require adoption by political parties in power and opposition (Khalidi 2016). Instead of such adoption, the PA's foray was instrumental and characterized by Nadia Hijab as an effort “to ‘manage’ both the popular struggle and BDS, providing funding for some segments of the former and claiming the mantle of BDS with a campaign targeting only Israeli settlement products” (Hijab 2010). Breakdown of this flimsy arrangement marked the end of period 2, when the PA effectively abandoned the selective boycott.

The final period in our analysis, period 3 (see figure 1), began in 2012. It has been characterized by increasingly explicit rivalry between the PA and rights-based civil society organizations, including BDS. Palestinian analysts continued to remark on the discrepancy between the growth of BDS abroad and the difficulties it faced within the occupied territories, expressing concern about the role of the PA in preventing the campaign's growth and about creeping normalization in areas under the PA's nominal control. These themes became the focus of the fourth BDS national conference in 2013. During one panel, the PA's Minister of Economy Jawad Naji was pressed by attendees about why the 2010 campaign had been abandoned and why there was evidence of normalization, but Naji denied abatement of the campaign, refused to acknowledge any joint projects that could be considered normalization, and was eventually compelled to leave the conference (Winstanley 2013). Especially since the failure of the Kerry initiative to advance the peace process in 2013–14 and the ensuing Gaza war, the rationale for refusing to boycott Israel was subjected to increased criticism by the Palestinian public, which largely came to see the PA as repressing dissent and cooperating with Israel to the detriment of the national struggle.

Three patterns of BDS mobilization separated by two inflection points

Citation: Israel Studies Review 37, 3; 10.3167/isr.2022.370303

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Three patterns of BDS mobilization separated by two inflection points

Citation: Israel Studies Review 37, 3; 10.3167/isr.2022.370303

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Three patterns of BDS mobilization separated by two inflection points

Citation: Israel Studies Review 37, 3; 10.3167/isr.2022.370303

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The response by the PLO and PA has been inconsistent, with variation evident over time and within the organizations. On the one hand, official representatives continued to claim to want a negotiated two-state solution based on cooperation and Abbas infamously declared security coordination to be “sacred,” while on the other hand, these same elites have launched internationalization campaigns to circumvent Israel and threatened to annul the Oslo agreements and cease cooperation.⁸ Although observers have attributed this inconsistency to an absence of strategy, this behavior is readily explicable from the perspective of political competition within the Palestinian struggle.

The pattern of competition that defines this period is apparent in a series of brief campaigns by the PLO and the PA to end security and economic cooperation with Israel, each of which was more symbolic than material insofar as it lacked both a substantial commitment of resources and staying power. For example, in 2015 the PLO Central Committee voted to end security cooperation with Israel in a resolution that was formally if not practically binding on the PA and advocated support for the BDS campaign. In 2018, the PLO announced official adoption of BDS, and then in 2020 the PA halted security and civil cooperation with Israel for six months, although the cessation was tentative and accompanied by tacit cooperation maintained via indirect contacts. As with each prior campaign, it was subsequently and rather quickly abandoned (Ofek 2017; Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee 2018). These campaigns are best understood as tactical responses to Israeli moves and reflections of maneuvering within the Palestinian arena rather than real support of the BDS strategy, despite formal resolutions encouraging the international boycott campaign (Melhem 2016). These cycles of short-term tactical campaigns of non-cooperation were not generated by sudden changes of heart by PA officials about the proper direction of national strategy, but by an expectation of their ability to mobilize needed resources by declaring a boycott: attention from concerned international parties, extra financial support from donors, and most importantly, popular legitimacy within the domestic arena.

Yet these expectations were not enitrely realized. Incumbent elites in the PA with interests tied to security and economic cooperation with Israel have strong incentives to avoid the severing of those relations, but both they and oppositional elites understand that popular struggle—including but not limited to the boycott—is a way to increase legitimacy and political standing in the Palestinian public. Incumbents are thus suspended between structural dependence on Israel and the potential benefits of appealing to a form of popular resistance with widespread legitimacy vis-à-vis the Palestinian public. This situation explains the contradictions and inconsistencies in the positions of the PA: Palestinian officials partake in tactical boycotts, invoke popular struggle, and gesture toward organizing a “resistance economy” (Dana 2020), but benefit from deeply institutionalized positions of power that are dependent upon security coordination with Israel and opportunities for private gain associated with the kinds of cooperation with Israelis referred to by its critics as “creeping normalization.”⁹

Despite protestations of unity, it is difficult to hide the reality of intensified antagonism between the official Palestinian leadership and BDS. In 2016, well into period 3, Omar Barghouti argued that realization of the BDS strategy was “primarily blocked by a complicit Palestinian officialdom that lacks a democratic mandate, principles, and vision” and resists diplomatic and political work with foreign governments to isolate Israel (Barghouti 2016). The endurance of this antagonism could be seen in 2021, when, after the death of the activist Nizar Banat in the custody of PA security services, the BNC released a statement calling for international support in the Palestinian struggle against internal repression (Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee 2021). Oppositional factions within Palestinian politics are well attuned to these tensions and prepared to exploit them by associating themselves with grassroots resistance and popular struggle with which BDS identifies itself. Marwan Barghouti's faction of Fatah provides one example, and a similar dynamic has been on display with Hamas support of nonviolent forms of popular struggle, such as BDS and the 2018 Great March of Return.

This analysis of political competition suggests that BDS on the “inside,” as one dimension of Palestinian anti-normalization and popular struggle, has faced substantially more challenges than it has internationally. Moreover, effective coordination between the “inside” and “outside” has been weak and has limited international growth, especially efforts to expand into the “S” (sanctions) of BDS. The absence of convergence around boycott can be explained by the reluctance of powerful elites to support a strategy that would undermine their own standing and hurt their material interests. Yet these same elites are aware of their increasingly precarious political position and have thus sought to manage BDS, invoking boycotts during times of crisis, but no conjuncture has yet materialized that has driven real and enduring convergence.

To the extent the political competition analysis provided here is valid, growth of BDS is less dependent on strategic calculation of its impact on Israel than it is on the perception by elites that they can mobilize critical bases of support through boycott campaigns. That in turn implies an increasing turn toward BDS—both local noncooperation and support for the international campaign—if or when the PA collapses or loses substantial support from Israel and/or the international community. Those same conditions would redound to the benefit of BDS, based on its commitment, not to a policy-driven negotiated arrangement, but to the kind of discursive and political-cultural transformation associated with the long-term war of position in which it is engaged.

A Rationalist View of Israeli Responses to BDS

A rationalist narrative of Israel's response to BDS is readily formulated. The Zionist experience with Arab boycotts made it natural for Israeli policy makers to expect that adversary use of that weapon could be effectively countered, and perhaps even turned to advantage, by conventional diplomatic and economic responses. In April 1936, the Arab Higher Committee declared a general strike and agricultural boycott in Palestine targeting both the British and the Jews. Jews in Palestine responded by enhancing an economic self-reliance to which Zionist leaders had always aspired (Porath 1977: 174–176; Shapira 1992: 220, 236). After 1948, the State of Israel responded effectively to the Arab League economic boycott with traditional hasbara (propaganda), by using alliances with great powers, including protective legislation within the United States, clandestine evasions, and by launching a counter-boycott of companies honoring the Arab League demand.

Seen as a process of adaptive learning, Israeli responses to BDS feature three phases, separated by two inflection points. In phase 1 (2001–2008) Israeli policymakers were not particularly alarmed by calls for a global boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel that developed between the Durban conference in 2001 and the Palestinian civil society call for a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions issued in 2005 (see Figure 2). Indeed, until 2009, most Israeli strategists, policy makers, and “pro-Israel” activists either ignored BDS or treated it as insufficiently consequential to outweigh the risk of giving it the attention it craved by responding to it as an important threat.¹⁰ This phase ended following worldwide condemnation of the destructiveness of Israel's war on Gaza in 2009 (Operation Cast Lead), and the surge in BDS activity associated with the bloody seizure by Israeli commandos of the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla's” flagship—the Mavi Marmora—in 2010. These developments ushered in phase 2. From 2010 to 2016, most contributors to Israeli discussions about BDS agreed that while BDS produced only irritating and inconvenient challenges in the cultural and legal arenas, and no immediate threat of significant material damage, it did pose a major threat of delegitimization. Virtually all participants in this debate advocated a major mobilization of resources to confront the problem, while disagreeing about how the counter-BDS and counter-delegitimization campaign should be conducted (Israeli and Hatuel-Radoshitzky 2015; Matias 2014; Reut Institute 2010b; Rynhold 2014). Following a devastating critique of the government's response to BDS issued by the State Comptroller of Israel's office in 2016, a third phase began. Phase 3 has been characterized by widespread agreement on what needs to be done and how—a strategy combining Israeli government surveillance and clandestine action against BDS activists on the one hand and on the other, programs to catalyze and subsidize “pro-Israel” networks to respond locally and semi-autonomously to BDS initiatives.

Three patterns of Israeli responses to BDS separated by two inflection points

Citation: Israel Studies Review 37, 3; 10.3167/isr.2022.370303

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Three patterns of Israeli responses to BDS separated by two inflection points

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Three patterns of Israeli responses to BDS separated by two inflection points

Citation: Israel Studies Review 37, 3; 10.3167/isr.2022.370303

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In this framing, Israel appears as a rational actor, learning from early underestimation of the challenge of BDS. In phase 2 it subjected different alternatives to critical scrutiny, choosing a strategy that learned from BDS itself about how to fight for large scale change in arenas not dominated by the power and interests of individual states. The stakes of this kind of contest pertained to international agendas, the languages of international discourse about Israel and the Palestinians, and the burdens of expectations placed on Israel versus the Palestinians by the outcomes of these “soft-power” conflicts. In Gramscian terms, Israel moved beyond responding to BDS as a matter of ordinary politics, for example, using pressure politics to achieve anti-BDS legislation or to sway influential. It supplemented those efforts with extralegal tactics, what Gramsci called “war of maneuver” techniques. These included clandestine surveillance, intimidation, and smear tactics. Israel now also embraced a lengthy, worldwide “war of position” via construction of networks of heavily subsidized, but only loosely coordinated, hubs of resistance, to combat the Palestinian narrative, contain BDS and associated campaigns of delegitimization, and to launch discursive counterattacks (Blau 2017).

One element missing from Israel's response to BDS has been an emphasis on denying or refuting critiques of Israeli policies BDS activists offer. In the past, Israeli hasbara (propaganda) efforts sought substantively to rebut claims and criticisms against Zionism in general and Israeli government policies in particular. But in the counter-BDS campaign it has waged in this phase it seldom challenges the merits of specific accusations against the Zionist movement or against Israel for discrimination or abuses against Palestinians, infringements of international law, or failures to advance workable solutions to the conflict. To be sure, books and monographs on how to counter BDS, and the larger campaign of “delegitimization” it is portrayed as exemplifying, often include final sentences gesturing toward the problems caused by some Israeli actions and the advisability of changes in policies. But these points are standardly characterized as “beyond the scope of the present work.”¹¹

Israeli Responses to BDS as a Process of Political Competition

Military and intelligence officials have played a dominant role in defining Israeli foreign policy and national security priorities, shaping acceptable terms of debate, and delineating the range of plausible solutions. From the perspective of most bitkhonistim (security experts), the key question about a potential problem has always been akin to that ascribed to Stalin: How many divisions does the Pope have? Real problems, for them, are a function of “hard power”—military capabilities, proven willingness to use force, and geopolitical realities. From this perspective it was natural to dismiss or downplay warnings that Palestinian activists and their sympathizers could, non-violently, threaten Israeli policies or raise questions about the state's right to exist. In period 1 (2001–2009) this perspective dominated. But the global challenge of “delegitimization,” isolation, and consignment of Israel to pariah status, offered opportunities to ambitious non-bitkhonist elites, with other skill sets, reputations, and resources.

Thus, not until 2010 was BDS, or the wider delegitimization campaign Israel advocates have taken it to represent, the subject of even one of hundreds of studies, reports, and commentaries issued by Israel's most widely consulted security affairs think tank at the time, the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA). When the first such report was published, by the Center's Director, Efraim Inbar, it avoided mentioning BDS, rejected talk of Israel's “isolation” as left-wing propaganda, and minimized threats of delegitimization as something Jews have always experienced (Inbar 2010). Similar treatment of the BDS threat as insignificant can be found in the reports of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (Shay 2014) and the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center, whose sparse and dismissive treatment of the issue between 2011 and 2019 focused on what it assessed as the failed mobilization efforts by Palestinian BDS organizers in the West Bank (Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center 2011, 2014).

But what was a sideshow or a non-problem for these hardline military analysts, was a real threat and a real opportunity for their “soft-power” competitors within the arena of Israeli politics and Israel advocacy. For those seeking to challenge the dominance of the bikhonistim, a scary, non-militarized, global, and civil society-based threat to Israel was a nearly ideal problem. Whatever threat BDS posed to Israel, for Israeli think tanks and Israel advocates oriented toward public diplomacy, international law, international civil society, and international public opinion, BDS was an unignorable opportunity to challenge bitkhonist dominance by advancing their analyses as correct, their skills as crucial, and their claim on resources as justified. This was true whether the political views advanced were right-wing or center-left.

For example, NGO Monitor is a right-wing Israel advocacy organization devoted to “exposing” the nefarious activities of NGOs deemed inimical to Israel. Although it did not begin publishing reports and commentaries about BDS until some years after the BDS movement's founding, NGO Monitor began focusing on the threat of international boycotts in 2005, and on BDS specifically in 2008 (NGO Monitor Website). The organization's founder, Gerald Steinberg, identified these threats as legacies of the 2001 United Nations Human Rights Conference in Durban, South Africa, and as consistent with the strategy of hundreds of NGOs to conduct a global campaign to “demonize and isolate” Israel (Steinberg 2006: 752). The organization's first explicitly BDS-focused publication appeared in April 2008 (Steinberg 2008). In that year it published six studies, reports, and analyses of BDS, thirty in 2009, and thirty-one in 2010. The torrent of publications rose to sixty-four in 2015, peaking at seventy in 2016.¹²

Reut, on the other hand, is a think tank founded in 2004 by Gidi Grinstein, an Israeli entrepreneur who served in the Office of the Prime Minister in the Ehud Barak government. Reut presents itself as occupying the pragmatic and sophisticated center of the Israeli political spectrum, registered by its implicit support for the “two-state solution” and a lengthy list of members of its “Political Security Team” that includes representatives from a wide swath of Israeli elite political opinion (Reut Institute 2010b: 4–10, 70). Like NGO Monitor, however, Reut is soft-power oriented. Following Israel's debacle in the 2006 Lebanon War, which featured both military and international public relations disasters, Reut launched an effort to replace Israel's traditional bitkhonist orientation toward security and foreign policy with a new “doctrine” anchored in public diplomacy, the acquisition and exercise of soft-power, and a focus on the “political-diplomatic arena” rather than military and security affairs (Reut Institute 2010a: 29–30). A ninety-two-page study published by Reut in March 2010 used the BDS threat as the basis for arguing that it had been correct in 2007 to call for Israel to transform its conception of the most serious challenges it faced and to shift attention from terrorism and other military threats to BDS and the soft-power requirements of defending the country from a dangerous campaign of delegitimization and isolation. Reut's proposal was to adopt a “big-tent” approach to combating BDS by isolating it from its progressive but non-anti-Semitic constituencies, animated by adopting the structure and tactics of networks to mobilize and catalyze worldwide counterattacks against BDS. In other words, according to Reut, “it takes a network to fight a network” (Reut Institute 2010a: 70).

But these efforts to shift Israeli attention to the BDS threat of delegitimization and isolation within international civil society were largely futile until the events of 2009 and 2010, when Reut took full advantage of the public relations disaster resulting from Israel's botched seizure of the Mavi Marmora. Reut's August 2010 analysis of the global reaction to the event characterized its effect as the “collapse of Israel's Political Firewall” and as a dramatic example of how Israel's failure to adjust security and foreign policy doctrine in line with Reut's proposals had exposed it to a damaging strategic strike for which the country had been completely unprepared (Reut Institute 2010b: 12).

Prompted by the growing visibility of BDS, and arguments in favor of emphasizing “public diplomacy,”¹³ Netanyahu told his cabinet in 2009 that BDS, albeit nonviolent, was to be considered a dangerous and potentially existential threat to Israel. There is no evidence, however, that Netanyahu developed a serious strategy to counter BDS. Wholly mistrusting the Foreign Ministry, Netanyahu appointed himself to lead it and then drained its budget. Nor did he protect the Foreign Ministry from attacks that it had failed to meet challenges for which its elite-focused traditional methods of hasbara were wholly inadequate. Netanyahu's primary move in regard to BDS was to revive the defunct Ministry of Strategic Affairs, but he treated it as an opportunity for patronage disconnected from any sustained mission, including meeting the BDS challenge. The Ministry, according to one Haaretz journalist,

was founded in 2006 as a portfolio tailored to Avigdor Lieberman. It was dismantled two years later and reestablished in 2009 in a different format. … During Lieberman's tenure, its authority was defined mainly as “thwarting the Iranian nuclear program.” … Then, under Moshe Ya'alon (2009–2013), the ministry focused on “Palestinian incitement” as well as the Iranian threat. During the term of Yuval Steinitz (2013–2015), the ministry was unified with the Intelligence Affairs Ministry into the “Intelligence Ministry.” In May 2015, it was once again separated out and given to [Gilad] Erdan, incorporating the Public Diplomacy Ministry, which had been removed from the Prime Minister's Office. (Blau 2017)

From the competitive politics perspective, period 2, the six years following the 2009 Cast Lead war on Gaza and the 2010 Mavi Marmora debacle, was marked by competition for resources among Israeli groups and organizations with different comparative advantages for contributing to soft-power versus hard-power struggles. This competition was complicated by differing ideological positions and by overlapping and unclear jurisdictional boundaries among ministries and other state and parastatal organs. The result of all these sharp-elbowed fights was a disjointed set of uncoordinated and inconsistent policies and actions.

Period 2 ended with the publication of a detailed report by the State Comptroller's office in early 2016. It offered a blistering critique of the Foreign Ministry, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Prime Minister's Office, and the Strategic Affairs Ministry. The Comptroller accused them of failing to defend Israel (and Diaspora Jews) against BDS and the worldwide threat of isolation and delegitimization and anti-Semitism it was seen to pose, for failing to recognize international civil society as an arena of crucial importance to Israel's vital interests, and for failing to even develop operational plans to contain and defeat the BDS campaign to transform Israel's image into that of an apartheid state, which it said had begun in earnest in 2005 (State Comptroller of Israel 2016). The report offered embarrassing details of squabbling over turf and budgets among these ministries and government offices that, along with their analytic and policy failures, had accounted for the serious damage Israel had suffered.

The Comptroller's findings were widely reported in the Israeli press (Blau 2017; Ravid 2016). Reaction to this report inaugurated period 3, marked by general convergence on a strategy for defining and combating the BDS threat that united competitors in the Israeli security/hasbara/foreign policy space. This new consensus represented a victory for the soft-power advocates, evident from the appearance of multiple position papers and in-depth analyses of how to confront BDS issued by think tanks (such as INSS [Institute for National Security Studies] and JCPA [Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs]) that had not previously given much attention to the problem (Fredman 2020; INSS 2022; Yogev and Lindenstrauss 2017). In contrast to the two previous periods, although it was agreed that the economic threat of BDS was minimal, the third period saw further agreement that the movement did pose a long-term serious challenge to Israel's legitimacy, that it was reducing Israel's foreign policy effectiveness, and that it could consign the country to the category of states, such as apartheid South Africa, expected to either transform their “political model” or disappear. A second key element in this consensus was that traditional criticism-countering hasbara techniques conducted within official diplomatic channels would have to be replaced by messaging campaigns operating in global and national civil societies.

This moment of strategic convergence featured slogans identifying BDS with a global, anti-Semitic, “Red-Green alliance” between Islamists and radical leftists. The “three D's” campaign, launched by Natan Sharansky in 2003 to combat what he characterized as the “new anti-Semitism,” was repurposed. Under this rubric, BDS was portrayed as epitomizing the “new anti-Semitism,” which sought “to demonize Israel and delegitimize it” by employing a “double standard.” Israeli Ministers, officials, agencies, and advocacy groups thereby combined the urgency associated with perception of an imminent and potentially existential threat to Israel with long-term, well-established Jewish anxieties. Their objective was to energize and coordinate an anti-BDS “array” of hubs and cells—“molecules” in the vocabulary of one veteran Israeli politician—that would, as noted above, fight a network with a network (Shai 2018: 192–193).

A third principle was added to this “soft-power” analysis, one that helped the bitkhonistim accept defeat. By characterizing the BDS campaign as not only anti-Semitic, but viciously eliminationist toward Israel and akin to terrorism in the illegitimacy and illegality of its tactics, the anti-BDS campaign could expand from protection of Israel to protection of Jews throughout the world. That justified elaborate, clandestine, and technically sophisticated efforts, especially in the United States and Europe, to surveil BDS activists and organizers, punish them in ways designed to affect their reputations and careers, and ban them from travel to Israel, including the Palestinian territories. By treating the struggle against BDS as a continuation of the struggle against terrorism and violent anti-Semitism, “hard-power”-oriented bitjhonist officials, politicians, bureaucrats, and security experts, could embrace an Israeli “long war” offering a familiar and well-funded role for their skills and preferred modes of operation. Increasingly, counter-BDS policies for conducting civil society struggles reflected the comfortable language of IDF commanders: featuring “reconnaissance,” “offensive operations,” “counter-strikes,” “targeting strategies,” and the winks and nods conveying how much could be said about what was being done was not being said because hayavin, yavin (those who understand, understand).¹⁴ To carry out these missions a variety of surveillance, opposition research, and dirty tricks-oriented companies appeared, each linked in barely deniable ways to Mossad and/or the Strategic Affairs Ministry.¹⁵

Installation of an eight-party coalition government in Israel in June 2021, left official Israeli policy toward BDS mostly unchanged, though the tone has softened and the bureaucratics of its implementation have been adjusted. The Strategic Affairs Ministry was shuttered. Responsibilities for counter-BDS activities and public diplomacy were returned to the Foreign Ministry under Yair Lapid, and to the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, led by Nachman Shai. Lapid committed his ministry to a relentless struggle against BDS—marked by his harsh response to the Ben and Jerry's ice cream boycott of West Bank settlements: “Ben & Jerry's decision is a disgraceful capitulation to antisemitism, to BDS, to all that is evil in the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish discourse” (LiveBlog, Times of Israel 2021). On the other hand, Lapid also urged Israel advocates to reduce their reliance on accusations of anti-Semitism and shift their characterization of it as including discrimination and oppression of any group on the basis of their identity (Mualem 2021). Nachman Shai is a centrist politician with extensive media experience. We have cited his 2018 book on how Israel should respond to BDS as outlining the strategy that, as we have argued, Israel adopted after 2016. Shai approached his duties with a commitment to find as much common ground as possible with US critics of Israel so as not to alienate potential allies in the process of countering BDS (Magid 2021).

Conclusion

Most writing about BDS focuses on why and how it should be advanced or defeated. We focus instead on questions about patterns of mobilization, learning, and the evolution of strategies arising from competition. The theoretical tools we use to examine BDS mobilization and counter-mobilization are appropriate for studying campaigns associated with boycotts and counter-mobilization campaigns related to any country, including Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. Our dual focus addresses limitations of the state-centric sanctions literature and the transnational advocacy literature dominated by extensions of Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's “boomerang” model in which demands for change within repressive arenas evoke international responses that empower grassroots mobilization (Grossman et al. 2018; Hallward 2013; Jones 2015; Keck and Sikkink 1998). We have found these models inadequate for capturing key dynamics of political struggles within the mobilizing communities that standardly develop around boycotts.

Our approach is not new, although we have sought to formalize it. Literatures dealing with transnational sanctions and boycott movements such as the anti-apartheid movement targeting South Africa, the MacBride principles movement targeting anti-Catholic discrimination in British-ruled Northern Ireland, and the boycott against the Nestlé corporation targeting its breast milk substitute marketing practices in Third World countries, feature prominent lines of analysis that frame these movements as processes of rational learning and as outcomes of competitive process and that understand the evolution of these movements as functions of reciprocally interdependent relationships with campaigns to combat them (Bueckert 2019; McNamara 2009; Sasson 2016). When read together, our accounts of BDS and anti-BDS mobilization suggest that members of both communities have acted strategically and rationally, but their ability to do so in a timely and effective manner is mediated by internal competition.¹⁶

Another specific payoff of our approach is complementary explanations of a striking pattern in the development of the struggle between BDS and Israel, namely why both sides see the crucial battles between them as taking place, not only in Palestine or Israel, but, also, and perhaps mainly, in the United States and Europe. Within a rationalist frame this reflects recognition by both sides that the war of position cannot be won or lost except within the minds and on the media platforms of international society—which, when it comes to the Middle East, means minds and media in those regions that dominate international political culture. Within the competitive politics frame, this pattern reflects another reality. Gramsci famously distinguished between the official state apparatus of bureaucratic, judicial, and coercive control and the larger state, which he referred to as civil society, composed of institutions and structures of power—the press, universities, foundations, corporations, and panoplies of associations—who normalize and standardize culturally defined boundaries of acceptable political behavior and political discourse. As an “official” state, Israel monopolizes the arena within Israel and Palestine itself so completely that wars of position can only be fought by Palestinians outside that arena—namely in the United States and Europe, and secondarily in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

Both Palestinian political elites who decided to pursue a strategy of “internationalization” through international institutions and BDS advocates who have mobilized through international civil society have understood this reality. Accordingly, Israel and its defenders must engage with their opponents in this struggle, not in Palestine or Israel, but in London, New York, Dublin, San Francisco, Paris, Barcelona, and Rome. In this context, we can appreciate more fully why the failure of BDS to have much of an economic or material impact on practices or economics in Israel is a false measure of its potential, even as it may be a useful indicator. It is precisely if and when that impact is discerned that Israel will have lost the war of position.