BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction)
UNJPPI Supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
In June 2021, the UNJPPI Coordinating Team unanimously affirmed Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as an effective, non-violent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law and end its oppression of Palestinians. UNJPPI affirms that BDS is in alignment with its values and mission.
What has UNJPPI done to implement BDS?
UNJPPI has developed a strategy that is designed to increase the awareness and understanding of BDS among United Church of Canada members and to encourage them to take action locally with members of their congregations.
What is Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)?
BDS is a Palestinian-led, non-violent international, grassroots human rights movement that advocates for freedom, justice, and equality for Palestinians.
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has been oppressing Palestinians, seizing their land, and denying them basic human rights and political self-determination simply because they aren’t Jewish. Far from condemning this, western governments have offered Israel diplomatic, military, and economic support, on which Israel has come to rely.
In response to this oppression, a consensus developed within Palestine civil society for an appeal to people of conscience to mount an international boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign to pressure Israel to comply with international law and human rights. One advocate described it as “a people’s foreign policy, or diplomacy from below.”
What are the demands of the BDS movement?
Three broad demands are based on the premise that “Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.”
- Dismantle the Separation Wall and end the occupation and colonization of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights.
- Ensure full equality for the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel who make up 20 percent of Israel’s population. Currently, they experience racial discrimination that is formalized in more than fifty laws and the 2018 Basic Law “Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People,” which defines the ethnic-religious identity of Israel as exclusively Jewish. They are also subject to calls by Israeli leaders for racial violence.
- “Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” In 1948, Israel violently expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. Israel refused to allow the refugees to return and instead seized their land, homes, businesses, and bank accounts. Today there are over seven million Palestinian refugees whose right of return must be addressed.
What is the Goal of the BDS Movement?
The BDS National Committee (Palestinian organizing committee) explains on their website:
“BDS aims to end international support for Israeli violations of international law by forcing companies, institutions and governments to change their policies. As Israeli companies and institutions become isolated, Israel will find it more difficult to oppress Palestinians.
What does Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Mean Specifically?
“Boycotts involve withdrawing support from Israel’s apartheid regime, complicit Israeli sporting, cultural and academic institutions, and from all Israeli and international companies engaged in violations of Palestinian human rights.”
See our page on specific Consumer Boycott Targets
“Divestment campaigns urge banks, local councils, churches, pension funds and universities to withdraw investments from the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid.”
“Sanctions campaigns pressure governments to fulfil their legal obligations to end Israeli apartheid, and not aid or assist its maintenance, by banning business with illegal Israeli settlements, ending military trade and free-trade agreements, as well as suspending Israel’s membership in international forums such as UN bodies and FIFA.”
Why UNJPPI Supports the BDS Movement
- BDS is not arbitrary — it is an explicit call from every sector of Palestinian civil society with specific demands.
- BDS is human-rights based and grounded in international law.
- BDS is based on a long history of boycotts in the American civil rights movement and sanctions and divestments against apartheid-era South Africa.
- The governing model provides broad principles and some “high impact corporate targets” while giving local groups autonomy in determining local priorities.
- BDS is a legitimate, non-violent means of protest and resistance in a democratic society.
- The demands of BDS align with Canada’s official foreign policy.
- BDS is accessible. Individuals can take part at whatever level suits them. Anyone can support BDS by what they choose to purchase and what they boycott.
- The targets are not individuals, but institutions, organizations, and corporations complicit in and profiting from the oppression of the Palestinian people.
- BDS is not anti-Israel. Its focus is on unjust policies and practices, and when these end, the BDS campaign will end.
- BDS works. Non-violent resistance coupled with principled, economic pressure works.
While there is still much to be done, an increasing number of churches, unions, businesses, pension funds, academic organizations, and artists are supporting BDS. The 2024 student protests on campuses across North America made BDS one of their central demands.
Israel’s obsession with crushing the movement also speaks to how effective the movement has been. Israel is afraid of becoming a pariah state, and so has mounted a widespread campaign to outlaw the BDS campaign. This has had some success, with over 30 U.S. states passing anti-BDS laws. In Canada, the federal government passed a non-binding motion condemning BDS.
The real power of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
An excerpt from www.decolonizepalestine.com
The real power of the BDS movement lies outside its material effects. Yes, some economic pressure on Israel is good, but nobody was arguing that the BDS movement was going to topple the Israeli economy, nor were they arguing that BDS alone would liberate Palestine. The effectiveness of BDS stems from its ability to raise awareness, speak truth to power, and bring to light parallels that Israel cannot combat. The discursive ability of BDS to shift the conversation, as well as its grassroots mass participatory nature, makes it a much bigger threat to Israel than the loss of a few billion dollars. This is where its strength lies, and as it becomes more mainstream among activists and campuses all over the world, this strength will only grow.
What Can I Do?
~ Review our page of recommended Consumer Boycott Targets; stop buying from those companies and let them know you have done so and why (more details on that page)
~ Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) has a comprehensive BDS Hub that contains “all the essential resources to participate in BDS in Canada.” It also contains an up-to-date list of all Canadian organizations that have endorsed BDS. https://www.cjpme.org/bds
~ Read and share this article by Naomi Klein: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/only-outside-pressure-can-stop-israels-war-crimes
~ Select three organizations that you personally will boycott and share why with your friends. The BDS National Commitee website is a great resource for information.
Palestinian Call for Support
In July 2005, over 170 Palestinian organizations representing Palestinian refugees, inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, and Arab citizens of Israel, signed an open letter seeking support for the BDS initiative.
We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel.
The movement grew rapidly and in 2007, the first Palestinian BDS Conference took place in Ramallah in the West Bank. The BDS National Committee (BNC) was formed to serve as the Palestinian coordinating group for the global campaign.
The BNC describes BDS as being “an inclusive, anti-racist human rights movement that is opposed on principle to all forms of discrimination including antisemitism and Islamophobia.”.
Israel's opposition to BDS
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BDS cofounder Omar Barghouti Speaks
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Breaking the Silence Around BDS
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Israel’s leaders have long viewed BDS as an existential threat to Israel. In 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the BDS campaign as
an international campaign to blacken [Israel’s] name. . . . This campaign to delegitimize Israel seeks to deny our very right to live here.
Israel employs several strategies to oppose and outlaw BDS.
At home, Israel has criminalized support of BDS and prohibited foreign supporters from entering the country.
Overseas, Israel leads campaigns to outlaw BDS. These involve:’
- Helping blacklist BDS student and faculty supporters by websites such as the Canary Mission.
- Using American lobby groups to pressure state governments to oppose BDS. This has worked as 38 states have passed some form of anti-boycott legislation.
- Equating BDS with antisemitism and extremism.
In response to Israel’s lobbying efforts, the Canadian government has stated that BDS is a manifestation of antisemitism, and in June 2024, Germany declared BDS to be a “suspected extremist threat.”
BDS cofounder Omar Barghouti on the non-negotiable demands of BDS:
“As South African archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu once said, ‘I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.’
“Ending the largely discernible aspects of Israeli occupation while maintaining effective control over most of the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 ‘in return’ for Palestinians’ accepting Israel’s annexation of the largest colonial blocks . . . has become the basic formula for the so-called peaceful settlement endorsed by the world’s hegemonic powers and acquiesced to by an unelected, unrepresentative, unprincipled, and visionless Palestinian ‘leadership.’ The entire spectrum of Zionist parties in Israel and their supporters in the West, with few exceptions, ostensibly accept this unjust and illegal formula as the ‘only offer’ on the table for the Palestinians — or else the menacing Israeli bludgeon.”
Johann Funk is a retired Canadian academic who spent almost a year in Hebron in the West Bank as a human rights defender with Christian Peacemaker Teams. In 2017 he wrote the following about BDS and the implications of remaining silent.
For me silence on BDS is not an option. BDS is one way in which I can express my solidarity with Palestinian suffering with concrete action.
- My silence would block out the call of Palestinian civil society to support a non-violent action to bring peace and justice to Palestinians and Israelis alike.
- My silence would implicate me in political Zionism’s erosion of the historic contribution of Judaism to the development of modern civilization. I would be supporting the unhealthy relationship between classical Judaism and political Zionism.
- My silence would implicate me in Israel’s impunity from International Humanitarian Law and the 4th and 5th Geneva conventions as well as numerous United Nations resolutions.
- My silence would implicate me in Israel’s Regularization Bill that legalizes the confiscation of Palestinian land and the displacement of Palestinians.
- My silence would implicate me in Israel’s use of death squads to carry out extrajudicial killings.
- My silence would implicate me in a recent law that restricts Palestinians recourse to civil litigations.
- My silence would implicate me in the Israeli arms industry that internationally markets equipment and security training that is openly ‘field tested’ on Palestinians.
- My silence would implicate me in Israel’s systematic use of collective punishment that kills innocent civilians: women and children.
- My silence would implicate me in Israeli settler violence against Palestinians: attacks on school children, poisoning cisterns and wells, violently harassing Palestinian shepherds and their flocks.
10. My silence would implicate me in the home invasions at night in which children as young as 12 are arrested and interrogated without a parent or lawyer present. Their conviction rate is 95 percent, and they can be sentenced to up to six years in jail.
“Palestinian human rights are not theoretical or negotiable. Israel’s denial of these rights is real and needs to be exposed and opposed forthrightly and effectively. That is why I choose not to remain silent and support Palestinian civil society’s call for a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.”