The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Call was launched in July 2005 by an overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society unions, political parties, and organizations. Since 2007, it has been coordinated by the BDS National Committee (BNC).The campaign brings together the Palestinian and international community in a concerted effort to end Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights through three main actions:

·      Boycotting Israel: Economically, this means avoiding goods made in Israel or by Israeli companies, particularly- but not only- those produced in occupied territory. Culturally and academically, it means boycotting institutions that are complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.

·      Divesting from Israel: This means targeting corporations complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights and ensuring that the likes of university investment portfolios and pension funds are not used to finance such companies.

·      Implementing sanctions against Israel: This means an effort by governments and international institutions to stop business as usual relations with Israel until the country observes international human rights standards. This can be done by refusing Israel’s participation in international forums and calling for embargoes and economic sanctions.

These three actions form the core of the BDS campaign and are indivisible from each other. However, the movement recognizes the choice of tactics and targets will depend on the particularities of each situation (Barghouti 2011, 60).  For the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), our focus is on a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Israeli academic institutions function as a central part of a system that has denied Palestinians their basic rights. Palestinian students face ongoing discrimination, including the suppression of Palestinian cultural events, and there is sanctioning and ongoing surveillance of Palestinian students and faculty who protest Israeli policies.

Israeli universities have been a direct party to the annexation of Palestinian land. Armed soldiers patrol Israeli university campuses, and some have been trained at Israeli universities in techniques to suppress protestors (ASA).  –They provide the military-intelligence complex with indispensable research that directly benefits the occupation apparatus.

In the aftermath of October 7th, in which Israel launched its ongoing genocidal attack on Gaza, all universities in Gaza have been destroyed by U.S. backed Israeli-airstrikes, and a majority of all schools, leading UN experts to believe that there is an “intentional intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’” (OHCHR 2024). As of May, 2024, over 90 professors have been reported killed by Israel’s ongoing attack (Lennard “New McCarthyism” 2024).

Those who oppose the academic boycott may argue that it curtails freedom of speech; this ignores that these freedom of speech rights are systematically denied to Palestinians and Palestinian academics in particular (Barghouti 2011, 90, 105). In other words, the academic boycott doesn’t violate academic freedom but helps to extend it: Palestinian universities have been bombed, schools have been closed, and scholars and students deported. The ordinary working conditions for Palestinian academics and students are severely constrained by restrictions on movement to and from work, on international travel, by discriminatory permit systems, and by the ongoing genocidal slaughter carried out by Israel.

Furthermore, in America, where our organization is based, our own academic freedom of speech is under attack as a result of a brutal and well-funded attack by the powerful Zionist lobby.

There is a tenacious network that exists–from Israel to the ADL and other pro-Israel propaganda organizations– that is built to spy on and disrupt student activism. The Washington-based organization Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) for example, has direct links to Israeli intelligence and AIPAC, and has consistently used student informants to gather intel on pro-Palestinian groups. The ICC’s chief executive director Jacob Baime was caught on an undercover reporter’s hidden camera describing the organization as a clandestine Israeli military command modeled on General Stanley McCrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, including the ongoing development of operations and intelligence briefs. The briefs, which include secret details about targeted students, get passed onto Israel’s Ministry of Strategic affairs. Data from the ICC’s campus spies of course make its way to the ADL, whose annual report on “Anti-Israel activism” strategically engages in fearmongering to further the crackdown on pro-Palestine campus groups (See: Bamford 2023).

Our colleagues and students are not safe on campus: this past year students have been violently arrested, suspended, expelled, and evicted for taking public political stances against the siege on Gaza.  An international graduate student at Cornell is currently facing deportation simply because he attended a pro-Palestine protest (Fernando 2024). Just days ago tenured (and Jewish) Professor Maura Finklestein was fired because of her pro-Palestine speech (Lennard “Meet the Tenured Proessor” 2024). These are just two examples of many that point to the dangerous McCarthyesque targeting of outspoken academics.

It is clear that the ongoing crisis in Gaza should matter to us as academics, but most importantly, it should matter to us as humans and concerned global citizens; medical experts have warned that final death toll will reach approximately 186,000 (Chalabi 2024)– a now conservative estimate made prior to the air and ground strike of Lebanon and slaughter of Lebanese civilians. Additionally, The International Court of Justice Ruled it “plausible” that Israel has committed acts of genocide (Al-Kassab 2024).

No. BDS is a rights-based campaign; as such, it departs from the premise that real peace entails justice and the pre-conditions for such justice to take place are these:

1.     End the 1967 Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and other Arab territories in Lebanon and Syria.

2.     End Israel’s system of racial discrimination against its Palestinian citizens.

3.     End Israel’s persistent denial of the UN-sanctioned rights of Palestinian returns, particularly their right to return to their homes and receive reparations (bdsmovement.net).

Apart from these minimal requirements, BDS does not advocate a particular political agenda nor does it take a stance in the one-state-versus-two-states debate. Thus, while individual BDS activists and advocates may support diverse political solutions, the BDS movement as such does not adopt any specific political formula, focusing instead on Palestinians’ right to self-determination. BDS simply fights for the conditions necessary for such self-determination to take place (Barghouti 2011, 52).

No. The Palestinian BDS Call does not target Jews, or even Israelis qua Jews; it is consistently institutional in nature and is therefore strictly directed against Israel as a colonial and apartheid power that violates Palestinian rights and international law (Barghouti 82). Moreover, to characterize actions and positions that target Israeli apartheid and colonial rule as anti-Semitic is itself anti-Semitic because it perceives of Jews as a monolithic sum that Israel represents and can speak in behalf of, therefore silencing dissenting views within the Jewish community and implying that all Jews per se are somehow responsible for Israeli crimes (Barghouti 149).

Conscientious Israelis have answered the BDS call positively, acknowledging that they cannot possibly have normal lives without first shedding their colonial status and recognizing Palestinian rights (ibid., 31).  Since 2009, Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within, a growing movement in Israel has fully adopted the BDS call, with several institutions endorsing it, such as the Alternative Information Center (AIC), the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD), and Who Profits from the Occupation?

• SEM’s campaign would add our voice to a stabilized and growing consensus of influential academic institutions with majority American membership that support BDS, including: Hampshire College, American Studies Association, Association for Asian American studies, American Anthropological Association, Association for Humanist Society, Middle East Studies Association of North America, National Women’s studies association.

• The large amount of American taxpayer dollars and US weaponry has prolonged and intensified this conflict. SEM’s campaign would signal this unethical, unrestrained, and disproportionate use of resources that have made the conflict a global issue and a “Moral Litmus Test.”

• SEM’s campaign would validate the presence and significance of Palestinian students, professors, and professionals that work in our departments and academic networks.