Opinion on BDS?

[papaspace]

What is your opinion on the BDS movement that aims to instate boycotts, fund divestment and sanction on Israel and its economy? Why do you support it or reject it?

Please refer to the following points:

1) Do you think that it is a capitulation to bourgeois politics, since the BDS plan essentially depends the imperialist governments and the capitalist class can stop the occupation? Should socialists support it?

2) What does it say about the BDS plan that previous boycotts on Israel (such as the one instated by the Arab League) had utterly failed?

[graymouser]

BDS as a strategy gained a lot of support because it was a prominent way people got involved in the anti-apartheid movement with regard to South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is useful inasmuch as it provides a focus for international solidarity efforts with the Palestinian people and draws the hard equivalence between apartheid in South Africa and apartheid in Israel.

Different parts are of different utility. Consumer boycotts are unlikely to have a massive effect, but academic and sport boycotts when they can be reached often have a significant propaganda effect. Divestment allows people like university students and union activists to play a role in demanding that their colleges or pension funds divest from companies and funds in Israel; again, each success is a propaganda victory. Sanctions are the only area where the BDS movement actually calls on bourgeois governments, and realistically it's mostly a propaganda point in the first place to call for them.

As far as earlier boycotts, one has to remember that the situation today is considerably different. The brutal Israeli attacks on Gaza and the illegal assaults on the flotilla last year really galvanized a lot of progressive opinion against Israel that didn't consider this to be much of an issue before 2009. BDS is an attempt to concretize that larger tide, and it has an eye to students and labor through the divestment angle. So I think there's reason to believe it could be more effective in keeping this pro-Palestine sentiment alive than prior boycotts were.

[papaspace]

Yet the situation in Israel is very different from the situation in South Africa. Israel, unlike SA, has a broad Jewish working class whose interests are opposed to those of the ruling elite and to the occupation. The BDS campaign aims to boycott them too, thus making them fall easily into the hands of the bourgeois propaganda which claims that "the whole world is against us" and that "we must stick together as a nation". In effect, it harms the class struggle in Palestine by further segregating the Jewish and Arab proletariat instead of uniting them in a single struggle.

BDS replaces mass popular struggle with a plea to the capitalists and imperialists -- the international corporations and the bourgeois states -- to end the occupation themselves. It's hard for me to see how pleading imperialism to act in a certain way, instead of fighting it directly through mass struggle, is a socialist tactic.

Furthermore, BDS is also extremely hypocritical: its organizers would never call, in this day and time, for boycotts, divestment and sanctions on other "criminal" states, whose crimes far outweigh those of Israel. This is a second reason why BDS causes the Jewish proletariat to (rightly) think that it is being singled out and fall for the bourgeois calls for "national unity".

Regarding previous boycotts, note that their effect was completely negligible in comparison to the popular Palestinian uprisings.

[blake 3:17]

The Israeli and Palestinians are already segregated and good lot of that has been a result of the Zionist trade unions.

Is there a single Israeli union which opposes the occupation?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yet the situation in Israel is very different from the situation in South Africa. Israel, unlike SA, has a broad Jewish working class whose interests are opposed to those of the ruling elite and to the occupation. The BDS campaign aims to boycott them too, thus making them fall easily into the hands of the bourgeois propaganda which claims that "the whole world is against us" and that "we must stick together as a nation". In effect, it harms the class struggle in Palestine by further segregating the Jewish and Arab proletariat instead of uniting them in a single struggle.

BDS replaces mass popular struggle with a plea to the capitalists and imperialists -- the international corporations and the bourgeois states -- to end the occupation themselves. It's hard for me to see how pleading imperialism to act in a certain way, instead of fighting it directly through mass struggle, is a socialist tactic.

Furthermore, BDS is also extremely hypocritical: its organizers would never call, in this day and time, for boycotts, divestment and sanctions on other "criminal" states, whose crimes far outweigh those of Israel. This is a second reason why BDS causes the Jewish proletariat to (rightly) think that it is being singled out and fall for the bourgeois calls for "national unity".

Regarding previous boycotts, note that their effect was completely negligible in comparison to the popular Palestinian uprisings.

From my perspective, it will take not only struggle by Palestinians but probably a region wide-revolt against the whole system developed after 1967... the ongoing struggle in Egypt makes this a very real possibility.

But BDS is more of a question of what the solidarity movement here can do. The anti-zionist left already does a lot to try and expose the abuses by the Israeli government and of Zionist vigilante groups and some individuals with the time or financial support go over there to do solidarity work, but how can you actually build a struggle here? I think it is useful to go after the support that the US and UK governments and institutions directly give to Israel for the propagandistic reasons that greymouser covered really well (and for some reason RevLeft won't let me "thank").

And I don't see how even the most idealistic supporters of this strategy see it as a way for the US to directly end apartheid in Israel, the most optomistic goal is that a big campaign and movement could make it too politically costly for the US to continue such unopposed material support for a settler-state. So I think most people probably do see such a strategy as a way to build a movement, organize the anger after the flotilla raid etc, and win some "easy" campaigns against corporations or universities.

If the choice was between a massive anti-war movement with a clear anti-imperialist bent and good politics on the middle east, then yes, that would clearly be a better way to go. But as pro-Palestinian sentiment is a minority of a minority political viewpoint, I think campaigns like this are a good start.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Within a Capitalist logic, a tactic like the BDS works very well. And last I checked, we're still living in a system which is not only Capitalist in nature, but dominated by Capitalist logic and ideology. So, why not?