The BDS movement appeared to be on the ascent at the start of 2014 with a pair of campaigns poised to push the movement into the mainstream. It started with the American Studies Association (ASA) announcing an academic boycott against Israel in late 2013. Within a month, the BDS was in the news again for its attack on SodaStream, which had just named Hollywood A-List Hollywood celebrity Scarlett Johansson as its brand ambassador.
But nearly a year has passed, and the BDS remains on the outside, as even its biggest successes can now be seen as failures that could haunt the movement for the coming year.
The ASA, which is currently holding its annual conference in Los Angeles, endured a year of censure by more than 250 college professors. More recently, to avoid violating American Civil Rights laws barring discrimination based on national origin, ASA leaders were forced to accept all Israelis wishing to attend the conference.
In doing so, it had to walk its boycott so far back, it now amounts to little more than a public statement.
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“For about a year, the American Studies Association has been offering a very public object lesson in how to destroy a scholarly organization,” wrote Thomas Doherty, an American Studies professor at Brandeis University.
Doherty noted that academic boycott has turned the group into a political action committee rather than a scholarly association. “The heretofore obscure academic group found itself condemned by newspaper editorialists and Op-Ed writers for shutting down the very kinds of dialogue it was created to foster.”
While the ASA is not the only academic association to align itself with the BDS, it remains a symbol for why academic boycotts are inherently counter-productive. And the victims of its political maneuvers are not all Israelis.
Hanan A. Alexander, dean of students and professor of educational philosophy at Haifa University told Inside Higher Ed. that his university was sending a representative to the ASA conference as a boycott buster. “The boycott would certainly harm our Arab students as well as our Jewish students.”
It’s even more extreme with the BDS boycott campaign against SodaStream, which announced plans to close its West Bank factory.
“The BDS movement may feel it claimed a victory. But against whom?” asked Haaretz columnist David Rosenberg. “Neither the company, nor the occupation, nor Israel lost much, but the hundreds of Palestinians employed at the plant lost their jobs.”
He added that comments from BDS leaders indicate that the campaign against SodaStream would continue even if it moves within Green Line Israel. “The goal is to score victories,” he wrote.”The fact that not a single Palestinian is better off today without SodaStream in the West Bank is irrelevant.”
Indeed, both the ASA and the SodaStream campaigns have become liabilities for the BDS because they draw attention to an inconvenient truth about the movement, that it has no plan for helping Palestinians, only for hurting Israel.
Maybe closing off dialogue and cooperation isn’t the best path towards a just solution to the conflict. Obviously, it never was. And maybe BDS supporters will see that it never will be.
