What’s BDS, the movement to boycott Israel?
By Frances Vinall
Award-winning journalist
Opponents of Israel’s punishing war in the Gaza Strip have called for boycotts of companies they claim support Israeli policies, and have drawn millions of views on social media.
Customers, particularly in the Middle East, have refrained from patronizing companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s. The coffee giant has said in response to criticism that it is against all violence, while the fast-food chain has said it doesn’t support either side in the conflict.
The calls have dovetailed with an almost two-decade-old movement — called BDS for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions — that protests Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories by targeting businesses and institutions accused of aiding violations of Palestinian rights.
Over 18 years, BDS has pressured some companies to end investment in Israel, and others to pull operations out of the occupied West Bank. But the BDS movement’s overall effect on Israel’s economy is hard to conclusively measure and could be minimal, analysts say.
BDS is an organization run by a committee and has specific targets and strategies. It includes a coalition of Palestinian organizations, but is decentralized by design, endorsing a system in which activists decide what to target and how if they agree with BDS’s principles.
It has found an influx of new adherents. By two months after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of the war, the hashtag #boycottisrael had about 340 million views on TikTok, and #BDS at least 3 billion, although the latter captures some posts on other topics. By January, there were almost half a million posts hashtagged #boycottisrael and 887,000 hashtagged #BDS on Instagram.
Some users, but not all, name-check BDS and direct followers to its website, despite largely not coordinating with its leadership. The BDS official account shared a post on Instagram last year, voicing support of recent “grassroots” social media campaigns and endorsing new boycotting targets that had emerged organically.
“All peaceful popular efforts, including boycott and divestment … are justified and called for,” it said on Instagram in November, while simultaneously calling for a more targeted approach than it had sometimes seen on social media since October 7.
What is BDS?
BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti said the movement began in 2005, inspired by the boycotts that helped end apartheid in South Africa and the nonviolent methods of the US civil rights movement.
Rights groups and some international law experts have accused Israel of committing apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law. Israeli officials reject comparisons to South Africa’s former regime and say Israel’s tight controls on the West Bank and Gaza are needed for security.
Barghouti, a Palestinian who resides in Israel, said in an email that the BDS movement has three goals.
It is focused on ending Israel’s occupation of land it captured and annexed in 1967 — which includes the West Bank and Gaza — and dismantling barriers that separate the territories from Israel; gaining “full equality” for Palestinian citizens of Israel; and establishing a right of return for Palestinian refugees, he said.
The movement calls for boycotts of corporations and institutions seen as supporting Israel’s stance toward the Palestinians, including through the contribution of financing, goods, and services, or cultural backing. BDS also calls for a withdrawal of investment in “complicit” projects, an end to specific company activities in Israel, and sanctions against the country, according to Barghouti.
What do BDS critics say?
The BDS movement has faced stiff opposition in the United States. The European Union also rejects the movement, and bloc countries including Germany have criticized it. Britain last month banned local councils from participating in boycotting Israel.
Measures against it have passed in more than 30 US states — often prohibiting public money from going to an entity or individual involved in an anti-Israel boycott — although a few of these have been successfully challenged on First Amendment grounds. Five years ago, the US House overwhelmingly passed a measure condemning BDS.
A particular sticking point is the BDS movement’s call for a right of return for Palestinians — and their descendants — who were displaced from what is now Israel during the state’s creation in 1948.
This seeks to “destroy the Jewish state” because it would “create a Palestinian majority” outnumbering Jews, AIPAC has said. An estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled 75 years ago, into the West Bank, Gaza, and elsewhere, and their descendants number in the millions.
Barghouti said the movement is not antisemitic and opposes “all forms of racism and discrimination”.
BDS supporters have argued that suppressing the movement shuts down a leading path for nonviolent protest.
“A boycott has a very long tradition of being something that people can do who are otherwise not necessarily very powerful,” said John Chalcraft, a professor of Middle East history and politics at the London School of Economics.
What is happening now?
Calls to boycott Israel have found support on TikTok during the war, which was touched off by the October 7 Hamas raid on communities in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people. More than 25,000 people have been killed in Gaza.
Social media creators have uploaded videos explaining which brands they’ve targeted, rejecting specific products by certain brands, or walking through stores and rating brands on their approach toward Israel.
BDS has called for boycotts of Puma, the sportswear brand, because it had a sponsorship deal with the Israel Football Association. Human Rights Watch has criticized the IFA for operating in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the IFA website continues to list teams from the West Bank for the 2023–2024 season.
On December 12, Puma said its sponsorship contract with Israel and some other countries would end in 2024 as part of a new marketing strategy. BDS called this a “win.” Puma had previously said that the Israeli national soccer teams were supplied with Puma equipment to compete in international competitions, but that it had no association with any other Israeli soccer team, in settlements or otherwise. It also said it was supporting two local aid organizations, one in Gaza and one in Israel.
Ahava, a skincare and cosmetics brand that has a factory and showroom in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank advertised on its website, is a BDS target. Ahava did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
McDonald’s was targeted — in a social media campaign that was endorsed by BDS in November — because a franchise in Israel promised free meals to Israeli soldiers. In an email, McDonald’s said that it was not supporting any government involved in the conflict; that the Israel franchise had acted independently without consent or approval from the company.
Starbucks has been a popular focus of boycott calls on TikTok because of legal battles over the pro-Palestinian actions of its union. The company sued the union for trademark infringement over a since-deleted social media post made on October 9, reading “Solidarity with Palestine!” It appeared above someone else’s post of a photo purporting to show a bulldozer breaking through the barrier separating Israel and Gaza. The company said that the post was “reckless and reprehensible” and that its own position was to condemn violence in the region. The union has since countersued.
Disney has also been criticized. It plans to feature the controversial Israeli superhero Sabra, a fictional member of the country’s real-life intelligence agency Mossad, in an upcoming Marvel film in the Captain America franchise set to premiere in 2025. BDS has called for a boycott of the specific movie, but many on social media have called for followers to boycott the company altogether.
In an email, Marvel Studios said: “While our characters and stories are inspired by the comics, in the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe], they are always freshly imagined for the screen and today’s audience, and the filmmakers are taking a new approach with the character Sabra.”
What is the impact of BDS?
From the start of BDS’s efforts almost two decades ago until right before the war, Israel’s economy grew. Dany Bahar, an economist and associate professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute, said in a phone interview that “it’s very likely that it has had zero effect” on the country’s economy.
In a 2018 Brookings Institution analysis, he and co-author Natan Sachs found that Israel’s economy is resistant to boycotts because it specializes in exports that are difficult to source elsewhere, such as advanced technologies and the intermediate goods used in the production of other goods, both of which are difficult to boycott. But the movement has had some notable successes, particularly in divestment, Chalcraft said. He pointed to the French services and utilities company Veolia, which pulled out of Israel in 2015 after a years-long BDS campaign that Chalcraft said caused it to lose “billions”. Veolia denied that BDS was a factor.
Maia Hallward, a professor of Middle East politics at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, wrote in an email that BDS’s impact had been in bringing “issues not traditionally in the US discourse into the public eye”.
She added that the number of US states passing legislation against the movement shows that “BDS is seen as a threat.”
The full article first appeared on The Washington Post.