The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign: contradictions and challenges

In: Race & class: a journal for black and third world liberation, Volume 55, Issue 4, p. 65-81

Abstract

This article analyses the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. First, it adumbrates the emergence and emphases of the BDS campaign. Then, it explains the BDS tactics, particularly the boycott measure. Next, it highlights some of the contradictions surrounding the campaign. The article closes by identifying the campaign's power and promise in its transgression of limits of the discourse of Palestinian-Israeli politics. More specifically, the campaign is powerful because it is a networked contestation of the discursive rules that require a symmetry be posited between Palestinians and Israel, Israel be represented as sui generis, and the relationship be temporally delimited to 1967.