BDS fashionable in academia, but not invincible

While the global anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has officially hit America’s scholarly associations over the last two years, even considering academic boycotts is a dramatic rupture with the past. 

In 2005, the prestigious American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote that it “condemned any such boycotts as prima facie violations of academic freedom.” This bedrock principle was so valued that the AAUP opposed academic boycotts of apartheid South Africa. Three-hundred university presidents signed a letter in 2007 declaring that academic boycotts are “utterly antithetical to the fundamental values of the academy, where we will not hold intellectual exchange hostage to the political disagreements of the moment.”

That consensus, however, began to crack in 2013. Anti-Israel animus started becoming academically fashionable with the rise of post-colonial, critical studies theory, and Israel’s self-defense after the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) in 2000 stoked these views.

In 2009, an American faculty arm of BDS was formed: the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USCACBI), which shares extremist agenda of the BDS movement—defaming Israel and advocating policies that would lead to the elimination of the Jewish state. USCACBI refurbishes old Arab arguments against Israel’s establishment, but reframes them in contemporary paradigms of social justice. USCABI activists have worked patiently and methodi-cally to mobilize support. They even supply templates for anti-Israel resolutions, which is why so many of the recent divestment resolutions proposed in student governments resemble one another. BDS activists try to make the resolutions seem relevant to academia under the pretext that Israel impedes Palestinian higher education.