Bds Quotes

BDS is perhaps the most ambitious, empowering, and promising Palestinian-led global movement for justice and rights. BDS has the capacity to challenge Israel's colonial rule and apartheid in a morally consistent, effective, and, crucially, intelligent manner.

Some people are comfortable in hell, that`s why I crawled between your legs

If it wasn't anti-Semitic to do it to South Africa, it's not anti-Semitic to do it to Israel.

Not only do the oppressed lose nothing when people of conscience boycott institutions that are persistently complicit in the system of oppression; in fact, they gain enormously from the ultimate weakening of this complicity that an effective and sustained boycott leads to.

Peace without justice is equivalent to institutionalizing injustice.

BDS is a modern, grassroots nonviolent movement inspired by a 2005 call from a long and diverse list of Palestinian civil society organizations. Despite being ignored by world leaders and global media, BDS has been an integral feature of the Palestinian national movement.

In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti racist [3], sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil non-violent resistance, but also a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence, and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.”5 With the relatively recent advent of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, it can be argued

The BDS on campus operation is organized by, among others, a group in Chicago, Illinois, called American Muslims for Palestine, or AMP. For years, AMP, through its sponsorship of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has been sending strategists, digital and communications experts, graphic designers, video editors, and legal advisors to colleges all over America and running flashy events in expensive hotels for the purpose of delegitimizing Israel, minimizing pro-Israel voices on campus, and harassing Jewish and pro-Israel students in order to deter them from supporting Israel. The embodiment of Cancel Culture. Managing such a sophisticated network of political operatives, extensive marketing, and (pre-COVID) ritzy gatherings at nice hotels is extremely expensive.11 So where is the money coming from? I

From my personal experience as an analyst and dance choreographer working in the midst of "conflict", I do not think that, in a situation of oppression, intellectuals have a choice of whether or not to reflect the impact of conflict on them and on their society. Oppression, in a way, forces itself upon their work, their creative process. Their basic choice seems to be, then, whether to passively reflect it, or to actively transcend it. Oppression, it seems, has its own way of touching everyone within its reach, irrespective of one’s actual involvement in it or will to get involved in it.

Only by dint of extinction, can Dinosaurs afford to be cynical about the future.

despite finishing first in my class at Yale Law School, I was rejected by all 32 of the law firms to which I applied.

In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace.

Money has no value, unless someone gets mugged.

A cow has no control over the quality of its lick

BDS’s reach has led Israel’s leaders and most ardent allies to describe the popular movement as the second most significant threat to Israel after a nuclear capable Iran.

Can you handle the truth? Here is the truth: Some of BDS’s most significant supporters (through AMP/AJP, and others!—but we don’t have time for everyone now) are also supporters of Hamas. Yep, the terrorist organization, the arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the one that aims to enact Sharia law. Some of the people who support that organization are also supporting your innocent-looking grassroots campus movement. I know this sounds horrific, but again, I didn’t make this up. Let’s hand it over to the terrorism finance expert again: The corporate structure of AMP is cause for concern, but it pales in comparison to the significant overlap between AMP and people who worked for or on behalf of organizations that were designated, dissolved, or held civilly liable by federal authorities for supporting Hamas.

At the end of the day, nothing Palestinians or those who support Palestine do will please Israel or the Zionist lobby. And Israeli aggression will continue unabated. BDS. Armed Struggle. Peace talks. Protests. Tweets. Social media. Poetry. All are terror in Israel’s books.

There are various means of resistance available to people who are oppressed by racist or colonial regimes or foreign occupations (that is, according to the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions), including through the use of armed force. Nowadays, the Palestine solidarity movement has committed itself to the route of nonviolent resistance. Do you think this alone will end Israeli apartheid? Solidarity movements are, of course, by their very nature nonviolent. In South Africa, even as an international solidarity movement was being organized, the ANC (African National Congress) and the SACP (South African Communist Party) came to the conclusion that they needed an armed wing of their movement: Umkhonto We Sizwe. They had every right to make that decision. Likewise, it is up to the Palestinian people to employ the methods they deem most likely to succeed in their struggle. At the same time, it is clear that if Israel is isolated politically and economically, as the BDS campaign is striving to do, Israel could not continue to implement its apartheid practices. If, for example, we in the United States could force the Obama administration to cease its $8 million-a-day support of Israel, this would go a long way toward pressuring Israel to end the occupation.

extremes are working in tandem to undermine the liberal Zionist middle which, unable to offer any realistic solution, ends up passively tolerating the occupation (one new liberal Zionist euphemism is “shrinking the occupation”)—another unwitting affirmation of the BDS movement. As the historical window for an equitable two-state solution closes, and the middle ground continues to shrink, what is a liberal Zionist to do?

The more I read about the group, however, the clearer it became that it lacks a focused ideological backbone. It, in fact, provides a virtual home for postmodern anticolonialist views, communism, and even Jihadism. Mostly, it provides a reference group for young students who look for social ties and a sense of self-significance. Not surprisingly, though, the strongest ideological denominators among many of the activists were anti-Israelism and antisemitism.

Academic freedom does allow for protest. Students should protest and argue about positions with which they disagree. But academic freedom does not imply that differences of opinion may be voiced via taunts, nor does it suggest that intimidation is a legitimate and productive means to affect change. Academic freedom does not mean that students should be pressured to avoid unique and difficult educational opportunities because others impugn them.

Instead of working to engage debate and refute contentious ideas, students and faculty are shutting down avenues of inquiry and blocking the attempts of others to examine difficult issues. Such bullying stymies learning and is anti-intellectual.

To exist should not be to resist but to coexist. To exist should be to dialogue. To compromise. To strive toward peace. To reject these values is to threaten lives on both sides of the struggle.

The BDS movement, which was inspired by South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, was formally launched in 2005 by 170 Palestinian grassroots and civil society groups. The aim is to put political and economic pressure on Israel to respect Palestinian rights and comply with international law. The three goals of the BDS movement are to end Israel’s military rule over the Palestinian land it occupied in 1967, full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were driven out of their homes in 1948.

This has been one of Israel’s worst fears, so much so that the state launched a vigorous campaign to criminalize BDS through legislation. Its top ally, the United States, has also attacked and criminalized the movement. Since 2014, state and local legislatures and even the U.S. Congress have enacted more than one hundred measures penalizing groups and businesses that boycott Israel. Thirty-two U.S. states have passed anti-boycott laws—this in a country that claims to uphold free speech. In its fierce crackdown on the movement, the United States has followed Israel’s lead in dishonestly branding BDS as anti-Semitic. But it’s not anti-Semitic. It’s anti-Zionist, and conflating the two not only is dangerous, but it dismisses our valid grievances as a population denied our human rights and our rightful land. Once again, as Palestinians, we are punished if we protest violently and nonviolently.

join the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement and to help intensify the campaign for a free Palestine.

Countering speech with speech is important and theoretically sounds wonderful, but the reality is frequently less speech against speech than screaming against screaming and a generalized escalation of tensions (and toxicity) surrounding Israel on campus.

BDS is propaganda. It operates as such. Continuous repetition of simple messages is reinforced by threat of social alienation. It is surprising how well it propagates its message of diametrically opposite factors, the sources of good and the sources of evil.

The episodes demonstrate the now-mainstream leftist belief that even those Jewish or Israeli voices that are critical of Israeli occupation must be silenced, for only eliminationist discourse is acceptable.

As we have seen in Donald Trump's Republican primary campaign, delivering insults instead of confronting arguments is an effective tactic. In BDS's case, it purports to replace fear with contempt.

When the campus allows just a single narrative, the open-minded students do not seem so open-minded anymore. They have already made their decisions on who is oppressed and who is not. It's no surprise that when you've decided that Jewish students are privileged white kids, you've decided that antisemitism is impossible - even as you demonstrate it yourself.

When we permit the anti-Israel hostility, we permit the antisemitism. We can no longer permit it.

One wonders how organizations that don't care about truth and facts are permitted to operate on college campuses, where you would think that truth and facts are important values.

Part of the reason it's so hard to defend Israel is that facts and truth have lost their importance and been replaced by feeling and emotion.

When the very professors and departments are the source of the hatred and disseminate propaganda disguised as fact and offer speakers without credentials as if they are experts, what chance, really, does the next generation of students have of learning the truth about Israel?

But in our zeal for activism, we have forgotten that when a student government takes a side in a conflict, when it decides that there are not two sides after all, it thereby abandons its role in the scholarly mission of the institution for the activism. And as the Judicial Board noted, where a student government's objective should be to protect and promote the interests of minorities, including minority opinions, against the tyranny of the majority, when the government chooses one side, it becomes the tyrannical majority instead. That is the moment when the activism begotten by scholarship overthrows the scholarship - the moment when the university launches its own destruction.

As many of us have witnessed, BDS tactics are brilliant. Boycott has never been its aim; what university would go along with such a childish, antiacademic idea? Its aim has always been to bombard campuses with an endless stream of anti-Israel resolutions. The charges may vary from season to season, the authors may rotate, and it matters not whether a resolution passes or fails, nor whether it is condemned or hailed. The victory lies in having a stage, a microphone, and a finger pointing at Israel saying, 'On trial!

The one-way prism worn by BDS advocates is most glaring when it comes to the issue of self-determination. Some of their intellectuals preach for hours and hours on the moral right of Palestinians to self-determination. At the same time, they intentionally forget, wish away, or deny the moral right of their neighbors to that same self-determination. In the old days, we used to label such intellectuals racists and shun them from the company of those of goodwill. Nowadays, the label racist is reserved primarily for Islamophobes and white settlers, real and imaginary, while the distinct racist character of the BDS ideology is rarely condemned for what it is. It is time to change that.

Selective neutrality should be the instrument with which the university administration distinguishes those who contribute to a respectful campus climate and productive discourse and debate from those who disrupt such a climate and discriminate against various identities. It must be selective, not in the sense of being inconsistent but in the sense of defining and shaping appropriate campus norms.

Targeted abuse of Jewish students is called free speech.

The current Palestinian political economy, influenced far too greatly by the BDS and anti-normalization campaigns, amounts to a corrupt, unsustainable, terror-supporting regime that is disinterested in the economic well-being of is own people and the developments of a new state.’ -Khaled Abu Toameh

BDS is a movement where way too often the ones with bad faith prey on the ones with bad knowledge. BDS cleverly aligned itself with various human and civil rights movements and with an anti-apartheid agenda, yet it is nothing but a false cognate. To conflate these movements is an insult to human rights movements, to the anti-apartheid movement, and to black Americans...The leaders of BDS do not want Israel to exist, and among the movement’s financial sponsors are supporters of terrorism.

The Palestine laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise. It’s unsurprising that repressive regimes want to mimic Israeli repression, using Israeli technology to oppress their own unwanted or restive populations, but the Jewish state craves Western approval to fully realize its diplomatic and military potential. Aside from the US, Germany is arguably the greatest prize of all. Israel helped Germany rehabilitate its shattered image after World War II, while Berlin grants legitimacy to a country that brutally occupies the Palestinians (a nonpeople in the eyes of successive German governments). Germany purchasing increasing amounts of Israeli defense equipment is just one way it can atone for its historical guilt. When Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Germany in August 2022 and spoke alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he accused Israel of committing “fifty Holocausts” against his people. The German establishment expressed outrage over the comment but the hypocrisy was clear; the Palestinians are under endless occupation but it’s only they who have to apologize. Germany has taken its love affair with Israel to dangerous, even absurd heights. The Deutsche Welle media organization updated its code of conduct in 2022 and insisted that all employees, when speaking on behalf of the organization or even in a personal capacity, must “support the right of Israel to exist” or face punishment, likely dismissal.40 After the Israeli military shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022, German police banned a peaceful public vigil in Berlin because of what German authorities called an “immediate risk” of violence and anti-Semitic messaging. When protestors ignored this request and took to the streets to both commemorate Abu Akleh and Nakba Day, police arrested 170 people for expressing solidarity with Palestine. A Palestinian in Germany, Majed Abusalama, tweeted that he had been assaulted by the police. “I just left the hospital an hour ago with an arm sling to hold my shoulder after the German racist police almost dislocated my shoulder with their violent actions to us wearing Palestine Kuffiyas,” he wrote. “This is the new wave of anti-Palestinian everything in Berlin. Insane, right?” This followed years of anti-Palestinian incitement by the German political elite, from the German Parliament designating the BDS movement as anti-Semitic in 2019 to pressuring German institutions to refuse any space for pro-Palestinian voices, Jewish or Palestinian.41 The Palestinian intellectual Tariq Baconi gave a powerful speech in Berlin in May 2022 at a conference titled “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” He noted that “states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

The original documents contained racist and derogatory language by Israeli officials toward Haitians, mocking their poverty and skin color, and so Judge Brenner claimed that this was a reason not to allow them into the public realm. Files, she wrote, which “include the use of insulting terminology that was accepted about fifty years ago and which today is perceived in a particularly negative light may damage the country’s image and foreign relations.” Brenner also worried that allowing the documents to be made public might assist the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

BDS on college campuses is a savvy, well-funded political operation whose sponsors and organizers include groups and individuals with ties to Islamist agendas. I didn’t make this up. A much smarter person than me said this in his sworn testimony in front of the United States Congress. Here is Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, former terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury: The overlap of former employees of organizations that provided support to Hamas who now play important roles [in the BDS movement]… speaks volumes about the real agenda of key components of the BDS campaign.10 Schanzer, now senior vice president at the Washington, DC–based think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is an expert in uncovering financial ties that are designed to be hidden. In his testimony, Dr. Schanzer describes a head-spinning web of financial and personal connections between BDS and supporters of terrorism. The BDS US campus operation represents a savvy rebranding of the Palestinian cause to make it more palatable—and, you know, less terror-y—for the American people. Key figures in the BDS movement come from a particularly uncompromising strain of Palestinian nationalism that calls for a State of Palestine to stretch from the river to the sea (yes, without Israel). Apparently, when they saw that their message was not resonating with Western society (not surprisingly, I would say), they decided to pivot and started pouring their resources into American colleges in order to influence future leaders and voters in America and Europe. “Investing in the future they are,” as Yoda would say.

The BDS on campus operation works in two primary ways. The first is meetings, or “training and educational” sessions. BDS distributes flyers or Facebook invites for pro-Palestine or anti-Israel events in which a speaker will present their standard talking points—misinformation, disinformation, a skewed reality, and the convenient elimination of history or facts. They will share a rough personal story to create a one-sided narrative that would rightfully infuriate anyone with a beating heart. The second critical operation is political. When campus voting season comes around, representatives descend on college students in order to push anti-Israel resolutions or referendums at the university.

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose goal is nothing short of the complete delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist. That’s what my speech to the UN was all about. In reading parts of that speech, you’ll start to see why this issue

Like in the time of Esther, God has a Jewish girl hidden in the palace! She was born a Jew, then adopted and grafted into the commonwealth of Israel. She lived in every foreign land, hid her Jewish identity, took a Gentile name, and followed the celebrations of the nations where she lived. She grew in beauty and majesty, and she’s married to the King. Do you know her name? That’s right—the Church is her name. And now that the plot to destroy all the Jews has been revealed…her uncle, Mordecai (Messianic Jews), is begging her (the Church) to go before the King and intercede for the lives of her relatives. But will she do it? Will she fast and pray? Will she cry out as a watchman on the walls? Or will she remain silent, hoping the curse will somehow disappear, saying, “I am not of those people any longer; they rejected their King and I am married to Him; they brought these troubles on their own heads; why should I stick my neck out for them? If they are God’s chosen people, then He will certainly take care of them!” Listen to the words of Mordecai when Hadassah, Esther, was concerned for her own safety above the salvation of her people. Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this? (Esther 4:12-14) Yes, that’s right, Church! You are God’s hidden plan for the salvation of Israel and the blessing of all the peoples on Earth! Will you fast and pray? Will you go before the King and cry out for your people? Or will you continue to give comfort and aid to Haman, embrace replacement theology (discussed in chapter 8), support BDS, and refuse shelter and supply to the Jews? For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you will have missed the day of your visitation—even the very purpose for which you were brought to the Kingdom. The adversary, the usurper, is seeking to destroy the whole house of Israel again because… a King is coming!

In this sense (although the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice would, despite Oslo and subsequent agreements, reaffirm Israel's status as occupying power with all the responsibilities for the occupied population that are specified in the key documents of international humanitarian law), the Oslo agreements were designed in part to relieve Israel of many of the burdens of occupation-- as well as the need to police a restive population on a daily basis.

BDS is a useful boogeyman for the Israeli and American right wings, allowing them to expand their assault on democracy while advancing the narrative that “the whole world is against Israel.”70 Rubio weaponized the BDS debate in an effort to force an internal fight among Democrats, who he knew were split between those who agreed with the Republicans and those who saw it as a violation of free speech.

Later a stalwart in the BDS movement, she remained convinced that although Said disliked the “rigidity” of the BDS movement at times, he would have taken his stand with it critically. In the last years of his life, he had already supported targeted divestment and boycotting the settlements and was furious with his colleague the progressive historian Eric Foner for refusing to support defunding the settlements. For most of the Said

It’s a hackneyed trope of Holocaust revisionism in service of the Palestinian cause to equate Hamas-controlled Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto. This portrayal is designed to gain sympathy for the Arabs in the Gaza Strip. It also equates Israel, the Jewish State, as the new Nazis.

In truth, they want it as a statement of conquest, to plant their flag to displace the Jewish infidel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. It’s less about having their state. It’s more about destroying our state and planting their victory flag over Jerusalem.

Whoever promotes Palestine today promotes the rise of Hamas. It’s as inevitable as storms after strong winds.

What do their references about killing Jews, and a perverse Islamic view of what is a Jew, have to do with Palestinian self-determination, except perhaps for their stated condition that a Palestine must be Judenrein – Jew free?

Palestinian Authority denounced the existence of any Jewish history in Jerusalem. In this report, they claimed that the Jewish Temple “exists only in the minds of radical organizations.

When Mohammed conquered Medina, the booty included the public beheading of eight hundred men and boys and the enslavement of their girls and women. He destroyed the last remaining Jewish tribe of Qurayzah at the Jewish city of Khaibar.

Due to enemies of the Jews flooding social media with anti-Israel propaganda, a recent study found that anti-Semitism has skyrocketed about 50% on America’s college campuses. The number one contributor to the rise of Jew-hatred in American universities is the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) movement.      The Islamist-inspired BDS campaign against the Nation

These tactics are not new. They have been used against Israeli speakers in the past and are part of the broader effort known as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS. Founded in 2005 by Palestinian organizations, it advocates for the following: (1) boycotting Israeli-made products and services, as well as public events in which Israelis participate; (2) the divestment by governments and private institutions of investments in Israeli companies; and (3) the establishment of international sanctions against Israel. Its goal is to punish Israel for what it terms Israel’s “apartheid” policies toward Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.

The boycott in the academic world today against Israelis has its roots, in some measure, in the 2001 United Nations–sponsored Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. There were actually two gatherings in Durban—the official United Nations conference and one sponsored by a group of about three thousand nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The discussion about Israel at both meetings was vituperative and overshadowed all other issues on the meetings’ agendas. The final declaration adopted by the NGO forum laid the groundwork for the BDS movement by equating Zionism with racism and calling for a boycott of Israel.

In 2015 the American Jewish pop star Matisyahu was disinvited from appearing at Rototom Sunsplash, an annual international reggae music festival held in Spain that was, ironically, devoted to “the promotion of peace, equality, human rights and social justice.”12 He was told by festival organizers that the pressure to disinvite him came from BDS members, and that if he made a public statement in support of Palestinian statehood and against Israeli “war crimes,” he would be able to perform.13 When he refused to do so, his performance was canceled and Rototom Sunsplash issued the following statement: Rototom Sunsplash, after having repeatedly sought dialogue in the face of the artist’s unavailability to give a clear statement against war and on the right of the Palestinian people to their own state, has decided to cancel [his] concert. Even though Rototom Sunsplash’s other goals included examining the “rise in Islamophobia in Western countries, as well as the situation of the prisoners in Guantánamo,” no European performers were required to denounce expressions of Islamophobia in their countries, and American performers were not required to share their views on the United States policy toward prisoners in Guantánamo. After an international outcry at the festival’s assertion that an American Jewish musician was answerable for Israeli government policy, the invitation was reinstated.

A particularly cruel irony inherent in the targeting of Israeli academics, artists, and intellectuals is that a disproportionate number of them publicly oppose many of Israel’s settlement policies. Instead of encouraging their efforts, BDS lumps them in with the very people and policies that they oppose. All this does is bar Israeli advocates for change from participating in the larger conversation with like-minded Palestinian individuals, and instead empower extremists on both sides.

How ironic it is that leftist BDS supporters have adopted the tactics of right-wing McCarthyites.

One of the main accusations and “proof” of the need for a boycott is that Zabludowicz has invested in Palantir. Its “main offense”: cooperation with the NSA and other secret services of exclusively democratic nations. Instead of describing Palantir, which is currently also playing a role in supporting Ukraine in its defense against the Russian war of aggression and in Israel in its defense against Hamas terror, as an important instrument in the international fight against terrorism, i.e. as a quasi-protective power of democracy, it is depicted as the epitome of evil in the woke milieu. Supporting Palantir is a welcome reason to cancel an art collection. Increasingly long lists of artists who have withdrawn their work from the Zabludowicz Collection are appearing on the Internet. The demands are coming thick and fast. It is not about weakening, it is about “the end,” the destruction of the collection. The anti-Israeli and antisemitic BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), which among other things propagates the boycott of Israeli products all over the world (in sad continuity with the Nazi call “Don’t buy from Jews”), is largely behind the activities. The climax of the hate campaign was a conversation that Anita and Poju Zabludowicz had to have with the board of the Tate Gallery in spring 2022. In a friendly and understanding manner, Anita Zabludowicz was advised to resign from the Tate Council in order to prevent damage to the museum. Anita Zabludowicz politely asked what exactly they were accusing her of, what she had done wrong. The answer was a shrug of the shoulders. They feared the damage that some outraged artists and curators committed to the woke movement might do to the Tate. In short, the Tate, one of the most powerful cultural institutions in the world, bowed to the Zeitgeist. Following instead of leading.

I once heard Palestinian activist and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, Omar Barghouti, talking about an ‘aha moment’ – what I would call, as you might by now have guessed, recognition. He was talking specifically about the moment when an Israeli realises, in a turning point of action, that a Palestinian is a human being, just like him or her.

This includes enormous sums of money funneled to bodies that appear to support conflict resolution and fundamental rights. The problem is that far too much of this money goes to bodies that fight for the opposite. Below are just a few prominent examples. The Dutch government funds Electronic Intifada.[813] Ali Abunimah is one of its heads. Abunimah considers Mahmoud Abbas to be a “collaborator” with Israelis (the Palestinian term for a traitor who deserves death).[814] Abunimah is also a virulent opponent to the peace process and an open supporter of the “one-state solution”[815] whose real meaning—in the eyes of Europe, as well as Israel—is an end to the Jewish state. Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, and Holland have supported the NGO al-Haq over the last decade.[816] A Palestinian organization based in Ramallah, al-Haq is supposedly a neutral human rights organization. The problem? It supports both BDS and the right of return.[817] Could someone explain how funding such an organization promotes genuine peace? The Development Center (NDC) transfers millions of dollars to Israeli and Palestinian organizations. The fund is supported by the World Bank, France, and other European countries.[818] Formally, the fund supports human rights as such, but a check of the organizations it funds shows that most of them either support the right of return or are involved in BDS. Among the dozens of organizations backed by the European Union is the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), headed by Jeff Halper. Halper has made a name for himself giving lecture tours attacking not just Israel but also global capitalism. He even views the Saudi Peace Plan as nothing more than a ploy “intended more to placate the Arab Street than as an actual political position.”[819] In his opinion, Western leaders are practically begging Israel to become a regional power so that the West can continue to oppress the Arab masses. ICAHD also publicly supports BDS and Return.[820] Despite all this, this openly radical organization was supported by the European Union to the tune of €169,661 between February 2010 and June 2012.[821] We could go on like this forever to cover the ever-growing list of organizations which are funded by the European Union, and European countries.[822] Organization after organization sells the West a bill of goods about supporting human rights—and then goes on to support the campaign against the very existence of Israel, for a right of return,

This brief list is only the tip of the iceberg, and the bottom line is simple: BDS is a movement whose organizational structure brings together Palestinian terror organizations, promotes classically antisemitic narratives, and denies the State of Israel’s right to exist in any borders whatsoever. Palestinian terror operatives are thus able to participate in a movement that claims to promote “non-violent resistance” and a “struggle for equality, justice, and liberty” and therefore meet with important national decision-makers around the world and raise funds, while in their other capacities openly working to murder Israelis.

As of January 2020, twenty-eight states had laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations, or individuals for engaging in or calling for boycotts against Israel.66 The laws usually penalize businesses or individuals for refusing to sign a document that commits them not to participate in any way in boycotts against Israel. Some of the laws have real penalties, while others are merely declarations that the state opposes BDS.

BDS is a useful boogeyman for the Israeli and American right wings, allowing them to expand their assault on democracy while advancing the narrative that “the whole world is against Israel.