BDS has shown its true face in boycotting Standing Together
Alienating a group with record levels of joint Arab-Israeli engagement proves BDS doesn’t actually care about ending the occupation
Members of Standing Together, an Israeli nonprofit that mobilizes Jewish and Palestinian Israelis for progressive causes, carry signs at a protest to bring Israeli hostages home. Photo by Getty Images
Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman February 1, 2024
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has finally revealed itself to be strategically bankrupt.
The Palestine Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel posted on the official BDS website last week, calling on its followers to boycott Standing Together (Omdim B’Yachad in Hebrew), a leftist Israeli-Palestinian organization that has called for a permanent cease-fire in the war in Gaza and a return of all Israeli hostages.
By disavowing the only group within Israel that is speaking up for Gazans under bombardment — at great personal risk to the groups’ Palestinian Israeli members — BDS isn’t just alienating a powerful ally. It is showing that it’s committed not to the cause of Palestinian liberation through coalition building, but rather that of ideological purity.
Standing Together, founded in 2015, is a grassroots organization that works for progressive change in Israel, focusing on peace, equality and climate justice. They have protested home demolitions in Arab villages in Israel; organized against the deportation of African asylum seekers; and fought judicial overhaul.
The group has both Jewish and Arab Israeli members, and is co-directed by a Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian Israeli, Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood. According to +972, Standing Together “boasts a level of joint Arab-Jewish engagement” that hardly any political parties in Israel can match. From its founding, all of the movement’s materials, including its own name, have been printed in both Hebrew and Arabic.
In a Tuesday statement, the Palestinian members of Standing Together expressed disappointment and frustration with the BDS boycott of their movement, particularly at a moment when their ability as Palestinian Israelis to express themselves within a “deeply traumatized” Israeli society overseen by “a fascist government” that is cracking down on Arabs in Israel is already becoming, in their words, “untenable.”
On a technical level, it is not surprising that BDS boycotted Standing Together. The group is politically on the far left in Israel, but is still inherently engaged with Israeli society. BDS’ raison d’etre since its founding in 2005 has been to isolate Israel economically and culturally on the world stage.
But on a tactical level, the boycott shows the disingenuousness at the heart of the BDS enterprise.
A rigid vision of progress for Palestinians
The BDS movement’s argument against engaging with Israel on any level centers on the idea that dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians is counterproductive, unless and until Israel fundamentally recognizes Palestinian’s right to statehood and the right of Palestinian refugees to return, and ends the occupation of all “colonized Arab lands.”
It is essentially a hardline negotiation technique: The game can’t start until both teams agree to radical new boundaries. It may not be practical, but in our polarized world, BDS’ politics of “no” is attractive to many who are drawn to radical ideological binaries.
Yet when it comes to Israel/Palestine, BDS’ methods are doomed from the start. If ending the occupation is truly their stated political goal, then it would need a majority of Israeli citizens to vote for it, and pressure their politicians to make it happen.
To do so, a mass movement of Jewish Israelis would need to be not only intimately familiar with the Palestinian experience, but to prioritize reciprocal political solidarity with their Palestinian neighbors above almost any other interest. That’s a very tall ask.
It’s also one of the prime reasons that BDS and Standing Together have historically pursued different courses of action. “One of the problems with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign is that it assumes Israeli society can’t change,” Sally Abed, one of the Palestinian leaders of Standing Together, told Dissent in December. “And by assuming that it can’t change, important conversations between Israelis and Palestinians don’t happen anymore.”
To be sure, conversations between Israelis and Palestinians are just a starting point for reaching a long-term solution, and meaningful discussions notwithstanding, the status of Palestinians has only worsened over the decades, precipitously so during the months since Oct. 7. But creating solidarity takes relationships and time.
As Palestinian-American, former Gaza City resident and Forward contributor Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote on X the day the BDS boycott call went out, Standing Together is “trying to operate within the mainstream landscape to be effective and become a political home for diverse Israeli audiences disillusioned with the Netanyahu/rightwing regime. That’s how you build effective power, not by appealing to fringe elements within the BDS/pro-Palestine movement.”
Action vs. ideals
“Our mission is to enact change, not merely to be correct,” Standing Together writes in its Theory of Change. To them, treating Palestinians and Israelis as potential allies is not an act of airy naivete but one of strategic political organizing.
In order to build a mass movement to effect the kind of paradigm shift in Israel they think is necessary for change, they know they must identify and build upon common interests between wildly diverse groups within Israeli society.
In their statement about responding to BDS’ boycott, Palestinian leadership of Standing Together writes: “We believe that all politics, whether we like it or not, begins from a place of self-interest.” In other words, Israelis will not organize en masse for the cause of Palestinian statehood and an end to the occupation of the West Bank unless they overwhelmingly perceive the pursuit of full Palestinian rights as being to their own benefit.
So, Standing Together works to persuade Israelis that it is advantageous for their own safety and well-being to forge a free and equal society between the river and the sea, and to persuade Palestinian Israelis to work with their Jewish neighbors. “Our strategy is not to morally lecture,” they write. “Historically, here and around the world, this does not work.”
BDS has repeatedly chosen tactics that all but eliminate coalition building, rejecting true political allyship with people living this reality in the region. In 2021, political historian Arash Azizi wrote in Newsweek of BDS: “If all cultural and political voices of Israel are boycotted, who exactly do these campaigners hope to build this one-state with? Their progressive friends in Brooklyn?”
If your political demands are unachievable, then they no longer are political goals, but empty platitudes. BDS’ position is strategically useless — and morally disappointing.
A friend of mine recently visited the celebrated author Octavia Butler’s archives, and posted some photos on social media of pages from Butler’s papers and journal entries. Scrawled vertically in the margins of a lined notebook was a question: “Do you want to communicate or do you want to preach?”
In boycotting Standing Together, BDS has chosen to preach. It would be better, instead, if they would commit to building something new, together.
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