The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—BDS for short—attempts to persuade the world to break off all economic and diplomatic relations with the state of Israel. Americans who’ve heard of BDS may think of it as a crotchet of left-wing cranks, but it now has budding support in Congress.
The BDS movement accuses Israel of imposing “apartheid” on the Palestinians. It holds companies and nations complicit in oppression unless they remove all financial and diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. The movement is in many ways a throwback to the Arab League boycott of Israel, adopted by the Arabs in 1945 to prevent Jewish emigration to the British Mandate—that is, to prevent the creation of Israel. The league tried to blacklist not just Jewish firms but any international company that traded with Israel. Eventually it fell apart because Arab companies liked profits more than they hated Jews.
The BDS movement, however, has picked up where the Arab League left off. Its co-founder and chief personality, Omar Barghouti, holds a degree from an Israeli university and lives in Israel, but he and his followers work to persuade corporations, international bodies, and national governments to cut off ties to Israel. The movement’s success has been to hide its anti-Semitic character—any movement that calls for the end of the Jewish state, as BDS does, is an anti-Semitic one—and sell itself instead as a “progressive” cause. Fringe Democrats have been trying to make Israel a partisan issue for the past two decades by portraying Israel’s defensive wars as offensive conquests. The campus left has been hostile to Israel since just after the Six-Day War in 1967: Resolutions to boycott Israel pass nearly every week on one campus or another.
Not until now, after this year’s midterm election, has this form of hatred found its way into the U.S. House of Representatives.
Representative-elect Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said she won’t attend a freshman congressional trip to Israel, and instead will lead a delegation to the West Bank. Tlaib alternately expresses support for a “two-state solution” and a “one-state-solution”—the latter being code for the obliteration of the Jewish state. Representative-elect Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will join her. Omar, who regularly refers to the Israeli state’s policy of “apartheid,” famously remarked on Twitter that Israel has “hypnotized the world.” Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), similarly, announced yesterday that she also won’t participate in the trip to Israel, which is sponsored by a non-profit.
It’s a small caucus, but a caucus, of sorts, all the same—and a doleful sign that the anti-Israel movement has gone mainstream.
