Palestinian resistance and international solidarity:
the BDS campaign
ABIGAIL B. BAKAN and YASMEEN ABU-LABAN
Abstract
Israel’s recent war in Gaza (‘Operation Cast Lead’) has both exposed Israel’s defiance of international law and provided the occasion for increasing support for an organised transnational boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)movement. The BDS movement is aimed at challenging the Israeli state’s illegal military occupation and a host of corresponding repressive policies directed at Palestinians. However, the BDS campaign, and in particular the call for an academic boycott, has been controversial. It has generated a counter-response emphasising, variously, the goals of the movement as ineffective, counter- productive to peace and/or security, contrary to norms of academic freedom and even tied to anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Utilising a Gramscian approach, and drawing from Charles Mills’ concept of ‘racial contract’, we examine the history of the divestment campaign and the debates it has engendered. We argue that the effectiveness of BDS as a strategy of resistance and cross-border solidarity is intimately connected with a challenge to the hegemonic place of Zionism in western ideology. This campaign has challenged an international racial contract which, from 1948, has assigned a common interest between the state of Israel and international political allies, while absenting Palestinians as simultaneously non-white, the subjects of extreme repression and stateless. The BDS campaign also points to an alternative – the promise of a real and lasting peace in the Middle East.
Race & Class
Copyright © 2009 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 51(1): 29-5410.1177/0306396809106162 http://rac.sagepub.com SAGE Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC
Abigail Bakan
is Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her publications include Negotiating Citizenship: migrant women in Canada and the global system (with Daiva K. Stasiulis), winner of the 2007 Canadian Women’s Studies Association annual book award, and Critical Political Studies: debates and dialogues from the Left (co-editor with Eleanor MacDonald).
Yasmeen Abu-Laban
is Professor and Associate Chair (Research) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She is co-author of Selling Diversity: immigration, multiculturalism, employment equity and globalization (2002), co-editor of Politics in North America: redefining continental relations (2008) and editor of Gendering the Nation-State: Canadian and comparative perspectives (2008).
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