Whitewashing the Antisemitic beginnings of BDS?

Whitewashing the Antisemitic beginnings of BDS?

As the BDS movement is currently marking ten years since its founding, there have been a number of articles outlining its history. At the popular Legal Insurrection blog, William A. Jacobson offers sharp criticism of a related and widely distributed article by the Associated Press (AP). Rejecting the AP claim that the BDS movement owes its existence to the efforts of “a small group of Palestinian activists” who “had a novel idea,” Jacobson makes the case that in reality, BDS “was the result of a multi-year organized effort for a global boycott of Israel, most prominently in a boycott call issued at the 2001 UN Durban Conference which was so anti-Semitic the U.S. walked out.” Moreover, Jacobson points out that “[while] the Durban conference gave birth to the BDS movement, the seed of that boycott strategy to replicate the boycott of South Africa was planted at a preparatory conference in Tehran.”

 

After citing plenty of material substantiating his claims about these usually ignored origins of BDS, Jacobson emphasizes in his conclusion once more that “the 2005 BDS launch was the culmination of a highly organized international process steeped in anti-Semitism. The notion that a handful of people just got together to launch the BDS movement is complete mythology which whitewashes the true intellectual and political foundations of the movement.”

 

Read the whole post here.