The BDS Movement: Antisemitism Repackaged

The BDS Movement: Antisemitism Repackaged

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement claims to be a non-violent, peaceful movement focused on Palestinian rights. In reality, as expressed by the AMCHA Initiative, which fights antisemitism on college campuses, “[t]he Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement aims to demonize, delegitimize, and destroy the Jewish nature of Israel, with the result of denying to Jews their right of national self-determination.”

Having failed to destroy Israel by traditional methods of war and terrorism, Israel’s enemies devised a new plan. They would target Israel’s political and economic stability with boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). The BDS movement is insidious because it manipulates world opinion of Israel through thinly veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric.

This movement is especially active on college campuses where young people are presented with a false narrative by individuals appropriating the lexicon of the civil rights and social justice movements. Its adherents claim Israel’s government oppresses Palestinians with the same kind of racial discrimination that white South Africans once used against black South Africans under apartheid, a vicious lie that has spread throughout academia and infected the United Nations. The old antisemitism of blatant hatred of the Jews has been repackaged as anti-Zionism and hatred of Israel, but it is fundamentally the same.