Transnational Activism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

M. Hallward

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137349859
• eBook ISBN: 9781137349866
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the polarization of positions surrounding the transnational boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at ending the Israeli occupation. The author compares four US-based case studies in which activists for and against BDS struggle over issues of identity, morality, legitimacy, and conceptions of "peace."

CHAPTER 1

The History and Theory of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

As a child growing up in a peace-minded Quaker household, I remember participating in consumer boycotts at an early age, from Nestlé products due to their promotion of infant formula in countries without clean drinking water to Wal-Mart for its treatment of employees and suppliers. I learned about Quakers’ history of using economic measures to pursue a more just social order, from the use of fixed pricing systems that treated all buyers equally to the dye-free clothing of antislavery activist John Woolman.¹ Although I did not make the connection to economic activism at the time, I became a vegetarian at 13 after learning about the environmental consequences of corporate beef farming in the rainforest. In school, we read Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy and learned in graphic detail about apartheid rule; we all celebrated when South Africa had its first open, democratic elections in 1994. Boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), which was part of the global campaign to end the apartheid era in South Africa, was seen as a successful, nonviolent method of applying pressure, and a way in which global civil society—including churches, universities, and private individuals—could exert its influence.

However, when 170 groups spanning the range of Palestinian civil society issued a call in 2005 to global civil society to engage in BDS, the response was polarized. The BDS Call was ground breaking in several regards: first, it signaled a clear break from the widespread use of violence in the second intifada by elements within the Palestinian national movement and affirmed the nonviolent methods used by Palestinians in the first intifada and by village committees resisting Israeli annexation and destruction of their lands for the construction of the separation barrier. Second, the call brought together not only Palestinians from within the West Bank and Gaza Strip but also Palestinian refugees and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, groups that have often distrusted one another or worked for disparate aims. Although Israeli leaders have long called for an end to Palestinian violence or asked “where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” the Israeli establishment quickly opposed the BDS Call, viewing it as a security threat and an effort to delegitimize the state of Israel. As a scholar of peace and justice movements in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was intrigued by the passion found on both sides of the BDS issue, particularly the rival framings of BDS as either a “nonviolent struggle for Palestinian rights” or an instance of “war by other means” posing a grave security threat to the state of Israel. Why is BDS deemed a threat second only to that posed by Iran? (Reut 2010) What makes this “movement” (if indeed it can be called one) so powerful given that it is unarmed, self-funded, and volunteer driven? Given the opposing portrayals of BDS as either nonviolent or effectively violent, I set out to investigate how the BDS movement operates in practice to determine the extent to which it engages with the theory and practice of nonviolent resistance and to ascertain why BDS was so feared by Israeli officials and institutionalized American Jewry in particular.

Through interviews with pro- and anti-BDS activists in North America (primarily in the United States, and also a few in Canada)² and analysis of the discourse surrounding BDS in the press, on the web, and in activist and opponent publications, this book analyzes case studies of BDS to trace empirically how the movement works, why it is controversial, and the extent to which it is nonviolent. I do not seek to adjudicate between claims about BDS nor are questions of effectiveness the primary aim of this book; instead, the book examines how BDS activism unfolds in different local contexts to demonstrate how activists on opposite sides of the matter operate under very different sets of assumptions about the issues at hand in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, vary in their conception of “peace,” and draw upon different forms of rhetorical, material, and relational power. Although opponents (and the press in general) refer to “the BDS movement,” I suggest that what occurs on the ground is less a coherent, collectively organized global movement in the singular and more a network of local BDS movements, linked together via certain key activist nodes (like the Palestinian BDS National Committee or BNC), conferences, email listservs, and organizational websites. Palestinian initiators of the 2005 BDS Call have consistently emphasized “context sensitivity,” that “activists should make decisions based on what makes the most sense in their particular context,” while the BNC “connect[s] Palestinian civil society with its global counterparts, facilitating the sharing of information, coordinating international campaigns, providing guidance and positions on political demands” (Jamjoum 2011, 141). Consequently, in order to understand the “global BDS movement,” one needs to examine local and regional boycott and divestment campaigns. This book attempts to make an initial scholarly foray into this topic, and in doing so I hope to contribute not only to the empirical study of a relatively unstudied transnational social movement, but also to the literature on nonviolent resistance and specifically the tactics of boycott and divestment. By first placing the BDS movement against Israeli occupation in the context of historical boycott and divestment activism as well as strategies of nonviolent resistance, one can see that Palestine solidarity activists are not the first to forge links between local particularities and global causes; rather, this strategy has epitomized boycott efforts since the origin of the term in the 1880s.

Approaches to Studying Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

Tactics of BDS are not new in the field of international relations. In fact, sanctions—economic, social, and political—are a long-established tool of statecraft, and are part of the contemporary diplomatic toolbox, as evidenced by international efforts to sanction Iran, Syria, Sudan, and other countries seen as violating international norms (Maller 2010; Resource Center: Iran Sanctions 2012). While boycott and divestment are tactics used by local and global civil society groups in their efforts at sociopolitical change, sanctions are the domain of states, although civil society groups can mobilize and put pressure on state governments to implement sanctions (Manby 1992). Although all three tactics are united in the name of the BDS movement, this book focuses primarily on boycott and divestment for a number of reasons. First, since sanctions are the purview of states, civil society actors can only indirectly pursue sanctions and must rely on a greater number of outside actors (public opinion, elected officials, etc.) to achieve campaign goals. Consequently, activists in the United States tend to focus on boycott and divestment for practical and strategic reasons given the political culture surrounding activism related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the strong culture of support for Israel in the US Congress (Mearsheimer and Walt 2006).³ Although there have been groups in the United States that have worked to end the billions of dollars in taxpayer money sent to Israel each year, their efforts have faced numerous obstacles. For example, billboards calling for an end to US foreign assistance to Israel have been taken down in Denver and Los Angeles before the end of their contracted terms, likely due to outside pressure (JTA 2012; Robbins 2012). Second, the question of sanctions is more problematic from the perspective of nonviolence. Several activists interviewed for this project noted their discomfort with sanctions because of the negative repercussions of sanctions on civilian populations and their efforts to combat sanctions regimes elsewhere. Although sanctions are often used with the express purpose of avoiding military intervention, they can also be used coercively in the context of power politics, and can have a debilitating effect on civilian populations, as was the case in Iraq in the 1990s (Abu-Nimer 2003; Goodman and Gonzalez 2005; Mingst 2008, 32).⁴ However, the term “sanctions” covers a range of actions and policies, many of which may legitimately be deemed nonviolent, such as making foreign aid conditional on compliance with US and international human rights laws, including the US Arms Export Control Act or the US Foreign Assistance Act. Because sanctions are not the primary focus of the BDS campaigns studied here (or for most US activists), for the sake of space and theoretical clarity, I generally bracket the (important) debates on sanctions in my empirical analysis of cases dealing with boycott and divestment.

Although the BDS movement⁵ has received a great deal of political attention from the Israeli government and “pro-Israel” Jewish institutions in the United States in recent years,⁶ the tactic of boycott has a long history in the United States, dating back to the American Revolution when colonists refused to purchase a range of British goods in protest of British policies. Boycott was historically used by the Zionist movement and is also used as a tactic today by American Jews in protest of what they deem “anti-Israel” actions (Friedman 1999, 139–141; Glickman 2009; Massad 2013). Boycotts are “usually conceptualized as instrumental—that is, as a tactic to influence the behavior of a firm (or other institution) by withholding purchase of their products” and not a goal in and of themselves (John and Klein 2003, 1197). While boycotts are generally studied through the lens of business and economics, focusing on practices of consumer behavior or the degree of economic impact on the target (Fershtman and Gandal 1998; Friedman 1999; Garrett 1987; Lundahl 1984), boycott and divestment are also studied through the lens of social movement theory (Glickman 2009; Sen et al. 2001; Soule 2009), as boycott success requires mobilization of sufficient numbers of people to have an economic, social, or political effect. In contrast to economic approaches, which tend to focus on market factors including sales, incomes, and labor conditions (Fershtman and Gandal 1998; Friedman 1999; Lundahl 1984), social movement approaches to boycott and divestment are less motivated by activists’ “perceptions of the boycott’s likelihood of success” in strict financial terms (Sen et al. 2001, 399) and instead have a more socially oriented agenda in which activists “attempt to coerce their targets toward specific ethical or socially responsible actions” (Sen et al. 2001, 400).

Boycotts have increasingly focused less on classic consumer issues (such as price), and instead have turned toward special interest groups such as animal rights activists, ethnic and racial groups, and the environment (among other causes), many of whom use “surrogate” boycotts intended to target states (Friedman 1999, 217–218). Social movements often target corporations, such as McDonalds, Nike, Dow Chemical, Ford Motors, Nestlé, Gerber, Kodak, and Proctor and Gamble because of the many ties between government and big business, because mergers have resulted in fewer corporations controlling more of peoples’ lives, and because the government has been seen as less responsive to particular social movements (Soule 2009, 4–8). Those engaging in consumer activism, including those using tactics of boycott and divestment, “have been guided by a relatively stable theory of moral action, even as they have disagreed over what constituted morality” (Glickman 2009, 5). The diversity of groups using such tactics, which span the political spectrum from extreme left to extreme right, underscores the contentiousness of the moral issues at the heart of debate (Friedman 1999; Soule 2009). While social movement approaches to boycott and divestment focus on civil society efforts for social and political change (the focus of this book), boycotts have also been studied as a tool of state coercion, effectively a form of government sanction, as leveraged against Israel, Cuba, and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), among others (Losman 1972, 1979).

Corporate Social Responsibility

In recent decades, many studies of consumer activism and boycott have been conducted through the lens of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or socially responsible investment (SRI), where actors “strive to challenge corporate power and remedy perceived wrongdoings in the areas of human rights, labor standards and environmental concerns” (John and Klein 2003; Sen et al. 2001; Soederberg 2009, 211). While some scholars deem boycotts an “extreme case” of consumer activism in the field of CSR, “boycotts have become ever more relevant for management decision making” precisely because of the increased public attention paid to corporate image (Klein et al. 2004, 92). Boycott campaigns focusing on CSR often take the form of what Monroe Friedman calls “media boycotts” although they often have a “market” dimension as well (Friedman 1999, 22). CSR’s focus is “to assess and improve corporate operations in relation to a range of values beyond profit: human rights, environmental protection, contribution to local communities and workplace diversity among others” (Marihugh 2006, n.p.), all of which are broad, multidimensional, complex, interrelated, and contested. Ethical values and goals comprise a “gray area” with “ethical responsibilities . . . considerably more difficult to define and interpret” for both businesses and consumers (Pinkston and Carroll 1996, 200). While boycott is often seen as “a tool used to empower the disadvantaged . . . consumer, boycott can also be used to pursue conflicting ethical aims” (Glazer et al. 2010, 340). At times it is also questionable whether tools like business codes of ethics actually work, as there may be more incentives for corporations to cheat than to comply given lax, or nonexistent compliance regimes (Lim and Phillips 2008; Seidman 2007). Like with debates on child labor, one cannot always know the broader ramifications of a boycott effort, and whether imposed regulations without addressing broader structural issues may lead to worse circumstances, since once barred from regulated industry children may turn to black market jobs with worse conditions and lower pay (Drachman 2003). Such debates bring up the “tension between, moral concerns (such as genocide) and economic concerns (such as risk reduction and shareholder value)” (Soederberg 2009, 212) illustrating the various types of social movement impact (intended or otherwise) due to the “multilevel, nested system of opportunity” available to consumer activists and consequently the complex web of ethical ramifications involved in sociopolitical and economic activism (Glickman 2009, 5; Soule 2009, 49).

Questions of “impact” and “success” are often difficult to ascertain in CSR campaigns, given the nested goals of activists and the difficulty of isolating lines of causation. In a study of the boycott of infant formula, for example, Baker notes that the coalition of organizations that mobilized consumers against Nestlé were successful in “changing the marketing policies of an industry” but did not find “a solution to the fundamental causes of malnutrition and infant mortality in the Third World” (Baker 1985, 189). Success is also difficult to identify because consumer activists do not always identify a clear goal or definition of success, for strategic as well as practical reasons (Friedman 1999). Furthermore, as Soule discusses in her analysis of consumer activism and corporate responsibility, activists regularly engage in scale shift, moving between multiple targets within a broader political opportunity structure (Soule 2009, 49). Rather than mobilizing around a primary goal related to a single target, activist movements are dynamic, with actors reframing their targets and goals and adjusting their tactics according to the political and social resources available to them. For instance, students in the United States reframed their broad goal of ending apartheid in South Africa “to the narrower goal of ending corporate investment in South Africa, to (eventually) the very specific goal of divestment by their own universities of holdings in corporations with ties to South Africa” (Soule 2009, 81, italics in original). Today many corporations have subscribed to the concept of CSR, in part due to the history of consumer activism on human rights and environmental issues (Seidman 2007). For example, the Free Burma Coalition brought together a number of activists, using a range of tactics, including, “organizing peaceful protests, publiciz[ing] consumer boycotts, and lobb[ying]for federal sanctions” to put pressure on the US government to change its policy toward Burma due in part to the human rights and environmental abuses linked to the Unocal gas pipeline (HBS 2000, 10). This ultimately led to the United States sanctions on Burma and a landmark court case against Unocal in which the California “court concluded that corporations and their executive officers can be held legally responsible under the Alien Tort Statute for violations of international human rights norms in foreign countries, and that the US courts have the authority to adjudicate such claims” (ERI n.d.). Unocal’s partner in Burma, Total, agreed to settle out of court, which was seen as possibly precedent setting “for similar lawsuits by victims of human rights violations against European companies operating in developing countries” (Schouten 2007, 20). The Kimberly Process, which is “the first international agreement in global trade politics that has been adopted in consensus by governments, industry, and NGOs” resulted in part from an NGO campaign that “strategically framed gems from war zones as ‘conflict diamonds’ or ‘blood diamonds’” (Kantz 2007, 1, 10) and scandals surrounding sweatshop labor used in Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line are other instances of consumer activism that have resulted in change (Jenkins 2005; Park-Poaps and Rees 2010). These multiple successes demonstrate “that corporations have both direct and indirect human rights responsibilities” and that consumer demands can result in economic and political change (Marihugh 2006, n.p.).

In a sweeping study of boycotts in historical perspective, Glickman notes that most boycotts historically have been “putative failures” in terms of their primary objectives, but that as “an enduring political tactic and philosophy” consumer activism, including tactics of boycott, has “played an important role” in the key US social movements of the twentieth century and has “provided a remarkably consistent vision of the power of aggregate consumption and its withdrawal to promote… ‘long-distance solidarity’” (Glickman 2009, 2–3). Despite this finding, other scholars assert that consumers choose to participate in boycotts based on their “perceptions of the boycott’s likelihood of success” as well as issues of peer pressure and the costs associated with boycott as opposed to other tactics (Klein, et al. 2004, 93; Senet al. 2001, 402). As the case of the Presbyterian Church (USA) studied in this book demonstrates, questions of social responsibility go beyond corporations and include nonprofit organizations like churches and universities, many of whom are invested in profit-making corporations for scholarship endowments, pensions, and covering operating expenses. The ethics involved in deciding how, where, and when to invest money is complex as it involves multiple relationships to a variety of constituencies (pastors, congregations, students, board members, international partners, etc.), and the debates involve not only competing ethical claims but also competing strategies for affecting change. As Glickman emphasizes, consumer activists historically have not “agreed about precisely how consumer power operated or about the meaning of justice,” which compounds the contention already surrounding boycott and divestment initiatives (Glickman 2009, 5). Depending on the context, local actors not only define “justice” in different terms, but they may hold varying conceptions of “success,” identify with different world views, and/or focus on different levels in a multitiered political opportunity structure. For example, although all of the commissioners professed to share the goals of “peace,” “justice,” and “security” for Israelis and Palestinians, in the July 2012 Presbyterian Church (USA) plenary debates surrounding whether to divest from Caterpillar, Motorola, and Hewlett Packard, some commissioners focused on overall economic impact (i.e., number of shares held), others emphasized the symbolic impact of divestment (i.e., impact on relationships with Jewish or Palestinian partners in the United States and globally), and others raised concerns about the ethical issues at stake (i.e. not wanting their pensions to be implicated in violence), and the final vote split the room evenly.

Forms of Consumer Activism

As scholars note, boycott and divestment are only a few of the many tools in consumer activists’ repertoire of social action. Soule (2009) catalogs a wide range of insider and outsider tactics available to consumer activists, including varieties of shareholder activism like bringing a nonbinding resolution for a vote at annual shareholder meetings, or outside tactics such as publishing a scientific study dealing with a particular issue of concern, working with organizational elites to change corporate culture, or en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 The History and Theory of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
• 2 Explaining the Contentiousness of BDS: Rival Framings of Identity, Peace, and Power
• 3 CodePink’s “Stolen Beauty” Campaign: Creativity in Action
• 4 UC Berkeley’s Student Government Divestment Bill: Power, Identity, and Fear
• 5 The Olympia Food Co-op Boycott: Brokerage, Networks, and Local Culture
• 6 The Presbyterian Church USA: Institutions, Justice, and History
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index