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Oct 173 min read

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and the Blurred Boundary between Legitimate and Antisemitic Criticism

Updated: 6 days ago

BDS is a Palestinian-led movement, formed in 2005, taking inspiration from the South African anti-apartheid narrative. It considers itself to be non-violent, seeking to mobilise international economic and political pressure on Israel in solidarity with Palestinians. Particularly, it calls for countries, businesses, and universities to sever ties with Israel unless it meets three demands: first, to end the occupation of all land captured in the 1967 six-day war, second, to grant ‘full equality’ to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and third, to ensure that the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their homes and properties – as stipulated in UN Resolution 194 – is fulfilled.


However, according to several Israelis and American Jews, the movement’s ultimate goal is eventually the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Their claim is based on the so-called ‘three Ds test’, proposed by Sharansky (2005), to differentiate legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. The first ‘D’ stands for ‘demonisation’, suggesting that portraying Israel as inherently evil or as a unique threat to humanity constitutes an antisemitic act. Comparisons of Israelis to Nazis and Palestinian refugee camps to Auschwitz are often cited as examples. The second ‘D’ stands for ‘double standards,’ referring to any discriminatory law or practice that disproportionately affects Jews. In this sense, it is antisemitic when Israel is singled out for human rights violations, while other perpetrators – such as China, Saudi Arabia or Sudan – are not mentioned. The third ‘D’ concerns ‘delegitimisation’ and implies that denying the legitimacy of the Jewish religion and people, along with their state, is a remnant of imperialist colonialism.


Whether or not the movement is antisemitic, however, remains an open debate that has intensified since October 7, 2023, and it more generally relates to what can be considered an antisemitic act. There is no clear-cut objective, and it remains to be determined whether the recent rise of antisemitic violence can actually be attributed to the movement itself. Obviously, the ‘three Ds test’ may offer a useful benchmark, and more generally one could argue that antisemitism is at play when the rights to dignity, sovereignty, and memory of Israelis are threatened. Johnson and Rosenhead (2016) offered an interesting article showing the contrasting view, and that perhaps a one-size-fits-all answer does not exist. In Europe, this contrast is closely observable. In Switzerland, the JUSO – a Swiss radical youth organisation connected to the Social Democratic Party, though legally independent – has explicitly declared its support for the BDS movement (Gerny 2024). Swiss security agencies have yet to react, also because according to Swiss law, extremism only falls within its remit if it is related to violence. Yet the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has recently categorised the BDS movement as a suspected extremist movement.


Certainly, a ‘wave of antisemitism’ is on the rise in Europe (Rankin 2024), as are boycotts, and the mere fact that BDS is the subject of heated discussions implies that it is probably not only anti-Zionist, but also at times antisemitic in its actions.


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