Reframing Palestine

BDS against Fragmentation and Exceptionalism

Ilana Feldman

L aunched in 2005, the movement to engage in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanc-

tions (BDS) of Israel has become a significant political force over the past decade.
Organizations as diverse as Jewish Voice for Peace and the Presbyterian Church
USA, and people as varied as Roger Waters and Stephen Hawking have taken up
the call for BDS. Evidence of its significance lies not only, perhaps not even primar-
ily, in its victories—as significant as these have been. Such evidence also lies in the
tremendous effort being made to defeat BDS. Enormous sums of money are being
directed to this purpose, coming from individuals such as Sheldon Adelson, the bil-
lionaire gambling magnate who is also a major supporter of Donald Trump, and
from the Israeli government.1 The effects of this money are evident in efforts by
multiple state legislatures to ban BDS activity and in the proliferation of “blacklists”
of BDS activists (the most insidious of these target undergraduate student activists
as racists for their social justice work). All these efforts can make BDS activism more
risky for vulnerable people and organizations, but they have not succeeded in stop-
ping the movement.
As a scholar who has focused on Palestine and Palestinians for my entire
career, I am interested in what BDS politics teaches us about the Palestinian expe-
rience and also in how it creates opportunities to increase reciprocity in research
relationships. My first serious learning about Palestine began when I was a college
student, during the early years of the first intifada against Israeli occupation, an

Radical History Review

Issue 134 (May 2019) DOI 10.1215/01636545-7323685
© 2019 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

193

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 194 Radical History Review

uprising characterized by political creativity, grounded optimism, and widespread

grassroots participation. During that same time, the divestment movement against
apartheid in South Africa dominated the politics of US campuses, including my
own. The lessons I took from both these movements included the importance of
international solidarity, the effectiveness of boycott politics, and the necessity of
recognizing that political change is a long-term process. More recently I have
been part of a campaign to have the American Anthropological Association (AAA)
adopt a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. My involvement in this campaign
was guided by what I have learned—through research and politics—about Palesti-
nian history, experience, and resistance.
In the face of Israel’s repeated assaults on Palestinians over the past
decade—large-scale attacks on the Gaza Strip in 2009, 2012, and 2014, and, in
2018, mass shootings of Palestinians protesting near the border—increasing num-
bers of people feel it necessary to stand against Israeli policy. And BDS is the only
real option on the table to do so effectively. When, amid the killing along the Gaza
border in April 2018, Natalie Portman wanted to express her discomfort with
“recent events in Israel,”2 she decided not to attend a ceremony to award her the
Genesis Prize—an award intended to honor “individuals who have attained excel-
lence and international renown in their chosen professional fields, and who inspire
others through their engagement and dedication to the Jewish community and/or
the State of Israel.”3 Even as she quickly tried to distance herself from BDS—saying
that her boycott was directed at Benjamin Netanyahu, rather than Israel—the fact
that boycott was the most effective means available to her to express her opposition
is notable. And many others are not nearly as squeamish as Portman in acknowledg-
ing this fact.
As the Portman example makes clear, boycott activity can take many forms,
not all of them undertaken with specific reference to the Palestinian BDS call. The
BDS campaign itself, coordinated since 2007 by the BDS National Committee
(BNC), rests on three fundamental demands. These are that Israel (1) end the occu-
pation of the West Bank and Gaza, (2) recognize the right of Palestinian citizens of
Israel to full equality, and (3) respect the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to
their homes.4 The impact of BDS and its demands lies not just in the particular
claims that it makes for Palestinian rights, as important as they are. BDS, as both a
Palestinian and a global project, also reframes Palestine as a political space.
The BDS campaign works against the fragmentation of Palestinian society
that has been a hallmark of Israeli practice since 1948. By making the political
demands of Palestinian refugees in exile outside of historic Palestine, Palestinian
citizens of Israel, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza all BDS
demands, the movement brings the three primary segments of the Palestinian pop-
ulation into the same political frame. By calling for global solidarity with Palesti-
nians, by highlighting the complicity of many parties (government, corporate,

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 Feldman | Reframing Palestine 195

individual) in Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and by insisting on the intersections

of the Palestinian struggle with many others around the world, BDS undermines the
language of exceptionalism that has long been an impediment to action. The trans-
formative effect of BDS on the politics and political space of Palestine is as signifi-
cant as the outcome of any specific BDS campaign.

Background of BDS
The significantly different circumstances in which Palestinians have lived since 1948
have made a divergence in political mobilizations inevitable. For many years the
center of Palestinian political life lay outside of Palestine, as the Palestine Libera-
tion Organization (PLO) organized refugees to fight for the liberation of their coun-
try. The peak of the thawra (revolution) was in the 1970s when the PLO, then based
in Lebanon, managed a large resistance movement and a statelike institutional
apparatus that operated in the fields of healthcare, economy, and the arts. After
the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon in 1982, and especially after the start of the inti-
fada against Israeli occupation in December 1987, the center of political gravity
began to shift to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Oslo Accords—signed in 1993 and stipulating final status determination
by 1999—created a further division between the diaspora and the occupied popu-
lation. In signing the accords the PLO functionally disregarded the rights of refu-
gees and focused the organization’s political energies on state building in the terri-
tories. Refugees understood and objected to these consequences of Oslo, launching
the Right of Return movement to insist on their political claims.5 During the height
of the Oslo period, when Palestinians in the territories believed the arrangement
might lead to the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state in
the West Bank and Gaza, the interests of Palestinians in the territories and those
outside seemed to be divergent.
The last twenty-five years—since the signing and implementation of the Oslo
Accords—have witnessed a degradation of Palestinian politics and a “developmen-
talization” of international support. There are a lot of reasons for this shift, but the
Oslo structure, which established the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and
Gaza and shifted the conditions of occupation, itself was key. As aid dollars poured
in, Palestinian politics shifted from mass movements to NGO building. And inter-
national action in these years become more focused on “aiding” and “helping” Pal-
estinians. There have always been countervailing practices (in Palestine and
abroad), but this was the overall trend.
As the Oslo process failed to deliver a Palestinian state, and as the closure of
the territories from labor markets inside Israel created economic hardship, wide-
spread disillusion and frustration led to the outbreak of a second intifada in 2000.
Everything that has transpired since then—the harsh Israeli crackdown, the mas-
sive increase in checkpoints and restrictions on movement not only from, but within

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 196 Radical History Review

the territories, the deepening division between the West Bank and Gaza, and the
siege and repeated attacks on the latter—have contributed to a loss of faith in the
traditional Palestinian leadership, both the PLO, the long-standing “sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people,” and Hamas, the more recent claimant to
the banner of resistance. And Palestinians have no belief that Israel will cede any-
thing without considerable pressure—pressure that has been largely absent. Per-
haps ironically, faith in the international community has not entirely eroded.
There is a high degree of cynicism about the proliferating human rights and devel-
opment nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are one instantiation of
that community on the ground, but the idea that international law and interna-
tional solidarity can have an impact on the Palestinian situation continues to have
a strong hold.6
The BDS call emerged out of all of these developments. Neither the PLO/
PA nor Hamas has a strategic vision for political transformation. People needed to
provide it for themselves. Also pressing was the need to create new ways of activating
international solidarity. The past decade has not been a good one for Palestinian
politics. The first target of BDS politics is Israeli policy, but it also highlights the
failures of Palestinian political leadership. It therefore puts pressure on these par-
ties to develop new and better strategies to promote Palestinian aims. That so far
neither the PLO nor Hamas has been able to do so reveals the depths of the political
crisis facing Palestinians. In recent years BDS activism has been one of the most
lively arenas of activism among Palestinians, as well as international supporters.
Without in any way undercutting the importance of this organizing, Palestinians
vitally need to develop other political tactics and strategies that BDS can help sup-
port. BDS alone cannot solve the problems facing Palestinians, and no one imagines
that it can. BDS is solidarity politics, and it will have its greatest effect when and if
it is widely enacted alongside a vibrant political movement and strategy among
Palestinians.
The struggle for Palestinian lives will not be, and has already not been, a short
or easy one. BDS is just one part of that struggle. Its value is symbolic, in the with-
drawal of support for Israeli oppression of Palestinians, as well as practical, in
expanding the possible conversations about Palestine in the United States and else-
where and in putting pressure on the Israeli government and population. It provides
a clear means for people around the globe to stand in visible support of the Pales-
tinian struggle. Crucially, it offers a mechanism to reject the fragmentation of the
Palestinian political community and the apparent exceptionalism of the Palestinian
political situation.

Rejecting Exceptionalism
The problem of exceptionalism—the view that the Palestinian, and related Israeli,
experience is so unique as to render comparative analysis impossible—has long

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 Feldman | Reframing Palestine 197

burdened both scholarship and political analysis. The refusal of comparison, which
deprives observers of a vital tool of analysis, often leads people to misjudge which
aspects of Palestinian experience are actually distinctive. In the twentieth and
twenty-first century Palestine has been at the center of major historical trends.
The League of Nations mandates that divided the territories of vanquished Otto-
man and German empires after World War I were a late colonial governing form,
one that anticipated the passing of an older colonial order and sought to exercise
some control over the future that would come to these places. The Palestine man-
date was distinct in its inclusion of a promise to a nonnative population (to support
the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine), but this was a distinction
within, rather than beyond, the colonial framework.
The settler-colonial condition that began with Zionist settlement of the ter-
ritory, and that continues today, connects Palestine to other settler-colonial socie-
ties around the world. Understanding the mechanisms of displacement, disposses-
sion, and elimination at work in Palestine for the past century demands an analytic
perspective that recognizes these connections.7 The language of exceptionalism has
produced intellectual blinders for some, and has provided cover for politically moti-
vated refusals by others, in rendering the framework of settler-colonialism radical
when applied to Palestine. Fortunately this intellectual isolation has been increas-
ingly breached in recent years.8 A growing body of scholarship places Zionist settle-
ment, Palestinian displacement, and Israeli occupation in global and regional con-
text.9 As Julie Peteet has underscored in thinking about similarities between Israeli
occupation and apartheid South Africa, the analytic “work of comparison” is funda-
mental to undoing exceptionalism.10
Political solidarity movements such as BDS have to contend with related
deployments of exceptionalism as block to action. In the political arena exception-
alism is frequently trundled out through the reference to “complexity.” In the face of
calls for boycott and divestment on college campuses, academic associations,
unions, and other organizations, Israel’s supporters frequently argue that the situa-
tion in Israel (they are less likely to say Palestine) is far too complex for any “outsider”
to understand—suggesting that any action is likely to be misguided. There is an
apparent irony in the fact that many people who make the argument about the
impossible complexity of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” themselves betray limited
understanding of its history and present condition. But the aim of complexity argu-
ments is not to advance understanding. Its purpose is to seem to suggest that the only
politically responsible position to take vis-à-vis Israel is to take no position at all. I say
seems to suggest, because in fact most opponents of boycott want the global com-
munity to “stand with Israel” (as the name of one Israel advocacy group captures).
And although the tactic has worked in the past, its power seems to be wearing
11
thin. Not only have Palestinians and their supporters worked hard to educate peo-
ple about the situation—making sure that more people have a grasp of its genuine

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 198 Radical History Review

complexities—they have also effectively made the case that the distinctiveness of
any circumstance does not render it immune to political comparison and judgment.
By taking up time-honored and widely used means to exert political pressure and
express solidarity (as the other essays in this issue illustrate), the BDS movement
not only rejects the false claim of Palestinian exceptionalism, it directly participates
in undoing it.
Recognizing the settler-colonial condition in Palestine does not automati-
cally lead people to support BDS, though many do. It does, though, make it harder
to dismiss this strategy out of hand. The most hysterical arguments against BDS—
that it is necessarily anti-Semitic, because any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic; that
it falsely designates Israel as a violator of Palestinian rights, when it should instead
be celebrated for “making the desert bloom”—make little sense when considered in
light of serious comparative historical analysis. This same kind of comparative anal-
ysis is also necessary to address important questions about the potential effective-
ness of BDS tactics, about the limits of and challenges in solidarity politics, and
about how to sustain political engagement across many decades, which will likely
be necessary for substantial change.

Resisting Fragmentation
Fragmentation of Palestinian society and political community is both a product of
concerted efforts—primarily by Israel, but also by Arab governments—and an
effect of Palestinian history. And the fragmentation to which Palestinians have
been subjected is itself multiple. Most obvious is the territorial fragmentation.
Since 1948 the Palestinian population has been dispersed, living under the authority
of different states, and often unable to reach each other across these boundaries. In
Israel, Palestinians live as second-class citizens. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
they are an occupied native population. And over the past decade the two occupied
territories have increasingly been further separated, with Palestinians in the West
Bank deemed targets for depoliticizing development and those in Gaza viewed as
enemy combatants who receive punishment and humanitarian aid. Palestinians in
exile—near and far—have lived with distinctly different opportunities and con-
straints, depending on the policies of the states where they reside.
As fundamental as this geographic separation has been, with as many conse-
quences as it has had for Palestinian political life and organization, there have also
been many policies of fragmentation within particular territories. The Israeli gov-
ernment, as a prime example, long sought to undermine the Palestinian subjectivity
of Palestinian citizens of Israel. It governed this population as “Israeli Arabs,” and
within that general category as multiple minorities. The turn in recent years for
Palestinians living inside the Green Line to proclaim their Palestinian identity,
and to make claims of the Israeli state precisely as Palestinian citizens, has been a
significant political development. Other distinctions within the Palestinian

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 Feldman | Reframing Palestine 199

community—between refugees and natives, between Christians and Muslims, and

among urban, peasant, and Bedouin populations—have sometimes been exacer-
bated by state policies (the Lebanese government, for instance, gave citizenship to
many Christian Palestinian refugees as a way of dealing with its own demographic
concerns). And these lines of differentiation have sometimes impeded effective
political action.
By placing the three primary geographies of Palestinian into the same polit-
ical platform, the BDS call works directly to combat fragmentation. It makes the
demands of one group of Palestinians the demands of all. It helps provide a
means for differently located Palestinians to engage in a shared political project. It
contributes to enabling a recognition of these different realities, while also disrupt-
ing the extent to which these differences become blocks to communication and
community. It compels outside observers—both supporters and opponents—to
engage the breadth of Palestinian political demands. The historical and political
forces that have produced, and continue to produce, the fragmentation of Palesti-
nian community and political society are not easily overcome. And BDS, of course,
cannot undo this damage on its own. But in insisting on a political imaginary that
works across these boundaries, it can play an important role in this struggle. By
refusing an apparent political common sense that renders the needs of some parts
of the Palestinian population outside the framework for realistic political engage-
ment, it can help break through the ossified terms that have structured the “peace
process” over the past few decades. A new vocabulary, a new imaginary, and a new
political geography are all necessary for substantive political change.

Effective Solidarity Centers Palestinian Voices

The terms in which opponents of BDS make their arguments say a great deal about
how they view Israelis, Palestinians, and their own responsibility. In the context of
campaigns for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, a first objection that
opponents (and even undecideds) often raise is a boycott’s impact on Israeli scholars.
They worry about whether it will harm them and their academic freedom. This cen-
tering of concern about harm to Israelis is telling. Not only does it misconstrue, or
even deliberately misrepresent, the features of the academic boycott—which has
been structured to ensure the continued welcoming of individual Israeli scholars
in international academic life—it displays remarkably little concern for the systemic
and egregious violations of academic freedom to which all Palestinian academics are
subjected by Israel. Even those who express sympathy for Palestinian suffering often
view Israelis as “colleagues,” with professional concerns similar to our own, and Pal-
estinians as distant others who can be cared for, but not necessarily listened to.
BDS politics works against these hierarchical relations of value. One reason
to boycott is precisely that our Palestinian colleagues and compatriots have asked us
to.12 Palestinians have asked for our solidarity in support of their efforts to end the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 200 Radical History Review

fifty-two-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to gain equal
rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to resolve the seventy-year Palestinian
refugee condition, ongoing since the displacement and dispossession of the majority
of the Palestinian population in 1948. Palestinians have asked the international
community to join in nonviolent struggle against these violations, and to engage in
campaigns of BDS against Israel. So it is first and foremost an action in solidarity
with Palestinian society.13 It participates in shifting the terms of engagement with
Palestine and Palestinians from hierarchical relations in a project of development to
horizontal connections in a struggle for justice.
The Palestinian call to solidarity is not the end of anyone’s political deliber-
ations, to be sure. But if “we” acknowledge Palestinians as compatriots, we will give
this call the weight it deserves in those deliberations. By centering Palestinian voi-
ces, we can ask better questions about tactics, strategies, and political aims. We can
think more acutely about international complicity in the conditions of oppression
and dispossession that structure Palestinian lives. For those of us who are US citi-
zens, we can recognize and work to redress our particular complicity as citizens
whose government has provided the greatest support for Israel.
Probably the single most important thing an American citizen can do in sup-
port of Palestinian rights is to work to change US policy. This will not be an easy
struggle, and it will almost certainly be considerably more difficult to change gov-
ernment policy than American public opinion, but it is a necessary one. BDS is a key
part of this effort. One especially productive feature of BDS as a political tactic is
precisely that it works in so many directions and has multiple audiences and effects.
It speaks to the Israeli public—which is in a direct position to demand change from
their government—and says that the world says no to occupation and injustice for
Palestinians. It speaks to the American public and government, and says we refuse
complicity in Israeli oppression and demand a change in US policy. And it speaks to
our Palestinian compatriots, and says that we hear their call and support their cause.
Palestinians—inside and outside of Palestine—are struggling to reinvigorate
their politics: to identify new strategies and better leaders. And this is not an easy
struggle. Those of us in the international community who want to stand in support of
Palestinian rights have an opportunity to move beyond our own impasse of the end-
less supply of aid that only supports a worsening status quo. We have the opportunity
to join a movement that is already strong and is getting stronger. We have an oppor-
tunity to pursue tactics that are appropriate to our location—such as academic orga-
nizations enacting academic boycotts—whose effects are amplified by being part of
an array of other located tactics. We can seek opportunities for “coresistance,” rather
than the stale, counterproductive framework of “dialogue.”14 And in so doing we
have an opportunity to engage Palestinians as our colleagues and compatriots,
rather than as supplicants in need of our charity.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 Feldman | Reframing Palestine 201

Ilana Feldman is professor of anthropology, history, and international affairs at George Washington
University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule,
1917–67 (2008), Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule
(2015), and Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics
(2018). She is co-editor (with Miriam Ticktin) of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of
Threat and Care (2010).

Notes
1. Ballesteros, “Israel to Spend $72 Million.”
2. Kershner and Specia, “Natalie Portman Backs Out.”
3. “The Genesis Prize,” genesisprize.org/. Accessed December 11, 2018.
4. BDS, “Palestinian BDS National Committee,” bdsmovement.net/bnc. Accessed
December 11, 2018.
5. Al-Hardan, Palestinians in Syria.
6. Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights.
7. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism.”
8. See, for example, the editors’ introduction to a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies
on Palestine (Salamanca et al., “Past Is Present”).
9. Collins, Global Palestine; Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine; Salaita, Inter/Nationalism.
10. Peteet, “The Work of Comparison.”
11. I witnessed a particularly misguided attempt at the using the complexity argument when
an advocate for Israel argued to an audience of Middle East studies scholars—many of
whom have spent their careers studying the situation, all of whom have considerable
knowledge of it—that they were ill-placed to take an informed stand on the matter.
12. Wiles, Generation Palestine.
13. Barkan and Abu-Laban, “Palestinian Resistance.”
14. As Noura Erekat puts it, “In contrast to the deployment of dialogue as an opportunistic
tactic aimed at reinforcing and reproducing the status quo, dialogue must begin with an
understanding and appreciation of Palestinian rights and demands, if it is to lead to co-
resistance.” Erekat, “The Case for BDS,” 60. And see the other essays in Estefan, Kuoni,
and Ricovich, Assuming Boycott.

References
Allen, Lori. The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Ballesteros, Carlos. “Israel to Spend $72 Million in Campaign against BDS Movement,”
Newsweek, December 31, 2017. newsweek.com/israel-bds-campaign-lobby-online-public
-speakers-766996.
Barkan, Abigail, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban. “Palestinian Resistance and International Solidarity:
the BDS Campaign.” Race and Class 51, no. 1 (2009): 29–54.
Collins, John. Global Palestine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Erekat, Noura. “The Case for BDS and the Path to Co-Resistance.” In Assuming Boycott:
Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production, edited by Hareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni,
and Laura Raicovich, 56–60. New York: OR Books, 2017.
Estefan, Kareem, Carin Kuoni, and Laura Raicovich, eds. Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency
and Cultural Production. New York: OR Books, 2017.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user
 202 Radical History Review

Feldman, Keith. A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Hardan, Anaheed Al-. 2016. Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities.
NY: Columbia University Press.
Kershner, Isabel, and Megan Specia. “Natalie Portman Backs Out of Israeli Award Ceremony.”
New York Times, April 20, 2018. nytimes.com/2018/04/20/world/middleeast/natalie
-portman-genesis-prize.html.
Peteet, Julie. “The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and Apartheid.” Anthropological
Quarterly 89, no. 1 (2016): 247–81.
Salaita, Steven. Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Salamanca, Omar Jabary, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, eds. “Past Is Present:
Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” Special issue, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012):
1–8.
Wiles, Rich. Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
Movement. New York: Pluto Press, 2013.
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide
Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2019/134/193/571044/193feldman.pdf

by CORNELL UNIV user