Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 66: Do BDS campaigns help Palestinians?

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current question: Do BDS campaigns help Palestinians?If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

On to the next question. Do cultural boycotts of Israel help the Palestinians? Do they actually help? A boycott is essentially an act of psychological pressure. Somebody's behaving in a certain way. You don't want them to behave that way. You create pressure to raise the costs of that behavior, and then the person will do a cost-benefit analysis,

realize that the costs are higher for behaving the way they're behaving, and they'll behave a different way. And therefore, a boycott is essentially in, engaging in a battle where the battlefield is the psyche of the target. You are entering the target's mind and you are changing how that target perceives the costs. It's not about objective costs. It's about how the target understands the cost it's paying for its behavior. And this is where the fundamental flaw of the BDS movement, of the anti-Israel boycott movement, becomes really visible and really hard to pretend it isn't there.

And I think really makes it not just useless, actually harmful to Palestinians. And I'll explain why. I'm an Israeli explaining this. So this had better be a really good explanation or you should have no reason to take it seriously. Let me do my best. The boycott divestment and sanctions movement officially wants no more Jewish state. That's official. It's one of its major goals.

It talks about it. its founders talk about it. It is founded out of a certain class of Palestinian civil society and public intellectuals and was established at the Durbin Conference, at the UN's Durbin Conference against racism back in 2001, I think it was. And the movement essentially calls for an end to a Jewish state and the establishment of an America-style civic democracy between the river and the sea. Palestinians and Jews all have a vote in a single state. and what is now no longer going to be is a Jewish state.

There will be no more Jewish self-determination, Jewish identity, Jewish definition. Now, there might still be a Jewish majority in that state, but to prevent there being a Jewish majority in that state, BDS also advocates, and it is its official, go to its website, it's an official stand, that it demands from the Israelis full and unlimited right of return for everyone who is a descendant of a Palestinian refugee from 1940. for all generations for all time,

even if it's a single great-grandparent. BDS movement, by the way, if there is a Palestinian state established, still wants a full and complete right of return for all descendants for all time into Israel. Its core purpose and idea is that there cannot be a Jewish state in this world. And that means that it actually has a really hard time

raising the costs in the Israeli psyche. The Israeli, the target of the campaign, has a cost-benefit analysis running in their own heads, right? I behave a certain way. Military rule in the West Bank. Because the costs of doing this, including international criticism, is lower than the cost of withdrawing from the West Bank,

or the cost of ending the military rule. What is that cost? As the Israeli perceives it, we're talking about perception of costs in the target psychology. The cost is Hamas, doing in the West Bank 16 times the size of Gaza, the highlands overlooking

all our population centers, a territory that if we lose it, it shrinks our country down to nine miles wide at the waste. Hamas, making sure the West Bank goes the way Gaza went. And by the way, Hamas wins the elections in every poll in the West Bank. And so, what is the cost of withdrawing from the

West Bank? An existential threat. Can you raise the cost through boycotts, divestments, and sanctions on Israel for staying in the West Bank? Can you raise it high enough to make a it worth taking on the cost that Israelis believe it will happen in a withdrawal? I'm not sure you can. Boycotting is not going to get Israel out of the West Bank. A sense among Israelis of a fundamental change in Palestinian politics might do the trick. But that's a tall order.

There isn't the leadership and there isn't the ideological and intellectual and religious structures in Palestinian society to begin to do that shift away from this deep Islamism that grips Palestinian Islam. But that's what it would take. Now, that means we're stuck. I don't have answers. If you came here for answers, I don't got them. But I know one thing about BDS.

It's even worse than that. It isn't just telling Israelis, you must do what I say or I will punish you. They say more than that. The very idea that you have a nation state to defend yourselves after the 20th century, you refugees of Yemen and Poland

and Ukraine and Morocco and Baghdad. The very idea that you have that capacity for self-determination is a great and vast and abiding crime. And I demand from you to surrender that self-defense that ended the vast death toll of the 20th century. When the survivors of Auschwitz flee to the American zone and get rounded up into DP camps, into displaced persons camps, and they're stuck there for three years because no country on earth will take in the last survivors of the Holocaust. They go to Israel.

And those DPs are probably a quarter of the IDF in the 1948 war. People who know that the world will watch Auschwitz happen and let it happen. Nobody will save the Jews. Any more than anybody saved the Tutsis of Rwanda?

Any more than anybody saves the Uyghurs of China? Nobody will save the Jews. The Jews are being told to unlearn every lesson they learned in the 20th century, and if they don't, they're going to be boycotted. How is that helping Palestinians? What Israelis here is a framing of the entirety of the Palestinian cause as the eradication of Israel, as the eradication of Jewish safety, as the eradication of Jewish identity, of Jewish self-determination, of the connection of Jews

to the land of Israel, of the legitimacy of their being a Jewish polity, a Jewish country, a Jewish people. If you want to help Palestinians, You need to lower the perceived costs among Israelis for withdrawal. You pulled out of South Lebanon and it ended in rivers of blood, and you pulled out of Gaza and it ended in rivers of blood. But this pull out, this won't end that way. You need to create that sense among Israelis, convincingly. And only Palestinians can do that, not you activists abroad.

And then applying costs to refusing to do it might work. The Jews cannot have self-determination and safety. They cannot have that. And in fact, the only way to solve the Palestinian problem is to take that away from Jews? Congratulations. You've just guaranteed that you're going to have to take it from the Jews's cold dead hands. You know, I boycott some things. There's some countries, some companies, some products.

I don't believe in, don't like... Boycotting is not the problem of the BDS movement. And not even the bigotry. There's some bigotry in the selectivity of it. The relevant part is what it does to Israelis and Palestinians on the ground, because those are the people who actually matter, not the moral feelings of foreigners. Now, why don't the BDSers understand this? There's a good reason.

They genuinely don't believe they need to know Israeli psychology. There's no discourse among the BDS of the effect of the second Intifada of the 140 suicide bombings on the Israeli public, on left-wing Israelis, willingness to withdraw, willingness to separate, willingness to have one state. If we could have one state, as BDS demands, with all of us living equally happily together, we could have two states. The problem is getting to a place where we don't think we're going to murder each other as soon as everybody's capable of it. That's the problem.

And so for BDS to not have any interest, even the slightest, in the psychology of the target, tells me it's not really about affecting change in the target. It's about placing the Israelis in the dock. It's about placing them in their rightful place morally. And that macro failure brings us to the micro, to the cultural boycotts. the most amazing thing about the cultural boycotts is that inasmuch as israelis notice them and they often don't notice them but inasmuch as they do notice them they chuckle and why do they chuckle because the culture producing institutions of this country don't tell anybody the stage between us are a bunch of leftists they are left-wingers singers from israel are boycotted writers from israel can't get published these are people set against the policies Academic institutions will boycott Israeli academics. What do you think Israeli academics would vote?

They don't vote for this government by and large. There's a separate problem of the monoculture of academia. It's worse in the West than in Israel, but it exists in Israel too. Who are you boycotting? You're boycotting the people most likely to agree with you. And it reaches heights of hypocrisy that are truly criminal. For example, there's a group of activists in Israel deeply, radically, profoundly bitterly opposed to the Gaza war.

And this group of activists actually ran the Amnesty International Israel chapter. And Amnesty produced a report that says there's a genocide in Gaza. And the Israel chapter, which has been telling Israelis, it's terrible, it's evil, they're war crimes, we need to stop, it's going to kill our own hostages, civilians are dying in huge numbers,

and the army isn't careful, and we must stop the war. Those people, they couldn't sign on to Amnesty's genocide report. And the reason they didn't believe it was a genocide was they didn't believe that the Israeli public or the Israeli state was literally intent on carrying out the

destruction of the people of Gaza. They actually thought that the purpose of the war was to get our hostages back and to remove Hamas. And incidentally, when Israel did get its hostages back, the war ended. It's possible that the Israeli far-left human rights activists

understood Israelis slightly better than people in New York at Amnesty headquarters, who wrote the report. What was Amnesty's response? to the Israel chapter agreeing on everything Amnesty said about this war, except the word genocide literally in real time as the report was coming out. Its response was to shut down the chapter and boycott those activists. People who stood in a country at war against enemies who proclaim for generations

that they want a genocide of us, the Israelis taking the most unpopular stand in the country, The Amnesty Israel people lost friends. The Amnesty Israel people didn't have other job options. The Amnesty Israel people sacrificed for their activism. Nobody in New York sacrifices to sit at Amnesty International's office and represent Amnesty International. And they're the ones Amnesty International boycotts. The cultural boycott of Israel is not a boycott of what Israel's doing.

It's a boycott of the very Israelis who want Israel to change most, and are loud about it inside a society that feels itself under siege and isn't always all that tolerant of those views. They're the ones they boycott. If Amnesty produced a report that China was carrying out a genocide of the Uyghurs and Chinese Amnesty, which is something that cannot exist, but if it could exist, it would be in a delicate place, said, we will stand and defend and fight for the Uyghurs and fight,

but we're not going to call it a genocide. An Amnesty shut down China's Amnesty chapter and kicked them all out of the organization and boycotted them, It would not be about human rights, and it would not be about genocide. It would be bigotry. It's about a bigotry. It's about taking the Jews and putting them in their rightful place. It's about the idea that Jews alone among the peoples of this earth can't have self-determination.

And it's a catastrophe for Palestinians. Because it's not about making a change on the ground there. And people telling you that that's what it's about, convincing you that that's what it's about, are lying to you or themselves don't understand what they're doing. and bd s doesn't have to be a bigoted turning on jews that ends up lashing out at any jews it can find anywhere in the world but if it keeps being that if it keeps being that then it's legitimate for jews to say to wonder if it's anything else