BDS as a Threat to Academic Freedom and Campus Free Speech in the United States

Key Findings:

This article focuses on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, its guidelines for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, and its erosive impact on academic freedom and freedom of expression within the American academy. The BDS movement campaigns for an academic, cultural, and economic boycott of Israel with the goal of effecting change in Israeli government policy through boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning Israeli institutions. 

The BDS movement was launched in September 2001 at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa. There, radical anti-Israel groups hijacked a meeting aimed at creating a global front against racism and refocused it around their specific demand for Israel’s “complete international isolation.” A global campaign to brand Israel as the new apartheid-era South Africa was then orchestrated by an associated forum of NGOs.

BDS does not advocate for coexistence, peace building, or dialogue with Israeli academics or Israel’s American-Jewish supporters on campus. The reality is that the movement’s painting of the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a false binary of oppressor versus oppressed (through heavy use of recycled yet emotive antisemitic tactics such as Nazi and USSR-style caricaturing of Jews, Israel and Zionists) brings a reactionary and fundamentally illiberal discourse to campus.

Campus BDS actions by students include: disrupting, heckling and shouting down of Israeli and Zionist speakers; campaigns to boycott and shutter study abroad programs and other types of inter-university scholarly exchange; efforts to impede students from freely expressing their Jewish and Zionist identities and from participating fully in campus life

Faculty members and professional associations are encouraged by PACBI to carry out a number of actions at their own university and college campuses in order to comply with PACBI’s own guidelines for academic boycott of Israel. These include: boycotting their own university’s study abroad or exchange programs in Israel; refusing to publicize such programs among their students; refusing to write letters of recommendation for students wishing to study in Israel; attempting to shut down collaborative research between scholars at their own university and those in Israel; boycotting academic programs or projects organized by students or faculty that “bring together Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis to present their respective narratives or perspectives, or to work toward reconciliation” or that promote “co-existence.”

It is important to note that most BDS-related, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish advocacy is lawful and protected by the First Amendment and by institutional rules and norms regarding freedom of expression. Atkins and Elman underscore that protected speech can still weaken the diverse, inclusive, and intellectually robust environments that universities strive to create (as is the case of racist, sexist, and homophobic speech).

A failed “Boycott Israel Resolution,” pitched in summer 2019 at the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) demonstrates several of the most significant ways in which BDS activism today undermines bedrock principles of the academy:

1. The attempt at the (impossible) separation between boycotts of academic institutions and the individuals whom those institutions employ, and whom such boycotts inevitably harm.

2. The restriction of academic freedom to work with scholars from other institutions around the world. Such freedom is essential to vital professional interest in open intellectual exchange, and the scholarly right to conduct research and collaborate with colleagues as they see fit to fulfill their professional responsibilities.

3. The setting of a dangerous precedent by sponsoring an inequitable and discriminatory policy that would punish one nation’s universities and scholars. In no other context would an academic body discriminate on the basis of national origin—and for good reason.

Legal avenues are increasingly being pursued to address campus anti-Jewish speech (often so severe that it amounts to harassment under federal anti-discrimination law), including the filing of complaints with the US Department of Education alleging discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.