Prospects for a Big Tent BDS Campaign Are Larger Than Ever

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

“Resistance to Trump is unifying us,” political economist and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activist Shir Hever recently told Truthout. “And because BDS is global and intersectional, the potential for a large tent campaign has never been better or stronger than it is now.”

For more than two decades, Hever’s scholarly interests and professional and political commitments have been bound up with the pursuit of justice for Palestinians in Palestine. Since 2011, Hever — an Israeli-born Jew — has been working in Berlin, entrusted by the Palestinian BDS movement with the role of worldwide coordinator of the military embargo, a campaign that’s been thrust into a renewed and urgent relevance since October 7, 2023.

Author of two books — The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation (Pluto Press, 2010) and The Privatization of Israeli Security (Pluto Press, 2018) — Hever was recently in the U.S. primarily to present at the inaugural conference of the Center for Heterodox Economics in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While here, his first trip to the U.S. since 2016, he met with Palestine solidarity groups in multiple cities in part to remind them they are members of a global movement that transcends this moment of escalating repression from the Trump administration. At the core of his message is an old movement slogan, imbued by U.S. political history in the making with a new utility: “They oppress, we BDS.”

Hever stopped in St. Louis, home to Boeing, which makes armaments deployed in Gaza and Lebanon against civilians, including in the brutal Rafah Tent Massacre; and Israel Chemical Ltd., which manufactures white phosphorous, a lethal flesh-eating substance reportedly used by Israel in October 2023 in violation of international law. He met with members of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, who had led the successful effort to pass a ceasefire resolution at the Board of Aldermen in January 2024 and are now developing a campaign to enact an ethical procurement policy. Hever sat down with Truthout to discuss developments on the military embargo front, the significance of the upcoming Israeli budget and prospects for further BDS success.

Frances Madeson: Welcome to Missouri, where since August 2020, by law, all agreements with contractors doing more than $100,000 worth of business with the state must contain an anti-BDS clause, which declares: “the company is not currently engaged in and shall not, for the duration of the contract, engage in a boycott of goods or services from the State of Israel.” How do you analyze the impact of such laws?

Shir Hever: Strange laws like this one are unique to the United States. There were a few attempts in Germany and France to legislate against BDS, but they failed miserably because they’re unconstitutional and because the High Court for Human Rights of the European Union shot them down.

In the U.S., there are these strange laws where a foreign state gets privileged status and people have to swear loyalty to that foreign state in order to do business. It’s an unhealthy situation.

But the military embargo is moving forward with its own agenda regardless of these laws, which are a form of oppression. They’re relevant for BDS activists in the United States because it’s an attempt to silence BDS, but every attempt to silence BDS makes the global movement stronger. Every attempt to criminalize BDS always fails because BDS is anchored in the most basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution — freedom of speech, political organizing and democratic values. Very basic liberal values, really.

The origin of the word “boycott” is from Ireland, when Irish land tenants [organized a campaign against] Charles Boycott, a land agent for an English lord. A boycott is an effective political act, it’s how the weak stand up against the strong.

In moments of repression, we remind ourselves we’re not asking anybody to sacrifice their jobs, or their safety, or their family. We’re not sacrificing ourselves. We’re not sacrificing our movement.

Taking action to reduce the flow of arms to Israel feels more urgent after 16 months of live streamed genocide, perhaps because more people are aware of the consequences of complacency. But objectively, is the movement gaining in popularity or strength?

One way of tracking it is to see how much BDS is mentioned and talked about in the news. Often you hear the voice of some very racist, pro-Israeli journalist or politician defaming BDS by accusing it of antisemitism. The liberal newspapers, at least, then feel obligated to have an opposing point of view also presented, which gives an opportunity to the BDS activists to speak for themselves.

How to track BDS is a very complicated question, because we’ve never seen so many companies take action to sever ties with Israel as we have in the last year and a half. So, we have to acknowledge that when the level of atrocities committed by Israel, when the dehumanization, which is an essential part of genocide, reaches this level, then even companies that were very pro-Israeli feel like they have to take a step back. It’s a success, but it’s not one that’s easy to celebrate.

I saw a new explainer on the BDS website that catalogues dozens of worldwide actions that have restricted the flow of weapons to Israel and saved Palestinian lives. You’ve also recently discussed embargo in depth on the “India & Global Left” podcast and have spoken about its moral dimension on Electronic Intifada. What’s driving your supercharged focus on embargo as opposed to some of the other vital campaigns on the dystopian dangers of Israeli spyware, #BlockTheBoat or #NoTechForApartheid, for instance? What’s changed?

Most people don’t participate in the arms trade, and they cannot really engage in embargo; it’s more about advocacy of governments, and governments don’t want to listen to us when we talk about military embargo. All this has changed in the last year and a half. Suddenly, we found ourselves on the other side of the conversation because now the military embargo is no longer a demand by the progressive movements — it is the law. The whole world has shifted.

The ICJ, the International Court of Justice, on July 19, ruled that the occupation is illegal and states are obligated to impose a military embargo to make sure that their weapons are not used to advance occupation. This was adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 18, with more than a two-thirds majority.

So the world has spoken, and suddenly, when there are weapon deals that are exposed, for example, of ships that are carrying weapons shipments to Israel — just the act of exposing them is enough to stop them. Because it’s illegal, and governments have to act to impose a partial or complete military embargo. This is important because it’s a global issue.

Israel’s new budget was supposed to be passed last October but is still being thrashed out in the Knesset’s Finance Committee. What does it, even in draft form, tell us about the feasibility of the state’s future war preparations?

We are in a moment in which the Israelis know there’s a military embargo. They feel it. Now they try to plan how to deal with it.

There’s no such thing as a state without a budget, but Israel is not really functioning as a state very much. It’s functioning as an army, as a genocidal army, and this budget has tens of billions of dollars set aside to build supply lines, production lines for weapons in Israel, in order to avoid importing weapons because of the military embargo.

For instance, the Israeli Ministry of Defense issued a tender for replacing the main combat rifle of the infantry. The condition of the tender includes that at least 54 percent of the materials and production of the rifles must be sourced inside Israel — in order to avoid military embargoes.

There’s a reason that most countries around the world don’t produce TNT. They’d rather import it, because producing it is extremely polluting and dangerous, and nobody wants to have that in their backyard. Israel is going to become a giant TNT factory according to their plans, which is horrible. They’ll basically be destroying the land of Palestine, and the nature of Palestine, in order to make weapons with which they want to destroy Palestine.

But if they do it, Israel is going to ruin its relationship with the U.S. military-industrial complex. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, [RTX Corporation, formerly known as] Raytheon, Northrop Grumman — they’re not going to accept it. The Pentagon is not going to accept it. If Israel is going to bury tens of billions of dollars into establishing those factories, the DoD will turn its back on Israel. Do they have a friendship between allies, or is it about economic, imperialistic interest? If Israel goes on this path, they’re going to lose support.

Fitch’s, Moody’s and Standard and Poor (S&P) all downgraded Israel’s sovereign credit worthiness in 2024, making it more expensive for the Netanyahu regime to borrow money to stay afloat. S&P has since warned about future potential downgrades. In February, the Development Corporation for Israel Bonds, working with Wall Street, issued for sale $5 billion of savings bonds — half in five-year terms, half in 10-year terms. The bonds which, unlike U.S. treasuries, can be owned by children and cannot be resold, support Israel’s general fund — including its wars, its occupation of Palestine, its extensive terror and torture apparatus, and the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Their customers are 65 percent retail — individuals and Jewish organizations — and the remainder are institutions, often red state governments. You have scoffed at the idea that any recent holder of a 10-year Israel bond will be paid back. What are some of the elements that led you to that conclusion — population loss, brain drain, capital flight, increased bankruptcies, low savings, lower standard of living, loss of purchasing power?

There is a concept in economics called a debt trap. A debt trap is when the interest payments are so high that you cannot meet them, and then you borrow in order just to pay the interest.

The people who loan money to Israel will not accept to be paid in worthless shekels. They want to be paid back in U.S. dollars, the world’s reserve currency, and Israel doesn’t have an unlimited supply of that. If Israel falls into a debt trap, it means default.

That’s the difference between the empire and the outpost. Those who think Israel is the empire and Israel pulls the strings of the United States, they need to keep this in mind. Because Israel can fall within a week once it defaults on its debt, but the United States has much more depth to its power.

Are there synergies between the various campaigns? For example, if you have a BDS success with McDonald’s, does it somehow add to the success of the military embargo?

In order to understand how the synergy works, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the business people. Companies like McDonald’s responded to the boycott by trying to distance themselves and say, we’ve lost so many billions of dollars, so let’s sell our branches in Israel to another company. But the company is still calling itself McDonald’s and using the McDonald’s brand. So, the work of the campaign continues.

But when they take this action of trying to cut their losses unsuccessfully, the other companies see this, including arms companies, which are profiting by selling to Israel for now. But then they see, oh, this is a risky business. Look what happens to a giant corporation like McDonald’s. If it happens to us, we will not survive it. It’s better to cut our losses now and stop trade with Israel. So that’s how the synergy works.

Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a worldwide survey of states as brands. Israel got the last place in favorability in the whole world; first in world instability, overshooting North Korea for the first time.

The one thing that I haven’t said yet, and I need to say this, is that in this moment when the Trump presidency seems so dark and dangerous for all of us, especially for people in the United States, resistance to Trump is unifying us. And because BDS is global and intersectional, the potential for a large tent campaign has never been better or stronger than it is now. So let’s use that to our advantage.