While BDS claims the movement began in 2005, campaigns to boycott and divest from Israel were launched years before, propelled by a UN conference held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. [1] At the Durban conference, which former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler described as, "a festival of racism against Israel and the Jewish people," a group of international organizations called for "comprehensive sanctions and embargoes" against the Jewish state. [2]

That same year, activists on American campuses and elsewhere initiated a series of anti-Israel campaigns, which were largely unsuccessful. The U.S. effort was initiated and led by an American professor named Francis Boyle, who has urged Palestinian leaders to "sign nothing with Jewistan/Israel," and let it "collapse." [3]

The failure of these early efforts led to the "official launch" of the BDS movement in 2005, re-branded as a "Palestinian Civil Society call for BDS." [4] The claim that BDS broadly represents Palestinian society is questionable at best. While there certainly are Palestinians who support the movement, it is not clear how many. Leading pro-Palestinian activist Norman Finkelstein has stated the following about the organizations behind the groups that "launched" BDS:

 “Who are these organizations? They’re NGOs in Ramallah, one-person operations, and they claim to represent what they call ‘Palestinian Civil Society’. If they really were Palestinian Civil Society as they claim, then why can they never organize a demonstration of more than 500 people? …They’re just Ramallah NGOs which represent absolutely nothing…”[5]

Furthermore, Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid writes that,

“BDS spokespeople justify calling for boycotts that will result in increased economic hardships for the Palestinians by asserting that Palestinians are willing to suffer such deprivations in order to achieve their freedom. It goes without saying that they themselves live in comfortable circumstances elsewhere in the world and will not suffer any such hardship… As a Palestinian who actually lives in East Jerusalem and hopes to build a better life for his family and his community, this is the kind of ‘pro-Palestinian activism’ we could well do without.”[6]

Additionally, while the current BDS Movement is relatively new, anti-Israel boycotts are quite old. The “Anti-Zionist” boycott began in the 1920s, promoted by Palestinian Arab leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later collaborated with the Nazis. [7][8] Arab states imposed similar boycotts [9] in 1945 and expanded them when Israel declared independence in 1948. Arab League official Mohamad Ali Allouba Pasha made the purpose of these boycotts clear in 1964:

“[Israel] is not an easy thing to destroy by military means. But there is a force which is not steel and fire, with the aid of which we can win, namely, the economic boycott.” [10]