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Boycotts Past and Present pp 1–19Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Boycotts: From the American Revolution to BDS

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism ((PCSAR))

Abstract

This chapter surveys the history of boycott movements from the late eighteenth century to better understand the global campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) directed against Israel. The chapter argues that boycott movements have often been both instrumental and expressive in character and have had an ambiguous relationship to the rule of law. The debate on whether or not BDS is antisemitic has drawn attention away from these other, more significant, ambiguities and tensions within the movement.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The origins of the movement have been traced to the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, where the NGO forum called for the ‘complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state’. Kenneth Marcus, The Definition of Antisemitism (Oxford, 2015), 204.

  2. 2.

    http://www.waronwant.org/bds; https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/blog/2016/12/10/university-of-manchester-must-follow-students-and-endorse-bds

  3. 3.

    Omar Barghouti, BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Chicago, 2011), 63.

  4. 4.

    http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/BDS-is-the-modern-form-of-anti-Semitism-449415

  5. 5.

    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.577920

  6. 6.

    Joel S. Fishman, ‘The BDS message of anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and incitement to discrimination’, Israel Affairs, vol. 18, no. 3, (July 2012), 412–25; Gary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm, The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (Chicago, 2015); Maia Carter Hallward, Transnational Activism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York, 2013).

  7. 7.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/24/artists-bp-protest-tate

  8. 8.

    In this regard BDS is different from the boycott of Israel pursued by Arab states. Gil Feiler, From Boycott to Economic Cooperation: The Political Economy of the Arab Boycott of Israel (London, 1988).

  9. 9.

    But not only in North America. See M. O’Dowd, ‘Politics, Patriotism and Women in Ireland, Britain and Colonial America, 1700–80’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 22, no. 4, (2010), 15–38; On the United States, see T.H. Breen, <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Marketplace of Revolution. How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004).

  10. 10.

    Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘Political Protest and the World of Goods’, in: The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Edward Gray and Jane Kamensky, (Oxford, 2013), 75.

  11. 11.

    Breen, The Marketplace, ch. 7.

  12. 12.

    Breen, The Marketplace, xvii.

  13. 13.

    Breen, The Marketplace, 254–67; Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power. A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, 2009), 46–8.

  14. 14.

    Clare Midgely, Women Against Slavery. The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1992), 35–37.

  15. 15.

    Midgley, Women against Slavery, 60–2, 103–4.

  16. 16.

    Peter Gurney, ‘Exclusive Dealing in the Chartist Movement’, Labour History Review, vol. 74, no. 1, (April 2009), 90–110.

  17. 17.

    R.C. Comerford, ‘The land war and the politics of distress’. in: In A New History of Ireland. VI Ireland Under the Union II, ed. WE Vaughan, (Oxford, 1996), 28–45.

  18. 18.

    T.W. Moody, Davitt and the Irish Revolution 1848–82 (Oxford, 1982), 418–9.

  19. 19.

    The Times, 18 October 1880, 6.

  20. 20.

    Donnacha Seán Lucey, Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland: The Case of County Kerry, 1872–1886 (Dublin, 2011).

  21. 21.

    R.V. Comerford, ‘The impediments to freehold ownership of land and the character of the Irish Land War’, in: Uncertain Futures: Essays about the Irish Past for Roy Foster, ed. Senia Paseta, (Oxford, 2016), 60.

  22. 22.

    Donald Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland. County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), 221, 226–7.

  23. 23.

    R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), 405–13.

  24. 24.

    Moody, Davitt, 377–81, 458.

  25. 25.

    John McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand. James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 2008), 159.

  26. 26.

    Glickman, Buying Power, 122–4.

  27. 27.

    Leo Wolman, The Boycott in American Trade Union (Baltimore, 1916), 24–5.

  28. 28.

    Harry Laidler, Boycotts and the Labor Struggle (New York, 1913), 58–94.

  29. 29.

    Glickman, Buying Power, 128–31.

  30. 30.

    Paula Hyman, ‘Immigrant women and consumer protest: The New York City kosher meat boycott of 1902’, American Jewish History, vol. 70, no. 1, (September 1980), 91–105.

  31. 31.

    Tehila Sasson, ‘Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism and Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott’, American Historical Review, vol. 121, no. 4, (October 2016), 1196–1224; Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Glaobalization (Ithaca, 2009), ch. 5; Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth Century to the Present (London, 2016), 562–80.

  32. 32.

    Sasson, ‘Milking’, 1217.

  33. 33.

    This dimension to the practice of boycott was present from the earliest occasions, when we find collective action to restrict the markets of an individual or group of individuals as a way of effecting political or social change. Wollman, The Boycott, 12.

  34. 34.

    Maneklal H. Vakil, Boycott of British goods and foreign cloth, (Bombay, 1930), 14.

  35. 35.

    Laidler, Boycotts, 75.

  36. 36.

    Torsten Lorenz, ‘Introduction’ 11, in: Cooperatives in Ethnic Conflicts. Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, ed. Lorenz, (Berlin, 2006).

  37. 37.

    Miloslav Szabo, ‘Because Words are not Deeds.’ Antisemitic Practice and Nationality Politics in Upper Hungary around 1900, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, Journal of Fondazione CDEC, no. 3, (July 2012), url: www.quest.cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=299, 176.

  38. 38.

    Szabo, ‘Because Words’, 179.

  39. 39.

    Klaus Richter, ‘Antisemitism, “Economic Emancipation” and the Lithuanian Co-operative movement Before World War 1’, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, Journal of Fondazione CDEC, no. 3, (July 2012), url: www.quest.cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=300, 187.

  40. 40.

    M. Gottleib, ‘The anti-Nazi boycott movement in the United States: an ideological and sociological appreciation’, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 35, no. 3–4, (July–October 1973), 198–227.

  41. 41.

    James Sanders, South Africa and the International Media, 1972–79 (London, 1999), 56.

  42. 42.

    http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/singling-out-israel-singling-out-the-jews/18904#.WuGteG4vxR0; Alan Dershowitz, The Case Against BDS: Why Singling Out Israel is Anti-Semitic and Anti-Peace (New York, 2018).

  43. 43.

    Barghouti, BDS.

  44. 44.

    Tara Zahra, ‘Zionism, emigration and East European Colonialism’, in: Colonialism and the Jews, eds. Lisa Moses Leff and Maud Mandel, (Bloomington, 2017), 166–92.

  45. 45.

    Maxim Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs (Harmondsworth, 1968) was important in establishing this formulation.

  46. 46.

    Derek J Penslar, ‘Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism’, Journal of Israeli History, vol. 20, no. 2–3, (2001), 84–98.

  47. 47.

    Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora. A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010), 476–83.

  48. 48.

    Marcus, The Definition, 207, 213.

  49. 49.

    Marcus, The Definition, 207–9; David Feldman and Brendan McGeever, ‘Labour and antisemitism: what went wrong and what is to be done?’ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/labour-party-antisemitism-jeremy-corbyn-jewish-left-wing-holocaust-a8306936.html

  50. 50.

    Marcus, The Definition, 207.

  51. 51.

    Marcus, The Definition, 181–5, 209.

  52. 52.

    Stephen Miller, Margaret Harris, and Colin Shindler, The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel (London, 2015); European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Discrimination and Hate Crime Against Jews in EU Member States: Perceptions and Experiences (Luxembourg, 2013), 27.

  53. 53.

    Discrimination and Hate, figure 1, p. 16.

  54. 54.

    Marcus appears to concede this point: The Definition, 210.

  55. 55.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/09/gove-against-boycotting-israeli-goods-gaza-conflict; Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 477–82.

  56. 56.

    http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/the-academic-boycott-movement/

  57. 57.

    Bashir Bashir, ‘Reconciling historical injustices: deliberative democracy and the politics of reconcilation’, Res Publica, vol. 18, no. 2, (2012), 127–43.

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  1. Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck College – University of London, London, UK

    David Feldman

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  1. Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck College – University of London, London, UK

    David Feldman

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Feldman, D. (2019). Boycotts: From the American Revolution to BDS. In: Feldman, D. (eds) Boycotts Past and Present. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94872-0_1

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