On the face of it, both sides of the movement to boycott, sanction and divest from Israel have to admit the decade-old movement has chalked up few concrete wins in Canada.
On university campuses, where the BDS campaign, as it has come to be known, is most active, a number of university student groups have passed motions sanctioning Israel, which have been quickly dismissed as merely symbolic by university administrations.
In the malls, shoppers have remained largely immune to the call to boycott products made in Israel, on either side of the Green Line. Meanwhile, economic and academic ties between Canada and Israel grow annually.
Tyler Levitan, campaigns co-ordinator for Independent Jewish Voices, which supports sanctions against Israel, agrees that it appears as if BDS has made little headway in Canada. But that may not be the campaign’s aim.
“At the practical level of threats to the Israeli economy, it hasn’t reached that level,” he said. “Education-wise, it is very effective. It gets people to talk about the issue, how Israel is violating Palestinian human rights.”
The BDS movement in Canada remains decentralized, with no overarching co-ordinating body or charismatic leadership. (Among the groups that promote BDS are Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, which declined an interview, and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, which did not respond to requests for an interview.)
But while the movement seems to be loosely organized, it has been able to drive and dominate debate, especially on university campuses, which leaves Jews and Israel’s supporters infuriated.
“We can be really cynical [and think] it’s the first step, to use propaganda to really boycott Israel or is it simply a PR campaign to create anger about Israel,” said Meryle Kates, executive director of StandWithUs Canada, an Israel advocacy organization.
“Thousands of students leave university not knowing anything about Israel except that it must be terrible because the student union boycotted it,” Kates said.
Sara Saber-Freedman, executive vice-president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, agrees that BDS has not had much impact on Israel’s economy or its academic institutions.
“It’s really a propaganda tool to give their rank and file something concrete to do. It allows them to make a lot of noise that is very disturbing to the pro-Israel and Jewish community.”
BDS first emerged as a strategy at the now infamous UN anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. It was formally endorsed by dozens of Palestinian unions and human rights groups in 2005.
Jewish and Israel advocacy groups have unequivocally opposed the campaign, arguing that peace needs to be negotiated by Israel and the Palestinians, without outside pressures, and they say the campaign delegitimizes the very existence of the State of Israel.
In Canada, the campaign has mainly been promoted by university student groups, unions and churches.
In 2012, the United Church of Canada made headlines when it voted to ask its members to boycott goods produced by three companies with factories in the West Bank. Church leaders have been at pains to point out that while the ongoing campaign, called Unsettling Goods, called for an economic boycott, it was not a blanket call for sanctions against Israel.
Sara Saber-Freedman
The boycott was one prong of a campaign that asked church members to lobby the Canadian government to require that Israeli goods made in the West Bank be labelled as such and to engage in “courageous conversations” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Patti Talbot, the United Church’s team leader for global partnerships.
The campaign will be re-evaluated at the church’s general conference this summer, but even within the liberal confines of the United Church, Canada’s largest Christian denomination, it has been slow to catch on.
“It’s taken much longer than anticipated to get a sense of what individuals and congregations need and what’s helpful,” Talbot said.
As a result, the church has introduced new materials for its members to combat “deeply held stereotypes,” among them that the boycott call is anti-Semitic, Talbot said.
But the greatest impact has been on university campuses, where BDS votes have been approved, often under disputed circumstances, at 11 universities.
University administrations, however, have been quick to dismiss the votes as meaningless. In the summer of 2013, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada signed a five-year agreement strengthening research ties with their Israeli counterparts.
“We fight it [BDS] by encouraging university presidents to visit Israel, by encouraging investment, by encouraging trade agreements,” Saber-Freedman said.
On the funding front, BDS advocates are at a distinct disadvantage, Levitan noted.
“Universities have strong ties to Israel, in part due to lobbying efforts of pro-Israel advocates on the administration,” he said. “Student clubs get some funding, there’s some money in the community, but it pales to funds available from Israel lobbying groups. It’s not a level playing field.”
Still, the noisy campaigns on campus are disquieting at the very least, often using violent imagery and making Jewish students feel vulnerable. Meanwhile, pro-Israel groups need to tread carefully as they combat BDS campaigns, lest they be accused of violating freedom of speech or trampling on academic independence, Saber-Freedman said.
Measuring the impact of BDS by the number of people who show up for a press conference or boycott goods is misleading, said Levitan. A better gauge of the movement, which in Canada is still in an “awareness-raising” phase, is the number of groups that have adopted some aspect of the campaign.
“It’s going to continue to grow and keep its momentum,” he said.
The next focus of the BDS campaign will be Israel’s multi-billion dollar security industry, which includes surveillance systems, drones and high-tech applications, some of which were refined during the recent Gaza operation, he added.
As proof of how seriously the Jewish world takes the BDS movement, Levitan points to the concerted efforts the Israeli government has taken to oppose it, both within and outside the country.
Saber-Freedman agreed that the Israeli government has devoted a great deal of time and resources to BDS, and, in fact, the Israeli consul-general in Toronto, DJ Schneeweiss, was formerly the Israeli foreign ministry’s primary tactician on the issue, but Saber-Freedman thinks the movement is running out of steam.
“There’s less coverage [in the media] than there was a few years ago. The temperature is not as hot as it was two to three years ago,” she said.
Ultimately, Saber-Freeman said, BDS has failed to gain traction here because it offends Canadians.
“The complete failure to get anything meaningful, speaks to the understanding of most Canadians that this is not a fair or sensible approach.”
