Hillary Clinton signaled that she will make opposition to a non-violent protest movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestine a part of her Presidential campaign.
In a letter sent last week to a prominent Israeli-American supporter, businessman Haim Saban, the former Secretary of State said “we need to make countering BDS a priority”–a reference to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement that started in the Occupied Territories in 2005.
“I am seeking your advice on how we can work together—across party lines and with a diverse array of voices—to reverse this trend with information and advocacy, and fight back against further attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel,” she wrote.
She also asked for Saban’s “thoughts and recommendations on how leaders and communities across America can work together to counter BDS.”
“From Congress and state legislatures to boardrooms and classrooms, we need to engage all people of good faith,” Clinton urged, “regardless of their political persuasion or their views on policy specifics, in explaining why the BDS campaign is counterproductive to the pursuit of peace and harmful to Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
The letter was published on Monday by the Israeli liberal daily Ha’aretz.
The claim that the movement is “harmful” to Palestinians, however, is demonstrably untrue. The initiative was organized by a wide section of Palestinian civil society to emulate a similar movement that helped cause the collapse of the Apartheid government in South Africa. It enjoys the support of a clear majority of Palestinians, according to polls released earlier this year, and has been heeded in the US and around the world by people of all faiths.
It also isn’t clear how any President could practically use executive power to directly combat BDS or any other boycott movement. In the recent Trade Promotion Authority legislation passed by Congress, the US Trade Representative was ordered to “discourage” the movement in European countries during the ongoing Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations, but it is largely organized at the grassroots level.
When President Obama signed the bill into law last week, his State Department’s spokesperson said he would oppose the anti-BDS language for “conflating Israel and ‘Israeli-controlled territories.’”
“The United States government has … strongly opposed boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions targeting the State of Israel, and will continue to do so,” John Kirby said last Tuesday.
“Every US administration since 1967–Democrat and Republican alike–has opposed Israeli settlement activity beyond the 1967 lines,” he also said.
In her letter to Saban, Clinton repeated an often-used line of Democrat supporters of Israel—that the BDS movement represents a “unilateral” threat to “direct negotiations.” The Obama administration, however, has only made vague statements about the possibility of merely considering withholding US support for Israel at the United Nations, after one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s more recent public statements refusing to recognize any kind of Palestinian statehood.
Late last month, the administration also declined to comment when pressed repeatedly on whether concerns it publicly discussed last summer about Israel’s then-ongoing bombing of Gaza have been resolved. During that fighting, about 1,500 Palestinian civilians and 6 Israeli civilians were killed.
