Governments targeted by transnational boycotts typically confront a difficult choice. On the one hand, the economic consequences of boycott actions are likely to be small, or even negligible. More than anything else, the boycotters need publicity. Often the best way to convince potential boycott supporters to give money and time to the effort is to show that the target of the boycott is worried by it and is devoting real resources to combatting it. For these reasons, target governments will be tempted to do what they can to ignore boycotts or belittle the challenges they are presumed to pose. Taking such a stand also has the attraction of not having to engage substantively with, and thereby give attention to, the critiques of the target government’s policies that fuel support for the boycott movement. On the other hand, this strategy of avoidance and minimization risks giving boycotters opportunities, unopposed, to transform the terms of debate over the target government’s policies with appeals, questions, and information that may mold the political and discursive landscapes to be more receptive to radical critiques, thereby laying the groundwork for weighty challenges in the future if the campaign builds power and the target does not change its policies. The paper discusses this policy conundrum as Israel has encountered it in the context of the BDS movement. The analysis suggests that Israel’s response should be understood as a typical response for any target: to hesitate to confront boycotters, then to over-react, but to do so by manipulative, ad hominem, and semi-clandestine measures rather than by confronting and contradicting substantive critiques of policies. The key conceptual and theoretical equipment will be drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between four different kinds of political contestation and change: molecular change, normal political struggle, wars of maneuver, and wars of position. These categories are used to locate BDS within a broader arena of political contestation and develop a theory of how boycotts operate in relation to other forms of struggle.

The recent normalization agreements of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco with Israel came as a surprise to the Arab-Muslim public, despite their general awareness of pre-existing informal security, intelligence, and trade relations between these states and Israel. Arab-Muslim states and populations have routinely expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for an independent state while at the same time Arab states have often been accused of raising the Palestinian issue as a means of distracting their populations from other domestic concerns. This paper explores the extent to which state and popular opinion in Arab-Muslim states are aligned when it comes to official diplomacy and recognition of Israel, and how activism related to the Palestinian cause intersects with other domestic concerns. Using Morocco as a case study, this paper specifically explores the nature of responses of three distinct Moroccan activist groupings–opposition leftists, Islamists, and boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) activists–to the Moroccan government’s normalization agreement with Israel. Using the concept of the two-level game that explores the relationship between domestic and foreign affairs negotiations as well as social movement theory’s concept of framing, this study comparatively examines how these different groups frame their views on normalization vis-à-vis the government in relation to their broader socio-political activism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with key leaders and members of opposition leftists (the Unified Socialist Party (USP), the Socialist Democratic Vanguard Party, and the Democratic Way), Islamists (the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD), which heads the current government, the non-political Unification and Reform Movement, and the Islamist Justice and Spirituality Association), and BDS movement representatives in Morocco, the paper asks to what extent activist frames focus specifically on Palestinian rights and/or on relations between their own movements and the Moroccan state. This study aims to identify patterns in these activists’ use of economic, cultural, and political, religious, and human rights arguments to oppose normalization, and the extent to which those frames differ between Islamist and secular movements as well as between groups linked to the government or to international solidarity networks in varying degrees. The findings of this research contribute to the broader literature on social movements and the extent to which they are responsive to domestic concerns versus broader social movement goals. The paper also contributes to policy debates regarding whether state-level normalization agreements are likely to bring social peace between Israeli and Arab populations.

“Je ne me considère pas du tout en procès en Allemagne.” (Achille Mbembe, 2020). This paper explores expressions and relationships of (moral, political, and legal) judgement in the context of the debate around the legitimacy of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement in Germany. Since its establishment in 2005, the BDS movement has based its demands and tactics within the discourse of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and International Law, continuing with a much longer history of Palestinian rights-claims through international legal institutions and language (Erakat 2019, Allen 2020). The call for BDS has since been a mode of resistance that seeks to locate responsibility for the ongoing denial of full human rights at the hands of the Israeli state, with those states and institutions that financially enable and legitimise such practices. In Germany, such mobilisation has been read in light of the country’s own history of boycotts, namely the National-Socialists’ call for a boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933. Judgement of the BDS movement culminated in a controversial 2019 parliamentary resolution, which vowed to defund any BDS-related activities and actors in Germany. In this context, moral and legal judgements of BDS efforts mobilise a ‘German’ historic responsibility. The resistance of BDS allies to such judgement is indicative of the complex workings of power in Germany when it comes to rights and responsibilities (cf. Abu-Lughod 1990). The politics of judgement that I explore in this paper, uses Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics as a struggle over speech, space, and the right to have rights (Rancière and Corcoran 2015). Whose historic past and present responsibilities are universalised, provincialized, or silenced are struggles that make up the field of judgement around BDS activism in Germany. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin and observation of the Humboldt 3 and Bundestags 3 for Palestine trials, I hope to highlight the way in which those coming under attack for their (alleged or real) alliance with the BDS movement experience judgement not merely as disagreement, but as a form of discrimination. In following my key ethnographic questions “Who gets to judge?” and “Who has the right to speak (back)?”, a picture of political and legal struggle animated by white racial anxieties emerges (Bruce-Jones 2017; Younes 2020).