BDS Movement

The founder of the BDS movement is Qatar-born Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, who currently lives in Israel. Barghouti rejects a two-state solution and has admitted publicly that the goal of BDS is to eliminate the Jewish state and replace it with a Palestinian-Arab state.

The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) oversees the work of over 300 different BDS organizations and fiscally sponsors the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), which is affiliated with major Palestinian terror organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Virtually all anti-Israel groups, both Jewish and Arab, support BDS, falsely libel Israel as a racist, colonialist apartheid state, traffic in historical revisionism, and create a hostile and isolating climate for Jews and Israel advocates, particularly on college campuses in the context of events such as Israel Apartheid Week or groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. Studies have shown that antisemitic attacks increase on campus following the adoption of BDS resolutions by student governments, which are often voted on during Jewish high holy days when Jews are unable to participate.

BDS proponents have been known to use Nazi-type propaganda against Jews. For that reason, the BDS movement is often considered the “new antisemitism” of our century. In fact, there has been an increasing alliance between left-wing BDS organizations and far-right antisemitic groups. For example, BDS supporters have appropriated the phrase “Jewish supremacy” to characterize the state of Israel, a term coined by white supremacist David Duke. In term, Duke and other white supremacists have begun adopting the BDS tactic of using dog-whistle terms and vocabulary such as “Zionist” and “Israel” as replacements for the word “Jews.”

Though both Republican and Democratic leaders, as well as Jewish groups across the political spectrum, oppose the BDS movement, an increasing number of Democratic members of Congress are embracing anti-Zionism and demonstrating their bias against Jews through pushing BDS and other anti-Israel policies, including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Betty McCollum, and Cori Bush.

BDS has been called a hypocritical campaign for its encouragement of punitive actions solely against Israel and has been accused of actually harming Palestinians and failing to advance the cause of peace. At least 28 states in America have enacted anti-BDS legislation that prohibits the state from contracting with entities that discriminate against Israel.

In 2017, the Israeli Knesset passed a law to ban foreign supporters of the BDS movement from entering the country.

The Jew Mapping Project

In June 2022, the BDS-affiliated activist collective BDS Boston published “The Jew Mapping Project,” an interactive map identifying and linking hundreds of Jewish institutions, synagogues, day schools, Hillels, Jewish federations, Jewish-led nonprofits, and prominent Jewish individuals across Massachusetts. The project framed these Jewish community organizations as nodes in a network of “harm” responsible for everything from policing and U.S. imperialism to the “colonization of Palestine,” and explicitly called on readers to “dismantle” them.

The map drew immediate condemnation from the FBI, the ADL, Massachusetts elected officials of both parties, and Jewish community leaders, who warned that doxxing Jewish institutions and individuals in this manner was a direct invitation to antisemitic violence, echoing the tactics of historical persecution. Despite this, the Jew Mapping Project remains online and has been celebrated and amplified by BDS organizers and anti-Israel activists, underscoring how mainstream BDS infrastructure normalizes the targeting of Jews under the guise of anti-Zionist activism.