I’M going to tell you the trouble with BDS. Not because I’m opposed to boycotting, divesting from or sanctioning the genocidal ethnostate of Israel – on the contrary, I think these things are not only necessary but essential if the final frayed and straining thread on the rope connecting the West to humanity is to hold. Rather, I’m going to tell you the trouble with BDS because I want it to stop being a niche activity.
Don’t get me wrong, the BDS movement is very successful in its current form – the extraordinary amount of capital Israel throws into countering it in terms of both shekels and people is testament to that. But how much more successful would it be if it moved from being an occasional thing to being a regular part of the overall shopping experience? Cutting directly and brutally to the chase, I’m asking how much more successful the BDS movement would be if it weren’t for the purists?
I’m going to try now and silence the harrumphs of disapproval, and I’m going to try and lower those raised eyebrows. I admire the purists. I think their commitment to the cause of Palestinian rights is outstanding and I only wish I had a fraction of it. But… and what’s the best way to say this?... they’re doing the movement a massive disservice.
Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I keep an eye out for Israeli products when I’m shopping. They know because occasionally I take pictures and post them. Chickpeas, dates, hummus – I like to target food because there’s something about the usurpation of thousands of years of Levantine cuisine by bus drivers from the Bronx who moved to Israel to be handed stolen land and stolen homes for free that really – like, really – grinds my gears. And in turn my pictures attract people taking a break from blaming immigrants for the fact that their lives are shit to tell me what’s what. And what’s what is that me taking a basket full of food imported from Israel to dump at the check-out is hilarious. That taking a dozen packets of chickpeas off the shelves is really going to stop the IDF tanks; that explaining to an innocent employee on the till that I’m sorry for the inconvenience is just a super way of stopping the Tel Aviv regime from dropping 2,000lb bunker-busters on tents; that if I was really serious about BDS I wouldn’t be posting the images by way of an iPhone replete with Israeli technology.
The truth is that a million people like me doing relatively modest things is exponentially more damaging to Israel than a thousand BDS literalists who won’t cross the road without checking to see if the traffic light technology is free of Israeli taint. Yes, I know that hit-and-run BDS takes much less effort on my part than global thermo-nuclear BDS; and I know that in a sense I’m making an excuse for my lack of commitment because the ideal would be that everyone concerned about the Gaza genocide would be thinking every second of every day about how to stick it to ICC fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu. But the vast majority of people aren’t like that; the vast majority of people are like me.
If the literalists confined themselves to making their protest in their own comprehensive way and left the rest of us to make ours in a more modest way, then that would be fine. But they don’t.
There’s an old joke that goes:
‘How do you know somebody’s a vegan/got the new iPhone 17/doesn’t watch The Traitors?’
‘They tell ye.’
We can, I think, squeeze BDS devotees in there, because, frankly, I’m getting fed-up with being told I’m going to verboten places and letting the team down.
“So, I was having a cup of tea in Costa yesterday and…”
“Wait. You were in Costa?”
“Ooh, I like your coat, where’d you get it?”
“Marksies.”
Uncomfortable silence.
“The queue at Burger King was mental last night.”
“You still eat at Burger King?”
It bears repeating: If you want to take the Trappist approach to BDS, my hat’s off to you. But it’s not just any hat, it’s a Marks and Spencer hat, as I’ve got a couple of Peaky Blinders caps and a Panama hat from M&S because I like their menswear. I don’t go to McDonald’s because I don’t like it; I drink Coca-Cola very rarely; but I go to Costa when it suits and I’ve been known to write my column in there – on a MacBook.
Which is to say that I do à la carte BDS. I perform acts of BDS regularly but unspectacularly. Taking Israeli food from a shelf and taking it to the till to explain and apologise to a nonplussed worker isn’t sitting at the front of the bus in 1960s Mississipi, but it makes me part of the BDS movement, even if the keepers of the BDS flame might cough out their Palestine Cola at the very thought.
Lecturing me on my BDS choices doesn’t deter me from contributing my widow’s mite, but I know that there are many, many people who do nothing because they think a modest contribution is not enough; people who are made embarrassed by their failure to go all-in. But it’s those people that the BDS movement needs to take it from being very successful to being devastatingly successful. I don’t think I’m blowing my own trumpet – after all, I’ve admitted to doing relatively little – when I say that BDS needs many, many more people like me. Because I’ve never in my life seen a lone shopper take Israeli goods off the shelf and/or leave them at the till. I’ve never seen a single shopper perform an act of modest retail protest. I’ve seen noisy groups doing guerrilla swoops on supermarkets, and, again, my hat is off to them (the M&S Panama one, this time). But it’s a simple statement of fact that if lone shoppers aren’t doing what the guerrilla groups are urging them to do, then their protest, while worthwhile, isn’t anywhere near as successful as it should be.
It's time BDS lowered its sights a bit. It’s time that Jo Soap was told that they don’t have to turn their lives upside down to join the movement. At this point the BDS campaign seriously discomfits the Israeli regime, but if the campaign in Ireland consisted of two million people people doing one or two things ina week, rather than a much smaller number doing a bigger number of things in a week, and if that were replicated throughout the world, Tel Aviv would not only be disrupted, it would be paralysed.
So let’s have less moralising and more encouragement in the war against genocide; and beside our elite regiment of all-or-nothing commandos, let’s have an army of privates just doing their bit.
