Pollak: Joe Biden’s Executive Order Is a Gift to ‘Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions’ (BDS)

President Joe Biden’s executive order on Thursday targeting what he calls “extremist settler violence” is a gift to the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement because it allows the U.S. to sanction Israel and Israelis far more broadly.

The BDS movement started over two decades ago, during the second intifada, when Palestinian leaders rejected a generous Israeli peace offer at Camp David in July 2000 and launched a murderous campaign of suicide bombings against Israelis.

In 2001, at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in South Africa, activists launched an effort to declare Israel the new “apartheid” state, and to isolate Israel as apartheid South Africa was isolated, through sanctions and economic pressure.

There is no “apartheid” in Israel, where Jews and Arabs have equal rights, and Arab parties have even recently participated in the Israeli government.

As for the “occupied territories,” which Israel took in a defensive war against Arab states in 1967, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and co-governs the West Bank (known to Israelis as Judea and Samaria) with the Palestinian Authority, under the terms of the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993.

Most Palestinians live under Palestinian rule in the West Bank; several hundred thousand Israelis live in “settlements,” most of which function as commuter suburbs to Israel’s major cities.

The goals of BDS are ambivalent. Some want to force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank (and eastern Jerusalem) to create a Palestinian state next to Israel. Others want to use BDS to bring down the State of Israel entirely — just as apartheid South Africa eventually collapsed — and replace it with a Palestinian state. (Little thought is given to what that state would look like — Islamist, democratic, or otherwise.)

Regardless of the goal, the BDS movement is united by the tactics of demonizing Israel and using economic pressure to isolate it. Biden’s executive order is a major win that provides the BDS movement the weapons against Israel that it has sought for decades.

There is no legitimate purpose to the executive order. The phenomenon of “extremist settler violence” exists, but it is rare, and it is dwarfed by extremist Palestinian violence against Jewish civilians, who are still protected by international law even if they are living in areas that are disputed between the sides.

Israeli settlers are also subject to Israeli criminal law. Though anti-Israel activists say Israel does not enforce the law against “settlers,” that is largely because the activists only want to hear one side of the story.

Many of the violent incidents that take place between Jewish and Arab residents of the disputed territories happen in situations where there is conflict between people on both sides, and where “settlers” can often reasonably claim to be acting in self-defense.

Biden’s executive order is not aimed at Palestinians who commit violent acts, or who encourage violence: by that standard, the Palestinian Authority itself should be sanctioned, since it pays stipends to terrorists, and broadcasts anti-Israel hatred.

The terms of Biden’s executive order are not limited to violence: it applies to anyone or anything that the administration says would “threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank.”

That loose definition would theoretically allow the U.S. to sanction anyone and anything in the territory or outside of it, including those (i.e. most of the Israeli population) who believe Israel should retain at least portions of the West Bank in any future peace settlement that would create a Palestinian state.

That means Biden now claims the authority to apply financial sanctions to Israelis in the West Bank, and indeed to Israelis generally, with regard to Israel’s policies in the West Bank, most of which have been adopted in self-defense against terror.

That is exactly the kind of weapon that the BDS movement has sought to wield against Israel for two-and-a-half decades. Already, anti-Israel groups are issuing statements demanding that Biden use his new authority to sanction members of the Israeli government.

BDS has been overwhelmingly rejected by the American people and by their representatives, at every level of government. In 2019, a Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution opposing BDS by the huge margin of 398-17. Several states, both Republican- and Democrat-governed, have also passed laws barring the BDS movement, and boycotting companies that join BDS in isolating Israel. Left-wing California passed an anti-BDS law in 2016 with almost unanimous support.

President Biden’s executive order defies the democratic will of the American people by imposing BDS by fiat. It also comes at a time when Israelis are literally fighting for the existence of their country against Hamas and other Iranian terrorist proxies.

Biden issued the order en route to Michigan, to appease Arab- and Muslim-American voters. In so doing, he defied Congress and the majority of Americans, and gave the BDS movement its greatest victory.

Those who truly oppose BDS must oppose this order.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.