New Book Documents Ties Between BDS Campaign and Terror Groups

New Book Documents Ties Between BDS Campaign and Terror Groups

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs just released an electronic “book,” documenting the ties between the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and Palestinian terror groups.

The book, written by  Dan Diker and Adam Shay lays out the connection between Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)—effectively the clearinghouse in the United States for all BDS activity—and BDS National Committee (BNC), based in the West Bank, and comprised of members groups that have been designated as terrorist groups by the U.S.

The report asserts that BNC is “a coalition that includes the umbrella terror group ‘PNIF’ (Palestinian National and Islamic Forces), which is comprised of EU-and U.S.-designated terror groups Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), amongst others.”

The introduction reviews the history of PACBI:

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was launched in the Palestinian Authority controlled city of Ramallah in April 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics to advance the international boycott movement against Israel. The campaign parlayed the Palestinian call originally issued in 2002 into formal movement for a comprehensive economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel.

PACBI is not a registered entity but rather a campaign comprised primarily of professors and lecturers from across the Palestinian Authority controlled territories, most of whom are affiliated with Birzeit University, which has been known for its public sympathy and support for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Hamas, and other designated terror organizations, as seen below.

PACBI employs a “total warfare” strategy of support for terror and political warfare against the State of Israel which has been cast as a criminal, illegal, and illegitmate entity. PACBI employs anti-Semitic terminology exclusively against Israel, referring to the Jewish and democratic state as a “Nazi” and “Apartheid” regime. Even the world’s worst rights-violating and criminal regimes such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea have escaped this vicious terminology.

PACBI calls on the International community to “comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization, and system of Apartheid…

The key revelation in the book is:

It is little known in the West that Arab and Islamic terror groups sit and strategize together with PACBI as equal members of the BNC. For example, one of the other founding members of the BNC is the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine,23 known outside of the Palestinian-controlled territories as the “Palestinian National and Islamic Forces” (PNIF). PNIF was founded by Yasser Arafat, forrmer Chairman of the PLO and Palestinian Authority, and Marwan Barghouti, former commander of Fatah’s Tanzim terror wing and leader of the Islamist Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. Barghouti is currently serving five consecutive life sentences for the murder of Israelis in terror assaults.

PNIF is comprised of five U.S.-designated terrorist organizations24 including: Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Popular Front – General Command (PFLP-GC), the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The ties between BDS and terror groups isn’t just a conspiracy theory promoted by Israel and its supporters but has had real-world consequences. In December of last year, Donorbox, a U.S. company that makes fundraising management software, suspended the account of the BDS movement in the U.S. because of its ties to PNIF.

Back in February, Vijeta Uniyal blogged about a similar report published by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs that covered much of the same territory. The Strategic Affairs report emphasized the role NGOs played in promoting BDS.

Even the Strategic Affairs document wasn’t exactly new. It was consistent with reporting going back several years showing the ties between BDS and terror.

Last year in Tablet magazine, Armin Rosen and Liel Leibovitz demonstrated that PACBI and BNC had a financial relationship.

I also noted in an op-ed for the Algemeiner at that time:

In 2016, Congressional testimony by Jonathan Schanzer, a former US Treasury Department official and current Senior Vice President for Research at FDD, showed that individuals who had raised millions for Hamas were leading BDS efforts in the US.

Schanzer explained that members of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and KindHearts for Charitable Development — all of which have been implicated in fundraising for Hamas — later joined a Chicago-based organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). AMP was described by Schanzer as “a leading driver of the BDS campaign.”

When reporting on the BDS movement, newspapers frequently describe it as an effort to pressure Israel to grant Palestinians their rights or to negotiate with the Palestinians. This is a misrepresentation that whitewashes the true nature of the campaign.

It is a campaign to delegitimize and, ultimately, to destroy Israel.

As Prof. Jacobson has written:

We have documented here many times how BDS has a direct connection to the anti-Jewish boycotts in the 1920s and 1930s in the then British Mandate for Palestine, the anti-Jewish boycott of the Arab League (which was put in place three years prior to Israeli’s independence), and the gross antisemitic activism at the 2001 Tehran and Durban conferences which launched boycotts in the current form.

The claim that BDS was a response to a 2005 call from Palestinian civil society is a demonstrable lie. That was the cover story to repackage an anti-Jewish boycott in the language of ‘social justice’, as documented in my lecture, The REAL history of the BDS movement.

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