Mobilize Workers Action Against U.S./Israel Genocide in Gaza!

“BDS” Dead End:
Liberal Divestment Schemes, No Road
to Liberation of the Palestinian People

Calls for “boycott, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) against Israel were a main demand of just about all of the 100+ encampments that sprang up on college campuses across the United States this spring to protest the genocidal war on Gaza. The encampments served to keep antiwar protests going and even, in a certain sense, represented an escalation from the innumerable marches calling for a ceasefire, which did not diminish the relentless slaughter. Many in the Gaza solidarity encampments were desperately looking for some way to take action against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. But the liberal “divestment” call, while it provides a “hook” to raise demands on local authorities, diverts attention from the most immediate issue: the role of the United States in jointly carrying out, together with the Israeli warmongers, a monstrous genocide in Gaza. And it does not point to a way forward in liberating the Palestinian people from Zionist domination.

The fundamental issue is what force to look to: the rulers of U.S. imperialism who liberals think can be pressured into being a force for good, or the power of the international working class.

“Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” was a common chant in student protests in solidarity with the embattled Palestinian people. At Columbia University in New York, the site of the first and most prominent encampment, the lead demand of the coalition backing the protest was: “Divest all of Columbia’s finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.”¹ The response of university president Nemat Shafik was to bring in the police. Baroness Shafik, the first Arab, Muslim and woman president of Columbia, a former top official of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Bank of England, and a member of Britain’s House of Lords, had long before suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

On the other side of the country, following a brutal attack by armed counter-protesters and police storming a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of California at Los Angeles on April 30/May 1, the union representing student employees and researchers in the UC system, UAW (United Auto Workers) Local 4811, called a strike protesting the repression and calling on UC to negotiate on amnesty for student protesters, free speech on campus and “Divestment from UC’s known investments in weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and companies profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza.”² The UCLA administration, which allowed the attack by Zionist thugs and called in the cops to clear the pro-Palestinian encampment, refused to budge and got an Orange County court to issue a restraining order against Local 4811 for supposedly violating a “no strike” clause of the contract, whereupon the union suspended the walkout.

Most of the universities affected refused to divest Israel-related holdings, either explicitly, like Columbia, or in effect, by bringing in police to shut down encampments. Many labeled the demand itself antisemitic, as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and others in the powerful “Israel Lobby” claim, smearing any opposition to Israel or Israeli policies as “Jew-hating.” A few schools agreed to let students present calls to divest to the corporation running the private university (Brown University), the Board of Regents (University of Minnesota) or an investment committee (Rutgers), or to set up an “advisory committee on investment responsibility” (Northwestern). None of these negotiated “agreements” actually commit the schools to do anything at all about divestment.

Nevertheless, even these toothless gestures, intended to get protests to disperse voluntarily, were furiously denounced by Zionists. The university heads were called on the carpet by Christian nationalist witch-hunters in Congress. Even schools that resorted to police repression are facing demands by well-heeled donors to fire faculty, expel pro-Palestinian protesters and ban future protests, or else face withdrawal of their multi-million-dollar donations. As virulently pro-Israel investors denounce Gaza solidarity protests as “antisemitic” – when many of the demonstrators are Jewish – the fact that they brazenly wield their dollars to silence protest shows how little they care that this would fuel genuinely antisemitic tropes about “Jewish bankers” pulling the strings.

Yet the solid wall of rejection that protesters’ calls for divestment have faced is not just due to the Israel Lobby (which has donated to every sitting U.S. senator) buying influence, it also reflects a ruling-class consensus that maintaining a militarily dominant Israel is a linchpin to U.S. imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. “Genocide Joe” Biden may be the most emphatic in asserting this, repeatedly saying, from 1986 to today, that “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” Yet no one in official Washington questions the basic policy. There may be tactical disagreements with some Israeli policies, but whether Democrats or Republicans are holding the reins, they are all determined to ensure that Zionist militarists can intimidate any potential challenger in the region.

BDS Didn’t Bring Down South African Apartheid

So, for starters, divestment from Israel is not going to happen so long as U.S. imperialist domination is not broken, in the Middle East and worldwide. One of the main arguments put forward by “BDS” proponents today is that this supposedly “worked” to bring down the white-supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa. This is a liberal myth. For one thing, Zionist Israel is not the same as apartheid South Africa, in several key aspects. Both are viciously repressive regimes, but in different ways. We have explained elsewhere that “the denial of political rights to the African peoples under the apartheid system in South Africa was designed to perpetuate the superexploitation of black labor” which continues today under black capitalist neoapartheid rule:

“The goal of Zionism is fundamentally different…. [T]he Zionists’ founding and present-day goal is not to superexploit Palestinians – their aim has always been to expel the indigenous population (euphemistically termed ‘transfer’) or destroy them…. The logic of Zionism is not apartheid but ‘ethnic cleansing’ by forced population transfer leading to what we are now seeing before our eyes: genocide.” [emphasis in original]

–“Genocide Defenders Slander Anti-Zionists as ‘Antisemitic’,” The Internationalist, May 2024

Moreover, the geopolitical position of Israel today differs from that of South Africa in the 1980s. At that time, as the massacres of black residents of Soweto and other townships horrified world public opinion, the imperialist rulers worried that the white-supremacist regime had become a liability in the anti-Soviet Cold War II. If anti-apartheid protesters were able to convince some universities to divest holdings in South Africa, it was because U.S. rulers were divided. In 1986, Congress, controlled by the Democrats, passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, and when Republican Ronald Reagan vetoed the mostly cosmetic sanctions, Congress overrode his veto. Nothing even remotely like that exists today, when both the Democratic and Republican parties of U.S. imperialism back Zionist Israel to the hilt.

Secondly, even at that time, the “BDS” campaign against apartheid South Africa, pushed by liberal Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus, did not bring about or even substantially contribute to the downfall of the white-supremacist regime. The Congressional investment ban excluded strategic minerals, all that really mattered to the U.S. As underlined in a 1985 speech by Marjorie Stamberg, candidate of the then-revolutionary Spartacist League for mayor of New York City that year and later a leader of the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International who died recently:³

“[T]he whole liberal strategy of pressuring Washington and Wall Street to pressure their junior partners in Pretoria and Johannesburg will not help the struggle for the South African revolution one whit. In the last month we have seen ‘divestment’ on a billion-dollar scale. Reagan has decreed sanctions, which was the program of the Democrats. You have seen just about as much imperialist pressure on the apartheid regime as you're going to get, and the regime has dug in. And while divestment hasn't helped South African blacks one bit, it has helped Chase Manhattan's bottom line. Right now, with the South African economy in trouble, divestment is good business….

“Real solidarity with our South African brothers and sisters heroically struggling against apartheid means class struggle at home. We say: from Detroit to Durban, workers to power!”

–“Soweto to Harlem: Smash Racist Terror!” Workers Vanguard No. 388, 4 October 1985

What really worried imperialist rulers was the rise of a militant black working class in South Africa, in the mines, auto and elsewhere. The purpose of the divestment campaign was, as we wrote then, “to attempt to give a democratic façade to U.S. imperialism”:

“For us, progressive divestment is when the oppressed South African toilers, who have created this wealth, ‘divest’ their own ruling class and the imperialists of Britain, Germany and especially this country of that wealth.”

–“Divestment and Imperialist Hypocrisy,” in the article “Black Labor Can Break Apartheid Chains,” Workers Vanguard No. 407, 4 July 1986⁴

The white-supremacist regime was ultimately replaced by black “majority rule” in 1994 in a deal negotiated with ANC leader Nelson Mandela in order to preserve South African capitalism. A major factor facilitating that deal was the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. For the imperialists, this meant that the Moscow-linked South African Communist Party, which had strong influence in the unions, was no longer deemed a potential danger.

BDS Campaigns Built on Illusions in Universities

More broadly, over South Africa in the 1980s (when a student blockade of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall led the university to become the first of a number of schools that sold their stocks in companies doing business in South Africa) and on Gaza today (when a blockade of Hamilton Hall led to over 100 arrests and a refusal by the university to divest from companies doing business in Israel), the divestment campaign is built on multiple illusions. A key one is that the university is supposedly a “community” that should reflect the values of educators and students. In reality, universities are businesses and they reflect the values of the capitalist rulers. They are part of the system of production for profit, tasked with preparing new generations for the workforce and new leaders for corporations, government and other pillars of bourgeois society.

This has always been true of institutions of higher education under capitalism. It is now notorious that almost all the elite Ivy League universities were originally financed by profits from slavery. In private universities, like Columbia, Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., etc., the connection between capital and educational “mission” is direct, as they are financed with huge endowments (Harvard, $50 billion; Yale, $40 billion; Columbia, $13 billion) with investment portfolios from which they draw profit to fund things like scholarships. In public universities the connection is often indirect, through boards of trustees representing the interests of leading capitalist sectors (at the City University of New York: real estate and Wall Street banks), and the capitalist politicians who control the purse strings.⁵ But even state-owned schools have investments, often managed by outside professionals (at CUNY: Meketa Investment Group).

So the sense of many supporters of “BDS” that somehow the university is investing “their” money, over which they should have some say, is an inversion of reality. This goes together with illusory calls on university authorities to condemn the war on Gaza, as if those authorities were somehow allies or representatives of a common academic mission, when in fact they are agents of the capitalist state which, together with Israel, is jointly waging the war of extermination in Gaza. Along with the caps and gowns, it seems that many have imbibed the medieval notion that universities are a “community of scholars.” In reality, the citadels of higher education are cogs in a giant “military-academic complex,” which from the Vietnam War to today is an integral part of U.S. imperialism’s “mission” of world domination. (And even in the Middle Ages, universities only existed by the leave of princes and bishops.)

Another illusion is that dumping shares in all Israel-connected companies would somehow contribute to liberating the Palestinians from the yoke of Zionist domination. Of course, we had nothing against Columbia selling off holdings in American Express, Chevron, Ford and Coca-Cola as it did in the 1980s in the name of divesting from South Africa (at a profit, of course), any more than we would object to this training facility for imperialist rulers (e.g., Barack Obama) pulling money out of Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon and Microsoft, which Columbia divestment advocates have identified today. Pointing out how those corporations provide software services for Israeli police and prisons, cloud computing for the Israeli military and surveillance of Palestinians is all to the good. But if Columbia sells off its stock holdings, some other capitalist investor will buy.

Students may demand with full justification that universities pull funding from the military-industrial complex (at CUNY: Boeing, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Motorola, Caterpillar and others⁶) and information technology giants (at CUNY: Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo, Cisco and BMC Software⁷) that are involved with Israel. But it should be clear that these are above all mainstays of U.S. imperialism, the greatest exploiter and oppressor of the peoples of the world, including working people and oppressed sectors in the United States. And it should be equally clear that universities disinvesting from these capitalist giants would not relieve the horrendous devastation of the people of Gaza, or change much of anything at all.

Moreover, these days, as a number of analysts have pointed out, many universities, public and private, have much of their holdings in hedge funds which often don’t even tell their investors (e.g., universities) where their money is parked, and are hardly about to inform student protesters. So as a practical matter, divesting Israel-connected investments would be very difficult. And to what end? Sanitizing a campus from connections to Israel may heighten illusions that “the academy” can be an Ivory Tower of morality, conferring a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of cleanliness for the institution, but this would be totally phony, and do nothing to aid Palestinians or weaken the Zionist state.

But if divestment would have little real effect, a BDS supporter might ask, why do the Zionists and university authorities resist it so fiercely? For the same reason they have reacted so harshly to the campus encampments, which contrary the claims of the authorities are neither violent, nor do they disturb the functioning of the university or threaten Jewish students (many of whom are in the encampments). The Zionists and their patrons – not only in the U.S. – insist that there must be universal backing of Israel in the West against any who would challenge, much less rise up against its “right” to dominate the land “between the [Jordan] river and the [Mediterranean] sea.” Why? Because without unconditional imperialist military support, Israel’s isolated position could become untenable. And they are now facing the prospect of a new generation identifying with the oppressed Palestinians rather than with the Zionist oppressors.

Academic Boycotts?

What about academic boycotts? A particular program might be especially objectionable, if for example it had a connection to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF, i.e., the Zionist military machine that is laying waste to Gaza). If Israeli academics were to hold an event supporting the criminal Zionist war on the Palestinians that should certainly be protested. But calling on the universities to impose bans, or calling for “no free speech for Zionists,” only plays into the hands of the powerful forces who would prohibit pro-Palestinian protests and events. In the same way, calling for the authorities to ban fascists (or fascist symbols, or speech) will inevitably be used with far greater effect against anti-fascist leftists. 

Defenders of Palestinian rights should not be for a blanket ban on any ties with Israeli educational institutions or academics. Are joint degree programs such as those of Columbia and Rutgers with Tel Aviv University (where 12-16% of the students are Palestinians) worse that New York University’s Abu Dabhi campus, which was built with virtual slave labor? And what about the 25 professors at the University of Haifa (where 40% of the students are Palestinian citizens of Israel), including both Jewish and Palestinian Arab faculty members, who protested the university’s expulsion of Arab students for allegedly posting pro-Hamas comments on social media? Should they not be allowed to come to a U.S. university? Instead, of boycotts, there should be solidarity protests against anti-Palestinian repression on campuses in Israel.

The absurdity of calls for all-inclusive boycott of Israeli academics was brought out during the recent (May 31-June 2) Historical Materialism/Institute for the Radical Imagination conference at Long Island University in New York where a number of panelists withdrew and a letter was written protesting the inclusion of someone they described as “an Israeli Zionist” in a plenary discussion on Palestine. Even after he was dropped from the plenary event, protesters opposed his inclusion in the program at all and demanded a formal apology by conference organizers for inviting him. Yet the person in question, a well-known Israeli film maker, calls for a binational state in Israel-Palestine, “from the river to the sea,” described October 7 as “an uprising of the hopeless,” has condemned Israeli genocide in Gaza, and even supports the “boycott, divestment, sanctions” strategy! Go figure.

The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International stand for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East. Since the very first days of Zionist military destroying Gaza and massacring its Palestinian population, we have underscored that this is a joint U.S./Israel genocidal war. We have called from the outset to mobilize the power of the working class internationally, in particular by labor actions to stop arms shipments to Israel, to defeat that war and defend the Palestinian people. And we have sought to turn that call into action from Italy to the U.S. West Coast and Australia.

BDS Appeals to U.S. Imperialism, the Biggest Mass Murderers of All

In contrast, BDS appeals to U.S. corporations and the government (via sanctions) to put the squeeze on the Israeli Zionists. That is, it calls on the warmongers in the White House and the Pentagon, the biggest mass murderers on the planet, to transmogrify themselves into allies of the Palestinian masses, who are being slaughtered en masse today by U.S.-supplied bombs. This is a losing strategy. Since 2001, more than a million people have been killed in U.S. wars in the Middle East. Moreover, since 7 October 2023, the U.S. has sent to Israel more than 10,000 2,000-pound bombs. Without this U.S.-supplied ordnance, dropped from U.S.-built war planes, the Zionist military would not have been able to destroy more than half of all the housing in Gaza and massacre almost 50,000 of its people. This is what should be the focus of protest and what every effort should be made to stop. As we wrote back in 2010, at the time of the Israeli seizure of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and massacre of activists bringing humanitarian aid to the embattled enclave:

“The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel arose in response to a 2005 call by a number of Palestinian ‘civil society organizations.’ Pressed to the wall by relentless Zionist repression, many in occupied Palestine desperately call for any and all solidarity action. In the imperialist countries, particularly on university campuses, campaigns for ‘BDS’ have sometimes become a referendum on opposition to vs. support for Zionist Israel and its crimes.⁸ The boycott campaign in the West is an expression of moral outrage, but at bottom it is aimed at enlisting imperialist rulers. …

“‘BDS’ implies that the supposedly democratic imperialist countries are less culpable than Zionist Israel. Yet the victims of U.S. imperialism number in the many millions (3-4 million dead in Korea, 2-3 million in Indochina, close to 1 million killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and counting), vastly outnumbering the numbers slaughtered by the Israeli military and paramilitary settlers in Palestine. So why not refuse to buy any products made in the United States, refuse to hire American faculty, call for U.N. and European Union sanctions against the U.S., etc.? ‘BDS’ also implies that a ‘mass movement’ could pressure the imperialists into defending the Palestinian Arab people. This is an illusion, particularly in the case of the United States, whose alliance with Israel is strategic. Israel is a key element in Western domination of the Middle East, including vital oil supplies and trade routes, which also benefit the European imperialists. No amount of popular pressure will change that.

“If Washington pushes Tel Aviv to lighten up on the repression, it will only be a slight modification at most. The Palestinians will still be caught in a Zionist vise. Consumer boycotts notoriously have little effect – and who buys Israeli matzo or chocolate anyway? Moreover, anyone who thinks the Pentagon will stop buying Israeli software for its computers or stop hiring Israeli mercenaries to train its paramilitary death squads in Latin America is dreaming. Getting a few pension funds and imperialist corporations not to invest in Israel won’t starve Israeli businesses of funds. But even if by some miracle they did, and Israel became an international pariah, this won’t stop the Zionist butchers. They are junior partners and allies of imperialism, but Israel’s capitalist rulers have their own reactionary interests and agenda. They are perfectly capable of turning on their patrons in Washington, like when Israeli jets and gunboats napalmed and torpedoed the U.S.S. Liberty, evidently out of pique over U.S. neutrality in the 1967 war.”

–“Israel’s Gaza Flotilla Massacre: Bloody War Provocation,” The Internationalist No. 31, Summer 2010

Israel is not simply a “terrestrial aircraft carrier” for the U.S. as some on the left (and some supporters of Israel) claim. (See box below.) It has its own kill-crazed capitalist ruling class, and sometimes differs from its U.S. imperialist patrons (e.g., both Netanyahu and “liberal” Zionists are seeking to launch a full-scale war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which could unleash war with Iran). It no longer plays the role of gendarme and guarantor of the Suez Canal assigned to it by decaying British imperialism. But for the U.S. imperialists, Israel represents a strategic asset in the Middle East, a region that is vital to their fraying global hegemony, and one which they are not going to abandon. The idea that, under enough pressure, the U.S. would or even could tame the Zionist predators is doomed to failure. The Zionists would rather blow up the world, and they have the nuclear weapons that could provoke it – plus they are crazy enough to use them.

In sum, as we wrote in 2010:

“Trotskyists do not call for consumer boycotts, capitalist divestment and imperialist sanctions against Zionist Israel, nor did we against Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s, apartheid South Africa in the ’80s or Haiti under the military junta in the ’90s, for the same reason we do not call today [2010] for U.S. aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti: imperialism is not a policy but a system – it cannot be pressured into aiding the oppressed, it must be overthrown. We demand an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza and defend efforts to break it. Likewise, we demand an end to all U.S. aid to Israel, some $7 million a day. We demand that the Israeli army (and U.S. military advisers) get out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, that the Zionist settlements be dispersed, that all Palestinian refugees have the right to return, that Palestinian prisoners be released. But the key to freeing Palestinians from a century of Western imperialist and Zionist domination is to mobilize the international working class (including Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking workers in Israel) which alone has the power to sweep away the Zionist rulers and their imperialist overlords.”

–“Israel’s Gaza Flotilla Massacre”

Israel is not a monolith. One-fifth of the population are Palestinian Arabs, and many in the Jewish population are not wedded to living in a theocratic garrison state facing endless wars and conflict with the predominantly Arab East. The Zionist fortress must be exploded from within, by its own Hebrew and Arab working class. Secular liberal democrats in Israel are doomed to political extinction unless they break with Zionism to ally with the oppressed Palestinian Arab people. That requires revolutionary class struggle throughout the region and centrally in the heart of U.S. imperialism. Rather than looking to the capitalists and imperialists to stop the Zionist mass murderers that the U.S. backs to the max, we in the League for the Fourth International look to the working people of the region – Arab, Hebrew, Kurdish, Iranian and others – and in the imperialist heartland to wage a common struggle for socialist revolution. ■