The Company They Keep: Organizational and Economic Dynamics of the BDS Movement

The "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" (BDS) movement against Israel is one of the faces of anti-Semitism in the United States. It threatens not only Jewish students and scholars but also the political neutrality of the university. The BDS movement is particularly concentrated in higher education and creates an environment of academic politicization to the detriment of academic freedom, freedom of speech, and constructive civil discourse. This report finds that the BDS movement's success on campus is mixed, while its broader movement is well-funded and growing in influence. This report expands beyond previous work on the BDS movement by examining its constitutive student groups in the context of its off-campus support organizations and funding. BDS in universities must be understood as one component of a larger left-wing social justice movement that politicizes higher education. This report first describes the Palestinian origins and development of the campus BDS movement, before examining its rates of success and failure nationwide from 2005 to the Fall 2022 semester. Three campus case studies then examine how pro-BDS initiatives are propagated, how such anti-Israel measures affect anti-Semitism on campus, and how university administrations address the issue. The second half of this report examines the off-campus organizations that enable BDS student activism by means of training, legal assistance, and funding. This report also notes ties between BDS organizations and terrorism.