BDS stands for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
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State agencies must then divest any funds from bodies named on the blacklist.
Spain’s government has repeatedly expressed its opposition to BDS, which is illegal in neighboring France because it is deemed discriminatory.
The Palestinian-led BDS calls it a “moral responsibility” to boycott Israeli goods in what the movement considers a nonviolent struggle against Israeli occupation.
“The message to Palestinians is clear”, Munayyer writes, “No resistance to the denial of your human rights is legitimate, because you have no legitimate claim to human rights”.
Some critics say the executive order is an attack on freedom of speech and that Cuomo is overreaching personal authority, since the order was passed without the approval of the state’s legislature. Supporters of the BDS movement also point to the fact that boycotts have always been used by the public and social justice movements when urgent change is necessary.
The Conference of Presidents was honored to host the event where Gov. Cuomo announced and signed the executive order. It’s very simple: “If you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you”, Cuomo proclaimed. Palestine Legal documented 240 incidents of suppression-“which included baseless legal complaints, administrative disciplinary actions, bureaucratic barriers, and false accusations of terrorism and anti-Semitism”-in 2015 alone”.
In response, the association’s Executive Board said it has approved a set of actions that can be taken, including issuing a statement of censure of the Israeli government; issuing a letter to USA government officials to identify ways in which the association believes that United States policies contribute to Israeli policies that violate academic freedom and disenfranchise Palestinians, and approving ways to provide active resource support for Palestinian and Israeli academics as well as visiting scholars in the region. Just in New York City this year, pro-BDS resolutions were passed by the doctoral council of the City University of New York and New York University’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC), a union of graduate academic workers that voted two-to-one to endorse BDS despite interference from the UAW’s local leadership.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed NY for supporting Israel.
But we can’t afford to be complacent.
Cuomo acknowledged that when he said, “as a Democrat, I always took for granted that there was a natural relationship with Israel that was unquestionable”.
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Some 1,100 anthropologists signed a petition to boycott Israel in August 2014, when Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions cited “Israel’s ongoing, systematic, and widespread violations of Palestinian academic freedom and human rights”.
