In Boycott!, Sunaina Maira depicts the origins and development of the US-based Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and presents a triumphalist account of the movement's progress to 2018. Her own participation in the movement and interviews with other scholars provides a rich basis for analysis. That said, additional, brief case studies would have better fleshed out the narrative, illustrating important arguments that at times feel more asserted than represented.
Maira has an insider perspective to share. She was involved from the beginning with organizing the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), a counterpart to the original Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). She offers details about discussions among largely US-based scholars during and after the Israel–Hamas clash in Gaza in 2008–09. Ultimately, these private discussions led to public advocacy and two successful efforts to pass pro-BDS resolutions at professional academic associations, the Association of Asian American Studies, and, more influentially, the American Studies Association.
Popular resistance, as Maira prefers to call it, has a long history in the Palestinian struggle. BDS is therefore contextualized as part of this legacy, not emerging from a vacuum. Building on Mazin Qumsiyeh's Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment (London: Pluto Press, 2011), Maira's book explains that past events like the Arab Revolt (1936–39), the oil shocks (1973–74), and the First Intifada (1987–93) often included elements like boycotts or labor and tax strikes. Whereas in American discourse Palestinians are often stripped down and Orientalized as violent actors, a fuller reading of Palestinian history uncovers a much wider array of tactics and practices that belie the standard caricature. Moreover, on its own terms, BDS engages in theoretical dialogue with many other grassroots mobilizations against racial and state power, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, the fight against apartheid in South Africa, and the grape boycott in the United States under the United Farm Workers. These and other examples in Chapter 1 highlight important facets of protest actions, such as cross-national solidarity and a fundamental stance of decolonization, that link BDS to this past.
The Israeli and US campaign against BDS has been “ferocious, well-funded, and highly-orchestrated” (p. 85). What we witness is a pro-Palestinian grassroots mobilization clashing with a powerful, pro-Israeli state-driven reaction. The reactionary forces, composed in Maira's telling not only of right-wing Zionists but also of liberal Israelis and their many supporters in the United States, seem to rely heavily on charges of anti-Semitism as a way of discrediting BDS: attacking the messenger obscures the message. Still, Maira believes the ferocity of the response is a sign that BDS is having a huge impact; she mentions “a tidal shift in knowledge production and discourse about Palestine since the call for academic and cultural boycott in 2004” (p. 142). However, greater empirical support for this would have been illuminating.
In Chapter 4, Maira situates BDS and Palestine inside a larger battle over the future of the US and global university, suggesting that BDS is a movement facing down university neoliberalism and corporatization. Universities need strong unions but they also need to “de-Zionize” (p. 126). Anti-Zionism stands with the democratization of the university in the United States. To demonstrate this point, she delves into the case of Prof. Steven Salaita, unhired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign due to his pro-Palestine views. At the same time, she highlights the role of Israeli universities as a mechanism for controlling Palestinian lives. One lingering question is the extent to which Palestine specifically is doing the work of disciplining academic radicals, as opposed to more general political and economic factors that have squeezed all faculty across fields in more contingent and precarious positions and thus may be the fundamental cause disciplining academic radicals.
There are areas for improvement, however. On several occasions, Maira downplays the argument that academic freedom should prevent the use of BDS against Israeli universities. She seems to assume that academic freedom is used by the powerful state to shield its acolytes. That may be the case. At the same time, though, academic freedom writ large may be a way for the weak and marginalized to claim some intellectual and symbolic space on college campuses or in society. Academic freedom can cut different ways. Moreover, much of the book is driven by brief anecdotes and short vignettes, which sometimes makes it challenging to differentiate between logically plausible as opposed to empirically supported arguments. For example, in Chapter 2, the author cites Rajini Srikanth, claiming that the “academic boycott movement has opened up discursive space to talk about Israel's policies” (p. 84). That seems plausible, but the reader is not offered many other examples or a systematic overview that would validate and prove this point.
Still, the book makes its core argument lucid, namely the notion that BDS and Palestine are part of a radical, global, and transnational solidarity network fighting settler colonialism, racism, and state power. In an affirmative sense, BDS is part of a movement of “global indigenous solidarity” (p. 125). In 2012, a Chicanx organization expressed this well in support of BDS: “Our Raza can relate to the concept of invasion, dispossession, occupation, exploitation, and discrimination” (p. 98). To put it more succinctly in Maira's terms, Hawaii is Ferguson is Palestine, and attacking BDS is to attack global solidarity. In the Middle East, Boycott! argues that BDS may play a vital role. Will Israel remain a state with an ethnonational identity (i.e., Zionism)? Or, will it ever switch to a state with full equality regardless of identity, the anti-Zionist goal of Maira and the BDS movement? Boycott! is convinced the push toward the latter is on the way.
