Framing Palestinian Rights: A Rhetorical Frame Analysis of Vernacular Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement Discourse

ABSTRACT

This essay applies rhetorical framing analysis to vernacular student-created discourse promoting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestinian rights. The results of this study suggest that pro-BDS student activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, settler colonialism, and apartheid against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, and joint struggle—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice discourses focusing on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. In response to the rhetorical ecology for pro-BDS discourse, including counterframing by Israel advocates and the doxa that BDS is antisemitic, pro-BDS activist-rhetors regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other struggles for justice and liberation.

KEYWORDS:

• Boycott
• framing
• Israel
• movement rhetoric
• rhetoric

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The BDS movement references several international laws and UN resolutions to support their claims for Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable, including the Fourth Geneva Convention and multiple UN resolutions, including Res. 181 giving Palestinians the right to return to their homes, along with UN resolution 242 and others (“Convention (IV)”; “Question”).

² In 2019, the Trump administration directed federal agencies to apply an expanded definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that includes examples of speech critical of Israel when investigating claims of discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; critics argue that this change intends to crack down on pro-BDS activism on US college campuses in the name of fighting antisemitism; this new policy also equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism (Kushner; Redden).

³ Several May 2021 media sources argued for the shifting of mainstream media discourse or represent examples of this phenomena, including the following: “Ayman”; Buttu; Kristof; Grim; Rickford; and Whitson.

⁴ Frame analysis can also be productively combined with Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theories about audience adherence (19–25).

⁵ For a more comprehensive discussion of rhetorical frame analysis methodology, analysis of both official and vernacular BDS movement discourse, results, discussion of texts, and so on see Hitchcock.

⁶ Long-term exigencies for pro-BDS discourse include the lack of accountability for Israel’s ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that has lasted over fifty years and denies Palestinians many basic human rights, as well as discriminatory policies against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and other settler-colonial and apartheid-like policies against Palestinians (“Regime”; “Threshold”).

⁷ See Edbauer for more in-depth discussion of rhetorical ecologies as an applicable model and alternative for the rhetorical situation.

⁸ Among several notable examples is scholar Steven Salaita, an outspoken BDS supporter who was fired from a new tenured position at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ostensibly for tweets that were harshly critical of Israel (Abraham, “Reluctant” 21–22; Salaita, “Why”).

⁹ The doxa that the BDS movement is antisemitic has been deliberately promoted by Israel and the many well-funded pro-Israel organizations that have successfully sought to deflect criticism of Israel and undermine the BDS movement by labeling as antisemitism many critiques of Israel’s human rights record or its settler-colonial or apartheid-like policies, including by the BDS movement itself (Abraham, “Reluctant” 22; Cortellessa; Finkelstein; Gordon and LeVine; Thrall; “Watch”). Thrall argues that “Israel’s most powerful tool in the campaign against delegitimisation has been to accuse the country’s critics of antisemitism.”

¹⁰ The apartheid analogy was previously popularized by former president Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, which was criticized by many Israel advocates for making this comparison (Beaumont). Some critics of Israel, including Noam Chomsky and prominent South African antiapartheid activists, have argued that the Israeli occupation of Palestinians is even worse than South African apartheid in many ways (Hasan; “Noam”; Tutu). In addition, many political commentators today believe that the two-state solution is no longer possible due to Israel’s ongoing settlement expansion and refusal to cede land for peace (Beinart, “Yavne”; Hassan et al.; Lynch and Telhami; Munayyer).

¹¹ The UN defines the “crime of apartheid” as including laws and policies “establishing and maintaining domination by one racial [group] of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them,” along with descriptions of other policies very similar to those in Palestine/Israel: “denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms … the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” and so on (“Discrimination”; “International” 1–2).

¹² “Inside Israel” refers to Israeli territory inside the 1949 armistice line, often referred to as the “Green Line,” which is Israel’s only internationally recognized border and excludes the West Bank and Gaza (Kershner).

¹³ In addition to critiques of BDS from Israel’s advocates, some well-known Israel critics, including Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, have also criticized the BDS movement for not promoting a two-state solution and for focusing on the right of return (Chomsky, “On Israel-Palestine”; Smith). Although many supporters of Israel claim that the third plank of the BDS call about respecting refugees’ right to return would effectively end Israel’s status as a Jewish state by overwhelming Israel with millions of Palestinian refugees, BDS movement leaders, including BDS movement cofounder Omar Barghouti, have argued for giving refugees their right to choose to return to Israel if they want and assert that it’s possible for Israel to absorb refugees without displacing current Jewish residents (“BDS and Liberation”). Many pro-BDS activists and proponents of the right of return also often reference Abu Sitta’s study demonstrating that many Palestinian towns and villages emptied in the Nakba remain uninhabited by Jewish Israelis; they also often mention a survey of Palestinian refugees that demonstrated that less than 400,000 current refugees living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and other countries in the region would choose to return to Israel proper if given the choice between Israel, the West Bank, residence in another country, or full citizenship in their current country (Abu Sitta; Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, “Results”).

¹⁴ Even though these “Visualizing Palestine” posters were not created by students, I include them in my analysis because SJP students chose them for display, thus representing one aspect of pro-BDS vernacular discourse.

¹⁵ For more examples and discussion of student-created texts on Georgetown’s mock apartheid wall and other IAW texts using the apartheid frame and others, see Hitchcock, Chapter 5.

¹⁶ For a more in-depth discussion of the historical and contemporary use of the settler-colonialism frame in the context of Palestine/Israel, see Hitchcock, Chapter 2.

¹⁷ Polls of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora have shown that the “right of return” is ranked as very important by most Palestinians, even for those who still favor a two-state solution (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, “Palestinian-Israeli”; Shiblak).

¹⁸ In addition to their anti-AIPAC protests, INN has launched direct action campaigns to promote discussion of the Occupation in Jewish summer camps, and its “Not Just a Free Trip” campaign encourages Birthright participants to walk out of their Israel tours to visit the West Bank, speak to Palestinians, and learn about the Occupation (IfNotNow, “Not Just”; Riesman). INN reflects the shift among many young Jews away from the reflexive support for Israel more commonly found in older generations and mainstream Jewish organizations, and their activism for Palestinian rights and refusal to denounce BDS lead to some overlap between their goals and tactics and those of the BDS movement (Borschel-Dan; IfNotNow, “Our Principles”; Maltz, “Young”; Ziri).

¹⁹ Identifying and distinguishing antisemitism from anti-Zionism and legitimate criticism of Israel is a much-debated topic. While some Israel advocates promote the use of the broad IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been criticized for restricting free speech on Palestine/Israel for labeling some legitimate Israel criticism as antisemitic, I rely primarily on the “Jerusalem Declaration” definition released in 2021 by Jewish and Israeli antisemitism scholars (Gordon and LeVine; Jerusalem”; “Working”).

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is the source of much contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theory about nefarious Jewish control of the media, international banking, world leaders, and so on was also tacitly endorsed in Hamas’s original 1988 charter that invoked several conspiracy theories originating in The Protocols. In 2017, however, Hamas updated their charter to remove references to Protocols-based conspiracies, among other revisions (Mughrabi).

²⁰ This exchange also seemed to contradict claims that the BDS movement is antisemitic for “demonizing” and applying “double standards” to Israel (The New Anti-Semites; Reut Group; StandWithUs).

²¹ For example, the assertion that “Zionism is racism” stems from a syllogism: because Zionism is a settler-colonial movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, and settler-colonialism is racist because it discriminates against and oppresses the Indigenous people in favor of a settler population, therefore “Zionism is racism.”

²² For sources discussing or representing the May 2021 increase in pro-BDS framing in the mainstream US media, see “Ayman”; Buttu; Kristof; Grim; Rickford; and Whitson.

²³ In May 2021 alone, the official BDS Movement Twitter account almost doubled their number of followers, and thousands of Americans joined Palestinian solidarity protests (Aspegren).

²⁴ See Beinart, “Yavne” and “There Is”; also see “Regime” and “Threshold.”