ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the conditions that led to the birth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and uncovers the analytical frames through which the BDS call for action can be interpreted. The movement draws its moral, legal, and tactical arguments from the comparison to the successful case of South African apartheid. Unlike the conditions in South Africa, the case of Israel makes it difficult for the BDS movement to leverage high economic costs against Israel. Nonetheless, BDS has managed to create a critical situation that threatens Israel’s ontological security by increasingly shifting the boundaries of the discursive consciousness around the state in liberal spaces that have traditionally been pro-Israeli. These discursive challenges manifest real consequences for Israel’s legitimacy that can explain why the movement has been constructed as an ontological security threat to the state and eventually securitized.
