Tbh aside from expressing sympathy for the Palestinian people, the BDS movement--as a labor movement--barely makes sense in the context of the majority of people and businesses supporting it considering neither country has a tremendous amount of relevant exports and factual inaccuracies many people do not even bother to look into.

This includes the Ahava store (a small Israeli skincare brand almost no one knows unless you are Israeli or a Jew) that is situated within the confines of the Israel border outlined in the 1949 Armistice Agreement within the Masada National Park on the Western border of the Dead Sea. You can see Jordan from the shore. It has nothing to do with Gaza, which means, no, it’s not in “occupied territory” unless you consider Israel’s entire existence to be occupying land, which many of them do—another problem with the #freepalestine movement that I refuse to co-sign. When you ask a bookstore how exactly BDS solidarity factors into their purchasing decisions of books and products they never would have carried in the first place, you realize it’s not actually about BDS at all.

The BDS movement as a labor movement has such a small and meaningless impact on labor aside from it sounding cool. The FLA, which may be less flashy to the general public, addresses actual forced labor issues around the world--something that BDS just doesn’t even care about because their only focus is making people hate Israel, even when the employees (who include Palestinians) are treated fairly with better benefits than most Americans. This is probably why the FLA doesn’t really address it because it’s not about labor unless you want to do the mental gymnastics to argue that everything is labor.

Is silencing them helpful? Probably not. But I think people give them way too much lip service because they feel helpless in a war they have no control over and are about two steps away from the “by any means” extremists.