I’m an Arab Muslim — I still don’t understand the antisemitic BDS movement

I am an Arab. I am a Muslim. And I have spent years trying to understand the movement that calls itself BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. I still don’t.

I understand grievances. I understand the pain of a conflict that has cost lives on every side and broken too many families. What I do not understand is a movement that insists it advances justice by demanding that human beings reject the very things that heal them, feed them, protect them and connect them.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that BDS will never print on a placard. If you truly boycotted everything Israel has given the world, you would have to dismantle a large part of modern life. So let me make the offer seriously. If you are fully committed to BDS, then in the name of consistency, you must give up the following.

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Now notice something. No one in the BDS movement actually does any of this. They will boycott Israeli hummus and refuse to share a stage with an Israeli professor, but they will not surrender the navigation guiding their car or the medicine sitting in their cabinet. Because somewhere inside, they know the truth. To genuinely cut Israel out of your life is to cut out medicine, safety, food and communication. A boycott you cannot live by is not a principle. It is a performance.

And as an Arab and a Muslim, that is what wounds me most. The countries of my region do not lack for grievances or for politics. What we have lacked, for too long, is the freedom to take what is good wherever it is found and use it to lift our own people. BDS asks the Arab world to do the opposite. It asks us to reject the irrigation that could green our farms, the medicine that could save our sick and the technology that could employ our young, simply because of where it was invented.

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I have chosen a different path. Since the Abraham Accords, I have met Israelis who want nothing more than to trade, to build and to live beside us in peace. I have learned that you do not honor the Palestinian people by impoverishing everyone, including yourself. You honor them by demanding leaders who choose negotiation over slogans, and life over hatred.

But peace has an enemy, and I know it well. The Muslim Brotherhood, the mother movement of modern Islamist extremism, was expelled from our countries for the chaos it breeds, from the battlefields of Sudan to the capitals of Europe, and the West would be wise to heed those of us who confronted it from within and won.

So boycott if you must. But be honest about the price. Put down the phone, the medicine, the car and the salad first. Then we can talk.

The rest of us will be busy building.