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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• Waze. Every time an activist opens it to avoid traffic on the way to a protest, they are using Israeli technology. It was founded in Israel and now tells half the planet how to get home.
• Your Intel processor. Much of the chip architecture inside the world’s laptops, very possibly the one used to type “boycott Israel,” was developed in part at Intel’s research labs in Haifa, which played a leading role in several generations of Intel’s processor design.
• The USB flash drive. The little stick that has carried your documents, your photos and yes, your protest flyers, was developed in large part by the Israeli company M-Systems, one of the pioneers behind the technology.

Capsule endoscopy devices like PillCam allow doctors to view the digestive tract without invasive scopes or sedation. (Medtronic)

• The PillCam. A swallowable camera the size of a vitamin, invented in Israel, that lets doctors see inside the human body without cutting it open. Millions have been diagnosed because of it.
• Drip irrigation. Israel’s Netafim turned deserts green and now water farms across Africa, Asia and the Arab world, feeding people who will never know where the technology came from.

Local farmers and daily wage laborers are seen in the agricultural fields as they are busy working in Nabrangpur district area, near the eastern Indian state of Odisha’s capital city Bhubaneswar. In these areas, people started agriculture in the drip irrigation method as they adopted it from Israel and harvesting good crops using less water also earning more benefits through vegetable and other money crop farming to help their families. (STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

• Teva. The largest maker of generic medicine on earth is Israeli. Open almost any medicine cabinet, in Cairo or in Chicago, and you are likely to find their pills.
• Mobileye. The collision avoidance system that brakes your car before you can, technology that has saved countless lives, came out of Israel’s Hebrew University.
• Check Point. The modern firewall that shields banks, hospitals and governments from cyberattack was built by an Israeli company.

The plump, sweet, long-lasting variety in supermarkets everywhere was developed by Israeli scientists. (Michael Jacobs/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images)

• Wix. The website builder used by millions of small businesses worldwide, perhaps even by some BDS chapters, is Israeli.
• The cherry tomato. Cherry tomatoes have existed for centuries, but the plump, sweet, long-lasting variety found in supermarkets everywhere was developed in large part by Israeli scientists, who bred the durable, slow-ripening version now grown around the world. Even the salad is not safe from consistency.

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Anti-Israel activists hold banners that include, “globalize the intifada” during a protest commemorating Nakba Day on May 15, 2025 in the Brooklyn, New York.  (Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

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.

The event was organized by Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Muslim Association of Britain, Palestinian Forum in Britain and CND. (Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)

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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.

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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.