Earlier this week, the Palestinian BDS National Committee, which serves as the Palestinian leadership of the global BDS movement, sent a letter to the Boston chapter of the BDS movement, telling them to take down the “Mapping Project” from its social media or else “remove the BDS acronym from your name.”
The project, published this month by an anonymous group of BDS supporters, links together a range of Massachusetts Jewish groups and police, government, media and other institutions. It blames these groups and their networks for any number of harmful activities, calling for their dismantlement. The cooperative released a map showing the locations of the groups, as well as a listing of the names of some of their staff.
The publication has been widely condemned as being steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and tropes. An FBI agent told several Boston-area Jewish groups that it was monitoring the project, and a bipartisan group of 37 U.S. House members urged federal law-enforcement agencies to investigate whether extremist groups could use the map to harm Jews.
In a letter obtained by the Jewish Journal, the central BDS movement wrote to BDS Boston that “the association of the BDS name with such groups and activities hurts our entire movement.”
The letter accused BDS Boston of “promoting messaging which indirectly advocates for armed resistance and associating with groups who do,” supposedly violating a key BDS movement guideline. Notably, the letter lays out concerns that BDS Boston’s actions “opens the door for widely for the Israeli lobby” to smear the BDS movement, intensify “legal warfare,” and put members of the movement in danger of “persecution and repression.”
It mentions nothing of the safety of Jews and Jewish institutions that have been targeted.
BDS Boston replied with a statement on Wednesday, saying it “continues to feel that the ‘Mapping Project’ is an important source of information and useful organizing tool. The Mapping Project is its own collective that works autonomously from BDS Boston and can be contacted at the email address on their website.”
