Boycotting Apartheid: Comparing US Labor’s Responses to the South African and Palestinian Freedom Movements

Abstract In the 1980s, organized labor in the United States enthusiastically threw its weight behind the Free South Africa Movement, with top union officials championing boycotts and divestments against Pretoria to nonviolently push for an end to the racist apartheid system. But twenty years later, many of these same labor officials came out in opposition to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions ( bds ), a South African-inspired movement to similarly pressure the Israeli government to end its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and to respect Palestinian human rights and self-determination. By juxtaposing US labor’s drastically different responses to the South African and Palestinian freedom movements, this essay highlights the ways that American unions choose to either embrace or reject calls for international solidarity and how, in the case of Palestine, the choice has been shaped by US labor officialdom’s traditional alliance with the State of Israel.