President Harry S. Truman, a history buff, said: “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” As a professional historian, I confess to an occupational affliction, which might be called “the obsession with origins,” that is a more sophisticated version of Truman’s aphorism. This causes me, like many of my professional confreres, to believe instinctively that past is key to present, and the essence of a thing resides in its origins. Sometimes, this instinct is right—sometimes not. Allow me to speculate first about the remote origins of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) Movement, critiqued in my Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) Against Israel: An Anti-Semitic, Anti-Peace Poison Pill (link: www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/REPORT_313.PDF). BDS was officially launched only on July 9, 2005, with “the Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS” in which over 100 named Palestinian organizations declared that “fifty-seven years after the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners,” they were launching a movement “inspired by the struggles of South Africans against Apartheid.” Obviously, as we shall see, the movement gestated before 2005. Yet it can be argued that its roots go back, not only to the early twenty-first century, but to before the modern era. Anthony Julius in his learned, witty history of anti-Semitism in England, Trials of the Diaspora (2010), writes: Calls to boycott Israel, for sure, both resonate with historical anti-Semitic campaigns against Jews, and draw on the language of anti-Semitic polemic. Indeed, to generations earlier than the present one, it could be taken for granted that anti-Semites would especially favour the boycott because it most completely expressed anti-Semitism’s project of repudiation and exclusion of Jews. . . . What happens when people are boycotted? The ordinary courtesies of life are no longer extended to them. They are not acknowledged in the street; their goods are not bought, their services are not employed; invitations they hitherto could rely upon dry up; they find themselves isolated in company. The boycott is an act of violence, though of a paradoxical kind—one of recoil and exclusion rather than assault. In Julius’ view, the honor as BDS’ titular founder does not go to Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), who stated in 2010: “If the refugees were to return, you would not have a two state solution, you’d have a Palestine next to a Palestine. . . . If you don’t leash the mad dog, it will bite everyone.” Nor to the noble Saladin who issued a call for Jews to return to post-Crusader Jerusalem in 1190. But to Richard I “The Lion Heart”—scourge of both Muslims and Jews—during that same time. For a granular, micro view of the medieval origins of anti-Jewish boycotts read, not David Nirenberg’s remarkable new synthesis, Anti-Judaism (2013), but his earlier, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996). Just because this was written a decade before the official birth of BDS, it is all the more telling for the connections to be drawn between the motives and content of anti-Jewish boycotts in medieval Spain those of the modern—or post-modern—BDS. Then there is the nexus between anti-Semitic ideology and the early twenty-first century origins of BDS. The BDS’ crucible was the period between the Second Intifadah of 2000—that reignited the Arab and Islamic campaign to isolate Israel, mostly dormant since the 1993 Oslo Accords—and the UN’s 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR), held in Durban, just before the 9/11 attacks. This period clothed the new anti-Israel boycott movement in perverted version of “multicultural” ideology. (Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, “Through a Glass Darkly: Durban and 9/11,” Midstream [November, 2001], link: www.midstreamthf.com/200111/feature.html.) The WCAR’s biased Declaration of Principles was justification enough for the decision by the U.S. and Israel to withdraw from Durban Conference—an Orwellian propaganda circus using the pretense of antiracism to reinforce hatred of Jews and Israel. The NGO Forum’s Declaration of Principles called for a revival of the UN’s “Zionism equals racism” resolution (passed in 1975 and repealed in 1991). It condemned Israel for war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and even “ecocide.” Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior accused the drafters of making Israel “the new anti-Christ . . . or the devil of the international community.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Associate Dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, was among the leaders of a walkout by every single Jewish delegate from the meeting where the NGO Declaration was adopted after a paragraph was voted down voted down describing “charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and Apartheid, as a virulent contemporary form of anti-Semitism.” The crux of the NGO Declaration, adopted in the newly-democratic South Africa, was the condemnation of Israel as “an Apartheid state.” This was the animating idea of “the Durban strategy”—including the call for “mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel”—that became the battle cry for the developing BDS Movement. The 2001 Durban NGO Forum—at which Palestinian Solidarity Committee of South Africa distributed copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—was so toxic that Mary Robinson, WCAR Secretary General, later admitted that throughout the Durban Conference “there was horrible anti-Semitism present—particularly in some of the NGO discussions. A number people said they’ve never been so hurt or so harassed or been so blatantly faced with anti-Semitism.” The BDS has a history, whether your focus is the remote or the recent past. It is an ugly history.