A university group that supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has built a website using the Israeli website builder WiX.
WiX is a successful Tel Aviv-based company that provides a platform for free website building and reportedly has over 50 million users as of last year.
The Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Denver recently set up a website using the service, prompting criticism that it was being hypocritical by using an Israeli platform and had in fact made a ‘BDS Fail’.
The SJP website was reportedly taken down for a few hours but then came back up, still using WiX, and the group published a post on its Facebook page defending its actions.
The post linked to a longer statement by the group’s branch at Cornell University in New York State two years ago (almost to the day), which was slammed for the same thing.
A portion of the statement reads: “Let us be clear: BDS is not abstention, nor an absolute moral principle. It is not isolation or withdrawal, and it does not entail a rejection of everything Israeli. It is not anti-Semitic, and it has nothing to do with the merits of Israeli technology. BDS is not the attempt of beautiful souls to avoid contamination with oppression and keep their own hands clean: it is a tactic within a larger strategy, and it is beginning to work.”
“The idea that supporters of BDS must avoid contact with anything Israeli not only misconstrues the nature of BDS, but also contorts the idea of politics in general,” SJP at Cornell wrote in its longer statement.
“Those who call us hypocritical for not adhering to a rigid logic of separation simplistically insinuate that if one believes in boycotting Israel one must do it absolutely and deprive oneself of all the innovative benefits of the ‘Start-up Nation’; since one is opposed to Israel, one must not be in contact with anything Israeli,” it added.
The website was still using Wix as of Tuesday.
Sources: Israeli Cool / Times of Israel
