Mr. Chair, the BDS movement is a movement to essentially cause institutions and individuals to divest from companies that are part of the Israeli economy, or trade with Israel, or have operations in Israel. Sanctions of various sorts include academic sanctions and they legitimize, to some degree, the taking into account considerations other than academic merit in the promotion of professors.
Many of us have been university students. We all know that some students do not want to adopt a position that is likely to negatively affect their marks. There is a certain amount of subtle pressure there on students in many cases.
Separate from this, but I remember being very careful to write some papers for some professors without giving any clue that I was not necessarily supportive of Marxism back when I was a student in the 1980s. It is a universal phenomenon, and those social pressures are meaningful.
However, in general, the idea of singling out Israel and applying a different standard to it and then saying therefore we ought to boycott and divest, almost invariably the comparison is to apartheid in South Africa under the white regime. Any objective view of Israel makes it clear that there is no resemblance. The parallel is completely inappropriate, but that is articulated over and over again, particularly in the Israel Apartheid week, which unfortunately is cleverly crafted as a marketing slogan. It is hard to even mention it without repeating the message of those who purport that somehow apartheid in South Africa and Israel are related.