Yesterday in New York City, a coalition of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Iranians and Americans did more than launch a campaign. They drew a line against the politics of boycott, isolation and division — and offered a different one in its place.

The Anti-BDS Campaign is now officially underway. Faith leaders, activists, entrepreneurs and community members filled the Dreiser Loop Community Center in Co-op City on Wednesday, September 23, for an afternoon built around a shared approach: engagement over boycott, investment over isolation, and relationships over division. The gathering doubled as a celebration of the 25th anniversary of a peacebuilding partnership between two of the campaign’s founding members — a milestone organizers say shaped the spirit of the day as much as the politics did.

A Coalition Built on Relationships

I was proud to stand alongside Sheikh Musa Drammeh, Anila Ali, Wajid Ali Syed, Iranian singer Ghazal Mizrahi, Rev. Massimo Parrino, Andrew Zeidman, and many others who traveled from across the city — and beyond it — to be in the room. Soraya Deen joined the gathering virtually from Los Angeles, adding her voice from three thousand miles away to a conversation happening in the Bronx.

What united the room was not agreement on every point of policy. It was a shared conviction that the answer to boycott campaigns is not louder opposition, but a competing vision — one built on capital, cooperation and people who actually know each other’s names.

People can disagree about governments and policies. Our campaign is pursuing a different path from boycott: investment, dialogue, cooperation, and people-to-person relationships. — Khurram Ali Raza, at the Anti-BDS Campaign launch

Voices From the Podium

The program moved between prepared remarks, readings and open reflection. One organizer read from a text drawing on scripture shared across traditions, framing the day’s message of unity in language older than the conflict it was answering. Another read a message of support to the room. Between speakers, the projection screen carried the campaign’s own case for itself, plainly stated: if others organize to boycott Israel, this coalition will organize to invest in it.

A reading of scripture on unity and steadfastness — recited in Arabic and English — set a reflective tone partway through the event, a reminder that the campaign’s organizers see this project as much as a spiritual undertaking as a political one.

Near the close of the program, organizers returned to the campaign’s core appeal: this is not a rejection of disagreement, but a refusal to let disagreement calcify into permanent isolation.

The Five Pillars of the Campaign

Organizers built the campaign’s public case around five ideas, printed across the event’s own materials and repeated from the podium throughout the afternoon.