We Can’t Watch Genocide and Do Nothing. Now Is the Time for Renewed BDS

Boycott, divestment and sanctions offer a collective way to pressure Israel toward a ceasefire and an end to apartheid.

By Stéphanie Wahab , 

EXCERPT

TRUTHOUT/HAYMARKETBOOKS

PublishedFebruary 16, 2024

People gather at Washington Square Park and march the streets with placards and Palestinian flags within a demonstration in support of Palestinians in New York City, on February 8, 2024.

FATIH AKTAS / ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

We are months into Israel’s latest brutal campaign against Palestinians, with no sign of an end to the slaughter of civilians and society. The statistics, the stories, the images and witness testimonies are breathtakingly horrifying. The world has heard the genocidal intent from “every sphere of the state of Israel,” South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said to the International Court of Justice. The global community has seen the atrocities in real time. No amount of Israeli officials’ gaslighting can erase the desperate cries and pleas from fathers, mothers, children, siblings, friends and colleagues.

The enormity of this violence and suffering can’t be held individually, and attempting to do so leads to feelings of overwhelm and helplessness. Systems of oppression — steeped in supremacy, embedded in social and governmental institutions, and fine-tuned over decades — rely on people becoming tired, disheartened and weary, which facilitates inaction. Consequently, it is understandable that an individual coping response to cruelty of this magnitude is to believe that, “there is not much I can do to stop the genocide.”

What if there are some forms of violence and human suffering (think genocide, slavery, the Holocaust) that aren’t meant to be held alone, but rather, can only be held with others, in community? What if we choose to see, feel, grieve, think and act collectively in the face of Israel’s relentless violence against Palestinians in and out of Gaza?

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) provide a collective, civil society, nonviolent means of pressuring Israel toward a ceasefire, as well as pressuring it to end the genocide, apartheid and occupation. BDS is the largest global Palestinian solidarity movement, influenced by South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. It aims to challenge Israel’s use of apartheid as a technology of settler colonialism. BDS can be an entry point into collective action, alongside other interventions to effect change. That BDS has been criminalized in some states speaks to the ways it is perceived as a threat by Zionist entities.

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In recent years, academic boycotts have been particularly contentious. Academic boycotts call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions due to their complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as articulated by international law. More specifically, the call is to “to boycott and/or work towards the cancellation or annulment of events, activities, agreements, or projects involving Israeli academic institutions or that otherwise promote the normalization of Israel in the global academy, whitewash Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian rights, or violate the BDS guidelines.” Details and guidelines for academic boycotts can be found here.

Palestinians have always valued education, as evidenced by the fact that Palestinians have one of the highest literacy rates in the world, coupled with an exceptionally high rate of Ph.D.s per capita. In the current phase of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has destroyed every institution of higher learning in Gaza. Every single one. Any scholar who believes in academic freedom should appreciate the scholasticide and sociocide implicit in the targeted destruction of every university in Gaza, not to mention the added fact that nine out of ten schools for children have been significantly damaged. In addition, Israel has murdered university presidents, at least 94 university professors and at least 4,327 students since October.

During the past three months, Israeli forces have also entered universities in the West Bank and arrested students and faculty, including an incursion into An-Najah National University the week of January 19 where many were arrested. Even Palestinians studying and working in Israeli universities are harassed, targeted and denied academic freedom, including the right to education. Take for example the experience of my friend and colleague Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a chaired professor of law and social work at Hebrew University, and one of the few tenured Palestinian women in the Israeli academy. Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed a public letter on October 26, 2023, titled, “Childhood Researchers and Students Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza,” condemning Israel’s killing of 3,000 (at the time, now over 11,000) children in Gaza, and affirming the preciousness of Palestinian children’s lives. The university response was swift and dangerous: a letter from the president that concluded, “We are sorry and ashamed that the Hebrew University includes a faculty member like you. In light of your feelings, we believe that it is appropriate for you to consider leaving your position.”

This response further endangered Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her family in the face of other threats they received. She experienced debilitating fear and could not leave her home for weeks. Such a violation of the academic freedom of scholars of genocide and childhood trauma jeopardizes their lives and safety. The university didn’t argue with the facts of the public letter, but rather with its context and framing, which situated the killing of children in Gaza within the ongoing settler colonial violence against Palestinians.

Even before Israel’s latest attack on Gaza, it has acted to control indigenous knowledge production through military closure and invasions of college campuses. Additional technologies of censorship, harassment and interference with Palestinian basic rights to education have also included detention and incarceration of faculty and students, as well as surveillance and control of Palestinian curricula and learning. Take for example the 2006 law prohibiting the mention of the Nakba in textbooks, or the 2011 prohibition on institutions holding remembrance ceremonies for the Nakba.

Ultimately, the targeting of Palestinian and anti-Zionist students and faculty, who speak out against the genocide and occupation in Israel, Palestine, and around the globe, enacts a type of epistemic violence (a violence against the mind and knowledge). This form of control serves not only to erase Palestinians, but also to erase our refusal and dissent to our subjugation.

As Steven Salaita has recently written on this topic, “Reluctance to boycott is no longer acceptable.” We have witnessed in the past three months students and faculty around the globe supporting a ceasefire and an end to the occupation. Such support is not a condemnation of Jewish people, nor is it antisemitic, but rather a declaration of support for Palestinian humanity, self-determination and international law. For those searching for opportunities to witness and hold the suffering of Palestinians with others, as well as translate that witnessing into action, the BDS movement provides an avenue into collective action.

To support the renewed push for BDS in this horrific moment, I am sharing below a chapter on BDS within the social work field, which I wrote for a forthcoming anthology that will be published this spring by Haymarket Books: Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care (edited by Mimi E. Kim, Cameron Rasmussen, and Durrell M. Washington, with a foreword by Mariame Kaba). The chapter discusses in detail each of the three BDS tactics.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions as Abolitionist Praxis for Social Work

There may be few issues that test social work’s stated values of social justice, human dignity, and worth more than the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine. Following the razing of 500 Palestinian villages and the displacement of the majority of the Palestinian population in 1948, Israel has engaged in consistent acts of genocide, violence, and oppression against Palestinians through its carceral political and legal systems. The violence of Israel’s settler colonialism provides social work with a real-life case study of ongoing genocide, apartheid, dispossession, racism, and carcerality. Although Palestinians are not uniquely defined by their dispossession and suffering, I bring these affective, material, political, social, and economic conditions to bear to shine a light on a system of apartheid, reliant on international support, and a matrix of incarceration. The international community must act now. Furthermore, I call attention to Israel’s carceral violence to invite social work colleagues around the world to work in solidarity with Palestinians to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing attempts of erasure of the Indigenous people of Palestine, and to abolish the Israeli occupation of Palestinians and their land.

Social Work Silence and Complicity

Over the course of thirty years in social work, I’ve noticed that most social work academics, students, and practitioners in the United States (I feel this is different outside of the United States) know very little about the history and present of Palestine. This ignorance runs parallel to a silence about Israeli oppression of Palestinians, a silence often referenced as progressive except for Palestine, where social and political groups customarily outraged by racism, apartheid, and human dispossession remain silent. “Too often, social work has chosen professionalization, growth and partnership with harmful state agencies over social justice, solidarity, and self-determination. When it comes to Palestine, there is even more pressure to be quiet.” Orientalism, settler colonialism, anti-Arab racism, and taken-for-granted Zionist myths contribute to this ignorance, and readers may find detailed discussions of this issue else- where. What is relevant (and connected to this ignorance), however, is the global social work silence in the face of Israeli necropolitics and the necrocapitalism of Zionism. Necro comes from the Greek root nekros, which means “corpse,” hence necropolitics refers to the “politics of death.” Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as a framework for understanding “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.” Necrocapitalism extends Mbembe’s theorizing of necropolitics to focus on accumulation through death. More specifically, necrocapitalism speaks to “practices of organizational accumulation that involve violence, dispossession, and death.” This silent bystanderism, Palestinian social workers notwithstanding, is deafening in the face of social work’s explicit commitments to social justice, human dignity, and human worth. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful in the face of recent shifts in certain spaces toward Palestinian solidarity, especially among abolitionist communities, as evidenced by the inclusion of this chapter in this text.

Apartheid and the Matrix of Incarceration

A robust understanding of the relationship between abolition and Palestinian liberation requires a basic understanding of the settler colonial violence of Zionism, and although a thorough discussion of the racism of Zionism goes beyond the scope of this chapter, I do wish to note some of the linkages for those who are new to understanding Palestinian dispossession and liberation. It is important for readers to understand that the occupation is a structure within Zionism. I lean on understandings of Zionism that frame it as always having been a European colonial project that evolved into an imperial project sustained by the United States. As many have previously argued, Zionism’s early writings reveal that the dispossession of the Palestinian people was always at the core of Zionism, hoping to render us as “no people.” My colleague and I have argued elsewhere:

Zionism’s domination over Palestinian bodies, land, life, and psyche exists to nurture a binary necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003), where there are those who should be killed, and those who always and forever possess the right to maim, kill, and eliminate (Puar, 2017). Such logic is apparent in Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law as it maintains the exclusivity of the Jewish Israeli state, and the demonization of the disposable other (Jabareen and Bishara, 2019). Framing settlers as always-and-forever victims, rather than as invaders and abusers, ignores Palestinian ordeals, and erases historical memory alongside present narration (Zreik, 2016). Ultimately, the state’s brutal attacks, denial of historical and present injustices, coupled with the dismemberment of the Palestinian social, cultural, and spiritual fabric, together constitute intentional national domicide alongside racialized dehumanization.

Beginning in 1948, when Israel established two separate sets of laws — civilian for Jews, and military for Palestinians — Israel has relied on physical and affective containment of Palestinians to fortify its project of erasure and co-optation. One does not need to engage a deep dive inside Israeli laws and policies to see evidence of the carceral blueprint of Zionism and the occupation. Gaza provides the most extreme example of Zionism’s carceral backbone, often referred to as the “the world’s largest open-air-prison,” with 1.8 million people trapped within 138 square miles. The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza cannot leave as land, sea, and air borders are controlled by Israel, effectively making Israel the warden of the Palestinian prisoners inside Gaza.

Another glaring example of Zionism’s carcerality is the apartheid wall, referenced by Zionists as the “security barrier,” spanning 472 miles and standing 26 feet high (twice as high as the Berlin wall), and present in Bethlehem, parts of Ramallah, Qalqilya, parts of Tulkarm, and throughout East Jerusalem. The apartheid wall was deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice at The Hague in July 2004, with the court stating that the wall violates international law by restricting Palestinian movement and access throughout the West Bank and is “tantamount to de facto annexation.” Despite calls for an immediate stop to construction alongside reparations for the damage caused, Israel ignored the United Nations’ decree as it has consistently done since 1948 and continues to build the wall alongside illegal settlements to this day. The conditions containing Gaza coupled with the apartheid wall represent just two glaring examples of Israel’s incarceration of Palestinians, where fences, walls, crossing points, and 500 checkpoints and roadblocks are strategically built and maintained to create a sophisticated web of containment, what I refer to as a “matrix of incarceration,” with the aim of preventing Palestinian access to their lands, homes, medical care, families, work, water, human dignity, and human rights. Working alongside these physical containment structures are also practices of home arrests, home demolitions, exile, collective punishment, and the criminalization of Palestinian nonprofit human rights organizations. These practices function like a swarm, expanding and entrenching the matrix of incarceration, effectively creating militarized “reservations” or “choking system of Bantustans.” Shai Gortler uses the term Israeli carceral dispositive to reference the web of government, security, and psychological control holding up and enacting Israel’s apartheid state:

Israeli carceral dispositive—a term I use to indicate the assemblage of the Israeli Prison Service, the General Security Services, government officials, and, more importantly, Israeli public opinion and the Zionist psyche—has employed prisoners’ self-identification and their collective organization to better control them. It does so by encouraging regional identifications over national ones, by dividing the prisoners, and by encouraging a self-interested comportment.

Reading political prisoner Walid Daka, Gortler argues that these assemblages are not only meant to erase Palestinians, but also to create particular (obedient and more passive) Palestinian subject positions:

If the segregated areas Israel demarcated for Palestinians in the occupied territories are akin to bigger prisons, and its practices towards Palestinians in the smaller prisons are a continuation of its policy in the larger ones, then it is useful to first apply theoretical tools to study the smaller prisons. The panopticon is the fundamental form of this control and surveillance that Israel conducts not only to enhance security but to re-shape people.

Consistent with carceral logics and practices, those who resist these forms of containment and dispossession are frequently criminalized, incarcerated, tortured, maimed, and murdered by Israel. Central to this discussion about Zionism’s matrix of incarceration is that it has been made possible via international support and complicity, particularly from the United States, such that every sitting U.S. president since Harry Truman has expressed unwavering support for the state of Israel. The United States alone has historically and consistently given billions ($3.8 most recently and double that for many years) of dollars on a yearly basis, alongside military and construction equipment, to support Zionism’s project of erasure.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions

Boycotts have long been an element of anticolonial struggles. Inspired by earlier Palestinian boycotts after the Nakba of 1948 (what Palestinians refer to as the catastrophe when half the population of Palestinians lost their homes and property in addition to becoming stateless in and out of historic Palestine), as well as the South African antiapartheid movement, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian civil society, nonviolent social movement calling for freedom, justice, and equality. Formed in 2005, BDS is made up of academic associations, unions, refugee and women’s organizations, churches, and grassroots liberation organizations. BDS was created explicitly as an organized response to the settler colonial violence of Zionism and its violent and carceral conditions. Its founder Omar Barghouti wrote:

Faced with overwhelming Israeli oppression, Palestinians under occupation, in refugee camps and in the heart of Israel’s distinct form of apartheid have increasingly reached out to the world for understanding, for compassion, and, more importantly, for solidarity. Palestinians do not beg for sympathy. We deeply resent patronization, for we are no longer a nation of hapless victims. We are resisting racial and colonial oppression, aspiring to attain justice and genuine peace. Above all, we are struggling for the universal principle of equal humanity. But we cannot do it alone. Given its uncontested military superiority, the unquestioning and all-embracing support it enjoys from the world’s only empire and the lack of political will by Arab and European states to hold it in check, Israel has been gravely violating international law, with audacious impunity, showing little if any consideration for the UN or world public opinion.

Hence, the main goal of BDS is to render Israel compliant with international laws that recognize the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Syrian Golan Heights as occupied by Israel. Hence, BDS demands an end to the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and the dismantling of the apartheid wall, recognition of Arab-Palestinians in Israel with full equality, and the promotion and protection of the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes as stipulated by United Nations Resolution 194. To better understand what each component of this campaign signifies, I present the definitions for each tactic as articulated by the BDS movement.

BDS articulates three demands in service of the three tactics:

1) Ending its occupation and colonization of All Arab lands and dismantling the Wall: International law recognizes the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights as occupied by Israel. As part of its military occupation, Israel steals land and forces Palestinians into ghettos, surrounded by check- points, settlements, and watchtowers and an illegal apartheid wall. Israel has imposed a medieval siege on Gaza, turning it into the largest open-air prison in the world. Israel also regularly carries out large-scale assaults on Gaza, which are widely condemned as a constituting war crimes and crimes of humanity.

2) Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality: One-fifth of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians who remained inside the armistice lines after 1948. They are subjected to a system of racial discrimination enshrined in more than 50 laws that impact every aspect of their lives. The Israeli government continues to forcibly displace Palestinian communities in Israel from their land. Israeli leaders routinely and openly incite racial violence against them.

3) Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194: Since its violent establishment in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of more than half of the Indigenous people of Palestine, Israel has set out to control as much land and uproot as many Palestinians as it can. As a result of this systematic forced displacement, there are now more than 7.25 million Palestinian refugees. They are denied their right to return to their homes simply because they are not Jewish.

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement as Abolitionist Praxis

In the same way, solidarity with Palestine has the potential to further transform and render more capacious the political consciousness of our contemporary movements. Black Lives Matter activists and others associated with this very important historical moment of a surging collective consciousness calling for recognition of the persisting structures of racism can play an important role in compelling other areas of social justice activism to take up the cause of Palestine solidarity—specifically, BDS.

As discussed throughout this book, the focus of abolition is both to dismantle police and carceral systems, as well as build liberated societies, free of violence. I lean on Ruth Gilmore Wilson’s statement that prison is not a building, “but a set of relationship that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere.” Placing Wilson’s words in conversation with the matrix of incarceration discussed earlier sets the stage for the discussion that follows, that is, one that positions BDS as an abolitionist praxis.

As the daughter of a Palestinian refugee, I am frequently asked, “What can I do?” from those moved to action. My response is that support for BDS represents one action (of many) that enacts solidarity with Palestinians. And although support for BDS may offer an entry point for Palestinian solidarity work, I also believe that abolitionists around the world have something to learn about abolition from Palestinians who have been resisting and subverting police and carceral systems since 1948. Consequently, I position BDS as abolitionist praxis along four rationalities: (1) BDS enacts a praxis of divesting from the carceral state, (2) BDS is a grassroots initiative that relies on civil society; (3) BDS translates dreaming and imagining a different world into action; (4) BDS enacts hope as a discipline.

Divesting From the Carceral State

The three BDS demands articulate a need to divest from the carceral state. Israel is deemed a carceral state by many because of the ways it isolates, controls, and contains Palestinians through a matrix of incarceration. Because the criminalization and occupation of Palestinian land and psyches would not be possible without consistent international financial and material support, BDS aims to disrupt the financing of this system of apartheid. Corporate, individual, and institutional divestment from Zionism’s settler colonial project, and the companies that aid and sustain it, aims to dismantle the carceral logics and practices discussed earlier. I argue that this dismantling is consistent with abolitionist practice as discussed by Berger et al.:

Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for nonreformist reforms—those measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.

At my university, Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights led a student campaign in 2016 calling on the university to divest from institutions profiting from human rights violations against Palestinians. Currently, Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights is calling on the university to divest from Boeing. As one of the world’s leading defense contractors, Boeing is directly and indirectly involved in many countries that use Boeing weapons against their own people, or people whose lands they are occupying, including in Israel. Al Jazeera reported in 2021 that 260 Palestinians had been killed with thousands more displaced from their homes by Israel. Of note is that Boeing sold $735 million of weaponry to Israel earlier that year. Boycotting and divesting from systems and institutions that support the occupation can take many forms. Those interested in participating can utilize the BDS website to search for the names of companies BDS boycotts, as well as to connect with BDS chapters near them in their own countries.

Reliance on Civil Society

Abolition is a people’s movement anchored by a vision to eliminate imprisonment, policing, and surveillance, with a goal to create alternatives to punishment and incarceration. For reasons discussed previously, Palestinians possess tremendous knowledge about imprisonment (in all its forms), as well as the power that resides in the collective to resist and refuse incarceration. Consequently, boycotts as anticolonial praxis rep- resent just one tactic Palestinians have historically engaged to resist the carcerality of Zionism. In fact, BDS was modeled after the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel of 2004, a response to Israeli academic institutions’ complicity with the occupation. The formation of BDS was largely inspired by the antiapartheid South Africa campaigns that played a significant role in garnering international participation in the fight against apartheid. Having witnessed the international community’s abject failure at holding Israel accountable to international laws condemning the occupation, Palestinian civil society coalesced (over 170 organizations), representing three sectors (refugees outside the historic homeland, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians in the occupied territories) to form BDS. As stateless people, Palestinians do not have the luxury of relying on the state of Israel for help even if they wanted to, particularly since the state in this case is responsible for their oppression and dispossession. Consequently, BDS models the slow, difficult work of organizing people to harness the collective power in service of liberatory change, a type of labor that is also central to abolitionist praxis, particularly feminist abolitionist praxis.

Dreaming and Imagining a Different World Is Action

Because we are all deeply entangled in the oppressive systems that shape our lives, imagining and dreaming different futures is vital to creating new structures and possibilities. Prison and police abolitionist Mariame Kaba suggests we might begin our abolitionist journeys by asking, “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” Hence, if we consider the deeply entrenched Zionist discourses suggesting that Palestinians pose an existential threat to the State of Israel, and that Palestinians are terrorists, less than human, and the aggressors, imagining counternarratives and consequently possibilities constitute important and necessary work. “Theoretically and ideologically, Palestine has also helped us to broaden our vision of abolition, which we have characterized in this era as the abolition of imprisonment and policing. The experience of Palestine pushes us to revisit concepts such as ‘the prison nation’ or ‘the carceral state’ in order to seriously understand the quotidian carceralities of the occupation and the ubiquitous policing by not only Israeli forces but also the Palestinian Authority.” Creating a future without settler colonial violence (in all its forms) for Palestinians requires imagining a different future as a possibility. BDS was/is a way for Palestinian civil society to “restore public visibility of the nonviolence aspect of Palestinian resistance.”

Hope as a Discipline

Kaba has famously argued that “hope is a discipline.” By this, she means that hope involves believing that change is always possible. She also discusses that hope isn’t just a belief, a thought, a feeling, but also a practice, a doing, an action. Hope as a discipline invites us to consider movement timelines rather than our personal, incidental, brief timelines. Hope as a discipline is radical because it is a move against the status quo. Hope as a discipline moves beyond the imagination into action.

Sumud is a Palestinian term referencing our particular forms of steadfastness. Palestinian feminist Lena Meari points to the sociopolitical and affective value of sumud as a psychological act of both defiance and willful self-affirmation. Sumud, she argues, is a healthy attachment to one’s inner self and social world.

Palestinians have demonstrated persistent sumud by continuing to refuse oppression and resist the label of “no people.” Consequently, hope as a discipline has been exercised by Palestinians through our sumud because Palestinian resistance and survivance is not possible without hope. Take, for example, the six Palestinian political prisoners who escaped Gilboa prison in September 2022 by purportedly digging a tunnel with spoons. The hope that fueled the planning and digging of these tunnels was not contained nor born of this imprisonment, but rather, passed on from generation to generation. When hope is a discipline, an intellectual, spiritual, psychological, and physical practice, time is not linear. Rather, time is a relational and temporal phenomenon constituted of past, present, and future. Boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions enact practices of hope, hope that a different reality is possible.

Addressing Intimidation Tactics

Given the ongoing Zionist narrative that BDS is anti-Semitic, I offer a few thoughts for those concerned with these claims. First, the accusation that BDS is, at its core, a dog whistle for anti-Semitism, or simply straight-up anti-Semitism, is a tactic intended to intimidate and consequently preclude support for BDS. We must keep in mind that the target of BDS is Israel and Israeli biopolitics and necropolitics impacting Palestinians, not Jews, nor Israelis. Furthermore, we must keep in mind that Israel and its necropolitical policies does not represent all Jewish people, as many Jewish people support and participate in BDS. Although Israel would have the world believe that it represents all Jewish people, for example, through its racist 2018 Nation-State Law, Jewish people are diverse. Not all Jewish people live in Israel, and even some Jewish people who live in Israel don’t feel represented by the state. Jewish anti-Zionism has a long history as articulated by Rabbi Irving F. Reichert (1895–1968), an influential and controversial leader in the Jewish reform movement and the American Council for Judaism. Claims that BDS is anti-Semitic assume that the state of Israel is the same as the Jewish people, or put an- other way, that Jewish people are homogenous in their identities, beliefs, and politics. The fact that Jewish people make up a demographic majority in Israel, coupled with the fact that Israel has support from Jewish people around the world, does not preclude the existence of critiques of Israel’s apartheid and carceral practices from Jewish people inside Israel. In fact, Jewish people in and out of Israel do critique Israel’s settler colonial and apartheid violence. I believe, or at least would like to believe, that social workers would agree that a state should make efforts to represent all its people equally, as well as support all its people to have freedom of movement, basic human rights, and access to water, health care, family, and a life free of violence.

A similar argument leveraged against BDS is that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic, such that BDS critiques of Zionism are labeled as anti-Semitic. A thoughtful discussion of this issue extends beyond the scope of this chapter, in part because it calls on us to work closely with the provenance of the definitions of anti-Semitism, as well as the political move to equate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. I stand with the Palestinian Feminist Collective and so many others who reject the conflation of the two.

Resisting Violence = Practicing Hope

Let me be clear that I’m not arguing that BDS offers an endpoint to decolonization nor liberation for Palestinians. BDS has been criticized by some of its staunchest Palestinian advocates for the limitations of its rights-based framework when it comes to addressing and disrupting the violence of settler colonialism. I am suggesting, however, that BDS may serve as an entry point for Palestinian solidarity work, one that offers explicit activities and practices within the context of a broad social movement, led by those most affected by the violence of settler colonialism in Israel. It bears mentioning that although the International Federation of Social Workers voted against supporting BDS in 2021, social work does have a history of engaging in boycotts as evidenced by participation in the “free produce movement” of the Progressive era and the more recent boycotts of Hyatt hotels for workers’ rights violations and labor disputes, just to name a few examples. In addition, social work does have a mandate to resist social and racial injustice. This form of civil society solidarity is in service of social work commitments to social justice and human dignity and worth. “BDS is a call to conscience to supporters in civil society around the world to use economic leverage, including lobbying their governments, in order to bring about specific changes in Israeli policies that violate human rights.” I encourage all who are concerned with Zionism’s carceral violence to join the BDS social movement, in solidarity with Palestinians, as an enactment of abolitionist praxis.Excerpt from "Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care" © 2024, Haymarket Books. Used by permission.


STÉPHANIE WAHAB
 Ph.D., MSW, is a professor at Portland State University, School of Social Work.

ZIONIST SLANDER

What are the antisemitism claims linked to Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux?

The 2022 laureate for the Nobel Prize for literature has supported the anti-Israel boycott movement, BDS, on many occasions. Is Annie Ernaux antisemitic or simply a vocal critic of Israel's policies?

Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux

Just a few days after being showered with praise for winning the Nobel Prize for literature, French author  Annie Ernaux is now making headlines for her "dark side," as German tabloid paper Bild put it. News magazine Spiegel also reports on accusations of antisemitism, based on an initial article in the Israeli Jerusalem Post, which reveals Ernaux's closeness with the BDS movement.

An acronym for "Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions," the BDS movement aims to put Israel under international pressure to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

BDS activists accuse Israel of colonialism and compare it to South Africa during apartheid. They are therefore trying to isolate the country economically, culturally and politically.

Those who accuse BDS of being antisemitic point to statements of leading activists who deny Israel's right to exist, such as: "Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine," said BDS co-founder, Omar Barghouti.

One of the most prominent supporters of the movement is Roger Waters.

Ernaux supports BDS views

The Jerusalem Post reports that in 2018, Annie Ernaux signed a letter with 80 other cultural figures stating that the Israeli state was represented too positively in the French media. "It is a moral obligation for any person of conscience to refuse the normalization of relations with the State of Israel," the letter said.

Barbara Vinken: Ernaux cannot be called antisemitic

Again, in May 2019, Ernaux and more than 100 other French artists signed a letter demanding a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest, taking place in  Tel Aviv that year. They called upon French TV broadcasters to abstain from airing the popular competition.

Two years later, Ernaux signed "A Letter Against Apartheid," in which Israel was compared to South Africa's apartheid regime. The letter denounced Israel's politics in the Gaza strip as well as Israeli attacks on Arabs and Palestinians. In its article on the Nobel Prize-winning author, the Jerusalem Post claims that the letter does not give proper background on who initiated tensions that led to fierce fighting in May 2021.

BDS has a wide network

Ernaux's political views, including her close support for BDS, are not a secret in France, says Barbara Vinken, professor for French literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In France, people accept her views as freedom of opinion.

"But one needs to probably also think that in other countries, the BDS has more support than it has with us [in Germany], also among intellectuals. We in Germany have a special position because of our history, and rightly so. It is clear that we are extremely sensitive towards this issue."

The Jerusalem Post also accuses Ernaux of supporting the call for the pardon for Georges Abdallah, a Lebanese communist, who murdered an American officer and an Israeli diplomat. A BDS letter about Abdallah's case, which Ernaux also signed, describes the murdered persons as "active Mossad and CIA agents" and Abdallah as "committed to the Palestinian people and against colonization."

But beyond Ernaux, a French-Jewish union for peace also stood for Abdallah at the time, Vinken told German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. The campaigns "were definitely supported by a really broad and also Jewish public," she said.

Mirna Funk is critical toward Ernaux's support of the BDS movement

'No indication of antisemitism' in her works

According to Vinken, Ernaux is condemning Israeli politics in the Palestinian territories; in principle, she stands for an opinion that can evoke popular agreement. There is no reason to accuse the author of antisemitism, Vinken says.

"There is nothing in her work indicating antisemitism," the literature professor said. To turn a public personality's statements against a certain policy into a "death sentence" is unacceptable, she added, referring to the negative press Ernaux has received in Germany and Israel over the last days.

Berlin-based author Mirna Funk has a different opinion, though. The Jewish writer considers BDS to be unambiguously antisemitic. "And I also find people supporting the BDS politically dangerous," she told DW.

Funk is not alone in her opinion. The German Bundestag has also decided in a May 2019 resolution that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign against Israel is antisemitic.

Anyone receiving the Nobel Prize and stepping into the public limelight must also accept that people will engage with their political position, argued Funk: "The same happened with [Peter] Handke."

The Austrian author, who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2019, expressed solidarity for Serbia during the Yugoslavian conflict and according to critics, trivialized the war crimes perpetrated by Serbian forces.

Ideologies of the suppressors and the suppressed

Like many BDS supporters, Ernaux's political positions are linked to her own background. She grew up in a small place in Normandy, where her parents ran a village shop. Ernaux was the first in her lower middle-class family to complete university.

Until her retirement, she worked as a teacher and used her free time to write about her life: Poverty during her youth, her unwanted pregnancy and her abortion, which was illegal at the time. She also wrote about her sister, who died as a young child, before Annie was born.

Ernaux was always committed to the causes of the left.

"In leftist ideology, one assumes that every relationship, whether personal or political, is based on power relations between the suppressors and the suppressed," Mirna Funk said. The problem between Palestinians and Israelis is therefore interpreted this way too. "From the Palestinian side, one has understood for decades how to stylize the Palestinian as the underdog and that has functioned wonderfully well in the leftist sphere."

Boycotting Ernaux is not an option

Nevertheless, Funk would still read Ernaux's books. "Even if Ernaux supports BDS, I am not in favor of boycotting [her]. I think it is very, very important to separate artistic performance from the artist herself."

Ernaux is a BDS supporter, but one must make a distinction between artists creating work that is independent of their political positions and artists who are directly producing propaganda material, Funk emphasized.

"Ernaux has not published books on Israelis and Zionists and Jews, but about her own world," Funk said. "Still, one needs to consider that she represents political positions, which can be criticized. But that is the multi-dimensionality of every person. And I think it is very important to be able to tolerate that contradiction."

Among her various political stands, Annie Ernaux applauds the courage of Iranian women currently protesting the regime and also condemns Putin's war on Ukraine.

Reacting to her prestigious award, Ernaux said that she saw it as an invitation to continue her struggle against injustice worldwide: "To get the Nobel Prize means to continue my responsibility," she stated, adding that she felt responsible to be open towards the path the world may take.

This article was originally published in German. It was translated by Manasi Gopalakrishnan.

Update: The article was modified on October 12, 2022, after its publication, to include a quote by a BDS co-founder, and now specifies which conflict is referred to in "A Letter Against Apartheid."

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Nobel Prize: Annie Ernaux wins 2022 award for literature

The Swedish Academy gave the award to French memoirist Annie Ernaux. An icon of autobiographical fiction, the author of "The Years" joins the ranks of other prestigious figures in the literary scene.  

• Date 11.10.2022

We Have A Tool To Stop Israel’s War Crimes: BDS

By Naomi Klein

January 11, 2024

Source: The Guardian

Photo. Alex Chis. Flickr.


Exactly 15 years ago this week, I published an article in the Guardian. It began like this:


It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on ‘people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era’. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Back in January 2009, Israel had unleashed a shocking new stage of mass killing in the Gaza Strip, calling its ferocious bombing campaign Operation Cast Lead. It killed 1,400 Palestinians in 22 days; the number of casualties on the Israeli side was 13. That was the last straw for me, and after years of reticence I came out publicly in support of the Palestinian-led call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights, known as BDS.

Though BDS had broad support from more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, internationally the movement remained small. During Operation Cast Lead, that began to shift, and a growing number of student groups and trade unions outside Palestine were signing on.

Still, many wouldn’t go there. I understood why the tactic felt fraught. There is a long and painful history of Jewish businesses and institutions being targeted by antisemites. The communications experts who lobby on Israel’s behalf know how to weaponize this trauma, so they invariably cast campaigns designed to challenge Israel’s discriminatory and violent policies as hateful attacks on Jews as an identity group.

For two decades, widespread fear stemming from that false equation has shielded Israel from facing the full potential of a BDS movement – and now, as the international court of justice hears South Africa’s devastating compendium of evidence of Israel committing the crime of genocide in Gaza, it truly is enough.

From bus boycotts to fossil fuel divestment, BDS tactics have a well-documented history as the most potent weapons in the nonviolent arsenal. Picking them up and using them at this turning point for humanity is a moral obligation.

The responsibility is particularly acute for those of us whose governments continue to actively aid Israel with deadly weapons, lucrative trade deals and vetoes at the United Nations. As BDS reminds us, we do not have to let those bankrupt agreements speak for us unchallenged.

Groups of organized consumers have the power to boycott companies that invest in illegal settlements, or power Israeli weapons. Trade unions can push their pension funds to divest from those firms. Municipal governments can select contractors based on ethical criteria that forbid these relationships. As Omar Barghouti, one of the founders and leaders of the BDS movement, reminds us: “The most profound ethical obligation in these times is to act to end complicity. Only thus can we truly hope to end oppression and violence.”

In these ways, BDS deserves to be seen as a people’s foreign policy, or diplomacy from below – and if it gets strong enough, it will eventually force governments to impose sanctions from above, as South Africa is attempting to do. Which is clearly the only force that can get Israel off its current path.

Barghouti stresses that, just as some white South Africans supported the anti-apartheid campaigns during that long struggle, Jewish Israelis who oppose their country’s systemic violations of international law are welcome to join BDS. During Operation Cast Lead, a group of roughly 500 Israelis, many of them prominent artists and scholars, did just that, eventually naming their group Boycott from Within.

In my 2009 article, I quoted their first lobbying letter, which called for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” against their own country and drew direct parallels with the South African anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective,” they pointed out, saying it helped end the legalization of discrimination and ghettoization in that country, adding: “But Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”

That was true 15 years ago; it is calamitously so today.
The price of impunity

Reading BDS documents from the mid- and late 2000s, I am most struck by the extent to which the political and human terrain has deteriorated. In the intervening years, Israel has built more walls, erected more checkpoints, unleashed more illegal settlers and launched far deadlier wars. Everything has gotten worse: the vitriol, the rage, the righteousness. Clearly, impunity – the sense of imperviousness and untouchability that underpins Israel’s treatment of Palestinians – is not a static force. It behaves more like an oil spill: once released, it seeps outwards, poisoning everything and everyone in its path. It spreads wide and sinks in deep.

Since the original call for BDS was made in July 2005, the number of settlers living illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has exploded, reaching an estimated 700,000 – close to the number of Palestinians expelled in the 1948 Nakba. As settler outposts have expanded, so has the violence of settler attacks on Palestinians, all while the ideology of Jewish supremacy and even overt fascism have moved to the center of the political culture in Israel.

When I wrote my original BDS column, the overwhelming mainstream consensus was that the South African analogy was inappropriate and that the word “apartheid”, which was being used by Palestinian legal scholars, activists and human rights organizations, was needlessly inflammatory. Now, everyone from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International to the leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have done their own careful studies and come to the inescapable conclusion that apartheid is indeed the correct legal term to describe the conditions under which Israelis and Palestinians lead starkly unequal and segregated lives. Even Tamir Pardo, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency, conceded the point: “There is an apartheid state here,” he said in September. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

Moreover, many also now understand that apartheid exists not only in the occupied territories, but inside Israel’s 1948 borders, a case laid out in a major 2022 report from a coalition of Palestinian human rights groups convened by Al-Haq. It’s hard to argue otherwise when Israel’s current far-right government came to power under a coalition agreement that states: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel … the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

When impunity reigns, everything shifts and moves, including the colonial frontier. Nothing stays static.

Then there is Gaza. The numbers of Palestinians killed in Operation Cast Lead felt unfathomable at the time. We soon learned that it was not a one-off. Instead, it ushered in a murderous new policy that Israeli military officials casually referred to as “mowing the grass”: every couple of years brought a fresh bombing campaign, killing hundreds of Palestinians or, in the case of 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, more than 2,000, including 526 children.

Those numbers shocked again, and sparked a new wave of protests. It still wasn’t enough to strip Israel of its impunity, which continued to be protected by the US’s reliable UN veto, plus the steady flow of arms. More corrosive than the lack of international sanctions have been the rewards: in recent years, alongside all of this lawlessness, Washington has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and then moved its embassy there. It also brokered the so-called Abraham accords, which ushered in lucrative normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

It was Donald Trump who began showering Israel with these latest, long-sought-after gifts, but the process carried on seamlessly under Joe Biden. So, on the eve of 7 October, Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of signing what had been giddily hailed as the “deal of the century”.

Where were Palestinian rights and aspirations in all these deals? Absolutely nowhere. Because the other thing that had shifted during these years of impunity was any pretext that Israel intended to return to the negotiating table. The clear goal was crushing the Palestinian movement for self-determination through force, alongside physical and political isolation and fragmentation.

We know how the next chapters of this story go. Hamas’s horrific 7 October attack. Israel’s furious determination to exploit those crimes to do what some of the government’s senior leaders had long wanted to do anyway: depopulate Gaza of Palestinians, which they currently appear to be attempting through the combination of direct killing; mass home demolition (“domicide”); the spread of starvation, thirst and infectious disease; and eventually mass expulsion.

Make no mistake: this is what it means to allow a state to go rogue, to let impunity reign unchecked for decades, using the real collective traumas suffered by the Jewish people as the bottomless excuse and cover story. Impunity like that will swallow not only one country but every country with which it is allied. It will swallow the entire international architecture of humanitarian law forged in the flames of the Nazi holocaust. If we let it.
A decade of legal attacks on BDS

Which raises something else that has not stayed stable over the past two decades: Israel’s escalating obsession with crushing BDS, no matter the cost to hard-won political rights. Back in 2009, there were many arguments being made by BDS’s critics about why it was a bad idea. Some worried that cultural and academic boycotts would shut down much-needed engagement with progressive Israelis, and feared it would veer into censorship. Others maintained that punitive measures would create a backlash and move Israel further to the right.

So it is striking, looking back now, that those early debates have pretty much disappeared from the public sphere, and not because one side won the argument. They disappeared because the entire idea of having a debate was displaced by one all-consuming strategy: using legal and institutional intimidation to put BDS tactics out of reach and shut the movement down.

To date in the United States, a total of 293 anti-BDS bills have been introduced across the country, and they have been enacted in 38 states, according to Palestine Legal, which has closely tracked this surge. It explains that some legislation targets university funding, some requires that anyone receiving a contract with a state or working for a state sign a contract pledging they will not boycott Israel, and “some call on the state to compile public blacklists of entities that boycott for Palestinian rights or support BDS”. In Germany, meanwhile, support for any form of BDS is enough to get awards revoked, funding pulled, and shows and lectures cancelled (something I have experienced first-hand).

This strategy is, unsurprisingly, most aggressive inside Israel itself. In 2011, the country enacted the Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott, effectively nipping the nascent Boycott from Within movement in the bud. The Adalah legal center, an organization working for Arab minority rights in Israel, explains that the law “prohibits the public promotion of academic, economic or cultural boycott by Israeli citizens and organizations against Israeli institutions or illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It enables the filing of civil lawsuits against anyone who calls for boycott.” Like the state-level laws in the US, “it also prohibits a person who calls for boycott from participating in any public tender”. In 2017, Israel began openly barring pro-BDS activists from entering Israel; 20 international groups were placed on the so-called BDS blacklist, including the anti-war stalwart Jewish Voice for Peace.

Meanwhile, across the US, lobbyists for oil and gas companies and gun manufacturers are taking a page from the anti-BDS legal offensive and pushing copycat legislation to restrict divestment campaigns that take aim at their clients. “It points to why it’s so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine exception to speech,” Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, told the magazine Jewish Currents. “Because not only is it harmful to the Palestinian rights movement – it eventually comes to harm other social movements.” Once again, nothing stays static, impunity expands, and when the rights to boycott and divest are stripped away for Palestinian solidarity, the right to use these same tools to push for climate action, gun control and LGBTQ+ rights are stripped away as well.

In a way, this is an advantage, because it presents an opportunity to deepen alliances across movements. Every major progressive organization and union has a stake in protecting the right to boycott and divest as core tenets of free expression and critical tools of social transformation. The small team at Palestine Legal has been leading the pushback in the US in extraordinary ways – filing court cases that challenge anti-BDS laws as unconstitutional and supporting the cases of others. They deserve far more backup.
Is it finally the BDS moment?

There is another reason to take heart: the reason Israel goes after BDS with such ferocity is the very same reason that so many activists have continued to believe in it despite these multipronged attacks. Because it can work.

We saw it when global companies started pulling out of South Africa in the 1980s. It wasn’t because they were suddenly struck by anti-racist moral epiphanies. Rather, as the movement became international, and boycott-and-divestment campaigns started to affect car sales and bank customers outside the country, these companies calculated that it would cost them more to stay in South Africa than to leave. Western governments began belatedly imposing sanctions for similar reasons.

That hurt the South African business sector, parts of which put pressure on the apartheid government to make concessions to the Black liberation movements that had been rebelling against apartheid for decades through uprisings, mass strikes and armed resistance. The costs of maintaining the cruel and violent status quo were growing higher, including for South Africa’s elite.

Finally, by the end of the 80s, the pincer of pressure from the outside and inside grew so intense that President FW de Klerk was forced to release Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years, and then to hold one-person-one-vote elections, which carried Mandela to the presidency.

The Palestinian organizations that have kept the flame of BDS alive through some very dark years still place their hope in the South African model of outside pressure. Indeed, as Israel perfects the architecture and engineering of ghettoization and expulsion, it may be the only hope.

That’s because Israel is markedly more insulated from internal pressure from Palestinians than white South Africans were under apartheid, who depended on Black labor for everything from domestic work to diamond mining. When Black South Africans withdrew their labor, or engaged in other kinds of economic disruption, it could not be ignored.

Israel has learned from South Africa’s vulnerability: since the 90s, its reliance on Palestinian labor has been steadily decreasing, largely thanks to so-called guest workers and to the influx of roughly a million Jews from the former Soviet Union. This helped make it possible for Israel to move from the oppression model of occupation to today’s ghettoization model, which attempts to disappear Palestinians behind hulking walls with hi-tech sensors and Israel’s much vaunted Iron Dome air defense.

But this model – let’s call it the fortressed bubble – carries vulnerabilities of its own, and not only to Hamas attacks. The more systemic vulnerability comes from Israel’s extreme dependence on trade with Europe and North America, for everything from its tourism sector to its AI-powered surveillance-tech sector. The brand Israel has fashioned for itself is that of a scrappy, hip, western outpost in the desert, a little bubble of San Francisco or Berlin that just happens to find itself in the Arab world.

That makes it uniquely susceptible to the tactics of BDS, including cultural and academic boycotts. Because when pop stars wanting to avoid controversy cancel their Tel Aviv stops, and prestigious US universities cut their official partnerships with Israeli universities after witnessing the detonation of multiple Palestinian schools and universities, and when beautiful people no longer choose Eilat for their holidays because their Instagram followers won’t be impressed, it undermines Israel’s entire economic model, and its sense of itself.

That will introduce pressure where Israel’s leaders clearly feel little today. If global tech and engineering firms stop selling products and services to the Israeli military, that ups the pressure still further, perhaps enough to shift the political dynamics. Israelis badly want to be part of the world community, and if they find themselves suddenly isolated, many more voters could start demanding some of the very actions that Israel’s current leaders dismiss out of hand – like negotiating with Palestinians for a lasting peace rooted in justice and equality as defined under international law, rather than trying to secure its fortressed bubble with white phosphorus and ethnic cleansing.

The hitch, of course, is that for BDS’s nonviolent tactics to work, the wins cannot be sporadic or marginal. They need to be sustained and mainstream – at least as mainstream as the South African campaign, which saw major corporations like General Motors and Barclays Bank pull their investments, while massive artists like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr joined a quintessentially 80s supergroup to belt out “ain’t gonna play Sun City” (a reference to South Africa’s iconic luxury resort).

The BDS movement targeting Israel’s injustice has certainly grown over the past 15 years; Barghouti estimates that the “labor and farmers unions, as well as racial, social, gender and climate justice movements” that support it “collectively represent tens of millions worldwide”. But the movement has yet to reach a South Africa-level tipping point.

That has come at a cost. You don’t need to be a historian of liberation struggles to know that when morally guided tactics are ignored, sidelined, smeared and banned, then other tactics – unbound by those ethical concerns – become far more appealing to people desperate for any hope of change.

We will never know how the present could have been different if more individuals, organizations and governments had heeded the BDS call made by Palestinian civil society when it came in 2005. When I reached out to Barghouti a few days ago, he was not looking back at two decades of impunity, but on 75 years. Israel, he said, “would not have been able to perpetrate its ongoing televised genocide in Gaza without the complicity of states, corporations and institutions with its system of oppression”. Complicity, he stressed, is something we all have the power to reject.

One thing is certain: the current atrocities in Gaza dramatically strengthen the case for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Nonviolent tactics that many wrote off as extreme or feared would get them labelled antisemitic look very different through the dim light of two decades of carnage, with new rubble piled upon old, new grief and trauma etched in the psyches of new generations, and new depths of depravity reached in both word and deed.

This past Sunday, for his final show on MSNBC, Mehdi Hasan interviewed the Gaza-based Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who risks his own life, day after day, to bring images of Israel’s mass killing to the world. His message to US viewers was stark: “Don’t call yourself a free person if you can’t make changes, if you can’t stop a genocide that is still ongoing.”

In a moment such as ours, we are what we do. So many people have been doing more than ever before: blocking arms shipments, occupying seats of government demanding a ceasefire, joining mass protests, telling the truth, however difficult. The combination of these actions may well have contributed to the most significant development in the history of BDS: South Africa’s application to the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague accusing Israel of committing genocide and calling for provisional measures to stop its attack on Gaza.

A recent analysis by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that if the ICJ rules in South Africa’s favor, even if the US vetoes military intervention at the United Nations, “an injunction could result in Israel and Israeli companies being ostracized and subject to sanctions imposed by individual countries or blocs”.

Grassroots boycotts, meanwhile, are already beginning to bite. In December, Puma – one of BDS’s top targets – let it be known that it will terminate its controversial sponsorship of Israel’s national football team. Before that, there was an exodus of artists from a major comics festival in Italy, after it emerged that the Israeli embassy was among the sponsors. And this month, the McDonald’s chief executive, Chris Kempczinski, wrote that what he called “misinformation” was having “a meaningful business impact” on some of its sales in “several markets in the Middle East and some outside the region”. This was a reference to a wave of outrage sparked by news that McDonald’s Israel had donated thousands of meals to Israeli soldiers. Kempczinski has sought to separate the global brand from “local owner operators”, but few people in the BDS movement are persuaded by the distinction.

It will also be critical, as momentum for BDS continues to pick up steam, to be acutely aware that we are in the midst of an alarming and real surge of hate crimes, many of them directed at Palestinians and Muslims, but also at Jewish businesses and institutions simply because they are Jewish. That is antisemitism, not political activism.

BDS is a serious, nonviolent movement with an established governing model. While giving local organizers autonomy to determine which campaigns will work in their areas, the BDS national committee (BNC) sets the movement’s guiding principles and carefully selects a small group of high-impact corporate targets, chosen “due to their proven complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights”.

The BNC is also very clear that it is not calling for individual Israelis to be boycotted because they are Israeli, stating that it “rejects, on principle, boycotts of individuals based on their opinion or identity (such as citizenship, race, gender or religion)”. The targets, in other words, are institutions complicit in systems of oppression, not people.

No movement is perfect. Every movement will make missteps. The most pressing question now, however, has little to do with perfection. It is simply this: what has the best chance of changing a morally intolerable status quo, while stopping further bloodshed? The indomitable Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy has no illusions about what it will take. He recently told Owen Jones: “The key is in the international community – I mean, Israel will not change by itself … The formula is very simple: as long as Israelis don’t pay and are not punished for the occupation and not taken accountable for it and don’t feel it on a daily basis, nothing will change.”
It’s late

In July 2009, a few months after my original BDS article was published, I traveled to Gaza and the West Bank. In Ramallah, I gave a lecture on my decision to support BDS. It included an apology for failing to add my voice sooner, which I confessed had come from a place of fear – fear that the tactic was too extreme when directed at a state forged in Jewish trauma; fear that I would be accused of betraying my people. Fears that I still have.

“Better late than never,” a kind audience member said to me after the talk.

It was late then; it’s later still now. But it’s not too late. Not too late for all of us to create our own foreign policy from below, one that intervenes in the culture and economy in intelligent and strategic ways – ways that offer tangible hope that Israel’s decades of unchecked impunity will finally come to an end.

As the BDS national committee asked last week: “If not now, when? The South African anti-apartheid movement organized for decades to gain broad international support leading up to the fall of apartheid; and apartheid did fall. Freedom is inevitable. The time is now to take action to join the movement for freedom, justice and equality in Palestine.”

Enough. It’s time for a boycott.


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Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept. In 2018 she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021 she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice (tenured) and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice.

UK Conservative MP says party pushing for law to ban BDS 'within a year or two'

'Within a year or two, we should have an absolute ban on BDS,' Conservative MP Robert Jenrick 

The New Arab Staff
17 December, 2021

MP Robert Jenrick said his party will ban BDS in the coming months [Getty]

A Conservative MP and former housing minister said Tuesday that his party is pushing for legislation to outlaw the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the UK.

During an online conference event entitled “Why Do So Many People Hate Jews”, MP Robert Jenrick said: “In the following months we will be working to outlaw BDS”.

“I do think BDS is being beaten back here. There is no political party in the UK that would support BDS today”, he said.

“What we want to do is pass a piece of legislation here and I’m pretty confident it will be in the next legislative programme in the Spring of next year.”

MP Robert Jenrick's remarks this week about UK gov't plans to legislate against BDS made a few headlines - but this is the full clip. It's...bad.

"Within a year or two, we should...have an absolute ban on BDS here, which would be a great step forwards".https://t.co/99Q4uhBTyl pic.twitter.com/1y1Nezxhn0 — Ben White (@benabyad) December 16, 2021

“Obviously I want it to be as broad as possible so there’s next to no avenue for BDS to continue here. Within a year or two, we should have an absolute ban on BDS.”

..This measure must and will be resisted by all who care about the upholding of international law, democratic freedoms including the right to invest ethically and the fundamental principle of standing always with the oppressed and not the oppressor — Ben Jamal (@BenJamalpsc) December 17, 2021

Palestinian campaigners and rights groups have slammed Jenrick’s remarks as an anti-democratic suppression of free speech.

Meanwhile, Israel advocacy group Zionist Federation welcomed the move to ban the anti-apartheid campaign, which they claim is anti-Semitic.

A movement which increasingly demonises #Jews and which marginalises #Jewish students on campuses should have no place in mainstream society.

We look forward to the day when legislation will outlaw the @BDSmovement https://t.co/2glUmzNvb4 — Zionist Federation (@ZionistFed) December 15, 2021

The UK Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, pledged to ban local councils from boycotting products from countries including Israel in the run-up to the December 2019 general elections.

Free speech, Israel-Palestine and the battle to define anti-Semitism
Analysis
Ziad Al-Qattan

Labour leader Keir Starmer has said his party will not support BDS, calling the movement divisive and damaging to UK-Israel relations. However, party members passed a motion at the annual Brighton conference in September that labelled Israel an apartheid state and called for sanctions against the country.

Britain wants to ban boycotts of Israel. Does that mean they’re working?

The Tories want to stop public bodies engaging in ‘BDS’ campaigns – but that’s unlikely to stop grassroots organisers


Nandini Naira Archer

OPEN DEMOCRACY
21 February 2024

Pro-Palestine activists with banners calling for a boycott of Israeli dates in London 17 February 2024
Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images


When neighbours who had met at pro-Palestine marches learnt that a charity in their east London borough was raising cash for the Israeli military, they organised quickly.

Their goal was to pressure the local Chabad Lubavitch Centre to withdraw its fundraiser for a reserve unit in northern Israel. Horrific details about Israel’s siege of Gaza had by then been emerging for months, with reports of tens of thousands of deaths and scenes of devastation in civilian areas.

“We’re young, old, men, women, Muslim, non-Muslim,” one told us. “We protested outside their offices and wrote to the Charity Commission and our MP en masse. We also climbed ladders to wave our flags in protest… We were disgusted that the genocide had made its way to our doorstep.”

The neighbours’ group was hastily convened in December under the name of the Redbridge Palestine Solidarity Network; today, a spokesperson says the network has more than 350 members. Redbridge is a large, multicultural borough near Greater London’s boundary with Essex that has both Muslim and Jewish populations.

The charity, in the Gants Hill area of Redbridge, never responded to the campaign, and the donation link remains live on its website – though the wording has subtly changed from “donation of equipment needed by soldiers of Israel” to “donation in honour of our soldiers and the safe return of the hostages”. (The Chabad Lubavitch Centre did not respond to our requests for comment.) What’s more, Redbridge Council has spent more than £2,000 removing Palestinian flags from main roads after receiving a letter from the lobby group UK Lawyers for Israel.

But the group still considers its actions a success. Members typically replace the flags within 24 hours in a sort of cat-and-mouse game, and continue to picket the charity, part of a larger network across north-east London that supports local Jewish communities. Sooner or later, the Redbridge Palestine Solidarity Network hopes, the Chabad Lubavitch Centre will reconsider its backing for the Israeli military.

“The support for Palestine in our area is clear,” said the group member, who asked not to be named. “We won’t stand by while councils, companies and charities are complicit in genocide and politicians are failing to speak up or represent us as they should.”

Israel was accused of perpetrating genocide in Gaza last month at the International Court of Justice by South Africa, which Israel denies. The court stopped short of calling for a ceasefire, but ordered Israel to “prevent” acts that could amount to genocide. A ruling on whether Israel has actually been committing genocide could take far longer.

Redbridge Palestine Solidarity Network outside their local town hall

The flags, and the picketing of the charity’s offices, represent just one of many small acts of resistance taking place across the UK and the world under the ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) umbrella. BDS targets specific public bodies and private companies accused of aiding what it calls ‘Israeli apartheid’.

Since it began in 2005, the BDS campaign has attracted high-profile supporters including archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, US politicians like Ilhan Omar, and authors from Arundhati Roy in India to Benjamin Zephaniah in the UK.

But the movement has also attracted significant pushback from Israel’s supporters, particularly in the UK and US. The ramifications of an ‘anti-boycott’ bill currently making its way through Britain’s House of Lords are likely to ripple beyond the UK’s shores, showing how far Israel’s allies are prepared to go in clamping down on the practice.

“Israel can only maintain military occupation and apartheid because of the complicity of governments and corporations in Britain and around the world,” said Lewis Backon, campaigns officer at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign that co-organises the weekly pro-Palestine demonstrations that have been taking place across the UK since October.

“BDS gives us a strategy to turn our rage into meaningful action. It is a way in which people in Britain and elsewhere can retract our tacit approval of Israel.”

The campaign calls for boycotts of a small number of companies where it believes it can have a maximum impact – and it calls on a larger list of companies to divest from the state of Israel. Since October, leaders of the movement from Palestinian civil society have also endorsed what they call “organic boycott targets” which BDS itself did not initiate – McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Burger King.

“The strategy of BDS has always been about institutional divestment over consumer boycotts,” said Shabbir Lakha, a campaigner with the anti-war group Stop the War. Personal consumer boycotts in the UK are welcome, he added, but “it’s the wider organised movement around the world that’s important – essentially creating a situation where Israel is a pariah state, as are companies that directly profit from apartheid and occupation”.

Anti-boycott bill

The “draconian” new anti-boycott bill – being considered by the UK’s House of Lords this week – is evidence that the threat of BDS is working, according to Lakha.

First introduced to the British Parliament in the summer by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill was originally promised in the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto in a pledge to “ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries”.

Israel and Palestine are the only states currently explicitly named in the legislation, whose stated aim is to stop public bodies from “pursuing their own foreign policy agenda”.

Opponents argue that, in reality, the bill itself will stop public bodies – including NHS trusts, councils, and even the government itself – achieving their environmental, ethical and international human rights obligations, by forcing them to invest in companies and states whose actions are damaging.

Amnesty International has previously said the bill “effectively grants Israel impunity at a time of flagrant breaches of international law in Gaza and the West Bank”. “Public procurement represents around 14% of the UK economy,” said Kristyan Benedict, the charity’s crisis response manager, “which provides an enormous opportunity to drive the transition to sustainable production and consumption.

“If, however, businesses believe that public bodies are unlikely to exclude them from contracts on human rights grounds, then this creates a form of moral hazard where companies that respect human rights face being undercut by those that don’t.”

The wording of the bill is “deliberately vague”, which will make it difficult to implement, in the opinion of Daan de Grefte – a legal officer at the European Centre for Legal Support, which gives legal help to Palestinian rights activists across Europe.

But the vague wording could also give rise to a wider “chilling effect”, leading people to believe it bans free expression on Palestine altogether. “It’s quite evident that the main intent of this bill is to silence politicians and others from speaking up about Palestinian rights,” said de Grefte.

Locals put Palestine flags up around Redbridge, east London |
Redbridge Palestine Solidarity Network


A wave of similar moves to ban BDS have taken place in states and university campuses across the US. And in Germany, 2019 legislation condemned any sympathy with BDS in official institutions, calling it antisemitic. A new initiative there similarly attempts to ban boycotts of publicly funded institutions such as arts bodies and academic groups.

According to Amnesty’s Benedict, “smear campaigns” by Israel and its allies are behind this proliferation of “anti-BDS” laws. “Such laws violate freedom of expression, help shield the Israeli authorities from accountability for violations of international law, and harm the fight against genuine antisemitism,” she added.

But not all western countries have reacted with hostility. Across the Irish Sea, Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald has announced that her party is working with councils across Northern Ireland to “ban the awarding of contracts to businesses that profit from human rights abuses in Palestine and across the world”.
Victories

It is tough to measure the effect of BDS on company ledgers or Israel’s economy: the movement is largely decentralised, with activities happening locally and nationally run by different groups and individuals.

But companies are cutting ties with Israel – most recently the German sportswear brand Puma, a BDS target since 2018, which announced in December that it would not renew its contract with the Israel Football Association (IFA).

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Puma has rejected claims that the BDS campaign was behind its decision. But the BDS movement has claimed it as a victory, saying: “Leaked internal messages revealed that Puma was under tremendous pressure to drop the contract… The years of relentless, global BDS pressure on Puma and the damage to its image should be a lesson to all companies supporting Israeli apartheid, that complicity has consequences.”

By contrast, McDonald’s and Starbucks have openly admitted that anti-Israel boycotts hurt their sales in the last quarter of 2023. Both claim they have been misrepresented, with McDonald’s distancing itself on a corporate level from the actions of its franchisees seen on social media offering free meals to the IDF. The fast food giant is now seeking $1.3m in damages from the BDS movement alleging defamation.

A current target for the movement in the UK is Barclays Bank. Stella Swain, youth and student campaigner at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said Barclays held over £1bn of shares in firms whose “weapons, components, and military technology” were being used by Israel in its attacks on Palestinians, and had provided those firms with more than £3bn in loans.

“You and I aren’t in the market of buying weapons,” she said, “so what we aim to do is target places like Barclays that have shares in these kinds of companies, because that’s what makes them complicit.”

She claims 1,500 people have agreed to close their accounts, and that another larger group of people who currently bank elsewhere have vowed to keep steering clear of Barclays. Swain points out that the bank was also a major target of the South African anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. (Backers of BDS often draw this comparison; Labour peer Peter Hain told the House of Lords on Tuesday that an anti-BDS bill would have prevented UK councils from boycotting apartheid South Africa at the time.)

“There isn’t any one target that would win this – it has to be more of a gradual approach,” said de Grefte. However, he points to online tourism operators like Trip Advisor, Expedia and Booking.com that continue to profit from Israeli settlers in the occupied territories who rent out their accommodation. “Getting them to change their position on this would be a huge blow to Israel’s ability to say this is business as usual,” he said.

Back in Gants Hill, the campaigners take over a branch of McDonald’s every Thursday to “peacefully chant, sit in and educate customers and staff on why McDonalds is complicit in genocide”.

And as Ramadan approaches, they stand outside the town hall and tell passers-by about which brands of dates – a Palestinian staple – are grown in Israeli settlements, in the hope that people will choose to boycott these, too.

“We basically try every angle,” they say. “We will be relentless. We won’t stop until our voices are heard.”