Half a brigade was released from duty after complaining of poor training and lack of weapons before deployment to Gaza.
18 Jan 2024 – About half the soldiers of an Israeli reserve battalion refused to fight in the Gaza Strip and were released from duty by their commander, Al-Arabi Al-Jadeedreported yesterday.
The Qatari outlet cited Israel’s Kan Reshet Bet radio as reporting that reserve soldiers were called up to form a new brigade in the Israeli army to carry out protection tasks in the areas surrounding Gaza and the occupied West Bank. However, the soldiers received permission to leave the battalion after the army tried to send them to fight and carry out combat missions within Gaza for which they were not qualified or adequately equipped.
The soldiers were called up in late December, but the new brigade was poorly organized, did not have a deputy brigade commander, and was short on weapons and officers.
During the training period, soldiers complained of serious gaps in equipment, professionalism, and a lack of human resources.
The soldiers were then further angered to learn their mission had changed, and they would be sent to Gaza for combat missions.
The radio quoted one soldier as saying: “We received the conscription order, and we responded to that. They told us that our specialty would be to protect the towns, and after about a week of training that took place in a horrific manner, without ammunition, and without officers, we were suddenly told that there was an order that the Israeli army needed us to enter the Gaza Strip to clear homes.”
The soldier added, “We were shocked. We are all combat soldiers. I personally was in the Nahal Brigade, and the rest of the soldiers are from former infantry brigades, but we had not carried out reserve missions for years. We were given an M16 weapon, which fell apart in our hands, and there was no ammunition for training. We collected bullets off the ground so that we have something we can fire.”
The radio station quoted another soldier as saying, “There are people who trained without military uniforms. There are soldiers who were not given shirts or slippers at first. The means that were available were not suitable for training. The brigade, which was supposed to include four battalions, barely reached one and a half battalions. It is not understandable how they wanted to introduce such a completely unqualified force into the Gaza Strip.”
The report comes amid the announcement that the 36th division, which comprises armored, engineering, and infantry companies, withdrew from the Gaza Strip after 80 days of fighting.
The Israeli government says this is part of a planned transition away from the “intensive manoeuvring stage” of its Gaza military campaign to a more targeted phase to last until the end of this year.
At the same time, some speculate that Israel has been forced to withdraw some of its forces due to heavy losses inflicted by fighters from Hamas’ military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
Israel is also facing economic difficulties, with the government having to pay salaries for hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers called away from their civilian jobs.
Israel also has large numbers of soldiers on the northern border to support operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel’s army chief said Wednesday the likelihood of a full-scale war with the Lebanese resistance group has become “much higher.”
“I don’t know when the war in the north is, I can tell you that the likelihood of it happening in the coming months is much higher than it was in the past,” Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi said in a statement during a visit to northern Israel.
24 Jan 2024 – Since 7 Oct, Israel’s police have systematically banned, restricted, and attacked protests against the army’s assault on Gaza, instilling a sense of fear among Jewish and Palestinian citizens alike.
On the evening of Jan. 16, several dozen activists gathered in front of the Kirya in Tel Aviv, home to Israel’s Defense Ministry and army headquarters. It was one of the first Jewish-Israeli demonstrations explicitly condemning the military’s assault on the Gaza Strip since the war began, and the police acted swiftly to suppress it: dozens of officers were deployed in advance, and they refused to allow the protest to take place in its intended location. They confiscated signs reading “Stop the massacre” on the grounds that these offended public sentiment. One activist was arrested, and several others were assaulted by police.
This sequence of events is far from exceptional. Since October 7, Israel’s police have been implementing a consistent policy of preventing or limiting any protest against the war — in contrast to protests in solidarity with the hostages and their families, which have been permitted in certain areas. This policy is still in effect despite Israel’s Supreme Court issuing an interim injunction earlier this month prohibiting National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir from interfering with the policing of demonstrations; in large part, police appear nonetheless to be enforcing the minister’s desired crackdown on freedom of expression during the war.
Anti-war activists across the country — Palestinian citizens as well as Jews — who were interviewed for this article all mentioned one word: “fear.” Even veteran political activists say they have never been so fearful of protesting. They are afraid of being arrested, which for Palestinian citizens could spell months in prison. More than ever, they said, it is dangerous to show solidarity with the people of Gaza, and they feel that politicians’ belligerent rhetoric is directly impacting police behavior.
“From the early days of the war, it was clear that this was the policy,” Maysana Mourani, an attorney with the Haifa-based human rights and legal center Adalah, told +972 and Local Call. “The police have taken on new powers to immediately repress protests, even when a protest permit isn’t required, because of their supposed ‘lack of manpower.’”
Adalah has petitioned the Supreme Court several times since October 7 to challenge such police bans on the right to protest. Despite the Court’s intervention earlier this month, however, it has repeatedly failed to intervene on numerous other occasions, meaning the police have had broad discretion to decide which protests to permit. “It depends on the identity of the demonstrators and the slogans,” Mourani said.
Our leading humanitarian and civic institutions, including major medical institutions, refuse to denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This exposes their hypocrisy and complicity.
31 Jan 2024 – There is no effective health care system left in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.” Clinics, along with ambulances – 79 in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank – have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.
Israeli soldiers routinely enter hospitals to carry out forced evacuations – on Wednesday troops entered al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis and demanded doctors and displaced Palestinians leave – as well as round up detainees, including the wounded, sick and medical staff. On Tuesday, disguised as hospital workers and civilians, Israeli soldiers entered Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank and assassinated three Palestinians as they slept.
The cuts to funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — collective punishment for the alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 attack of 12 of its 13,000 UNRWA workers — will accelerate the horror, turning the attacks, starvation, lack of health care and spread of infectious diseases in Gaza into a tidal wave of death.
The evidence-free charges, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The reporter, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the numerous lies Israel has employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,” it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.
The allegations, of which details remain scant, are apparently based on confessions by Palestinian detainees — most certainly after being beaten or tortured. These allegations were enough to see 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Australia and Japan cut or delay funding to the vital U.N. agency. UNRWA is all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and famine. A handful of countries, including Ireland, Norway and Turkey, maintain their funding.
Eight of the UNRWA employees accused of participating in the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, where 1,139 people were killed and 240 abducted, were fired. Two have been suspended. UNRWA has promised an investigation. They account for 0.04 percent of UNRWA’s staff.
Israel is seeking to destroy not only Gaza’s health care system and infrastructure, but UNRWA which provides food and aid to 2 million Palestinians. The object is to make Gaza uninhabitable and ethnically cleanse the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands are already starving. Over 70 percent of the housing has been destroyed. More than 26,700 people have been killed and over 65,600 have been injured. Thousands are missing. Some 90 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population has been displaced, with many living in the open. Palestinians have been reduced to eating grass and drinking contaminated water.
Noga Arbell, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, during a discussion in the Israeli parliament on Jan. 4, stated: “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, saying UNWRA was “totally infiltrated by Hamas,” reiterated the call to shut UNRWA down.
If UNWRA is abolished it puts into question the Palestinian’s status as refugees, imperiling the “Right of Return,” the demand, long rejected by Israel, that Palestinians be allowed to go back to their homes in what is now Israel.
“It’s time for the international community and the UN itself to understand that UNRWA’s mission must be terminated,” Netanyahu told visiting UN delegates, according to a statement from his office. “It seeks to preserve the issue of Palestinian refugees. We must replace UNRWA with other UN agencies and other aid agencies, if we want to solve the Gaza problem as we plan to do.”
More than 152 of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza — including school principals, teachers, health workers, a gynecologist, engineers, support staff and a psychologist — have been killed since the Israeli attacks began. Over 141 UNRWA facilities have been bombed into rubble. The death toll is the largest loss of staff during a conflict in the U.N.’s history.
The destruction of healthcare facilities and targeting of doctors, nurses, medics and staff is especially repugnant. It means the most vulnerable, the sick, infants, the wounded and elderly, and those who care for them, are often condemned to death.
Palestinian doctors are pleading with doctors and medical organizations from around the world to decry the assault on the healthcare system and mobilize their institutions to protest.
“The world must condemn the acts against medical professionals happening in Gaza,” writes the director of Al-Shifa hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, who was arrested along with other medical personnel by the Israelis in November 2023 while evacuating with a World Health Organization (WHO) convoy, and who remains in custody. “This Correspondence is a call for every human being, all medical communities, and all health-care professionals around the world to call for these anti-hospital activities inside and around the hospitals to stop, which is a civilian obligation according to international law, the UN, and WHO.”
But these institutions — with a few notable exceptions such as The American Public Health Association that has called for a ceasefire — have either remained silent or, as with Dr. Matthew K. Wynia, the director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, attempted to justify Israeli war crimes. These doctors — who somehow find it acceptable that in Gaza a child is killed every 10 minutes on average — are accomplices to genocide and stand in violation of the Geneva Convention. They embrace death as a solution, not life.
Robert Jay Lifton in his book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” writes that “genocidal projects require the active participation of educated professionals — physicians, scientists, engineers, military leaders, lawyers, clergy, university professors and other teachers — who combine to create not only the technology of genocide but much of its ideological rationale, moral climate, and organizational process.”
A group of 100 Israeli doctors in November 2023 defended the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, claiming they were used as Hamas command centers, a charge Israel has been unable to verify.
The deans of U.S. medical schools and leading medical organizations, especially the American Medical Association (AMA), have joined the ranks of universities, law schools, churches and the media to turn their backs on the Palestinians. The AMA shut down a debate on a ceasefire resolution among its members and has called for “medical neutrality,” although it abandoned “medical neutrality” to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
There is a cost to denouncing this genocide, a cost they do not intend to pay. They fear being attacked. They fear destroying their careers. They fear losing funding. They fear a loss of status. They fear persecution. They fear social isolation. This fear makes them complicit.
And what of those who do speak out? They are branded as antisemites and supporters of terrorism. George Washington University clinical psychology professor Lara Sheehi was pushed out of her job. The former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, was denied a fellowship at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy because of his alleged “anti-Israel bias.” San Francisco professor Rabab Abdulhadi was sued for supporting Palestinian rights. Shahd Abusalama was suspended from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K after a vicious smear campaign, although the institution later settled her discrimination claim against it. Professor Jasbir Puar at Rutgers University is an ongoing target for the Israel lobby and endures constant harassment. Medical students and faculty in Canada face suspension or expulsion if they publicly criticize Israel.
The danger is not only that the Israeli crimes are denounced. The danger, more importantly, is that the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of the institutions and their leaders are exposed.
This brings me to Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), whose call to halt bombing hospitals and to examine the impact of Zionism as a racist ideology unleashed a torrent of vitriolic attacks against her, attacks tacitly endorsed by the medical school where she works.
She has been slandered as an antisemite and targeted by the Canary Mission, a Zionist organization that seeks to defame and destroy the careers of students and faculty that criticize Israel and defend Palestinian rights. She has had speaking engagements rescinded and received death threats and messages such as: “kill yourself you retarded grifting n*gger,” “Jew baiting c*nt,” and “White people are the greatest people on Earth. You know this.”
You can see her statement on the campaign against her here.
There is a striking contrast between the treatment of Dr. Marya and the physicians who cheer on the genocide. UCSF physician Matt Cooperberg, who is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Urology, ‘liked’ social media posts such as “REMOVE Palestinians FORM [sic] MAP” and a quote by former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: “We are able to forgive the the [sic] arabs for killing our children. We are unable to forgive the arabs for forcing us to kill their children.”
“Cooperberg’s endowed chair comes from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, UCSF’s largest donor, which to date has gifted some $1.15 billion dollars to the health campus,” Dr. Marya writes. “In 2018, due to a mistake on a tax form, the Helen Diller Family Foundation was exposed as a funder of the Canary Mission. The Foundation attempted to erase its connection after this exposure.”
She continues:
As a faculty member at UCSF, disgraced dermatologist Howard Maibach exposed and injected over 2,600 imprisoned Black and brown people with chemicals in experiments that echoed the experiments put on trial at the Doctors’ Trial just a few years before he went to medical school in Pennsylvania. There he studied under Albert Kligman, who taught him how to exploit Black people for medical experimentation, documented extensively in the horror nonfiction book, Acres of Skin. Maibach also advanced notions of racial differences in skin, furthering racist ideas from the pseudoscience of eugenics. Race is a social construct that enshrines supremacism. It is not a biological reality.
Most of Maibach’s experiments were conducted without informed consent, and while UCSF issued an apology, Maibach is still employed by the University of California. His family supports the Friends of the IDF, and he is represented by Alan Dershowitz, who also argued for the bombing of hospitals in Gaza. Dershowitz attempted to prevent me from speaking at the AMA’s first National Health Equity Grand Rounds, where scholar Harriet Washington, who studies medical experimentation on Black people, highlighted Maibach’s racist practices. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, UCSF faculty, trainees and students of color brought Maibach’s story to light, and many have expressed their horror that they have to continue to sit in the same room as this man during Dermatology Grand Rounds. But the problem is not just one man. It is a system that allows someone with these values and actions to continue to be present in our learning and practicing community.
The dehumanization of Palestinians is lifted from the playbook of all settler colonial projects, including our own. This racism, where people of color are branded as “human animals,” is coded within the DNA of our institutions. It infects those chosen to lead these institutions. It lies at the core of our national identity. It is why the two ruling parties and the institutions that sustain them side with Israel. It feeds the perverted logic of funneling weapons and billions of dollars in support to sustain Israel’s occupation and genocide.
History will not judge us kindly. But it will revere those who, under siege, found the courage to say no.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.
Below is a detailed guide to our targeted consumer boycotts, divestment and pressure campaigns. Help us spread the word to maximize our impact!
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society that is leading the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, salutes activists, organizations and institutions worldwide that have expressed meaningful solidarity with our urgent struggle to stop Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza by escalating boycott and divestment campaigns. The spreading boycotts of complicit Israeli and multinational corporations can be effective if done strategically.
Ending all state, corporate and institutional complicity with Israel’s genocidal regime is more urgent than ever. Our lives and livelihoods literally depend on it.
Targeted Boycotts vs. Non-Targeted Boycotts:
People of conscience around the world are rightfully shattered, enraged, and sometimes feeling powerless about Israel’s #GazaGenocide. Many feel compelled to boycott any and all products and services of companies tied in any way to Israel. The proliferation of extensive “boycott lists” on social media is a result of this. The question is how to make boycotts effective and actually have an impact in holding corporations accountable for their complicity in the suffering of Palestinians?
The BDS movement uses the historically successful method of targeted boycotts inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the US Civil Rights movement, the Indian anti-colonial struggle, among others worldwide.
We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies and products for maximum impact. We need to target companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes and where there is real potential for winning, as was the case with, among others, G4S, Veolia, Orange, Ben & Jerry’s and Pillsbury. Compelling large, complicit companies, through strategic and context-sensitive boycott and divestment campaigns, to end their complicity in Israeli apartheid and war crimes against Palestinians sends a very powerful message to hundreds of other complicit companies that “your time will come, so get out before it’s too late!”
Many of the prohibitively long lists going viral on social media do the exact opposite of this strategic and impactful approach. They include hundreds of companies, many without credible evidence of their connection to Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians. Many do not have clear demands to the companies as to what we expect them to do to end the boycott, making them ineffective.
That being said, all peaceful popular efforts, including boycott and divestment, to hold all genuinely complicit corporations (and institutions) accountable for supporting Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian rights are justified and called for. It is perfectly legitimate, for instance, to boycott companies whose Israeli branch or franchisee has supported Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza, some of which we mention below in the grassroots organic boycott targets section.
Also, a company or product may make perfect sense as a boycott target in one context or city but not another. This context-sensitivity is a key operational principle of our movement. Regardless, we all have limited human capacity, so we’d better use it in the most effective way to achieve meaningful, sustainable results that can truly contribute to Palestinian liberation. We therefore call on our supporters to strengthen our targeted campaigns and boycott the complicit companies named on our website to maximize our collective impact.
As an intersectional movement that connects Palestinian liberation with racial, indigenous, social, gender and climate justice struggles, we also recommend boycotting companies that are involved in oppressing other communities as well. We also recommend adopting a universal human rights investment screen, to prevent investments in all companies complicit in human rights violations.
1. Consumer boycott targets – The BDS movement calls for a complete boycott of these brands carefully selected due to the company’s proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid.
2. Divestment and exclusion targets – The BDS movement works to pressure governments, institutions, investment funds, city councils, etc. to exclude from procurement contracts and investments and to divest from, as the case may be, as many complicit companies as practical, especially arms companies and banks. We rely on the following authoritative sources:
AFSC list of companies that have provided Israel with weapons and other military equipment used in its #GazaGenocide.
UN database of businesses involved in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.
WhoProfits database of Israeli and international corporations profiting from the ongoing Israeli occupation.
Don’t Buy Into Occupation list of businesses involved in the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise in the OPT in which European financial institutions have investments.
3. Pressure targets – The BDS movement actively calls for pressure campaigns against these targets. This includes boycotts when reasonable alternatives exist, as well as lobbying, peaceful disruptions, and social media pressure.
4. Organic boycott targets – The BDS movement did not initiate these grassroots boycott campaigns but supports them due to these brands’ complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.
1. Consumer boycott targets:
Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc)
HP Inc (US) provides services to the offices of genocide leaders, Israeli PM Netanyahu and Financial Minister Smotrich. HPE, which shares the same brand, provides technology for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, a pillar of its apartheid regime.
Chevron (including Caltex and Texaco brands)
US fossil fuel multinational Chevron is the main corporation extracting gas claimed by apartheid Israel in the East Mediterranean. Chevron generates billions in revenues, strengthening Israel’s war chest and apartheid system, exacerbating the climate crisis and Gaza siege, and is complicit in depriving the Palestinian people of their right to sovereignty over their natural resources. Chevron has thousands of retail gas stations around the world under the Chevron, Caltex, and Texaco brand names.
Siemens
Siemens (Germany) is the main contractor for the Euro-Asia Interconnector, an Israel-EU submarine electricity cable that is planned to connect Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory to Europe. Siemens-branded electrical appliances are sold globally.
PUMA
Since 2018, we have called for a boycott of PUMA (Germany) due to its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA), which governs teams in Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. In a major BDS win in December 2023, PUMA leaked news to the media that it will not be renewing its IFA contract when it expires in December 2024. Until then, it is still complicit, so we continue to #BoycottPUMA until it finally ends its complicity in apartheid.
Carrefour
Carrefour (France) is a genocide enabler. Carrefour-Israel has supported Israeli soldiers partaking in the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with gifts of personal packages. In 2022, it entered a partnership with the Israeli company Electra Consumer Products and its subsidiary Yenot Bitan, both of which are involved in grave violations against the Palestinian people.
AXA
Insurance giant AXA (France) invests in Israeli banks financing war crimes and the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources. When Russia invaded Ukraine, AXA took targeted measures against it. Yet, Axa has taken no action against Israel, a 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, despite its ongoing genocidal war on Gaza.
SodaStream
SodaStream is an Israeli company that is actively complicit in Israel’s policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of present-day Israel in the Naqab (Negev) and has a long history of racial discrimination against Palestinian workers.
Ahava
Ahava cosmetics is an Israeli company that has its production site, visitor center, and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory.
RE/MAX
RE/MAX (US) markets and sells property in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, thus enabling Israel’s colonization of the occupied West Bank.
Israeli produce in your supermarkets
Boycott produce from Israel in your supermarket and demand their removal from shelves. Beyond being part of a trade that fuels Israel’s apartheid economy, Israeli fruits, vegetables, and wines misleadingly labeled as “Product of Israel” often include products of illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Israeli companies do not distinguish between the two, and neither should consumers.
2. Divestment & exclusion targets:
Though the BDS movement calls for divesting from and excluding from procurement/investment all the companies in the four authoritative databases listed above, we are focusing on the following targets:
Elbit Systems
Elbit Systems is apartheid Israel’s largest arms company. It “field-tests” its weapons on Palestinians, including in Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza. On top of building killer drones, Elbit makes surveillance technology for Israel’s apartheid wall, checkpoints and Gaza fence, enabling apartheid. The US and EU use Elbit’s technology to militarize their borders, violating refugee and indigenous peoples’ rights.
Intel
Intel has announced that it will invest $25 billion in apartheid Israel as Israel’s #GazaGenocide continues, signaling its commitment to bolstering apartheid. The company’s first development center outside the US was opened in Haifa in 1974. For decades, Intel has invested in apartheid Israel. Its plant at “Qiryat Gat” is built on Palestinian land within the boundaries of the Palestinian village of Iraq al Manshiya, which was ethnically cleansed and razed to the ground and then replaced by the Israeli settlement of Qiryat Gat.
HD Hyundai/Volvo/CAT/JCB
Machinery from HD Hyundai (South Korea), Volvo (Sweden/China), CAT (US), and JCB (UK) has been used by Israel in the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians through the destruction of their homes, farms, and businesses, as well as the construction of illegal settlements on land stolen from them, a war crime under international law.
Barclays
Barclays Bank (UK) holds more than £1 billion in shares of, and provides more than £3bn in loans and underwriting to nine companies whose weapons, components and military technology have been used in Israel’s armed violence against Palestinians.
CAF
Basque transport firm CAF builds and services the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), a tram line that serves Israel’s illegal settlements in Jerusalem. CAF benefits from Israel’s war crimes on stolen Palestinian land.
Chevron and Chevron-owned Noble Energy
US fossil fuel multinational Chevron is the main international corporation extracting gas claimed by apartheid Israel in the East Mediterranean. Chevron and Chevron-owned Noble Energy generate billions in revenues, strengthening Israel’s war chest and apartheid system as well as exacerbating the climate crisis.
HikVision
Amnesty International has documented high-resolution CCTV cameras made by Hikvision (China) installed in residential areas and mounted to Israeli military infrastructure for surveillance of Palestinians. Some of these models, according to Hikvision’s own marketing, can plug into external facial recognition software.
TKH Security
Amnesty International has identified cameras made by TKH Security (Netherlands) used by Israel for surveillance of Palestinians. TKH provides Israeli police with surveillance technology that is used to entrench apartheid.
3. Pressure targets:
The BDS movement calls for pressure against these companies, including boycotts, if reasonable alternatives exist.
Google and Amazon (US)
In May 2021, as the Israeli military bombed homes, clinics, and schools in Gaza and threatened to push Palestinian families from their homes in occupied Jerusalem, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology to the Israeli government and military. By supporting Israeli apartheid with vital technologies, Amazon and Google are directly implicated in its entire system of oppression, including its unfolding genocide in Gaza. Join the #NoTechForApartheid campaign.
Airbnb/Booking/Expedia
Airbnb (US), Booking.com (Netherlands) and Expedia (US) all offer rentals in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land.
Disney
The Disney-owned Marvel Studios (US) is promoting in the next Captain America film a “superhero” that personifies apartheid Israel. Both companies are therefore complicit in “anti-Palestinian racism, Israeli propaganda, and the glorification of settler-colonial violence against Indigenous people,” as Palestinian cultural organizations have stated.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries
Teva is an Israeli pharmaceutical company and the world’s largest generic drug manufacturer. Teva benefits from Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands allowing the company to exploit the captive Palestinian market.
4. Grassroots organic boycott targets:
McDonald’s (US), Burger King (US), Papa John’s (US), Pizza Hut (US), WIX (Israel), etc. are now being targeted in some countries by grassroots organic boycott campaigns, not initiated by the BDS movement. BDS supports these boycott campaigns because these companies, or their branches or franchisees in Israel, have openly supported apartheid Israel and/or provided generous in-kind donations to the Israeli military amid the current genocide. If these grassroots campaigns are not already organically active in your area, we suggest focusing your energies on our strategic campaigns above.
Recently, McDonald’s franchisee in Malaysia has filed a SLAPP lawsuit against solidarity activists, claiming defamation. Instead of holding the Israel franchisee to account for supporting genocide, we are now witnessing corporate bullying against activists. For both these reasons, we are calling to escalate the boycott of McDonald’s until the parent company takes action and ends the complicity of the brand.
Remember, all Israeli banks and virtually all Israeli companies are complicit to some degree in Israel’s system of occupation and apartheid, and hundreds of international corporations and banks are also deeply complicit. We focus our boycotts on a small number of companies and products for maximum impact.
Cutting funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees at this time means furthering the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
31 Jan 2024 – On January 26, the very day the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an interim ruling on South Africa’s case accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people, the Israeli government dropped a bomb. It was not the usual 900kg US-made bunker buster, but a much more lethal one: it accused 12 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) of having ties to Hamas or being involved in its October 7 operation. This immediately resulted in over a dozen countries cutting their financial support for the agency and UNRWA’s chief, Philippe Lazzarini, firing nine of the accused (of other three – one is dead and two are unaccounted for).
Given the meagre aid trickling into Gaza and the looming starvation of its people, particularly in northern Gaza, defunding UNRWA now is worse than collective punishment – it could be a death sentence for many destitute and hungry Palestinians.
UNRWA was established by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1949 to provide relief to all Palestine refugees originally defined as “persons whose place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as the result of the 1948 war”. The definition was broadened to include persons displaced by the “1967 and subsequent hostilities”.
Today, UNRWA has 30,000 staff, mainly Palestinian physicians, nurses, educators, relief workers, drivers, engineers, logisticians, etc who provide humanitarian relief, healthcare, education and other assistance to millions of Palestine refugees throughout the Middle East. In Gaza, UNRWA’s 13,000 staff have supported almost all aspects of Palestinian life, especially after Israel imposed a blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2007 with Egypt’s support.
Critics have pointed out that the UN has delegated to UNRWA important international legal obligations that would otherwise be incumbent on Israel as the occupying power. Under the Geneva Conventions, basic services such as shelter, healthcare and education in occupied territories are the responsibility of the occupying state. Thus, in effect, the UN has subsidised, and possibly prolonged, Israel’s occupation of Palestinians.
From Israel’s perspective, UNRWA is another enemy that has prolonged Palestinian resistance to its occupation. It is a “barrier” to solving the Palestinian refugee question by simply resettling Palestinian refugees in other countries, as it is now openly advocates. For all Israeli governments, implementing UN Security Council resolutions and international law on the inalienable “right of return” of Palestinians forced by Zionist militias and subsequently the Israeli army to leave their homes in 1948 is anathema to Israel’s existence.
The accusations against the 12 UNRWA staff should be seen in this context; it is also important to remember who is making them. Israel is an occupying power facing allegations of genocide deemed plausible by the ICJ. Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked UN-protected facilities including schools and hospitals, killing thousands of civilians, mainly children and women seeking refuge on UNRWA premises, as well as 152 UNRWA staff. Israel also has a long history of unsubstantiated accusations against UNRWA employees and within the context of the current conflict, it has been caught lying repeatedly about alleged crimes by Palestinians (eg, the beheading of 40 babies on October 7).
Bolstered by the UN’s hasty decisions taken without establishing through an investigation a prima facie case, Israel now claims that 10 percent of Gaza-based staff have links to “militant groups”.
Under the UN’s internal rules, due process is compulsory when misconduct is alleged. When serious allegations backed by incontrovertible evidence against UN personnel are put forward, the UN’s secretary-general has the authority to order the summary dismissal of the accused staff. Such extreme cases are rare.
In all other cases, typically, a board of inquiry is established to investigate the most serious cases, or accusations are picked up by the UN’s internal investigatory department that may initiate a formal inquest based on preliminary evidence. In the interim, the staff member facing allegations of misconduct may be suspended.
In the case of the 12 UNRWA employees accused by Israel, summary dismissal is a surprising decision not least as the circumstances of the cases – an all-out war and possibly a genocide – and the credibility of the accusing party should compel a cautionary approach.
Yet the UN leadership was quick to jettison the presumption of innocence of their staff. On January 28, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a statement to advise that of the “12 people implicated, nine were immediately identified and terminated by the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini; one is confirmed dead, and the identity of the two others is being clarified. Any UN employee involved in acts of terror will be held accountable”. In his statement, Guterres further states that “the abhorrent alleged acts of these staff members must have consequences”.
Already, the secretary-general has seemingly adjudicated the case and promised “consequences”. He has shown no such outrage or made calls for accountability for the murder by the Israeli military of his own staff – as if such war crimes are not abhorrent acts that call for consequences.
Firing staff at will based solely, as Guterres admits, on “allegations” is troubling and should be of concern to all staff members and staff unions of the United Nations.
But more alarming and consequential is the swift decision of the United States, Austria, Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania and the United Kingdom to suspend their funding to UNRWA during an all-out war on the people it was established to protect.
Worse, when Israel is in the dock of the ICJ facing plausible allegations of perpetrating a genocide, such decisions may even be deemed a breach by these states of their obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise since some of the same governments choose to overlook the many war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel and continue their military support for its onslaught on Gaza, now in its fourth month.
In the end, even if the 12 accused staff are found guilty of grave crimes, this hardly justifies starving UNRWA of funding when it tries to save from starvation Palestinians in Gaza. Cutting down a septuagenarian olive tree because it might have 12 “bad” olives on it is not only collective punishment – it is furthering a genocide.
Moncef Khane is a former United Nations official who served as political director of the Office of the Joint Special Envoy for Syria (2012-2014), as liaison officer with the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer rouge) (1992-1993) and in the Executive Office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Fortunes of five richest men have shot up by 114 percent since 2020.
Oxfam predicts the world could have its first-ever trillionaire in just a decade while it would take more than two centuries to end poverty.
A billionaire is running or the principal shareholder of 7 out of 10 of the world’s biggest corporations.
148 top corporations made $1.8 trillion in profits, 52 percent up on 3-year average, and dished out huge payouts to rich shareholders while hundreds of millions faced cuts in real-term pay.
Oxfam urges a new era of public action, including public services, corporate regulation, breaking up monopolies and enacting permanent wealth and excess profit taxes.
15 Jan 2024 – The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour— while nearly five billion people have been made poorer, reveals a new Oxfam report on inequality and global corporate power. If current trends continue, the world will have its first trillionaire within a decade but poverty won’t be eradicated for another 229 years.
“Inequality Inc.”, published today as business elites gather in the Swiss resort town of Davos, reveals that seven out of ten of the world’s biggest corporations have a billionaire as CEO or principal shareholder. These corporations are worth $10.2 trillion, equivalent to more than the combined GDPs of all countries in Africa and Latin America.
“We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom. This inequality is no accident; the billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else,” said Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar.
“Runaway corporate and monopoly power is an inequality-generating machine: through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state, and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are funneling endless wealth to their ultra-rich owners. But they’re also funneling power, undermining our democracies and our rights. No corporation or individual should have this much power over our economies and our lives —to be clear, nobody should have a billion dollars”.
The past three years’ supercharged surge in extreme wealth has solidified while global poverty remains mired at pre-pandemic levels. Billionaires are $3.3 trillion richer than in 2020, and their wealth has grown three times faster than the rate of inflation.
Despite representing just 21 percent of the global population, rich countries in the Global North own 69 percent of global wealth and are home to 74 percent of the world’s billionaire wealth.
Share ownership overwhelmingly benefits the richest. The top 1 percent own 43 percent of all global financial assets. They hold 48 percent of financial wealth in the Middle East, 50 percent in Asia and 47 percent in Europe.
Mirroring the fortunes of the super-rich, large firms are set to smash their annual profit records in 2023. 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52 percent jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021. Their windfall profits surged to nearly $700 billion. The report finds that for every $100 of profit made by 96 major corporations between July 2022 and June 2023, $82 was paid out to rich shareholders.
Bernard Arnault is the world’s second richest man who presides over luxury goods empire LVMH, which has been fined by France‘s anti-trust body. He also owns France’s biggest media outlet, Les Échos, as well as Le Parisien.
Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person, holds a “near-monopoly” on cement in Nigeria. His empire’s expansion into oil has raised concerns about a new private monopoly.
Jeff Bezos’s fortune of $167.4 billion increased by $32.7 billion since the beginning of the decade. The US government has sued Amazon, the source of Bezos’ fortune, for wielding its “monopoly power” to hike prices, degrade service for shoppers and stifle competition.
“Monopolies harm innovation and crush workers and smaller businesses. The world hasn’t forgotten how pharma monopolies deprived millions of people of COVID-19 vaccines, creating a racist vaccine apartheid, while minting a new club of billionaires,” said Behar.
People worldwide are working harder and longer hours, often for poverty wages in precarious and unsafe jobs. The wages of nearly 800 million workers have failed to keep up with inflation and they have lost $1.5 trillion over the last two years, equivalent to nearly a month (25 days) of lost wages for each worker.
New Oxfam analysis of World Benchmarking Alliance data on more than 1,600 of the largest corporations worldwide shows that 0.4 percent of them are publicly committed to paying workers a living wage and support a living wage in their value chains. It would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO in the biggest 100 Fortune companies earns in a year.
Oxfam’s report also shows how a “war on taxation” by corporations has seen the effective corporate tax rate fall by roughly a third in recent decades, while corporations have relentlessly privatized the public sector and segregated services like education and water.
“We have the evidence. We know the history. Public power can rein in runaway corporate power and inequality —shaping the market to be fairer and free from billionaire control. Governments must intervene to break up monopolies, empower workers, tax these massive corporate profits and, crucially, invest in a new era of public goods and services,” said Behar.
“Every corporation has a responsibility to act but very few are. Governments must step up. There is action that lawmakers can learn from, from US anti-monopoly government enforcers suing Amazon in a landmark case, to the European Commission wanting Google to break up its online advertising business, and Africa’s historic fight to reshape international tax rules.”
Oxfam is calling on governments to rapidly and radically reduce the gap between the super-rich and the rest of society by:
Revitalizing the state. A dynamic and effective state is the best bulwark against extreme corporate power. Governments should ensure universal provision of healthcare and education, and explore publicly-delivered goods and public options in sectors from energy to transportation.
Reining in corporate power, including by breaking up monopolies and democratizing patent rules. This also means legislating for living wages, capping CEO pay, and new taxes on the super-rich and corporations, including permanent wealth and excess profit taxes. Oxfam estimates that a wealth tax on the world’s millionaires and billionaires could generate $1.8 trillion a year.
Reinventing business. Competitive and profitable businesses don’t have to be shackled by shareholder greed. Democratically-owned businesses better equalize the proceeds of business. If just 10 percent of US businesses were employee-owned, this could double the wealth share of the poorest half of the US population, including doubling the average wealth of Black households.
It will take 229 (almost 230) years to ensure the number of people living under the World Bank poverty line of $6.85 was reduced to zero.
According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook Database, the combined GDP of economies in Africa in 2023 is $2,867 billion, while that of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean is $6,517 billion, for a total of $9.4 trillion.
Oxfam defines windfall profits as those exceeding the 2018-2021 average by more than 20 percent.
Contact information
Annie Thériault in Peru | annie.theriault@oxfam.org |
21 Jan 2024 – In 2011, the Great British Class Survey was conducted, in collaboration with academics from the University of Manchester, the London School of Economics, and the University of York. The British have always been obsessed with class, so it is not surprising that British academics would attempt something of this nature.
The survey polled 161,400 people, and in a fit of obviousness, they concluded,
“We demonstrate the existence of an ‘elite’, whose wealth separates them from an established middle class.”
They also concluded that class distinctions had broadened into a multitude of seven classes. This is an expansion of the Marxist model of class division of capitalists and workers that has dominated academic circles for at least a hundred years.
According to Karl Marx:
Capitalist bourgeoisie — If you control the means of production this is you.
Worker — Oppressed and exploited proletariat with no control of the means of production. Sells his or her labor for profit.
The survey included “unusually detailed questions based on social, cultural and economic capital.”
For the economic capital section, the survey asks how much money you make and how much money you have in the bank, plus the value of your house.
Secondly, to determine your cultural capital, it asks what kind of cultural activities you participate in. This is based on high brow culture—preference for interests such as classical music, historic architecture, museums, art galleries, jazz, theatre and French restaurants. And the other, for emergent culture—appreciation and participation in such activities as video games, social networking, sports, hanging out with friends, working out at the gym, and rap or rock concerts.
Thirdly, social capital was measured using the position generator originated by Nan Lin, an American sociologist, in 2001, which measures the range of social connections. People were asked if they knew anyone in several dozen occupations.
Seven Classes
The study found there are seven distinct classes:
a wealthy elite
a prosperous salaried middle class consisting of professionals and managers
a class of technical experts
a class of new affluent workers
an aging traditional working class
a ‘precariat‘ characterized by very low levels of capital and ongoing precarious economic insecurity
a group of emergent service workers
This is an incomplete list in my humble opinion, because it fails to mention the homeless who are a separate class of non-persons, comparable to the Dalit caste in India. Homeless people have virtually no rights and squeeze out a fragile existence as urban nomads.
The most interesting group #7, the precariat, are the working poor who often fall into homelessness, when things go sideways in the economy or in their personal lives. The word precariat is a neologism of the words precarious and proletariat, coined by economist, Guy Standing, in his book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class.
The survey claims that the Elite class has a “mean household income of £89k (152K CDN), almost double that of the next highest class, and the average house price is £325k (556k CDN), considerably higher than any other class.” However, this elite class is only the upper middle class. The real elites make far more money than a meagre £89k per year. Many of them make that much in a day.
Other sociologists have gone further to sub-divide the wealthy into several categories:
Multimillionaires or Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Individuals (UHNWI) – those with $30 million or greater net worth. There are 211,275 UHNW individuals in the world, with a total combined net worth of US$29.7 trillion.
Billionaires – According to Forbes, there are 2,640 billionaires in the world who are collectively worth about $12 trillion. The number of billionaires has been doubling every 10 years. In 2013, there were 1426 billionaires, worth $5.5 trillion. In 2003, there were 476 billionaires worth just $1.4 trillion.
February 5th is observed as Kashmir solidarity Day all over the world. The Kashmiri Americans and Pakistan American community along with friend of Kashmir held a peaceful protest in front of the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Participants were carrying the placards and banners which read: “Modi Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity in Kashmir” ” India : Guilty of Genocide in Kashmir” ”Kashmiris Reject Indian Occupation: UN Resolutions only Solution” “Kashmir Deserves World Attention” etc.
Dr. Imtiaz Khan, Professor at George Washington University Medical Center said today we are commemorating the sacrifices made by people of Indian held Kashmir in their struggle for independence. The people of this region for decades have been facing unabated atrocities inflicted by occupation forces, but flame of freedom continues to kindle in their hearts. Notwithstanding, the acts of barbarism committed by the occupation forces the yearning for attaining the right of self-determination becomes stronger with every passing day.
Dr. Khan added that Kashmiris cannot forget the brutal killing of human right activists like Jalil Andrabi who was kidnapped by an army major, brutally tortured, murdered and his body thrown on banks of Jehlum. Kashmiris will continue the remember the victims of Kunan pashpora village where 87 women were gang raped by soldiers of Rashtra Rifles. India is living in fool’s paradise if it thinks that by this continued horrific behavior Kashmiri population will be forced to submission and they will abandon their struggle.
“India is encouraged by the criminal silence of the international agencies on their human right abuses in the occupied Kashmir. Non-resolution of Kashmir increases that danger every day and conflagration between the two countries can lead to holocaust that will not only engulf the region but annihilate one third of world population. India has to be cognizant of these realities and realize that world should not and will not for long tolerate its irrational, stubborn and obstinate attitude, Dr. Khan warned.
Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Chairman, World Forum for Peace & Justice said that the case of Kashmir is simple: a large country bullying a small nation into submission in violation of not only their right to sovereignty but international agreements and two dozen UN resolutions giving them the right to determine their own political fate. The purpose of hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in this small country is for no other purpose but blatant oppression. Their presences make Kashmir the largest army concentration anywhere in the world.
Dr. Fai added that for over 77 years, the people of Jammu & Kashmir have been peacefully struggling for their right to self-determination through a fair and impartial plebiscite under the auspices of the U.N. While India has systematically enacted laws, like Domicile Law to integrate Kashmir into India. These laws are designed to change the demography of Kashmir which are in violations of 18 substantives United Nations resolutions adopted by the Security Council on Kashmir. India’s refusal to implement these resolutions calling for such a plebiscite is at the heart of the problem, and she has chosen the path of death and destruction, instead of negotiations and peaceful resolution to the conflict.
“The truth is that the people of Kashmir themselves have always been hostile to the presence of India’s troops on their soil and have resisted to such oppression, and over hundred thousand Kashmiris have died within the past 32 years alone. The U.N. has the ability to change this miscarriage of justice and to put an end to the violence,” Dr. Fai stressed.
Sardar Zarif Khan, Advisor to the President of Azad Kashmir and main organizer of the event said, “Peace has eluded Kashmir for more than 77 years ever since the partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Reason: The denial of self-determination that has been enjoyed by countless other peoples in comparable circumstances, most recently in East Timore, Montenegro, Southern Sudan, etc. The uncertainty over Kashmir will lead not only India and Pakistan to disaster but it will also destroy any possibility of bringing peace and stability to the region.
Sardar Zubair khan of KAWA said that India has reneged on her promise to allow the people of Kashmir to exercise their will. It has also unleashed a reign of terror on the civilian population that has been reported by reputable international BGO’s.
Sardar Shoaib Irshad Khan of KAWA said that human rights violations in Kashmir perpetrated by 900,000 Indian military and paramilitary troops with legal immunity dwarf in scale the violations that provoked international humanitarian action in Kosovo, East Timor, Southern Sudan: tens of thousands indiscriminately slaughtered and countless rapes, abductions, custodial disappearances, arbitrary detentions, arsons, and brutal suppression of peaceful political protest.
Sardar Aftab Roshan Khan said that the presence of Indian occupation forces have made Kashmir the hell for its inhabitants. People are not allowed to have peaceful protests. Those who do come to the streets are lodged under draconian laws and sent thousands of miles away in the jails of India.
Malik Hamid, a well-respected community leader urged the Biden administration to place Kashmir on its front burner, not the back burner, because of the American and international consensus is that Kashmir pinched between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan is the most dangerous place on the planet.
Dr. Maqsood Choudhary, a well-known, interfaith scholar urged the world powers to intervene in Kashmir to end the bloodshed and suffering there. He added that the involvement of world powers will have a direct positive effect on international security by eliminating regional fighting, national tensions, and the risk of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
Raja Liaqat Kayani, the President of Kashmir House said that it is in everyone’s interest to settle the Kashmir conflict peacefully without further delay. We don’t want to see the horrific nightly scenes from Kosovo and Bosnia replaced by an even greater catastrophe in Kashmir.
Mr. Shafiq Shah emphasized that the global community has a long and proud tradition of upholding the causes of human freedom and dignity. Kashmir calls urgently for initiatives in accordance with that tradition.
Zia Ul Hassan, leader of Pakistani American community said that Kashmiris will resist India’s colonial occupation for as long as necessary to enjoy their right to self-determination as prescribed by international law, and a long series of United Nations Security Council resolutions that were agreed upon by both India and Pakistan, negotiated by the United Nations, endorsed by the Security Council and accepted by the International Community.
Gul Sher Sai of Pakistan Farm House warned that India’s illegal military occupation of Kashmir has already sparked two wars between India and Pakistan, and a third could occasion a harrowing exchange of nuclear volleys between the South Asian nations.
Speaking at the rally, Javaid Kousar, a well-known journalist from Washington metropolitan area reminded the audience of the injustice, tyranny and inhumanity of the Indian military as it occupies Kashmir. However, he cautioned that at this moment in our historic struggle for self-determination, the Kashmiri people with poise, confidence and unity are taking their inalienable struggle in a new direction of peaceful agitation.’
Yamin Khan elaborated that we must mention here that even by today’s violent world, the behavior of the Indian occupation regime in Kashmir is singular in as much as it has enjoyed total immunity. Not a word of condemnation has been uttered at the important capitols of the world, not even in Washington, DC.
Maqsood Chughtai said that although the human rights situation in Kashmir is depressing but we must hail the resoluteness of the people of Kashmir in carrying forward their struggle for pursuing their cherished goal of freedom.
Waseem Zahid asked: Doesn’t the world community recognize the double standards? On one hand the world is consumed with human rights situation in Ukraine and genuinely so but when it comes to Kashmir, the world powers close their eye.
Khalid Faheem hoped that the world powers in general and the United States in particular will not continuance any attempt to ignore the wishes of the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir and bypass the expression of those wishes.
Sardar Zeeshan Zarif Khan, youth representative said it beautifully that it is our collective responsibility to intensify our activities for peace and just that should lead to the lasting and durable settlement to the Kashmir dispute.
Other persons who participated in the rally included: Asif Manghat; Mnasar Kashmiri; Ashfaq Shah; Sheraz Hayat; Ilyas khan; Imran Aslam; Adnan Tahir; Farukh Shahand others.
Dr. Fai is also the Secretary General, World Kashmir Awareness Forum. He can be reached at: WhatsApp: 1-202-607-6435. Or. gnfai2003@yahoo.com www.kashmirawareness.org
As the world, and especially Muslims, correctly has been focused on the Zionist genocide in Gaza, we seem to have forgotten President Biden’s criminality in another part of the world. Indeed, just as Israel’s savagery has been wholeheartedly supported by the Biden Administration, the regime change operation in March-April of 2022 in Pakistan was also on Biden’s watch. More and more Pakistanis, especially in the largest and politically dominant province of Punjab, have come to recognize the venality of the military establishment. Though the other provinces of Pakistan had no illusion of the nefarious and violent role of the generals in Pakistani social and political life, people in Punjab had to experience the torturous wrath of the military top brass after the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan – to realize the cold-bloodedness of the military high command.
Khan has been languishing in prison since August of last year on various trumped up and farcical charges. And now, he and another senior member of Khan’s political party, former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, have been sentenced to a ten-year jail sentence because of the ostensible cypher-gate scandal. The ‘cypher,’ a secret diplomatic cable sent to Islamabad by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington in March of 2022, stated quite explicitly the American desire to oust Khan from power. The task was left to Washington’s old Cold War friends in Pakistan’s praetorian guard to fulfill the mission.
After Khan was removed from power by a military establishment-US embassy.in-Islamabad engineered vote-of-no-confidence in parliament, he made it very clear to Pakistanis that this was a regime change conspiracy involving the US on the one hand, and Pakistan’s generals and kleptocratic politicians on the other. At the time, sadly, those who had historically opposed the role of the military in Pakistan’s politics, refused to believe Khan – essentially considering him a conspiratorial nutcase. After more than a year after Khan’s ouster, the American online publication, The Intercept, confirmed that the official diplomatic cable that Khan referred to was in fact real, and that its content laid out in no uncertain terms the American insistence on removing Khan from power. By now, even the most ardent ‘cypher deniers’ have had to acknowledge the veracity of Khan’s claims at the time of the successful regime change operation in the country. The tragedy was that the big media houses in Pakistan acceded to state pressure to erase the name Imran Khan from any public discourse, and that it took a foreign publication’s stellar investigative journalism to expose the treacherous collaboration between Washington and the generals in Pakistan – in particular, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Gen. Bajwa – in subjecting Khan and his political party, PTI, to the most totalitarian forms of repression.
After two decades of the ‘War on Terror’ having created some friction between the American and Pakistani military-intelligence apparatuses, both came to realize that, ultimately, they will always be joined at the hip. The Pakistani military is one of the most vicious relics of colonialism. It transitioned quite smoothly in its neo-colonial relationship with Washington throughout the Cold War. Pakistan’s generals never lose sight of the fact that they make billions from American machinations in West and Southwest Asia. Other than excelling as a satrapy of the American empire, the powerful Pakistani armed forces are good for nothing but extreme levels of repression, torture, disappearances, and murdering its own population.
However, throughout the past two years, Pakistanis have been somewhat bewildered at the extent of the vendetta and ferocious repression targeted at Khan and his political party. It seems to be the case that the military establishment has never felt as insecure as it has after Khan’s ouster and the subsequent massive outpouring of support for him and his party. The well-understood arrangement between any civilian government and the COAS and the military-intelligence establishment was that the former agrees to cede full control of ‘national security’ and foreign policy to the latter. The generals increasingly felt that Khan began to violate this ‘code of conduct’ by positioning himself as the one who would carve out the direction of the country on the world stage. In addition, the generals’ Western patron-masters saw Khan as a thorn in their control of Muslim despots in West Asia, most of whom were on the path of normalization with Israel, turning a blind eye to Hindutva fascism in India, and engineering a pro-Empire- friendly Islam. On the contrary, Khan spoke passionately about justice for Palestinians and Kashmiris, rejected the imperial categories of ‘moderate’ or ‘extremist’ Islam, and denounced the rise of Islamophobia and its dreadful social and political impact throughout the world. His popularity among, and keen desire to bring together, nations such as Malaysia, Turkey, Indonesia, Iran, and Qatar was correctly seen as a counter-hegemonic bloc to the Saudi domination of the Muslim world. And finally, Khan’s praise of China’s ability to lift more than 800 million out of poverty and the lessons it offers for developing countries like Pakistan, as well as remaining neutral in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, convinced the US national security state that this man must be eliminated.
It’s important to note that generals’ detestation of Khan was not because he was some revolutionary. But he did help to politicize significant chunks of the population, young and old, and especially in the military establishment’s base of support – the province of Punjab. Punjabis protesting en masse against the military establishment was something unforgivable for the generals. Punjabis were supposed to love or at least respect their military leaders, not despise them as they did following Khan’s ouster.
Comparisons are often made with the popular leader of Pakistan during the 1970s, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – who certainly had a revolutionary character in his rhetoric. But two key differences are often overlooked. Bhutto came to power on the backs of Bengali blood, the genocidal campaign of West Pakistani generals against the population of East Pakistan – which became Bangladesh after winning its war of liberation. Bhutto’s party, the PPP, would have lost to the Awami League political party in East Pakistan had it not been for the merciless military assault on the future nation of Bangladesh. In a cynically transactional manner, Bhutto repaid the favor by effectively rescuing and rehabilitating a humiliated and defeated Pakistani military. In fact, Bhutto would go on to rely on that same military to target political opponents, especially in the provinces of NWFP (now renamed KPK) and Balochistan. Of course, none of this is to deny that Bhutto was a very popular leader.
But secondly, Bhutto’s own shortcomings and political authoritarianism while in power ultimately led to disillusionment within his support base, resulting in a fairly reticent popular response to his ouster by the military dictator, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq – and, as in the case of Khan, a regime change completely supported by Washington.
One can claim that Khan also came on the backs of the military establishment’s very temporary squabble with the other two major dynastic political parties. But like Bhutto, no one can claim that Khan was not immensely popular. The major difference, of course, is the massive outpouring of support for Khan after his ouster, in rallies across the country sustained for more than a year until the barbaric military crackdown began in May of 2023. In fact, the surprise for many was that despite a rather lackluster performance in his period of governance, still Khan was popular as ever, if not more.
The saga of the cases, charges, and convictions against Khan are seen by virtually all of Pakistan’s 240 million people as a politically motivated clown-show. Specifically, the recent convictions in ‘courts’ for which the term ‘kangaroo court’ would be way too generous, deferential, and respectful, are intended to further demoralize and terrorize the population before ‘elections’ to be held on Feb. 8th. Some think that these elections would give Saddam Hussain’s and Hosni Mubarak’s forms of elections good competition.
While Pakistanis in and outside of the country continue to witness one travesty after the next, to see the totalitarianism of the generals and their favored political mafias reach newer and more ruthless heights, the hope remains that, just like in Gaza, the people’s resistance and international solidarity may be able to mount a serious impediment to Biden’s generals’ torture chambers imposed on the country. And the perennial palace intrigues and squabbles of the political and military elite have a tendency to derail all major plans of coordinated and disciplined perpetual punishment of the population.
Nevertheless, one underreported story during the past two years has been of the many officers and overwhelming majority of soldiers who’ve had nothing but revulsion for the shenanigans of the bloodthirsty high command, causing many of them to be ‘disappeared’ or forced to resign, or just resigning on their own, without pension.
Absent the ability of the people to, at this point, initiate an effective and formidable challenge to Washington’s comprador military and political elite, a progressive officers’ coup may not be a bad idea.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches religion, law, and global politics and is the Director of the Center for Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan.
In 2005, Palestinians called on the world to boycott Israel until it complied with international law. What if we had listened?
Exactly 15 years ago this week, I published an article in the Guardian. It began like this:
Enough. It’s time for a boycott
Naomi Klein
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.
Well, 2023 didn’t exactly go to plan, did it?
Here in the UK, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, had promised us a government of stability and competence – not forgetting professionalism, integrity and accountability – after the rollercoaster ride of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Remember Liz? These days she seems like a long forgotten comedy act. Instead, Sunak took us even further through the looking-glass into the Conservative psychodrama.
Elsewhere, the picture has been no better. In the US, Donald Trump is now many people’s favourite to become president again. In Ukraine, the war has dragged on with no end in sight. The danger of the rest of the world getting battle fatigue and losing interest all too apparent. Then there is the war in the Middle East and not forgetting the climate crisis …
But a new year brings new hope. There are elections in many countries, including the UK and the US. We have to believe in change. That something better is possible. The Guardian will continue to cover events from all over the world and our reporting now feels especially important. But running a news gathering organisation doesn’t come cheap.
With your help, we can make our journalism free to everyone. You won’t ever find any of our news reports or comment pieces tucked away behind a paywall. We couldn’t do this without you. Unlike our politicians, when we say we are in this together we mean it.
Happy new year!
Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer.
