This video is created by Australians for Palestine and Women for Palestine
as an educational tool to help people gain a better understanding of the clear
principles underpinning the Palestinian BDS call and the global Palestinian
BDS movement.
OMAR BARGHOUTI, founding member of the Palestinian Campaign
for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) explains BDS
and answers the arguments against it
WATCH VIDEO HERE
Australians for Palestine BDS guidelines
Australians for Palestine fully endorses Palestinian Civil Society’s call for
Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) global movement and has decided
to concentrate its efforts on developing material and providing information
about the BDS call and how it can be implemented.Read more..
Editor’s note: Heartbreakingly frank, this analysis of the Palestinian struggle and its long tortuous journey from the early days of rugged resistance to today’s slick brigade of negotiators, is something every Palestinian and activist should read. The failure of the Palestinians to obtain the justice and the freedom to which they are entitled is so incredibly tragic, and yet, within that ongoing tragedy, the seeds of hope still find ways of escaping from under the layers of hopelessness. There are the enormously brave spirits in the refugee camps and in Palestine itself who still dare to ignite a flicker of revolutionary zeal in their people, but at enormous cost to themselves and their families. If not death, they can expect imprisonment, with all that it entails – torture, violence, isolation, abandonment – and for their families, the razing and theft of their lands, the destruction of their homes, and hundreds of humiliating laws and acts to make their lives as unbearable as possible. The unrecognisable Palestinian parties of the revolutionary years are no better in suffocating their peoples’ cries today. Don’t mobilise! Don’t protest! Don’t unite! Don’t do anything that might jeopardise the cosy arrangements that the leadership has with Israel and the US to keep the status quo. As if twenty years of failed talks aren’t enough to underscore Israel’s true intentions that its minions never tire of propagating – an exclusively Jewish state in all of Palestine. And yet, the Palestinians remain un-cowed by their never-ending ordeal – one generation after another just as determined as the last to throw off the utter misery forced upon them in the world’s cruellest experiment in human containment. In such circumstances, one can always expect a revolutionary spirit to emerge with the potential to “ignite a mobilisation large enough to create a truly national initiative”. What is rarely mentioned, says Karma Nabulsi, “ is the dangerous and seemingly interminable slog that is required to build up to any revolution’s launch”. Now, after 60 plus years of Israel vainly trying to make the Palestinians non-existent, there may yet be a revolution waiting to happen, especially with the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns so successfully raising the ante around the world.
Nowadays, when Palestinian activists in their twenties and thirties meet up with veterans of the Palestinian struggle, they show an unexpected thoughtfulness towards the older, revolutionary generation, to which I belong. This is nothing like the courtesy extended as a matter of course to older people in our part of the world: it is more intimate and more poignant. What brings us together is always the need to discuss the options before us, and to see if a plan can be made. Everyone argues, laughs, shouts and tells black jokes. But whenever a proper discussion begins, the suddenly lowered voices of our frustrated young people, many of them at the heart of the fierce protests on university campuses and in rights campaigns elsewhere, have the same tone I used to hear in the voices of our young ambulance workers in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s: an elegiac gentleness towards the hopelessly wounded, towards those who were already beyond repair.
The way Palestinians see things, the fragmentation of the body politic – externally engineered, and increasingly internally driven – has now been achieved. This summer, even the liberal Israeli press began to notice that the key people in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority’s capital in the West Bank, no longer discuss strategies of liberation but rather the huge business deals that prey on the public imagination. Every institution or overarching structure that once united Palestinians has now crumbled and been swept away. The gulf between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah, between Palestinians inside Palestine and the millions of refugees outside it, between city and village, town and refugee camp, now seems unbridgeable. The elites are tiny and the numbers of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised increase every day. There is, at this moment, no single body able to claim legitimately to represent all Palestinians; no body able to set out a collective policy or national programme of liberation. There is no plan. Read More…
The country that has long been known to abuse its powers and privileges in the United Nations is now leading a campaign to reform the same organization.
While UN reforms are welcomed, if not demanded, by many of its member states, there is little reason to believe the recent US crusade is actually genuine. Rather, it seems a clear attempt to stifle any semblance of democracy in the world’s leading international institution.
Most American politicians actually despise the UN. While the Security Council is directed or tamed by the US veto (often to shield the US and its close ally Israel from any criticism), other UN bodies are not as easily intimidated.
When the UN education and science agency, UNESCO, accepted Palestine’s bid for full membership last October, following a democratic vote by its members, the US could do little do stall the process. Still, it immediately cut funding to the agency (about 20 percent of its total budget).
The move was devoid of any humanitarian considerations. The UNESCO provides vital services to underprivileged communities all over the world, including the United States. Read More…
One state or two? Boycott of Israeli goods or goods from the settlements? Is the lobby the genesis of American wrongdoing in Palestine or is it imperialism? The questions — regarding vision, strategy, and analysis — produce sharp cleavages on the Left. Indeed, generally ones much deeper than they need to be. And they remain stubbornly unsettled.
They also congeal in the person of Norman Finkelstein, who has taken some unpopular positions — his insistent call for a two-state solution, his references to “cultish” aspects of BDS — as well as more popular ones, like blaming the occupation solely on the Israel lobby. For that reason he has become a lightning rod, attracting furious bolts of criticism and support. The core issues, however, remain obscured amidst a charged atmosphere of extravagant denunciations (catcalls of Zionism and worse) from one side and fierce defenses from the other.
From one perspective, it’s an odd contretemps. Finkelstein has spent decades fighting for Palestinian dignity and a place for Palestinians to live free of the occupation’s suffocating violence and capricious indignities. He is the maverick scholar who exposed the American intellectual community as a gaggle of hacks by dissecting Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, showing it to be a hoax intended to deny the Palestinians peoplehood by painting them as peripatetics who had fabricated a “Palestinian” identity to ride the wave of Israel’s successful nation-building project. And his forensic dismantling of Israeli scholarly mythologies in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict remains one of the very best primers on the prejudices that surround the conflict.
For all that time his fight has been for a two-state settlement: something that seemed reasonable in 1988 and in the early 1990s. But what seemed possible twenty years ago — with the Israeli electorate temporarily shaken by the savage repression of the 1st intifada and Israeli capital needing to recover from the aftermath of the destabilizing military-industrial accumulation patterns of the 1970s and 1980s, break through the sectoral envelope of domestic accumulation, and globalize – seems less possible now, with militarized accumulation again on the rise in the Middle East and elsewhere. In some ways, the argument for two states has become a relic when so much of the discourse (less so the organizing) of the radical pro-Palestinian Left in the West and the Palestinian Left in the Occupied Territories is oriented towards one single state. Read More…
Regardless of who may rule Israel, little change ever occurs in the country’s foreign policy. Winning parties remain obsessed with demographics and retaining absolute military dominance. They also remain unfailingly focused on their quest to initiate racist laws against non-Jewish residents of the state, and continue to hone the art of speaking of peace, while actually maintaining a permanent state of war.
Every few years the media become captivated by Israeli democracy. Commentators speak of right, left, center, and anything in between. Despite Israeli elections still being a year and a half away, media pundits are already discussing possible outcomes of the vote against the peace process, economic reforms, social equality, and so on.
In a recent article, Israeli columnist Uri Avnery decried the fact that the main opposition to the right-wing parties — “the Likud, the Lieberman party and various ultra-nationalist, pro-settlement and religious factions” — is no other than the center-left Kadima. The party, led by the “incompetent” Tzipi Livni, is allegedly in “shambles.” Moreover, left parties, such as Labor and Meretz, are not expected to pose a real threat to the right party conglomerate, despite their temporary rise in the polls. Read More…
Every single event of the past year points to the moral bankruptcy of Israel’s rule, the urgency of ending an intolerable status quo, and the need for a new vision that will serve the needs of all the people and offer the hope of freedom and justice.
This is, in general terms, the common thread that links the headline struggles and events of the past year: from Tunisia to Moscow, from New York to Tel Aviv, from Athens to Bahrain, from Cairo to Damascus, we’ve witnessed the mobilisation of millions of people who have had their fill of corruption, abuse of power, outrageous and violent injustice and constant assaults on their dignity and human rights.
Palestinians too want a normal life, a secure home, healthy, educated kids, freedom of movement and travel, the right to practise their culture and religion, and an equal voice in how their country is run. And they want all their exiled kin brought back home. Read More…
I grumble as I wait in the line of cars at the checkpoint. At least, there are only a few cars in front of me and the soldiers are moving quickly. As I approach the checkpoint, I roll down my window and flash my passport.
In Hebrew, I am told to go straight and up the hill- not the usual left to exit the checkpoint. It is amazing what can all be communicated with a single point of a finger and a grunt. It seems that the mere presence of an M16 can help in understanding foreign languages.
As I drive to the designated area, there are soldiers pointing myself and 5 other cars (all Palestinian) towards selected parking spots. Every spot has an apparatus next to it, which looks like a giant IV that you would find in a hospital. I am told to get out of my vehicle with all my windows shut, except the driver window, which should be 5 cm open. Read More…
by Harriet Sherwood - The Guardian - 22 January 2012
The room is barely wider than the thin, dirty mattress that covers the floor. Behind a low concrete wall is a squat toilet, the stench from which has no escape in the windowless room. The rough concrete walls deter idle leaning; the constant overhead light inhibits sleep. The delivery of food through a low slit in the door is the only way of marking time, dividing day from night.
This is Cell 36, deep within Al Jalame prison in northern Israel. It is one of a handful of cells where Palestinian children are locked in solitary confinement for days or even weeks. One 16-year-old claimed that he had been kept in Cell 36 for 65 days.
The only escape is to the interrogation room where children are shackled, by hands and feet, to a chair while being questioned, sometimes for hours.
Most are accused of throwing stones at soldiers or settlers; some, of flinging molotov cocktails; a few, of more serious offences such as links to militant organisations or using weapons. They are also pumped for information about the activities and sympathies of their classmates, relatives and neighbours.
At the beginning, nearly all deny the accusations. Most say they are threatened; some report physical violence. Verbal abuse – “You’re a dog, a son of a whore” – is common. Many are exhausted from sleep deprivation. Day after day they are fettered to the chair, then returned to solitary confinement. In the end, many sign confessions that they later say were coerced. Read More…
SYDNEY, Australia – The smiling young man waiting his turn near the delicatessen counter at a supermarket in the affluent Double Bay neighborhood, where many Jews live, struck up a conversation with me in sabra-accented Hebrew. He had come here eight years ago and will soon be going home to Israel. Life in Sydney is wonderful. The weather is mild and it is easy to make a living. He knows that young people like him in Israel find it hard to get a foothold. “So maybe you can tell me why the hell I decided to go back,” was his surprising question.
I responded that Israelis have trouble relating to the troubles of others, including those of the rich. Read More…
A report sent to the European Union on Monday by its member countries’ top diplomats in Jerusalem and Ramallah proposed state-level boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel’s illegal colonial infrastructure in the occupied West Bank. These recommendations, unprecedented among Western nations, herald a breakthrough for the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Like most efforts opposing only the West Bank settlements, they appear somewhat myopic about the state policies of ethnic cleansing and apartheid that stand squarely behind settlers’ walls and guns, while also denying refugees their homes and Palestinian citizens of Israel equality under its laws. But high-level backing for even modest steps can afford many new opportunities. Read More…
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