As alarming, anti-democratic measures are aimed at Palestine solidarity activists in the UK and beyond, Husna Rizvi speaks to Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement.
***
‘We are armed only with our rights, and our dignity.’ Speaking
earnestly to a crowd at a recent anti-racist event in King’s College
London,
Omar Barghouti repeats the words he said to Israeli Defence Force soldiers during a raid on his family’s home during the second Intifada.
Omar has been targeted by the Israeli military and
interior ministry
for several years as a result of his human rights activism. As a
student at Columbia University in New York he began organizing within
the South African anti-apartheid movement as well as the General Union
of Palestinian Students and
went on to co-found the
Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement in 2005, after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled Israel’s wall an ‘illegal situation’.
The ICJ ruling stated that the
700km barrier
in the West Bank contravened rights of Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories set out by the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights – namely, ‘liberty of movement’, ‘the right to work, to health,
to education and to an adequate standard of living’. It also concluded
that all nation states were ‘not to render aid or assistance in
maintaining the situation created by such construction’.
The
failure of the international community
to make good on those obligations directly motivated the BDS call, Omar
tells me. ‘We felt this was the time to go global with our message of
resistance, with our message of liberation. And to ask supporters of
Palestinian rights the world over to end the complicity of their
institutions, corporations and governments, which are enabling Israel’s
system of oppression.’
One year after the ICJ ruling, the newly-formed BDS movement issued
three core demands: end the occupation, end Israel’s system of apartheid
(the UN defines this as ‘inhuman acts committed for the purpose of
establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons
over any other racial group’) and respect the rights of Palestinian
refugees who were expelled from their homes in 1948, and now constitute
68 per cent of the Palestinian population – often described as ‘the
right of return’.
This, he tells me, ‘formed a consensus among nearly all Palestinian
society – among civil society, trade unions, women’s unions, farmers,
academics, students, and so on.’
Ending Complicity
On a geopolitical level, things don’t look positive, he acknowledges.
‘Far-right white supremacists, Christian Zionists and all sorts of very
fanatical groups are today in the White House,’ but this hasn’t stopped
inspiring action from being taken on the grassroots level.
‘We’ve managed to win support even in the liberal mainstream. So
today in the United States – where it matters the most – the American
Civil Liberties Union, a massive organization defending constitutional
rights of American citizens, is at the forefront of opposing anti-BDS
legislation, whether in Congress or in state legislatures.’
He also reports a steady shift across progressive movements and
social movements in Europe towards supporting Palestinian rights; in
2018, Leeds University became the first higher education institution to
divest from corporations trading military equipment with Israel.
‘BDS has been successful at continuous growth: winning over social movements, churches,
pension funds, and impacting large complicit
corporations,’ he says. ‘The trade union movement in the
UK,
Norway, increasingly in France, the Netherlands and Belgium have all
called for serious accountability measures along the lines of BDS.’
Support has also stemmed from less traditional allies: ‘When Israel
hosted Eurovision last year, instead of receiving around 50,000
tourists, they got only 5,000. More than a hundred LGBTQ+ groups in
Europe came out in support of the BDS campaign against Eurovision in
apartheid Tel Aviv.’
Despite Trump’s
widely criticized proposal
for a ‘peace’ plan – for which the Palestinian Authority was not
consulted – and what Omar called a ‘cash for rights’ deal on Novara
Media’s radio show, Tysky Sour – he says there’s still some cause for
conditional optimism. ‘Presidential candidates in the Democratic Party –
for the first time in US history – are calling for making aid to Israel
conditional. A presidential candidate in the US has never dared to
question aid to Israel – until now.’
Discrediting Dissent
Image on the right: Omar was awarded
the Gandhi Peace Award in 2017 for his work as the co-founder of
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.
But BDS’s movement work is under attack from both Israeli and Western
security establishments, which seek to discredit and delegitimize its
activism. ‘Israel has been fighting the BDS movement since 2014 as “a
strategic threat”. That’s their term, not ours,’ explains Omar. ‘[It]
has formed a whole government ministry to fight the BDS movement. It has
outsourced its McCarthyism, its antidemocratic repression to those
Western governments – especially the US, France and the UK.
‘The UK government has been fighting the BDS movement for Palestinian
rights head on: interfering with trade unions and city councils; trying
to suppress events on campuses; government ministers making calls
against the BDS movement.
‘This is unparalleled. Even the US government – until Trump – had not
fought the BDS movement with the same passion as the UK government,
believe it or not. It is undermining British democracy, not just free
speech on Palestine,’ he adds.
All of what Omar describes, is consistent with the UK government’s
broader ‘counter-terror’ strategy Prevent, a widely condemned
surveillance operation largely affecting Muslim citizens and civil
society groups. Under the programme, one
schoolboy
was labelled ‘extremist’ and referred to the government’s
deradicalization program for wearing a ‘Free Palestine’ badge. An
information pamphlet produced by Palestine solidarity group
Friends of Al-Aqsa was also used by the police as evidence of ‘terrorist-like’ views.
Heightened surveillance, targeted harassment and shutting down
activist events isn’t unfamiliar to Omar, who himself has been
threatened with arrest, assault, and was the subject of a campaign
calling for his expulsion while studying for a PhD in Ethics at Tel Aviv
University.
The King’s College lecture theatre in London where Omar spoke in
January was itself openly monitored by management. Several contract
security staff hovered throughout the venue, and attendees’ names were
checked multiple times.
Heavy surveillance tactics are likely to put off impassioned young
activists pursuing ethical divestment policies. I ask, how much energy
goes into protecting the right to campaign compared to the more
positive, coalition-building work?
‘There’s always a golden balance,’ he replies. ‘Yes, we’ve got to
defend our space and the space is shrinking for human rights defenders
active on Palestine. But never fall into the trap of defence at the
expense of building and growing the movement.’
A New McCarthyism
But a recent development in the UK troubles Omar. ‘We’re working with
a broad tent of civil society organizations, human rights organizations
that are all extremely alarmed at Boris Johnson’s government’s attempt
to pass legislation that basically demonizes, or even criminalizes,
support for BDS.’
The legislation Omar refers to is Boris Johnson’s plan to pass an
anti-boycott bill, banning public institutions from engaging in trades
boycotts, a move that harks back to Margaret Thatcher’s ban on councils
refusing to trade with apartheid South Africa. Johnson, this time, plans
to implement harsh financial penalties on already cash-strapped
councils that pursue ethical divestment policies.
Omar is also concerned about developments in Europe, where the French
and German parliaments have chosen to adopt the controversial
IHRA definition of antisemitism, which he describes as a bogus framing designed to ‘shield Israel from criticism and accountability’.
‘Everyone is alarmed,’ he says. ‘Because if they succeed in
suppressing freedom of expression on Palestine then no one is safe. The
LGBTQ+ movement is not safe. The black justice movement is not safe,
immigrant justice and climate justice…. Who knows who will be next.’
More worryingly for the BDS movement, these plans come at a time when
France,
Germany and the
US –
where prominent CNN anchor Marc Lamont Hill was fired in 2018 for
promoting Palestinian rights – are simultaneously cracking down on BDS.
Asked – blue skies style – about what a Bernie Sanders presidency
could mean for the US-Israel relationship, Omar admits he’s hopeful.
‘The US has never had a progressive president like Sanders. If Bernie
Sanders is elected, it will change the world, not just a US relations
vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinians.’
‘Of course, we’re not naive to think that a progressive president can
with a magic wand alter decades of policies by an imperialist,
neoliberal, very aggressive establishment that serves the one per cent.
But I think the absolute majority of Palestinians – just like the
majority of progressives in the world – are rooting for Bernie Sanders
to be the first Jewish president of the US – the first social democratic
president,’ he adds.
Regarding the claim that BDS alienates Jewish communities, or even
promotes antisemitism, Omar tells me that the movement targets
complicity, not identity. ‘It is not anti-Jewish to engage in a
non-violent movement’ to support Palestinians, he says.
In fact, he believes that it’s the rise of Trump and his far-right
Zionist and white supremacist base that has led Israel to drop its ‘very
thin[ly] worn warn mask of democracy’ has actually increased support
for BDS among a young Jewish demographic.
‘We’re seeing Jewish millennials in the United States and elsewhere
become antagonistic towards Israel’s current regime. We’re noticing that
across US campuses for example, where many Jewish activists are joining
the BDS movement.’
He adds: ‘Israeli injustice against Palestinians is one of the
longest living actually, and one of the least accountable. Israel really
gets away with murder – literally murdering Palestinian youth
protesting in Gaza
for the right of return and for ending the siege on Gaza – on
television. And it’s getting away with it. So there’s a sense of
urgency. We cannot wait. And I think more and more people across the
world can see that.’
*
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Husna Rizvi is a New Internationalist staff writer covering global affairs and has previously written for Prospect Magazine.
Featured image is from Palestine Solidarity Campaign
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