The Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee has campaigned for decades to bring conversations about justice in Palestine onto Harvard’s campus. The Harvard Crimson’s editorial endorsing BDS was a watershed moment that showed that our approach is working. The recent backlash against The Crimson and PSC has been immense, but it all speaks to the impact of our work.
An interview with the activists behind the Mapping Project, a project created to “investigate local links between entities responsible for the colonization of Palestine, for colonialism and dispossession here where we live, and for the economy of imperialism and war.”
Even as Australia elected a Labor Prime Minister who opposes BDS and rejects the apartheid label for Israel, the country’s Israel lobby is moving further to the right, agitating against PM Anthony Albanese and backing the conservative coalition in politics. No matter what concessions Labor gives the lobby it will always oppose it. This is because the lobby is accommodating new right-wing voices in Australia and ultra-nationalists in Israel.
On May 31 General Mills announced that it divested its stake in its Israeli subsidiary. For the last two years the company has been targeted by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) over the fact that some of its Pillsbury products are manufactured in an illegal Israeli settlement.
GOP councilwoman Inna Vernikov is pulling $50,000 earmarked for CUNY Law School in response to the faculty endorsing a BDS resolution.
A coalition called “No Rugers to Israel” can document over 200 Palestinians killed or injured by Rugers — now including Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — though it believes the true number to be far higher. “For years we’ve been calling attention to sales of Ruger guns and ammunition to the Israeli military which is a serial human rights violator,” says Stanley Heller.
Harvard University faculty and officers issue an open letter in support of the Harvard Crimson’s endorsement of BDS, and student efforts to oppose Israeli apartheid. They write to counter a faculty letter deploring the Crimson endorsement in which “the only violence mentioned is that of antisemitism, the only threat identified is to the Jewish national project, and the only vulnerability named is that faced by ‘Jewish and Zionist students.’”
New Pew survey shows growing support for Palestinians among Democrats. More Democrats hold favorable views of Palestinians than of Israelis by 64 to 60 percent. Compare to Republicans: 78 to 37 favorability ratings for Israelis over Palestinians. And while most people don’t know what BDS is, 7 percent of Democrats support BDS while 2 percent oppose it, and the ratio is 8 percent to 4 percent among those under 30.
In attacking the Harvard Crimson for endorsing BDS, Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz deny a core reality: “If there is ever to be even a minimally just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the most important prerequisite, is the Israeli recognition that their historical narrative of the conflict is largely mythological and that they have incurred an overwhelming moral obligation… to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinian people.”
The idea of sanctioning Israel may appear a pipe dream, but two recent precedents show it is very possible.