Tufts students are expanding their BDS campaign amid increased backlash from pro-Israel clubs and their university.
BDS news from Ohio State and Princeton, as well as ongoing fallout from the Middle East Studies Association’s endorsement of boycott.
In an impressive appearance before a Pittsburgh pro-Israel group, Summer Lee, a progressive running for Congress, refused to back down on Palestinian rights. She supported conditioning aid to Israel over home demolitions and child detention. She did not rule out the idea that Israel is an apartheid state. She attacked the claim that Israel had a right to defend itself by storming the al-Aqsa mosque last year. And while she did not endorse the BDS campaign, she likened it to the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. as a vital effort to change government’s conduct.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has signed legislation to expand the state’s anti-BDS law, and adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism.
80% of Middle East Studies Association scholars voted to endorse the Palestinian call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions of Israel
European Mathematical Society members welcome the decision to freeze cooperation with Russian state institutions in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, and call on the organization to apply the same universal principles to Israel.
The Western double standard when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is painful, enraging, and humiliating for people in the Global South, including for Palestinians. In addition to the hypocrisy, the speed with which all these Western-dominated entities boycotted, expelled or otherwise sanctioned Russia and ordinary Russians, only days after its invasion of Ukraine, sends a clearly racist message to Palestinians, Yemenis, Iraqis, Afghanis and many others, that our lives and rights as people of color do not count. Ironically, these acts and the statements that justify them also effectively demolish almost all the anti-BDS excuses propagated by Israel and its anti-Palestinian apologists in the West against us over 17 years to thwart our calls for accountability and justice.
Activists for Palestine are considering the knock-on effects of the western support for Ukrainian resistance. Does the Zionist lobby think that they can carry on with their anti-BDS bashing as usual, once the Ukraine crisis is no longer in the news? Or are we witnessing a qualitative shift? The number of social media posts talking about the bravery of Ukrainian women, usually in fatigues and holding a gun, are too numerous to count. While pro-Palestinian organizations continue to have their social media posts censored for milder fare.
It was supposed to be the “Iron Dome” to stop social media attacks on Israel, but the apartheid reports just kept coming and coming! Act.IL, the pro-Israel app at least partially funded by the country’s government, has now been deactivated after 5 years.
The Illinois state investment board voted to divest from Unilever because its subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s has decided to stop selling in occupied Palestinian territories. “We find the IIPB’s punitive actions against companies exercising their free speech rights to engage in boycott to be patently unjust,” write a group of Illinois rabbis and cantors.