On the 20th anniversary of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, Mondoweiss speaks with Omar Barghouti about the past, present, and future of the movement.
Shalev Hulio, the Israeli spyware-maker who is at the center of an international controversy, says the BDS campaign pushed the investigation of his company, and Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling in occupied territory. Hulio is right that a new era of accountability has begun for Israel.
Hamid Dabashi’s new book on Edward Said shows how the Palestinian intellectual became “integral to the very alphabet of our moral and political imagination.”
Israel could seek to end BDS leader Omar Barghouti’s residency by declaring him disloyal, but doing so presents a giant PR problem. Better– he’s a security threat. And lawmaker Keti Shitrit says he threatens Israel’s “universal security.”
According to the BDS movement, the Israeli Shin Bet declined to present any charges or evidence that they against Mahmoud Nawajaa with him or his lawyer — a common practice used by Israeli officials who routinely cite unnamed “security reasons” to justify the detention of Palestinian political activists.
Israel’s Minister of the Interior says he is taking action to force Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, out of the country.
Eric Alterman dismisses BDS in the NYT, saying it is a youthful fad that only obscures the underlying issues. Alice Rothchild responds that it is important because of those issues — Israeli racism, Jewish privilege, and Palestinian dispossession.
The New York Times would never run an article asking a very legitimate question, “Is Zionism racist?” But it ran a full-page to answer whether BDS is anti-Semitic. The article was surprisingly fair to BDS, including the explanation that Israel supporters feel threatened by BDS because the call for “full equality” for Palestinian citizens would undermine the basis of the “Jewish state.”
Omar Barghouti’s mother Wafieh, 75, is undergoing surgery for cancer in Amman, Jordan, later this month, but Israel is preventing Barghouti, a leader of the international boycott movement, from traveling to be with her. He says the travel ban is a punishment for his activism. “Mother, forgive me,” he writes.
Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and political activist specializing in international human rights law, tells Mondoweiss it is difficult to know how Israel’s controversial new law aimed at barring boycott activists from entering the country will actually be enforced, but he says the law is in direct violation of international law. “Countries have wide discretion to allow are deny entry to foreigners,” Sfard says. “However, International Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the basis of a person’s opinion and provides freedom of conscious and thought. The law is definitely a violation of both.”