[News] Palestine - BDS: Discussing Difficult Issues in a Fast-Growing Movement

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/bds-discussing-difficult-issues-in-a-fast-growing-movement/ 



  BDS: Discussing Difficult Issues in a Fast-Growing Movement - Al-Shabaka

by Omar Barghouti on June 14, 2016

Israel’s attacks on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement 
and other human rights defenders living under occupation, such as Al Haq 
staff, have dominated the headlines in recent weeks, including the 
direct threats made by leading Israeli officials against BDS activists 
and in particular against the movement’s co-founder Omar Barghouti.

Beyond the headlines, the work goes on, as does continuous debate and 
discussion to further the movement amongst Palestinians at home and 
abroad as well as among global solidarity activists. There is much to 
discuss and some of the issues are difficult ones, including questions 
of framing. Al-Shabaka Executive Director Nadia Hijab 
<https://al-shabaka.org/en/author/nadiah/> discussed some of these 
issues in a wide-ranging conversation with Omar Barghouti.

Omar began by clarifying that all the views he expresses here are his 
and his alone; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the wider 
BDS movement or its Palestinian leadership, the BDS National Committee 
(BNC).

/*Omar, thanks for making the time at this especially difficult juncture 
(to put it mildly) for the movement and for you personally. The BDS 
movement’s goals – self-determination, freedom from occupation, equality 
for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return – 
encompass Palestinian rights under international law. But we know that 
the BDS movement will not on its own achieve Palestinian rights. What 
other movements are needed and what mix of strategies is necessary? */

Boycotts have historically been one of the main popular resistance 
strategies available to Palestinians of all walks of life, and today, in 
the realm of international solidarity, BDS is the most important and 
strategic form of support to our struggle for self-determination. The 
BDS movement has never claimed that it is the only strategy to achieve 
full Palestinian rights under international law. Nor is it possible to 
expect it to deliver Palestinian rights by itself. Among other 
strategies are, for example, local popular resistance against the wall 
and colonies as well as legal strategies to hold Israel and its leaders 
accountable for the crimes they have committed against the Palestinian 
people.

In fact, one of the most significant strategies available to us that is 
hardly being pursued is diplomatic and political work with parliaments 
and governments across the world to isolate Israel’s regime of 
occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid and have sanctions imposed 
on it similar to those applied to apartheid South Africa. Taking this 
path is primarily blocked by a complicit Palestinian officialdom that 
lacks a democratic mandate, principles and vision.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/"The BDS movement has never claimed that it is the only strategy to 
achieve full Palestinian rights...Nor is it possible to expect it to 
deliver Palestinian rights by itself."/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A very important component of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s regime 
are Palestinians in exile, who represent half the Palestinian people. We 
are not just talking about refugee communities, who are clearly the most 
important to consider, but also Palestinians, like those active in 
Adalah New York, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, social 
movements in the UK or Chile, and their equivalent across the world of 
Palestinian communities in exile, who play a leading role in promoting 
Palestinian rights, including through BDS-related actions.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are also often forgotten when people talk 
about Palestinian resistance, despite their crucial role not only in 
steadfastness in the face of Israel’s regime of Zionist 
settler-colonialism but also their active popular, academic, cultural, 
legal and political resistance to the regime and its institutionalized 
and legalized racist structures and policies.

Some Palestinians in exile, however, claim they are unwilling to support 
BDS because “Palestinians don’t ‘do’ solidarity with our own people.”

But the traditional Palestinian political discourse of the 1960s, 1970s, 
and 1980s is largely gone. In South Africa, the national liberation 
movement remained active until the very last minute, but we have, 
unfortunately, lost much of what made up the Palestinian national 
liberation movement largely due to the Oslo agreements. The Palestinian 
leadership, with the explicit or implicit endorsement of most 
Palestinian political parties, has surrendered basic Palestinian rights 
and accepted dictates by the United States and European Union to adapt 
to most of Israel’s regime of colonial oppression.

The Palestinian people is now in a state of loss and disarray. There is 
no longer a Palestinian “national consensus,” if ever there was one. 
Even the Palestinian political parties, right and left, Islamist and 
secular, with almost no exception, talk of “independence” and not 
national liberation, often forgetting the refugees and always omitting 
Palestinian citizens of Israel from the very definition of the 
Palestinian people.

It is up to the entire Palestinian people to determine its future and 
the solution to this colonial conflict. In the meantime, every 
Palestinian individual, group or coalition must strive to weaken the 
Israeli regime of oppression, as a prerequisite to attain Palestinian 
rights under international law. We in the BDS movement have opted for 
developing one, time-honored form of Palestinian resistance and the most 
effective form of grassroots international solidarity with it, based on 
rights, not political solutions.

BDS of course recognizes that there are other strategies and approaches; 
we’re just saying that we chose to focus on the rights, not the 
solutions, because for any political solution – determined by the 
majority of Palestinians everywhere – to be just, comprehensive and 
sustainable it must accommodate our rights under international law. 
Moreover, to be effective you need to have something close to a 
Palestinian consensus, and to achieve that we had to stick to the most 
principled and strategic lowest common denominator, to the most 
significant and least controversial goals of the Palestinian people that 
hardly anyone can object to: Ending the 1967 occupation, ending the 
system of apartheid, and fulfilling the right of return of Palestinian 
refugees to their homes and properties from which they were ethnically 
cleansed during and since the Nakba. And we adhere to these rights strictly.

This approach has brought us broad support amongst Palestinians. The BNC 
recently organized a relatively large rally in Ramallah in a show of 
popular Palestinian support for BDS. I personally do not see that kind 
of street mobilization as a decisive indicator of popular support, but 
my colleagues insisted we needed to do it in order to demonstrate to the 
world the popular appeal of BDS. There were over 2,000 people and many 
speakers from political parties and grassroots movements and unions, all 
of whom expressed strong support for BDS. One of the outcomes of that 
rally was to defuse the perception among some local circles that BDS was 
“elitist”.

There are those who don’t want to support the nonviolent BDS movement 
because it’s “below their political ceiling.” Being revolutionary, in my 
view, is not about raising “revolutionary” slogans that are not 
implementable and that therefore have little chance of contributing to 
processes aimed at ending the reality of oppression. What is truly 
revolutionary is raising a slogan that is principled and morally 
consistent and yet conducive to action on the ground that can lead to 
real change towards justice and emancipation. Otherwise you remain an 
armchair intellectual.

/*And yet the way the BDS movement is sometimes represented makes it 
sound as though it alone can actually achieve Palestinian rights. The 
frequent references to South Africa convey that impression, whether 
intended or not.*/

We Palestinians always compare our strategies and progress to South 
Africa and other movements for justice, self-determination and human 
rights – and we know that we’re missing key pillars that were critical 
to their success.

In South Africa, for example, the African National Congress-led struggle 
identified four strategic pillars for the struggle to end apartheid: 
Mass mobilizations, armed resistance, an underground political movement, 
and international solidarity (particularly in the form of boycotts and 
sanctions). There is no “copy-paste” strategy to achieve liberation and 
human rights – every colonial experience is different and has its unique 
particularities. We have been engaged in evolving our own Palestinian 
strategies that suit our environment of struggle for justice and dignity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/“Being revolutionary… is not about raising 'revolutionary' slogans … 
What is truly revolutionary is raising a slogan that is principled and 
morally consistent and yet conducive to action on the ground that can 
lead to real change towards justice”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the case of the Palestinian struggle, the pillar of the underground 
movement is limited to Gaza, where it is isolated. International law 
upholds the right of any nation under a foreign occupation to resist it 
by all means, including armed resistance, so long as all forms of 
resistance themselves adhere to international law and human rights 
principles. Aside from that, as human rights advocates, we are obliged 
to consider the cost-benefit of this pillar at this stage and to measure 
the human price of any resistance.

As for mass mobilization, what we can do in the occupied Palestinian 
territory in terms of popular resistance, for example, against the Wall, 
is fairly limited. And it is not really a mass movement in the way that, 
for example, the recent teachers' strike was popular, or the strikes 
against the Salam Fayyad government’s neo-liberalism or against the 
social security law were popular.

The whole question of the effectiveness of different forms of resistance 
is key and we in the BDS movement engage in the question of the 
effectiveness of our nonviolent, international law-abiding strategies at 
every stage.

/*Another concern is that some of the BDS movement’s discourse makes it 
sound as if Palestinians are on the point of achieving their rights. 
That comes out not only in the frequent references to the South Africa 
“moment”, but also in statements that say that a “tipping point” has 
been reached.*/

Yes, but when we speak of a tipping point, we mean a tipping point only 
in terms of the specific pillar of international isolation. The measure 
of effectiveness is whether you’re achieving your goals or not. BDS is 
one of the strategies of internal resistance and it is also the most 
important international strategy. We never claimed otherwise. Why, then, 
should BDS be held responsible, say, for the inability of the 
Palestinian people to achieve our goals of self-determination and 
national liberation? At least give us credit for being realistic.

*/There are many and growing critiques of the international law 
framework. Does that pose a problem for the BDS movement given it is 
grounded in international law?/*

To be effective in mobilizing international pressure by groups and 
individuals of conscience against Israel’s regime of oppression, as well 
as morally consistent, we must adopt human rights principles that are as 
universal as possible as well as a language that can touch people across 
the world and inspire them to action. That’s the language of 
international law.  We know the inherent flaws of international law as 
well as anyone. But we also know that it is either that or the law of 
the jungle, and the latter does not work for us, on principle and 
practically, given that we are by far the physically weaker party.

We don’t want symbolic rhetoric: We’re sick and tired of rhetorical 
support. We need effective, strategic action that has a chance to 
undermine the system of oppression in order to make it more realistic 
for the Palestinian people to realize our UN-stipulated rights. The 
minimal action people can take is to end their complicity. That’s a 
profound legal and moral obligation to end this injustice; it is not an 
act of charity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/“We Palestinians always compare our strategies and progress to South 
Africa and other movements for justice, self-determination and human 
rights – and we know that we’re missing key pillars that were critical 
to their success.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

What are the alternatives to international law? It’s true that the 
colonial empires wrote it. It’s true that it is not weighted in favor of 
the peoples of the world, but it is not a dogma or a static set of laws 
that are engraved in stone. There is a simplistic view of international 
law that doesn’t see it as something dynamic, as something where we, 
through our persistent and mass struggles, can affect the interpretation 
and the application. After all, we are not asking for the moon; we are 
simply working to consistently apply international law to Israel and to 
end its exceptional status as a state above the law. That is a simple 
yet far-reaching demand that requires years of strategic struggle.

/*There is lack of clarity around the normalization guidelines that is 
often a source of tension with activists – and especially among 
Palestinians who may engage in activities that are said to be 
“normalizing” and who don’t appreciate what seems like having their 
nationalism called into question.*/

The normalization guidelines are very clear. The reference document to 
that was adopted by consensus at the first national Palestinian BDS 
conference, held in November 2007. Normalization, in this context, is 
understood by Arabs, including Palestinians, to mean making something 
that is inherently abnormal, like a relationship of colonial oppression, 
appear deceptively normal. According to the BDS guidelines, there here 
are two main principles in order for a relationship between a 
Palestinian (or Arab) party and an Israeli party not to be considered 
normalization. The Israeli side must recognize the comprehensive 
Palestinian rights under international law, and the relationship itself 
should be one of co-resistance to oppression, not “co-existence” under 
oppression.

The whole point is that such relationships should not legitimize, 
fig-leaf or whitewash Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights. To 
consider an example that may not be immediately obvious, say an 
organization in the United States is organizing a conference and has 
received sponsorship from Israel or an Israeli institution that is 
complicit in violations of Palestinian rights. And let’s say that the US 
organization is willing to have a panel that would include Palestinian 
speakers so as to provide space for a Palestinian voice. Participation 
under these circumstances would mean that we are effectively normalizing 
Israeli sponsorship – in other words normalizing the violations of our 
rights. This is too high a price to pay for our voices to be heard, as 
important as that is, given the mainstream media’s suppression of these 
voices. So we work closely with partners to apply pressure to rescind 
that Israeli sponsorship, and if that fails we call for a boycott.

/*But there are still gray areas, and it is in the gray areas where 
problems can arise – especially as some people take it on their 
shoulders to speak on behalf of the BDS movement and to lay down the law 
when in fact they have no authority to do so.*/

There are always gray areas. I would say 90% of the cases that we deal 
with are indeed gray. When we come across a gray area, we go back to the 
principle and try our best to measure profit vs. loss. BDS, after all, 
is not intended to be a dogma, but rather an effective strategy to 
contribute to our struggle for our rights.

Some Palestinians want to have their cake and eat it too. They allow 
themselves to engage in projects and activities that clearly conflict 
with the anti-normalization guidelines, adopted since 2007 by the 
broadest coalition of political parties, unions and networks in 
Palestinian society, yet they reject any characterization of those 
activities as normalization simply because they are “patriotic” and “no 
one should call that into question.” In the BDS movement, we do not call 
into question anyone’s patriotism and we never ever label anyone or 
resort to personal attacks; that would conflict with our principles as a 
movement. We also reject any suppression of freedom of speech and the 
simplistic and harmful dismissal of those engaged in normalization 
activists as “traitors.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/“We attack positions and statements but not individuals, and we don’t 
believe in blacklists or any form of McCarthyism. It negates our 
principles, it’s an abuse of power, and it’s counter-productive.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) simply mobilizes /moral/ 
pressure to expose normalization activities in order to undermine 
normalization. It is /vital/ to counter normalization activities because 
they constitute a key weapon that Israel has used against the movement 
and against the Palestinian struggle for rights in general.

And sometimes we do things that are seen as ahead of their time or use 
language that is not yet accepted. For example, when we first used 
apartheid as a key facet of Israel’s regime of oppression or insisted on 
the right of return in our international discourse, both were frowned 
upon not only in the mainstream but even in some Palestine solidarity 
circles in the west. Also, when the 2004 call by PACBI (the Palestinian 
Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) mentioned 
Zionism as a racist ideology that has been a pillar in Israel’s 
settler-colonial regime, this issue was hardly discussed in most 
Palestine solidarity circles in the west in the post-Oslo period.

It’s important not to conflate opposition to Zionism and to Israel’s 
regime of colonial oppression and apartheid as being an opposition to 
Jews: It is absolutely not. The BDS movement has consistently and 
categorically rejected all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and 
anti-Semitism. The fact that 46% of non-Orthodox Jewish-American men 
under 40 support a full boycott of Israel to end its occupation and 
human rights violations, according to a 2014 poll 
<https://libcloud.s3.amazonaws.com/862/5e/f/122/2014-jstreet-national-election-night-crosstabs.pdf>, 
partly attests to the inclusive, anti-racist character of the movement.

/*Can you give an example of what you do when there is a gray area?*/

We never take decisions as individual members of the BNC or of its 
academic and cultural arm PACBI when there’s a gray area; we always go 
back to the group and decide collectively, based on the agreed upon 
principles, not the personal opinions and biases of each of us. We don’t 
give our advice or recommendation until we reach consensus. If we have a 
deadlock we say to the person seeking advice that we don’t have clear 
advice to give them. We pick our battles. We don’t chase everything, and 
we ignore so many targets based on cost-benefit calculations.

We don’t issue edicts; rather, we issue advice. We never say “thou shalt”.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/“It is vital to counter normalization activities because they 
constitute a key weapon that Israel has used against the movement and 
against the Palestinian struggle for rights in general.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

And we never use ad hominem attacks – we have never done so since BDS 
was founded in 2005. We attack positions and statements but not 
individuals, and we don’t believe in blacklists or any form of 
McCarthyism. It negates our principles, it’s an abuse of power, and it’s 
counter-productive. Personally, I’ve never engaged with anyone who, for 
example, attacks us as “agents of imperialism” or similar ultra-left 
nonsense. We pick our battles, as I said earlier, and we keep our eyes 
on the real enemies.
When we engage to stop a normalization activity, our objective is always 
to first and foremost convince the person involved to stop normalizing. 
You can’t use ad hominem attacks and expect that person to side with 
you. And in fact many Palestinians who were engaged in normalization 10 
years ago are now BDS supporters, and that’s partly because we avoid 
personal injury. It’s wrong on principle and it’s pragmatically wrong.

When someone has a question, we recommend seeking advice from PACBI or 
the BNC, or one of our partners in any given country and we seek to 
resolve it through interactive debate. We now have much better 
mechanisms to implement the guidelines.

/*There is a gray area that was cited to me as an example of something 
Palestinians don’t understand, and indeed find problematic – that of 
Arab passport holders entering Israel on a visa issued by an Israeli 
embassy being treated as normalization, as opposed to getting a permit 
issued by the Israelis at the request of the Palestinian Authority (PA). 
People don’t get the difference because Israel issues both.*/

That is a sticky point and a very difficult one. After extensive 
debates, community meetings and discussions with many Palestinian 
artists and cultural organizations, we concluded that when an Arab 
passport holder receives an Israeli visa he/she is normalizing Arab 
relations with the regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and 
apartheid by treating this regime as if it were normal. Whereas 
obtaining a permit from the Israeli occupation authorities through the 
PA is not, despite the problematic nature of the PA’s role, to put it 
mildly, because Palestinians under occupation are in a coercive 
relationship with Israel: Palestinians have no choice to receive family 
or friends from the Arab world without dealing with the Israeli 
authorities. But such dealings do not per se recognize Israel’s regime 
as normal.  Still, we recognize this as a difficult area, and we admit 
that it is not the most robust or irrefutable of our guidelines.

My question is this: Why don’t Palestinian BDS critics at home or in 
exile write to us if they seek clarification or want to share their 
criticisms in a constructive way that strengthens our collective 
movement? We get hundreds of emails daily from solidarity activists but 
very few from Palestinians. A few Palestinians attack BDS without 
bothering to first write to the BNC and express their critique in a way 
that can help make this already effective movement better and more able 
to handle the many challenges facing it. We are open to and we sincerely 
encourage discussion and debate among Palestinians in our diverse 
communities. I beg those with questions, criticisms, or comments to 
communicate with us – just write to pacbi at pacbi.org or 
info at bdsmovement.net. Despite the workload we, as volunteers, have to 
deal with, we do our utmost to respond to every email we receive, 
especially one coming from a Palestinian sister or brother.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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