From Nakba to second intifada
SO IN 1948, Israel captured 78 per cent of Palestine. To accomplish this, they terrorised the Palestinians and violently drove 750,000 people from their homes. Having won this much through ethnic cleansing, they set their sights on more. In 1967, Israel attacked the surrounding states in a war, and captured the remaining 22 per cent: seizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, it seized the Golan Heights from Syria, and Gaza Strip and Sinai peninsula from Egypt.
Palestinians resisted in many ways. What took the headlines was the audacious militant tactics of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, a self-styled guerilla movement led by Yassir Arafat that became notorious for a series of plane hijackings. There were other groups like the one that carried out an attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972, killing several of them. Most of these attacks were carried out by Palestinians in exile in the diaspora and were spectacular but ineffective in realizing Palestinian demands. It wasn’t until 1987 that there was a mass popular uprising in the Occupied Territories. Known as the first intifada, this uprising erupted out of frustration with the PLO’s strategy. Nevertheless, the PLO ended up claiming the mantle of representative of the Palestinians in the negotiations to resolve the crisis precipitated by the intifada. But when the negotiations happened in Oslo in 1993, Arafat negotiated away everything except for the bare minimum. In return, what did he get? Arafat and the PLO were able to return to the Occupied Territories from exile and establish the Palestinian Authority, with its own security and police force. As Edward Said and Noam Chomsky argued back then, Israel subcontracted the task of policing the area to the PA while giving the Palestinians little to no civil and political control.
The Oslo agreements were vague. They called for Israel to carry out troop withdrawals from the Occupied Territories in three phases, but they left open the question of the extent of the withdrawal. And only the land that Israel seized in 1967 was up for negotiation anyway, which meant that 78 per cent of what was historically Palestinian land was negotiated away by the PLO when it surrendered in 1993. In either case, these phased withdrawals never took place, and by 1998 the so-called ‘liberal Zionist’ Ehud Barak made his ‘generous offer’ of skipping the troop withdrawals and moving straight away to final status negotiations regarding the future of Jerusalem.
This was the pattern throughout the so-called peace process of the 1990s — Israeli offers, usually termed ‘generous’ by a compliant Western media, that were designed to be rejected by the Palestinians, so that no real progress would be made towards a viable Palestinian state, while Israeli settlements would continue to expand.
In the year 2000 the Second Intifada was sparked by former Israeli general Ariel Sharon ‘visiting’ the Al Aqsa Mosque compound with a thousand soldiers.
Ariel Sharon was at the time an opposition member of the Israeli parliament, and a member of the right-wing Likud Party. He was known as the butcher of Beirut for greenlighting the 1982 massacre of around 3000 Palestinians and Lebanese inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Phalangist militias.
In retrospect, it’s clear that Ariel Sharon’s provocative action of entering the Al Aqsa compound with a thousand armed soldiers signalled the end of the so-called ‘peace process’ that had played out through the 1990s.
In the fighting that followed, Israel used its now-familiar tactic of relentless artillery and air bombardment of refugee camps. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed and the resistance responded with a spate of suicide bombings that took the lives of Israeli settlers.
BDS breaks with status quo
FOR those of us involved in Palestine solidarity efforts in the US those were difficult years. At the time, I was on the International Committee of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition. Al Awda was the only Palestine-solidarity group that stood for the principle of self-determination for Palestinians in all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea. By emphasising the right of return, Al Awda held to the solution of a single democratic state with freedom for all — the vision that had united Palestinians until Oslo. But Al Awda and its tiny cohort of allies on the left were very much on the margins of the discussion, to the extent that there was one at all. On one side, the establishment consensus was for a two-state solution, the framework for which was apparently codified in the Oslo Accords. Every escalation in violence had been successfully blamed on the Palestinians. On the other side, with the PLO co-opted by the occupation, the only ones left fighting were Hamas and its militant wing, the Al-Qassem Brigades. Secular left organisations like the DFLP and PFLP had been more or less neutralised by Israeli repression and, it must be said, by Fatah and Hamas.
So those of us who stood for Palestinian liberation including the right-of-return for refugees were a small minority within the Palestine solidarity movement. To the extent that there was a solidarity movement at all we spent most of our time debunking the various ‘generous offers’ made by the Israelis but there was little to point to as a focal point for our solidarity. The mainstream consensus was for a two-state solution, while the one-staters, so to speak, had a politics and used tactics — such as suicide bombings — that we could defend but not advocate. There was no Palestinian leadership or campaign that we could identify with or point to as a viable alternative.
It was in this context, in 2005, that the BDS Movement was launched. I remember well the anticipation and excitement with which we greeted its announcement. The initial call explicitly drew parallels with the boycott of apartheid South Africa a decade or two earlier, and ended with these words:
We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organisations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.
These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognise the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:
— Ending its occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
— Recognising the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
— Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolutions
Some activists at the time dismissed it as too gradualist. Boycotting, after all, isn’t as glamorous as protesting, striking, or occupying a college campus. But these activists failed to appreciate that in fact the BDS call was a strategic breakthrough in that it ruptured the consensus around two-states by insisting on the right of return. This was and is a radical demand; for the right of return to be successfully implemented would require a transformation of the Jewish-supremacist state into a truly democratic and inclusive one.
The following year, in 2006, Hamas won the elections in Gaza and engaged in a brief tussle with Fatah over leadership over the Palestinian movement. In the end, Hamas retained control in the Gaza Strip, while Fatah remained in power in the West Bank, and with the Palestinian movement clearly divided, Ariel Sharon announced the so-called ‘unilateral withdrawal’ from Gaza, whereby the Occupation forces withdrew and subsequently encircled and enforced the tightest siege on a people in modern history. Various efforts to break the siege were met with violence by the occupation forces, such as in 2010, when the Freedom Flotilla, led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship laden with humanitarian aid, was raided and captured, and several aid workers were killed by the Israelis.
BDS in present context
IT WAS out of this open-air prison that Palestinian fighters broke through on October 7 to launch the attacks that triggered the current phase of Israel’s genocide.
From the Palestinian perspective, the current crisis must appear as a confirmation of the BDS campaign’s central premise: that the two-state solution is a dead end, and a just peace can only come about with self-determination for the Palestinians in the context of a single, secular and democratic state with equal rights for all, including the right of return for refugees.
For the last few months, millions of people around the world have taken to the streets to protest the genocidal war, horrified by the images flooding their social media feeds. One might well ask: What can a boycott movement achieve in the face of the Zionists’ settler-colonial aim to annex all of Gaza and the West Bank and to create, as the right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu would have it, Israeli dominance over all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea? And what can a boycott movement achieve in the face of the unflinching support given to the Zionist state by virtually every Western government, especially the United States?
The BDS campaign is one part of a multi-pronged struggle that Palestinians have waged for their freedom and self-determination. It was launched in 2005 through a call for boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions on, Israel, issued by a large coalition of Palestinian civil society. Some 170 organisations, representing virtually all of Palestinian civil society, endorsed the initial call. It’s worth noting that a call for an academic boycott of Israel had already gone out a year earlier; the BDS campaign took this up and expanded it into a comprehensive strategy of boycott, divestment, and sanctions, modelled on a similar campaign that had helped coalesce international solidarity with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The Palestinian BDS National Committee was formed to coordinate this campaign.
The BDS campaign has called for targeted and focused consumer boycotts of companies profiting from Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and of companies directly tied to Israel. In particular, the BDS campaign has called for a global boycott of HP, Soda Stream, Puma, and other consumer brands.
Interestingly enough, from our perspective here in Dhaka, the BDS Movement website does NOT list Coke as one of its targets for boycott. Nor for that matter does it mention McDonalds or Starbucks. But recently it’s these companies that have emerged as targets of global boycotts, fuelled largely by social media campaigns. This is a reflection of the global ripples of dissent that the genocide in Gaza has set off.
In a country where we haven’t seen mass protests against the genocide we have nevertheless seen a mass response to the call to boycott Coke, and all thanks to a single commercial. This is interesting. In the commercial, a man refuses to drink Coca Cola because it comes from Israel. Now the ad doesn’t actually mention Israel by name, and it’s worth thinking about why the territory remains unnamed—is Israel already a pariah state? In either case, the ad mocks the man’s objection, presenting it as mere hearsay or rumour, and the shopkeeper schools the man on Coca Cola’s global presence. What finally convinces the man to accept the bottle of coke is the shopkeeper’s declaration that Coca Cola even has a factory in Palestine.
The backlash all over social media was immediate and unrelenting, as people pointed out that Coca Cola does indeed have a factory in Palestine, and it is in the settlement of Atarot in East Jerusalem. Bangladeshis responded en masse, and Coca Cola’s sales in Bangladesh have reportedly fallen dramatically in the few weeks since the commercial aired. In a sense, this is a vindication of the boycott strategy, at least in so far as it can be seen to have an impact on the company’s profits.
Consumer boycotts are notoriously difficult to coordinate or sustain, which is why, although the BDS campaign calls for a boycott of all Israeli products, it strategically focuses on those companies and products that have a direct hand in the Occupied Territories and are thus more likely to trigger mass boycotts. In addition to consumer boycotts that one can do privately and individually, the BDS campaign calls for collective campaigns to get companies to pull out of the Occupied Territories. Thanks to years of organising, companies like Veolia, Orange, G4S, General Mills, and others have exited the Israeli market because of BDS campaigns. It’s these collective efforts that are the most successful both in terms of their impact on the Israeli economy and in terms of their capacity to mobilise and strengthen solidarity movements and organisations. The campaign also calls for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel. A recent book on this subject, Towers of Ivory and Steel, by Maya Wind, does a great job of casting a spotlight on Israeli universities, which have been deeply complicit in the settler-colonial project in diverse ways.
In addition to these targeted boycotts, the BDS movement calls for divestment campaigns to get local universities, municipalities, banks, and investment funds to divest from Israeli companies, especially those involved in the OT. Divestment has emerged as the key demand of the student protesters at campuses across the US, UK, and Canada this past year, thanks in large part to the brave students at Columbia University who launched a campus sit-in and faced massive police repression.
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Bangladesh Defense Forum
