Free speech and justice: Defending the rights of the BDS movement
Jana Tamimi, a 10-year-old journalist-in-the-making from the village of Nabi Saleh in the occupied Palestinian territory, asked me during the latest conference of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights held in Ramallah last April: “Given the terrible Israeli threats stacked against BDS lately, how can we keep the hope that it gives us alive?” Jana was referring to thinly-veiled official Israeli threats against the movement.
Jana is the youngest of many generations of her family who for years have been peacefully protesting for their freedom from Israel’s occupation and against the encroachment of illegal settlements built on their village’s land. In recent years, younger generations of Palestinians like Jana, who have lived their entire lives under occupation and the specter of a never-ending “peace” process, have found new hope for the future in the BDS movement for Palestinian rights.
I responded without hesitation, “Your very question gives us hope and determination to carry on.”
We maintain this optimism in the face of mounting attacks against BDS, particularly in the US, where the Israeli government and pressure groups have been intensifying efforts to suppress it. The latest broadside comes from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who recently issued an executive order that requires state agencies and authorities to divest from any company or entity that is perceived as supporting BDS.
The American Civil Liberties Union rejected the order, saying it “not only threatens to punish constitutionally protected political speech but also requires the state of New York to create a blacklist of allies of the movement.”
Cuomo’s order bypassed a proposed New York State bill to the same effect that had stalled in the legislature after opposition from the large Freedom to Boycott Coalition, which described it as “McCarthyite, anti-democratic and unconstitutional.”
Similar anti-BDS measures that have been passed by a number of state legislatures come in the context of a new top-down strategy adopted by Israel since 2014 to replace its failed previous strategy of dismissing the movement or fighting it with “branding.”
Ultimately, Israel is intent on not just colonizing our land but also our minds, searing into our consciousness the futility of hope and the impossibility of resisting its hegemonic and unjust order. Hope, after all, can be contagious. Despite decades of dispossession, occupation, and brutalities, Palestinians have not given up; we continue to resist oppression and to assert our quest for equal rights to all humans.
This is precisely why Israel is desperately trying to squelch the BDS movement which is kindling Palestinian aspirations through its effectiveness in shedding light on our denied rights and in showing a nonviolent path to realizing them.
Begun in 2005 by the broadest coalition in Palestinian civil society, BDS calls for ending Israel’s 1967 occupation, ending its institutionalized racial discrimination, which meets the UN definition of apartheid, and upholding the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were uprooted and dispossessed since 1948.
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