Campaign: Global campaigns

Cisco’s complicity in Israel’s crimes of apartheid and genocide is well documented through its illegal operations in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), discriminatory policies, long-standing partnership with the Israeli military, and serial acquisitions of Israeli companies complicit in human rights violations. Cisco knowingly provides Israel with technology that is deployed in its grave human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

In July 2021, Amnesty International, in collaboration with tens of journalists and scholars, exposed how the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware facilitated “human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.” Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes have employed Pegasus, a military-grade cyber weapon, to target 50,000 people, including lawyers, human rights activists, opposition politicians, and diplomats, as well as climate justice and women’s rights advocates. This Israeli spyware has also enabled the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul and countless other cases of arrests, torture, and killings. Palestinian civil society has issued an urgent call to ban all spyware, including NSO’s Pegasus. Israeli spyware companies such as NSO Group hire graduates of Israeli military intelligence units who use illegal mass surveillance to blackmail Palestinians, sow divisions and distrust, and sell the tools that have been developed to maintain Israeli apartheid to the worst violators of human rights around the world as “field tested.”

Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – which is why Microsoft is a now priority BDS target.

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Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.

After weapons manufacturers, technology is arguably the second most complicit sector in Israel’s ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied and besieged Gaza Strip and its underlying, decades-old settler-colonial apartheid regime against the entire Indigenous Palestinian people. This makes tech targets a priority for the BDS movement.

Reebok sponsors the Israel Football Association (IFA), which includes in its official league teams in illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. The IFA advocates, together with the Israeli government, to maintain these teams.

The “S” in BDS stands for sanctions, and it intentionally comes after B and D, as it requires building a critical mass of people power to make policymakers fulfill their obligations under international law and impose accountability measures to end Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian rights and international law.

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is a tool for mobilizing grassroots support on the global level for the Palestinian liberation struggle against Israel’s decades-long regime of settler colonialism and apartheid. It is a grassroots solidarity mechanism to raise awareness about Israeli apartheid and to mobilize support for strategic BDS campaigns to end international complicity in this system of oppression as a meaningful contribution to dismantling it.

Israel, including its military forces, arms industry, and research institutions, wouldn’t be able to commit these crimes and atrocities, maintain its illegal occupation and apartheid regime against the entire Palestinian people without weapons, ammunition, technology, joint academic research, and other military and dual-use material produced globally. The urgency of a military embargo has never been greater.

Israel’s unparalleled impunity has allowed it to maintain its decades-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid and emboldened it to unleash the world’s first live-streamed genocide. The January 2025 ceasefire agreement in Gaza is only the most crucial first step to end the genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. At the same time, Israeli apartheid is escalating its military aggression, ethnic cleansing, and large-scale annexation of the illegally occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.