Tag: BDS

It seems like no sooner did the British government issue its new regulations aimed at “banning” boycotts of Israel than the move backfired. “BDS,” the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement,protesters declared in response, “is here to stay.” There was immediate talk of defying any ban, with civil disobedience if necessary. That may not be needed: while the full facts are still being debated, according to lawyers who spoke to anti-poverty charity War on Want, “there is nothing new in the new procurement guidance aside from some overblown rhetoric clearly intended to scare campaigners.”

The “BDS ban” in fact is no real ban at all. It has essentially restated existing legislation, campaigners say. This is likely to be tested in courts, however. Although Israeli campaigns of “lawfare” (tying campaigners up using spurious litigation in courts around the world) have often proven fruitless, even disastrous in the past, it seems Israel’s supporters have not given up the strategy.

Such litigation can be costly for BDS activists, who are almost all volunteers and have little in the way of serious funding to defend against such cases. Local councils do have more serious resources to defend their democratic mandates. But with ever increasingly budget cuts, thanks to Conservative austerity, they may prove unwilling to fight back against such cases: they’d often rather avoid them altogether if the popular pressure is not enough.

Read more over at MEMO.

Last week the government made an announcement intended to intimidate supporters of Palestinian rights. It was trailed in the media as a “ban” on boycotts of Israel, which The Independent claimed would now become a “criminal” offence for public bodies. The Palestine Solidarity Campaignsaid this amounted to “a gross attack on our democratic freedoms and the independence of public bodies from government interference.”

There is no doubt that the new measure is probably the biggest attack by the Tory government yet on the movement for Palestinian human rights. In the last 11 years, a key tactic of that movement has been boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS.

But the devil was in the detail, as so often.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

A fascinating article by a Jerusalem Post Knesset reporter earlier this month gives quite the insight into the increasingly desperate state of the Israeli “war” against BDS. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement aims to hold Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people.

At first ignored, and later derided, the BDS movement has by now become one of the top strategic threats to Israel’s ability carry on the business of occupation as usual. Formally founded in 2005, the movement aims to encourage people of conscious around the world to boycott Israel products, dis-invest from Israeli businesses and to put pressure on governments to implement sanctions against Israel.

And over the last 11 years, the movement has achieved some impressive results, despite an enormous and well-funded backlash by Israel’s powerful supporters in the West. Examples are too numerous to detail, but the most recent victory has been the move of the United Methodist Church in the US to divest its $20-billion pension fund of any stake in five Israeli banks – excluded for their involvement in illegal Israeli settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Read more over at MEMO.

Earlier this month, The Scotsman reported that US presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton had tried to stop a cultural boycott of Israel in Edinburgh.

In 2009, the Edinburgh film festival returned small amount of funding from the Israeli embassysensitivity that Israel and its supporters have to BDS.. Famed left-wing director Ken Loach had been a prominent figure in the campaign.

The festival later admitted accepting the £300 was “a mistake” and publicly returned the money.

But newly published emails revealed this monththat Clinton, a strong supporter of Israel, had tried to intervene in the affair. (Her emails were released as part of the ongoing controversy in the US over her use of a personal email account to conduct official business in an apparent attempt to avoid freedom of information law.)

Read the rest over at MEMO.

On the new phase in Israel’s campaign to sabotage BDS:

As Israel ramps-up its fight against BDS, the increasingly shrill nature of the warnings coming from Jerusalem raise serious concerns about potentially fatal actions Israel could may begin to take against BDS activists (especially Palestinians). If that sounds alarmist, consider the words of new Likud member of parliament Anat Berko. She is a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, and this week formed a lobby in the Knesset specifically to target BDS. In an interview she said that the “BDS movement against Israel is also a weapon. It is a form of terrorism and it should be fought against just like we fight against terrorism.”

Implicit in that ludicrous description of the purely non-violent BDS movement as “terrorism” is a threat to assassinate and kidnap leaders of the BDS movement. After all, that is how Israel treats Palestinian resistance fighters – those it terms “terrorists”. This designation of BDS as “terrorism” is another proof that when Israel terms Palestinian resistance as terrorism, it is not a serious description, but an opposition to any form of basic Palestinian human rights or existence.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

On the BDS freak-out:

What Israel’s apologists still don’t get is that, much like the Palestinian cause itself, BDS is a popular, grass-roots and humanist campaign.

So here is some free advice for them: you can’t make the “BDS threat” go away by throwing money at the problem. Previously the Israeli government seems to have tried ignoring the problem, but that didn’t work, so now they are trying a different tack: freaking out about it.

Me on the psychology of of BDS:

The very fact the bogus story spread around so quickly before being debunked (even making it onto popular American blog The Huffington Post) tells us something about the successes to date of the BDS campaign. It is having a far-reaching impact amongst Israelis, showing that BDS activists are punching way above their weight, compared to their modest means.