By Rafeef Ziadah, April 09, 2008, Left Turn

At approximately 8pm on Sunday, January 20, the Gaza Strip power plant ran out of fuel and shut down, plunging the Gaza Strip into darkness. The closure of the Gaza power plant, in addition to Israel's continuing siege of the Gaza Strip, have had a catastrophic effect on the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are already suffering chronic shortages of fuel and medicine. "Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key," said United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, John Dugard.

The residents of Gaza had no choice left. As the international community aided Israel in the strangulation of the Gaza Strip, they took matters in their own hands and blew up the wall on the Egyptian border. With that, they both destroyed the Israeli siege and highlighted the Egyptian regimes complicity in the siege.

The story of the Gaza Strip is the story of the Palestinian Nakba-the Catastrophe that saw the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-48. The majority of those living in Gaza are refugees who can see their lands from inside the Gaza Bantustan. What we see in Gaza today is the model that Israel wants to implement in the West Bank. It reinforces the fact that the Israeli state is a settler-colonial project that closely resembles features of South African apartheid.

Right of return

The Israeli system of apartheid affects every single group of Palestinians, wherever they reside: those who are citizens of Israel, those living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and refugees living in exile. Israel was founded on the expulsion of more than three-quarters of the Palestinian indigenous population, who became refugees in neighboring countries and around the world.

One of the first laws passed by the Israeli state was the so-called Law of Return, which permitted any person of Jewish background from anywhere in the world to immediately become an Israeli citizen. Yet Palestinians, who now constitute the largest refugee population in the world, are still denied the right to return to their homes and lands from which they were expelled. The campaign against Israeli apartheid is fundamentally centered upon the right of Palestinian refugees to return.

Israeli Apartheid supporters claim that Israel is a democracy because of its equal treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel. However, those Palestinians who managed to remain on their land and became Israeli citizens are deliberately denied equal access to social services and the material resources of the state. Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute one-fifth of the Israeli population yet it is illegal for any individual or party to run for the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) if they do not support the Jewish character of the state.

Open-air prisons

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinians under military occupation have been herded into isolated cantons; they are divided from one another by illegal Israeli settlements, Israeli-only roads, military checkpoints, electric fences, and concrete walls. Palestinians are forced to carry different colored ID cards and apply for permits from the Israeli military in order to travel between areas. At the entrance to each of these large "open-air prisons," checkpoints with cattle-like turnstiles have been erected to control Palestinian movement.
Palestinians are subject to military law-a separate and discriminatory "legal" system drawn up by the Israeli military and regulated by Israeli military courts-while Israeli settlers in the same area are under civil law. Over 10,000 Palestinians are being held as political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centers because they have been accused of violating this military law.

While Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert attempt to hide Israel's crimes behind the lie of "peace negotiations," thousands of individuals and organizations around the world are building a real and effective alternative movement centered on boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid. This movement is quickly gaining momentum.

IAW

This year Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), which began in Toronto four years ago, took place in 25 places across the world including, for the first time, Palestine and South Africa. In a symbolic gesture, exiled Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Azmi Bishara, gave the opening address of IAW in Soweto, South Africa. Bishara said, "Reconciliation happened in South Africa after apartheid was dismantled, not instead. The message sent to the Palestinians is that you have to make peace and reconcile. We can reconcile after racism and occupation is dismantled." Dr. Bishara's lecture was screened during IAW in participating cities around the world, a sign of the new level of coordination between anti-apartheid activists on a global level.

The 2008 IAW was held under the banner "60 Years of Nakba: End Israeli Apartheid." The analysis of apartheid put forward during IAW in previous years has played an important role in raising awareness and disseminating information about Zionism, the Palestinian liberation struggle, and its similarities with the indigenous sovereignty struggle in North America and the South African anti-Apartheid movement.

A number of unions have passed divestment motions with labor activists working continuously on rank-and-file education in their workplaces. The latest of these divestment motions is one by the London School of Economics' student union calling for divestment from corporations that support the Israeli occupation. In academic institutions, the debate on the academic boycott of Israel is ongoing despite attempts by university administrations to shut it down.

Ethnic cleansing

The articles in this special Nakba issue of Left Turn capture the changes the Palestine solidarity movement is undergoing as it transforms itself from a movement which has to constantly respond to Israel's ethnic cleansing to one that focuses on a campaign of BDS aimed at ending the apartheid system that drives the ethnic cleansing.

The articles confirm that a new anti-apartheid movement is taking shape with Palestinians themselves at the forefront-rethinking what needs to be done and how to do it in new, dynamic, and creative ways. There's also a sobering sense that this will be a hard fought struggle which will not be won overnight. As Salim Vally points out in his article, it took several decades for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa to begin to make any real gains. Key to this new anti-apartheid movement's success will be deepening its connections to struggles against neoliberalism, racism, and war.

Rafeef Ziadah, a third generation Palestinian refugee, is a member of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (www.caiaweb.org).
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BDS Conference in Palestine: Building Solidarity, Combating Normalization

By Andréa Schmidt, April 09, 2008, Left Turn

It's the end of November. International attention is focused on the upcoming summit in Annapolis, MD, and foreign reporters in Gaza City, Tel Aviv, Ramallah are busily soliciting predictably jaded and mocking Palestinian and Israeli responses to the question, "Will Annapolis bring peace?" I am in Ramallah too, listening as Allam Jarrar of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO) welcomes his audience to "the launching of a new vision and new era for the renewal of popular resistance and Palestinian dignity." He's definitely not talking about Annapolis. Instead, this is the first-ever Palestinian conference to promote the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli apartheid. Almost 300 people-mostly Palestinian political activists, NGO workers, and university students, but with a sizable contingent of international activists as well-have gathered in a conference hall for a day of panel discussions and strategy sessions.

The call for BDS to isolate the state of Israel was issued more than two years ago, in 2005, and signed by 170 Palestinian organizations. They asked the international community to enact these punitive measures until Israel "recognize[s] the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law" in three ways: "ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting [...] the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194." In response, the global BDS campaign has taken off, attracting steadily growing support from progressive communities in South Africa, the UK, Europe, the US, and Canada.

Strength in unity

The conveners of this conference decided it was necessary to raise the local profile of the BDS campaign. They are hoping it will put all the Palestinian groups present on the same page and develop shared strategy and criteria for the campaign in order to provide clear Palestinian leadership for the global component. There is strength in unity, especially in an anti-colonial struggle where a primary tactic of the colonizer is always to weaken by fragmenting or to divide and conquer. As Gabi Baramki of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) puts it, "Feeling weak makes us lose dignity, and makes us act like a beggar accepting the remains from another people's table even if they are dipped in poison." Throughout the day, panelists expressed optimism that BDS will contribute to rekindling the kind of mass grassroots civil resistance that characterized the first Intifada.

Yet there is some skepticism to be overcome concerning the effectiveness of a local boycott of Israeli products before BDS gains massive popular support here. Boycott campaigns against Israel have a history here that stretches as far back as the '20s. In that sense, Baramki points out, BDS is both a "new and old approach." But given the intense dependence of the Palestinian economy on Israel's economy-the result of years of Israeli de-development, land theft, and closure policies-there are also significant challenges to the local success of a consumer boycott.

The participants in the conference agreed that for Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, the boycott will have to be limited to Israeli products for which a Palestinian alternative is available. For this reason, Jamal Juma' of the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign underscored the importance of linking boycott with supporting Palestinian agricultural and cultural production. Employment in Israel and the settlements is also exempt from the boycott-reality is such that far too many families rely on it to make ends meet.

So on the ground in Palestine, a BDS campaign is just one of many strategies Palestinians must use to resist the daily devastation of Israeli apartheid and occupation. This is something that participants asserted repeatedly and emphatically during the question and answer periods that followed the morning's panels.

International activists

But as the day goes on, it strikes me-as it will several more times throughout my two-week stay-that for international activists, BDS is likely the most effective strategy for Palestine solidarity work. Unlike so many equally well-intentioned solidarity efforts, it doesn't seem condemned to reiterate the very exploitative or divisive dynamics of colonial relationships it is attempting to overcome.

The BDS strategy is powerful precisely because it defies the political fragmentation that has been the consequence of Israel's expulsion, settlement, and bantustanization policies. As Jarrar emphasized, it contributes to building a united framework for a struggle for self-determination that Palestinians living in the Diaspora, Arab countries, Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel can all participate in.

BDS avoids creating a situation in which solidarity activists undermine that unity by funding or grooming the Palestinian counterpart that reflect their own sense of a just solution, or of what "self-determination" should look like. Islah Jahad, a professor of Women's Studies at Birzeit University, referred to BDS as a way of developing "joint ownership" over a political process, and contrasts it with the divisive "clientelism" that has characterized the vast majority of international support for Palestinian non-governmental organizations since the first Intifada.

Most importantly, BDS is a framework for solidarity that directly counters normalization-the subtle and insidious processes from dialogue projects between Palestinian and Israeli women to the upgrading of military checkpoints into "terminals"-that legitimize Israel's colonization and occupation policies even as they purport to pursue peace. "How to stop normalization," says Juma', "is the major question for Palestinians today." By emphasizing the racism of the Israeli state and its policies, and insisting on Palestinians' inalienable rights to self-determination and to return, the BDS campaign attempts to answer that question.

Beyond boycott

The afternoon is devoted to three concurrent breakout sessions to discuss practical steps for BDS locally, within the Arab world, and internationally. I join about fifty other people for the one on international strategy. It is clear from the conversation that there is a great deal of work to be done to expand the understanding of the 'B' in BDS beyond consumer boycott, to encompass a multi-sector boycott of Israeli cultural, sports, and academic institutions as well. Where a consumer boycott is undertaken as a focus, the symbolic and educational value of the target is often more important than the actual economic impact of the boycott. Still more effort is needed to move beyond boycott to campaigns within labor unions and other institutions that have the power to divest.

It is also apparent that the kind of coordination necessary to make this kind of global campaign work will require the kind of patience that international solidarity activists aren't necessarily known for cultivating. Virginia Magwaza-Setshedi from the Palestine Solidarity Committee had said it best earlier in the day when, drawing on South Africans' experience fighting an apartheid regime, she cautioned her audience against getting disillusioned when results come slowly at first: "Building a campaign like this takes years-a generation even."

So although much of the potential of the BDS strategy can be expressed in terms of its capacity to bypass the contradictions that too frequently plague international solidarity work, it nonetheless provokes a different, and possibly more productive kind of dissonance. The urgency of responding to military occupation, ethnic cleansing, and land-theft collides uneasily with the painstaking coordination and education necessary to build a global movement to isolate Israel and contribute to dismantling its apartheid policies. On the 60 anniversary of the Nakba, we must build, urgently.

Andréa Schmidt is a researcher based in Toronto. She wants to thank Rafeef, Justin, Kobi, and Abu Ahmed for conversations that contributed to the writing of this piece.