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IN 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations and 71 members of parliament, political parties, and unions in Jordan united to issue a powerful nongovernmental call for global nonviolent resistance to occupation through acts of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.(1) They had three goals: an end to occupation and return to the pre-1967 Green Line, equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and recognition of the Palestinian right of return.
The strongly united 2005 Palestinian civil society call for BDS electrified progressives around the world. European activists responded strongly, but in the United States, where the mainstream news media have tended to voluntarily censor undistorted news reports about Israel’s ever-widening theft of Palestinian lands, public consciousness was generally absent, while sympathy for the Jewish legacy of trauma from the Holocaust remained the dominant theme.
It’s time to reassess: Where is the U.S. BDS movement now? The answer is that, while it still lags behind the BDS movements in Europe, Australia and elsewhere, it’s catching up fast, on campuses across the country and in local communities, as a genuinely grassroots movement led by focused, smart, strategic young Arab Americans — with the generous, if unintended assistance of Bibi Netanyahu, whose unashamed racism and crudeness has stunned the world, leaving Israel’s defenders without a credible spin on his words and actions."
