Omar Barghouti's speech to the PSC AGM Saturday 21 January 2012 in London

Omar is a leader of the Palestinian National Boycott Committee: www.bdsmovement.net/ This is an edited version of Omars speech to the PSC AGM, where he received a standing ovation. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign today is the finest and most effective Palestine solidarity group anywhere in the world. A warm salute to PSC and all its chapters and members for a job very well done. With its emphasis on the rights of all Palestinians, not just those of us in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory, PSC has distinguished itself from many other solidarity groups that had to struggle with this basic concept of solidarity with the oppressed. Today, there is a sense of critical urgency in solidarity with Palestine. Israel has embarked on a new phase in its ongoing crusade to disappear the Palestinian problem through literally disappearing the Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing, colonial expansion, killings and house demolitions, the wall, the fatal, even genocidal siege on Gaza and the continuous denial of refugee rights have all reached a new, intense chapter where Israel is awash with colonial arrogance, buttressed by criminal impunity afforded to it by deeply complicit Western government and institutions. Thus BDS. At its most basic level, BDS calls for ending partnership in crime, ending complicity in the perpetration, justification and whitewash of Israels grave violations of Palestinian rights. That is not heroic. Withdrawing support for an evil policy or system, as Martin Luther King describes the boycott, is not heroic; it is a profound moral obligation. Solidarity with Palestine means, above everything else, supporting the Palestinian right to self determination, which entails listening to Palestinian voices and heeding their appeals, as expressed through their civil society organisations. Today, solidarity with Palestine cannot but include support for BDS as the most popular and one of the most effective forms of peaceful, civil struggle for Palestinian rights. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign began with the Palestinian civil society call in 2005. There were many boycott or divestment initiatives years before the BDS Call, including PSCs Boycott Israeli Goods campaign [launched in 2001], but BDS is the specific name of the call issued by the great majority of Palestinian civil society on 9 July 2005, which though rooted in decades of Palestinian and international boycott and divestment initiatives against Israel constitutes a qualitatively new phase in the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and in international solidarity with Palestinian rights. In the BDS movement, we must be careful not to confuse principles with tactics. The main principles of BDS are Freedom, Justice, Equality, embodied in the three basic demands of the BDS call which are the minimum to achieve self-determination right of return, end of 1967 occupation and colonization, as well as equality for the indigenous Palestinians inside Israel. No part of the Palestinian people can be ignored. Anyone claiming to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people cannot be satisfied with ending the 1967 occupation alone while ignoring the basic rights of the rest of the Palestinian people, as that

would address most of the rights of a mere one third of the Palestinian people, sidelining the basic, UN-sanctioned right of the great majority of the people of Palestine. BDS tactics are based on three operational principles: context-sensitivity, sustainability, and gradualness. The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest Palestinian civil society alliance that leads the global BDS movement, defers to partners in any international context deciding the BDS targets and campaign tactics that are most suitable for their particular context. BDS is about accumulating victories and widening support for Palestinian rights in a big-tent movement that is anchored in international law and universal principles of human rights. Aside from respect for these key principles, which are inherently anti-racist, ideological and political considerations should not hinder the spread of BDS into the mainstream around the world. While our basic rights under international law are inalienable and non-negotiable, our means to realize them and the methods through which the movement of international solidarity supports our struggle to realize them are tactical and dependent on context, political alliances, awareness, among other variables. BDS is not a leftist agenda, as such, though leftists are obviously expected to support it. At its core, it is based on upholding human rights principles and international law, both of which should be endorsed by any self-respecting (morally-consistent) liberal, not just by progressives. Our analysis of Israels regime of multi-tiered oppression against the Palestinian people is fundamental settler-colonialism, occupation, apartheid. Many analysts maintain that Israels regime of oppression is in fact worse than apartheid. While true, this does not refute that it also includes forms of apartheid, a crime well defined under international law, based on the 1973 International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the 2002 Statute of the International Criminal Court, both of which define apartheid in terms that apply to part of Israels regime of oppression. BDS is a universalist movement that categorically opposes all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. This is not negotiable. We should never welcome racists in our midst, no matter what. Equating Israel with the Jews is unacceptable and is, in fact, anti-Semitic. Only Zionists and Nazis do that. Nazis say Jews are sub-human, Zionists say they are superhuman; both agree that they are not a normal part of the human species, and that is clearly racist. Claiming that a boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic because it is equivalent to a boycott of the Jews assumes that Israel and the Jews are one and the same. This implies that Jews are one monolithic sum who think alike and are all collectively equivalent to Israel and responsible for Israel. If this is not anti-Semitic, I am not sure what is! Jews, like any other human group, have diversity and differences. Many of the leaders of the BDS movement in the West are Jewish intellectuals, academics, feminists, students, activists. Many of them support the struggle for Palestinian rights through BDS not just out of a deep-rooted sense of international solidarity and moral obligation but also based on their insistence that Israel, a colonial apartheid state does not and should not speak in their names. BDS is on the verge of its South Africa moment. With the beginnings of divestment in the US, you can almost smell it. We have had huge successes, such as Alstoms recent loss of a $9.4bn Saudi contract and Veolias continuing losses of contracts (now standing at more than

$12bn), especially in the UK and Ireland. Many thanks to the anti-Veolia campaign in the UK, led by PSC chapters. The University of Johannesburgs severance of ties with an Israeli university implicated in human rights violations and the spread of the cultural boycott to prominent musicians and other artists have also led many to sense the South Africa moment. The need now is FOCUS, to take the campaign into the mainstream, with the UK and South Africa leading. We cannot expect all our campaigns to achieve concrete results in a few months; we need to think long term, to strategize, to build broad alliances and to build awareness throughout the process. A key factor to take into consideration in mainstreaming BDS is the need to highlight and strengthen the ties between the struggle for Palestinian rights and the global struggles for social and economic justice, for freedoms, for equal rights, against racism, for immigrant rights, for the environment, for LGBT rights, etc. We must recognize and convey to the mass public in our campaigns how Israels expansionist and belligerent agenda fits right at the centre of the agenda of the 1%, the Perpetual Wars Inc. agenda that thrives on ongoing armed conflicts, imperial pillage, racism at home, deterioration of social and economic conditions for the 99% of societies. Israels wars and colonial endeavours are good business for the Western 1%, the military industries, the homeland security businesses, the oil companies, the banks and financiers, etc. The Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality is today at the core of the global social movement and its struggle for jobs, affordable housing, health care, environmental sanity, equality and dignified living. The 1% of the world are already united; it is high time for us, the 99%, to unite.