Hysterical over-reaction
This posting has these items:
1) Huff Post: BDS: A Legitimate and Moral Response to Israeli Policy, describes Netanyahu’s response as an ‘hysterical over-reaction’;
2) Gush Shalom: BDS, the New Enemy, Uri Avnery was there at the start but doesn’t recognise how the child has grown;
3) MEMO: Bibi boosts BDS – Israel’s opposition proves it is necessary, because, says Ben White, the opposition has bought into the Zionist narrative
4) Time: This Is Why It’s Hard to Boycott Israel, the campaign has morphed beyond its starting aim to become anti-Israel and, amongst some, a cover for antisemitism;
5) Links, groups leading the boycott campaign.
Is this Cape Town protest, on August 9th 2014, against the ‘apartheid’ and ‘racist’ nature of Israeli policies or is it simply anti-Israel? Photo by Reuters
BDS: A Legitimate and Moral Response to Israeli Policy
By James Zogby, Huffington Post blog
June 13, 2015
The Israeli government response to the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) movement has been predictable. Being incapable of engaging in any reasonable form of self-criticism or even self-reflection, Israeli leaders have, instead, turned their wrath on their accusers and their victims.
In recent years, several entities have implemented boycotts or are in the process of considering other punitive actions in an effort to force a change in Israeli behaviour in the occupied territories. European governments are moving to require Israel to label products originating in West Bank settlements so as to distinguish them from exports from Israel. Some U.S. churches and pension funds have decided to divest from businesses that support the occupation and settlement enterprises. U.S. and U.K. student groups have been successful in winning votes calling on their institutions to support BDS. And some professional academic groups and renowned scholars and performers have indicated that they will not co-operate with events supporting or hosted by Israeli institutions in the occupied lands.
These actions are not only legitimate expressions of political concern, they are also a profoundly moral response to Israel’s behaviour. When confronted by: Israel’s continued defiance of international law; its theft of Palestinian lands in order to construct Jewish-only settlements and roads; and its daily displays of brutality and humiliation of captive Palestinians — the desire to disassociate from and refuse to support that behaviour is the right thing to do. And when confronted by an international system that has neutered itself, refusing to act decisively to put the brakes on Israeli conduct in the occupied territories, then the response of the BDS movement becomes even more supportable.
In the face of this growing international pressure campaign, the Netanyahu government has gone on the offensive. Speaking this week in Israel, the Prime Minister said:
We are in the midst of a great struggle being waged against the state of Israel, an international campaign to blacken its name… The last thing we should do is bow our heads and ask where we erred, where we went wrong. We did not err, we did not do wrong.
Netanyahu went on to emphasize that what is behind this international campaign is nothing more than antisemitism in a new form. Others in his government went further calling the BDS movement “terrorism” or equating it to Nazi efforts to demonize and eliminate the Jewish people.
As an initial response, Israel’s legal system has criminalized activities that support BDS. And Israel’s allies in Congress have followed suit by introducing language in both the pending trade and U.S. Customs authorization bills that would target countries or businesses that in any way boycott, sanction or divest funds from Israel.
There is, of course, more than a little chutzpah on display here. Israel acts with impunity in seizing Palestinian land, demolishing Palestinian homes and denying basic freedoms to Palestinians. Israel then acts to sanction the Palestinian Authority by refusing to transfer tax revenues that are legally Palestinian funds, and supports U.S. legislation that sanctions and divests from any United Nations entity that recognizes Palestinian national rights. But when confronted with a dose of the same medicine, Netanyahu not only screams “foul,” he denounces his adversaries as “antisemites” and threatens severe retaliation.
This is nothing more than the perverse reaction of a spoiled child who insists that he not only win every game, but that he must be able to define the rules by which the game is played. And when everybody doesn’t agree to his “rules,” a name-calling tantrum follows, coupled with threats of retaliation. This is the spoiled child turned bully.
James Zogby
It’s an old story. When the United Nations votes 143 to three in favour of a Palestinian position, Israel denounces the world body as a “collection of antisemites and third world dictators.” The UN, Israel insists, is hopelessly biased and incapable of playing any fair role. Israel’s supporters then turn to what is, in fact, the “hopelessly biased” U.S. Congress pressing it to pass one-sided anti-Palestinian or anti-UN legislation. And they do so with no sense of irony.
To be sure, there are some sane voices being heard in Israel, above the din created by the hysterical overreaction. Like the prophets of old, they are calling on the Israeli people to reject the dangerous fallacy behind the Prime Minister’s argument. They note that it is not the BDS movement that is blackening Israel’s name — it is the policies of their government that are causing it to become increasing isolated. If anything, they say, the peaceful BDS movement is a response to Palestinian despair and to the world’s frustration with the intransigence and acquisitiveness of the Netanyahu government.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu’s efforts to demonize the BDS have been joined not only by Congress, but by several state legislatures who are passing anti-BDS bills and now by a collection of pro-Israel billionaires and ultra-right Islamophobic groups who have joined forces to silence the BDS protest movement here in the U.S.. One early tactic they have employed is the creation of an insidious website that posts the bios and pictures of student BDS leaders — the stated purpose being a warning to prospective employers that these young people are antisemites and enemies of Israel.
As a tactic, the resort to BDS is a far better and more productive form of resistance than violence and may be the last best hope of reining in Israel’s behaviour and salvaging the possibility of creating an independent Palestinian state. It would be a tragedy and a travesty if Israel’s bullying tactics were to succeed in silencing the legitimate and moral voices of the BDS movement.
James Zogby is the President, Arab American Institute and author of ‘Arab Voices’. He also co-founded and directed the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Save Lebanon, Inc.
Review of Arab Voices by James Zogby in NY Times.
Israeli Border Police and army soldiers block Palestinian protesters from advancing near the southern West Bank village of Jab’a, 14 March 2015. The protesters carried posters referring to the BDS movement which aims to put pressure on Israel to end its engagement in the Palestinian territories. Photo by Abed Al Haslhamoun / EPA
BDS, the New Enemy
By Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom
June 13, 2015
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU was racking his brain. His whole career is based on fear mongering. Since Jews have lived in fear for millennia, it is easy to invoke it. They are addicts.
For years now, Netanyahu has built his career on fear of the Iranian Nuclear Bomb. The Iranians are crazy people. Once they have the Bomb, they will drop it on Israel, even if Israel’s nuclear second strike will certainly annihilate Iran with its thousands of years of civilization.
But Netanyahu saw with growing anxiety that the Iranian threat was losing its edge. The US, so it seems, is about to reach an agreement with Iran, which will prevent it from achieving the Bomb. Even Sheldon the Great cannot prevent the agreement. What to do?
Looking around, three letters popped up: BDS. They denote Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a worldwide campaign to boycott Israel because of its 48 year-old subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Ah, here we have a real threat, worse than the Bomb. A second Holocaust is looming. Brave little Israel facing the entire evil, antisemitic world.
True, until now Israel has suffered no real damage. BDS is more about gestures than about real economic weapons. But who is counting? The legions of antisemites are on the march. Who will save us? Bibi the Great, of course!
HONEST DISCLOSURE: my friends and I initiated the first boycott, which was directed at the products of the settlements. Our peace movement, Gush Shalom, was deliberating how to stop the spread of the settlements, each of which is a land mine on the road to peace. The main reason for setting up settlements is to prevent the two-state solution – the only peace solution there is.
Our investigators made a Grand Tour of the settlements and registered the enterprises which were lured by government enticements to set up shop beyond the Green Line. We published the list and encouraged customers to abstain from buying these products.
A boycott is a democratic instrument of protest. It is non-violent. Every person can exercise it privately, without joining any group or exhibiting himself or herself in public.
Our main aim was to get the Israeli public to distinguish clearly between Israel proper and the settlements in the occupied territories.
In March 1997 we held a press conference to announce the campaign. It was a unique event. I have held press conference which were overflowing with journalists – for example, after my first meeting with Yasser Arafat in besieged West Beirut. I have held press conferences with sparse attendance. But this one was really special: not a single Israeli journalist turned up.
Still, the idea spread. I don’t know how many thousand Israelis are boycotting the products of the settlements right now.
However, we were upset by the attitude of the European Union authorities, which denounced the settlements while in practice subsidizing their products with customs exemptions like real Israeli wares. My colleagues and I went to Brussels to protest, but were told by polite bureaucrats that Germany and others were obstructing any step toward a settlement boycott.
Eventually, the Europeans moved, albeit slowly. They are now demanding that the products of the settlements be clearly marked.
THE BDS movement has a very different agenda. They want to boycott the State of Israel as such. I always considered this a major strategic error. Instead of isolating the settlements and separating them from mainstream Israelis, a general boycott drives all Israelis into the arms of the settlers. It re-awakens age-old Jewish fears. Facing a common danger, Jews unite.
Netanyahu could not wish for more. He is now riding the wave of Jewish reactions. Every day there are headlines about another success of the boycott movement, and each success is a bonus for Netanyahu.
It is also a bonus for his adversary, Omar al-Barghouti, the Palestinian organizer of BDS. Palestine is well stocked with Barghoutis. It is an extended family prominent in several villages north of Jerusalem.
The most famous is Marwan al-Barghouti, who has been condemned to several life sentences for leading the Fatah youth organization. He was not indicted for taking part in any “terrorist” acts, but for his role as organizationally responsible. Indeed, he and I were partners in organizing several non-violent protests against the occupation.
When he was brought to trial, we protested in the court building. One of my colleagues lost a toenail in the ensuing battle with the violent court guards. Marwan is still in prison and many Palestinians consider him a prospective heir of Mahmoud Abbas.
Another Barghouti is Mustafa, the very likable leader of a leftist party, who ran against Abbas for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority. We have met while facing the army in several demonstrations against the Wall.
Omar Barghouti, the leader of the BDS movement, is a postgraduate student at Tel Aviv University. He demands the free return of all Palestinian refugees, equality for Israel’s Palestinian citizens and, of course, an end to the occupation.
However, BDS is not a highly organized worldwide organization. It is more of a trade mark. Groups of students, artists and others spring up spontaneously and join the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Here and there, some real antisemites try to join. But for Netanyahu, they are all, all antisemites.
AS WE feared from the beginning, the boycott of Israel – as distinguished from the boycott of the settlements – has united the general Jewish population with the settlers, under the leadership of Netanyahu.
The fatherland is in danger. National unity is the order of the day. “Opposition Leader” Yitzhak Herzog is rushing forward to support Netanyahu, as are almost all other parties. Israel’s Supreme Court, a frightened shadow of its former self, has already decreed that calling for a boycott of Israel is a crime – including calls for boycotting the settlements.
Almost every day, news about the boycott hits the headlines. The boss of “Orange”, the French communications giant, first joined the boycott, then quickly turned around and is coming to Israel for a pilgrimage of repentance. Student organizations and professional groups in America and Europe adopt the boycott. The EU now vigorously demands the marking of settlement products.
Netanyahu is happy. He calls upon world Jewry to take up the fight against this antisemitic outrage. The owner of Netanyahu, multi-billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, has convened a war council of rich Jews in Las Vegas. His counterpart, pro-Labor multi-billionaire Haim Saban has joined him. Even the perpetrators of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion would not believe it.
AS COMIC relief, another casino owner is competing for the headlines. He is a much, much smaller operator, who cannot be compared to Adelson.
He is the new Knesset Member Oren Hazan, No 30 on the Likud election list, the last one who got in. A TV expose has alleged that he was the owner of a casino in Bulgaria, who supplied prostitutes to his clients and used hard drugs. He has already been chosen as Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. The Speaker has temporarily suspended him from chairing Knesset plenum sessions.
So the two casino owners, the big and the small, dominate the news. Rather bizarre in a country where casinos are forbidden, and where clandestine casino goers are routinely arrested.
Well, life is a roulette game. Even life in Israel.
Bibi boosts BDS – Israel’s opposition proves it is necessary
While Netanyahu’s policies are widely seen as boosting the global boycott campaign, it is Israel’s so-called moderate opposition that shows why BDS is necessary
By Ben White, MEMO
June 13, 2015
In his speech to AIPAC last year, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu referred 18 times to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. A year on, and it is clear that for Bibi, BDS is the new public enemy number one. Denounced as an antisemitic “strategic threat,” the Palestinian-led, global campaign to pressure Israel into ending systematic rights violations is now very much in Tel Aviv’s cross-hairs.
Ironically, it is during Netanyahu’s time in office that BDS has made considerable headway. His ambiguity over Palestinian statehood (in public, veering between rejection and unreliable endorsement) is exacerbated by the unambiguous views of his hard-right ministers and coalition partners. Then there was the unprecedented bombardment of Gaza, also under Bibi’s watch, and a slew of anti-democratic, hyper-nationalist legislative initiatives.
However, while Netanyahu may accelerate moves to boycott and impose sanctions, it is Israel’s so-called moderate opposition that most effectively makes the case for boycott. Step forward Isaac Herzog, leader of Israel’s Labour Party and head of the Zionist Union – the alliance with Tzipi Livni formed to defeat Netanyahu in the March elections.
Now leader of the opposition, Herzog addressed the annual Herzliya Conference on Sunday, and told attendees that “the biggest threat to the existence of the State of Israel” is a binational state. He warned that “in about a decade, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority. The Jewish national home will become the Palestinian national home. We will be again, for the first time since 1948, a Jewish minority in an Arab state.”
He continued: “I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel. I don’t want them to change my flag and my national anthem. I don’t want them to change the name of my country to Isra-stine.”
Compare these comments by the Labour leader with Netanyahu’s notorious election day warning of Palestinian citizens coming out to vote “in droves”. Or Bibi’s remarks as finance minister in 2003 – also at Herzliya, as it happens – about Palestinian citizens constituting the real “demographic problem”. As MK Ayman Odeh put it, “With a Left like this, who needs a Right?”
Meanwhile, former prime minister Ehud Barak also spoke at the Herzliya gathering, and he was keen to emphasise what he saw as a big difference between Netanyahu and Herzog. On Tuesday evening, Barak said: “Close your eyes and imagine a government headed by Herzog, Lapid and Kahlon. Or dream even bigger – a government headed by Yitzhak Rabin. Does anyone have a doubt that this present wave against Israel wouldn’t exist if this were the government today?”
To an extent, Barak has a point. Netanyahu’s re-election showed, in the words of B’Tselem, that “the voting public in Israel favours the ongoing occupation in its present form” – a message that even the country’s allies are finding hard to ignore. However, it is Israel’s opposition, not Bibi, who highlight the flaws in two arguments most commonly used against BDS.
Firstly, it is claimed that boycotts simply empower and energise the Right against the moderates who want to make a deal. But Herzog and Livni show where these ‘moderates’ are coming from, and what motivates their talk of Palestinian statehood.
Herzog’s speech at Herzliya demonstrated how the Zionist Left sees a peace agreement as a way of preserving a Jewish majority in most of historic Palestine. For them, Palestinian statehood in (some) of the territories occupied in 1967 is not about Palestinian self-determination but about racial segregation. To return to Barak, it is encapsulated by his campaign slogan in summer 1999: “Peace through separation: Us here, them over here.”
As Edo Konrad, an editor at +972 Magazine, put it this week, for “the great ‘liberals’ of Israeli society…peace and an end to the occupation aren’t an end in and of themselves, but a vehicle for maintaining and making permanent a demographic majority that will ensure Jewish rule over a country where 20 percent of the population is not Jewish.”
A majority, recall, that was only established through the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population; the refugees are still denied their right to return home to protect the “demographics” established by their expulsion.
“We must choose between two possible states”, Livni explained in 2013. “One state is Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and the other is a state between the sea and the Jordan river which will ultimately be an Arab state, not a Jewish one.”
Compare this to the words of Apartheid South Africa minister Eben Donges, who in 1959 stated: “We choose rather a smaller South Africa, with the political power in the hands of the whites than a greater South Africa, with the political power in the hands of the non-whites.”
A second argument often heard against BDS is that it damages the “peace process”. But even leaving aside the ways in which Netanyahu’s coalition has intentionally stymied progress in the official, US-led negotiations, taking a look at what Herzog has to offer in talks with the Palestinians offers a sobering reality check.
As I wrote before the election, the Zionist Union’s plan for a “final status agreement” makes for grim reading. Their manifesto promised to keep West Bank settlement blocs “under Israeli sovereignty” and Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital,” with Israeli tourism and industry zones in the occupied Jordan Valley. The platform, along with Herzog’s campaign trail statements, leave no doubt that the Palestinian state envisaged by Israel’s “moderate” opposition is a blueprint for a bantustan.
Just as the practical impossibility of an independent Palestinian state, through Israel’s colonisation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank – the famous “facts on the ground” – is prompting a mainstream discussion about the fundamental merits and desirability of the “two-state solution” itself, so a peace process dead on its feet can, and should, prompt a rethink about the nature of the process itself.
The official peace process is designed to thwart, and act as a substitute for, international law and the Palestinian people’s rights; BDS is based on them. The politics of Herzog and Israel’s centrists, the (il)liberal Zionists, is focused on preserving the settler colonial status quo; BDS seeks its transformation. Thus while Bibi and Bennett hasten Israel’s pariah status, it is the politics of the opposition, the ideology of Rabin, Barak, and Herzog, that best illustrate the impossibility of change from within – without the pressure and accountability that comes with BDS.
Ben White is the author of ‘Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide’ and ‘Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy’. He is a writer for Middle East Monitor, and his articles have been published by Al Jazeera, al-Araby, Huffington Post, The Electronic Intifada, The Guardian’s Comment is free, and more.
‘The legions of antisemites are on the march’. Demonstration Paris, July 23rd, 2014. Photo by Francois Mori / AP
This Is Why It’s Hard to Boycott Israel
Israeli leftists actually began the boycott movement against settlements, but it’s grown larger—and provides a cover for antisemitism
By Karl Vick, Time
June 05, 2015
The drumbeat of boycott is being heard again in Israel, faint, but persistent and disquieting. On June 3 the head of the French cell phone company Orange said he would he would pull the brand from Israel “tomorrow morning” if he could escape the penalties for voiding the contract. A day earlier, the national student union of Great Britain voted to boycott Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the first “a miserable statement” and the opposition leader Isaac Herzog called the rise of boycotts “a new form of terrorism.”
What’s the truth? The boycott movement was actually started by Israelis — Zionist liberals who support Israel’s existence on land it won in the 1948 war that gave birth to the country, but object to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory on the West Bank and Gaza Strip conquered in 1967. The liberals, however, wanted only to boycott goods produced by Israeli companies that operate on Jewish settlements atop Palestinian land—vast truck farms and small factories that profit from what critics call an essentially colonial arrangement.
It’s both a political and a social matter. A lot of the produce found in Israeli supermarkets — and lots of the wine in liquor stores — comes from Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and Tel Aviv liberals will remind one another to avoid it, much as many Americans boycotted table grapes in the 1960s, to pressure California farmers to improve the lives of the Mexican migrants who picked them.
Over time, people outside Israel took up the cause, especially in Europe. The continent was once a great champion of the Jewish state, but as Israel became more powerful and the occupation dragged on, people grew more sympathetic to the Palestinians (far more, according to polls, than in the United States). “Solidarity,” says Stein Guldbrandsen, a board member of the huge Norwegian public employee union, Fagforbunde, which has been a major force in the boycott.
Israel exports a lot of produce to Europe, and several supermarket chains there have been labeling the bell peppers and mint grown in West Bank settlements so consumers could avoid buying them if they wish. But Fagforbunde plays at another level. Along with advocates like Norwegian People’s Aid , the union promotes boycotts against whole companies, not just product by product. Any firm that does business with Israel on the West Bank faces “disinvestment” by Norway’s $890 billion sovereign fund. Believed to be the world’s richest, its board publishes a list of shame, naming companies “excluded from the investment universe.” The list includes firms that make cluster bombs, nuclear weapons, cigarettes and (as of Friday) mine coal. The list also includes companies that help build Jewish settlements on the West Bank, deemed a “serious violation” of human rights for contravening the 4th Geneva Convention, which bars settling residents of an occupying power in occupied territory.
How do they know what companies are profiting from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank? The information is right there on WhoProfits.org, a website maintained by a handful of liberal Israelis operating out of a shabby office in downtown Tel Aviv. The activists gather photos, annual reports and other public information, confirm its veracity, and publish it for the convenience of any investor interested in avoiding companies vulnerable to being labeled part of “the Israeli occupation industry,” as the site calls it. WhoProfits provides one-stop shopping for boycott activists.
“At the end of the day, they read the same website,” says Daniel Reisner, an international law specialist in Tel Aviv, where his firm does a growing business counselling companies on the risks of investing in and around Israel. He prefers not to name those clients. “I find that companies who are accused by boycotters react quite like victims of sexual assault,” Reisner tells TIME. “A: They want to keep it quiet and don’t want to tell anyone, because they appear to be ashamed–this guilt by accusation. And B: They want the matter to be handled as discreetly as possible. They won’t tell the press. They won’t tell the government. They won’t tell the shareholders.”
And yet, none of this amounts to boycotting Israel the country. All these activists—liberal Israeli Jews and ardent Scandinavians alike—take careful aim at punishing companies only for doing business on the West Bank (Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza in 2005). Other activists are not so restrained, however. They call for a broad boycott on all of Israel. And that’s where the issue gets difficult, and where Israel actually adds to the difficulty of taking discerning action.
For the last ten years, the most prominent voice for boycotting Israel is a group called BDS—short for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It was begun by a Palestinian in Ramallah, Omar Barghouti, who promotes a campaign of economic isolation and opprobrium against Israel inspired by the one mounted against apartheid South Africa. The group publicizes almost every pro-boycott development around the globe, and in the process frequently appears to take credit for each—even the discreet, surgical decisions of northern European pension funds that say they want nothing to do with BDS. The pension funds, and many other groups, are wary of BDS because its agenda reaches well beyond Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. BDS calls for Israel to allow back Palestinians who in 1948 either left or were driven out of what is present-day Israel—a maximalist position that Israelis understandably say amounts to the destruction of their country.
The Zionist liberals who started all this? They don’t like the sound of that one bit. “Because right now they are boycotting not only the products of the settlements,” says Tamar Hermann, a pollster for the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv resident who has long avoided settler vegetables and wine. “They are preaching for the expansion of the boycott to all Israeli products. For me, it’s problematic.”
What’s more, a broad boycott of all things Israeli offers convenient cover for antisemitic feeling, both the virulent strain lately resurgent in Europe and the latent sort that doubtless accounts for a measure of the extraordinary level of critical scrutiny directed at Israel.
But Israel’s government does nothing to clarify the situation. One of the reasons it’s so hard to enforce a “surgical” boycott on, say, bell peppers grown on a West Bank settlement is that the things are shipped abroad in boxes marked “Product of Israel.” Which is how the Israeli government sees things too. For decades, no Israeli government has chosen to observe the Green Line—the boundary separating Palestinian and Israeli territory in 1967 —as a border. A freeway runs from Tel Aviv to a settlement 10 miles inside the West Bank without a checkpoint. The speed traps are run by Israeli cops. The same big green busses that run on Israeli roads stop at bus stops outside West Bank settlements.
By every important measure — budget, voting, administration — the 200 settlements Israel has built on Palestinian land over the last 48 years are regarded, inside Israel, as part of Israel. Which may be very shrewd, or foolish, depending on how the boycott threat proceeds.
Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods
UK Jews who support the Palestinian call for a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israeli ApartheidWho profits?
Exposing the Israeli occupation industry.
Who Profits is dedicated to exposing the commercial involvement of companies in the continuing Israeli control over Palestinian and Syrian land. The project publishes information about these companies, produces in-depth reports and serves as an information centre.
Website of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), a wide coalition of the largest Palestinian organisations, trade unions, networks and NGOs.The most controversial campaign is PACBI, the Palestine Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel as it doesn’t target the occupation and settlements and because cultural and academic relationships with Israelis can carry the arguments into Israel and be supportive of Israeli dissidents.
