BDS 20th anniversary
BDS anniversary image
The BDS National Committee publishes this statement on its 20th anniversary:
Today, we mark a milestone in the liberation struggle of the Indigenous people of Palestine, as the Palestinian-led nonviolent, anti-racist BDS movement completes 20 years of grassroots organizing and building intersectional people power. This day will be remembered in history as the start of a principled, strategic, and creative process that has isolated Israel’s 77-year-old regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and military occupation at the grassroots and institutional level. It has redefined the meaning of solidarity with our struggle as starting with ending the complicity of states, corporations and institutions with this regime.
Meaningful solidarity, as BDS has tirelessly advocated, must uphold the fundamental ethical principle of doing no harm and stopping or offsetting harm done in one’s name.
Yet in the midst of Israel’s livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, we are too grieved and too enraged to celebrate the phenomenal BDS impact. But we owe it to every single Palestinian, especially our people in Gaza, to reaffirm our unbreakable commitment to march on until Israel’s regime of oppression is entirely dismantled. This obliges us to recognize and share with the world the immense people power we have collectively built over these two decades and the many milestones we have reached towards isolating genocidal Israel as a rogue state that threatens humanity at large.
Building power from the grassroots to the grasstops, the BDS movement has created an unprecedented level of global solidarity coordination and pressure to end Israel’s impunity and global complicity in its crimes. Despite the painful fragmentation of our people, due to the phases of settler-colonial conquest and the destructive Oslo process, our movement has been led by the largest Palestinian coalition ever, with entities representing the absolute majority of Palestinians inside historic Palestine as well as in exile, and has maintained consensus on its goals and strategies.
With the moral authority that this consensus provides, the BDS movement has influenced states’ decisions to impose targeted sanctions on Israel. It has played an indispensable role in pressuring some of the world’s largest investment funds to divest from companies and banks that enable Israel’s atrocity crimes. It has galvanized the collective power of unions, associations, and other grassroots formations representing tens of millions of workers, farmers, students, artists, academics, and justice organizers to make local governments as well as colonial Western academic and cultural institutions divest or break ties with apartheid and its complicit institutions. Moreover, “BDS … has changed Israel’s global trade landscape,” as a senior Israeli trade official has recently admitted.