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BDS Movement 15 December 2014
BDS Movement 15 December 2014
Repression Fails to Stop the Growing BDS Movement on North American Campuses!
In
the past few years, support for the Palestinian call for Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel has grown tremendously
around the world, particularly on North American campuses, despite
heightened bullying and threats by Israel and its well-oiled lobby
groups.
In
December 2013, the American Studies Association’s historic endorsement
of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions, following the precedent
set a few months earlier by the Asian American Studies Association,
successfully pierced the McCarthyist wall of fear and intimidation that
Zionists had created within the US academy.
A
number of high profile academic associations subsequently followed suit
and passed resolutions in support of the global, Palestinian-led BDS
movement, including the Native American and Indigenous Studies
Association, the Association of Critical Ethnic Studies, the African
Literature Association, the Peace and Justice Studies Association and,
most recently, the National Women's Studies Association. The Middle East
Studies Association has overwhelmingly voted to legitimize support for
BDS.
During
the same period, many student governments on U.S. and Canadian campuses
passed divestment resolutions; in the past two years, six such
resolutions were passed within the University of California system
alone.
As
the BDS movement expands rapidly in the heart of the US empire,
Israel’s key backer and bankroller, the Israeli government and Zionist
organizations are intensifying their efforts to repress BDS on campuses
and forestall the growing voices calling for an end to Israel’s regime
of occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid.
In
February 2014, the Israeli government held a secret meeting to adopt a
new strategy for fighting the BDS movement worldwide, indirectly
admitting the failure of its earlier propaganda-based strategy. The
Ministry of Strategic Affairs, now in charge of fighting BDS, requested
100 million shekels for an aggressive campaign to combat the movement;
the funds were earmarked for“PR materials and aggressive legal and media
campaigns against pro-boycott organizations.” [1] The Ministry of
Strategic Affairs has already provided the intelligence branch of the
Israeli army with “a budget of several million shekels for the purpose
of bolstering military surveillance of such organizations.”[2]
The
reverberations of Israel’s desperate attempts to suppress BDS,
particularly after the failure of its “Brand Israel” campaign, which
poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a propaganda war aimed at
whitewashing Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, are now
being felt across campuses in the UK, Europe and North America. [3] This
is especially the case after Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza this past
summer, which exposed its regime’s naked brutality to the world and left
it more vulnerable and less defensible.
Zionist
organizations, often from western universities, are now actively trying
to crackdown on BDS student organizing, turning to the only defense
they have left - sheer coercion and suppression of free speech. But
those tactics have already backfired, alienating liberals and
inadvertently boosting support for BDS.
In
the United States, anti-Palestinian groups have started to “regularly
threaten university administrations with legal action and encourage
administrative punishment of SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine)
groups.”[4] Similar tactics are being used by Israel’s supporters in the
UK. [5] Israel and its lobby groups are trying to criminalize support
for BDS on campus to forcefully shut down legitimate spaces for student
activism and for academics’ expression of criticism of Israel’s regime
or even its policies. Israel is effectively promoting a chilling “new
McCarthyism” that demands unconditional loyalty and that severely
punishes dissent. [6]
The
most glaring example of this escalating repression is the case of
Palestinian-American Professor Steven Salaita. After being offered a
tenure track position at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign,
Salaita was targeted for denouncing Israel’s latest massacre in Gaza on
social media. As a result of Zionist pressure on the university,
Professor Salaita was stripped of his tenured job appointment. Thousands
of U.S. academics have come out in support of Salaita’s case denouncing
the political decision by the university as an infringement of free
speech.
The
targeting of those who criticize Israel is not just about the question
of Palestine; it has broader implications for all those who are
organizing for social justice in North America and elsewhere in the
world. Steven Salaita’s case clearly illustrates the danger of
university administrations becoming agents that facilitate the policing
of legitimate expression of support for struggles from Ferguson to Gaza
and many in between. It also underscores the way Palestine and BDS
activism are becoming the frontline defending the right to freedom of
expression and to dissent on increasingly corporate-influenced campuses
in North America.
At
the recent launch of a divestment campaign at the University of
Toronto, BDS organizers were subject to racist and sexist attacks by the
fanatic Jewish Defense League. Instead of protecting students and
upholding their right to freedom of speech, the university
administration capitulated to this coercion and shut down the BDS event,
instead of escorting a group that is accused of hate speech off campus.
[7] Still, BDS campaigns are spreading across Canada.
The
tide has turned, and BDS has built a broad based international human
rights movement that firmly stands with the Palestinian struggle to end
Israel’s violations of international law and achieves freedom, justice
and equality. This movement cannot be easily stopped. The divestment
resolution that was passed by the student government at UCLA on November
20th is the clearest evidence of this. In a landslide
victory, a broad coalition of student organizations passed the
divestment resolution despite an aggressive campaign that was waged by
the Zionist organization Hillel, which had an annual budget of $1.8
millon in 2012, and went so far as to hire a PR firm to fight BDS on
campus. [8] Through collective organizing students managed to defeat
these forces of repression and intimidation.
People
of conscience throughout the world are making their voices heard and
standing on the right side of history. These voices “signal an end to
Israeli apartheid. The clock is ticking.” [9]
[2] Ibid
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