An international boycott movement of Israel can play the same role that it did in apartheid South Africa, says Riham Barghouti.

The BDS movement kind of works as an umbrella organization, to provide guidelines, resources, liaisons and support, but not to delineate exactly what everybody should be doing,” says Riham Barghouti.

Barghouti’s family has participated in resistance against the occupation of Palestine since the late 1800s. In 1948, her family was exiled from the Palestinian village of Safad. Barghouti grew up in New York, but has maintained close ties with Palestine. She lived there from 1995 to 2005, and was a founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).

At the time that the official BDS call that was issued in 2005, 170 civil society organizations had signed on to it, representing all sectors of Palestinian people: In Gaza, the West Bank and Israel proper, but also Palestinian refugee organizations working in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria at the time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

THE INDYPENDENT: Why are Palestinians so active?
RIHAM BARGHOUTI: People that are oppressed will always struggle for liberty. It’s an inherent need; it’s like water; it is like air. You can only subjugate a people for so long before they rise up. There’s a continuous uprising; people can only bear the brunt of oppression for so long before something gives.

Tell us about the founding of BDS.
This builds off a long history of Arab boycott and Palestinian boycott against Israeli products and against companies that are profiting from Israel. As far back as 1936, during the Arab revolt against the colonization of Palestine, there were massive boycotts, refusal to engage with the British mandate authorities and so on, moving through to the First Intifada (1987–1993), where Palestinians burned their ID cards as an attempt to boycott the whole military civil administration, refused to work within that administration and began to boycott Israeli products.

When the BDS call was issued in 2005, we really built on grassroots organizing that was already happening on the ground. And we were — at the university I was working at in Palestine at the time — being devastated by the impact of the Israeli incursion into the West Bank, the closures, checkpoints, killing, injuring, land confiscation, expansion of settlements and so on.

In launching BDS, we provided a tool for people of conscience worldwide to mobilize and organize to sever ties with state, corporate and institutional bodies complicit in profiting from and maintaining the Israeli settler-colonial apartheid regime. The demands are very clear: end the occupation of all Arab lands, which includes the West Bank, Gaza, and the occupied Golan Heights; end the apartheid regime that exists inside Israel — so providing full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; and most importantly, because they compromise the largest portion of our population, is an implementation of the Palestinian refugees right of return to their home, their homelands.

Those are our goals. The way to get there is using the tool of boycott, in addition to other forms of resistance. It doesn’t undermine any other form of resistance that Palestinian people are using, and can use, and should be able to use in order to reach those aims.

What kind of successes has the movement seen?

From the onset, the idea was to find targets that made sense, make it something that you can create benchmarks and winnable kinds of components of your campaign, and identify very creative actions that can then pull in community and get media coverage.

For example, in 2006 Adalah-NY began organizing around Africa-Israel, an Israeli diamond-mining company that was mining diamonds in Namibia and building settlements in Palestine. Lev Leviev, the owner of Africa-Israel, was opening a diamond store in Manhattan at the time. And it just made sense. It part of a global BDS campaign yet, but it was a New York City hook. Eleven years later, the campaign succeeded in shutting down the store, and that loss of business led to the company declaring it will stop building settlements in 2014.

We’ve had city councils that withdrew contracts, local and community groups would remove their funds from these companies, you had apartheid-free zones in Italy that would no longer do business with companies that were profiting from the occupation. Then there’s academic boycott, with several academic associations having signed onto the divestment call. And there is the cultural component, with a number of cultural workers refusing to perform in Israel.

Just some actions taken in protest of the Israeli genocidal attacks on Gaza since Oct. 7 are the United Auto Workers calling for a ceasefire and pledging to look into their economic ties with Israel, the dock workers in Barcelona and Italy refusing to handle cargo and weapons bound for Israel and major trade unions in Belgium refusing to transport weapons to Israel.

The current war on Gaza has galvanized long-standing Arab boycott campaigns with U.S. companies that seemingly support Israel suffering huge losses, such as Starbucks losing $11 billion dollars in worth. In Egypt and Jordan, businesses like McDonalds and Dominoes are reportedly empty. And most recently, Puma dropped its contract with the Israeli Football Association, after a five-year BDS campaign, within which athletes and football clubs around the world ended their ties to the global sportswear manufacturer.

Compare the BDS movement to the South African boycott movement.

The South African call for boycott began in the 1950s. And it took a lot of time for people to accept it and to begin to work on it. Now, in relation, the Palestinian boycott call has progressed seemingly much quicker. But of course, we have social media and ways of reaching communication that weren’t available, then.

Where we have more of a problem is that the interests of the U.S. and Israel are so strongly aligned. And it’s multifaceted: There is the Christian Zionist belief system, in terms of the need for Jews to return to the Holy Land. You have the economic ties that are very strong. You have the military-industrial complex. You have geopolitical interests because for a while it was the only pro-U.S. body in the Arab world — although that has changed significantly — but it’s always been seen as the only by-product of the colonial system that still exists in the Arab world.

How do you address the criticism that BDS is anti-Semitic because it targets Israel?

Israel is attempting to make anti-Zionism and anti-Israel activism the same as anti-Semitism. And it’s a false conflation. Anti-Semitism is a very real and dangerous form of hatred and discrimination against the Jewish people based on racist values, while anti Zionism is an opposition to an illegal, immoral and apartheid regime that currently exists in Israel.

Jews and Jewish activists here in the U.S. and around the world are a part of this BDS movement. And they’ve been an amazing part; they showed some of the most powerful and inspiring actions, especially during the current Israeli war on Palestine.

How does what happens in Palestine affect the rest of us?

What’s playing out right now in Gaza — the fighting that’s taking place with the Israeli attacks and the Palestinian resistance to those attacks — is part of a much larger struggle in the region. And that’s why it also could be potentially so hopeful, because a war is being played out in Palestine. And that war is connected to the United States, to Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah — global interests. The event of a liberated Palestinian people will have a huge impact on the Arab world and on the global south. And if a successful genocide of the Palestinian people is allowed to continue, it will have a huge impact on the way that other oppressed people are going to fare.

Original Contents by Indypendent