ON POPULAR RESISTANCE AND BDS

The Future of the Palestinian Struggle38

Jamal Jumaa

The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 has had an impact far worse and more dangerous on the Palestinian people than the Israeli incursions into the West Bank in 2002. This is because the Accords reversed the values and principles of the Palestinian Revolution, reduced the map of Palestine into shrunken and fragmented territories, and distorted the Palestinian educational curricula and inalienable national ideals instilled into the Palestinian consciousness over decades. The Accords effectively ignored key events in the Palestinian struggle: the Nakba of 1948, the Naksa of 1967, in addition to countless other massacres and displacements of the Palestinian people. Palestinian cities like Haifa, Acre, Nazareth, Jaffa, Lod and Ramle suddenly ceased to exist as Palestinian, and the term “the Israeli enemy” was rendered mute.

Even the Left could not act as a safety valve to rescue the sinking ship of the PLO. Instead, they sank into an identity and existential crisis. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP), to which I belonged, entered a major crisis that resulted in abandoning the party’s ideological identity and changing its name to the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP). Subsequently, many of the Party’s members left. A similar storyline can be told about the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).

The extent of the crisis resulting from the Oslo Accord is clear to us, Palestinians. Instead of ending the occupation, the Accords institutionalized it by not reaching a final settlement on key issues, including the administrative division of the Occupied Territories into “A, B and C.” This has allowed Israel, among others, to maintain—and even strengthen—its colonial project in Jerusalem and Area C, both making up over 60% of West Bank areas.

Like most Palestinians, especially First Intifada activists, I expected that the next popular uprising would inevitably be against the PA and in protest of the Oslo Accords. The Second Intifada of 2000, however, worsened an already horrific reality on the ground.

In truth, the PA has failed to preserve the Palestinian national project. Coupled with its poor governance practices, are its corruption, nepotism, bribery, silence over Israel’s actions in Jerusalem and the West Bank, its suppression of the Palestinian resistance, especially members of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the PFLP, its control over the judicial system and over people’s lives. Crony capitalists have also emerged because of the alliance between businesspeople and the PA’s security services, institutions and political elite. This, in turn, has led to the rise of a bourgeois class whose interests are linked with the occupation system and who, thus, became threatened by the Palestinian national project. They did so by strengthening economic dependence on Israel and eradicating what might be called the resistance economy developed during the First Intifada. As a result, the middle class shrank and a wide segment of people living below the poverty line was formed.

Following the Benjamin Netanyahu-led Likud Party’s rise to power between 1996 and 1999, a freeze on settlement activity ended, and the pace of settlement expansion increased. I noticed, at the time, that an undeclared war was being waged on the Palestinian environment. Most of the wastewater from settlements poured through Palestinian agricultural lands, destroying lands, crops and polluting spring water. The West Bank ended up being a disposal site for solid and hazardous waste, including wastewater coming from pre-1948 Palestine (Israel). Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian landscape and environment includes the cutting down of trees, mostly under security pretexts, as in Gaza’s buffer zone. Israeli bulldozers destroyed most of the orchards there, from where hundreds of tons of citrus had been exported to Jordan and other Arab countries during the 70s, 80s and earlier.

In 1999, I began coordinating with the Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG) to establish a Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network to confront Israel’s systematic environmental destruction of the Palestinian environment. I enjoyed a cordial relationship with the Group’s managers and the directors of other institutions by virtue of my work in agricultural relief in the early 90s. The Network included 12 NGOs operating in the Occupied Territories in 1967; the challenge was to advance its work despite the lack of an allocated budget. The PHG provided the location and logistical support for the Network, and my battle with funding began.

This was my first exposure to the dynamics of NGO work, the means for securing funding and the conditions set by international donors to allocate funds. It helps one understand local interactions with international bodies, usually with underlying conflicting ideals. One dangerous aspect to this interaction is the relationship between NGOs and the parties they are affiliated with, and how these NGOs’ influence has become stronger than that of the parties they represent because of the financial resources at their disposal.

These service-based popular initiatives represented the civil branch of the political parties, the key link between the parties and their people, as well as a strong means of attracting people to join the ranks of political parties during the period leading up to the Intifada. Most of these NGOs, if not all, were affiliated with the Left. Another type of NGOs emerged against the backdrop of promoting the peace process and co-existence between the two peoples. The goal of these NGOs was to normalize relations between the Palestinians and Israelis, at local or regional levels.

My first task was to design a webpage for the Network and produce material on environmental issues, the project being funded by UNDP/PAP. On completion of the webpage design and content, the NGO had one condition: to acknowledge them as the sponsor for this work. However, when they discovered the content of the designs, they declined association with the webpage because of its “national” orientation. Is it a sin to talk about the Israeli violations committed against our people and the destruction of our country’s environment?! All I did was to address the crimes committed by illegal settlements against the environment and the future of Palestinian life on this land that were contrary to international law, but I excluded any mention of either armed or peaceful resistance. This exemplifies how the war we face seeks to curtail our awareness, distort our national culture and sever our association with Palestine. Obviously, this NGO then terminated funding.

The environmental destruction was enormous during the first year of the Second Intifada from September 2000 until the incursions into the West Bank in March of 2002. Thousands of perennial olive trees were cut down along the main roads under the pretext that they would be used as shields for anybody shooting at army and settler cars. Entrances to cities were closed and garbage trucks were denied exit from Palestinian cities, leading to mountains of waste accumulating in the cities.

During my work at the Network during this period, I focused on two key issues: exposing, on a global scale, Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian landscape and environment, and achieving the dismissal of two NGOs in the Network that promoted normalization and were members of the Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME). I also wanted to have the organization removed from Friends of the Earth International, the largest environmental umbrella in the world. FoEME has claimed to represent Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Egypt in this global network, this being made possible in 2004 after lobbying, pressure and forging alliances in the Network that lasted over two years with groups from the South. The two groups promoting normalization were eventually expelled from the Network at the beginning of 2002.

The Second Intifada (or Al-Aqsa Intifada) began as a popular uprising similar to the First Intifada. I recall how when we went out by the thousands for the funeral of a martyr to the Al-Bireh Cemetery, we would return with more than one martyr. The Israeli Occupation government unleashed its forces, authorizing them to repress, kill, abuse and exercise outright collective punishment to break the uprising since the Intifada erupted on September 28, 2000.

The Intifada was met with Israeli forces’ repression, abuse and killing, leading up to its militarization, which was exactly what Israel wanted. Palestinian armed groups and faction brigades then began attacking settlers and army patrols on the main roads, with operations later striking inside Israel in response to the crimes committed daily by the occupation forces. This led to Israel’s invasion of the West Bank under Ariel Sharon’s orders. At the time, I was working with foreign journalists, mainly facilitating their meetings with political leaders and civilians. I hoped that the Palestinian factions would end these operations immediately after the September 11 attacks in 2001, especially following George Bush’s declaration of his war on terror campaign. I expected that Israel would take advantage of this campaign to slap us with that label to stigmatize our struggle and to isolate us internationally.

Using tanks, the Israeli army invaded the West Bank on March 29, 2002, bombed the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, bulldozed streets, razed entrances to cities and villages, besieged the West Bank, cut off cities and villages from each other, invaded the camps and committed a massacre in every city and village they entered. The most horrific of these massacres was the infamous Jenin refugee camp massacre.

Nobody realized that Israel’s so-called Operation Defensive Shield was carried out purely to strike the Palestinian Resistance and re-occupy the West Bank in preparation for the construction of the Wall (the Apartheid Wall). Two months after the start of the Operation in June, while the West Bank was still under siege by tanks, nearly 250 vehicles began razing agricultural lands in the northwest of the West Bank along the Green Line, labelled as the first phase of building the 145 km Wall from Salem, north of Jenin, to Mas-ha, southwest of Qalqilya. Simultaneously, they started to bulldoze many areas around Jerusalem.

Here, the Israeli plans seemed clear, as it symbolically declared the Oslo phase and negotiations with the Palestinians dead. It then began dictating and forcing its vision for the future of the geographic area and for the relationship with the Palestinians through a colonial apartheid regime, starting with the unilateral disengagement plan. It is based on the ideology of the Zionist project, where Greater Israel is seen as stretching from the “River to the Sea,” with as few Palestinians as possible within its borders.

The project was based on the administrative divisions set out in the Oslo Accords. Therefore, Israel planned to build the Wall around areas A and B of the West Bank, hence isolating 62% of West Bank area for illegal settlement expansion. Here, Yasser Arafat should have dissolved the Palestinian Authority, withdrawn recognition of Israel and let Israel, as the occupying power, take responsibility for the entire population under its rule, as was the case prior to the First Intifada. However, Arafat was not going to live for long, and was under immense American and Arab pressure—he was surrounded by tanks at his HQ—to abandon his responsibilities in favor of Mahmoud Abbas as Prime Minister and Salam Fayyad as Minister of Finance. The two were imposed after Yasser Arafat passed away in 2004.

Starting the Grassroots Popular Campaign

Palestinian farmers in northern West Bank began to raise their voices over a potential third Nakba: the destruction of agricultural lands, greenhouses, irrigation networks, wells and water tanks. Movement between the cities and towns was very difficult, as there were still tanks on the streets, with military barriers erected in every corner. I consulted my connections and representatives of the Network in the northern governorates of the West Bank to arrange a meeting with the farmers, organized for the end of August in the Asla village in Qalqilya, two months after Israel began to raze their agricultural lands. Those who could, attended from the villages of Qalqilya and Tulkarm. I accompanied colleagues from some NGOs. The meeting was stormy, attended by nearly forty farmers and activists. The cries of some of them still ring in my ears: “This is a third Nakba. It seems the PA has agreed to the building of the Wall; they ruined everything for us, they plundered the land.”

Shocked, we returned to Ramallah. The next day, we, the Network’s coordinating committee, decided to launch a campaign to expose the scheme. Some of the NGOs donated to help facilitate the work. The PHG arranged for the work to take place in the Qalqilya Governorate from nearby Jayyous village, in addition to the Agricultural Relief in the Tulkarm Governorate and the Medical Relief in the Jenin Governorate. I left Ramallah and traveled between the governorates in coordination with active colleagues in these NGOs and their affiliates. We held meetings in the villages affected by the Wall and formed popular committees in each village, selecting representatives of affected farmers, village groups and local leaders. The idea of popular committees goes back to our experience in forming unified leadership committees in the First Intifada. These committees were then known as the “Popular Campaign Committees” or “Popular Committees.” Each popular committee bore the name of the village it was representing.

Farmers from different villages unanimously agreed about the Wall: they saw it as an attempt by Israel to separate their villages and homes from their agricultural lands as well as to isolate entire villages from one another. In other words, Apartheid. The campaign we launched was called the “Popular Campaign to resist the Apartheid Wall.” There were two factors behind this designation: the nature of the Wall project and its consequences, which is on a par with colonial apartheid practices. The second factor was farmers’ spontaneous accurate description of the project as an Apartheid Wall.

The challenge for popular resistance was to organize civil demonstrations and get people to join, despite the bloodshed and killing of Palestinians every single day. It was also equally challenging to keep the protests 100 percent peaceful. The use of firearms by one person could derail the peaceful movement. The committees started to organize daily demonstrations in many locations in areas of Jayyous, Flamiyya, Qalqilya, Baqa al-Sharqiya, Far’un and Al-Ras in Tulkarm, in addition to Zabouba and Anin in Jenin and other areas. All of these protests were committed to traditional popular rallies, and we did not have to stress the need for the protests to remain peaceful.

Demonstrations often took place in the early morning at the sites where bulldozers worked in order to disable them. On the first day, the bulldozers’ work was successfully disrupted. The people’s connection to the land in the north was organic; fertile agricultural lands were the main source of income for farmers and their families; hence their activities were being carried out daily. People were ready to sacrifice to protect their land from bulldozing and confiscation.

There is a very important dimension to popular resistance that was quite influential: international solidarity. In response to Israeli crimes, international solidarity began to re-emerge with the Second Intifada, with solidarity delegations arriving in Palestine. During Israeli invasions, groups of them formed human shields in some camps and in the HQ with Yasser Arafat. As Israel began constructing the Wall, we drew the attention of solidarity activists to it, and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) began to form, in parallel with the Ta’ayush (or co-existence) movement (which included Jews from the Israeli Left and Palestinians from 1948 areas). What is unique here is that solidarity activists participated in popular activities at the Square.

The participation of foreign and Israeli solidarity activists in demonstrations, sit-ins and tents, such as the Mas-ha tent in 2003, created a kind of confusion and added a new dimension that required defining the nature of their participation. One of the female protesters arrested by Israeli intelligence was investigated by an Israeli officer who pretended to be part of the solidarity group and was present in the tent. Another problem was the direct interaction and contact they had with the village residents, which also began to create some social problems. Namely, some people involved in the solidarity movement exceeded their mandate as members of the solidarity committees and began to dictate the form of resistance which they perceived to be acceptable and the kind of slogans that should be used. This was unhealthy and unsustainable for the popular resistance, affecting its popularity among the Palestinian public.

To discuss this issue, I initiated a meeting for the representatives of the popular committees in Tulkarm, Qalqilya and Jenin. This was necessary to resolve several issues, the most important of which were: restructuring the committees to facilitate the process of communication with solidarity groups as their numbers increased, and determining the kind of relationship to be established with Ta’ayesh and other Israeli groups and the international solidarity movement. The second issue was the dispute concerning the use of terminology relevant to the Wall, and the underlying understanding of the nature of this project and its objectives. This would determine the nature of the work strategy that we would adopt during the next stage. There was constant debate within the Network’s coordinating body (the umbrella of the popular committees’ campaign). Some of the members objected to calling the Wall the “Apartheid Wall.” The Palestinian Authority also rejected this label, calling it the “Wall of Annexation and Expansion,” instead. The NGOs’ premise in opposing the label has to do with the sources of funding: they feared that, insofar as European institutions do not accept this label, they therefore would not provide the necessary funding, taking us back to the risks of conditional international funding. The PA, in my opinion, viewed the “Apartheid” label as suggesting extremism and, hence, felt it would anger the Europeans and Americans.

We held the meeting in Tulkarm at the end of June 2003. This meeting was crucial for determining the campaign conditions and its political affiliations and relations. Undoubtedly, I was apprehensive about the direction the meeting would take, especially because of the relationship of some activists with certain NGOs. The meeting began with an analytical introduction about the Israeli plans for building the Wall and its repercussions, in addition to how that would determine the nature of the resistance strategies at the local and international levels. I also spoke about the popular resistance, the set of values and principles that should govern our work and the need to control and regulate the committees’ relationship with villages, on the one hand, and with the Israeli and foreign solidarity committees, on the other. At the end of the meeting, the committees adopted the following detailed points:

1.Focusing on decentralizing the relationship with the committees and working to integrate the people’s committees in each governorate into a single committee that represents all the villages in the governorate, in addition to forming a coordinating committee in each governorate that would be responsible for communicating with the village committees.

2.Placing an emphasis on the popular campaign’s comprehension of the nature of the Wall and the political meaning behind it, as it is an apartheid wall that forms the framework for the colonial apartheid project, which aims to end the Palestinian cause and eliminate the Palestinian struggle and inalienable rights.

3.Placing an emphasis on the leadership and decisions of the popular committees being Palestinian, and that the role of Ta’ayush and the ISM being limited to solidarity to support the Palestinian struggle and to change the Israeli and international public opinion. At the end of the meeting, we agreed on a program of activities until the end of the year.

In light of this decision, we requested a meeting with the Israeli Ta’ayesh movement and the ISM to agree on the principles of work. The meeting was arranged in al-Jawarish village in Tulkarm and attended by me and two representatives of the committees, where we presented our position to them. They requested some time to reflect before they answered, but we never received any response to our suggestions. Following this, we decided to organize their participation through the committees.

The first phase of building the 145 km-long Wall from Salem village, north of Jenin, to Mas-ha village, east of Qalqilya, was completed in mid-2003, i.e., within a year. At the time, we issued the first book in Arabic and English documenting this phase, an important document of which more than 20,000 copies were distributed, mostly to parliaments, international institutions and embassies.

In September 2003, I received an invitation from the United Nations to talk about the Wall. The invitation’s proposed title for the topic was “Does the Wall constitute an obstacle to peace?” Personally, I found this headline provocative and disgusting—the United Nations was still asking whether the Wall is an obstacle to peace. I am not sure what kind of peace they were talking about.

I accepted the invitation and prepared the summary of the book as a video presentation, showing the first phase of the Wall building, supported by maps, pictures and analyses. My speaking slot at the conference was for ten minutes but I spoke for about twenty minutes without interruption. Clearly, the information I provided shocked the audience and as soon as I got off the stage, I spoke to our Ambassador to the United States, Nasser Al-Kidwa, who assumed responsibility to take this file to the General Assembly and, from there, to the International Court of Justice. After the Conference ended, a tour of several US states was arranged to talk about the Wall.

That visit marked the beginning of the campaign’s work at the international level, after which it participated in many conferences and tours to talk about the Wall and its political and economic ramifications on the future of the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom. During these interactions, I encountered a painful reality, especially in Europe: that at any conference or workshop, there had to be a “good” Israeli sitting by my side. I saw in this approach an implicit racist discourse and a colonialist view of the Palestinian people as they live under a settler-colonial occupation. Expressly, for a European to believe what you say, there must be a white Israeli at your side to give you credibility, which led me to challenge this approach. We are the ones whose suffering from the occupation will require generations to overcome, after liberation. We are the ones in the position to talk about our pain and the meaning of being robbed of freedom and dignity. At first, I refused to have any Israeli on the stage, even if he or she was anti-Zionist, leading to several disputes in this regard with our friends in European institutions and solidarity committees.

With the growing work of the popular campaign internally and of the Network’s external relations, differences were deepening between me and the coordinating committee of the Network. The popular campaign was emerging as a popular movement. The requirements of its work differed from the work of the Network. The latter is limited to coordinating the efforts of groups and organizations in relation to environmental issues, and the former is a popular political action and a form of resistance that is not compatible with the administrative or strategic work of civil society organizations. Hence, we decided on the Network’s coordinating committee to separate the popular campaign from the Network, and to change the administrative structure of the campaign so that representatives of the popular committees in the governorates form the coordinating committee to manage the campaign. The Network’s organizations requested that a place for representatives of the Network remain in the committee.

Following the death of President Yasser Arafat in November 2004, his opponents in the PA replaced him, supported by the Americans and the Israelis. The first is Mahmoud Abbas, who was one of the founders of the PLO, who has been a strong proponent of achieving peace through negotiations with the Israelis since the 70s and was the architect of the Oslo Accords. The second is Salam Fayyad, a distinguished World Bank employee. This is how a new phase in the Palestinian life and struggle was ushered in. It was based on first restructuring and forming the Palestinian security services with a new security doctrine, supervised by US General Keith Dayton. Among Palestinians, this is referred to as the “Dayton Doctrine.” The doctrine is also overseen by American, European and Israeli intelligence. Secondly, the new phase included the adoption of neoliberal policies and economic openness aimed at changing the economic lifestyle and attitudes of Palestinian society. In 2005, the PA realized that the popular movement to resist the Wall had begun to affect Palestinian and international public opinion, and the political discourse it presented embarrassed its political system and its orientations. Its work was only confined to the cycle of negotiations and the strengthening of security coordination with the Israeli Occupation, regardless of the fundamental changes that Israel was making on the political map on the ground, and the consolidation of its apartheid regime, in which Israel bypassed the issue of establishing a Palestinian State. In 2007, in an attempt to co-opt the work of the committee, Salam Fayyad twice offered to open a bank account for popular resistance activists from all over the West Bank and to deposit 6,000 shekels per month to support committee activities. We coordinated with Fatah activists in the popular resistance and caused the meeting to fail, twice.

The destructive effects of the post-Oslo era were not limited to the Palestinian struggle on the ground, but also affected international solidarity. In the 1970s and 80s, and up until the First Intifada, international support for the Palestinian cause came from the countries of the South and the revolutionary movements in the world. During the First Intifada, support expanded to the formation of solidarity committees with Palestine in Europe and America. But during the 1990s, the form of solidarity changed and became limited to Europe and America, led by civil society organizations in coordination with Palestinian NGOs. This support was framed within the scope of what is permitted under international law and official international institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations. The demands sought to put pressure on Israel without putting enforceable and effective means in place to hold Israel to account. The unions and popular movements were largely absent from the scene.

The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign was among the first to begin to restore international solidarity to its rightful place. First, it had a clear vision and demands from the international community; second, it had laid the foundations of solidarity within the framework of mutual solidarity based on the common enemy of peoples, represented by the alliance of imperialist and capitalist forces, including Israel, which aim to drain the wealth of peoples and perpetuate colonialism. Two examples of the latter stand out: Transnational Corporations (TNCs), and Israel’s arming and training of dictatorial regimes and militias that companies and regimes use to suppress revolutions and carry out assassinations of resistance leaders. The third point pertains to the active participation in large international social forums such as the World Social Forum, which includes thousands of institutions and movements from different countries and holds its annual conference for a week. We became members of the International Preparatory Committee for the Conference after a year of active participation. Our inaugural participation in the forum was in India in 2004, where Palestine was mentioned in the final statement as one of the places of conflicts in the world. In 2005, there was a paragraph in the final statement on Palestine and, in 2012, the International Social Forum devoted its conference to Palestine under the name of the “Social Forum Global/ Free Palestine.” Fourth, the committee launched joint solidarity campaigns shedding light on the suffering and common struggle of peoples. In 2017, we started an international campaign alongside indigenous movements, human rights groups and coalitions in Mexico, Brazil and America in the name of “A World Without Walls.” The campaign has now spread across more than 30 countries in the world, highlighting the impact of walls of colonialism and oppression on peoples and immigrants in Europe, America, Latin America, Kashmir and the Arab world.

Starting the BDS Movement

In 2003, we began a number of international conferences and meetings, raising the issue of boycotting Israel with foreign delegations. Our position was based on our struggle against the Apartheid Wall and on our understanding of Israel’s institutionalization of a dangerous apartheid regime in the West Bank, akin to that of Apartheid South Africa. We then initiated an immediate discussion with the Academic Boycott movement and BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. We discussed the founding statement of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in depth, which would then develop into a document representing its set of founding principles.

We worked on the document for an entire year, which included discussions and brainstorming with figures and institutions inside and outside of Palestine. The biggest challenge was to find a comprehensive discourse that all Palestinians could agree upon, to be the basis for their demand to boycott Israel. Completing this task on the discursive and referential levels was the most important factor contributing to the success of the BDS movement. Therefore, it was impossible for the movement to adopt in its discourse a political solution based on the two-state solution or the one-state solution because the Palestinian people do not agree on either of them.

Any solution to a legitimate struggle must ultimately achieve the demands and rights that the peoples struggle for. The Palestinian issue is one of rights, against the injustices and violations they are subjected to. The solutions presented are complex. Realizing absolute justice for our people, given the extent of the historical injustice that has befallen them, does not seem possible in the near future. Therefore, talking about one or two states becomes a political luxury and privilege in light of the great imbalance of power in favor of the colonizer that is using the most advanced modern technology to subdue, oppress and displace the colonized.

Therefore, it was agreed that the movement’s statement should be based on comprehensively addressing human rights, over which neither the Palestinians nor international solidarity activists would dispute. The statement adopted three basic rights and, to realize these rights, we demanded the boycott of Israel and sanctions enforced on it until it respects international law. These basic rights are the right of return for Palestinian refugees who make up 50% of the Palestinian people; ending racial discrimination and inequality for Palestinians living in pre-1948 Palestine (now Israel)—who make up 12% of the Palestinian people—and, finally, ending the occupation of Arab territories, including the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, which has gone on since 1967.

The statement was signed by 171 Palestinian groups and bodies inside and outside Palestine, whose representatives formed the movement’s general body which, in turn, forms the movement’s secretariat, where membership is voluntary. Its decisions and leadership are established by consensus.

Thus, the BDS movement restored Palestinians’ sense of unity, united international solidarity and provided activists with effective and influential tools for solidarity. Accordingly, the Palestinian people have strengthened the concept of the internationalism of human struggle, inspired by the exceptional experience of the people of South Africa.

The greatest achievement of BDS is restoring hope to the Palestinian people, making them realize that they are not alone in their struggle. The movement’s leadership style has become a shining Palestinian model of purity in an atmosphere where conspiracies against the Palestinians never stop.

As I write the last lines of this essay, the Bedouin families of Humsa are still living in tent-like shelters on the ruins of their homes, pursued by the occupation forces from one site to another, just like dozens of other Palestinian communities that continue to be uprooted by Israel. Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighborhoods are still being forcibly cleansed of their Palestinian population by gangs imbued with hatred and terror, armed with bulldozers and trucks to uproot and displace, while the world is still watching.

38 This essay was originally written in Arabic and was translated by Ahmed Almassri.