After Israel’s illegal war against the 1.5 million Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, with all its war crimes and crimes acts of genocide, the Palestinian civil society campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, BDS, has spread dramatically and consistently throughout the world, from Montpellier to Johannesburg, from Stockholm to London, from Ramallah to Toronto, to New York, from Oslo to Rio de Janeiro, to Cairo to Kuala Lumpur. For the first time in decades, we feel that Israel’s impunity is slowly coming to an end and that the indigenous people of Palestine may finally attain justice and equality under international law.

But what can solidarity movements do after the Palestinian Authority’s disgraceful withdrawal of support at the UN Human Rights Council for the UN Fact Finding mission’s Goldstone report on Israel’s war crimes? The French representative to the Council repeated the mantra: “We cannot be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.” To him and to the French government, I say: Do not even try to cover up your criminal complicity in Israeli violations of international law by cynically and immorally hiding behind the ill-conceived and entirely unpopular position of an authority that you, the EU, Israel and the US have imposed on us, without a democratic mandate or any accountability!

If you really want to know what “THE Palestinians” want, read all the statements that were issued by Palestinian political parties, human rights organizations and other civil society coalitions; they all expressed solid support for the Goldstone report and demanded immediate adoption of the report and its recommendations by the UN. So did Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. This position is also endorsed unanimously by the Palestinian BDS National Committee, the BNC, the largest coalition of Palestinian parties, NGOs, unions and other civil society components, representing Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, Palestinians inside Israel and, most importantly, Palestinian refugees, who form the absolute majority of the people of Palestine. The BNC calls on all conscientious people around the world to intensify BDS as the most effective response to the latest failure by the UN and the so-called international community to defend international law and to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes and ongoing abuse of human rights.

Where governments have failed to protect Palestinian rights, there is a moral imperative for citizens to act. As during the global struggle against apartheid in South Africa, creative, gradual and context-sensitive citizen-led campaigns present the best hope for ending Israel’s occupation and oppression.

Most recently, the British Trades Union Congress, TUC, which represents 6.5 million workers, adopted a selective form of BDS. A few weeks earlier, hundreds of a group of prominent cultural figures, including John Berger, Danny Glover, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, issued a statement protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s special tribute to Tel Aviv, saying that “the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of … an apartheid regime” was an objectionable act of complicity.

Concurrently, the Norwegian finance minister announced that her country’s sovereign pension fund, the third largest in the world, has decided to divest from an Israeli arms company implicated in providing equipment to Israel’s wall built on occupied Palestinian land. The decision was in compliance with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice at the Hague in 2004 which found Israel’s Wall and settlements to be in contravention of international law.

Israel’s latest war of aggression against the occupied Gaza Strip and its two-year illegal and immoral siege of the Strip have stimulated a real transformation in world public opinion against Israeli policies. The heart-wrenching images beamed across the world of Israeli white phosphorus bombs showering densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods and burning children hiding at UN shelters triggered worldwide boycotts and divestment initiatives in economic, academic, athletic and cultural fields. The former president of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, distinguished artists, writers, academics and filmmakers, progressive Jewish groups, major trade unions and labor federations, church-affiliated organizations and student groups have all endorsed, to varying degrees, the logic of sanctions, convincing many that our South Africa moment has finally arrived.

The Palestinian-led and guided BDS campaign, which was launched in July 2005, is endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Palestinian organizations everywhere. It is the closest thing we have to a Palestinian consensus. Rooted in a long tradition of non-violent popular resistance in Palestine and largely inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, it adopts a rights-based approach that is anchored in universal human rights that all people of conscience have defended since the French Revolution. It resolutely rejects all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

The BDS call unambiguously defines the three basic Palestinian rights that constitute the minimal requirements of a just peace and through which the Palestinians can exercise their inalienable right to self-determination:

(1) Ending the 1967 military occupation of all Arab lands including Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as in Lebanon and Syria;

(2) The UN-sanctioned rights of the refugees, particularly their right to return to their homes and to reparations; and

(3) Ending the system of racial discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, described by an increasing number of experts as an “apartheid regime.”

The BNC published this year an in-depth analysis of Israel’s system of oppression against the Palestinian, concluding that Israel practices occupation, colonization and apartheid. A recent study commissioned by the South African government and led by the prominent international law expert, Prof. John Dugard, reached the same conclusion, despite limiting itself to the 1967 territory.

Calling Israel an apartheid state does not imply that its system of discrimination is identical to apartheid South Africa’s. It simply states that Israel’s laws and policies against the Palestinians, described even in a 2008 State Department report as a system of “institutional, legal and societal discrimination,” largely fit the 1976 UN definition of apartheid.

Despite the above, awash with understandable guilt over the Holocaust, unable or unwilling to recognize the fundamental difference between opposition to Israel’s violations of international law and discrimination against Jews, the Western establishment has failed to adopt any policy instrument intended to hold Israel accountable or to pressure Israel in any meaningful way to actually end its human rights abuses and implement the relevant precepts of international law. Instead, Europe has continued to bribe the Palestinians to accept paying in their land and rights the price of a European genocide against Jews which Palestinian Arabs had no role in perpetrating.

The most morally and politically sound policy that the international civil society can pursue to contribute to upholding the primacy of international law and universal human rights in the Middle East is through adopting a morally consistent and operative position that endorses meaningful BDS initiatives against Israel, similar to those applied to apartheid South African.

What exactly is BDS calling for?

The most significant civil society groups, political parties and unions representing the great majority of Palestinians, inside the occupied territory, in Israel as well as in the diaspora, have supported BDS since July 2005. We are calling upon the world to boycott Israel, with all its institutions and companies, as well as to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s apartheid, occupation or denial of refugee rights.

But what if a group only wants to focus on the occupation, not on apartheid in Israel or refugee rights? The inalienable rights of the people of Palestine are indivisible and non-negotiable. Only the Palestinians can decide what we aspire to and how we can exercise our right to self determination. Solidarity movements choose the tactics that they perceive as the most effective and the most sustainable in their particular context to help us achieve our rights.

In the boycott against apartheid South Africa, all apartheid institutions were boycotted: cultural, athletic, academic, economic, etc. We are asking for the exact same measures being applied to Israeli occupation and apartheid. In every boycott movement, you adopt measures against the state that is violating international law and human rights principles. Even if you oppose only the occupation and colonial settlements, you must boycott Israel; after all, according to international law, Israel as a state is the entity that is guilty of the crimes of occupation and colonization. Despite the obvious differences, no one has ever called for boycotting Sudanese products made in Darfur or Chinese products made in Tibet in opposition to perceived human rights violations in either. We should insist on moral consistency and reject double standards.

But isn’t boycott counterproductive because it hurts the Palestinians?

This is up to us, the Palestinians, to decide. We appreciate your solidarity, but we are mature enough to decide what is in our best interest. Yes, boycott has a price for us; but clearly the great majority in our society is ready to pay the price in order to end Israel’s oppression.

Can BDS actually work against such a powerful country as Israel?

A quick review of the most recent successes of the BDS campaign tells us that, indeed, BDS not only can work, but is in fact working quite well. In only 4 years, the BDS movement against Israel achieved far more that our South African comrades achieved in 20 years. We now have support from major unions, from South Africa to Britain, to Canada, to several European countries, including France and Italy. Major cultural figures in the West have come out in support of boycott or have heeded our calls by boycotting Israel, even without announcing their support for it. Every week, there is a new initiative somewhere around the world of civil society groups and social movements organizing campaigns that implement BDS tactics.

In perhaps the most important indicator of our success to date, this last May, at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference, AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr referred to the BDS campaign saying, “No longer is this campaign confined to the ravings of the political far left or far right, but increasingly it is entering the American mainstream.”

Finally, isn’t any boycott of Israel anti-Semitic?

Actually, this accusation is itself anti-Semitic! It assumes that criticism of Israel or action against its oppression by necessity is an attack against all Jews, as if all Jews have a monolithic view in support of Israel and are collectively responsible for its actions and policies. THAT assumption is the definition of anti-Semitism!

Our movement is anchored in universalist, progressive principles that reject all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. We call for a boycott of Israel not because most Israelis are Jewish, but because Israel is a colonial and apartheid state. If it were Christian, Hindu or Muslim, it would not make a difference. So long as it is oppressing us and violating our fundamental rights, we shall continue to resist it by all means, including BDS. Furthermore, there is a growing pattern of Jewish groups around the world joining the BDS movement. In the US, Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and even in Israel, an increasing number of Jewish groups and public intellectuals are reaching the conclusion that a just peace can never come true without effective, sustainable and morally consistent BDS tactics against Israel.

Two days after the end of Israeli hostilities against Gaza and despite all the death, devastation and trauma, hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s children almost literally rose from under the rubble that most of Gaza was reduced to and went with enthusiasm to their damaged schools, carrying their torn bags, scarred books and injured souls. Their agony was deep and anger deeper; but their eyes were still shining with ambition, defiance and hope for emancipation. Like South African children of yesteryear, they deserve a better future; they deserve freedom and dignified living. Thus BDS!