On November 14, US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution recognizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and calling for accountability measures, including an arms embargo and lawful, targeted sanctions on Israel. The resolution was co-sponsored by 20 members of the US House of Representatives.
While other Congressional efforts, such as the No Way to Treat a Child campaign and the Block the Bombs Act, have called for conditioning or limiting funding and arms transfers to Israel, this marks the first time that a resolution in Congress has explicitly called for sanctions on Israel.
The S in BDS is no longer a taboo in the US.
It is actually inspired by the enforcement measures adopted by the UN against apartheid South Africa. Such measures are considered the most ethical, legal and effective paradigm for accountability. We work to build pressure on governments to impose legal, proportional, targeted, ethically justifiable, and strategically effective sanctions to help dismantle Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid against the Indigenous Palestinian people.
Sanctions were the final blow to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Given the dependency of Israel upon global markets, targeted and lawful sanctions at a state, regional or international level will be a highly effective measure to bring about real pressure on Israel’s apartheid regime.
Representative Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored even by a Representative who was endorsed by AIPAC just last year. This massive shift toward mainstream support for holding Israel accountable for its crimes is due to pressure from people-powered grassroots movements.
Many other countries have implemented some form of sanctions on Israel. But the US is by far the main culprit in arming, funding, justifying, and otherwise enabling Israel’s genocide, apartheid and occupation, and Israel’s crimes will continue with impunity unless US complicity is ended. Representative Tlaib’s resolution shows that we are closer than ever to ending that support.
Now is the time to escalate BDS pressure.
As part of their third state responsibility, all states are required to cooperate and adopt measures in order to bring Israel’s peremptory norms violations to an end and ensure accountability for them. States can take action, including imposing sanctions, unilaterally, multilaterally, and in the framework of the United Nations.
In order for states to uphold the obligation not to recognise as lawful a situation created by such a serious breach, and not to aid or assist in maintaining it, States must take measures to ensure that they themselves uphold universally binding peremptory norms, avoid or end complicity, and do no harm. While these are not technically sanctions, they are an obligation and not a discretion.
The BDS movement adopts a hybrid definition of sanctions that combines both obligations. Such an approach reconciles the most important elements of the generally agreed upon definitions of sanctions with the legal definitions, while maintaining the principles of ethicality, legality, and strategic effectiveness.