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BDS@15: Fifteen Ways to Support Our Struggle for Freedom, Justice & Equality

As BDS turns 15 , here are 15 things you can do to stand in solidarity with Palestinians. Take action now! 

Fifteen years after its launch on 9 July 2005, the BDS movement for Palestinian rights enters a new era. It is more urgent than ever as Israel intensifies its gradual ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous Palestinians, choking us in ever shrinking Bantustans.

The last time Israel annexed occupied land - Palestinian East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights - the United Nations General Assembly in 1982 voted overwhelmingly for targeted sanctions on Israel. However, the UN, under US and EU pressure, has failed to date to impose any accountability measures to end Israel’s regime of oppression.

This impunity has allowed Israel to entrench what dozens of UN human rights experts call its “21st century apartheid,” violating Palestinian rights and openly planning to formally annex large parts of the occupied West Bank.

Over the last 15 years the BDS movement for Palestinian rights has become among the more impactful global justice movements. Now we need to be even more effective, more intersectional, more global. Join us in building alliances with all international justice movements struggling for freedom, justice and equality for all.

Take action now:

  1. Expose Israeli Apartheid: Organize educational campaigns to expose and condemn Israeli apartheid and mainstream accountability measures similar to those imposed against South African apartheid in the past. Defend the right to advocate BDS against Israeli apartheid as a matter of freedom of expression
     
  2. Targeted Sanctions: Pressure parliamentarians and elected officials to impose targeted sanctions to stop Israeli annexation and apartheid, including by cutting military trade, ending free trade agreements and banning trade with settlements.
     
  3. Apartheid Free Zones (AFZs): Promote the creation of AFZs in your community as  spaces free of racism, sexism, discrimination, domination and oppression, in alliance with other social justice movements.
     
  4. Corporate Complicity: Mobilize pressure (including boycott and/or divestment) against the companies and banks listed in the UN database of companies involved in Israel’s illegal settlements and those that should be added to it, such as CAF, G4S, HP companies, Elbit Systems, AXA, Caterpillar, Hyundai Heavy Industries, Volvo, Heidelberg Cement, Cemex, among others.
     
  5. Racial and Indigenous Justice: Support Indigenous-led and Black-led struggles for racial justice and reparations by working to end systemic racism, invest in  Black, Indigenous, people of color and lower cast/dalit communities, and demilitarize and defund police, ending police training with Israeli apartheid.
     
  6. Environmental and climate justice: Support environmental campaigns towards truly sustainable and alternative policies, and stop practices to greenwash Israel’s water apartheid and colonization of land through agro-business, among others.
     
  7. Women’s struggles: Justice is always a feminist issue and in turn, justice in Palestine is a feminist issue, and the rights of women are fundamental to our movement. Join women-led movements for gender and social justice and against militarization.
     
  8. Ethical City Councils: Promote an intersectional motion in your local council to exclude from investment and/or procurement companies involved in human rights violations or racist practices, including those complicit in Israeli apartheid.
     
  9. Faith Communities & Tourism: Mobilize support in your community or church to endorse and respect the Palestinian call for ethical tourism/pilgrimage.
  1. Cultural Boycott: Encourage statements from cultural figures supporting Palestinian freedom, justice and equality and pledging to boycott Israeli apartheid and cultural institutions that are complicit in its occupation and human rights violations.
     
  2. Academic Boycott: Promote a motion in your faculty union, academic association or university department supporting the boycott of academic institutions involved in human rights violations, including Israeli universities. Contact pacbi@bdsmovement.net for support.
     
  3. Student Activism: Organize intersectional campaigns to end your college’s investments in or contracts with companies harming the environment or implicated in racism or other human rights violations, including Israel’s.
  1. Sports Boycott: Join the global campaign to boycott Puma over its support of illegal Israeli settlements. Write to superstar footballer Raheem Sterling calling on him not to sign with Puma. Urge W Series women’s race series to listen to the Palestinian Speed Sisters and drop Puma.
     
  2. LGBTQI+ Rights: Work with queer groups to unmask and counter Israel’s agenda of pinkwashing its violent apartheid regime. Boycott Tel Aviv Pride and urge queer filmmakers to pledge not to participate in Israeli government-sponsored events like TLVFest.
     
  3. Donate to BDS: As a volunteer-led movement, BDS needs support from people of conscience everywhere to resist Israel’s occupation and apartheid and contribute to the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.

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