The BDS movement welcomes NYC Mayor Mamdani’s revocation of the anti-BDS Executive Order issued last month by the previous mayor, who’s accused of serious corruption and was funded by Israel lobby groups. Executive Order 60 was modelled after similar, Israel-induced anti-BDS legislation in other US states and prevented any mayoral agencies or appointees from doing business with vendors and organizations complying with international law by holding genocidal Israel accountable.
Mamdani also revoked an Executive Order which had adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, an anti-Palestinian racist tool pushed by apartheid Israel and its lobby groups to conflate condemnation of Israel and BDS campaigning to dismantle its illegal regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid on the one hand with anti-Jewish racism on the other.
In his inauguration speech, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, promised Palestinian New Yorkers that they “will no longer have to contend with a politics that speaks of universalism and then makes them the exception.”
In 1985, New York’s City Council banned goods from apartheid South Africa and divested from companies doing business with it, kickstarting a national movement. When will NYC divest from apartheid Israel?
Money for jobs and healthcare, not for apartheid, genocide and warfare.
Mamdani’s cancellation of the anti-BDS order and the IHRA policy is a significant step in countering the Palestine exception to free speech and civic rights in the US.
Activists and organizations in solidarity with Palestine, and our allies in NYC supporting BDS, must be able to exercise, without fear, their constitutional rights to stop billions of taxpayer dollars from being gifted to Israel to massacre, starve, freeze, and bomb Palestinians in Gaza, while millions in New York cannot afford rent, food, or healthcare.
Let’s escalate BDS in NYC and across the US to end this horrific complicity.