The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement calls for the international prosecution of leaders of the United States, including heads of the Democratic Party, for their unparalleled complicity in Israel’s genocide, not to mention in its 76 years of settler-colonialism and apartheid against the Indigenous Palestinian people.
The US government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, has consistently funded and provided political cover to Israel’s regime of oppression since it was established through the planned, genocidal destruction of Palestinian society in 1948–the Nakba. By 2022, the US had given to Israel a sum exceeding $300 billion.
The BDS movement also condemns the Democratic Party’s repressive, anti-Palestinian demonization of BDS. This repression aims at silencing authoritative and representative Palestinian voices and undermining the Palestine solidarity movement that is exponentially growing in the US, particularly among the younger generations, including in the Jewish community.
Led by the Biden-Harris administration, the Democratic Party establishment enthusiastically supports the continued arming of Israel, shielding it from accountability while it continues its live-streamed genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.
Leaders in both major parties in the US, which has a fundamentally anti-democratic, oligarchic, and exceptionally corrupt election system, are “bought and paid for” by various lobby groups, including the weapons lobby and the Israel lobby, as admitted today by mainstream figures in US media and academia.
The Democratic Party has systematically resisted meaningful justice and reparations for Indigenous nations and Black Americans following centuries of colonialism and enslavement. True to this infamous history, the Democratic National Convention is now reaffirming the party’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide, insisting on unconditionally arming Israel and attacking in its platform the BDS movement, which is led by the largest coalition in Palestinian society. In short, it is bowing to special interest pressure from Israel’s influential lobby and to its bribes, otherwise presented as “donations.”
The Democrats have partnered with the far-right Republicans in Congress and in dozens of state legislatures in eroding freedom of speech to unprecedented levels with their repressive, McCarthyite, unconstitutional attacks on BDS, which present a serious threat also to racial, economic, social, gender and climate justice movements. As leading civil rights groups have affirmed, boycotting is a time-honored nonviolent form of political, economic, or social protest rooted in the US civil rights movement, protected by the US Constitution, and upheld by the US Supreme Court.
We demand international accountability for the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the US government, including Democratic Party leaders, in Palestine and across the Global South, and for the constitutional and internationally stipulated right to freedom of expression to be upheld.
We salute the millions of Americans who have been marching against Israel’s genocide, protesting and peacefully disrupting the partnership of the Biden-Harris administration in it, and escalating boycott and divestment pressures on complicit corporations and institutions, including universities.