As’ad Abdul Rahman - Israel, with all it military power and the unconditional support it receives from the US and all other western states - including its pro-Zionist news media - finds itself surrounded and besieged by a tiny Palestinian civil movement addressing all people of conscience in a worldwide nonviolent campaign against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights.
The grass-roots movement for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) has been building a global wave of boycott actions against Israeli occupation and apartheid policies since 2005, which have now turned into a kind of tsunami gradually threatening Israel’s legitimacy as a state. The BDS global campaign has managed to achieve an amazing level of consciousness in support of Palestinian human rights among many trade unions, student organisations, artists, musicians, writers, investment funds, global corporations, many western intellectuals and writers (including Jews) as well as an ever-growing body of students all over the world.
In May, the Bill Gates Charitable Foundation, one of the richest organisations in the world, sold its shares in the security firm G4S because this British company was ‘participating in gross human rights violations against Palestinian political prisoners in the Occupied Territories’. G4S signed a contract with the Israeli Prison Authority to provide security systems to major prisons holding around 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, including many under-aged children and women. G4S is also providing the Israeli colonial occupation with equipment and services to be used at Israeli checkpoints in Occupied Palestinian Territories, besieging and isolating many Arab Palestinian communities and rendering entire West Bank a humongous prison.
In Brazil, trade unionists, students and solidarity activists have been holding blockades, seeking an end to the presence of Elbit Systems, an Israeli military company operating in the country. Their slogan is being repeated day and night: ‘Elbit, Out of Brazil.’ The latest to boycott Israel is the students’ organisation of the American DePaul University that declared ‘victory in a campaign to get the university to divest from corporations that profit off Palestinian human rights violations’. The most surprising phenomenon being seen in many universities across the US is the huge increase in the number of American reform Jews joining the BDS campaign against Israel across the nation. They are known to abhor the racist, immoral teachings of the western Talmud whose followers now rule in Israel and where one of its satanic quotes include that ‘all non-Jews are beasts in human form created for the sole reason of serving Jews’.
American reform Jews no longer have any moral connection with the present state of Israel and its Talmudists.
Recently, one of the biggest and most respected churches in America, the Presbyterian Church, agreed to halt investments in Israel and discourage contacts with companies that do business in the Zionist state. Certain extremist Jewish groups in the US were shocked when in June, the Presbyterian Church’s general assembly voted to divest its holdings from three American corporations on the basis of ‘their record of complicity in the oppression and denial of human rights of Palestinians’. Presbyterians are known to hold high spiritual morality that is dedicated to serving fellow human beings, regardless of gender, creed, colour or ethnicity. They have built many academic institutions and hospitals around the world, like the American University of Beirut and its hospital.
This Church decided to divest from Hewlett Packard for providing the Israeli navy with the technology to enforce its blockade of Gaza, which also completely destroyed its thriving fishing industry. Motorola Solutions Technology came next on the church’s list for providing Israel with technology used in the construction of the Israeli separation (apartheid) wall and the colonies. The third American corporation that the church divested from is Caterpillar whose bulldozers are daily demolishing Palestinian homes to make life miserable for Palestinians and force them to leave their land, declared as ‘the land of Israel for Jews only’, according to the motto of the colonists’ lobby published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The Presbyterian Church in America was left with no choice but boycott these three companies that were aiding the Israeli regime.
Israel has been toppled from the high horse from which it was claiming high moral values shared with the US and the rest of the western world. The Presbyterian Church, in effect, not only boycotted Israel commercially, but morally as well. Such a move, by far, was the greatest achievement of the BDS, the tiny Palestinian civil society movement that felled the Zionist/Israeli giant with a sling shot of not brute force, but the force of intelligence and peaceful struggle, while holding on to dear principles of human rights and international law. This loss of morality is accompanied by a huge financial loss as well - thanks to the close cooperation between the BDS and Israeli civil society groups who oppose ‘the exploitation of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories’. One of the watch groups is The Coalition of Women for Peace, Tel Aviv, that provides well-documented information of ‘the exploitation of settlement colony industries’, to be targeted by the boycott campaigns of the BDS around the world. According to a study by this Israeli Coalition titled: ‘Who profits from Occupation’, there are three main industrial zones - Barkan, Mishor Adumin and Atarot - that consist of more than two dozen colonies in the Jordan valley and the Golan Heights, producing agricultural and industrial goods for exports. BDS campaigns around the world to boycott these illegal Israeli enterprises, according to international law, have caused losses ‘close to $20 billion since 2005’ - the year in which BDS was established.–Gulf News