The Siege of Israel by the BDS

Prof. As’ad Abdul Rahman

Israel, with all it military power and the unconditional support it receives from the USA as well as all 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 non-violent campaign against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights. The grassroots movement for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) has been building a global wave of boycott actions against the Israeli occupation and apartheid policies since 2005 which has now turned into a kind of small tsunami gradually threatening Israel’s legitimacy as a state. The BDS global campaigns have managed to achieve an amazing level of consciousness in support of the Palestinian human rights among many trade unions, student organizations, artists, musicians, writers, investment funds, global corporations, many western intellectual 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 organizations in the world, sold down its shares in G4S because this British company is “participating in gross human rights violations against Palestinian political prisoners in the occupied territories.” G4S signed a contract with the Israeli Prison Authority for providing security systems to major prisons holding around 5000 Palestinian prisoners including many under-age children and women. G4S is also providing the Israeli colonial occupation with equipments and services to enforce Israeli checkpoints in occupied Palestine besieging and isolating many Arab Palestinian communities making of the whole West Bank a humongous prison. In Brazil, trade unionists, students, and solidarity activists have been holding blockades calling for an end to the presence of ELBIT Systems, an Israeli military company operating in the country. Their slogan being repeated day and night: “Elbit, Out of Brazil”. The latest to boycott Israel is the student organization 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 phenomena being seen in many universities in the USA is the huge increase in the number of American reform Jews joining the BDS campaigns 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 moral connection with the present state of Israel and its Talmudists.

Most recently, one of the biggest and most respected churches in America, the Presbyterian Church agreed on practical steps to halt investments in Israel and discourage contacts with companies that do business in the Zionist State. Certain extremist Jewish groups in the USA were shocked when in June the Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly voted to divest its holdings from three American corporations on the basis proved beyond any doubt 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 men, male and female, regardless of gender, creed, color or ethnicity. They have built many learning institutions and hospitals around the world among them the American University of Beirut and its hospital. This Church decided to divest from Hewlett Packard Company 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 colonial settlements. The third American corporation that the Church divested from is Caterpillar whose bulldozers are daily demolishing Palestinian homes to make life unlivable for Palestinians and force them to leave their land declared ‘the land of Israel for Jews only’, according to a motto by the settlers’ lobby printed in Haaretz. The Presbyterian Church in America was left with no choice except to boycott these three companies aiding the colonial Israeli regime.

Israel has been toppled down from its high horse where it was claiming high moral values shared with the USA and the rest of the Western World. The Presbyterian Church, in effect, not only boycotted Israel commercially, but morally as well. Such move, by far, was the greatest achievement attained by the BDS, the tiny Palestinian civil society movement who felled the Zionist/ Israeli giant with a sling shot of not a brute force, but by using the force of intelligence and peaceful struggle while holding dear to principles of human rights and international law. This loss of morality is accompanied by a huge loss of money, thanks to the close cooperation between the BDS and Israeli civil society groups who oppose “the exploitation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.” One of the watch groups is The Coalition of Women for Peace, Tel Aviv who provides well-documented information of “the exploitation of settlement 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”, that there are three main industrial zones, Barkan, Mishor Adumin and Atarot which consist  of more than two dozen settlements in the Jordan valley and the Golan Heights producing agricultural and industrial goods for exports. The BDS campaigns around the world to boycott these Israeli illegal enterprises, according to international law  have, so far caused” losses close to $20 billion since 2005″, the year in which the BDS was established. Israel besieges Gaza and the occupied West Bank and the BDS, a Palestinian civil society Movement, besieges Israel around the world stripping it of its so called morality and its illegal profits gained from stolen Palestinian lands.