The “Palestinian Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)” released 9 July 2005 “call[s] upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. Since 2005, hundreds of Palestinian and international organizations have endorsed the appeal.
The BDS call states that “nonviolent punitive measures should be maintained” until Israel meets all its obligations to Palestinian rights and international law, specifically: ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab land and dismantling the apartheid wall; recognizing the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.”
Reports published Monday 4 June said
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Sunday called on the international community to follow South Africa’s example and boycott products of Israeli settlements. Fayyad praised South Africa’s recent determination to outlaw the labeling of settler products as “Made in Israel.”
The South African Ministry of Trade and Industry last month published a notice in the Government Gazette requiring traders “not to incorrectly label products that originate from the Occupied Palestinian Territory as products of Israel.”
Fayyad met in Ramallah with the head of the South Africa Representative Office and thanked him for the decision. The PA prime minister expressed hope that such boycotts would be endorsed by the entire international community.
But the PA is not the greatest fan ever of the BDS movement. Ali Abunimah, in his article The PA’s disingenuous boycott campaign written in 2010 at The Electronic Intifada, noted the following:
Despite the rhetoric of defiance and resistance, and exaggerated screams of anguish from Israeli settler groups, the PA effort actually appears designed to co-opt, undermine and abort the much broader Palestinian civil society campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), and to reassure Israel of the continued docility and collaboration of its puppet regime in Ramallah.
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BDS represents the broad consensus of Palestinian society, but the PA settlement boycott campaign actually violates and calls on people to defy the BDS call. During a photo opportunity where he affixed a sticker to the door of his house attesting that it was free of settlement goods, Abbas emphasized, “We are not boycotting Israel, because we have agreements and imports from it.”
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But the PA website even acknowledges that Israel itself does not abide by agreements and that “Israel forbids any of our products from reaching its markets. In addition, Israel places many obstacles that face Palestinian products waiting to be exported to foreign countries … Israel is even denying Palestinian rights which were agreed in the Paris agreement.”
The PA’s insistence on abiding by agreements Israel constantly violates is further evidence — if it were needed — of the PA’s terminal subservience. Given this reality, the main purpose of its campaign is actually to undermine both the methods and goals of the growing grassroots BDS movement and to preach to Palestinians that they must and should do business with Israel and allow Israeli goods in their markets and cooperate and normalize with Israel unconditionally.
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The PA is not just attempting to undermine the independent BDS and grassroots campaigns, but to co-opt them precisely because of their growing power, popularity and legitimacy as liberation strategies, in the hope that some of that legitimacy will rub off on the Ramallah regime.
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So while the Ramallah leaders — who have no mandate or authority from the Palestinian people whether under the PA or the Palestine Liberation Organization to negotiate on their behalf — make a show of boycotting settlement goods, their actual agenda is to promote economic normalization, undermine BDS and legitimize the settlements through “negotiations.”
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Palestinians and their allies should remain clearly focused on the simple truth that those who continue to coordinate with the Israeli occupation forces to hunt down Palestinians by night cannot don the mantle of popular resistance by day.
[من فلسطين] 