Omar Barghouti

“BDS was inspired by a century of Palestinian popular resistance initially against British colonialism, and then Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine,” Omar Barghouti said in July 2025, marking the movement’s twentieth anniversary. “So we’ve learned the tactics of BDS mainly from our own people’s struggle, but it’s also inspired by many liberation movements, especially the South African anti-apartheid movement, and of course justice movements like the civil rights movement in the United States.”

Barghouti is a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, launched on 9 July 2005 when Palestinian civil society groups — trade unions, coalitions of political parties, women’s unions, students, academics, professional unions and grassroots movements — signed the BDS call that he and others had drafted after nearly a year of consultations spanning the occupied territories, the Palestinians of 1948, and the refugee camps and exile communities. The call rests on three demands, which he describes as the minimum for the exercise of self-determination: an end to the military occupation, an end to the system of racial domination and apartheid, and the right of refugees to return and receive reparations. The movement is led by the BDS National Committee, the broadest coalition in Palestinian society; its stated principles oppose all forms of racism, including anti-Jewish racism, and its method is nonviolent pressure — social, economic and political — to end complicity in violations of international law. “The first very profound obligation if you want to do real solidarity,” he argues, “is to do no harm and to stop, cut back, or offset… the harm done in your name.”

The response of the Israeli state is a documented part of his record. Front Line Defenders, the international foundation for the protection of human rights defenders, lists him as a defender at risk whose case history includes a travel ban imposed in 2016 — against which he won only a temporary injunction that May — along with arrest, detention and judicial harassment, in a period it describes as one of deteriorating space for human rights work in Israel and the occupied territories: administrative detention of defenders, travel bans, and legislation restricting civil society. He has continued through it to make the movement’s argument in universities, courts and the press: that states, corporations and institutions that sustain the occupation are parties to it, and that ending that complicity is the shortest nonviolent road to Palestinian freedom.

Sources

• Omar Barghouti — Front Line Defenders
• 20 years of BDS: An interview with Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the movement — Mondoweiss, 9 July 2025