The Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS

The call was issued on 9 July 2005, one year to the day after the International Court of Justice delivered its advisory opinion on the wall Israel was building through the occupied West Bank. That timing is the argument. The text opens by observing that the Court found the wall illegal and that “Israel continues its construction of the colonial Wall with total disregard for the Court’s decision” — and it proceeds from there to the conclusion that the legal finding, on its own, would change nothing.

The reasoning is set out in the form of recitals. Since 1948, “hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies.” All forms of international intervention and peace-making “have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine.” Given that, the signatories turn to the precedent they name explicitly — “the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions” — and address themselves not to states but to civil society:

“We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call 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.”

The call is explicit that the measures are “non-violent punitive measures,” that they are conditional, and that they end when three things are done. The three demands are the whole of the programme, and they are quoted here in full because they are so often described inaccurately:

“Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality and Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194”

What gives the document its standing is the signature list rather than the prose. It was endorsed by bodies “representing the three integral parts of the people of Palestine: Palestinian refugees, Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel” — among them the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, the General Union of Palestinian Women, the General Union of Palestinian Teachers, the Forum of Palestinian NGOs in Lebanon, and the Union of Arab Community Based Associations in Haifa. It is that spread, across the fracture lines that Palestinian politics has otherwise been unable to cross, that made the call the most widely adopted Palestinian political initiative of the past two decades. The text also does one thing rarely noticed: it invites Israelis in. “We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.”

Sources

• Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS, 9 July 2005 — full text and list of signatories, BDS Movement