boycott divestment sanctions

Linda Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian American activist, got the cold shoulder from the Biden campaign last week, followed by a sotto voce apology – but an elephant lingers in the room with the initials B.D.S.
Sarsour has worked across the progressive agenda on issues running from immigration, mass incarceration, and Black Lives Matter, to name a few. But her position on free speech has overshadowed all the rest, and made her an outcast – at least temporarily – from the Joe Biden campaign.

Will Smith was quoted saying that racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed, and indeed, it is being filmed a lot lately. No sooner did we begin to recover from one victim of racist violence, the next victim is slain. Just as we began to wrap our heads around the murder of Breonna Taylor, we saw the lynching-murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and then came the murder of George Floyd.

MILAN, ITALY  — My lecture at the University of Milan was scheduled for the afternoon of October 9, 2019. That morning the university president, pressured by a local Zionist group, decided to cancel the lecture.

In 1948, my grandfather, along with thousands of Badrasawis, was expelled by Israeli military forces from our ancestral village of Beit Daras in Palestine. 
Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from over 500 other villages, my grandfather assumed he would be back home in a few weeks. “Why bother to haul the good blankets on the back of a donkey, exposing them to the dust of the journey, when we know that we will return to Beit Daras in a week or so?” he asked my bewildered grandmother, Zeinab. 

SANTIAGO, CHILE — After the Chilean city of Valdivia became the first municipality in Latin America to support the non-violent Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement this past June, the Chilean government has now ruled that it is illegal to boycott Israel at the municipal level throughout the entire country.

Two police departments in the New England region of the United States canceled their annual visit to Israeli police forces and engagement in training, amid pressure from organisations affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The Vermont State Police and the Northampton Police Department in Massachusetts both canceled their planned trip to Israel for a training program just days before it was supposed to start.

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA — (Analysis) In the aftermath of the horrific attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, politicians have managed to use the tragedy to attack their opponents. Instead of addressing the underlying issue of such hate attacks, they change the focus to unrelated matters.

The botched Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip on 12 November is delineating Tel Aviv’s failure to utilise its army as a tool to achieve Palestinian political concessions.
Now that Palestinian popular resistance has gone global through the exponential rise and growing success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement, the Israeli government is fighting two desperate wars.

Israel’s gross diamond exports have crashed by a staggering 45 percent since the 2014 massacre in Gaza that resulted in the death of over 2,200 people, mainly civilians including over 550 children.
The net value of Israel’s diamond exports has fallen even further, by 60 percent from $11.25 billion to $4.4 billion over the period. This is about the same as the value of Israel’s total arms exports.

The Palestinian people are in need of some good news to boost their morale at an extremely difficult time in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality.