10. Dismantling Racism and Settler Colonialism: Challenges for the BDS Movement

Where to begin, when one talks about Palestine? What can represent what Palestinians have been going through since at least the early 1940s?

For many of us, not just those of us who are Palestinian, but for those of us who have been following this struggle, we are not surprised. We have yet to be surprised by anything that the Israeli government or the Israeli military does, but still it is a bit surprising to know that the vast majority of Jewish-Israeli society openly supports discriminatory policies.

The crimes of settler colonialism become acceptable, even encouraged.

An eleven-year-old child feeling exhausted by the normalcy of barbarism. Since 2005, the rate of home demolitions has only increased. Such ‘normalcy’ has only become ‘more normalized’.

Open, clear calls for rape of women.

Also popularised were shirts encouraging the killing of children. One image is of a pregnant, veiled woman with a sniper-cross hair on her belly, with the statement, ‘1 shot, 2 kills.’ Another image shows a child in a cross-hair with a caption, ‘every Arab mother should know that her son’s fate is in my hands.’

Open, clear calls for the targeting and killing of children.

What these images reflect is how Palestinian women and Palestinian children have become literal and figurative targets for killing, and the ease with which their killing can be dismissed and justified, the ease with which certain lives can be set aside, without any shame.

The problem that we are facing in Palestine is not a Palestinian problem; it is not an Arab-Israeli ‘conflict’. It is a problem for humanity, and it should be attacked by all elements of humanity.

We have come to see through this experience how deeply all of Israel’s institutions are implicated in the impunity enjoyed by the Israeli military. Nevertheless, it is clear that this decision, affirming the August 2012 lower court finding, amounts to judicial sanction of immunity for Israeli military forces when they commit injustices and human rights violations. Rachel’s case provides yet another example of how the Israeli justice system is failing to provide accountability. (Lazare, 2015)

acts that fall within the ambit of the crime. These include murder, torture, inhuman treatment and arbitrary arrest of members of a racial group; deliberate imposition on a racial group of living conditions calculated to cause its physical destruction; legislative measures that discriminate in the political, social, economic and cultural fields; measures that divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate residential areas for racial groups; the prohibition of interracial marriages; and the persecution of persons opposed to apartheid.

We recognise that, because we live in such insane, hypocritical times, where war is peace, and violence is calm, and apartheid is freedom and democracy, that merely telling the truth becomes revolutionary. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. And, today, it becomes our responsibility to critically speak the truth — clearly and powerfully. Israel is, according to international law, an apartheid state. It is clearly a settler-colonialist, apartheid state.

Our role, to assist in that struggle, is to resist as well. We begin by resisting the normalisation of surrender, cloaked as appeals for Palestinians to compromise on their rights.

And what about the language in our reference to those Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers? Do we refer separately to the deaths of ‘women and children’, as was commonly done during the war? A child is an individual who lacks agency, sovereignty, and who lacks the ability to protect himself or herself. Some patriarchal communities may want to impose a lack of agency on women, but women still have agency, so they don’t belong in the same category as children.

What is the consequence of including women and children in the same category, and separating them from men? By simply saying ‘women and children’, the implicit assumption is that men can be justifiably killed — because all Palestinians males are terrorist or may become terrorists — or that the murder of men should render less anger than the murder of women, because women cannot carry weapons and fight. Naturally, both of these assumptions are wrong.

Palestinian men and women do have the legal and moral right to carry weapons; they do have the right to defend themselves. Any occupied population, any oppressed population, has the right to defend itself and the right to determine its own means of liberation. Whether or not we agree with them is secondary to their right to determine their struggle for liberation.

Using clear and powerful language also includes rejecting the ‘legitimacy of a Jewish Israeli state’.

In 2007 (and this was not the first declaration!), a group of Palestinians and (a small group of) Israelis publicly declared their support for a ‘One State Declaration’ (2017).

The historic land of Palestine belongs to all who live in it and to those who were expelled or exiled from it since 1948, regardless of religion, ethnicity, national origin or current citizenship status; Any system of government must be founded on the principle of equality in civil, political, social and cultural rights for all citizens. Power must be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all people in the diversity of their identities.

In 2015, the University of Southampton planned to have an academic conference entitled ’International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism’ (Ben-Dor, 2014):

States, per se, don’t have a right to exist. People do.

And in just the one month of February 2015, there were numerous victories.

We understand that there are structures of violence we have to dismantle. As we dismantle those structures of violence, we build other structures of connectivity to other struggles because we understand the core of our struggle.

Let us work together to make the fall of apartheid faster, and the liberation of Palestine sooner.