Omar Barghouti - The Case for Global BDS (2010)

Jens Hanssen: It is a great privilege and an immense pleasure to host Omar Barghouti at the University of Toronto tonight. Omar comes to us from Montreal, where he's attending an international boycott, divestment, and sanctions conference of the campaign he co-founded back in 2005. Omar has published widely on the philosophy and practice of civil disobedience and grassroots Activism. He has contributed to the edited volume Controversies and Subjectivity of 2005. His most recent book-length publication is Boycott, Divestissement, Sanctions: BDS, Contre-Apartheid et l'Occupation en Palestine, published by Lutus Éditeur in 2010. Yes, he addressed the Arab people. He's a seasoned public debater and indefatigable traveler for the Palestinian cause. I think it's fair to speculate that if he were campaigning for Darfur, he'd be on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people. The question of whether violence is legitimate was debated heatedly and openly around the world. In a famous 1967 debate, this question had pitted Noam Chomsky against Hannah Arendt. In it, Chomsky makes a qualified Fanonian argument that if violence, especially of the tactical kind, frees the oppressed from bondage and their sense of inferiority, then there would be, he said, a pretty good case for it. Arendt, who held early that Zionism was a periodism, Was no friend of student mobilization and rejected hair and all forms of anti-colonial violence, but both shared an unconditional preference for nonviolent civil disobedience. I am struck by how much cachet violence had in those days, how much it got done, and how much recognition it got. The Palestinian Revolution most notably catapulted Yasser Arafat in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1974, which recognized the Palestinians' right to exist as a people. Since these debates on and practices of violence 40 years ago, tolerance of violent struggles for the right to self-determination has evaporated proportionate to With the tolerance of American and Israeli state violence. This shift has hit the PLO hard and forced it to beg for a state, any state really, in Palestine, at the expense of the moral and legal force of its cause. Because of this substitution, the PLO has ceased to represent Palestinian liberation struggle since Arafat's death in 2003.

Omar Barghouti: Yes.

Jens Hanssen: If not long before, during the ill-fated Oslo years. Hamas has come in to fill this void of violent struggle. But now Palestine's geographical fragmentation is mirrored by its political fragmentation, all the while Israel destroys Palestinian life, land, and statehood. The result of this deplorable state of affairs is that the so-called two-state solution Based on UN resolutions and demarcations, has become all but a pipe dream that will turn into the nightmare of population exchange once implemented. Over a million Israeli Palestinians and over 250,000 Israeli settlers will be forced across the mutually incarcerating prison wall that seals off the 2 communities. It is in the shadow of these developments that the Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Israel has gained momentum and regained the dignity of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Initially co-founded by Omar Barghouti and other Palestinian civil society activists and based in Palestine in 2005, The campaign has become a global movement. At a conference in Beirut a couple of weeks ago, I asked a Palestinian professor of history from Najaf University in Nablus whether he was in favor of the BDS activities. The elder gentleman replied, we are very proud of these activities. You know, these days we have some Israeli colleagues who want to work with us, and we ask them, where were you when we were under siege and when your tanks entered our city? I then wondered whether he knew that the BDS campaign was actually initiated in the West Bank. To my surprise, he was surprised. He did not know this, and his wall eyes glowed even more. Now, this may mean at least a couple of things. One, that the BDS campaign has not affected the occupied territories and the Arab world as much as it has affected the West, although most recently, if one follows the news, agricultural boycott of Israel by West Bankers has had some considerable traction. The professor's reaction may also allude to the nature of global movements like the BDS, whose very universalization obscures its point of origin. Postal workers, labor unions, writers, musicians, Yes. And a growing number of leading postcolonial scholars have joined or supported the BDS movement. Most recently, much to my surprise, the historian anthropologist Alora Stoler has issued a letter, a strong letter of solidarity. As Omar will elaborate much more in a moment, the BDS campaign aims to bring about the end of Israeli occupation, and champions the Palestinian right of return, and its weapons are public campaigns that raise awareness and pressure businesses, schools, and governments to distance themselves from Israel. What accounts for its popularity? And what causes Israeli government officials to consider this movement, which by 1970s standards is exceedingly liberal, as more dangerous than the Hamas government in Gaza. The way I see it, both its popularity and the Israeli counterinsurgency are a reflection of the way the BDS campaign manages to recapture the moral high ground of the Palestinian struggle. First, it does so by adhering strictly to nonviolent forms of civil disobedience, as well as consumer and labor mobilization. Second, it appeals to the historic antecedent of the successful anti-apartheid movement against the South African regime, making a convincing case for the comparability of the Palestinian and Black South African experience. Third, perhaps most importantly, it is based on universal principles of equal rights, or in Arendtian terms, of Palestinian right to have rights. As I've recently argued in Beirut, these are not in principle and in mode of propagation radical ideas or demands. On the contrary, they actually sit quite comfortably With Arendtian liberalism. For it seems to me that the BDS campaign does not seek validation from Israel, as PLO does, nor does it seek to inflict military defeats on Israel, as Hamas does. Instead, it is ultimately premised on a binational sharing of one and the same land. A request you'll have to Omar Is whether this noble idea of victors and victims sharing one land is in fact best served by the so-called one-state solution, as many in the BDS campaign seem to think. It is not that there haven't been one-state precedents going back to pre-1948, and I pose this question not because I side with those whose Yes. Chandler's above-mentioned piece rightly dismissed as civility-stability themes. Rather, it seems to me that a single state will lead to neither political nor economic sovereignty for Palestinians, but to a form of assimilation that negates their inalienable right to self-determination. As Raza Krakowski has recently argued, even the two-state solution demands In other words, the universal appeal of the BDS campaign hinges on the desire to transform both the Palestinian and Israeli political system into a secular politics of equality.

Omar Barghouti: Thank you. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the traditional ancestral territory that we're having this lecture on of the Mississauga First Nation. So I thank them for allowing us to speak here.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: Regarding violence, as it was mentioned, it was not in my lecture, but I had a fitting quote from the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. That I thought would help understand this issue of violence, at least the way I use it throughout my lecture. Paulo Freire says in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, any situation in which A objectively exploits B or hinders his and her pursuit of self-determination as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence.

Jens Hanssen: Yes.

Omar Barghouti: Even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. With that, I would like to start with a subject not often talked about: colonizing the minds. Not just in Toronto. I know you think that's a Monopoly for Canada. No, no, it's everywhere. Colonizing the mind is something that has affected the struggle as much as colonizing the land, if not more. I want to quote Ngugi wa Thiong'o, one of Africa's most important contemporary writers from Kenya. He says— Ngugi says, the oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance against imperialism. Liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of unachievement, and it makes them want to distance themselves from From that wasteland. It even plants serious doubts about themselves and about their struggle. Possibilities of victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency, and a collective death wish. The BDS campaign is exactly in response to this attempt to make us despair. Colonizing of the mind was pursued by Israel from very early on. But I'll just give one glaring example from the First Intifada that started in 1987. In December 1987, just a few days after the first Palestinian intifada, or civil resistance, broke out, Israel Radio announced that the Israeli army had ordered all 1,194 schools in the West Bank closed until further notice. All the universities were shut. And a few months later, all the kindergartens were closed, too. Palestinian education was forced to go underground, so clandestine classes were held. Education was effectively criminalized. It was held in homes, offices, community centers, mosques, and so on.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: On 19 April 1989, a Jerusalem Post report said that the Israeli police had, quote, uncovered a network of illegal classes held by West Bank universities in private high schools in East Jerusalem. A few days later, 24 April 1989, the Israeli army raided the YMCA building in Ramallah, which housed the departmental offices of Birzeit University, throughout the closure of the campus. A warning was delivered to the university administration, quote, under no circumstances can you teach in houses or anywhere else. If we find anyone teaching or any students carrying books, we will take appropriate measures against them. And certainly appropriate measures were taken. But even as far back as 1948, with the establishment of the State of Israel on the ruins of Palestinian society, As part of what Palestinians call the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 1948, when the great majority of Palestinians were dispossessed and uprooted, tens of thousands of Palestinian books were destroyed by Israel after the establishment of the state, according to research by an Israeli Jewish academic at Ben-Gurion University. He says Israel plundered and destroyed tens of thousands of Palestinian books in the years after the state's establishment. Because these were deemed security threats. The exact number, I think, is 27,000 books were destroyed. And he says that Israel destroyed those books in the framework of its plan to, quote, Judaize the country and cut off its Arab residents from their nation and culture. Fast forward to the present, we see that the BDS campaign is expanding across The globe. And some of us wonder, even some of us who founded this movement wonder, how did we get here so quickly? I'm one of the most optimistic in the movement, actually, and I never imagined back in 2005 when we started this movement that we would be here in 2010 to see major trade unions across the globe, major artists, the Pixies, Costello, Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, and so on. Joining the boycott, major academics and cultural figures everywhere. We never thought we would get here so fast, because in the South African experience of the anti-apartheid movement, it took about 25 years on average to see anything happen in the mainstream Western society. People forget that. People say, oh, but the South African boycott was tremendous. Everyone supported the boycott. There was no resistance.

Jens Hanssen: I'm sorry.

Omar Barghouti: People have a short memory. They're talking about the '80s. People forgot the '50s and '60s and '70s when nothing, nothing was happening. It took a very long time. I remember I was in the anti-apartheid movement at my university, Columbia University in New York, where I used to participate in demonstrations holding up a sign, Abolish Apartheid. And once a colleague who was not active was asking me, do you really think that this will happen in your lifetime? I said, no, probably not, but I do it as a moral obligation regardless whether it will happen in my lifetime. But it did happen in my lifetime, and no one can take that experience from me. Now the reality in Israel is calling for BDS even more. The situation on the ground The siege of Gaza, the rising fanatic right inside Israel, has— have all made BDS even more critical, more urgent. Some prominent Israeli academics and intellectuals have recently protested what they call the rise of fascism in the state. Of course, it's fascism now because it's affecting the Jewish Israelis.

Jens Hanssen: Mm-hmm. But regardless.

Omar Barghouti: In fact, some of them have drafted a declaration for the independence from fascism, signed by hundreds of academics and intellectuals, Jewish Israelis. Some of the most famous playwrights, actors, academics, and poets have signed that statement. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency talks about the image of Israel given this rise of the right, and it explains Israel's image problem.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: As having somebody like Netanyahu, who's very clearly against peace, as they put it, to put it very mildly, and somebody like Lieberman, whom they call— is perceived as a racist bully, again, putting it very mildly. So given this, the Brand Israel campaign, the campaign sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 2005 and tested in Toronto— that was the first testing field for them— Has come very close to an end. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency admits that rebranding has failed. Given the reality on the ground, we've got to do much more than polish the image of Israel with artists and poets and dancers going around the world and saying Israel is wonderful, white, enlightened, and democratic. It will take a real change of policy inside Israel. Even the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is now acknowledging. But coming on the heels of Israel's markedly devastating war of aggression on Lebanon, Israel's bloodbath in Gaza did not help it either. Images of white phosphorus being thrown on schools, UN shelters, burning people alive devastated Israel's rebrand campaign. It will take a real change of policy inside Israel. Even the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is now acknowledging But coming on the heels of Israel's markedly devastating war of aggression on Lebanon, Israel's bloodbath in Gaza did not help it either. Images of white phosphorus being thrown on schools, UN shelters, burning people alive devastated Israel's rebrand campaign, not to mention its effect on the Palestinians.

Jens Hanssen: That's right.

Omar Barghouti: A BBC report revealed that within Israel's siege, it is watching, making sure that a minimum calorie intake needed by Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants, according to their age and sex, is allowed in. They're watching how many calories each person in Gaza is using. And this reminds people of 1930s Germany.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: The 2009 war of aggression on Gaza was condemned across the board by human rights organizations, by the UN, especially in the Goldstone Report. I shall quote very briefly from the Goldstone Report, because it's very important to put this to rest, the debate on what happened. Was it self-defense? Wasn't it self-defense? Who exactly was harmed, and so on. The Goldstone Report summary says the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories, and residential homes was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy to make the daily process of living and dignified living more difficult for the civilian population. Israeli forces also humiliated, dehumanized, and carried out an assault on the dignity of the people occupied.

Jens Hanssen: Oh, yeah.

Omar Barghouti: Of Gaza through the use of human shields and unlawful detentions. The Israeli operations were carefully planned in all their phases as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population, concludes the Goldstone Report. A particularly sensitive aspect of this massive destruction in Gaza was environmental and directly connected to health. Israel's systematic targeting of Gaza's water and sanitation facilities has compounded an already severe and protracted denial of human dignity, wrote Maxwell Gaylord, UN humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, causing a steep decline in the standards of living. A report by Amnesty International in October of last year commented on a particularly disturbing aspect of Israel's war on the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. 90 to 95% of the water supply in Gaza, Amnesty reported, is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. The nitrate level in the water supply is rising so high that it's causing new diseases that we have never witnessed before, even in Gaza. One particular disease is called methemoglobinemia.

Jens Hanssen: Methemoglobinemia.

Omar Barghouti: Or what Amnesty calls the blue babies syndrome. In that disease, the symptoms are blueness of the hands, the mouths, the feet, and sometimes the entire body. Babies are born with entire lavender bodies. They develop diarrhea, convulsions, and sometimes they die when the nitrate level goes higher.

Jens Hanssen: Hmm.

Omar Barghouti: The contamination caused by Israel's assault and siege did not stop at Gaza's water resources. It dangerously polluted the soil as well. An independent group of scientists and physicians from the New Weapons Committee, an Italy-based group that researches the effects of recently developed weapons on civilian populations in war zones, conducted a study on Israel's use of nonconventional weapons and their middle-term effects on the Palestinian residents in Gaza. The study showed that a high concentration of toxic metals in the soil was left.

Jens Hanssen: Oh, my God.

Omar Barghouti: Due to Israel's bombing, which caused tumors, fertility problems, and serious effects on newborns like deformities and genetic pathologies. A Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Dameen Association for Human Rights in Gaza, published a position paper on the tragic effects of this policy. Most important finding they pointed to was the dramatic increase in the incidence of cancer in Gaza. Now, we're often accused of presenting a one-sided story. Yeah, we're one side. But anyway, we can't be two sides at the same time, but I'll try. Let me quote some testimonies of Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza, who participated in the war crimes in Gaza. These were published widely in the Israeli Hebrew media. Explaining orders to indiscriminately shoot civilians in residential buildings and civilian neighborhoods, one soldier, Israeli soldier, in his testimony says, quote, from above they said it was permissible to shoot at civilians because anyone who remained in that sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned a terrorist because they hadn't fled. In every conflict zone, civilians should flee, but those who remain Should not be condemned as terrorists and killed. But that was the command for this particular soldier. Another soldier narrates how a well-reported incident of intentionally shooting and killing an elderly Palestinian woman took place. He says, quote, a company commander saw someone coming on some road, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take her out. If she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don't know, he says.

Jens Hanssen: That's right.

Omar Barghouti: In the end, the commander sent people to the roof to take her out with their weapons, and so they did. When asked why they shot her despite recognizing her as an older woman, the soldier replied, that's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza. You see a person on a road walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon. You don't have to identify him with anything, and you can just shoot him. An honest soldier from the elite army brigade, from an elite army brigade, explains why a fellow sharpshooter deliberately fired at a mother and her 2 children, killing all 3. He said he did not feel too bad about it. Quote, after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understand from most of my men, who I talked to, he says, I don't know how to describe it. The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. Gidon Levy, the famous Israeli journalist, contextualizes this phenomenon of total dehumanization of the Palestinians, saying, to do this without any unnecessary moral qualms We have trained our soldiers to think that the lives and property of Palestinians have no value whatsoever. It is part— it's a part of a process of dehumanization that has endured for dozens of years, the fruits of the occupation.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: Given all of this, it was only natural that the BDS campaign, started in 2005, would expand tremendously. Before going to some Israeli reactions to the BDS campaign, let me explain a few things about what this campaign is and what it's not, actually, because there are lots of myths about this campaign. Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions is not about boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning only. That's almost a secondary aspect. The main aspect of the BDS call is its rights-based approach. That was mentioned in the introduction. That it focuses on the 3 basic rights of the Palestinian people, which together constitute the minimum of a requirement to realize the right to self-determination. The minimum to realize the right to self-determination is to first end the occupation of the 1967 occupied territories, all of them, ending the system of racial discrimination within Israel, which is a system of apartheid, And I'll talk a bit about that later. Third and foremost, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, who constitute the majority of the Palestinian people. So quite often we hear about 2/3 of the Palestinians said this or 1/3 said that, and they're talking about the West Bank and Gaza only, sometimes including East Jerusalem, sometimes not. But in fact, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are 1/3 of the Palestinian people. 2/3 are either refugees in exile, and a small minority, about 1.3 million Palestinians, are citizens of Israel. These are the 3 main segments of the Palestinian people. So the right to self-determination means the minimum rights of those 3 segments, and all 3 must participate in realizing this right. Being based on international law and universal human rights, the BDS campaign immediately had an appeal Not just to progressives. It's very true to liberals. This is not a far-left agenda. It is a very decent liberal agenda. Any self-respecting liberal shouldn't find anything he or she should object to in this agenda of equal rights and application of international law consistently to everyone. This has made the BDS campaign a very tough weapon. That Israel could not face very easily. And Israel in fact is increasingly admitting that it has not found yet a proper weapon to combat this nonviolent civil resistance movement. Going back to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, another important quote from it, it says, the fear is that Israel is subject to a growing tide of delegitimization. That if unchecked could pose an existential threat. Now BDS is an existential threat. The nightmare scenario has the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement gaining more traction and anti-Israel opinion moving from Western campuses to governments, followed by a lifting of the protective American diplomatic umbrella. That's the nightmare scenario. In the same vein, in May 2009, AIPAC's Executive Director Howard Kohr warned that BDS was reaching the American mainstream and, quote, laying the predicate for abandonment of Israel, adding— Kohr adds, this is a conscious campaign to shift policy, to transform the way Israel is treated by its friends to a state that deserves not our support but our contempt, not our protection but pressure to change its essential nature. So delegitimization, changing its essential nature. I had a debate yesterday when my debate partner accused the BDS campaign of wanting to destroy Israel, eradicate Israel. They used some very bloody terms for a nonviolent movement. Regardless, let's really check what are they talking about. What is this delegitimization, eradication of Israel? Some who consider themselves Smarter in that counter-BDS campaign say it's the second right that's problematic. It's this equality, the full equality in Israel. Why don't you say it straight? Calling for full equality means you want to eradicate Israel. I was actually— somebody actually said those words exactly in a lecture I gave at Manchester University quite a few years ago. So I told him, let me just deconstruct what you just said. You're saying that equality would destroy Israel. What does that say about Israel? So that was the end of the debate. So unlike in any other boycott movement, this is the only boycott movement that's accused of eradicating a state and its people, and accused of such bloody Smears that do not relate to the campaign. Did the call for divesting from Darfur— from Sudan and boycotting Sudan over Darfur eradicate Sudan? I mean, did it intend to eradicate Sudan? Those calling for a boycott of China over Tibet, as suicidal as it sounds— boycotting China, can anyone do that? But anyway— You stop to live. But anyway, assuming one could boycott China over Tibet, Did they call that as intending to eradicate China, eradicating the existence of the Chinese people? What nonsense! Only when it comes to Israel is this exceptionalism. Only Israel is treated as outside of history and above international law. Now, as I said, we've seen this dramatic growth in the BDS movement. And it's not just because you are good activists, those of you in SIA, KAYA, KWAYA, and all the others. Faculty for Palestine, and I don't want to miss any other group, Independent Jewish Voices, all our partners. You're wonderful activists, definitely. And we're doing good work, not bad work, in Palestine too. But it's not just about that. There's an opening, clearly. There's an objective opening in the political spectrum that's allowing this to 10 years ago, BDS might not have succeeded as much. Mired in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. and its allies are facing this endless war on terror, which really should be called the mother of all terror, because they are doing most of that terror. But regardless, mired in that, and they can't see an opening in that endless war on terror.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: There's a change in public opinion, even in the U.S. establishment, which counts the most. Even in the conservative elite in the U.S., there's a change. There's an opening. There's a crack. We're seeing debates in mainstream papers in the U.S. that we have never, ever seen before, even in the establishment. The New York Review of Books published an article by the influential Jewish-American author and academic Peter Beinart. Who considered the failure of the Jewish establishment in the U.S. a foregone conclusion. Beinart says, for several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism's door. And now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead. Morally, he says, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the conference of presidents of major American Jewish organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Jon Mearsheimer, who co-authored the book on the Israel lobby, differs slightly. He says, the lobby's unstinting commitment to defending Israel which sometimes means shortchanging U.S. interests, is likely to become more apparent to more Americans in the future, and that could lead to a wicked backlash against Israel's supporters as well as Israel. He says, the lobby faces yet another challenge. Defending an apartheid state in the liberal West is not going to be easy. Quite true. The most consequential achievement Of the first 5 years of the BDS movement, which we commemorated last July, was indeed to expose the essential nature of Israel's regime over the Palestinian people as one that combines military occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. So I said I would come back to this apartheid issue. People tell us, but apartheid? Are you saying that Israel is identical to South Africa?

Jens Hanssen: No.

Omar Barghouti: Who mentioned South Africa? Saying that Israel practices apartheid does not yet relate to South Africa. Apartheid is not a South African patent. It's a regime that existed in South Africa, but it's now a universal crime. There is a convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid developed by the UN that defines the crime of apartheid in international law. The 2002 Rome Statute for the International Court of Justice has a very clear definition of apartheid. So we take the criteria and we match them— we see if they match what Israel is doing, its policies, its laws, and we see if it's practicing apartheid or not. Practicing apartheid does not mean practicing racial discrimination. It's much more than that. It's institutionalized, legalized racial discrimination. And what is the difference between racial discrimination That's the difference between just racist practice and racist laws. Israel has racist laws that distinguish between its Jewish citizens and its non-Jewish citizens. I don't have much time to expand on that, but I'll be happy to answer in the question period if you have some questions. So Israel, by that definition, does indeed have an apartheid regime against Palestinians.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: So going back to the achievement, I think one of the main achievements is that Time magazine has recently titled its cover, quote, Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace. For Time magazine—

Jens Hanssen: Wow.

Omar Barghouti: It's not Al Jazeera. It's Time magazine. To have such a cover was shocking, even to us. I mean, that's the very mainstream of the U.S. establishment accusing Israel of not wanting peace. For 62 years, since its establishment, Israel's propaganda focused on nothing more, nothing greater, than proving that they want peace. Everything done is for the sake of security and peace. It's always about peace. So for Time magazine to say, you know, we don't buy it anymore, says something where Israel is going with its PR.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: So while we debate whether Israel is practicing apartheid or not, as I said, many Israelis are debating whether Israel has shifted to fascism or not and to what degree it has shifted to fascism. As I said earlier, I think it's a bit exaggerated. And I think that the outcry from hundreds of Jewish Israeli top intellectuals and academics is mainly due to the fact that the stick is now hitting them. Finally. It's always been hitting us since 62 years, but it has finally reached them. And now they're crying foul. This particularly came to the fore after that loyalty oath, which was passed by the Israeli government recently, which calls upon anyone who wants to become a citizen of Israel who is not Jewish has to swear allegiance to Israel as a, quote, Jewish and democratic state.

Jens Hanssen: An oxymoron.

Omar Barghouti: So in reaction to this loyalty oath, Israeli award-winning academic Gavriel Solomon went as far as comparing today's Israel to Germany in the 1930s, saying, the idea of Judenrein, a Jew-free zone, or Arabrein is not new. Some might say, how can you compare us to Nazis? And he says, I'm not talking about the death camps. But about the year 1935. There were no camps yet, but there were racist laws. And we are heading forward toward those kinds of laws. The government is clearly declaring our incapacity for democracy, end of quote. Another well-known Israeli, the writer Sefi Rachlevsky, differs on the timeframe of the comparison. He says, The struggle in Israel today is not between left and right. But between Democrats and fascists. Israel is becoming fascist and racist. In a sense, you could say we are more like not the madness that was in Germany in 1933, but in 1944-45. When they were in danger of losing the war, madness prevented them from stopping. End of quote. After Knesset took a significant step towards criminalizing boycott. It passed a certain committee in the Knesset that anyone calling for a boycott within Israel, a citizen or permanent resident, will be breaking the law and can pay a fine up to 30,000 Israeli shekels and possibly more. Any foreigner calling for a boycott may be banned from entering Israel for at least 10 years. After this passed the first hurdle in Knesset, many Israelis saw that as a very, very alarming development. David Landau, former editor of Haaretz, a very prestigious newspaper in Israel, actually called for boycotting the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in reaction to this, quote, to stand against the wave of fascism that engulfed the Zionist project, he says. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister of Israel, sounded the alarm about the BDS campaign. So it was no longer think tanks and, and little groups. It's the prime minister of Israel. He said the following: The State of Israel is under an attack of delegitimization— again, delegitimization— by elements in the international community. This attack includes attempts to enact economic, academic, and cultural boycotts. The last thing we need at this time Is to be under such an attack. I mean this attempt at a boycott from within. What we what he was referring to is a growing boycott in the cultural milieu in Israel against the settlements, against the colonial settlements. What started with sixty or so playwrights, actors, theater people in Israel, they started a boycott against a cultural center in Ariel, which is a settlement. Colonial settlement built on occupied Palestinian territory and other colonial settlements as well. They called for a cultural boycott of these settlements. A few days after, about 150 Israeli academics came out in support of that appeal. And a few days after— and that is the most important development, and I think it's a threshold in the development of the BDS movement, a historic threshold has been crossed— is that about 150 top American and British playwrights, actors, filmmakers, and others from Broadway to Hollywood endorsed that boycott, cultural boycott of Israeli colonial settlements. Now, at Carleton University or Ottawa, this might sound okay, but this is Broadway. This never ever happened before that anyone in mainstream in the U.S. dared to use the B-word and Israel in the same sentence. I mean, they just don't do that in the U.S. So this was a major development for us, that it legitimized boycott as a tactic, at least against the colonial settlements. So to wrap up, I have 5 minutes left. In challenging Israel's oppression, the global BDS campaign does not call for Israel to be treated according to higher or lower standards than those that apply to any other state committing similar crimes and violations of international law. The crucial demand is for Israel to be taken off the lofty pedestal on which it has been placed by the same Western powers that sponsored and justified its creation. On the ruins of Palestinian society. Although Israel is by no means the most atrocious offender around the world, it is the only persistent wrongdoer that has constantly been treated as an honorary member of the Western club of democracies, with the Holocaust cynically and quite irrelevantly summoned as a smokescreen to cover up this Western collusion. The virtually unparalleled state of exceptionalism and impunity that Israel enjoys today allows it to pursue its apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and slow genocide agenda against the indigenous people of Palestine without any regard to international law. It is worth repeating in this context that Palestinians and Arabs more generally bear no responsibility whatsoever for the Holocaust, a European genocide committed against European communities of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, among others. It is therefore not incumbent upon Palestinians to pay in our lives, land, and livelihoods the price for relieving Europe's conscience of its collective guilt over the Holocaust. And as some progressive Jewish intellectuals have stated recently, Never again must always be understood to mean never again to anyone. Western civil society carries a unique responsibility to hold Israel accountable to international law due to the exceptional level of complicity of Western governments in sustaining Israel's system of colonial and racial oppression with your tax money. Deep complicity engenders profound moral responsibility. This complicity, though, should not be seen as merely a function of guilt. It predominantly stems from the Western establishment's hegemonic economic interests, lingering racism, and the belligerent crusade to preserve a system of privilege and exploitation based on might and the monopoly on the tools of mass devastation. Collusion and moral duty aside, the responsibility to promote and support the BDS campaign against Israel also derives from common interest. While the U.S. and other Western states fund Israel's endless atrocious wars and system of apartheid to the tune of billions of dollars every year, millions of children in the West are still left behind in substandard housing, inadequate or nonexistent healthcare, poor education, and an establishment that effectively disenfranchises them. At the same time, when the oil, military and banking industries are aggrandizing their colossal wealth, most Westerners are steadily seeing their civil rights and economic well-being erode before their very eyes, especially in Canada. A progressive transformation in U.S., Canadian, EU priorities from directing these nations' great human and material resources into wars and imperial hegemony Instead of that, into universal healthcare, dignified housing, a school system that's conducive to learning, critical learning, and reversing the fatal damage to the environment is not only good on its own merits for the peoples of the West, it is also good for the rest of the world, for Iraq, Afghanistan, and most certainly for Palestine.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: And I'm coming to the end here. The global BDS movement for Palestinian rights represents a progressive, anti-racist, sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil, nonviolent resistance. It's becoming one of the key political catalysts and moral anchors for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of ending the law of the jungle and upholding in its stead the rule of law, reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignified living, As Desmond Tutu said, we don't need anyone to polish our chains. We want to break the chains altogether. Our South African moment has arrived. Thank you. As I said earlier, the BDS movement is a rights-based approach in that it does not take a position on the one-state versus two-states solution of this colonial conflict. Now, this doesn't mean that each one of us doesn't have a position. Each one of us does have a position. I personally, with my other hat, have advocated one state for 27 years. Consistently, I've been against the two-state solution. And I only see a one democratic state as the most moral solution to this conflict. Now, but let's go back to the question about BDS. Does BDS tacitly lead necessarily to the one-state solution?

Jens Hanssen: No.

Omar Barghouti: I think the question is irrelevant to whether we should support it or not. Why? I will answer the question, but I have to say that it's irrelevant whether we should support it or not. If somebody is committing a crime and I should take part in stopping this crime, at the very least I should not participate in the crime. That's a moral obligation, regardless what might come out of this ending the crime. If I'm a partner in crime, stopping this partnership in crime is no heroism. It's basic moral obligation. When we call on the West to end its complicity in Israel's occupation and apartheid, we're calling for basic human decency, nothing heroic. End your complicity. Don't support their crimes. The next step is help us end the crimes. That's a bit more heroic.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: But regardless, that's a moral issue that has nothing to do with what the outcome might be. Especially, how scary is this outcome? When we say that— well, yeah, I have it. About the delegitimization, the worst-case scenario, one think tank, Reboot Institute, that has been publishing most of the arguments against the BDS campaign, Yeah. Had this same question. I'll just quote it from them, just to bring this— to connect it to what you asked me. What made this delegitimization scare tactic fail even more in the mainstream liberal West was that the nightmare scenario was that the movement's aim would supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the one person, one vote, This is the nightmare scenario. Hardly something that would, you know, hurt the ears of any liberal. So if this were the case, as I said, BDS does not have any intention as a movement leading towards a one-state solution. It's a mainstream consensus movement. We have Fatah, we have center, we have left, we have The majority of the groups within the BDS movement do not endorse one state. Maybe the majority of the more active ones of us do, but the majority of the groups do not. So we do not take a position. But let's assume it were to lead to a one-state solution. What is wrong with a one-person, one-vote solution ultimately? If it's good in any democratic country, why is it so bad and genocidal and disastrous in Israel? Why should we, the indigenous people of the land, accept settler colonialists as our masters forever, as fate? So from a one-state perspective, my other hat, not as a BDS spokesperson, ultimately, as the indigenous population, the most generous offer we can give to our colonial settlers is equality, but nothing more. Don't ask for colonial privileges. Do not get them.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you. Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: So we don't need to be tacit. I mean, if the BDS movement were intended towards a one-state solution, we could have said it. But it's really not. The majority are not for a one-state solution in that movement. The other question was about cutting off communication with Israel. I think the premise is faulty. The premise is we're talking about academic and cultural boycott specifically because economic, there is no communication. So no one objects about that. It's academic and cultural that raises most controversies. That, you know, we do not want to cut off relations from our Israeli academic and cultural figures, colleagues, partners, research partners, and so on. But who's calling for cutting off links? PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, In its boycott call of 2004, until now has never ever called for severing links with academics or with individuals. Unlike the South African boycott, which was a blanket boycott, by the way— and again, I said people do have short memories— the South African boycott was blanket against everyone and everything South African. It did not raise much problem in the 1980s. People were fine with that. Right. But the Palestinian boycott, academic cultural boycott, never calls for severing links with individuals. It's an institutional boycott against Israeli institutions due to their complicity. Nothing prevents an Israeli academic from coming to a University of Toronto conference to speak, to present, to do joint research, to do anything of that sort, so long as it's not an institutional link. An institutional exchange program between U of T and Ben-Gurion University is complicity and should be boycotted. That is our target, not the individuals. Now, why aren't we targeting individuals in Israeli academia and cultural establishment? Is it because of the liberal Zionist myth that they are at the forefront of the struggle against occupation? Absolutely not. They're as racist, as bigoted, as colonial as the average Israeli. Not any better. I'll give one example. In 2008, four Jewish Israeli professors started a petition calling upon the Israeli authorities to allow passage at checkpoints to professors, Palestinian professors and students, to reach their universities. They did not even call it the occupied territories, lest they would. To offend somebody's sensibilities. So they call it the territories. We call on the Israeli authorities in the territories to allow passage at checkpoints to Palestinian professors and students to get to their universities. The most basic academic freedom demand. They passed it on to all 9,000 Israeli academics, thinking that, you know, any self-respecting academic would at least support that demand. Only 407 Out of a population of 9,000 Israeli academics saw it fit to sign this petition. 407. Less than 5%. This reflects very well the level of progressiveness among Israeli academics. Professor Yehuda Shenhalt, a Jewish Israeli professor, did research a few years back on the total number of Israeli academics who have ever signed anything against the occupation. Or taking any public stand against the occupation. And he found a few hundred out of what was then about 7,000 academics have ever taken a public position against the occupation, let alone ending apartheid in Israel, let alone the right of return. Just ending the occupation. So the academic community in Israel has not distinguished itself at all from the average Israeli opinion. But we don't call for boycotting individuals because we don't believe in McCarthyist measures. We don't believe in political tests, in blacklists. Who's a good Israeli? Who's a bad Israeli? We don't do this on principle. We're boycotting institutions because they're complicit. That is black and white. That is very clear. But even then, there are very nuanced guidelines that PACBI has developed. You can check them on the PACBI website, pacbi.org. Very nuanced on how to boycott and what to boycott. They're nuanced to make sure as much as possible that we don't Do you want to start over there? Um, the question is directed at you. At the beginning of this event, you stated that you didn't want people, uh, coming with facts or ramblings, but you rather only wanted Very direct questions.

Jens Hanssen: Now, this event was marketed as a conversation on questioning the boycott of Israel, path to justice, and a possible peace.

Omar Barghouti: Now, one would assume that such an event would be a debate where the other side would be represented, and that is the problem. I don't have any problem with anything that was said, but I have a problem with is that this cannot be challenged because no pro-Zionist or Israeli speaker was brought to the table, and that's what we see We see so often that when pro-Israeli speakers do come to university, their free speech is infringed upon. So many people try to sabotage this or prevent it, and we see this with all sorts of things, be it abortion issues or any issue that doesn't sit with the political left. They try to suppress it. And we see these one-sided events where only one side is represented, and then we're told not to come with flags and only ask direct questions. So I don't have a problem with anything that was said. I'm not even going to get into it. I just think this whole event's a joke.

Jens Hanssen: Yeah.

Omar Barghouti: Why do you think they refused to come?

Jens Hanssen: Well, I mean, I did most of the trying to contact people. You might have suggested a few names. It was, of course, short notice, so that is a good reason. But I think the other issue that I was told from colleagues of mine, good colleagues of mine, They weren't so much afraid of Omar, and who would be? I mean, as I insist, there's nothing radical about him or his ideas, but about the kind of polarity that Omar's ideas generate, and that it becomes a shouting match of audience ad hominem attacks and so on and so forth, and they would have nothing To do with it. Whether that is an honest sort of response, I take that at face value, and that's good enough for me. I have asked an entire spectrum of colleagues and people I didn't know that were recommended to me, and there was no interest in this. But I do want to insist that, to the point really, of raising questions about the boycott. And I've said— I don't want to repeat myself from my introductory remarks— is it is not really about 2 sides. I think Chandler Davis has pointed to the nuances even, you know, within supporters of various gradations of the boycott. So I think one way to move forward is to accept the nuances of this question.

Omar Barghouti: Thank you.

Jens Hanssen: And the ambivalences that many of us feel. But—

Omar Barghouti: If I may add, just before you leave, just very quickly, because I came from Carleton University, where I did manage to have a debate. After Carleton students invited 11 people who refused to debate me, finally one professor at University of Ottawa agreed. And this has been the case at University of California at Berkeley, at Columbia. Every single university in North America, the number of people from the Zionist left to the center to J Street to AIPAC that have refused to debate us on BDS has been staggering. 11 to 1 is the ratio.

Jens Hanssen: Why was it marketed as a debate?

Omar Barghouti: That's fine.

Jens Hanssen: Nobody wants to come.

Omar Barghouti: Why was it marketed as a debate?

Jens Hanssen: It wasn't.

Omar Barghouti: But you're welcome to debate us. I mean, ask any challenging question. Give me any facts that you wish to be aired that you felt I left out. This is the chance to ask any tough questions you have. Do you really? I invite you to have a debate. Can you debate any question you want?

Jens Hanssen: Debate him.

Omar Barghouti: It's every country relative.

Jens Hanssen: Yeah. It wasn't till half of we came private.

Omar Barghouti: Not that question, on the topic.

Jens Hanssen: I'll ask one question.

Omar Barghouti: You spoke about the different segments of the population, the 1.3 living in Israel, population living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and of course the refugees living outside of any definition that is Israel. So, like, and those who know, like, I think if you know that in Lebanon, for example, human rights are extended to all people except for Palestinians. In Syria, I mean, they're called in, in, uh, And I mean, in Kuwait there was a ban on Palestinian academics at one point. And we see it like we see it's coming from the Arab world. And I wonder if the BDS has openly or unopenly done anything about that.

Jens Hanssen: Is that a question? Okay. It's a fair. It's a fair. It's a fair question. I mean, this is the kind of question we have. I have an answer, but for ourselves.

Omar Barghouti: Okay. Professor Farid Isaac, one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement. South Africa, was recently in Palestine. And he told us that the exact, exact same question was raised in South Africa, even much worse. That, look at other African countries around South Africa. Do you want to be like that? Their human rights record is appalling. So why are you complaining about apartheid? At least you have some decent, you know, government and functioning economy, unlike the devastated state of economies around.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: It is very highly irrelevant. Why? Because we're talking about the cause and effect. The root cause of this is our dispossession and occupation. Once that ends, we will have no problem in any other Arab country. I cannot possibly defend autocratic dictatorships in any Arab country that are committing horrendous violations of human rights, not just against Palestinians, against their own citizens.

Jens Hanssen: Yes.

Omar Barghouti: And I would sign any petition calling for a boycott of Saudi Arabia, of Egypt, of any country over their record of human rights violations. I'm a human rights activist, and I'm morally consistent. So I'm not going to defend any of these dictatorships. But how is that relevant? Israel has dispossessed us and occupied us. We want our rights, and we should get our rights, regardless how our refugees are treated elsewhere. Jewish refugees of World War II Were not treated very well by this country that said one Jew is one too many. The Zionist and antisemitic leadership of this country then wanted them all to go to Palestine to get rid of them. And the U.S. and most of Western Europe, they were not very welcome. Does that give Nazi Germany an excuse? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. We have to deal with root causes.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: My question is about something that Mahmoud Darwish said in a film about his life that was made about him. When the question was brought up about Israelis and Palestinians living together, and he paused for a second in the film and said, well, we need a new culture. As I was listening to you, I started to wonder and reflect if this BDS movement could provide some of that new culture, at least a certain kind of political culture. I was wondering what you and Tamer thought about this, and I was wondering if you could give us some examples of how that might be.

Jens Hanssen: Go for it. Sorry. Yes.

Omar Barghouti: Okay. I think so. I haven't thought of it before, but it's a very good question. I think so. I think BDS, by its focus on international and human rights, on equality, justice for all, on its anti-racist agenda, and on connecting with social movements worldwide, is setting a new type of culture, political culture, struggle culture. In other words, we're saying that our struggle, regardless of what UN international gives us a right to do— for example, Palestinians, as any nation under occupation, has a right to resist by all means. Including armed resistance. That's a right. So long as this resistance is not indiscriminate. We're not allowed in international law to indiscriminately attack our enemies, the society of the other. Regardless, in the BDS movement, by adopting this civil, nonviolent form of resistance that focuses on rights and on equality ultimately— I mean, we have the term equality in every literature, in every statement we have, which means we're not calling for Reversing oppression. We're not calling for becoming stronger so that we can oppress our current oppressors, but getting rid of all oppression, as Paulo Freire has it. So I think we are establishing a new culture based on rights, based on equality and justice, respect for the law and for the rights of others. Can we predict that the future will be so rosy? Absolutely not. We're dealing with human lives, with societies. It's always dynamic.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: But at least it's a good intellectual and activist basis to start from, I think. As you mentioned Darwish and as you mentioned film, let me just say that we have a great many instances of joint culture in the last 20 years of most, most heartwarming.

Jens Hanssen: And if you go to the Toronto Palestinian Film Festival, or if you just see the foreign films that are circulating now, you'll see collaborations between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

Omar Barghouti: Sure.

Jens Hanssen: And you probably all know about the—

Omar Barghouti: Musical efforts joined with Daniel Barenboim of Edward Said, as long as he was alive, which continued by Barenboim after Edward Said's death.

Jens Hanssen: Just a few of the many examples of when people can talk to each other, they do.

Omar Barghouti: Thank you. First of all, apologies to the audience for reading my question off my phone. This is an English— in a recent article, Yannick Saryn-Mathissy used the term necropolities to describe Israel's relationship and administrative bureaucratic practice, political ideology, active combat, etc. And the disappearance of power dynamics and language itself to describe this situation. How does this aggressive process of disappearance of necropolitics affect the understanding of BDS organizing, particularly because the South African precedent did not necessitate the willful disappearance of the Black population there? Yeah, thanks for the question. This is the main difference between Israel and South Africa, is that South Africa wanted to exploit But like majority, Israel wants us to disappear into thin air. That's a major difference. And they do it gradually because a Holocaust is not allowed in the 21st century, not in this region at least. In Rwanda we had something similar, but not in this Middle East region with all its oil, instability to that level. It cannot be afforded. That's why, as Ilan Pappé says, if Israel is not committing en masse ethnic cleansing, let alone genocide, Right. Not for ethical reasons, but for very practical reasons. It cannot lose the reason why it was established in the first place. I mean, all of this sympathy in the West, it will lose it entirely. But I think we're beyond that stage of bureaucratic hurdles and slow ethnic cleansing and so on. We're up to what Richard Falk, UN rapporteur for human rights, calls acts of genocide. A team of legal experts Sponsored by the Arab League immediately after Cast Lead, the Israeli aggression on Gaza, came up with the conclusion that Israel has committed acts of genocide. You cannot yet call it a crime of genocide, because in international law you have to prove the intention. And you know lawyers, they can discuss it forever whether there's intention or not. But anyway, at least we know there are acts of genocide being committed. What's the Willfully difference between acts of genocide and crimes of genocide? contaminating the water supply, destroying the sewage system, making water and sewage mix, and preventing equipment from entering Gaza that would fix this problem cannot be but intentional. So this is far worse than anything that is happening in the West Bank or in the Negev Desert. The slow ongoing process of ethnic cleansing is continuing everywhere with building the colonies, the wall, and so on, depriving us of our access to water. It's happening. But the worst, I think, is the genocidal aspect of Israel's war, which is intensifying. This is why it has become much more urgent to do BDS now. We cannot afford to wait 25 years like South Africa. We'll be all gone by then. My question is about BDS and your campaign on BDS and its relation within internal politics of Palestine. I'm particularly interested because you said that BDS is right-based, right? A right-based campaign. I understand the main target of this right-based campaign is the systematic discrimination by the Israeli state. But at the same time, I think that a right-based campaign cannot be simply indifferent to what other forms of discrimination and Or violations of human rights that happens within Palestinian groups.

Jens Hanssen: In particular, I'm interested to hear from you about the relation between your campaign and groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

Omar Barghouti: There's a coalition of Palestinian political, national, and Islamic forces that was the primary signatory of the BDS call, affording us this legitimacy of having a consensus support in the political spectrum. So everyone is represented, yet most of these political groups do not actually participate in the leadership of the BDS movement. So they're on paper supporting it, everyone is behind it, but they don't play a direct role, including Hamas and Jihad. As far as I know, they have never participated in any single BDS campaign or discussion or decision until now. Within the BDS movement, no, we do not criticize things outside our mandate, not just violations of human rights inside Palestinian occupied territories, even things like neoliberalism, our position on economic issues. We don't. This is not the place to do that. This is A movement that is struggling on a very, very clear mandate with certain tactics. We do that kind of politics elsewhere. Palestinians don't just have the BDS movement. Each one of us is active in several other movements where we do criticize. I personally have consistently criticized Hamas's violations of women's rights and human rights in general in the Gaza Strip on Hamas's radio.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: They had no idea I would do that, so they interviewed me on BDS, and knowing my position on the PA, because I called the PA complicit in the war on Gaza, so they gave me the red carpet. But after that, I did speak about the sociocultural repression in Gaza. And so we are quite open about that, but not as a representative of the BDS movement. That's what I'm trying to say. We cannot afford that.

Jens Hanssen: Okay. My question to you, Omar, is about the dialogue politics between Israelis and Palestinians and its relevancy in how it maintains apartheid against Palestinians.

Omar Barghouti: Okay, we have a name for this dialogue business. We call it the peace industry. After the Oslo Accords of 1993, actually, this was the most flourishing industry in the occupied territories, the peace industry. If you're a mediocre academic or I'm an artist who cannot make it otherwise. The fastest way to get rich is finding a Israeli partner. You get very, very rich, very quickly. Europeans, Americans, Canadians pay very handsomely for any kind of collaboration, particularly those that are apolitical. So long as you don't discuss the occupation, apartheid, or anything, you can do anything. Women discovering their common roots and you discovering how the environment is so important, whatever you wish. You get rich doing it, as long as you get an Israeli partner. So this became an industry. Now it's totally discredited, unlike 10 years ago when it was at its height, when we had hundreds and hundreds of shops selling democracy, women's rights, whatever, as long as they don't discuss the political situation. The main basis for criticizing this peace industry is that there can never be dialogue, there can never be parity between oppressor and oppressed. There can only be a form of negotiation. So long as there is an oppressor and oppressed, you can never build a bridge, because one is above the other. You need a ladder to go up and down, but not a bridge. To have a bridge, they need to be on the same level, which means you need to end oppression. So there is no possibility of dialogue, serious ethical dialogue, as in working towards just peace, it's impossible if you divorce it from the political reality. So yes, we've had good dialogue between groups resisting together. For example, Boycotts from Within. We have a whole Israeli component of the BDS movement— and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention it— that is playing a very important role globally called Boycotts from Within. It's hundreds of mainly Jewish Israelis that support this campaign. The Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel, which is joint Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, has a Who Profits from the Occupation website, which is an excellent resource on companies complicit in the occupation. It's whoprofits.org, one word, whoprofits.org. We have AIC, the Alternative Information Center, Michael Warschawski. We have several groups within Israel that are in dialogue with us, but that's a different kind of dialogue. It's a dialogue between partners struggling to end injustice, not dialogue for the sake of whitewashing injustice and presenting a deceptive image of the possibility of coexistence without ending injustice.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you. Hi, um, so you just spoke about several groups that, um, that you can work with. Um, so every time I go back, I'm also from— as I go back, I find myself, um, in direct contact with 2 kinds of people. One kind is the baddest kind, obviously, in these areas that you did as well.

Omar Barghouti: Yeah.

Jens Hanssen: The other kind are people who are activists, particularly socialists, communists, and some anarchists, who— I mean, I don't doubt there's—

Omar Barghouti: Israelis, you mean? Israelis?

Jens Hanssen: Israelis. I'm not necessarily— they go to some of the obsolete political things. However, they have a few problems with debt because they are now in class analysis, and they're saying, okay, no real problems with cultural origins. The problem is that it will end up creating this siege mentality.

Omar Barghouti: Yeah, those microphones need some help.

Jens Hanssen: It will create this siege mentality. So the Jewish working class, which is mostly Mizrahi, who are also oppressed by Zionism, because Zionism, as you know, is a white European movement and ideology. So they're also supporting here. What happens is that they're going to be further marginalized, they're going to buy into the seasonality, they're going to give the government, you know, carte blanche to do whatever. So the situation for the Palestinians, for the working-class Palestinians and the working class in the suburbs, is going to get worse, you know. So they're actually worried about coming Okay.

Omar Barghouti: Okay, I was at NPA, which is a new anti-capitalist party in France. They have a summer university every year. They invited me to their last university in the south of France last year. So I had a similar question from— they're all communists. So one of them asked me, gave me that class analysis, the same that you mentioned. And it's a thoughtful question. My immediate reaction was that this is white Marxism. This is not Marxism. This is white Marxism. This is the type of Marxism that privileges the whites, workers or not workers. It privileges the whites, our settlers. The reason I'm saying that, in a situation of grave oppression, colonial oppression, settler colonialism, as we have in Palestine, the most important The first obligation for any progressive, Marxist or otherwise, any liberal, is to end that main form of oppression, hopefully in a way that will also bring about social justice, social economic justice, obviously. But if the working class of the oppressor is part of the problem, our concern should not be mostly about their social security and economic security. It's about ending the oppression. They will suffer? Yes. That is a price that must be paid, because this state is oppressing us. The working class of Germany did suffer tremendously from the counter-German attacks. The working class of South Africa suffered tremendously from the boycott, and the black working class suffered more than anyone, more than the white working class. But did that stop us from supporting the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa? No. And the movement in Palestine? The, the black workers ask us to stop. That is the key question. Because if we're really doing solidarity, proper solidarity, we listen to the oppressed, not the oppressors, not the working class, not the ruling class. The oppressed first and foremost. The Palestinian oppressed, all the trade union movement, all federations of trade unions in Palestine, all professional unions are in the BDS movement and have called upon the world to boycott Israel. We understand very clearly the price we must pay. But there is no freedom without price. We are ready to pay that price to see the light at the end of the tunnel. So we understand we will suffer even much more than the working class of Israel. But that's okay. Ultimately, we'll live with it until we get our freedom. Because you know what? It's not going to be any better if we don't struggle.

Jens Hanssen: Yeah.

Omar Barghouti: So if you resist, you always pay a price. But at least there's this chance that you might, just might, end oppression once and for all. For that hope, we're ready to do it. Just very quickly, the second part about the siege mentality, because I don't want to drop that very important question. As I've said in previous talks, Israelis are not genetically different than any other human group of colonialists. I mean, they're just like any colonial society. The fact that resistance makes them band together in a tribal mode is normal. So did the South Africans, so did the French in Algeria, so did the British in India, and so on and so I could go on and on. So do many in this country when it comes to indigenous rights.

Jens Hanssen: Yes.

Omar Barghouti: It's this banding together as a tribe, you know, us versus them. But this happens always at the beginning. In South Africa, it happened. The entire white population, English and Afrikaner, got together against the blacks, with very few exceptions. When the anti-apartheid boycotts started really hurting, when they really looked more and more like a pariah on the world stage, when their cricket players could not play at the Commonwealth and their oranges were not selling and their wine—

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: They said, enough. We don't want this apartheid to continue. So at first they band up like a truck. But eventually, when boycott hurts, we start seeing some cracks. We're already seeing some cracks, by the way. But this crack, this crack in the wall will further and further grow as the boycott hurts more. I think it's a natural phenomenon to see this first phase. But it's only a first phase. Okay. On the first issue, the distinction between Jews and Zionism. You are not referring to something I said, I hope?

Jens Hanssen: No, no, no, this is just something I noticed and observed.

Omar Barghouti: A lot of people talk about Judaism being the problem as opposed to Zionism being the problem. Okay, it's worth repeating that the BDS movement is totally anti-racist, which includes our solid opposition to any form of antisemitism. We've been very consistent about this. Antisemites are not welcome in the movement. To join the BDS movement, you have to believe in equal rights for all humans Regardless of identity, any form of identity— sexual identity, gender, any identity. We are against all kinds of discrimination and racism, including anti-Semitism. The second part of the Israeli academic petition for basic academic freedom, that only 407 signed out of 9,000— a secret ballot— are professors ashamed to sign a statement that says, allow professors to go to university? Well, yeah, but you've got the thing that happened with Ford yesterday in this city. There wasn't that vote that went on, and I heard the radio say they think there's a lot of people that didn't want to be seen to say, yeah, I support Ford, because a lot of people think he's an idiot. But that's supporting Ford. That's a big statement. Supporting Ford is something major that you have to account for and you have to feel ashamed of. I will never get a visa again to Canada. I'm not taking sides in Kenya.

Jens Hanssen: You just have to speak loud. I'd be curious to get your view on whether, uh, there are any halfway steps between complete boycott legislation and sort of no And your discussion recalls some things that were going on in the '80s in South Africa. Hard as it is to believe, it was very controversial in those days for the establishment here. It was still the Cold War. A lot of people associated ANC with communism. And so that was an important apology for the relations to apartheid South Africa. So one compromise popular in the business community with the so-called Sullivan Principle, right, in which, uh, companies weren't being, uh, the demand wasn't so much to immediately divest from South Africa but to adopt more progressive policies to integrate Blacks more closely into the business sector. Do you envision anything that's like that as possible simply for the reason this tactical strategy To make it sort of more appealing, more mainstream, to defuse the kind of negative reaction one often gets from a powerful person? Okay.

Omar Barghouti: Halfway measures in the BDS movement. As I said, let's look at the BDS call, the basis for this movement, in 2 parts. First part is mandatory. The second part is nuanced. The mandatory part is admitting, respecting, recognizing our 3 basic rights. Ending occupation, ending racial discrimination, and the right of return. That is not negotiable. Those are our minimal rights under international law. We shall not accept anything less than that. As Desmond Tutu says, we want the full menu of rights. We don't want some crumbs thrown at us. With the second part, the implementation of the boycott and divestment, a main guiding principle in the implementation phase is context sensitivity. What this says is that our partners everywhere know best what to target, how to target, what phases to go through, how gradual it should be. We never impose from Palestine how the University of Toronto student activists, faculty activists should implement BDS. They know best. We defer to them. We respect their decision and their autonomy in thinking of how best to do this.

Jens Hanssen: And I think that's a very important point.

Omar Barghouti: We appreciate deeply their solidarity, and we defer to them. So, I've said it before, jokingly, but we don't mind if you accept the BDS principles if you start with just boycotting Israeli eggs. Nothing else. We'll be happy with that. So, of course, half measures, quarter measures, one-hundredth of measures, that's okay. The University of Toronto does not have to boycott Israel tomorrow. We'll be very happy if they clean out their pension funds.

Jens Hanssen: Okay.

Omar Barghouti: Of stocks of companies invested in the Israeli occupation that are in direct violation of international law. We'd be happy even if they don't go that far and just condemn Israel's siege of Gaza. We'd be happy if academics in the faculty senate, whatever you call it here, call for an end to the occupation. These are half measures along the way. Any step helps, so long as you admit— you recognize our basic rights.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.

Omar Barghouti: So that's the key issue. Concerning the Sullivan Principles, the Sullivan Principles, to reduce them in a nutshell, called on the U.S. not to boycott any factories, any businesses in South Africa that were not apartheid— implementing apartheid. In other words, if Ford, the cars company, cars manufacturer, their factory in South Africa— not your Ford, the other Ford. I don't know if they're related, actually. Anyway, if the Ford car manufacturer in South Africa had equal opportunity to blacks and whites and did not distinguish between them, then it's okay to do business with Ford in South Africa. The South African movement rejected the Sullivan Principles. This is where the quote I had from Desmond Tutu came in. That's the historic context. Then Desmond Tutu came out and said, We don't want you to polish our chains. We want to get rid of them. He was referring exactly to the Sullivan Principles, because Ford was still benefiting apartheid. It's still paying taxes to apartheid. Whether or not it was implementing certain measures to ameliorate apartheid is another story. It was not enough for the movement there. And similarly, it won't be enough for us. We've learned a lot of lessons. We're in constant contact. with our South African comrades, and we learn a lot from their experience and tactics. So I don't think we can accept that type of compromise on the principle. But in the implementation, you can be as gradual as you wish. Hi.

Jens Hanssen: I know that in South Africa there's, in retrospect, a lot of consideration that the History over apartheid is very limited, but because in part of the focus on human rights in civil and political, right, but not social and economic aspects of it. So I guess my question has to do with that. I guess I would relate to what some of the class-based, as well as an expanded Insights now about liberalism. We've heard a number of times about liberalism, and there certainly are, you know, any number of analysis now of the question of the narrowness and the distortions of liberalism, you know, for not including the social. So, so is it not the thing You know, relating that to, you know, the huge environmental threats, which are certainly a huge threat in the Middle East, you know, that will require regional administration, simply just because of the huge water problems.

Omar Barghouti: Okay, it's a very, very tough question that has faced revolutions, freedom movements for decades, I think. What do progressive elements in a liberation movement do? How do you bring in the socioeconomic agenda while the focus is mainly on liberation? And as a progressive person, of course, and as I was talking over dinner before we came here, we have the Algerian example before us, not just South Africa. I'll come to South Africa. In the Algerian case, social economic justice was delayed, but let's get liberation first and foremost, and then we'll deal with that. And they never dealt with that, and they will never deal with that. If it's not part of the revolution, it will never come later. So we understand that fully. Now, do you do that in every form of struggle, or do you have different fronts where you lead your struggles? This is the question that I was trying to refer to. So it's a dilemma. We can make the BDS National Committee, the huge coalition that's leading this global BDS movement, much more progressive. But then we'll be much, much smaller. And we'll have a very good progressive agenda that connects with the best of the social movements and women's agenda, everything, on the whole spectrum of socio-cultural-economic issues. But then it'll be a much smaller movement and be much, much less effective. When I say it's a liberal agenda, I did not mean it in what's currently being used as liberal in the West, to mean that, you know, unchain those companies, those multinationals to do what they want and destroy the environment. And so I did not mean it in that sense. I meant with the good old traditional sense of liberalism, respect for the law that applies to everyone, equality, democracy.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: Human rights, that type. Now I know this has no basis if you don't discuss economic and social justice, and the progressives of us in the movement are not ignoring that. We just choose not to do it there in order not to destroy this huge unity, particularly in a situation where we have complete fragmentation of the Palestinian people. Israel has succeeded largely in fragmenting us: Gaza, West Bank, Jerusalem, 48, the refugees. Diaspora. I mean, we are so fragmented. The BDS National Committee is one place, the BDS movement is one place where we have a massive Palestinian consensus and on a very good agenda, very solid agenda. And we do the other stuff elsewhere, not necessarily here. On South Africa, absolutely. If there's one lesson we learned after freedom was that political freedom is not enough.

Jens Hanssen: Right.

Omar Barghouti: When you still can't own your land, when you're still enslaved economically, you still have economic apartheid, of course. And we recognize that in South Africa. And that is the harshest lesson we learned from the South African experience, how not to fall into that trap. But again, I want to distinguish the BDS movement is not the Palestinian liberation movement. We cannot become the Palestinian liberation movement.

Jens Hanssen: I see.

Omar Barghouti: We are part of that movement. We cannot cover the entire spectrum. The other stuff is up to political parties, which are currently dearly lacking, but we need political parties to retake that struggle again.

Jens Hanssen: Thank you.