Threat to BDS from Tories
Here is a statement from the Palestine Solidarity Committee protesting against the move against BDS towards the state of Israel.
https://www.palestinecampaign.org/psc-responds-to-governments-anti-bds-threat/
Under the Tory Queen’s speech the government will ban universities and local councils from organising boycotts, sanctions and disinvestment (BDS) against Israel. Further, public bodies will be banned from working with institutions that advocate BDS. This is a threat to democracy and the right to protest.
Israel is violating international law by planting and supporting Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, thus robbing the Palestinians of their land and livelihoods.
The BDS movement is the exact equivalent of the campaign of boycott against apartheid South Africa launched 60 years ago. This movement, headed by the Anti-Apartheid Movement, played its part in the ending of apartheid. It was given a huge impetus in 1960 when in 1960 69 unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by the apartheid regime. Volunteers leafleted outside supermarkets urging people not to buy South African goods. It extended to an academic boycott and was fully supported by the mass movement of black workers fighting apartheid in South Africa.
The AAM’s campaign was generally opposed by big business, which found apartheid horrible but horrible profitable. The movement was unable to get successive governments to support the campaign.
It is a feature of capitalism that our money, in the form of local authority pension funds etc, are used in ways we would oppose. The pension fund managers invest wherever it is most profitable, whether that was apartheid then or the state of Israel now. It is surely our right to bring pressure to bear on these financial institutions to stop doing this and switch these investments elsewhere. Even the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney has urged financial institutions to move investments away from carbon emitting firms in view of the climate emergency. Why should we not be entitled to control where our money goes? The BDS movement is entirely peaceful.
As the PSC statement, shows the Tories are copying legislation enacted in 20 US states and supported by Donald Trump. Though Trump is a staunch supporter of this aggressive policy by the Israeli government he cannot be described as a friend of civil liberties or Jewish people. He described the Nazis who killed a protester and injured many others in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.”
The BDS movement has been identified by the Netanyahu government as “the number one strategic threat” to their racist, expansionist project. They are spreading the lie that any criticism of their policy is antisemitic. By the same token the apartheid regime could have accused the opposition as being racist against white South Africans! Of course the movement back then was opposed not to individuals but to a system that treated other humans as second class citizens. The same is true of the BDS movement now.
The government threat to BDS is one of a series of gestures to limit freedom of speech and effective opposition to the Tories. It is clear that Johnson intends to exploit his election victory to move in a Bonapartist direction with attacks on the judiciary, on the rights of Parliament and human rights. This is one small example of this. It must be resisted all down the line.
