Palestine: Resisting Genocide and the US-Israeli Might-Makes-Right Order

By Omar Barghouti

“Palestine is really the center of the world,” says Angela Davis. This may imply two simultaneous and equally pertinent propositions. First, the genocide perpetrated by Israel against millions of Indigenous Palestinians in Gaza with the full partnership of the colonial West, led by the United States, is the first livestreamed genocide in history. Israel’s “total impunity” in committing it has ushered in a might-makes-right era unseen in decades, and that poses a threat to humanity at large, not just Palestinians.

As Palestinian civil society warned from the beginning of Israel’s livestreamed genocide, and as Colombian President Gustavo Petro put it as early as October 2023, “Gaza is only the first experiment to consider all of us disposable.” Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine,” which trashes international law, coupled with the US criminal aggression against Venezuela and Cuba, as well as its colonial threats against Greenland, must be scrutinized in this context. The Gaza “experiment” has relatively “normalized” an unprecedented level of unmasked colonial brutality that is inspiring the US ruling elites and the military-security-technology oligarchs and establishment that stand to gain from the resulting wars and conquests. “In a world where even genocide is not a red line, there are no red lines,” as former senior UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber has said. Any state, even the pathetic colonial powers of Europe that thought it was safe, must think again.

Trump, the self-appointed US emperor, has ambitions that go well beyond Gaza. His desire to gradually replace the United Nations with his “Board of Peace” is the most serious threat to the UN since its inception. The US and Israel, increasingly isolated at the UN, seem to prefer burying it altogether, so that no state can hold them accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or, indeed, genocide. But far from projecting power, these desperate moves by the US and Israel reveal, perhaps more than anything, the unraveling of Pax Americana and confirms the decline of both the US empire and Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism. Unmasked villains may continue to be ruthless, hubristic, and depraved, but their unmasking exposes their Achille’s heal.

The current phase of US imperialism – unprecedented in its shedding all pretenses of honoring commitments to human rights, democracy, peace, or international law—builds on, and is emboldened by, doctrines and mechanisms first tested on Palestinians. Resisting the empire’s new destructive phase must therefore begin with ending Israel’s ongoing genocide and holding it genuinely accountable through the established mechanisms of international law.

This brings us to the second implication of Angela Davis’s aphoristic dictum— resisting this might-makes-right order begins from Palestine, from realizing the intersectionality of struggles for liberation, for justice, and against all forms of oppression, racism and supremacy worldwide.

Back in 2009, I wrote that Palestine’s South Africa moment was nearing. Despite the US-Israeli genocide against over two million Palestinians in the illegally occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, I now think this moment is nearer than ever. The global movement in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, led by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has reached an unprecedented level of coordination, strategic reach, and irrefutable impact. The BDS movement is beginning to affect real policy changes that are isolating Israel’s 77-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid like never before.

A few months ago, Israeli PM Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, shockingly called for Israel to become a “super Sparta,” admitting for the first time Israel’s unprecedented global isolation. Even Trump in his recent speech before the Israeli parliament warned Israel of its worldwide isolation saying with his typical eloquence, “It was getting to be a little nasty out there in the world. And ultimately the world wins. You can’t beat the world.” This world is us, all of us who have collectively, persistently, and strategically campaigned to end Israel’s genocide. The BDS movement has been the main engine behind this isolation. There is no doubt that every boycott, every divestment, every pressure for real, lawful sanctions is already contributing to our struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.

But what about the ceasefire? As many have said, to Israel a ceasefire means: “You cease, we fire.” We realize that even a real ceasefire would only be the most important first step to end the genocide. Without massive pressure, it would constitute a continuation of a less visible form of genocide that Israel and the US hope will provoke less regional and global outrage, boycotts and sanctions. Neither the famine nor the repercussions of the annihilation of Gaza would end. Israel’s illegal military occupation, apartheid, and denial of our refugees’ rights would persist unabated. Only meaningful accountability and ending all forms of state, corporate, and institutional complicity can force the US-Israeli genocidal axis to respect the ceasefire and eventually end the siege and occupation.

Those who blame the blatant depravity and unspeakable criminality of Israel’s genocide on Netanyahu and his fascist government alone betray either selective amnesia or a warped reading of the current reality. According to a recent Israeli public opinion poll, 82% of Jewish Israelis support the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and 56% support the forced expulsion of Palestinian citizens of present-day Israel. About 50% support the full extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. According to Orly Noy, the chair of B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights organization, “Israel is unleashing a holocaust in Gaza, and it cannot be dismissed as the will of the country’s current fascist leaders alone.” Noy calls for a “denazification process” in Israeli society.

Apartheid Israel, enabled and emboldened by the shameless, boundless military, financial, political, and media complicity of the US, the UK, and most of the member states of the European Union, is trying to normalize the fundamentally abnormal and inhuman. It is trying to numb our consciences with its relentless savagery. Israel has for decades committed what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls “incremental genocide.” It has viewed the rise of far-right, fascist, and authoritarian powers in the West, India, and elsewhere as the long-coveted opportunity to finally exterminate the Indigenous Palestinian survivors of its ongoing Nakba. Eliminating the natives, after all, is a feature not a bug in settler colonial history, as the long history of settler-colonies from the Americas to Australia teaches us.

A growing international human rights consensus now recognizes Israel’s unspeakable crimes in Gaza as genocide. Reports by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars are the latest confirmation of this reality. In addition to murdering tens of thousands of Palestinians and reducing Gaza’s 4,000-year-old heritage to ashes, Israel is reducing the basic tenets of international law “to tatters,” as former President of Ireland Michael Higgins has put it. The world stands at the precipice of a might-makes-right era.

At the core of Israel’s “total impunity” lies the complicity of states, corporations, and institutions with Israel’s regime of oppression. It is this complicity that the global Palestine solidarity movement, led by the BDS movement, seeks to disrupt and sever.

As dozens of UN human rights experts have affirmed, in order for states to comply with their legal obligations triggered by the International Court of Justice’s rulings, they must impose a comprehensive military embargo as well as “cancel or suspend economic relationships, trade agreements, and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory.” Some states are complying with their duties. Colombia, Turkey, and other global south states are imposing energy, trade, or military embargoes on Israel. In the West, Spain, Slovenia, Scotland, among others, now support sweeping sanctions.

The global majority today realizes that Israel’s regime of oppression is a model for most of the world’s authoritarian rulers. It is a partner of fascist parties in the West, most of whom are antisemitic to the core, and of far-right regimes and dictatorships globally. It sells its military-security technologies and colonial doctrines as “battle-tested.” This means “tested” on the bodies of Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Syrians and other Arabs. Aside from the widespread bribing, bullying, and extortion of elected officials, Israel has extensively deployed the export of its weaponized spyware, as well as its disinformation and election-rigging services as diplomacy tools to gain influence in dozens of countries, south and north. Israel’s intimate connections to the depraved sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein may shed more light on methods used by Israel to gain influence in countries across the world.

To resist the new global order of might-makes-right, or “peace through strength,” Israel’s Western-enabled genocide must be stopped. To that end, and exercising our moral agency, we in the BDS movement have persistently channeled our grief and rage into principled and strategic energy to fight the complicity that enables the genocide. Our ultimate goal has consistently remained to dismantle Israel’s underlying regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid as a necessary condition for the Indigenous people of Palestine to exercise self-determination and enjoy freedom, justice, and equality.

Palestinians have no illusions that justice will just shine on us from the International Court of Justice in The Hague or the UN in New York. We have international law and the ethical high ground on our side. We exist as an Indigenous people resisting a depraved, genocidal system of oppression and insisting on achieving our inalienable rights. Ethics and the law are necessary in any liberation struggle, but they are not—and never have been—sufficient. To resist and dismantle a system of oppression, the oppressed invariably need power to counter and resist their oppressors: people power, effective solidarity power, grassroots power, intersectional coalition power, media power, cultural power are among its many necessary forms.

When the Palestinian consensus calls for BDS worldwide, including against Israel’s complicit academic, cultural, and sports institutions and against the colonial Histadrut (General Organization of Workers in Israel), we are not begging the world for charity. We are calling for meaningful solidarity. But before both, we are demanding an end to complicity. First, do no harm. As the struggle that abolished apartheid in South Africa has shown, ending state, corporate, and institutional complicity in Israel’s system of oppression through the nonviolent tactics of BDS is the most effective form of solidarity.

Launched in 2005, the nonviolent BDS movement is led by the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It is inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the US Civil Rights movement and is rooted in a century of Palestinian popular resistance. It aims at ending Israel’s regime of occupation and apartheid and upholding the right of Palestinian refugees to return and to receive reparations. Anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the BDS movement categorically opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Muslim racism, and anti-Jewish racism. It targets complicity, not identity. There is nothing Jewish about Israel’s illegal occupation, ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or genocide. There is therefore nothing anti-Jewish about working to end these structures of oppression.

Over the last two decades, the BDS movement has built a massive network, supported by trade unions and farmers’ coalitions as well as by racial, social, gender, and climate justice movements. Together this coalition represents tens of millions of people worldwide. The movement’s impact continues to accelerate.

BDS has played a significant role in the divestment from giant sovereign funds in Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and elsewhere and from complicit companies and banks. Norway’s pension fund, the world’s largest sovereign fund, has divested its entire $500m worth of Israel Bonds as have the US-based United Methodist Church and Presbyterian Church USA.

BDS has forced large multinationals, including Veolia, Orange, G4S, CRH, PUMA, and Pillsbury, to end complicity in Israel’s crimes. Co-op supermarkets in the UK and in parts of Italy have joined the boycott of Israeli products, and tens of city councils have adopted ethical procurement and/or investment guidelines to exclude companies implicated in Israel’s crimes.

In the last year or so alone, there have been deeply inspiring BDS measures taken by trade unions globally. Trade unions in Italy and later in the Spanish state have led national strikes against the genocide and complicity in it, setting a historic precedent. Dockworkers and transport unions in Italy, France, Belgium, Morocco, Turkey, Greece, and Spain, to name just some of them, are translating their solidarity into popular mobilizations to disrupt the military supply lines to Israel.

Tens of universities, in Europe, Latin America and South Africa, have cut academic ties with Israel’s deeply complicit academic institutions. Universities in the US have divested from companies enabling Israel’s crimes.

In the cultural domain, five European broadcasters are now endorsing the exclusion of Israel from Eurovision. Over 700 Dutch and Belgian cultural institutions, including the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam—the largest in the world—have most recently endorsed the cultural boycott of Israel. More than 5,000 film workers, mostly from Hollywood, have signed a historic pledge to boycott Israel’s complicit film industry. Over 7,000 publishers and writers, including Sally Rooney, have endorsed the cultural boycott, as have tens of thousands of cultural figures, including musicians, visual artists, and a rapidly growing number of arts organizations, unions, and associations.

Under pressure from artists and human rights defenders, many major music, literary and arts festivals around the world are dropping corporate sponsors complicit in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and/or ended partnerships with Israel, its lobby groups, and complicit institutions.

The Football Association of Ireland has voted by a huge margin to bring a motion to UEFA calling to exclude genocidal Israel from world football, while mass mobilizations have forced Israel’s cycling team to drop Israel’s representation.

Divesting from Israel and from companies that enable its regime of genocide and apartheid against Palestinians is not just an ethical and legal obligation, but also an expression of financial and fiduciary responsibility. Israel’s economy, after all, is experiencing what 130 of its top economists describe as a “spiral of collapse,” with an almost unprecedented “brain drain,” a nosediving tech industry, and a credit rating that is near “junk” levels, according to Moody’s. Intel has frozen a planned $25 billion investment in Israel in 2024. Increasingly seen by investors as what the BDS movement calls a #ShutDownNation, Israel has ranked dead last among 50 countries in the recently released Nations Brand Index. The Chairman of the Israel Export Institute admits, “BDS and boycotts have changed Israel’s global trade landscape.”

“But wouldn’t respecting BDS guidelines cost us jobs? a few trade unionists have asked

The BDS movement has been around for over two decades. Where on earth have you heard of any self-respecting trade union blaming BDS, not neoliberal austerity, climate calamity, and corporate criminality, for losing jobs? One British trade union leader, in private, has raised this concern. At a recent British Trades Union Congress conference, I said the following:

“Across the West, including the UK, the economy, academia, society are significantly dominated by militarization and securitization. When the Labour Party had an actually progressive, pro-labor leadership, not a racist, authoritarian and neoliberal one, it had a revolutionary and well-thought-out plan to transition the economy and society, to be more peaceful, more democratic, more ethical, more respectful of people and the planet, and more beneficial for working people. What ever happened to that vision? But why is this our business as Palestinians? Because your weapons are burning and cutting our children, women and men to pieces, so excuse our audacity in demanding justice and accountability. We have the absolute right to ask you to end this complicity—end the arms trade with Israel, fully and immediately, no ifs or buts. This is a matter of duty, not discretion—legal and ethical duty, that is.”

Solidarity is more needed now than ever, and it begins with ending complicity and pushing for real accountability. All major Palestinian trade unions and almost the entirety of the rest of Palestinian civil society have appealed to international trade unions and the solidarity movement saying:

“As a matter of life-or-death urgency, we call for forming broad coalitions and building towards powerful mass disruptions, where feasible, that are context-sensitive, peaceful, and strategic, targeting complicit entities and calling for ending complicity and imposing lawful sanctions, particularly comprehensive military and energy embargoes.”

BDS is fundamentally calling on all people of conscience and their institutions to fulfill their profound moral obligation to desist from complicity in Israel’s system of oppression against the Palestinian people.

Palestinian civil society is united in calling for more than just enacting consumer, academic, cultural and sports boycotts of Israel and its complicit institutions in accordance with their legal and ethical obligations. We are calling also for peaceful disruption of business-as-usual with Israel at the state, corporate, and institutional levels. This includes pressuring city councils, trade unions, universities, churches, and other institutions to divest from Israel Bonds and from companies that are complicit in Israel’s grave human rights violations. We call for the exclusion of complicit companies from tenders and contracts. Our movement calls upon schools, trade unions, community centers, churches, businesses, neighborhoods, and all other civic organizations to declare themselves Apartheid Free Zones. We call on unions and all other institutions with investment or pension funds to adopt Ethical Investment Policies that exclude companies implicated in grave human rights violations anywhere.

We call for citizens to pressure their governments to end their shameful complicity, starting with imposing a comprehensive military embargo on Israel. We call for pressure on governments to fulfill their obligations under international law to impose lawful, targeted, financial, economic, academic, and diplomatic sanctions, including expelling Israel from the UN, the Olympics, FIFA, and Eurovision.

Palestinians call for the non-platforming of war criminals and supporting legal and human rights groups’ initiatives for investigating and prosecuting Israelis and others who have been involved in international crimes against Palestinians.

Some say, “But we are suffering from genocide fatigue and see no hope.” Palestinians do not have the luxury of genocide fatigue or of giving up hope. For a century, the Palestinian people has resisted colonial oppression without giving up. We insist on our “full menu of rights,” as Archbishop Desmond Tutu once put it. Palestinians are counting on global solidarity and unwavering support in this critical moment—our South Africa moment.

* Co-founder of the BDS movement and recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award.