In the long history of repression of the fight for justice in Palestine, there are unwritten laws that are strictly followed. This week we are witnessing the fulfillment of one of them: every peaceful pro-Palestinian protest ends up being delegitimized by the procedure of attributing a violent and sectarian character to it. Even terrorist, if we pay attention to Donald Trump, who has taken advantage of the occasion to consider the pro-Palestinian encampments on American campuses to be more serious than the storming of the Capitol by his followers in 2021.
The pro-Palestinian camps and demonstrations by American students have exposed, once again, how, when it comes to Palestine, pacifism cannot be tolerated. Because if we tolerated it, if we accepted a civic and transversal mobilization of different sectors of society, the Palestinians would have long ago obtained the justice they demand and deserve.
According to this unwritten law, it does not matter whether the activism is Western or Palestinian; individual than coral. 21 years ago, bulldozers were used, if necessary, to silence a single voice, as happened with Rachel Corrie, the American activist trampled when she tried to prevent the demolition of homes in Gaza. Later, in 2018-2019, Israeli drones and snipers killed or injured more than 20,000 participants in the March of Return, with which Gazans walked to the Wall every Friday to remind the world that they live in a ghetto ( The West prefers to speak of “the largest open-air prison”, a euphemism reminiscent of outdoor sports).
The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, known as BDS, is possibly the most effective and therefore persecuted action of Palestinian pacifism. BDS is a call (since 2004) by various Palestinian civil society groups to impose on Israel the same measures of commercial, sporting, academic and cultural boycotts, business disinvestment and international sanctions that were once applied to Israel. apartheid South Africa.
Israel has a whole machinery to criminalize it as anti-Semitic, even at the risk of something that does not seem to matter to the Netanyahu Government and the ultranationalist clique on which it relies: instrumentalizing the Holocaust and its victims.
The acts of civil resistance we are witnessing are an expression of growing solidarity with Palestine around the world. As such, they cannot be repressed in the interests of the powers. The current student mobilization, supported by intellectual figures such as Naomi Klein, Cornel West and Susan Sarandon, which is already spreading to campuses in Canada and Europe, is a small light in these seven months of massacres in Gaza.
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It makes a certain hope for justice shine from below, even though violent pro-Israel groups try to break up the protests; that the governing councils of the universities criminalize them; and that the police intervene with their militaristic paraphernalia. Governments are banking everything on the proximity of university exams and vacations. Maybe you should remember that May (1968) was in May.
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