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Tearing down the walls that colonise Palestine, a thousand bricks at a time

Palestinians are showing enormous bravery during this moment of horror. The walls of intimidation and despair that Israel has erected in the minds of Palestinians to prevent resistance are being torn down. Now that everyone has seen that Palestinians will no longer be silent , we need the rest of the world to respond with corresponding acts of courage and support, tearing down the wall of silence, inaction and complicity so Palestinians can finally enjoy freedom, justice and equality.

A man waves the Palestinian flag for Eid al-Fitr prayers at the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem, Thursday, May 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Yesterday, without prior warning, a close relative of mine, 84, experienced an eruption of long-suppressed memories of his traumatic childhood during the 1948 Nakba and was overcome by mixed feelings of ominous fear and liberating hope. While unbearable, the images of the latest massacre of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip did not bring him to this emotional tipping point, nor did the images of the brutal repression of worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound or the relentless forcible displacement of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and around occupied East Jerusalem.

What did was the view, from his little balcony in Akka (Acre), of young Palestinians struggling to fend off a mob of far-right Jewish Israelis roaming the streets, chanting “death to Arabs”, and hunting Palestinians to lynch. The same thing happened to indigenous Palestinian communities in Lydda, Jaffa, Ramleh, Haifa, Bat Yam and in other places, triggering calls for international protection.

As my relative looked on, memories of his beloved Haifa in 1948 gushed through his mind – of Zionist militias aided by British soldiers literally chasing Palestinians at gunpoint to the sea. Of the makeshift raft his family had to board, heading to Lebanon ‘for safety’. Of his father’s wise decision to disembark in Acre instead.

Yet, even as these memories filled his mind – memories of existential fear and the trauma of vulnerability – they shared space with a new and inexplicable hope. “My generation lost Palestine,” he said. He then continued with a defiant inflection and a smile: “But this new generation is courageous, resilient, determined to resist and to overcome 73 years of our ongoing Nakba. All they… I mean, all we need is some, just some, more courage from the world.”

Cracks in the walls that colonise the mind

It is not naïveté or fatalism that gives hope to my elder relative or the Palestine diaspora. It is the fact that the dual walls that Israel has so systematically erected over decades – the walls it is truly trying to ‘guard’ – are showing some serious cracks, if not beginning to topple. The first of these walls is Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’ of despair that has colonised Palestinian minds. The second, just as inhibiting and debilitating, is the wall of intimidation that inhibits many people of influence worldwide from speaking out for Palestinian rights.

In 1923, Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist leader, theorised the necessity of the first wall: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized…. Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” He recommended an ‘iron wall’ to overpower the native Arab Palestinian population, partly by colonising our minds through instilling a sense of hopelessness and making us internalise a sense of inferiority, as Frantz Fanon puts it. Decades later, and backed by the United States and the European Union, Israel had built concrete walls and employed its Dahiya Doctrine (a doctrine of extreme, ‘disproportionate’ violence targeting Palestinian – and Lebanese – civilians and civilian infrastructure) precisely to sear into our collective consciousness the futility of resisting its colonial hegemony.

As for the other wall, Israel and its lobby groups have invested massive resources in building it in the minds of opinion-shapers globally, especially in the West, making the price of dissence, of defending Palestinian rights, ruthlessly painful to one’s career, reputation, and even mental health. Analysing this wall, Edward Said explained how ‘avoidance’ and “fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history [Palestine] has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it.”

Cracks in both walls have started to widen under pressure from fearless Palestinian popular resistance across historic Palestine and the corresponding courage that Hollywood celebrities, prominent musicians, star athletes, and millions of activists worldwide are displaying in standing up against the injustice. The bravery of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah defending their homes against forcible displacement is among the factors inspiring tens of thousands of other Palestinians to participate in acts of civil disobedience. The same Palestinian bravery was visible in the thousands who defended the occupied Old City of Jerusalem against a ‘pogrom’ by Israeli ‘Jewish fascists’ – a pogrom, moreover, encouraged by government officials expressing “racist, even genocidal animus towards Palestinians” – as the progressive Jewish American group If Not Now described it.

This bravery has inspired an outpouring of support across new and vital parts of the US landscape. Expressing a growing sentiment in the US Congress, and connecting military funding to Israel with social and justice struggles at home, representative Cori Bush said, “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected. We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma… we are anti-apartheid. Period.” Susan Sarandon tweeted, “What’s happening in Palestine is settler-colonialism, military occupation, land theft and ethnic cleansing.” Halsey wrote, “It is not ‘too complicated to understand’ that brown children are being murdered + people are being displaced under the occupation of one of the most powerful armies in the world.” Viola DavisMark RuffaloNatalie Portman, and many others expressed solidarity with Palestinians.

These cracks, which shatter much of the silence that Palestinians have often witnessed, reflect the cumulative, creative, and strategic efforts exerted over years by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and other Palestine solidarity campaigners around the world, including those by progressive Jewish groups. A 2018 US poll for instance shows that 40 percent of Americans (56 percent of Democrats) support imposing sanctions or more serious measures on Israel to stop its occupation.

A particularly important source of Palestinian hope is the growing impact of the Palestinian-led nonviolent BDS movement, which aims to end Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid and defends the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. Sovereign funds in NorwayLuxembourg, the NetherlandsNew Zealand, and elsewhere have divested from Israeli or international companies, and banks that are implicated in Israel’s occupation. Mainstream churches in South Africa have endorsed BDS, while major churches in the United States, including the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church, have divested from complicit US companies and/or Israeli banks. The city of Dublin in 2018 became the first European capital to adopt BDS, while tens of other cities and hundreds of cultural institutions and public spaces across Europe have declared themselves Israeli Apartheid Free Zones. BDS has won the endorsement of major international trade union federations in South AfricaLatin America, India, Europe, Canada, and the United States. Thousands of artists, academics, and hundreds of student governments, LGBTQI+ groups, and social justice movements across the world have also endorsed BDS accountability measures.

The main contribution of the BDS movement to Palestinian liberation, however, is its role in decolonising Palestinian minds from deep-seated powerlessness, and in leading a radical praxis of globalised, intersectional resistance, transformation, and emancipation.

Today, more than ever, Palestinians are telling the world that true solidarity with our struggle for freedom, justice, and equality spells out BDS. We are shattering our wall of fear every day, and we need not just “some more courage”, as my relative from Acre said, but an eruption of meaningful solidarity that ends all complicity in Israel’s oppression.


This article was edited by Lize Swartz. The original appeared here.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the author:

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and cofounder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, former ISS Visiting Research Fellow. He is corecipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award.

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Legal mobilization to end impunity for international crimes by Jeff Handmaker

In 2014, on the 20th of July, the Israeli military targeted and bombed a home in a refugee camp in Gaza, killing several family members of Saad Ziada, including his mother and three brothers. Since this day, Mr. Ziada, a Dutch citizen and resident of the Netherlands, has persistently been seeking justice through legal mobilization. Ziada’s search for justice reveals the immense challenges faced by individuals and organizations seeking to hold individuals accountable for international crimes through different forms of legal mobilization.


It hasn’t been an easy journey. Ziada’s family were some of the 2000 killed, overwhelmingly civilians, during this large-scale Israeli military operation, which was extensively documented by United Nations investigators as well as representatives of Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations. Numerous reports, including extensive dossiers that have been submitted to the International Criminal Court in The Hague as part of a preliminary examination, allege that international crimes were committed during Israel’s 2014 military operation.

Holding individuals accountable who were allegedly responsible in either Gaza or Israel has been a non-starter. The Israeli government has not even acknowledged that crimes took place, let alone pursued investigations against the alleged individuals responsible for those crimes. Ziada has therefore been compelled to seek justice elsewhere.

The most common response to any crime committed by an individual is prosecution in the country where the crimes took place. Obviously, this is an unrealistic prospect in a country that is led by a government unwilling to even acknowledge that such crimes took place. But international crimes have a special character.

International crimes are described in the preamble of the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court as “unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity”. Accordingly, multiple alternatives to prosecute international crimes have gradually emerged on the basis of what is described as “universal jurisdiction”. These alternatives include prosecution by the International Criminal Court or other specialized tribunal and prosecution in a “third country” that may have little to no association with the crime committed or the nationality of the alleged perpetrator.

The person who is prosecuted for international crimes doesn’t even need to have committed the alleged crimes themselves. For example, the Netherlands prosecuted the Dutch businessman Guus Kouwenhoven in relation to his complicity in war crimes committed in Liberia. In 2017, the Dutch Court of Appeal found Kouwenhoven to be criminally liable for his complicity in these crimes.

Alongside criminal jurisdiction, there is the possibility to sue an individual who is alleged to have committed an international crime for damages in a civil court. This is currently the basis of the case that has been brought to the Dutch District Court in The Hague by Ziada. The case is being brought against two Israeli military commanders who were believed to have ordered the bombing, including the former General Chief of Staff of the Israeli military, Benny Gantz, who has been campaigning to become president of Israel.

Universal jurisdiction received significant attention in our 2019 book Mobilising International Law for ‘Global Justice’, particularly in a chapter by Aisling O’ Sullivan. O’Sullivan argued how the struggle for ending impunity for international crimes is locked in a struggle between two competing approaches: on the one hand, there is a desire to hold individuals accountable for the most heinous of crimes; on the other, there is a desire to maintain order between nations which can be disrupted by these kinds of criminal trials. What further complicates matters are the different power positions between states and the tendency to give “deference to the interests of powerful states” (p. 180).

Universal jurisdiction was also the topic of a seminar that I co-organized in 2010 with Professor Liesbeth Zegveld, the outcome of which was contained in an ISS Working Paper. One of the key observations at this seminar was that “while some governments show a willingness to prosecute these crimes, others see this as a ‘problem’ and even advising their nationals / soldiers not to travel abroad” (p. 14).

What we observed then as a “relatively new area of the law” (p. 15) is now gaining currency, particularly in the courts of the Netherlands. Zegveld, who is also a prominent human rights lawyer, has represented several individuals and groups who have been seeking justice for international crimes committed against them and their loved ones. This includes the family of three men, including Rizo Mustafic, an electrician, who were killed during a massacre in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovnia by Serbian military forces in 1995. A Dutch military contingent was part of a United Nations military force stationed in Srebrenica at the time and was said to have mostly stood by while the massacre took place. In September 2013, the Dutch Supreme Court confirmed that the Dutch military commanders were partly responsible for not taking sufficient action to try and prevent the massacre.

Apart from the obvious political sensitivities involved in holding individuals accountable for international crimes, these kinds of cases are incredibly complex, not least the challenges of gathering evidence to prove what happened. There are also various cultural and other challenges associated with international criminal justice, particularly through international criminal tribunals, which I have discussed in other academic work.

Zegveld represents Ziada in the case that will be heard on 17th September, 2019. Will the outcome of this particular case of legal mobilization further advance the struggle against impunity for international crimes? There can be little doubt that international lawyers, human rights groups and concerned individuals around the world will be awaiting the outcome of this hearing with great anticipation.


Image Credit: Palestine Justice Campaign


JeffHandmakerISS
About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

He is a regular author for Bliss. Read all his posts here.