“We’re counting on you”: In video, students in Gaza call on world peers to intensify BDS

We, Palestinian students and youth, have created this boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) video call for students around the world, believing in the power of youth to make a change. We specifically want to support and encourage students to attend the UK Student Palestine Conference 2012 on 23 September at the University of Manchester.

We want people around the world to move beyond just feeling solidarity with Palestine and to actually stand up for justice.

Don’t sit behind your TV screen and watch us getting killed, injured and detained in numbers, and feel sorry. Nothing will get better and Israel will, with impunity, escalate its inhumane practices and violations of Palestinians; human rights. When you watch our people dying while waiting for permits to cross the Israeli apartheid check points and react with feeling depressed, the situation will not change. Silence contributes to making our situation worse.

Silence tortures our hunger strikers inside Israeli jails and makes them go through a process of slow death. Silence contributes to the rising number of ill Palestinian prisoners who die at the Israeli apartheid checkpoints. Silence motivates Israel to terrorize us, massacre our people with their “world’s most moral army.” It allows Israel to attack our fishermen and shoot at our farmers while they work for a living in their lands located close to the “buffer-zone” —the ever-expanding area that separates Gaza from Israel. Farmers are banned from working on 35% of our total agricultural land, severely weakening the potential for economic and agricultural development in the Gaza Strip.

Silence is the reason behind the ongoing blockade on the Gaza Strip for the sixth year. Silence contributes to the Israeli occupation and supports it to continue, as I say in the video, “While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation.” Silence encourages Israel to act as a state above law.

Many governments prefers to just watch Israel violating our rights and committing striking crimes against humanity and stay silent, and even continue their ties with Israel, and thereby contribute to their economy. However, you, “civil society, must hold them to account, since governments do not. As we, Palestinians, deserve the same rights as anybody else.”

UK students organize for action

A brave group of UK student Palestine activists decided to move and speak up loudly against Israel’s apartheid regime. They organized the UK Student Palestine Conference 2012 on 23 September at the University of Manchester. It aims to encourage students to put boycott, divestment and sanctions at the heart of their solidarity actions.

Organizers are aiming higher than ever:

Together we will form the steps necessary to guarantee that this year our commitment to justice in Palestine exceeds all previous years; our activism brings achievement and that our campaigns bring results. With the rising Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and the threat it poses to the Israeli Apartheid system, it is now time that we as students go beyond just being members of our Palestinian solidarity group and become change-makers – on campus and across the UK.

The conference’s goals include:

To Give students the ideas and tools they need to build effective campaigns, particularly Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions efforts

To Link Palestine Societies with other national and international organizations, so that they have better access to outreach, speakers and resources.

To Develop effective and safe methods of communication between UK student activists.

These goals mean building creative and engaging campus campaigns which seek freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians; involving new people on the issues; challenging academic discourses; and with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, creating real political and economic pressures while narrating Palestinian identity

Those passionate activists who organized this conference are taking big strides towards justice for Palestine and they inspired us to send this video message to support their call for students to come to the conference and get involved.

BDS gives Palestinians hope

We want say to all the activists that we want you to double your efforts because every success that the BDS activists accomplish brings us, the Palestinian people, more hope that justice isn’t far away. Every BDS success makes us feel like we made a stride forward towards freedom, justice, equality and return.

The Palestinian call for BDS was inspired by the South African struggle against apartheid and the responsibility that the international community shouldered to fight injustice and inequality, which helped abolish the apartheid regime. “South Africa is leading the way because they know what racism means. With hard work the same can happen at your university.” That’s why we started our video saying, “We, the students in Palestine, believe in you. But we demand more from you this year. This year we hope for results.”

It’s time to push even further to boycott Israel and isolate it until Palestinians enjoy their full human rights. I believe in the power of BDS to help Palestinians regain their rights and exercise self-determination. Without justice and equal rights for everybody, there can never be a just and sustainable peace in the entire region.

The video includes music by Marcel Khalife, who dedicated his life to singing for justice and freedom for Palestine and immortalized our great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, by singing his lyrics that take one’s breath away.

Please share this video and spread it worldwide. Make our voice heard and act. “Make this year, not only about solidarity but change, too. Palestine needs political action from you. This year, we’re counting on you.”

Comments

BDS

Permalink robby martin replied on Fri, 09/21/2012 - 17:42

The world has stayed silent for too long. BDS brought about the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, now it's our duty to support the people in Palestine by heeding their call to support the BDS movement and put an end to Israel's terrorism and crimes against humanity.

BDS

Permalink Christine replied on Sat, 09/22/2012 - 18:23

For those with Video try and track Ali Abuminah's address in Alberquque New Mexico last November followed by Norman Finkelstein's own video address on BDS in which he calls it a"cult" and inflates its numbers of supporters. He further states that BDS must address both the Palestinian and Israel public if it is really to garner support. The adds BDS cannot do this -cannot be honest- the Palestinian Campaign cannot because it would mean the end of the PNA which he labels corrupt(which I believe to be true-but whereis the evidence beyond fancy villas, fancy villas and a'maqata' built like a moatless castle but grass to keep the people OUT. Whilst Albuminah is honest to say the success of BDS will indeed be the end of Israel asdwe know it (hopefully) whilst also labelling the PNA leadership a bunch of clowns without specifying how they entered that particular circus.
Now- what do the thousand of Fatah supporters think of being garnered to that?