On June 13, 2025, the evening after the initiation of an Israeli aggression on Iran, BDS Greece held the first halv of a two-day political panel. The event was held, with translation into Greek and English, in The Free Social Space Altai and featured Palestinian artist and performer Diana Sabri, other local activists as well as BfW's member Ayala Shani, through video conference. Here's Ayala's speech.
In 2022 Jews became a minority from the river to the sea. This is according to Israel’s main statistical bureau that has been monitoring this figure given the settler-colonial regime’s Jewish supremacist demographic drive from its foundation, through the ongoing Nakba that started in 1948. As we all know, just a year later, Israel embarked on a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, stating its goal to pursue a second Nakba, destroying entire cities and infrastructures with the intent that those who survived the genocide would be ethnically cleansed. Up until October 2023, all of Israel’s massacres in Gaza were confined to a few weeks, the longer being the 2014 massacre that killed over 2100 people. It is for this reason, that only after October 2023 the world was exposed in full scale to just how genocidal the Israeli public was. However, those of us who followed it closely, have seen the same genocidal rhetoric and practice manifesting throughout Zionist colonial history, and within our adult lifetime during those previous Israeli massacres in Gaza and the 2006 Lebanon war as well. 95 to 97 percent of Israeli Jews have been supporting the initiation of bombardment of Gaza and Lebanon in each of these cases. Whenever a massacre ended, Israelis would lament how “corrupt” and “submissive” their leaders are and how disappointing US presidents are. This was all that was there to fend off a fast-pace genocide, and once the world, led by the Unitied States, refrained from stopping Israel, Gaza has been subjected to over 20 months long genocide; Palestinians from the river to the sea, and especially under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank suffered increased ethnic cleansing and waves of torturous incarceration by Israel; and Lebanon and Syria have also been invaded, terrorized and heavily bombarded by it. Today’s and previous attacks on Iran, as the attacks on Yemen, which include civilian targets, are added to that. This has been both a culmination of Zionist ideology, practice and goals as well as a sick popularity contest for local political leaders.
The decades-long scheme of siege and bombardments on Gaza, the apartheid-induced physical, mental and societal separation of Palestinians from most of their homeland - all enhanced by the Oslo process - is now utilized to impose a final solution on the Palestinian people in Gaza. This scheme was described in 2004 by Prime Minister Sharon’s adviser, Arnon Sofer, an Israeli academic who has been for years sounding warnings of Israel’s so-called “demographic threat”, meaning the possibility that Jews will find it harder to manage their supremacist status given that the Jewish majority that was criminally obtained during the 1948 Nakba is now being at risk again. Pitching to a Zionist audience, Sofer described back in 2004 the logic of Sharon’s “disengagement plan” - the plan of removal of settlements from Gaza that was implemented a year later: “Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee ‘peace’. It guarantees a Jewish-Zionist state with an overwhelming majority of Jews [...] The Palestinians will bombard us with artillery fire – and we will have to retaliate. But at least the war will be at the fence – not in the kindergartens of Tel Aviv and Haifa [...] We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire ten in response. And women and children will be killed and houses will be destroyed [..] When 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will be even bigger animals than they are today [...] The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” (1)
I am sorry to subject you to such filth. Many have argued, and we would like to think of a genocide as unforgiveable. But we don’t know what will transpire and we have yet seen a world that applies meaningful sanctions on Israel. The reason we are in this moment is because settler-colonialism, occupation, siege, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, which should have also been considered as “unforgiveable”, were nevertheless normalized as business as usual.
It has been our experience in Boycott from Within that with all the effort we may put into pushing artists and celebrities to cancel their engagements with Israeli apartheid, it has always been Israel's atrocities, typically in Gaza, that have solicited the huge waves of cancellations. Yet, in this way, boycotts were not informed by a profound understanding of the settler-colonial, genocidal and apartheid nature of the Zionist regime, but rather a shallow objectification of the current onslaught - the more the Palestinian spilled blood was “fresh” and in abundance, the more the refrain held, before business as usual kicked in again in full force. Moving away from our own experience, one can see this dynamic play out in the way sanctions are being called for, considered or even applied in rare cases. Rather than being rooted in the Palestinian people’s just demands articulated in BDS, those sanctions or the discourse around sanctions is focused on reaching a long-awaited ceasefire, while letting the genocidal regime a pathway back to normalizing its rule.
There is a positive material development in the reports of massive migration of Israeli citizens away from historic Palestine. Some of us in the group over the years have already migrated from historic Palestine, acknowledging we also have personal responsibility in “divesting” ourselves, if we can afford it, from the Zionist regime, undoing for ourselves what Zionism was set out to do since its inception. On the other hand, it is also encouraging to see Israeli tourists, typically demonstrating Jewish supremacism, arrogance and violence, increasingly being unwelcomed, and in the case of war criminals, also facing possible apprehension and indictment. While it is not likely for an anti-zionist jewish citizen of Israel to be similarly shunned for holding an Israeli passport - I can say for myself, and I heard it from others as well - it would make my day to witness such organic boycotts from random business owners and service providers, a huge improvement on going through another day with nothing but more images of destruction of Palestinian life, of grieving, traumatized, displaced, starving, maimed or killed children and adults.
While Boycott from Within is not a field group - we mostly issue statements and letters - last September, following a workshop that introduced BDS to newcomer field activists, we held an action within Chevron’s offices. Activists chained themselves to the entrance, protesting that company’s complicity in the Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza as well as its climate criminality, in coordination with the Boycott Chevron BDS coalition during a global week of action against Chevron. Given that there are, for example, in the Yaffa-Tel-Aviv area, only about a few dozen anti-zionist field activists that would publicly support BDS in the first place, as well as the constant focus of such activists on what is called “protective presence” in the occupied West Bank, this kind of activity against BDS global targets was not resumed so far. There have been, though, other instances in which activists called for embargos, protesting the genocide in front of the embassies and consulates of the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. However, if a boycott campaign sees a benefit in orchestrating coinciding actions against a company, say for example, Carrefour, we could perhaps set up a demonstration in front of its store or office to add to the action held elsewhere. This was also the case with the Germany embargo action, which also involved activists chaining themselves to the entrance and a few arrests, coinciding with a demonstration held in Berlin.
In mid-2023 our group, Boycott from Within, published a rare statement (2). Instead of addressing cultural and academic campaign targets abroad, as we typically would, this time we made a commitment to ourselves and invited also the few jewish citizens of Israel, who wished, like us, to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian BDS movement and object to normalization. In that statement we committed and called for “withdrawing all support from any event, including abroad, which meets the BDS movement’s definition of normalization”, meaning that for an event that is an engagement of Israelis and Palestinians to be considered as ethical or not boycottable the Israeli party had to publicly support decolonization and the comprehensive rights of the Palestinian people, and that the event itself had to be a form of resistance against the Zionist settler-colonial regime.
In the few first months of the genocide, some Israeli normalization organizations were not even calling for the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza to stop. At the same time, no Palestinian suffering or killing was even briefly mentioned in the Israeli media. Even if those organizations did call for an end to the onslaught, it was only indirectly, through a call for an exchange of captives and prisoners of war, contributing to an environment of symbolic and literal erasure of the Palestinian people. To this day, organizations like Standing Together and Betselem refrain from describing the Israeli war crimes in Gaza as amounting to genocide.
As western liberals are candle-searching for sane voices within the Israeli genocidal public, such organizations have gained attention and, in the case of Standing Together, were able to mass fundraise while presenting Mossad-like rhetoric against any materially-based resistance to the Zionist regime. This includes vehemently blaming Palestinians under occupation for even supporting armed resistance, “both siding” the resistance and Israel, or spewing smears on the BDS movement. Instead, they suggest, Palestinian armed resistance should surrender to the genocidal colonial regime and Westerners should refrain from any material activism and just donate - not even to Palestinians directly but to this Israeli organization- and wait for Standing Together to mobilize genocidal Zionists, all while effectively preserving Israel’s apartheid and colonial dominance. They would obscure how central the continued denial of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants is to the Gaza strip coming to be this narrow, densely populated segregated ghetto and would not respect this right. Even so, Standing Together has not been able to mobilize many Zionists, but rather had some success in promoting their Zionist framework to some Palestinian citizens of Israel - providing them some path of “acceptible” political expression, in the face of heavy Israeli repression for even posting or liking content on social media. Majd Asadi wrote about his experience with Standing Together that it even objected to the slogan “Free Palestine”; platformed a Zionist former member of the Knesset to talk about her reservist soldier husband and “Israel’s interests” in a demonstration that was set up in response to Israel’s flour massacre in Gaza, the first one, and much more. Asadi concludes: “I cannot participate in Israeli peace organizations — not because I oppose peace, but because the struggle for equality, rights, and justice is impossible within a colonialist oppressive entity that is based on dispossession, racial and military supremacy, displacement and destruction, settlements, and demographic engineering. A true advocate for peace cannot shout for equality and peace without fighting the very system which is responsible for the oppression. Asking for equal rights and peace within the system itself is a struggle for nothing other than whitewashing the crimes of that very system” (3).
Quite recently, in response to the rise of the local Zionist discourse of peace-while-preserving-the-ethnostate in the midst of a genocide, a number of anti-normalization activists in 48 Palestine have launched a site called NoNormalization.org, that features a worthwhile digital leaflet (4), specifying pitfalls in building solidarity without normalizing injustice. Those pitfalls include trying to “fix” Israel, referring to West Bank “settler violence” as if it’s external to the occupying settler-colonial regime, as well as referring to threats to so-called democracy; perpetuating a sense of Jewish or Israeli superiority; delegitimizing certain forms of Palestinian resistance; promoting misleading narratives of partnership and symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians; and lastly, proposing solutions based on deadly separation and segregation.
In conclusion, while there are definitely principled anti-Zionists activists, in Boycott from Within, our circles and field activism, we are entirely surrounded by a genocidal Jewish-suprimasict public and leadership that has yet to be isolated and sanctioned enough for the Zionist regime to collapse and decolonization to initiate. Our importance is largely symbolic, casting a hopeful look on the material struggle that is waged globally for Palestinian liberation.
(1) https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/gaza-massacre-price-je...
(2) https://boycottisrael.info/node/431
(3) https://ronniebarkan.medium.com/standing-together-a-testimony-from-withi...
(4) https://nonormalization.org/five-questions-for-activists-who-want-to-bui...