is a global campaign against is really party to demand that israel comply with international law in palestinian rights the following speakers discuss the significance of the  i constructed my talk in the same way that i construct the poem now we don't know if that's a good or bad thing yet but essentially going to talk about cultural boycott from from the position of a palestinian artist and an activist and i think from the outset it's important to say  especially from my perspective is that we should be less concerned with hurting the feelings of the oppressor and more concerned with standing in solidarity with the oppressed and especially in the case of cultural boycott it's about how we can engage how we can actually act it's not that we're going to a fund and we're trying to necessarily divest from it but we're talking about how we can use our own time and action to to support i'm going to i'm going to talk a little bit about how how i think it's different and how i think it's effective i became a poet after nine eleven i became a poet i was writing about middle east politics and i felt like there was a void there was you know one point four billion muslims in new york city were being or were being mischaracterize in new york city you had the air populations that there was widespread discrimination and i wanted i wanted affective medium to combat those kind of stereotypes and especially as a palestinian there was a lot of talk about you guys are terrorists and this is you know you're crazy in your browny your animals and essentially i became a poet because i saw other poets so i understand the power and the nyssa poetry but when your when your poetry or your r is used to service occupation when it's used to normalize occupation when it's used to rebranded apartheid i think that you not only have an obligation as an artist but with any person of moral clarity you should be standing against those actions the truth is though no dialogue cultural or otherwise can exist under these conditions not as one point five million palestinians are cut off an open air prison not as medical supplies aid supplies water sanitation supplies and human bodies are denied entry into gaza not as palestinian cultural artists from the west bank are denied exit how many stories have we heard of artist after artist trying to get an exit visa trying to get an exit past to go share their craft with the world world and not just their craft but engage in their own livelihood you know it when we look at all the cultural institutions inside of israel they're making their living they're paying their rent through this medium the palestinians in the west bank g slim and even forty eight palestine as they're denied visas as they're delayed visas aren't afforded that same kind of rights so so often we look at how this hurts the israeli cultural institutions who don't stand against occupation who don't stand against apartheid and very rarely look at what it does to the palace and arts community when we talk about cultural boycott it's important to note that it is institutional it is not aimed at individuals frequently israelis travel the world and they're able to go  d speak a number of them luckily against their system of apartheid and occupation our number of them for the right of return a number of them for the quality for palestinians living inside of the state of israel but we need some kind of action  notion that i'm going to go and perform in tel aviv tomorrow and my poem in some stadium aside from the fact that poetry is not the most popular medium but my poem let's say is going to reverberate through israeli society and it's going to change the internal israeli psyche and from the river to the sea there's going to be freedom democracy and equality is absolutely ridiculous it's the reality is that israelis aren't going to look inward they aren't going to shift their power structure they don't want to give up they're not going to hold up the merits of themselves what we need is a global system of pressure on the state of israel for that society that says you know what you're acting against international law and there are three basic demands which all fall in line with international law the right of return of quality for palestinians living in israel and the end of occupation for arab lands that is pretty simple it's straightforward it's easy and what is good about the cultural boycott movement in b d s generally is it is affective it is smart  strategic it is nonviolent and as a palestinian as a human being i don't want to hug a segregationist i don't want to wave to you at the separate water fountain and i don't want to appeal to you from the back of the bus this is not a case two sides with equal grievances this is occupier and occupied this is oppressor and oppressed this is those implementing a system of apartheid and those living under system of apartheid and when we get away from that we get away from the reality of the situation and so it's important that we need action too often were enamored by the intellectualization of palestine yes education is important yes we need to document human rights abuses but we don't need ten more and to see international reports we don't need ten more human rights were reports we don't need ten more goldstone reports what we need to do is say fourteen hundred people were massacred and gaza over twenty two days what we can say is they've used hellfire missiles white phosphorus cluster bombs all paid for by the united states to the tune of three point one billion dollars a year we can see the united states vetoing resolutions at the u n the question is what are we going to do about it yes we need to educate ourselves but we need to act against the oppression we see and that action is boycott divestment and sanctions to the film community as well and if how many people laughed at pac b and other organizations when they talked about cultural boycott you're never going to get people to sign on this isn't going to have a reverberating impact this isn't going to have a domino effect and yet that is the case if you look at cultural boycott it has had success after success after success there's barely a day or week that goes by where there isn't another one lastly i want to say it's important for us to engage i mean i work with us act b the u s campaign for the academic and cultural boycott and we're always looking for more activists for more students and community members to help out regarding cultural and academic work and what the point is no matter what group we're working with we can all do something from groups writing letters to artists doing facebook and twitter campaigns to working on your campus with flash mobs and mock checkpoints to leafleting the reality is is that we shouldn't ourselves to listening to speakers or limiting to artists or reading books we have to be part of the movement ourselves and every single you know and i don't mean this in a silly or cliche way like every single person that it whenever because i sit in the audience a lot every single person in the audience is as important as the person that sits at that panel what is great to me about the boycott divestment and sanctions movement is that it is very decentralized in the sense that there aren't authorities saying come fall us where the pied piper and we're going to lead you to victory but there are people standing up across the globe being led yes by the call from palestinian civil society but by their own conscious to say that we don't just need five leaders we need five million so to quote martin luther king freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor and must be demanded by the oppressed boycott divestment and sanctions is the way forward and the time is now i'm here to talk about the u s campaign for an academic and cultural boycott of israel and how many of you already know about this because i'm guessing most of you do ok so i won't go over the basics but basically for those of you who may not remember this was actually formed in january of two thousand and nine during the massacre in gaza so why us was you know while israel with the help of us funding and arms was raining white phosphorus and massacring and slaughtering people locked into this open air prison thousand and four when haq be the palestinian academic and cultural boycott campaign was formed many european scandinavian western european countries had already started their actions for academic and cultural boycott but the u s had actually not we had not in a coordinated official way responded to the call for pact be for particular an academic boycott even though they had been actions so in january two thousand and nine we decided to throw down the gauntlet and we decided to say we are going to have an academic and cultural boycott off israel in the u s and we are not doing it and that was the way it started we just decided the time is now we actually have to call on american academics scholars and cultural workers to stop supporting ethnic cleansing and genocide of palestinians and so one of the things that we encountered of course when we did this because you know people in palestine as well taught that this might not happen for a long time that you know they had been waiting for an american campaign and it had not taken place and we all know the reasons why i don't need to tell you all but i think we found of course that there was a lot of resistance to academic and cultural boycott that we didn't necessarily find in the case of divestment and i want to talk a little today because you all are here part of the movement to understand why that is and what is the work that we need to do to co that but why i think that's a productive side of resistance actually that we should harness and understanding where we are in the movement today i think the reason there is so much resistance to academic and cultural boycott is because it goes to the heart of the problem i think this is the crux of the palestine question and gets to the issue of racism that is at the core of zionism and that is a difficult thing for a lot of people to confront so i think what is at stake with academic and cultural boycott and particularly academic boycott because when you're talking about the academy you're talking about the legitimacy of a nation that sees itself as being civilized as being martin as being rational right as being democratic and so i think the difficulty that we had  organizing around academic and cultural boycott in the u s helped us realize that people are forced to confront not just the economic apparatus of the colonial state right not just the issue of you know the checkpoints and the economy and the infrastructure that needs to be dismantled it's about the legitimacy of the state's logic of settler colonialism and apartheid and actually getting to that question which i think people have been trying to get out for a very long time i mean apartheid is not a new framework but i think many you know sort of detractors have pointed out that in fact the question is this issue of legitimacy and i think this is why the b d s movement is considered a strategic threat and i think design is themselves are acknowledging that and so the question for me is really one of confronting the way in which settler colonialism constantly needs to be legitimized because it is fundamentally a racial system of dispossession where the indigenous people need to be cleansed and displays to make way for the settlers as it is in this country as it is in the us which is of course clearly that connection so the settler colonial state constantly has to be maintained by ever more militarized and violent forms of domination because there is no way to maintain that system otherwise unless it's by brute force but it needs to also be supported by a cultural logic  justify these systems of segregation and to suppress indigenous resistance as in the case of south africa as desmond tutu said it's archbishop tutu that it's even worse in south africa so this notion that there's a chosen people who have the right to displace the indigenous people and who then act as if they were the indigenous people right i mean that is the kind of inversion of settler colonialism is i think what the academic and cultural boycott challenges because it gets to that question of the legitimate right of these people to displace to eliminate and to destroy another people and their way of life and so this is why i think we have encountered the most hostile resistance from people who otherwise actually somet support divestment it's very interesting the kinds of counter arguments we've got which was you know this attempt not just to divide the movement but to shield i think is remi saying that core logic of zionism and so to many people who said to us you know just focus on divestment or just focus on economic boycott you know why must you actually challenge this i think academic and cultural boycott is one prong of this larger movement and we need to keep pushing it because we see that the legitimacy of israel is really crumbling this exceptional impunity as me says in this idea that they are the only democracy in the middle east and i'm going to come back to that but in two thousand and nine there was actually a zionist political science professor who's international advisory board for academic freedom and he issued this wonderful statement that we have on our website he says we have to be careful not to overexaggerate on this but we also have to be careful not to ignore it it is a festering wound he was talking about us there at that time fifteen scholars and california mainly what started the academic boycott it is a festering wound and it needs to be countered not ignored the danger is not these fifteen the danger is if u so in september two thousand and ten we did become five hundred we became five hundred and forty you and we also had one hundred sixty cultural workers who signed on and you know in my view this is not a lot i think this is a victory this is great we are now a strategic threat in fact the roid institute's of the b d s movement was an existential threat so i think one of the things to think about is this idea that we should understand that sometimes we say when we succeed it's when our enemy actually uses our language is this something that i think about a lot that we have forces to talk about b d s b d s is now in their lexicon they are forced to respond to us this is also a victory because it's about reframing the terms of the struggle and so for u you know we've actually really had to think of what kinds of strategies we could use given this enormous challenge and the massive resistance in the us into our organizing and one of the issues that we really had to  struggle with is the fear in the academy of taking a stance and zionism and this is why i wanted to know how many of you are students or how many of you work in a university because there's a great deal of caution and anxiety amongst american academics and scholars about using the word they don't want to use the p word but they also definitely don't want to use the z word and people don't want to talk about the palestine issue until they get tenure and they especially don't want to talk about it through the frame of zionism and so this is a big issue for us this is why we're only at five hundred  forty because people don't want to endorse until they get tenure even when they get tenure sometimes they're hesitant about taking this on and i think it is that culture of the academy that we also have to shift and i think this is in this we're doing a service to the u s academy in my view so where are we right now and what are some of the future issues and challenges we're trying to form local chapters and the idea is that we don't want to be a top down campaign ok so we're not here to sort of tell people these are your marching orders and we want everyone to take our brand and kind of you know exported in different places but we do want to coordinate with people we want to hear about campaigns in your community on your campus find out if you need our support if we can help you publicize it we have a huge email list we also have a newsletter i have some copies of here which talks about the many different kinds of campaigns that are feeding into our work and that we are also trying to support and we want to actually have affiliates members as well so even if you don't have time you know to be working on this you know twenty four seven we'd love to have people in different parts of the country especially the midwest and the east coast actually because of the way we performed a very heavy in california so just to wrap up i mean i think actually alluded to this is that the victory of the b d s movement as i see it i think it is a victory as remy pointed out is that we've also provoked a massive backlash of course they're throwing money they're throwing propaganda  with this movement and to shift attention away from these ongoing massacres that are happening in gaza again and also the issues of displacement in east jerusalem and also the context of the arab revolutions because i think this is deeply humiliating and anxiety provoking for a state that you know suggested that it was the only democracy in the middle east and guess what there are all these revolutions that are actually calling for true democracy and it's really destabilizing their role so this i think a defensiveness and desperation clearly on the part of the zionist state and so we need to really i think have a stronger strategic vision we have to be very tight and so my call i just want to end with this is that i think we need to be more united i think we need to be more coordinated i think we need to allow spaces of autonomy and grassroots organic action but i think it would really help if we started thinking long term in terms of this is what we want to do this year this is what we want to do the second year boycott divestment and sanctions campaigns on israel those that were used to help and apartheid in south africa until israel respects international law and palestinian human rights two thousand and four second to to risk two to guarantee the equal rights and all forms of discrimination against palestinians  israel so called palestinian citizens of israel in one nine hundred forty eight promised palestinians and number three to respect promote and implement the rights of palestinian refugees  r now also talked last night about how palestinians have been broken up into different segments those in inside one nine hundred forty eight those in gaza those in the west bank those in nablus those in  bethlehem those in chicago or those in london so we really need to think of ourselves imagine ourselves as a single community and to act as a single community so the b provides a platform i think for real unity and this is important in the context of the latest headlines of a so called reconciliation deal between hamas and fattah and they're calling this unity  i don't think of that as unity what did they agree to they haven't even shown us a document what's their platform how does it solve the palestinian people how does it serve the refugees how does it serve palestinians in galilee how does it serve palestinians in the knock up in the negev who are being pushed off the land that's not the unity that we're interested in a unity between factions so they can share seats in a government that has no power to protect us for advanced the rights of palestinians a real unity is based on a platform that addresses the rights of all palestinians wherever they are and provides a mechanism to struggle for those rights that's what the b d s platform does boycott divestment and sanctions strategies and tools but the goal the outcomes that we're looking for are the one stated in the two thousand and five call a restoration of actual palestinian rights now one point many of you know me as someone who's written for many years supporting a single state is one state solution the b d s call doesn't specify whether it should be one states or two states or ten states it says that we must have all of these rights in any solution whether it's one hundred states or one and that's important that's very important because a one state solution in which palestinians remain an underclass would not be a solution a two state solution in which israel remains a racist state and palestinians are living in a little bantustan so it brings the focus back to rights and that too is the we bring the focus back to what surreal and what will make a difference in palestinian lives the second way in which the b d s is powerful is its ability to mobilize solidarity around the world and we've already seen that we've heard some of the incredible examples of that going on here in california and in the united states and the battle that was for to u c berkeley although the b d s motion was overturned i don't see it as a defeat because as a nine a said it forced the zionists to expend enormous resources to talk about our agenda and they were on the defensive and they retain a lot of residual power and inertia which they're deploying now with all its might to try to push us back but they're on the defensive i think never take off you know i mean this is just such a long shot and we've already heard how this is now the main existential threat as perceived by the zionist community in fact the jewish federation a few months ago launched a multi million dollar initiative to fight against b d s let me close with the final point i want to make about the b and i think this is really why i'm so optimistic that we are going to see the dramatic changes in the next few years if we work at it is that we have a vision we can put forward  positive vision that is based on universal values without betraying any palestinian rights we can put forward a universal vision our vision is rooted in one that the view is all human beings is equal their vision is rooted in one that sees some human beings as garbage palestinians in gaza garbage palestinians in the refugee camps in lebanon a garbage palestinians  that is a division that is a vision or a nightmare i can say that cannot be defended in the twenty first century this isn't the one nine hundred fifty s in alabama it's not the one nine hundred sixty s in south africa it's the twenty first century and in the context of the arab revolutions we don't know yet i mean every day brings horrifying news and news that lifts the heart and the changes that have to come