U.S. Campaign Adopts Cultural & Academic Boycott

Approximately 200 delegates from 27 states attended the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation’s eighth annual National Organizers’ Conference in Chicago, IL on Sept. 12 and 13. Attendees from 90 member organizations of the U.S. Campaign strategized about strengthening their political and legislative work to challenge U.S. military aid to Israel and their existing boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Caterpillar and Motorola.

The BDS movement is an international coalition with the goal of isolating and discomfiting Israel just as South Africa’s apartheid regime was targeted in the 1980s. The Global BDS Movement claims a number of recent successes, including the downfall of jeweler Lev Leviev, who had invested heavily in the construction of West Bank settlements. Many major shareholders in Leviev’s company, Africa-Israel, divested their holdings after receiving complaints from their clients.

In the wake of Israel’s Gaza invasion last winter, groups associated with the boycott have expanded their efforts into the sensitive realm of academic and cultural boycotts of Israel. Delegates voted to endorse the principle of extending BDS work to cultural and academic boycott campaigns and to non-U.S. corporations. They endorsed the Stolen Beauty campaign against the Israeli cosmetics company Ahava for its profiting from Israeli occupation and settlements.

Delegates also voted to endorse the Gaza Freedom March, an international nonviolent march alongside the people of Gaza to mark the one-year anniversary of the Israeli attack, on Jan. 1, 2010, and to work with organizers to include a U.S. policy component of ending U.S. support for the blockade of Gaza. Finally, delegates also elected six new members to the U.S. Campaign’s steering committee.

As Omar Barghouti, one of the Palestinian leaders of the BDS movement, told supporters, “Our South Africa moment has finally arrived.”

—Kent Howard