Summary
The author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket Books, 2011), who presents the book as “an attempt to speak truth to power” in support of “the most effective effort to date aimed at ending Israel’s impunity and realizing Palestinian rights: the global BDS movement” (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PDF p.44-45).
Details
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Barghouti states his own position on a track separate from the movement: “While I firmly advocate nonviolent forms of struggle such as boycott, divestment, and sanctions to attain Palestinian goals, I just as decisively, though on a separate track, support a unitary state based on freedom, justice, and comprehensive equality as the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli colonial conflict.” (PDF p.61)
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His alternative to an “exclusivist, ethnocentric, settler-colonial state” is “a secular, democratic state, ending injustice and offering unequivocal equality in citizenship and individual and communal rights both to Palestinians (refugees included) and to Israeli Jews” (PDF p.61).
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The praise printed in the book describes him in these terms: Judith Butler calls his case “no more comprehensive and persuasive case than his for boycott, divestment, and sanctions to end the Israeli occupation and establish the ethical claim of Palestinian rights” (PDF p.9); Phillip Weiss calls him “the future. He is intelligent, empowered, and nonviolent.” (PDF p.10)
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Chapters 6 and 8 of his book are co-authored, with Lisa Taraki and Haidar Eid respectively (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PDF p.110, p.137). In Chapter 7 he writes as a dance choreographer himself, and describes his own airport profiling in Israel: stickers with the number 6 on his passport, luggage and ticket, against Israeli Jews’ usual 1 (PDF p.120, p.134).
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His stated position on violence (Chapter 7): indiscriminate attacks on civilians by either side are morally unjustifiable and international law “never condones deliberate or criminally negligent attacks against civilians”, while any parity between oppressor and oppressed is rejected (PDF p.132).
Related pages
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, BDS movement, PACBI, BDS National Committee, One-state solution