Palestine is in flames. At this moment, racist lynch mobs are marching through the streets of Jerusalem, chanting “death to Arabs,” and hurling threats and insults at terrorized and bleeding Palestinian children and youth, left to die surrounded by dozens of Israeli soldiers, when they are not summarily executed on their way to or from school. Trigger-happy Israeli soldiers are showing even less restraint than usual, while Israeli politicians are calling on their citizens, the notoriously violent illegal settlers, to carry and use their weapons. Homes have been set on fire by settlers and families burnt to death. Palestinian students have been assaulted, arrested, and murdered in the West Bank, Gaza, and in Israel and universities are beginning to close under threat of attacks.
Throughout the land, tens of thousands of Palestinians are rising up. They are joining together to protest Israel”s intensified ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people; the increase in home demolitions; their restricted access to Al-Aqsa Mosque; the tightened siege on Gaza; and the new legislation repressing Palestinian citizens of Israel. They are also calling for international solidarity and those of us who live in the United States, especially, must act now to speak out, challenge the complicity of our government and the broad spectrum of political leadership with Israel, and expose the racist distortions in mainstream media coverage of the events in Palestine.
As fierce clashes and confrontations once again engulf all parts of historic Palestine, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural boycott of Israel (USACBI) stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people rising up against the everyday, all-pervasive violence of apartheid, occupation, and siege. We support the Palestinian people seeking to break free from their oppression, and enact our solidarity by heeding the call for BDS issued by Palestinian civil society 10 years ago. Boycott now!
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), which leads the global BDS movement, has called for a wave of action in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle beginning this weekend, October 16-18. At this critical time, USACBI calls on people of conscience to step up BDS actions and academic and cultural boycott campaigns wherever and whenever they can.
We urge our endorsers, academics and cultural workers, to organize teach-ins, film screenings, book discussions, “occupations” or similar such events that educate their campuses and communities about the reality of settler colonialism and apartheid in Palestine/Israel, as well as provide information on what we all can do, here in the US, through our involvement in BDS campaigning.
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