20 years of BDS: An interview with Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the movement

July 9, 2025

Michael Arria

On the 20th anniversary of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, Mondoweiss speaks with Omar Barghouti about the past, present, and future of the movement.

 

July 9, 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the nonviolent Palestinian-led campaign aimed at holding Israel accountable under international law.

“This day will be remembered in history as the start of a principled, strategic, and creative process that has isolated Israel’s 77-year-old regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and military occupation at the grassroots and institutional level,” said the BDS National Committee in a statement. “It has redefined the meaning of solidarity with our struggle as starting with ending the complicity of states, corporations and institutions with this regime.”

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Omar Barghouti, a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and a co-founder of the BDS movement about the campaign’s past, present, and future.

 

Mondoweiss: I wanted to start by talking about the history of the movement. How did BDS start and what are its goals?

Barghouti: It’s important to situate it, though, in the current ongoing live-streamed genocide, by Israel in Gaza, because BDS is now even that much more important than it has ever been and because of the genocide, because of the role BDS has played for the last 20 years in fighting the complicity of states corporations and institutions and that have enabled Israel to continue its settler colonialism, its apartheid, and its military occupation leading up to this genocide.

So going back to 2005 when BDS was established, many and civil society groups, trade unions, coalitions of political parties, women’s unions, students, academics, professional unions, and grassroots movements got together and and signed the BDS call, which a number of us drafted, basically after almost a year of community consultations.

By that I mean consultations within historic Palestine, in the 67 territory or the 48 territory, Palestinians in exile, in refugee camps, and in Western exile because we wanted this movement to be inclusive of all Palestinians, especially after so many years of the so-called Oslo Accords and the complete fragmentation, if not complete undermining of the struggle for Palestinian rights.

BDS was inspired by a century of Palestinian popular resistance initially against British colonialism, and then Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. So we’ve learned the tactics of BDS mainly from our own people’s struggle, but it’s also inspired by many liberation movements, especially the South African anti-apartheid movement, and of course justice movements like the civil rights movement in the United States. Those played a very important role in inspiring the philosophy, if you will, of the BDS movement.

We decided that, at a minimum, in order for Palestinians to exercise our inalienable right as an indigenous people in our homeland to self-determination, three rights must be achieved. An end to the military occupation, an end to the system of racial domination, segregation and apartheid, and the right of refugees to return and receive reparations.

Without those three rights, we cannot exercise self-determination. We cannot enjoy the full menu of rights, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu would have said.

Now, why address all three? Palestinians have been fragmented by the different phases of Zionist settler colonialism into three main constituent parts. Palestinians in the occupied Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as recognized by the UN, constitute only 38% of the entire Palestinian people. This is something since the Oslo Accords of 1993, people have forgotten that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are really a minority.

12% of the Palestinian people are citizens of present-day Israel, living under a system of apartheid as second- or third-class citizens. And then 50% of Palestinians are in exile, not allowed to go home, not allowed to enjoy their right of return, as stipulated by international law.

Within Palestinian communities in historic Palestine, whether 67 or 48, there’s a very large minority of internal refugees, internally displaced persons, who together with the 50% in exile, constitute the absolute majority of Palestinians. That’s why the right of return is the most important right that the BDS movement has called for.

Another important aspect of BDS is that it’s an inclusive movement that has a unified leadership. The absolute largest coalition in Palestinian society, the BDS National Committee or BNC, leads this global movement.

BDS is opposed to racism of all forms, and therefore it opposes anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous racism, and so on, as it opposes sexism and misogyny and all kinds of discriminatory tendencies.

It is based on international law, but it takes a critical view of it. We understand its limitations, and we work to expand its interpretation and we’ve done that.

Could you give some examples of how you’ve done that, and maybe some other milestones of the last 20 years?

There are too many to mention, but we put out a statement about 20 years of BDS, with 20 highlights.

In the midst of a genocide, we feel it is quite inappropriate, quite awkward, quite tone deaf to celebrate. So we’re not celebrating, but we’re marking the occasion, highlighting the immense impact, this grassroots movement with its so many partners around the world has achieved in 20 years, not against Israel only, a nuclear power with immense influence in the colonial West, but against the entire colonial West.

Israel’s settler colonialism is not just Israeli, it’s a Western project. So throughout those 20 years, we were up against the U.S. government, both Congress and and White House, European bureaucracy, the European Union, the UK, Australia, Canada and so on.

So it wasn’t just a struggle against Israel’s repression. It was against all of the partners in crime of Israel, if you will, the colonial West.

BDS has actually reshaped what solidarity with Palestinian liberation means and should look like. As I said, BDS is very influenced by the the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the US civil rights movement, but it has created its own philosophical underpinnings and understanding of what solidarity should look like.

Our analysis was that Palestinians cannot reach liberation, freedom, justice, equality without cutting the links of international complicity with Israel’s regime of settler colonialism, apartheid, military occupation, and now genocide because Israel relies on the support it gets–diplomatic, financial, military, academic, cultural, in sports–mainly from the colonial West.

So BDS said, the first very profound obligation if you want to do real solidarity is to do no harm and to stop, cut back, or offset, if you cannot do either, the harm done in your name. If you’re a citizen of the United States and you know that your government is deeply implicated in all the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, including the ongoing genocide, in all aspects of this genocide, it’s a U.S.-Israeli genocide, then what is your responsibility?

That means that anyone in the U.S. should compensate for the government speaking on their behalf by joining BDS, by highlighting the complicity in their unions, in their schools, in their universities, in their hospital, wherever they work at. That concept is a very important achievement for the BDS movement actually.

A second aspect at this macro level is the analysis of Israel’s regime as well as settler colonialism and apartheid. We did not invent that, of course. Historians have written about that, but it was forgotten throughout the Oslo Accords years. The Palestinian question was reduced to the occupied West Bank and Gaza and the concept of autonomy, as if it’s a dispute between Israel and its neighbors.

The BDS movement said, No, this is about settler colonialism and apartheid that has existed since the very foundation. This is a settler colony on the Palestinian indigenous homeland. That’s what it is.

Therefore, without this right analysis, we cannot find the right tools to dismantle the system of oppression. Many years later, major human rights organizations and UN experts started recognizing Israel as an apartheid state. Some of them started talking about settler colonialism, but we have a long way to go. But that is one of the main impacts, if you will, of the BDS movement.

As far as impacts, I’ll start with the policy level, or what we call the S in BDS, which is mainly about observing, meeting, honoring obligations under international law, not discretionary sanctions, and definitely not the criminal sanctions that the U.S. has applied against Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries in the global South.

Before October 23, we had no countries supporting a military embargo of Israel. Now, there are 52 states that have an official policy of a military embargo. There are loopholes, yes, but at least they’ve adopted that policy. Many states have taken actual actions as measures of accountability.

Colombia, for example, has banned the import of Israeli weapons and is working to ban the export of coal to Israel because of its genocide. Turkey has played a role in cutting a lot of trade with Israel. Malaysia has prevented ships from going to Israel. This is all very new. We didn’t see many states doing things in the past.

The Norwegian pension fund, which is the biggest sovereign state fund in the world, has divested from Israeli bonds and several companies involved in apartheid. Many states have prevented ships carrying military material to Israel from using their ports. Malta, Angola, South Africa, and others. Dock workers played a very important role in this achievement.

In addition to Norway, there are New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, among others, but also among faith communities who have divested from Israel. The United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and others have divested from either Israeli banks or U.S. companies and French companies involved in Israel’s occupation and human rights violations.

Now we’re seeing universities across the United States divesting thanks to the student-led mobilizations, the encampments, and the faculty supporting them.

At the B level, which is the grassroots boycott level, many people understand BDS as only targeting corporations and consumer goods. That is definitely a very important part of BDS, but there’s also an academic boycott, a cultural boycott, and a sports boycott.

I mentioned the military embargo to start with because that’s a sanction, but as far as boycotts are concerned, all of these are important. Across Europe, for example, we’re seeing many universities for the first time ever cutting ties with Israeli universities, even refusing to work with Israeli universities within the so-called Horizon program, the largest research program of the European Union.

In the cultural sphere, we’re seeing cultural centers cut ties, divesting or installing procurement policies that exclude companies involved in Israel’s occupation and apartheid.

We’re seeing thousands and thousands of artists and writers and publishers joining the cultural boycott of Israel, which, like the academic boycott, is institutional. It targets institutions not individuals, and this is very important difference between the BDS movement and the South African boycott, which was a blanket boycott against everyone and everything South African.

Then, of course, we see the boycott against corporations. We’ve seen some of the largest corporations in the world compelled, thanks to BDS pressure, to abandon entirely their illegal projects in the Israeli economy.

Some of them are Veolia, CRH, Puma, G4S, which is the largest security company in the world, and others.

There are so many companies that have been forced because of losing tenders across the world because of BDS pressure. Some companies, like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, have already had their bottom lines impacted by these grassroots campaigns. The CEO of McDonald’s has repeatedly said that they’re losing markets in many parts of the world. Some Israeli financial media puts the losses at McDonald’s at about $6 billion because of boycott pressures. Coca-Cola is facing a similar fate.

Companies like Chevron, the large oil company, are beginning to feel the heat. Intel was forced to abandon a $25 billion project in Israel that they had planned two months into the genocide. BDS played a role, not the only role, but an important role in this campaign.

I can go on and on. There are so many examples of impact. They are important to mark, but we cannot celebrate. We’re too angry. We’re too enraged. We’re too sad to celebrate. Yet we need to mark this because this is part of building hope and building people power to affect policy change.

Looking back on the last 20 years, what has surprised you, and what have you learned? Did the backlash to the movement surprise you? Has it changed your strategy at all?

We’ve always known that the U.S. partnership with Israel is important. We’ve known that without the U.S. military, financial, economic, and diplomatic support for apartheid, it cannot continue.

However, when we began the BDS movement 20 years ago, we had no idea how much influence Israel has on the U.S. government, Congress, and the White House. We had no idea it was to that extent.

We’ve always known and read analyses about the Israel lobbies, not one lobby, the Jewish Zionist lobby, the Christian Zionist lobby, the military industrial complex lobby, and others. Now we have the tech lobby that is invested heavily in Israel because they get to test their weaponized AI and weaponized Cloud services in the battlefield against Palestinians, but we didn’t know the level to which it was happening.

So in any international conference, any resolution on Palestine, the main fight is not with Israel because Israel is usually too small and too insignificant to count. You are fighting with the U.S. government, with the U.S. administration. You’re up against them in any international forum, be it the United Nations, international scholarly associations, international unions.

It’s always the United States, number one, followed by Germany, the rest of the Europeans, and Israel’s ambassadors. This level of co-optation, corruption, and complete partnership in crime was quite a surprise for us, indeed. We had no idea it was at at this level.

There’s another aspect which I think kind of surprised us, maybe because we were too influenced by the Western propaganda about liberal democracy. We’ve always looked at it very critically and those of us who studied in the U.S. have always known the limits of liberal democracy. After all, the United States is a settler colony that just recognized equal rights for women not too long ago, not to mention equal rights for black people. There wasn’t equal rights for indigenous communities in the United States and Jim Crow wasn’t that long a ago. So we we never took this liberal democracy at face value. We’ve always looked deeper.

However, we had no idea that the United States, which has always cherished its First Amendment, the freedom of speech and expression, would sacrifice these civil rights to protect Israel from accountability, from grassroots campaigns.

Why would the state of Texas punish survivors of a hurricane [in 2017], in the middle of nowhere in Texas, that have gone to the state to ask for support after the floods destroyed all their livelihoods, by making them sign an anti-BDS pledge?

They had no idea what this BDS was, but they had to sign something that said, “I will not boycott Israel or territories under Israel’s control while receiving aid from the state of Texas.”

Why? What could have led to such a level of penetration of Israeli interests in states, not to mention the federal government, and a sacrificing of civil rights, a sacrificing of the U.S. Constitution to shield Israel’s apartheid? This was a shock to us.

When I used to tour the U.S. around 2015, 2016, I remember in church after church, university after university, community center after community center, I was always saying, “These anti-BDS laws that are starting will not stop at BDS or the Palestinians.” It’s a threat to every justice movement because it’s a threat to the First Amendment and once they abuse the the First Amendment and bend it to allow for suppressing speech on Palestine, and BDS is freedom of expression, then they’ll use that against everyone else.

This is a new McCarthyism. Just like the first McCarthyism was not really against the Communist Reds only. That’s how it started, and then it was against every dissenting voice. This is This McCarthyism 2.0 and it will not stop with Israel and BDS.

At that point, very few were listening, including our strongest partners. They did not comprehend that the writing on the wall, which Palestinians saw first, was true. They might have thought that we were being alarmist and exaggerating. It took them years to realize that anti-BDS legislation was used as template for suppressing black voting rights, women’s reproductive rights, campaigns against fossil fuels, and other movements.

The exact wording in one state legislature after another was used to suppress those other justice movements. So this intersectionality of struggles, which is now much more obvious, much more taken for granted, and it was not obvious even a few years ago.

How did October 7 impact BDS? Has the ongoing genocide recalibrated the movement in any way? Has it drawn more people to support BDS, in your opinion?

Since the beginning of the genocide, we, all Palestinians, were in a state of complete shock. The level of grief and the level of rage has been unprecedented.

Nothing has prepared us for a live-streamed genocide. We’ve always thought that there must be some limits, some international law mechanism that will kick in and stop a live-streamed genocide. Even the United States, the world’s only empire, has never dared to perpetrate such a genocide, even the United States.

It has always tried to find excuses for killing millions in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and across the world. They’ve always said they were trying to fight Communism, terrorism, or something, but they’ve never said, “These people are human animals and we’re going to slaughter them. We’re going to cut off water electricity and food and let them die.” They never said, we’re going to concentrate them in camps.

This is the language used today by the Israeli establishment. They want to concentrate over 2 million Palestinians in camps. To get away with this was an absolute shock. However, we could not fall into despair, which is exactly what our detractors want. They want to colonize our minds with utter despair, utter powerlessness. They want us to think there’s nothing that we can do to stop this. Israel, supported by the U.S. and the European Union and the UK, is unstoppable. It will continue killing and killing and killing. There’s nothing we can do.

That is one path that we refuse to take on ethical grounds. There was another path, the difficult one. We’re going to channel our immense grief and our boundless rage into constructive energy to campaign like never before to isolate apartheid Israel at every level possible. Academic, cultural, sports, economic. We are going to target every company involved in Israel’s crimes against us. We need to exact a price from it, a reputation price, we need to impact the bottom line.

That’s the path we took in the BDS movement from day one—actually, since we issued our first statement on October 8. We analyzed this as a genocide and we called for action. We called for escalating pressure, disruption, peaceful disruption of business as usual in every institution, every corporation that is complicit.

We called for boycotts like never before and for pressure on governments, and we had the tools because we’ve been building this toolbox for many, many, many years. We’ve built alliances and networks with trade unions and grassroots movements and racial justice movements and indigenous groups across the world. So we were a little prepared with our strategies, but we had to decolonize our minds from the hopelessness.

But your other point is absolutely right. Because of the genocide, because of the unspeakable horror that Israel has visited upon us, and the killing and destruction, destroying Gaza’s 4,000-year civilization, that has enraged not just Palestinians and many across the Arab region, but many across the world, especially the younger generation.

I think Israel will live, or not, to regret it—to regret that it has entirely lost the young generation, Gen Z and the younger generation worldwide, from Japan to the United States, from South Africa to Sweden, from Latin America to Indonesia.

They’ve lost the younger generations completely. By losing them, Those young people who are so angry, and I’ll explain another intersectional aspect aspect of their anger, it’s solidarity with Palestinians, it’s rage about what Israel is getting away with and how their leaders are trying to justify this, are trying to to sanitize this in such dehumanizing language.

They were so colonial, so dehumanizing. The so-called media outlets from the New York Times’s genocidal coverage, to the BBC, super genocidal coverage, not to mention Fox News and the fascists.

Across the colonial West, the mainstream media played a very important role in inciting genocide. And when we have the power to have our own Nuremberg, it’s not only the Presidents, Ministers of Defense, Governors, and so on who have led the support for the genocide that should be held to account, but also media executives, big tech executives, the executives of all the arms corporations that have sold the weapons and the companies themselves. So we will hold them all to account. That’s a very important point.

I think those young generations were saying that it’s not just Palestinians, Israel is destroying international law, it’s destroying the order that has ever existed, and bringing in a “might makes right” era with the support of the U.S. and Europe. This era is making the world so unsafe, so unpredictable for all of us.

On top of the climate disaster, now you have another disaster of a world where the powerful can do whatever they wish and they can just sanitize it and whitewash it. With the right propaganda tools like the New York Times and the BBC, what kind of future will we have as young people?

I’ve heard this over and over from universities across the world, in Indonesia, in Stockholm, and in Cape Town, the same sentiment, despite the immense difference, saying the same thing. People are scared of what Israel is doing.

President Gustavo Petro of Colombia was the first head of state back in October 2023, who said, Gaza is only the first experiment. They will consider us all dispensable unless we do something about it. He was so right and this reflects the sentiment among the global majority, actually, not just in the global south.

I think that has channeled a lot of energy into supporting BDS. You’ve seen our campaigns grow immensely. We’ve begun to have much more influence on policy during the genocide. We’ve begun to exact a heavy price from complicit companies during the genocide because the support was extremely large and people wanted something effective to do.

They didn’t just want sloganeering and marching. While those are important, they are not enough. You need to target complicity. It’s all about complicity. That’s what meaningful solidarity begins with.

What’s next for the movement? What’s upcoming? How do you see BDS evolving over the next 20 years?

Well, we hope we won’t have a BDS movement in 20 years. We hope that apartheid will be dismantled, occupation will be ended, and Palestinian refugees will be able to return and reestablish their lives.

If that happens, we won’t need BDS movement. The BDS movement was born because the international community failed to hold Israel accountable to anything. International law broke down, and now it’s being buried under the rubble of Gaza and under the corpses of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children.

If that were not to happen, we wouldn’t have had a BDS movement. So we really hope in 20 years we won’t have this movement. We hope peace, justice, dignity, self-determination, and the right of return prevail.

However, until then, we will continue escalating our pressure. We’re getting more sophisticated. We have many, many more allies and partners.

Just one example. BDS activists just disrupted a United Nations conference in Geneva called AI for Good. Extremely provocative title, not to mention that the United Nations is partnering with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Cisco and other companies that are enabling to genocide.

We’ve established a very broad coalition calling on the UN to designate AI and Cloud as dual-use because they have a military application and to regulate them as such, including under the arms treaty.

This work would have been completely impossible two years ago. Now it’s possible. Now many form a coalition and work with us on this.

So we will continue to do this, partnering with so many trade unions and grassroots movements who are supporting our demands. We will continue calling for the boycotting of Israel, divesting from companies invested in Israel and supporting its crimes against Palestinians and even imposing lawful targeted sanctions, the only sanctions we call for,

None of this is beyond the pale, like it was ten years ago, even five years ago. Today, it’s much more mainstream, but there’s a complete split between the establishment, especially in a colonial west that’s still extremely genocidal, and extremely supportive of Israel, and the grassroots, especially the younger people, who are all pro-Palestine today.

So when we say “Palestine frees us all,” we really mean it. In the struggle to stand with Palestine, people have discovered the limits of their so-called liberal democracies, their universities that were supposedly democratic. They discovered how repressive, how autocratic how corporate controlled they are.

They’ve discovered their governments to be mainly oligarchies, not so much democracies. They’ve discovered the corruption in the political class, the economic class, and the military-industrial conflicts.

Those discoveries will push younger generations to really demand change and lead change.