Forty years after Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and almost sixty years after the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, Palestinians still live under occupation and apartheid. The state of Israel undemocratically controls the lives of the indigenous people of Palestine—as second-class citizens in a Jewish state, as occupied subjects, as resident “aliens” in Jerusalem, and as refugees exiled from their homes since 1948.

The Palestinian struggle for self-determination and freedom reflects the continuing struggles of indigenous peoples, immigrants, and prisoners, poor communities, communities of color and dislocated people in the United States. Moreover, these struggles share the devastation created by the historic and current imperialist agenda of the United States and its Western allies.

The U.S. government and its allies have escalated the implementation of a long-term agenda of securing control of the Middle East/West Asia for its economic, military and political interests. At the center of this agenda is the U.S. and its Western allies’ unwavering support for Israel and the leveraging of Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian land and its broader designs for the region. Western governments imposed sanctions on the democratically elected Palestinian government led by Hamas, unconscionably compounding the suffering, poverty, and malnutrition caused by the Israeli occupation. The U.S. and the E.U., in collusion with Israel and neighboring states, worked underhandedly to sabotage the Palestinian unity government and to exacerbate factional tensions. The U.S. encouraged the war on and destabilization of Lebanon last summer, and is supporting the current shelling of defenseless Palestinian refugees living in the Nahr-El-Bared refugee camp, with the silent approval of governments around the world.

To date, official diplomacy has failed in enforcing countless UN resolutions and relevant principles of international law aimed at ending Israel’s occupation, colonization, displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people. While Israel is allowed to act with impunity, Palestinian rights and concerns have been erased from the international agenda. As governments continually fail to hold a belligerent state up to the standards of international law, peoples’ movements must intervene to ensure respect for human rights and self-determination.

American military investment that is required to maintain the US occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian correspond with a divestment from education and health care, and a decrease in employment options. This leaves youth from poor communities and communities of color with few options for their futures other than prison or the military.

Key to our struggle against US imperialism abroad and at home is the building of solidarity between Palestine activists in the U.S. and domestic struggles that oppose war, dispossession, and attacks on marginalized and oppressed communities at home and abroad. We condemn the walls, barriers and prisons built to divide and destroy communities in the U.S. as well as in Palestine. We affirm that the call to Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) is part of a larger struggle against militarization, colonialism, and global systems of apartheid.

Echoing the demands included in the Palestinian Civil Society call for BDS in July 2005 and reaffirmed in the joint statement of Palestinian civil society to the World Social Forum in January 2007, and inspired by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, we resolve to support a comprehensive BDS campaign against Israel until it complies with its obligations under international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the wall;
2. Ending its system of racial discrimination and recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, including their right to full equality;
3. Recognizing the right of Palestinian refugees, including Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN General Assembly resolution 194.

We bring our solidarity to domestic and other global struggles for liberation and request your participation in the following Call to Action:

We call on our friends and allies to endorse the call for BDS issued by Palestinian civil society.

We call on our friends and allies to support the Global Day of Action against the Apartheid Wall in November 2008.

We call on our friends and allies to support and participate in the Fourth International Israeli Apartheid Week in February 2008.

We call on our friends and allies to prepare for mass commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) in May 2008 and throughout that year.

We call on our friends and allies to support the first grassroots Popular Palestinian National Conference “Claiming our Voice, Asserting our Narrative” organized for and by Palestinians in North America to be held in Chicago, Illinois, on August 8, 2008.