A year after the last war crime on the Gaza Strip and after the apparent usage of internationally banned weapons against noncombatant civilians, many solidarity groups in several regions began taking a serious stance from Israel.
One of these solidarity movements is the Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid, abbreviated in “BACEIA “.
This campaign is mainly initiated by grassroots efforts aiming to engage people in boycott, divestment and sanctions work, this to shake Israel’s economic infrastructure.
The campaign came out when people of conscience realized that the consumer behavior plays a major role in supporting the apartheid and the hoodlums of the Israeli autocratic government and its bestial so called IDF army.
The campaign’s activists established the baceia.org website in order to keep people updated with the campaign’s news and achievements, and to popularize the contributions of consumers to boycott Israeli’s products all over the world. The website includes a petition for people to sign as an indicator for the number of people around the world intending to get involved in imposing an economic punishment against Israel.
It also shows a huge list of products produced by Israel, and products produced by countries supporting Israel. The list includes the product name, product descriptions, and known product location.
Luckily, the number of petition signers is increasing each day, and the campaign became now one of the prominent notable campaigns around the world. Today, a coalition is being formed under the BACEIA name.
On February 24th/10, members of the campaign marched in San Francisco’s streets, and closed one of the busiest shopping districts as a scene of road closure that runs almost daily in the Palestinian territories specially in the “Shuhada” Street in Hebron. Protestors held a huge banner across the street with these words written: Israeli apartheid closes streets, open Shuhada Street, boycott Israel, free Palestine.
After the march, they gathered in front of flagship stores which profit from the Israeli occupation and disrupted business over there.
Further more, posters that display names and packages of commodities made in Israel, are being posted on the advertisement panels in the streets, to fully inform citizens with those products that fuel the bloodshed and massacre-perpetration in Palestine.
What we need to know is, while westerns are devoting their time and money for the sake of Palestine, and while they are getting arrested for their non-violent resistance, we insist on helping the Israeli culprits in the killing of our children.
To end the siege and to demolish the segregation wall, we the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular must trample Israel economically by decimating the financial base of its business entities and enterprises.
As a conclusion for this article, let us chant the BACEIA’s slogan that says: “We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiative against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era “.
August 2, 2010 at 11:51 pm |
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May 10, 2013 at 4:22 pm |
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work on. You’ve done a formidable job and our entire community will be grateful to you.