[lbo-talk] Yousef Munayyer: Why BDS doesn't come with a map

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Thu Apr 19 14:30:20 PDT 2012


"The BDS movement is a global movement called for by Palestinian civil society that aims to pressure Israel to meet three requirements: 1) self-determination for Palestinians in the occupied territories, 2) a Right of Return for Palestinian refugees and 3) full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

"BDS is not a political movement; it is, and I think by design, a rights-based movement. It does not aim to draw borders. This is not because of a philosophy about one state or two, but rather because a person’s location on one side of a border or the other has no bearing on their inalienable human rights.

"The question of Palestine has always been one of rights—rights to vote, rights to return to and live on your land, rights to equality among others—and not simply one of identity. Palestinians are not in search of a national-state identity; we know who we are, and we are the people of Yaffa, Haifa, Nablus, Ramallah, Gaza, Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

"This is perhaps why the ‘peace process’ was such a dismal failure. It attempted to Zionize the Palestinian cause, converting it from a cause of rights to a cause for an ethnically homogeneous state to address a Zionism-created problem of statelessness within the confines of 22% of Palestine. Palestinians do not want a state for the sake of having a state, a flag, an anthem, an army, or a president. Palestinians who supported a two-state outcome only sought a Palestinian state *in so far as* that state would be a vehicle toward realizing Palestinian rights.

"What became clear over the past 20 years of peace processing is that even in the best case scenario a Palestinian state would come only at the significant *expense* of Palestinian rights ..."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/19/why-bds-doesn-t-come-with-a-map.html

-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."



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