In recent years, Palestine solidarity activists have pressured corporations to end their complicity in the Israeli regime’s violations of Palestinians’ rights. As a result, companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Veolia, and Pillsbury, among others, have pulled their products and services from Israeli markets, albeit to varying extents. How, exactly, have these successes been achieved? What are some of their limitations, and how hopeful should we be for a proliferation in corporate boycotts of Israel?
To answer these questions and more, host Nadim Bawalsa was joined by Sandra Tamari and Omar Barghouti for Al-Shabaka’s first policy lab of 2023.
Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. He is a co-recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, NY, and is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy (ethics) at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of, BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket: 2011). His commentaries and views have appeared in many mainstream outlets including the New York Times, the Guardian, MSNBC, CNN, Le Monde, among others.
Nadim Bawalsa is Associate Editor with the Journal of Palestine Studies. From 2020-2023, Nadim served as Al-Shabaka’s commissioning editor. He is a historian of modern Palestine, and author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022). His other work has appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, NACLA Report on the Americas, and as well as in edited volumes. He earned a joint doctorate in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017, and a Master’s in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in 2010. In 2019-2020, he was awarded a PARC-NEH fellowship in Palestine.
