Recorded: 

Curated Track: 

Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth University

Description:

International solidarity with national liberation movements has taken a variety of forms across history. This roundtable session looks to economic strategies, including (but not limited to) boycotts, blockades, and divestment, to gather lessons and learnings for the current liberation struggle in Palestine. As we submit this session, the Israeli invasion on Gaza extends beyond one year, an aggression that has expanded to the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. The Israeli attacks on Gaza are an extension of the Nakba or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land in 1948, and the development of a settler-colonial fascist regime that denies Palestinians basic rights through the use of occupation, discriminatory laws, and military violence. In Palestine and across the diaspora, people have turned to economic strategies to resist the occupation and the Israeli settler-colonial regime.

From the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to blockades of Israeli ports to the demands for an arms embargo, this panel asks both what can we learn from previous economic solidarity strategies, and how might we apply these learnings (as Geographers, as academic workers, as people of conscience) to boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns both within and outside the academy.

This session was planned by the Geographers for Justice in Palestine and is part of a series of events including panels and a field trip.

Non-Presenting Participants