International Relations Commissioner for the Fatah movement Nabil Shaath called on Palestinians to begin a full-fledged consumer boycott of Israel in an interview with The Arab Weekly on Tuesday.
“A consumer boycott should be the Palestinians’ weapon against Israel,” the newspaper quoted Shaath as saying.
Referring to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which has failed and been revived numerous times, Shaath said Palestinians should “wake up from their dreams of peace,” adding that the peace process should be declared dead.
Nabil Shaath: peace process is dead, & Palestinians should pursue consumer boycott against Israel https://t.co/Zt3Pr8aKpO
— Ben White (@benabyad) October 25, 2016
“Rights are not given, but taken by force,” Shaath said, saying the biggest strength Palestinians have against Israel’s military, air force, and navy, was public action.
“If anything, past experiences and alterations in the world and around us in the region tell us that we should start depending on ourselves, not wait for others to give us our rights,” Shaath said.
Shaath criticized peace brokers like the United States and France, who announced its efforts to renew a multilateral peace initiative earlier this year, saying that those countries “cannot realistically put pressure on Israel.”
BDS campaign 'winning battle for hearts and minds' – Omar Barghouti @AJENews https://t.co/t11MSvHKRO
— Furkan Mulla (@mulla_furkan) August 23, 2016
“Israel does not give anything to anybody for free,” Shaath said. “It will never give us our land if the cost of occupying this land is not far higher than leaving it.”
He went on to emphasize his call on fellow Palestinians to “depend on themselves more” through an economic boycott of Israel.
The international success of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call it a “strategic threat” for Israel and allocate state resources to fight it.
“The Palestinian boycott of Israeli products is spreading and becoming more entrenched, especially among younger Palestinians,” Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the BDS movement, said at the beginning of 2015.
(MA’AN, PC)
