Recently, Israel announced that it intends to revoke the residency rights of Omar Barghouti – a Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The lack of international response speaks to the extent to which Israel’s violation of fundamental democratic norms has become normalised and not led to any re-evaluation of its standard characterisation as a functioning liberal democracy.
Omar Barghouti has enjoyed permanent residency status in Israel since 1993. Since he came to prominence in 2005 as a co-founder of the BDS movement he has had his rights and freedoms routinely denied. In 2016 Israel’s intelligence minister threatened him with “targeted civil elimination”, a statement described by Amnesty International as alarming. Since then he has been subjected to regular restrictions to his freedom of movement including in Autumn 2018 when he was denied permission to travel to Amman to attend his late mother’s funeral.
These attacks are just one manifestation of Israel’s intensifying war on BDS. The BDS movement seeks to apply non-violent tactics against the Israeli state until it complies with international law by ending the occupation, recognising the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and upholding Palestinian refugees’ fundamental right to return to the homes from which they were expelled. Ever since its inception, the Israeli state has sought to delegitimise and even criminalise the movement.
