Twenty Years of BDS

This month marks a milestone in the liberation struggle of the Indigenous people of Palestine, as the Palestinian-led nonviolent, anti-racist BDS movement completes 20 years of grassroots organizing and building intersectional people power. It will be remembered in history as the start of a principled, strategic, and creative process that has isolated Israel’s 77-year-old regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and military occupation at the grassroots and institutional level. It has redefined the meaning of solidarity with our struggle as starting with ending the complicity of states, corporations and institutions with this regime. 

Meaningful solidarity, as BDS has tirelessly advocated, must uphold the fundamental ethical principle of doing no harm and stopping or offsetting harm done in one’s name.

Yet in the midst of Israel’s livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, we are too grieved and too enraged to celebrate the phenomenal BDS impact. But we owe it to every single Palestinian, especially our people in Gaza, to reaffirm our unbreakable commitment to march on until Israel’s regime of oppression is entirely dismantled. This obliges us to recognize and share with the world the immense people power we have collectively built over these two decades and the many milestones we have reached towards isolating genocidal Israel as a rogue state that threatens humanity at large.

The BDS movement has consistently argued that, in parallel with exterminating tens of thousands of Palestinian lives in Gaza and destroying its 4,000-year-old civilization, Israel has established a might-makes-right order unseen in decades, burying the foundations of international law in the process. Today, the overwhelming majority of international human rights organizations, UN experts, scholars, and justice movements agree. They also endorse, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report affirms, our strategy of isolating Israel by enforcing accountability in accordance with international law and ending complicity. Following the historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which found Israel guilty of apartheid against Palestinians and its military occupation of Palestinian territory illegal, former senior UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber said this ruling makes BDS “not only a moral imperative and constitutional and human right, but also an international legal obligation.”

Read more from the BDS Movement on this anniversary, including a list of its twenty most significant impacts, here.

Berlin: ‘aʿmāl al-‘arḍ - Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, on view through September

Opening at Spore on 18.07.25 and unfolding until the end of September, the second chapter of ‘aʿmāl al-'arḍ - Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, with works by Baha Hilo, Emily Jacir, Michael Rakowitz, Mohammad Saleh, Sari Khoury, Sebastián Jatz Rawicz, Shayma Hamad, Vivien Sansour.

In a landscape where access to land, food, and heritage is constantly threatened, how do people sustain themselves—physically, culturally, and spiritually? 

This second chapter of the exhibition gathers works that examine the politics of cultivation, nourishment as resistance, and the act of preserving memory through soil, seeds, food, and storytelling. Through farming, fermentation, sound, and material archives, these works insist that care, creativity, and sustenance are radical acts in the face of erasure.  

Here cultivation is understood in its broadest sense: not just the tending of crops, but the cultivation of memory, community, and resistance itself. The artists engage with food, soil, and land as sites of both vulnerability and defiance, where seeds are planted as acts of future-making. 

Whether through the restoration of olive trees, the archiving of recipes, the fermentation of wine, or the sonic mapping of place, these works highlight how Palestinian cultural practices persist despite ongoing displacement. They remind us that to cultivate is to resist, to nourish is to remember, and to gather is to survive.

Find out more about the exhibition, including workshops, talks, and other future events.

Los Angeles: Michel Khleifi's Fertile Memory, 31 July

As part of their July series "US Tour," 7th House is proud to present a rare screening of Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi's gorgeous, meditative, and deeply affecting landmark film FERTILE MEMORY (1980). The sole film in 7th House's series not set on American soil, it nevertheless reverberates with our nation's contemporary impact abroad. The first full length film to be shot within the disputed Palestinian West Bank "Green Line," FERTILE MEMORY is the feature debut of Khleifi, acclaimed director of the Cannes Film Festival triumph, WEDDING IN GALILEE. Lyrically blending both documentary and narrative elements, Khleifi skillfully and lovingly crafts a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives.

Grandmother Romia fights an unending legal battle with the Zionist authorities who confiscated her ancestral land soon after the Israeli occupation in 1947. With her family scattered all over the globe while she works in an Israeli factory, Romia doggedly maintains a dignity and passion that for her are the difference between mere subsistence and tenacious survival. Sahar Khalifeh, a divorced novelist and young mother living in the West Bank, struggles to maintain a modern role for herself within her increasingly intolerant occupation community. Representing both contemporary Arab womanhood and vanguard Palestinian conscience, Sahar must balance the changes in her world after the Six Day War with the changes in herself after achieving personal emancipation.

With painterly flair, Khleifi elevates the everyday details of Romia's and Sahar's lives to a timelessness as irresistible as the hauntingly beautiful desert landscape they fight for. Whether in a tearful lullaby or a sensuously performed lover's lament, the women of FERTILE MEMORY lend tender and powerful voices to their people's chorus of outrage. Michel Khleifi's poetic and powerful film puts a distinctively feminine expression on the ordinarily violent and male dominated face of Palestinian resistance.

Find more details and get your tickets here.

London: Between Sky and Sea, 2 August

Between Sky and Sea is a photography exhibition by the late Palestinian artist Ismail Abu Hatab, created remotely from Gaza during the 2023–2024 war. Despite severe injuries and living under siege, Abu Hatab documented the lives of displaced Palestinians caught "between sky and sea" — exposed to war, weather, and waiting. Between Sky and Sea is an immersive exhibition that seeks to convey the emotional and physical reality of displacement experienced in Gaza, those who were forced to live in fragile tents along the coastline, with only fabric walls between them and the sky, the sea, and the constant threat of bombardment.

Set within a symbolic tent echoing Gaza’s camps, the exhibition combines immersive visuals and audio to explore exile, memory, and resilience. It centers people—not objects—as the heart of its sensory storytelling.

Following its debut in Los Angeles, the third edition in London expands the experience. It is hosted by BYPA – By Palestine in partnership with Palestine House.

Ismail Abu Hatab, a Palestinian photojournalist and filmmaker from Gaza, spent over a decade capturing life under siege through powerful visual narratives. After losing the ability to walk for over a year due to an Israeli airstrike in 2023, he continued working, documenting with crutches and unwavering resolve.

He founded BYPA to amplify Palestinian voices through photography, film, and exhibitions shown in Los Angeles, Chicago, and beyond. As a trainer and mentor, he led storytelling workshops with DW Akademie, UNESCO, and others across the Arab world. Known for fusing documentary clarity with poetic depth, Ismail turned collective suffering into visual testimony. He was killed on June 30, 2025, in an Israeli airstrike while documenting Gaza. 

Find more details and reserve your tickets for Between Sky and Sea here.

Book of the Week

This book never misses the defiant beat of an exile’s haunted footing across wars, seas and memory. Almadhoun turns the genocidal logic of colonialism upside down, emptying out the crumbs of humanity and civilisation.

—Don Mee Choi

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

In a phalanx of notes and footnotes, I have brought you a severed hand destabilizes the very hierarchies of the page, and in so doing transgresses the borders of the poem, the nation, the body, and even that zone between speaker and addressee. Written over the years 2017 to 2023, the poet takes us to Palestine, Syria, Germany and Sweden, reasserting the stakes for those unable to leave their states of imprisonment while proposing that hope may be inseparable from the absurdity of violence. He writes: “You say that I survived the war. No, my dear, nobody survives wars. It’s only that I didn’t die. I just stayed alive.”

Translated by Catherine Cobham, Ghayath Almadhoun’s I have brought you a severed hand is out now. You can get your copy in North America from Action Books, and in the UK/Europe from Divided Publishing.

Media Roundup

Complicity – Mary Turfah wonders what the point of “raising awareness” about Gaza in the West is, when almost two years of awareness have done practically nothing to stopping the genocide. 

The Gavel and the Gun – Darryl Li argues that most “progress” on Palestine in international law comes about because of – rather than despite – the force of armed struggle against Israel.

The Road from Gaza – Doha Kahlout writes here, in Yasmine Seale’s translation, of continuing to carry the memories of Gaza in her body since she managed to leave.

Fugitive Solidarities – In this longread, Dylan Saba thinks through the life and work of Ghassan Kanafani, George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Yahya Sinwar in order to offer a comparative genealogy of prison breaks and escape between Palestine and the United States as a form of “subterranean internationalism.”

Deadly Slop – Sophia Goodfriend writes about how the recurrent inaccuracies and “slop” of civilian uses of AI are replicated in the Israeli military’s adoption of AI tools to bombard Palestine, leading to “mistakes” that can be blamed on the technology instead of the government using it to kill.’

Getting Some Air – In this photo essay, Maen Hammad profiles Palestinian skateboarders in the West Bank who experience skating as a form of freedom that refutes the fragmentation of Palestine.

Sonny Singh and Huda Asfour Won’t Sink into Despair – Sonny Singh and Huda Asfour, co-curators of the new BDS Mixtape, speak about the anti-fascist history of improvisation, and the necessity of sumud.

A Book Stall in the Rubble Nourishes Hungry Minds – Esraa Abo Qamar profiles readers and writers finding solace in the books at a book stall in Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza.

What Next for Palestine Action? – D. K. Renton appraises the state of pro-Palestinian activism in the UK, suggesting that the upcoming court decision on the proscription of Palestine Action represents a fork in the road for the future of Palestine solidarity work writ large.

GHF Guards Gassed Starving and Fenced in Palestinians, Causing a Deadly Stampede – Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports on the mass murder of Palestinians at the so-called “aid distribution site” as part and parcel of the campaign to systematically starve Gaza. 

The Paradigm of Arab National Security: Between Systematic Distortion and the Need for Redefinition – Mohammed ElAbadsa argues that the concept of national security has been functioning as a double-edged sword for Arab states that neighbor Israel to implicitly support the occupation of Palestine.

The Double Life of a Palestinian Translator: A Bridge Between Wounds and Words – “To be a Palestinian translator,” Alaa Alqaisi writes, “is to become an intermediary between a vanishing world and one that often refuses to acknowledge its disappearance. It is to carry voices across the abyss of silence; to smuggle meaning past the barricades of linguistic and political distortion; to refuse the obliteration of one’s history by ensuring that its words do not die with its people.”

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