‘Intensify the global anti-apartheid movement against Israel and for Palestine’: Global Anti-Apartheid Conference program of action

The Global Anti-Apartheid Conference for Palestine held in Johannesburg, South Africa, on May 12, 2024, attended by over 400 participants from 32 countries, adopted the “Johannesburg Declaration on Israel’s Settler-Colonialism, Apartheid and Genocide: Towards a Global Anti-Apartheid Movement for Palestine”. The Declaration urged people and organisations globally to expand and escalate actions in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s courageous liberation struggle to end genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid “from the River to the Sea”.

Since the Johannesburg conference, and despite the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on May 24 explicitly ordering Israel to halt its military offensive, Israel continues to relentlessly bomb civilians and Gaza’s infrastructure, increasingly making the territory unliveable. The ICJ also reiterated its order for Israel to immediately allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid, including food, water and medicines. Israel has ignored this and previous orders and is deliberately hastening the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians through disease and famine. Israel has also rejected United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions demanding a ceasefire, including one on June 11 that was supported by 14 of the15 UNSC members (with one abstention). 

As we witness the horror and daily carnage, we take courage from Palestinians who, despite facing appalling and inhuman brutality, continue resisting on all fronts. We condemn governments that persist in supporting the genocidal Zionist regime, including the United States, Britain, many European Union states, and despotic Arab regimes, as well as those who remain silent. We are sure they will be found guilty of complicity in Israel’s genocide following recent ICJ, International Criminal Court (ICC) and UN Human Rights Council decisions. The US went further than others in allowing its “humanitarian” pier to be used to launch one of the worst massacres of Palestinians, and in supplying its own murderous special forces to assist in the commission of war crimes.  While the atrocities are continuing in Gaza, this year has also seen the largest land theft in the West Bank in 30 years.

Furthermore, Israel has repeatedly shown that its actions are a threat to global peace and security. Over decades, it has blatantly violated international law with abandon; rejected UN resolutions and rulings of the ICJ with disdain; labelled UN institutions “terrorist” and as enabling “terrorism”; undertaken illegal actions in various countries of the world, including assassinations, bombings and other acts of violence against individuals and states with impunity. Israel also possesses a large nuclear arsenal and its officials, at different times, have emphasised their willingness to use those weapons of mass destruction, thus imperilling the region as well as international peace and security more generally. Its weapons industry is a threat to peace in various parts of the world, particularly as Israel is unconcerned about producing and using banned weapons such as cluster bombs and white phosphorus. In June 2024, the Human Rights Council and several independent experts again reiterated their call to states and arms manufacturers to cease the sale, transfer and diversion of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel.

Israel’s crimes are so heinous, their depravity so disturbing, Palestinian suffering so intolerable, and the UN so paralysed that people around the world are increasingly rising up in outrage. This level of global solidarity — students on hundreds of university campuses demanding divestment; workers refusing to handle goods and arms to and from Israel; cultural workers and sports people condemning and boycotting events with Israeli participation; communities declaring apartheid-free areas and even countries taking tentative steps to impose sanctions on Israel — was last witnessed during the struggle against apartheid South Africa. 

Attendees at the Conference often on the frontline of these actions, vowed to support, strengthen and expand BDS actions such as these. Our program of action encourages the establishment of activist, grassroots structures in every country to stop the genocide. Delegates supported campaigns for the release of prisoners; reparations and compensation for the wanton destruction and crimes; the exercise of the right of return for refugees and the ending of Israel’s occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism. 

During the conference, workshops were held on the themes of boycotts, divestment and sanctions; interfaith activities and campaigns; changing the narrative; actions in the legal and multilateral spheres; Palestinian popular and other struggles against settler colonialism and apartheid; and supporting Palestinian political prisoners and humanitarian support.  Participants also convened in six regional workshops: Africa, Asia Pacific, Arab World, Latin America, North America and Europe. The key areas for action that arose from the deliberations are outlined below. These actions seek to confront Israel’s settler colonialism and apartheid through diplomatic, legal, political, activist and solidarity actions.

Stop arming genocide

Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians is carried out with weapons supplied by Western powers, especially the United States, which has been the largest single provider of military financing and arms to Israel for decades, as well as by Germany, Canada, Italy and the United Kingdom, among others.

Selling weapons to and buying weapons from Israel, including spyware/cyberweapons, amount to criminal complicity in its crimes, as do other forms of financing its war machine. The weaponry and technology the Israeli military-industrial complex exports around the world are field tested on the bodies of Palestinian men, women and children. Through its sale of high-tech weaponry, “securitisation” and methods of pacification, Israel plays a key role in fuelling conflicts and the suppression of human rights globally. 

We call on the global solidarity movement to mobilise through direct action, lobbying, grassroots and trade union activism to: 

• Pressure governments, parliaments and corporations to immediately impose a #MilitaryEmbargo on Israel, as called for by the UN Human Rights Council and dozens of UN human rights experts. This should include the sale and transfer of weapons, military equipment and dual-use technology, cutting of military funding in the case of the US, and a ban on importing Israeli arms and spyware and on joint military and security projects.
• Campaign against, expose and, where possible, prosecute mercenaries from different countries joining the Israeli occupation forces.
• Disrupt the manufacturing and transport of weapons, weapon parts, and other military equipment to Israel, including in transit states.
• Stop Israel training police forces and security agencies around the world.
• Mobilise the world to end Israel’s nuclear, chemical and biological warfare threat.

No trade with apartheid

Support the Palestinian call for BDS against apartheid Israel similar to the call on the international community made by South Africans in support of their liberation struggle. BDS is already making investment and trade with apartheid Israel increasingly unprofitable and contributing to the contraction of the Israeli economy. National and local governments and other institutions in the West are trying to impose bans on BDS actions precisely because they work.

Intensify BDS campaigns in communities, associations, educational institutions, faith-based organisations, trade unions, and workplaces to:

• Directly hit the profits of businesses operating in Israel through targeted consumer boycott campaigns against the most complicit companies.  Take actions that raise awareness and create reputational damage to companies doing business as usual with génocidaires.  Ask shops, businesses, institutions and municipalities to declare themselves “apartheid-free zones” by refusing to stock or purchase products complicit in Israeli genocide and apartheid.
• Demand that governments implement trade sanctions on Israel.
• Join the global campaigns at ports to “block the boat”, to disrupt and stop Israeli-owned ships and consignments to and from Israel.
• Campaign for a global energy embargo against Israel to halt all exports of coal, gas and oil to the apartheid state.
• Pressure parliaments and governments to reject anti-BDS legislation and promote the passing of pro-BDS legislation.

Don’t play with apartheid

Apartheid Israel uses its participation in international sporting structures and cultural exchanges as tools of normalisation. The sports and cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa had a powerful psychological and public relations impact on the racist regime. Palestinians are making the same call against normalisation and to isolate Apartheid Israel. It is unconscionable that Israel is still able to participate in global sporting events such as the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup and other international competitions.

Increase urgent campaigns for national sporting codes and representatives to international sports bodies to:

• Suspend Israel’s membership and ban it from international tournaments and games including the International Olympic Committee and FIFA until it ends its grave violations of international law, particularly its apartheid rule and the crime of genocide it is perpetrating in Gaza.
• Raise awareness and urge cultural workers including unions, associations, venues and cultural spaces to: boycott and/or work towards the cancellation of events, activities, agreements, or projects involving Israel, its lobby groups or its cultural institutions; and ask international venues and festivals to reject funding and any form of sponsorship from the Israeli government.

Stopping the scholasticide

There continues to be a deliberate effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as “scholasticide”. The term refers to the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of lecturers, teachers, students and staff, the destruction of educational infrastructure and the erosion of the intellectual and cultural fabric of Palestinian society. Thus far, 450 schools and all 12 universities in Gaza have been bombed, together with archives, libraries and printing presses. Israel’s destruction of this infrastructure leaves 625,000 school and 90,000 university students in Gaza without access to education. To date, 8,600 students, 497 educators and administrators, 98 professors and four university presidents have been killed, many with their families. 

In the West Bank, the occupation forces have systematically attacked Palestinian universities and other educational spaces. These actions include regular storming of universities, arresting student council members and killing students and educators. Since October 2023, the occupation forces and armed settlers have killed at least 438 Palestinians, including 106 children across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. They murdered 100 Palestinian students, injured 494 and forcibly detained at least 349. The occupation forces have also invaded Palestinian teachers’ homes, assaulting families, and enforcing arbitrary arrests.   In the ’48 areas as well, over 80 Palestinian students at 25 “Israeli” institutions have been targeted and punished merely for liking tweets and authoring posts expressing sympathy for their family members in Gaza. 

We call on the solidarity movement to support a comprehensive and consistent boycott of all academic institutions in Israel as advocated by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). This entails: 

• Refraining from engaging in academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration, or joint projects with Israeli institutions. 
• Desisting from publishing in or reviewing articles from Israeli-linked academic journals, or publishing in collaboration with Israeli institutions.
• Refusing to serve as external examiners of dissertations associated with Israeli universities and/or Israeli-linked institutions.
• Refusing to write recommendations or to submit joint grant applications with/at Israeli universities and/or Israeli-linked institutions. 
• Refusing to enrol in Israeli-linked international faculty teaching and/or student programmes, conduct research at and/or with Israeli institutions, or engage in academic visits or fact-finding undertakings funded by Israel, its complicit institutions, and/or its international lobby groups.
• Supporting Palestinian academics, students and their institutions. 

Ending reproductive genocide

Since October 2023, the Israeli regime’s reproductive genocide in Gaza, through systematic violence and the deliberate targeting of women and children, has increased exponentially. The arbitrary detention and extrajudicial killing of children in the West Bank has also increased. The mass murder of women, children and babies is a deliberate genocidal effort to eradicate not only current but also future generations of Palestinians. Restrictions on access to vital resources such as food, water, electricity, and medical treatment results in women, particularly pregnant women and children suffering the most.  

In June, the UN Secretary-General’s envoy for children and armed conflict, Virginia Gamba, added Israel to the UN’s “list of shame”. The report covers grave violations including killing and maiming, sexual violence, abduction, denial of aid and attacks on schools and hospitals. It only reports on violations verified by the UN. The report attributed 5698 violations to Israel's “armed and security forces” verifying the killing of 2267 Palestinian children —  mostly in Gaza between October 7 and December 31 — but said the process of determining attribution was ongoing, adding: “Most incidents were caused by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas by Israeli armed and security forces.” By June, over 20,000 children have been killed, 19,000 orphaned and 21,000 are missing. Children feature overwhelmingly among the almost 90,000 Palestinians injured. Many children have been severely injured, over 1000 have had limbs amputated without anaesthesia. 

Advance the fundamental rights of Palestinians to bodily autonomy, safety, and justice through:

• Disseminating materials that outline the concept of reproductive genocide and its devastating impact. 
• Collaborating with reproductive justice advocates globally through rallies, protests, and public demonstrations to demand a ceasefire and an end to the violence in Gaza. 
• Advocacy for policy changes at both national and international levels to address the root causes of reproductive genocide in Gaza. Perpetrators of violence and human rights violations in Gaza must be held accountable, and justice for affected communities must be sought.
• Targeting mainstream and alternative media outlets to secure coverage of the crisis, op-eds featuring Palestinian voices particularly women and emphasise the urgent need for action. 
• Raising awareness internationally with organisations that focus on the rights of children to explore ways of supporting affected children, providing psychological and trauma counselling and assisting in resuming educational activities.

Highlighting ecocide

Since its founding, Israel’s settler colonialism has attempted to “greenwash” the crimes of the Nakba by planting non-indigenous forests over depopulated and destroyed Palestinian towns, damaging local ecosystems, uprooting ancient olive trees, stealing water from Palestinian aquifers, and, more recently, flooding tunnels in Gaza with seawater, thus imperilling Gaza’s water supply for generations to come. Israel’s military onslaught has had enormous effects on Gaza’s ecosystems and biodiversity. The scale and potential long-term impact of the damage is ecocide and must be investigated as a war crime. The Geneva Conventions require that warring parties do not use methods of warfare that cause “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment”.  Yet, Israel has dropped 85 000 tonnes of explosives — more than three nuclear bombs — on a densely packed area of 365 square kilometres.

Much of Gaza’s agricultural infrastructure, farms, 7500 greenhouses and orchards have been destroyed. Olive groves and farms have been reduced to packed earth; soil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; and the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter. The bombing has left about 30 million tonnes of debris, unexploded ordnance and hazardous material, with much of the rubble containing human remains.

It is the responsibility of Israel and its allies — which provide Israel with diplomatic cover and weapons —  to ensure the restoration of Gaza’s ecology, environment, water resources, and to remove the debris and hazardous material with which Israel has polluted Gaza.

We commit ourselves to:

• Inform and mobilise climate justice organisations and environmentalists to understand the extent of Israel’s ecocide and to campaign against it.
• Counter Israel’s use of greenwashing to legitimise its war on Gaza and normalise oppression and environmental injustice. 
• Mobilise against Israel’s “reforestation” project with Jordan and the UAE, also known as Project Green and Project Prosperity, which is aimed at normalisation with neighbouring Arab countries. 
• Strengthen the global campaign against the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which raises funds globally for Israel’s settler-colonialism and greenwashing initiatives.

Confronting Zionist propaganda and promoting the Palestinian narrative

The dominant Zionist narrative must be countered by ensuring the conversation is led by Palestinians, and by amplifying narratives that highlight the Palestinian history of colonisation and the legitimacy of the Palestinian right to resist genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid.

We call for implementing education and public campaigns in the mainstream and alternative media, including social media, to:

• Amplify Palestinian voices to counter Israeli “hasbara” (propaganda). 
• Legitimise and assert the Palestinian narrative and the right of Palestinians to resist.
• Characterise Israel as a racist, apartheid, settler-colonialist state founded on ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. 
• Share Palestinian stories of the ongoing Nakba and current living conditions under genocide and apartheid.
• Through various educational means and media, work to entrench the fact that Zionism is a political project and Israeli oppression is unrelated to Judaism.
• Collaborate with anti-racist organisations and movements and show that Zionism is racism.
• Promote discussion and education of Palestinian history with learners and students globally.

Punishing the Zionist project legally and diplomatically. 

Identify and expose Israel’s illegal actions. Support legal, diplomatic and multilateral initiatives to hold Israel accountable under international law and use legal means to promote Palestinian rights by:

• Empowering activists and communities with information around ICJ/ICC cases using traditional and social media and other fora.
• Localising legal action against Israeli war crimes and the war crimes complicity of other states using universal jurisdiction.
• Exploring class actions for damages against governments complicit with Israeli crimes.
• Developing and maintaining a repository of evidence of Israel’s crimes, as well as precedents, treaties and conventions that Israel violates.
• Forming task teams to work for the decriminalisation of the Palestinian narrative and the decriminalisation of the Palestinian right to resistance.
• Coordinating legal actions in different states to prosecute their citizens who join the Israeli Occupation Forces.
• Defending Palestinians and solidarity activists faced with criminal prosecution and assisting them with legal defence. 
• Utilising civil society spaces and lobbying in regional and UN structures including the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and special mechanisms, treaty bodies such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ISESCR); Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).
• Lobbying friendly states to form a bloc to campaign for the revival of the UN’s Special Committee Against Apartheid and to campaign for sanctions against Israel. 
• Lobbying African states to ensure the revocation of Israel’s observer status at the African Union.

Supporting Palestinian prisoners and their families

The treatment of Palestinian prisoners, detainees and hostages remains one of the most under-reported Israeli crimes because of restrictions on access for journalists and even humanitarian agencies such as the International Red Cross. Furthermore, organisations such as Addameer, which maintains updated information on Palestinian prisoners, have been banned by Israel. Since October 2023, thousands of Palestinians have been kidnapped, disappeared, tortured and sexually abused, as described by released prisoners. Israeli prisons where Palestinians are held are sites of physical, psychological and emotional torture including against children and the elderly. Hundreds of these hostages held by Israel are children.

Advocate for legal actions by:

• Establishing a Palestinian Legal Defence Fund for prisoners and their families. 
• Working with NGOs dealing with Palestinian prisoners to document the number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel and their conditions. 
• Lobby for access to prisoners.
• Working to ensure effective documentation of the situation of Palestinian prisoners by UN Special Rapporteurs.
• Advocating for the adoption and adherence to the “Nelson Mandela Principles” for the treatment of prisoners and for Israel to adhere to known standards for treatment of prisoners.
• Campaigning against the detention of children and strengthening existing campaigns such as “Free Them All” and other campaigns that focus on political prisoners. 
• Highlighting the fact that close to 10,000 Palestinians are held hostage in the prisons of the occupation.

Promote people-to-people solidarity by:

• Facilitating connection between families of Palestinian prisoners and families in other parts of the world that can provide moral support, maintain communications and publicise the stories of individual prisoners.
• Connecting with anti-xenophobia and migrant rights organisations to ensure Palestinians who seek political asylum are granted refugee status.

Mobilising faith-based communities 

Religion is often misused and abused as a justification and a tool of oppression, as was the case in apartheid South Africa and is now the case with apartheid Israel. This places a particular responsibility on religious communities to respond to situations of oppression. While it is necessary for different faith communities to mobilise their own members for actions, it is also necessary and useful to mobilise in an inter-faith manner, with adherents of different faiths standing together against Israel’s genocide, apartheid, colonialism and occupation.

Within the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement for Palestine, adherents of different faiths, faith communities and faith-based organisations will undertake the following actions:

• Set up an interfaith task team to coordinate these activities across all sectors of civil society.
• Confront Christian Zionism and work to dispel the notion that Christians are theologically obligated to support Zionism and the state of Israel, and to undertake education programmes on this matter especially in working class communities. 
• Dispel the notion that Zionism and Judaism are synonymous, and that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
• Build relations between different faith groups to develop a global anti-Zionist, anti-apartheid interfaith movement and interfaith advocacy for Palestine.
• Consult the Palestinian Christian leadership on building the Kairos for Palestine and Palestinian interfaith networks.
• Work towards a global interfaith conference for Palestine.
• Issue a call on faith communities to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign.
• Consider an interfaith march of religious leaders from various traditions to the borders with Israel — from Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria.

Intensifying the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement against Israel and for Palestine

Conference attendees agreed to cooperate with other organisations working on the various issues and campaigns in this Program of Action.

We call on the global solidarity movement to:

1. Intensify all civil society solidarity campaigns and initiatives within our localities, countries, regions, continents and international networks. Strengthen and form new partnerships, deepen coordination and encourage anti-apartheid formations to develop in each country based on context specific, dynamic and action-oriented agendas.

2. The South African Anti-Apartheid Steering Committee will continue operating as an Interim Steering Committee for a three-month period following the publication of this Plan of Action to continue to engage in inclusive and wide-ranging consultations with Palestinian civil society and political entities in Occupied Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora.

3. Support regional formations focusing on united action with all those around the world who agree with our Program of Action.  Through this process we will collectively build the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement on the ground leading to establishing a committee with representation from Africa, Asia Pacific, Arab World, Latin America, North America and Europe towards holding a global launch gathering.     

Build the Global Movement for BDS!

Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!

Sanctions against the génocidaires now!