Some 18 months after the Israeli assault of 2009, the Palestinian territory of Gaza sat in almost total isolation at the south eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Surrounded by the Israeli separation barrier, Gazans are cut off from Palestinian residents of Israel and from Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank. Gaza is also largely separated from Egypt by the Israeli barrier along the Philadelphi route, which constitutes the border with its southern Arab neighbor. There are currently only three official points of entry into and exit from Gaza and Mubarak’s Egypt tried to block the underground tunnels connecting Gaza and Sinai by a subterranean security barrier. Given the elaborate system of fences and walls, it has become common to refer to Gaza as the “world’s largest prison” as Noam Chomsky did in a January 13, 2009 lecture, and the phrase is a powerful metaphor for the conditions of isolation lived by the Palestinians of Gaza. At one time and for a long time, Gaza was a passageway between the African continent and the Levant, a coastal strip of land that opened onto the world in all directions. But since the partition of historic Palestine in 1948, the Gaza Strip has suffered from the neglect and brutality of those who have dominated it, first the Egyptians from 1949 until 1967, and then the Israelis from 1967 to the present. The rise in popularity of Hamas in the late 1990s and in the first decade of this century was largely the result of the notorious misrule of Gaza by the Palestinian Authority. Despite the Israeli redeployment from Gaza in 2005—evacuating the settlements and the military bases—the territory remains subject to Israel domination. This background is crucial to understanding the internationalization of Gaza, confirmed once again by the Israeli raid on the Freedom Flotilla. This paper argues that the idea and image of Gaza have become over the last 2 years central to international organizing in support of Palestinians. In addition, it proposes that despite its isolation, Gaza is the site of global efforts to connect with Palestine. To illustrate this argument, the paper discusses the collection essays edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and published under the title Midnight Mava Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict (2010).

In a time when Palestinian leadership is bifurcated diplomatically and geographically and when the Palestinian national body is fragmented multiple times over throughout a global diaspora, it is seemingly difficult to identify with whom solidarity activists are allied. In fact, a common, and arguably disingenuous, retort to the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions has been that “there exists no Palestinian equivalent to the African National Congress that can genuinely call for solidarity,” as if to suggest that absent such leadership, no group of Palestinians can represent Palestinians as a nation. This raises several questions including, 1) how then can Palestinians realize their self-determination absent their composition as a nation?; 2) how did the advent of a peace process ushered by the Madrid Peace Process, and more prominently Oslo, undermine the Palestinian Liberation Organization?; 3) How have Palestinians come to represent themselves in the absence of a functioning trans-national government?; and finally 4) how did this political vacuum, coupled with a failed peace process, provide the platform for an alternative Palestinian option led by a broad swath of civil society actors? This paper seeks to answer these questions in a broader effort to understand the onus underpinning the burgeoning boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. The paper will address what BDS is; how Palestinians have organized themselves in a transnational diaspora absent formal institutions; how the 2005 call works to shift the paradigm from a statist-based to a rights-based approach and in so doing congeals the Palestinian national-body; and how the sincerest form of solidarity is one that adopts BDS and echoes its demands.

Since the Camp David Accords of 1979, anti-normalization has framed much of Palestine solidarity work in Egypt. As Elliot Colla points out anti-normalization—the principle of refusing travel, professional, and cultural relations with Israel—constituted dissident political principles for most of its history. The anti-normalization movement highlighted the political gap between state policy and public opinion. However, as Amr Shalakany has shown, this activist dissidence of the 1970s and 1980s attenuated by the 1990s into “a discursive phenomenon” that the state managed and co-opted to contain popular protest. As Ursula Lindsey has argued, the position of cultural boycott against Israel was accompanied with increasing political and economic normalization between Egypt and Israel. This process was part of what Wassim al-Adel argued was a “growing culture of numbness and complicity” of Arab governments. In the post-Oslo period as Shalakany shows, anti-normalization was ensconced in a centrist political position that preached inaction as the normative mode of Palestine solidarity. However, the outbreak of the Al Aqsa intifada in 2000 was a significant rupture. Egyptian activists creatively reshaped Palestine solidarity through popular committees in Cairo and Alexandria that “boast[ed] all the trappings of a genuine social movement.” This paper explores Palestine solidarity work in Egypt since the 2005 launching of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. It will study the intersections, continuities, and ruptures of political work and expression under the Mubrak’s regime “cold peace” with Israel. It will then move to trace the shifts in Palestine solidarity work after the 25 January Revolution. Now that the political atrophy observers noted about Egyptian political life has been irrevocably punctured, what comes next for Palestine solidarity work? This paper will trace Palestine solidarity after a people’s revolution that ousted the thirty-year reign of an anti-democratic regime. It will be an important time to observe the making of state policy under the millions' strong demand for democratic change. What will become of the gap between state policy and public opinion on Palestine in this moment? What conceptual and strategic frameworks will be employed and what is the status of both the anti-normalization rhetoric and the BDS movement? In exploring Palestine solidarity work in this period, this paper contributes a reading of BDS in an unprecedented political moment in Arab history.

The emerging calls across the landscape of US higher education for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions present complex questions and challenges. Yet, US-based efforts to boycott other governments accused of human rights abuses are not new and have proven effective in confronting such violations. This paper will explore some of the historical similarities and differences between the budding attempts over the last five years aimed at ending Israeli military occupation and those of 20-30 years ago directed at apartheid South Africa. I will explore some of the critical ethical questions that surround these contested issues, including what an academic boycott aimed at the Israeli state might or should look like. What lessons can American academics interested in debating the merits of a cultural boycott learn from earlier campaigns? A recently released counter-protest by the Israeli government, its US consulates, and many of its supporters in the US against the current and varied boycott efforts have expressed a deep concern with these campaigns’ intentions and methods. Israeli authorities have even gone so far as stating that such non-violent forms of resistance represent an “existential threat” to the Jewish State. Drawing from debates in print and on campuses over the last five years among supporters of an academic boycott and between supporters and those opposed to such efforts, this paper will outline some of the crucial questions—ethical and tactical—that these various issues raise. This paper will compare the debates, movements, and discourses of/on human rights that arose during the cultural boycott of South African apartheid.