Abby's Blog

Over the past six years, unbeknownst to most Americans, 36 states passed laws intending to silence boycotts and other nonviolent measures aimed at pressuring Israel on its human rights record. These dangerous bills remove the legal protection that has been awarded to boycotts for generations, granting governments the power to condition jobs on political viewpoints.

As this wave of anti-boycott legislation has swept through the country, so has a counter-wave in defense of freedom of speech. Everyday Americans are challenging these laws for their constitutionality in a nation-wide battle likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

With full access to the plaintiffs and in revelatory moments with elected officials, Boycott chronicles one of the most consequential First Amendment battles of the past few decades and investigates the question – how did we get here?

Mohammed R Mhawish | Gaza City | 5 Feb 2024

"I do not write of the struggle we are living to engender sorrow. Had sorrow moved people, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

I outline our struggle because, at this point, we have either already been killed or are in the process of being killed slowly.

We are appealing to the healthy ones, the ones with a bed to sleep on, the ones whose voices can be heard outside this slaughterhouse.

I write to equip you with the knowledge of what humanity is undergoing. We the Palestinians of Gaza are being starved, are sleeping on the streets with no cover from air strikes.

We are being denied our humanity by an army that continues to inflict some of the most painful and inhumane practices of war we know in our modern day.

It’s time for the world to defy the abuses, to give regard to human life, to keep it simple and basic, like the needs we require to maintain breath."

Alexei Sisulu Abrahams | February 2, 2024

"I say kinetic violence for the sake of distinguishing it from its complementary concept of structural violence. Whereas bombings or shootings are examples of kinetic violence, structural violence is exemplified by walls, barbed wire fences, or systems of discriminatory laws. When a bomb goes off, it is a discrete event that can be reported or remarked upon. Structures of violence, by contrast, are continuous features that rend reality in two.

To get a glimpse of what it means for Palestinians to be the victims of structural violence, we can turn to the great Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who once wrote that “our lives are as a straight line that marches in shame and silence beside the line of our destiny; but the two lie parallel, and shall never meet.” To live in the shadow of a wall, or on the wrong side of a fence, or on the receiving end of a discriminatory system, is to live “in the presence of absence,” to be haunted by the ghost of one’s potential self — the person you would have become were it not for this wall, this fence, this law, this structure. In Kanafani’s telling, the life that Palestinians were meant to live haunts their every footstep. It runs parallel, and in full view of their imagination, a daily reminder and humiliation, next to which they trudge in silence and shame."

Naomi Klein

"Reading BDS documents from the mid- and late 2000s, I am most struck by the extent to which the political and human terrain has deteriorated. In the intervening years, Israel has built more walls, erected more checkpoints, unleashed more illegal settlers and launched far deadlier wars. Everything has gotten worse: the vitriol, the rage, the righteousness. Clearly, impunity – the sense of imperviousness and untouchability that underpins Israel’s treatment of Palestinians – is not a static force. It behaves more like an oil spill: once released, it seeps outwards, poisoning everything and everyone in its path. It spreads wide and sinks in deep.

Since the original call for BDS was made in July 2005, the number of settlers living illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has exploded, reaching an estimated 700,000 – close to the number of Palestinians expelled in the 1948 Nakba. As settler outposts have expanded, so has the violence of settler attacks on Palestinians, all while the ideology of Jewish supremacy and even overt fascism have moved to the center of the political culture in Israel."

Al Jazeera | 24 January 2024

"625,000 children are out of school. At least 346 schools in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged.

Israel has destroyed every university in the Gaza Strip. On January 17, the Israeli military detonated 315 mines to destroy the strip's last standing university, Israa University, south of Gaza City.

At least 4,327 students have been killed; 7,819 others injured. At least 231 teachers and administrators have been killed; 756 others injured."

Al Jazeera

"The Gaza Strip is a graveyard for thousands of children, the United Nations has said.

Since October 7, Israeli attacks have killed at least 10,000 children, according to Palestinian officials. That is one Palestinian child killed every 15 minutes, or about one out of every 100 children in the Gaza Strip.

Thousands more are missing under the rubble, most of them presumed dead.

The surviving children, who have endured the traumatic impact of multiple wars, have spent their lives under the shadow of an Israeli blockade, influencing every aspect of their existence from birth."