anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism is an anti-imperial political ideology that opposes Jewish nationalism and/or the racist, settler colonial project of Zionism as it has unfolded in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the genocide, disablement, and displacement of Palestinians. As a history of Jewish opposition to Zionism indicates, anti-Zionism must not be conflated with antisemitism.

Source: IJAN

BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions)

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led, non-violent movement for freedom, justice and equality that calls for international governments, businesses, organizations, and individuals to use these economic and political tactics to pressure Israel to comply with international law. Boycotts withdraw support from Israeli and international companies engaged or implicated in violations of Palestinian human rights. Divestment is focused on financial investments, particularly those of large entities such as banks, churches, pension funds, and universities. Sanctions call for governments to withdraw monetary, political, and military support from Israel as well as suspending Israel’s membership in international forums such as UN bodies and FIFA.

Sources: BDS Movement (What is BDS?; PACBI; What to Boycott)

indigeneity

Indigeneity is most basically defined as being descended from the earliest inhabitants of a place. However, it cannot be understood apart from settler colonialism and indigenous sovereignty. Indigeneity focuses on the relationship between indigenous people and places and the political movement toward decolonization. On the other hand, settler claims to indigeneity serve as a crucial tool in many settler colonial projects globally as they attempt the erasure of indigenous communities with ancestral and ongoing relationship to the land and the knowledges, cultures, and traditions that result from that relationship. Indigeneity has become a transnationalist analytical tool in identifying and dismantling settler colonialism.

Sources: Al-Shabaka; Yellowhead Institute; 28 Mag; Mahmoud Darwish; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

normalization

Normalization is the presentation of Israel’s behavior and actions against the Palestinian people as normal and acceptable. This term emerged from the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, which stated that the “signatories shall establish among themselves relationships normal to states at peace with one another.” Palestinians and Arabs began using “anti-normalization” to describe the refusal to deal with the Israeli regime as a normal entity. Normalization also situates the oppressor and the oppressed on level ground, allowing for “both sides” of the conflict to be presented without context of power differentials. The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) defines normalization as “dealing with or presenting something that is inherently abnormal, such as oppression and injustice, as if it were normal. Normalization with/of Israel is, then, the idea of making occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism seem normal and establishing normal relations with the Israeli regime instead of supporting the struggle led by the Indigenous Palestinian people to end the abnormal conditions and structures of oppression. … Countering normalization is a means to resist oppression, its mechanisms and structures.” +972 Magazine describes normalization as “as a ‘colonization of the mind,’ whereby the oppressed subject comes to believe that the oppressor’s reality is the only ‘normal’ reality … and that the oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with.”

Sources: Al-Shabaka; +972 Mag; BDS Movement