 Hello, and welcome to NewsClick. On May 14th, Israeli security forces massacred nearly 60 Palestinians and caused injuries to over 2,700 protesters. Following this event, there has been a wave of solidarity across the world, and a lot of protests have been held. To talk more about this, we have with us, Apurva, who is a South Asia coordinator for the Palestinian Committee on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Hello, Apurva. Hi, Prasad. So Apurva, to start with, could you give a global, say, an outlook on the kind of protests that are happening, as well as specifically what the BDS campaign is doing in response to these atrocities on Monday? The response from Monday is not only emerging out of the massacre that Israeli forces wrecked upon Palestinian protesters in Gaza, but actually following up from land day, from 30th March, since when actually these protests have been going on, demanding the right of return of refugees, most of whom, as you know, in Gaza are refugees since 1948, 1948 and 15th is Nakba Day. And the most crucial demand that has emerged, or in a sense, has been reiterated through these protests and that BDS supporters and even otherwise people have been saying, and I'll just in a bit come to that, is the demand for military embargo on Israel. And that's really crucial here, because the relationships that foster and sustain what Israel is able to do rest very strongly on these military relations. I would just like to point out right away that India, in fact, buys 50% of the weapons produced by Israel that it exports. So the demand for military embargo is central in the responses to the protests that are going on there. In fact, if you see some of these images from the protest, there are even placards talking about and raising the important point that the weapons that Israel sells are field-tested. They call them field-tested, and that is what field-testing means when you come to Israel and what it does, bombing and killing and injuring Palestinian protesters, unarmed protesters. So the most crucial demand is of military embargo, which has, in fact, been reiterated by Amnesty International. In its report on what has been happening in Gaza, it reiterates this demand. The mayor of Barcelona, after the violence on 14th May, spoke about the same. So in the sense, it's coalescing around the central demand of military embargo. And we have the history of South Africa to really show that that's really effective. So could you talk a bit more about India in this context? In a sense, India has a very long history of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. And a lot of Indian movements have always protested. And even the Indian government has actually taken a very favorable stance towards the Palestinian cause. But if you look at the last, say, 15 to 20 years, and especially in the last, say, since this government has come to power, there's been a huge shift. So could you talk a bit more about that? It's important also to put it into context that a lot of people still really hold that idea about India in Palestine, which is that of a long-standing friend. And true enough that India was amongst the first countries to stand with Palestine back in 1948. And Nehru and the entire non-aligned movement. That history held strong till about 80s, since when the relations started to change. In 1992, you couldn't get a visa to go to Israel, in fact. But that changed around that time. But of course, not just the extent of relations that have shifted and changed, but the entire ideological background within which it comes have really sort of revealed themselves in the last four years. And that means that actually, so when I say 50%, that 10% shift is just in the last one year. So we were around 40, 41%. And then we became 49, 50% in just the last one year accounting of Cypri. So that has exponentially increased. And just to go specifically in what kind of relations these exchanges are, very heavily they rely on military technology, especially technology, which is, so to speak, crowd-controlled technology, which is exactly what Israel puts out on display when it is massacring cousins and Palestinians otherwise. And that is what is also, so that's the focus, the surveillance, the crowd-controlled, those are the military kind of exchanges that are really heavy apart from other kinds of farms. Then there is surveillance, there is agribusiness, which is growing. There is the issue of big data within agriculture that is now being given to Israeli companies. And we already have a huge issue of surveillance and big data going on. So it's really this pro-corporate, pro-military, very right-wing kind of and nature of exchanges, which of course fit into a larger ideological narrative. When Modi went to Israel in 2017, becoming the first prime minister to do so, they, Netanyahu and Modi wrote this op-ed together, which specifically says this whole like, I mean, the bogey of terrorism and this Islamophobic thing of we are the democracies in these contexts. And that's the ideological perspective with which this alliance is growing, which is why we see it growing in the last four years a lot more. So it's actually Hindutva and Zionism which are growing together. And also, can you talk a bit more about the media's campaign in India, especially the campaign against HP, which has been launched recently? Yeah, so I'm really happy to share this here that we've launched the Boycott HP campaign. Boycott HP has been a global campaign for several years. And in today's context, it becomes really important to focus why HP is this target for boycotts. The technology that HP, you know, we all have it in our homes, we have it in offices, but HP is also, as they say, what Polaroid was for South Africa. HP is that company right now when it comes to what Israel is doing. HP maintains the population registry, which is responsible for the racist ID system. And that's how it sort of pushes a pathide in Palestine. And then it is responsible for the computers that are provided to the Israeli military. So this entire precision targeting, I mean, we know where that's coming from. That's HP. That's how it's extending the occupation of Palestine. And then it's a spin-off of HP, which is DXE technology, has facilities from one of the illegal Jewish only settlements. So HP is very deeply invested in strengthening and enabling Israeli occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism. And we've been in discussions, of course, through our campaign in groups across the country. And the good part about India, and I really have to say this, is that when we talk about BDS, the next step is not what, how does that work. But because our own history of boycotts during the anti-clonial movement, the question is what do we do, which is our target. So really in urban centers and offices for individuals, for organizations, HP is that target. And in the past, many big corporations have been pressurized and isolated to break those contracts that they have, like Violia and Orange and so on. So HP is one of those targets now. And apart from that, if I can talk about the other sort of campaigns, we of course have amongst farmers movements, Netafim as a campaign that's been developing, but I mean the campaign against Netafim, which is an Israeli agribusiness company. And aside from that, there are lots of these plans and contracts and deals between Israeli and Indian government for like the centers of excellence, which we don't know how it works, but it really runs on Indian taxpayer money. So those are some of the things that campaigns that we've been working on in rural India and then of course at the academic and cultural front. So it's really growing very organically, very naturally amongst people who have, for long supported Palestine, are really aghast to see the changes that are happening now and really want to respond and bring back that solidarity. Thank you very much, Apurva. Thanks Prashant. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching Newscake.