 Tonight we are going to focus our minds and souls on Palestine. I am privileged and very, very, very happy to be presenting to you Omar Bargoudi. Omar Bargoudi is one of the initiators of the BDS movement. He has been awarded jointly the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award. He is an activist, an intellectual. Omar, let me ask you, can you share with our audience a brief history of BDS? Sure. BDS was launched in 2005 by the absolute majority of Palestinian society in historic Palestine as well as in exile. So it's a consensus movement. The coalition of political parties, all trade unions, women's unions, youth, academics, farmers, artists, everyone has participated in this movement since it was launched in 2005. But it wasn't something that came out of the blue. It has very deep roots in Palestinian nonviolent popular resistance that goes back to the 1920s against British imperialism, British colonization of Palestine, and later Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. Boycott has always been used by Palestinians as a key form of popular resistance. But it's also very inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement and by the civil rights movement in the United States, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and so on. Still till today, Black Lives Matter and the movement for Black Lives in the US is a key inspiration for our work. So BDS calls for three basic rights, ending the occupation of 1967, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ending the system of racial domination and discrimination, which is apartheid, and the right of return for refugees. Basic Palestinian rights under international law. The movement is intersectional. It sees that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is interconnected with progressive struggles across the world. It's not isolated from them. We cannot liberate the Palestinians by ourselves. We've got to connect with progressive movements worldwide, first on principle and second, pragmatically, because we cannot win against a very unified, far-right, xenophobic right, financial right that's growing around the world. Without unity, there's no way to fight as progressives. There's no way to win against the very vicious capitalism, imperialism, and its very militarized manifestation today. A very important part of BDS is that we're anti-racist, as I mentioned earlier. We oppose all forms of racism. So as you mentioned, that we would stand with any Jewish person facing persecution, absolutely. We would support that, and we would stand against any attack on a person because he or she is Jewish. We absolutely categorically oppose anti-Semitism because we never accept that Israel equals all Jews. In fact, that equation is anti-Semitic. Making all Jewish persons equal Israel means there's no Jewish diversity. That's a very anti-Semitic premise, and that's Israel's premise. That's the Zionist movement's premise that all Jews equal Israel. Israel speaks for all Jews, so that's a very anti-Semitic formula. Since its launch in 2005, BDS has achieved quite a lot in the academic sphere, cultural, economic, financial, sports, and so on. Rather than spend a lot of time, I'll just give very few examples. Some of the biggest companies in the world, Veolia, the French company, was kicked out of its Israeli business in 2015. We managed the BDS movement after a seven-year campaign that cost Veolia over 20 billion, with a B, 20 billion dollars over a seven-year period. It lost contracts in Sweden, the UK, Ireland, the US, Kuwait, and across the world. Ultimately, shareholders of Veolia decided, enough, let's pull out of those Israeli projects that violate international law, it's not worth it. They pulled out. After Veolia, several companies pulled out of the Israeli market because of BDS campaigning against them. That's one aspect. Another aspect is major sovereign funds, pension funds, like the Norwegian pension fund a few days ago, the Norwegian pension fund, the biggest sovereign fund in the world with 1.3 trillion dollars, divested from two Israeli companies because of their involvement in the occupation and settlement business and work rights. The United Nations has issued a database of companies that are involved in the settlement industry and increasingly sovereign funds in New Zealand, in the Netherlands, in Norway, and major churches in the United States are divesting from some of those companies. Some companies are not on the UN list, but are complicit, like HP, Hewlett Packard, AXA, CAF, and we're going after them. Going after them meaning we're pressuring city councils to exclude them from tenders, we're pushing people investment funds to exclude them from investments, and so on and so forth. In parallel with that, we do a lot of work on academic sphere, cultural sphere, but to explain, though we are inspired by the South African boycott, there's a huge difference, Yannis. In the South African boycott, which I was part of when I went to school in the United States, we boycotted everyone and everything South African, as you would remember. That's what the ANC called on us to do. We follow the lead of the oppressed. In the Palestinian-led BDS movement, we don't call for a boycott of Israeli leads. We call for a boycott of institutions that are complicit in Israel's violations. We don't target Israeli leads, we don't target identity, we target complicity, and that's a very, very important difference. We have many Israeli partners, Jewish Israeli partners in the BDS movement. Boycotts from within is a group within Israeli society that calls for BDS, not to mention the many, many Jewish partners around the world, the biggest of them being Jewish voice for peace in the United States, the fastest growing progressive Jewish organization in the world, and we're very proud of that. So we work in the Arab world, in the global South, across the world with many partners, especially the largest trade unions, and just to end this point, just to give the Greek audience and European audience an example, maybe it will make some Europeans more modest. The biggest farmers union in India with 16 million members has endorsed BDS, the largest progressive women's coalition in India with 10 million members endorsed BDS, and the largest student union in India with 4 million members endorsed BDS. Just think of those numbers. Quite impressive. By the way, you reminded me when you said that not all Israelis are complicit in the Israeli state policies. You reminded me of something one of my heroes said, about the Nazis. He said, as long as one German resisting the Nazis died in Auschwitz, she does not consider the Germans to be responsible for Auschwitz. And I think that is the essence, the essence of separating the struggle against state policies from the need for solidarity with every people, including the people, in whose name the appalling policies are being exercised.