 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. For over a decade now, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement has been leading the campaign against Israel's policies of apartheid and brutality against the people of Palestine. The BDS movement has specifically focused on institutions, both commercial and non-commercial, which have ties with Israel, and pressurized them to cut those ties. There has been a special focus on organizations which maintain links with Israel's military as well as the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Today, we are joined by Imen Habib of the BDS movement of France. Hello, Imen. Hello. Welcome. Imen, could you first talk a bit about the BDS movement in France itself? Because in every country, there are some specific characteristics the movement has and specific strategies the movement follows. So how do you see the movement in France and what are its key methodologies of organizing? So the movement in France, the BDS campaign, has been launched in 2009 after the Cast League massacre in Gaza. We think it was important to start a real BDS and coordinated BDS campaign in France. So we have different targets and we are, of course, in coordination with the Palestinian campaign, BDS campaign, and we have several targets since several years. And this year, we have, of course, different targets like AXA, which is the main insurance French company. And they are involved on LB system, which is the biggest arm industry. And they have also investment on five Israeli banks. And we are asking them to respect international law. So we have the AXA campaign and we have also a campaign, a cultural campaign, because Israel recognized to use culture to whitewash apartheid. And so it's a very important campaign for us because Israel is very sensitive to the image. And we think it's important to say, no, you cannot go to Israel to produce yourself into like a normal situation, it's a normal situation. So we try to explain this by letter, by contact with French artists. And we had last year the French-Israel season, which is cultural French-Israel season. It was a season of propaganda between the French government and the Israeli government. And we have, and it was a failure for Israel propaganda because it was not a success in terms of people who was not interested. And we, in a lot of cities, we disrupted events because we refuse the normalization with Israel apartheid. So it's a kind of way that we do in France to denounce this apartheid. And what has been the response generally as far as the campaign goes in France, as in how have the people responded to the campaign? So the citizens are very sensitive when we protest and when we organize, when we explain why we are boycotting Israeli apartheid. The most of the people understand the situation and understand why we are campaigning on the boycott today. On the artist, it depends, there is some people, we have some artists in France say they want to dialogue. But we are saying to them, when you go to Israel, to play in Israel, you are not dialling, you are whitewashing apartheid. And so some artists respond that, some other artist doesn't understand, and you have also artists who are sensitive, who don't think about that before. But when you explain them the situation, they are ready to heard about the campaign. So we have a lot of work to do, and it's very useful to do this work. And what about the state? Has there been any active attempts by the state to prevent any of these campaigns? In France, since 2009 and 2010, we have been confronted to the repression, they tried to forbid the BDS campaign, they tried to instrumentalize the law to attack us. So they say BDS, and they still say BDS is illegal, but it's not true. We always explain that, because a lot of people, when they think that the BDS campaign is not legal in France, and it's not true. So they are targeting, the French government is targeting the BDS campaign, but we are still here, and we are still doing the campaign, and we are determined to fight because it's an attack also more globally than BDS, but on the freedom of speech. On all the social movements, it's not only BDS, and it's important to be here and to defend the freedom of speech, the solidarity with Palestinians, but also our main freedom of speech. Also could you talk about some of the campaigns, like for instance against HSBC and Violia for that matter, or even the Eurovision campaign for that matter, which has got quite a bit of international problems. Yeah, there was a successful HSBC campaign in Great Britain, and we try to, we will try to inspire ourselves from this campaign, because for the AXA campaign it's very similar. It's also a bank, and it was successful because HSBC declared that they will remove their investment on LBC, which is a criminal company, and it's great news, so it's a news from 2019, so it's very recent, and it's inspiring, and we hope to have the same results for the AXA campaign. Yeah. Thank you. That's all we have time for today, keep watching People's Dispatch.