A group of activists in New York City spread the messages of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement during this holiday season, to remind shoppers of Israel’s ongoing war and destruction in Gaza.

In a video posted on the social media platform Instagram by the New Jersey Palestine Action channel, entitled “Tis the season to end genocide”, activists are seen hitting BDS target companies such as Starbucks, McDonald’s and Zara with stickers across neighborhoods in Manhattan.

BDS is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. The movement takes its inspiration from the boycott movement against Apartheid South Africa and seeks to pressure Israel into ending its occupation and violations by peaceful means.

Activists caught the attention of shoppers with colorful stickers and coupon codes, offering discounts and free items.

But upon scanning the QR codes, customers are confronted with images from Gaza where Israel’s war continues to kill, starve and displace Palestinians, in a war that has been going on for over a year and a half and has been called a genocide by leading human rights organizations.

Activists hoped to remind people that these brands are complicit in Israel’s continuing war on the Palestinian enclave, and called on them to boycott the brands.

Activists end the video by calling for an “arms embargo, an end to the siege of Gaza and an end to the 76 years of displacement, occupation and apartheid in Palestine”.

“Americans, particularly in big cities like New York, are extremely tunnel-versioned and consumer-driven. It can feel like screaming into the void despite hundreds of demonstrations. This was an action that was designed to bring the genocide right to their periphery where they can’t avoid it: to the complicity corporations that they refuel from daily,” New Jersey Palestine Action said about the campaign.

“Everything we do is for those in Gaza. We want the Palestinian people to know we will never forget them,” the movement added.

On 16 December, the movement posted a reel showing an autonomous group tagging 68 storefronts in Manhattan that are currently being boycotted.

They have also translated stickers into Spanish due to the amount of requests to do so. The group told Middle East Eye that they have received offers from people to translate them into other languages, such as German and French.

The group told MEE the sticker movement has travelled to major countries such as Spain, France, Germany, Canada, New Zealand and many states in the US such as California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Florida.

The activist group said they have set a deadline to receive content from those who have ordered the stickers, and expect to receive and release a mashup of footage of stickers being posted all over the world.

The movement attracted support from many grassroots organizations around the world in raising awareness about Israel’s war on Gaza and the complicit institutions.

According to reports in the past year, both Starbucks and McDonald’s have reported declines in sales and profits, and both corporations have blamed international boycotts by supporters of Palestine amid Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.

In December 2023, the fashion company Zara removed a controversial advertising campaign from the front page of its website after pro-Palestine activists called for a boycott of the retailer.

The advertisement featured mannequins that were missing limbs and statues wrapped in a white shroud. Activists said the photographs resembled images from Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Source: The Middle East Eye

A pro-Palestinian campus group at Northwestern University said the medical school scrubbed photos of Arab students, some of whom were wearing traditional headdresses, from several social media platforms.

In an Instagram post over the weekend, the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine said some of the photos taken at a school event earlier this year showed medical students wearing keffiyehs, a garment widely known to symbolize solidarity with the Palestinian people. They were deleted from Flickr, an online photo-sharing platform.

The group also said officials at the university’s Feinberg School of Medicine removed photos of Arab students from its official Instagram page. In an open letter to school administrators, the club demanded a public apology and an investigation into the incident.
“After 10 months of viewing the live-streamed genocide of their people, Palestinian medical students and their families are not allowed to celebrate their achievements in public without being targeted by their own administration,” the group wrote online.

In a statement, university spokesperson Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the photos were deleted to safeguard students from doxing. The university did not immediately clarify whether the students had been doxed or endangered because of the photos. Officials made the decision, the spokesperson said, “out of an abiding concern for the safety and well-being of the students pictured.”
“Student safety is our highest priority at Feinberg and Northwestern,” Anyaso said. “We are proud of Feinberg’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

As college campuses became hotbeds for debate over the Israel-Hamas war, many Arab and Muslim students felt increasingly unsafe. Last November, three college students of Palestinian descent were shot in Burlington, Vermont, where they had gathered for a Thanksgiving celebration. One was paralyzed from the chest down. While it is unclear whether they were targeted for their ethnicities, the mother of one of the victims said she believed they had experienced a hate crime.

So-called “doxxing trucks” bearing the names and faces of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators circled campuses in the fall at several colleges. Some schools took action to protect those students, who were being accused of antisemitism.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said it recorded the highest number of discrimination complaints in its 30-year history in 2023. Roughly one in 10 of those complaints was connected to an educational program.

Source: USA Today