“Perhaps most significantly, BDS has challenged the two-state consensus of the international community. In so doing it has upset the entire industry of Middle East peace process nonprofit organisations, diplomatic missions and think tanks by undermining their central premise: that the conflict can be resolved simply by ending Israel’s occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, leaving the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and refugees unaddressed.”

“For many diaspora Jews, BDS has become a symbol of evil and repository of dread, a nefarious force transforming the Israel-Palestine debate from a negotiation over the end of the occupation and the division of territory into an argument about the conflict’s older and deeper roots: the original displacement of most of the Palestinians, and, on the ruins of their conquered villages, the establishment of a Jewish state. The emergence of the BDS movement has revived old questions about the legitimacy of Zionism, how to justify the privileging of Jewish over non-Jewish rights, and why refugees can return to their homes in other conflicts but not in this one. Above all, it has underscored an awkward issue that cannot be indefinitely neglected: whether Israel, even if it were to cease its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, can be both a democracy and a Jewish state.

“In the Old City of Bethlehem, down an arched pathway near the souk and Manger Square, there stands a centuries-old limestone building that now serves as the headquarters of Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian organisation devoted to nonviolent resistance to Israeli rule. Sami Awad, the non-profit’s founder, has an office on the top floor; lining his shelves are books by leading theorists and practitioners of protest and civil disobedience: Gene Sharp, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr, all of whom figure prominently in his teaching, writing and even casual speech.”

“Awad meets often with delegations of Israeli and American Jews; unlike many Palestinian activists, he does not shy from discussing the Jewish connection to this land: “I can deny it till kingdom come. But it’s very deep and very emotional.” At the same time, he speaks candidly of occupation and racism, and he insists that Israel will not give Palestinians freedom unless forced to. “No oppressor group ever decides on their own just to be morally correct and change their behaviour,” he told me. “Something needs to happen: activism, resistance, boycott.”

“Jews and Arabs have been boycotting one another since the early days of Zionism. In the decades before Israel’s founding, the mainstream Zionist movement waged campaigns to boycott Arab workers, reject Arab produce, exclude Arabs from Jewish-only residential communities and forbid Arab purchase of Jewish-owned land. The fifth Palestine Arab Congress called for a boycott of Jewish goods in 1922. After Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Palestinian lawyers boycotted Israeli courts, and teachers went on strike under the slogan, “no education under occupation”. Israel responded to these and other acts of civil disobedience with arrests, fines, travel restrictions, shop closures, curfews and deportations of teachers, lawyers, mayors and university presidents.”

“Sami’s uncle, Mubarak Awad, was a pioneer of Palestinian nonviolent resistance in the 1980s: Mubarak encouraged Palestinians to send back bills written solely in Hebrew, to refuse court summonses and to fly the Palestinian flag, which was cause for arrest. Inspired by Gandhi’s boycott of British cloth, he urged the replacement of Israeli products with Palestinian ones.”

But it wasn’t until the first intifada, the popular uprising against occupation that began in 1987, that the programme Mubarak and others advocated found its chance for full expression. Tactics he had championed in small classrooms and academic journals were now put into widespread use by a popular movement backed by major political parties: consumers boycotted Israeli goods and services, labourers in Israeli industries refused to work, shops closed down in unison, customers withdrew funds from Israeli banks, residents refused to pay taxes and most of the Palestinian tax collectors and police resigned. The Bank of Israel reported that the Palestinian boycott had cost Israel $650m ($1.4bn today) during the first year of the uprising alone. Mubarak was charged with “fomenting a rebellion against the state”; like dozens of others, he was deported by Israel during the first year of the intifada.”

“Sami Awad was sent by his parents to Kansas in order to continue his studies. When he returned to Bethlehem in 1996, it had been transformed by the Oslo peace process. Tens of thousands of PLO officials and fighters had moved from exile in the Arab world to the West Bank and Gaza, and were now functionaries in the newly established Palestinian administration. A culture of resistance had been replaced by one of coexistence. A peace industry now flourished, as foreign funds flowed in to finance dialogue groups, NGOs and people-to-people initiatives. Awad, like most Palestinians, was optimistic that peace was on the horizon.”

“Within 2 years, his optimism faded. The nascent Palestinian administration established following the 1993 Oslo accord seemed less a burgeoning democracy that would lead to an independent country in the West Bank and Gaza than a growing police state. He heard no end of talk of peace and coexistence, but what he saw on the ground was increased segregation and limitations on his freedom. The Palestinian autonomous areas in the West Bank were small, disconnected islands, 165 of them, each surrounded by a sea of territory under Israeli control. Within that sea – the 60% of the West Bank that is off limits to the Palestinian government – Israel confiscated land for settlement, demolished Palestinian buildings and provided financial incentives for the settler population to grow. If Oslo was the road to a two-state solution, Awad was beginning to wonder if the destination was one he wanted to reach.”

“When the second intifada erupted, in September 2000, with Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli invasions and missile attacks, the dialogue and peacemaking activities of groups such as Holy Land Trust came to a halt. For Awad, the focus was now on nonviolent resistance, which was then neither popular nor simple. It was the bloodiest period of Israeli-Palestinian fighting since the 1948 war. More than 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed. The militarisation of the intifada had made it dangerous to confront Israel in any manner, including peacefully.”

“Yet Awad and other activists still managed to carve out a small space for nonviolent resistance. He demonstrated against land confiscation in the West Bank and, after 2002, the building of what Israelis refer to as a security fence and Palestinians came to call the apartheid wall. The barrier – a mix of eight-metre-high concrete slabs, fences and barbed wire – cut through the West Bank and Jerusalem, dividing Palestinians from one another and villagers from their land. The barrier effectively annexed nearly 10% of the West Bank to Israel. In occupied East Jerusalem, up to a third of the Palestinian residents were walled off from their schools, health clinics and workplaces. Dense crowds of Jerusalemites and West Bankers could be seen at 4 and 5am, packed like cattle as they inched through caged checkpoints to get to the other side of the wall.”