In the face of the occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide and mass starvation of the Palestinian people, it can be difficult to know how we can help from the other side of the world. Palestinian civil society has laid down what we can do, in the form of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement. The premise is simple: we can use boycott and pressure tactics to make global corporations pay a price for supporting and normalising Israel’s apartheid and genocide. If our emerging leaders and young people help change attitudes, uphold international solidarity and make companies feel this pressure, then we can save Palestinian lives. The intense repression of BDS by governments, organisations and corporations is a sign of the power of this tactic.

Across the world, public opinion is resoundingly opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Across Aotearoa, ordinary people, including many students, have marched and organised to help oppose the war machine. And Otago University students, like students across the world, have opposed the genocide of the Palestinian people. In the recent referendum, 53.5% of students voted yes in support of BDS, to 31.5% no. This result is a meaningful mandate to change OUSA’s operations to align with BDS.

OUSA officials have now deemed that this decision was “uninformed” and so any commitment to BDS will be abandoned. OUSA suggest that they will instead pursue “alternative action” to support the people of Gaza. This  claim is arrogant. Palestinian civil society have joined together and asked “international civil society organisations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. Somehow, the student body who voted in the referendum are not informed enough to make the decision to support BDS, yet the OUSA exec is so well informed that they know what the people of Gaza need more than the people of Gaza do themselves. BDS is an approach devised and led by those most affected: the Palestinian people.

We should not put a price on Palestinian lives. Yet the Critic reported that “the biggest factor the Exec considered was the price tag that came with the policy – a trade-off that Clubs and Socs Rep Deborah worried students weren’t made aware of and thus were unable to make an ‘informed decision’”. The OUSA Executive believe that if the students at Otago had a clearer price tag to put on solidarity with Palestine, they would choose their own minor convenience over the lives of starving children in Gaza, even if that means directly funding companies complicit in murdering Palestinians.

And to be clear, the inconvenience is relatively minor. Sometimes Zionist talking points are used to dismiss support for BDS as unreasonable. One lie, for instance, is that BDS requires people to throw out existing goods and replace them. None of the proponents of BDS at the University of Otago, including Staff for Palestine and Otago Students for Justice in Palestine have ever made this demand. Moreover, the global BDS movement simply does not and has never made this demand. As the BDS representative for the peak national organisation Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) explicitly states: “The Palestinian BDS National Committee (and the associated grassroots movement) does not ask that individuals and organisations immediately replace non-compliant brands with BDS-compliant products. To adopt BDS means to refuse to give another dollar, wherever practical, to BDS priority targets. For example, adhering to BDS would mean that when computer technology needs to be replaced, the purchaser would pick an alternative to HP and Dell computers, so that profits from those sales are not funnelled into Israeli apartheid surveillance systems”. 

Another disingenuous claim is that alignment with BDS has to be perfect and requires minute and onerous analysis of procurement decisions and avoidance of hundreds of brands. This claim is also a fiction. BDS advises focusing narrowly on a few targets: “We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies and products for maximum impact” and the movement acknowledges that we can only do what is practical. 

Yet despite these lies that try to present the simplest requests as unreasonable demands, students around the world have been overwhelming in their support for Palestine and for BDS. Across the US, students have faced deportation, arrest and police violence as they push their institutions to adopt BDS. In Australia, they have faced arrest and expulsion. Here at Otago, students face relatively few risks. The only thing preventing students from pursuing BDS is a lack of enthusiasm from the OUSA executive and the price tag. Purchasing decisions are not “neutral”; they are actions. Currently, OUSA, on behalf of the students of Otago, wants to continue actively buying goods from companies directly complicit in war crimes. 

The genocide in Gaza is the moral horror of our time. As Omar El Akkad says “One day, everyone will have always been against this”. Do the students of the University of Otago want to go down in the historical record for complicity in genocide because of the anti-democratic cowardice of their representatives? Is ‘pizza not politics’ the slogan the students of the University of Otago want to be remembered by when it comes to their response to a livestreamed genocide? Or do they want their executive to carry forward their principled call for solidarity, and material opposition to apartheid and genocide profiteering?

Signed by Otago Staff for Palestine, Otago Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim University Students’ Association.