As the number of deaths from Israel’s carnage in Gaza mounts, more and more people in Canada are being moved to take action. Of course, the question quickly becomes: ‘What can I do?’ Among the countless petitions, creative actions, protests, media alerts, letter writing campaigns, public statements and fundraising drives, how can we make the biggest collective impact on Israeli policies as people living in Canada? How can we build a movement that respects all of our different experiences, backgrounds, perspectives and understandings and at the same time effectively responds to Palestinian calls for solidarity?
Each contribution to stop the killing immediately helps, but as Naomi Klein has recently pointed out in The Nation magazine, there’s a way of focusing our energies on a campaign that comes directly from Palestine and that directly addresses Israel’s ability to kill with impunity. The fact is that Palestinian students, workers, women’s organizations, doctors, professors, teachers, refugees, environmentalists, peasant’s groups, and others have already told us what they want us to do: launch boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against any aspect of Israel’s apartheid system.
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The New Dark Age 