1. Origins of a movement

Boycotts as an act of resistance to Zionism began as early as 1908.Footnote ⁴ In 1936, during the Arab revolts, Palestinians resorted to economic boycott, general strikes, and noncooperation against the British. After 1948, the Arab states enforced a boycott and policies preventing normalization with the Israeli state,Footnote ⁵ and this had significant impact until the Oslo Peace Process, beginning in 1994, weakened boycotts and promoted normalization politics.Footnote ⁶ Israelis also faced an Asian sports boycott in football in the 1970s, with teams and players refusing to play with the Israeli football team.Footnote ⁷ During the first Intifada in the late 1980s, Palestinians again used boycotts and general strikes effectively.Footnote ⁸ But it was not until the BDS National Committee (BNC) was established in 2007 that the notion of a sustained global movement advocating for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions took off and captured the hearts of the international solidarity movement. It turned boycotts against the Israeli state into a tool of resistance used worldwide, and not just by Palestinians or Arabs, and offered people a blueprint for how to resist.

The BDS movement began with the launching of the Palestinian campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2004. It was 10 years after the fall of Apartheid South Africa, and 10 years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, which further entrenched the occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including Jerusalem. One year later, in 2005, an overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society—170 organizations including refugee organizations, women and labor unions, and all the influential political parties—called for an all-encompassing boycott (economic, military, sports, etc.) of the Israeli state and its institutions,Footnote ⁹ and two years later, the BDS National Committee (BNC) was officially born from the signatories as a Palestinian coordinating body for BDS campaigns worldwide. The call was inspired by the boycott of Apartheid South Africa, launched in 1959. The movement was also built in the wake of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that the wall being built in the West Bank was illegal,Footnote ¹⁰ and with the knowledge that after decades of inaction from world governments, it was time for international civil society to take matters into its own hands.

Emerging from the throes of Oslo, the BDS call sought, on one hand, to deflect the question of statehood at a time when everyone, in and out of Palestine, was caught up in this question, and, on the other hand, to provide a timeless blueprint for how to strategically use the contemporary international system and rights-based order toward the ends of liberation. The movement, guided by the BNC, established itself on a simple but radical idea that human rights laws could be liberatory. This was against the tide of the discourse, which was being deployed in Palestine in a way that was nonthreatening and depoliticized, going after individual cases of violations without a systematic and structural critique of settler colonialism.Footnote ¹¹ I will return to this distinction between law and discourse below, and which I learned from Mazin.

The BDS call was crafted around three demands that Palestinians were seeking, whether one encountered Palestinians in New York, Singapore, Gaza, Jenin, or Haifa. The demands were simple, clear, memorable, and meaningful, and above all, they were each embedded in an international law. The first was “ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the wall,” which corresponded to the UN recognition that Palestinians had the right to live free of occupation and colonization, as stated in the 1960 UN “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” Second, was “respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194,” and third was “recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality,”Footnote ¹² which was situated in the basic premise of equality in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

In its infancy, there were many debates around these demands. Some found the right of return was against the two-state solution and would prevent the movement from growing. Others argued that Palestinian citizens of Israel were equal and just suffered casual inequalities present in all countries. In the other direction, some Palestinians felt the focus on the 1967 occupation did not consider the full historic crimes and what took place in 1948. The position of the movement, however, was that these demands together guaranteed the full rights of Palestinians, were a non-negotiable principled position, and statehood was beside the point: “Give us all our rights and we don’t care how many states you do it in,” advocates of the movement would declare. Ali Abunimah, a proponent of the one state solution,Footnote ¹³ even argued against detractors, like Norman Finkelstein, and showed how the three demands could technically be met within a two-state framework.Footnote ¹⁴ It was his way to reaffirm the point that statehood was not the issue.

Academic boycott was and continues to be a pillar in this global movement. It faces extreme obstacles because US–European society, out of anti-Arab sentiment or perhaps economic–security–imperial interests, puts more emphasis on Israeli academic freedom than the right of Palestinians to life. PACBI, from the start, anticipating the backlash, ensured a principled stance by calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions rather than a blanket boycott of all Israeli scholars.Footnote ¹⁵ Still, this did not silence critics. Much energy was and continues to be spent making the case for the academic boycott.Footnote ¹⁶ It is clear today, however, that the strength of the argument was never the issue. It is simply that global Zionism is going to protect itself at all costs, even if it means sending death squads into Gaza to commit genocide.

Thus, the exponential growth of the movement in 2021, with around 350 academic departments, programs, unions and associations, and 24,000 scholars backing the BDS movement’s demands, was met with intransigence and resistance from those in power and has culminated in extreme repression of faculty and students today. “They only argued with those advocating for boycott because it wasn’t liberal to fire, imprison, or shoot them. But when arguments failed, that’s exactly what they resorted to,” Mazin stated this once, and I dared not ask if the shooting was fact or exaggeration.

The academic boycott has long been argued against on grounds that it does not make a difference and is largely symbolic. But this is another ruse. Every scholar knows that the symbolic always has material implications. The reputation of a university, for example, can lessen enrollment and funding and impact the work and collaborations of scholars. More importantly, critics argue that Israeli universities are liberal bastions from where opposition to Israeli state policies come. However, Maya Wind has shown this not to be the case, and I discovered in the future that her research opens the way for much of the dismantling of Israeli academia’s reputation in the West.Footnote ¹⁷ I asked Mazin once about Wind after spotting her book in his library, and thinking about how texts like hers and others, which are currently used to expose Israeli academia and mobilize masses of people, had become part of a historical record of a bygone era, like Ottoman time is to our present.

“Maya exposed how Israeli academic institutions were entrenched in the Israeli system of apartheid, settler colonialism, occupation, and genocide, and how they were founded as land grab institutions,” Mazin explained—I found it curious that he used her first name and discovered later in the inscription of his book that she was an old close friend of his family. “She wrote about how Haifa University, for example, was built in a region with the most Palestinians as this would increase the Jewish population and alter the demographics. Ben Gurion university was built in the sparsely populated Nakab with the same purpose. And post-1967, with the occupation of the West Bank, Hebrew University expanded into occupied territory and Ariel College was built on newly stolen land like the first universities.”

“I think even early boycotters didn’t know the full extent and just understood it given what they knew of Zionism,” I said.

Mazin made it clear that none of this really needed excavating. That if it were any other enemy, the world would have been fine with boycotting them with much less evidence. “Afterall,” he said, “the Israelis never needed proof to go after their victims or accuse them of fake claims. We, however, were required to cite every claim and have a higher level of proof to make any accusation against our oppressor.”

“It’s a condition of the oppressed to have to prove their status as oppressed,” I offered.

“Seems so. And some things will never change,” he said, lowering his eyes, pressing his lips. I felt a tinge of somberness that sent me into deep thought, a realization that the future would not be the clean break I wished it to be.

“Maya’s work wasn’t the first time universities were exposed, but it was possibly the most comprehensive, and it was given a boost by the BNC and by those of us in the League of the Levant,” Mazin continued. “She also exposed military–university collaborations. Universities sustained the largest weapons producers like Rafael and Elbit systems. They don’t exist anymore, but you should look them up. The universities also had tailored programs to train soldiers and give benefits to those who served in the army—like access to dorms, scholarships, course credit for reserve service, and other benefits. They provided the legal framework for the entire genocide and for bombing cities, legally. The Law and National Security Program offered a defense of Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip in 2021, for instance. And Haifa University, while always presenting itself as a bastion of tolerance, played host to three Israeli military colleges and provided equipment and stipends to genocidal soldiers.Footnote ¹⁸ Later, as you probably know, Tel Aviv University developed the death chambers that experimented with cryogenics on prisoners.”

My eyes shot up, but I immediately looked away.

“Academia and culture,” he went on without noticing, “were the pillars that made the Israeli state appear liberal, open-minded, tolerant, and thus, familiar to US–European society. It basically allowed the state to present itself as a white state. But underpinning this liberalism and academia and openness was ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.”

I told Mazin that this contradiction is precisely what constitutes the essence of the white state and western liberal institutions, so there was really no daylight between Israel and them. Mazin agreed. He suggested that this was even more reason for why “the strongest argument didn’t matter.” It was because “underpinning it all was the idea that Israel was US–Europe’s image in the Levant. It’s outpost. It’s outcome from its newest crusade.”

I continued to nag him, “so how did BDS bring the system down, ya Mazin?”

“Isbur, el-iyam jaye. B’ilak.”Footnote ¹⁹ He smiled, knowing I was overstating the question.

2. The BDS movement post genocide

Mazin painted a bleak picture of the time immediately after the bombs stopped falling on Gaza. Zionism emerged as an empire, he told me. Global Zionism had existed for some time, but now it flexed its muscles, spread its wings. “People began to recognize Zionism wasn’t a Jewish thing,” Mazin said one day. “It was held together by Western power, white Christian Zionist power, which predated Jewish Zionism. I think realizing this helped people understand the hydra that is white power, which no one was safe from. Palestine was the paradigm for what was awaiting everyone.”

He described to me what I could already observe in our present, that Israel was a colonial outpost for the West in the Majority World, at the crossroads between Asia, Africa, and Europe. It was also a tool in a Christian Zionist movement. Christian Zionism had acquired new currency in the 20th century, with Israel’s founding and the emergence of Jewish Zionism. Global Zionism rose from this bizarre alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionists. Jewish Zionism allowed US–Europeans to mask their Jewish hatred as love. Now, it appeared as though Israel was a new empire. “After all,” Mazin said, “the Israeli state had occupied large tracts of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.”

My conversations with Mazin always took us back to the years shortly after the genocide and before the collapse of the United States. There was mass anger and Israelis increasingly felt unsafe wherever they went in the world—this much I knew. What I learned from him, and what transpires in the future, is a marked escalation. In Thailand, for example, a group of Israeli tourists were found dead. In Zanzibar, Israelis were attacked at a restaurant, leaving several in critical condition. In Gudauri, Georgia, the locals stopped receiving them in their hotels. And the list went on.

“Habibi, this was a long struggle,” Mazin warned me. “People could no longer stomach the clear evil and injustice that went with impunity and passed off as God’s design.” Liberation, I would learn from him, was not without its pain and sadness and humiliation and sacrifice, sacrifice above everything else. People had to learn from the many failures and build on and intensify the many successes. And it appeared like much of the way forward lay in how the League worked to articulate the anti-state future for the land that I could see around me, and the way it managed to end the infighting and consolidate power within the global movement.

Mazin often spoke of the infighting in the global movement. At various times during my time in the future, he recounted to me different elements around the beginning of the end of Zionism that I will discuss below. His narrative of what happened was laced with the infighting and some kernels of how we overcome this to grow the movement. It is to this that I turn next and to the transformations in protest globally and in the Arab world. I offer these as developments that I found most useful because, for me, they resolved impasses of the present.

From Mazin, I learned that the League of the Levant was instrumental in transitioning the movement toward an early vision of liberation. It outlined and elaborated a vision of what it means for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea,” and countered Zionist discourse and myth, and then sought to educate people on its vision, both in the Levant and in the rest of the world, especially the west where support for Zionism was greatest. The League created a structure for discussion and debate to transform public opinion, especially around ideas of nationhood, governance beyond statehood, and the notion of property rights in the Levant. But it was not easy.

“There was a lot of infighting in the movement,” Mazin volunteered on one of our first evenings together, as we sat at the newly opened T-Marbouta cafe near the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem.

“Oh!” I said, eyes widened, trying to feign surprise.

“There is always infighting, but this was debilitating to the growth of the movement. It’s hard to identify a clear fault line, but in the US and Europe, there were those trying to grow the movement and those attacking Palestinians and their allies for not being solid enough on Palestine. There were those who were focused on popular resistance and those who wanted to make the case for armed resistance and normalize it. People were raising slogans of support for armed resistance or putting conditions on people—you could only be truly anti-Zionist, for example, if you openly supported armed resistance. Instead of directing full attention to fighting Zionists, people were weighed down by these debates that often turned into attacks against allies.”

I wondered out loud if this was sabotage, forms of infiltration into the movement. Mazin agreed, but with some discomfort and skepticism. He explained that the problem with sabotage was that one could never be sure, never have a smoking gun. “The more you call it out,” he said, “the larger the infighting gets. The enemy banks on suspicion and doubt to make you weaker.”

It made sense, and I could already see it in present debates.

Then he introduced me to a new idea that began to circulate after the US regime began heavily repressing Palestine speech and activism on and off university campuses, and detaining and deporting students. “It was called strategic radicalism,” Mazin said excitedly. “It originally came from PACBI in the form of a statement.Footnote ²⁰ I shouldn’t say it was new. It was a reframing of the movement’s already held operational principles. Strategic radicalism called for the movement to adopt and maintain principled demands for liberation but to pursue them with a deeply strategic posture in mind.”

The idea was not popular in my time yet, so it was helpful to understand from Mazin how it came to be understood and operationalized years later. I learned that strategic radicalism called for being principled in our demands and postures but to keep some cards closer to one’s chest; for being uncompromising with our rights but not adopting actions that harm activists without reasonable benefit or supportive infrastructure. It meant understanding one’s role within a particular context (whether in different countries or institutions). It meant knowing how to make the case for armed resistance as a sanctioned right in international law versus implicating oneself in that armed resistance through various slogans. Most importantly, it meant pursuing goals in a gradual and sustained way, keeping context sensitivity in mind, and balancing the long-term goals of liberation with the short-term need to engage in politics—its maneuvers, tactics, negotiations, compromises, and confrontations. “Strategic radicalism” was a term that built on the philosophies of other resistance movements that called for an accumulation of wins or gains rather than expecting one decisive victory. PACBI called it “incremental gains” that the movement should protect with “patience and ethical commitment.”Footnote ²¹

I learned from Mazin that the strength of the idea was that strategic radicalism allowed movements flexibility and opened spaces for critique that did not descend into accusations of liberalism, selling-out, or worse, treason.

“That seems like an obvious approach,” I told him after he explained the concept to me, perhaps for a third time. We were on the train from Jerusalem to Beirut, and I remember we were passing near the newly rebuilt village of al-Birwa.

“Maybe now. But as you know, you can’t propose an idea and simply expect it to stick. And this was the case initially with ‘strategic radicalism.’ We all can’t help it, in the face of oppression, to want to burn down the system, but patience and gradual building of a movement is the only way to bring about the revolution.” Mazin taught me that it is not the speed of change that makes a revolution. Rather, revolution is made through a commitment to the principles and demands that underpin the revolutionary process.

“As the repression grew, and PACBI used the term more often, ‘strategic radicalism’ began to circulate amongst activists and was adopted by the League,” Mazin continued. “People started to understand the BDS movement was not calling for some sort of liberal compromise. It was operating on the same principles it always had, which was to hold onto the radical demand of liberating all Palestine through a reliance on human rights law and making it work for Palestine.”

“Human rights?” I cringed. “Wasn’t that a liberal discourse?”

Mazin cautioned me to slow down. He acknowledged that in the early 21st century, a liberal human rights discourse emerged out of the law.Footnote ²² But he stressed how the BDS movement was not framed within that discourse, it only used the law itself but ensured it was principally political. The liberal discourse was not inevitable; it was an outcome of political work in centers of power at the time. “Human rights and the law could be used for imperial expansion or for Palestinian liberation,” he instructed, “a movement needed to know how to unlock the power within the law and carve a counter discourse. And we proved, through the formation of the land of AlSham, that the law could also be rewritten, not to erase human rights law, but to transform it and make it apply in a non-state international framework that was forced on the world through AlSham’s rejection of the modern state form. Ironically, as the Zionists and the USians threw out the established law in their pursuit of power and expansion, the law became more transformative and a point of solidarity amongst various oppressed groups in the world.”

Mazin taught me that the League’s rise eventually pushed other peoples and countries to establish a counter global force against the Western chokehold on the United Nations. The Majority World, as Mazin and others I met called it, eventually grew teeth to counter Western power—and not just to fight the rise of fascism but also Western liberalism that was built on the graves of the wretched of the Earth. I also learned how Gaza resisted, again and again, to ignite the heart of the world in its defense, and about the uprisings globally that were mostly led by movements in solidarity with Palestine and later the entire Levant.

“What I want to stress for you is the gradualness, because we should not forget that,” he stressed. “I can, of course, fast forward to the waves of wars—of liberation and otherwise—that you heard of, the breakdown of the United Nations, and the rest of the collapse that brought about our liberation. But we need to study the processes that led there, the hard and slow incremental work people undertook. This is what I’m homing in on and where the early years after the genocide were so important. What I’m trying to stress is how a simple idea gathered steam to counter the moral purities that often cause the left to fracture and be its own worst enemy. How an idea and its derivatives consolidated our power and allowed the League to be effective globally where other political parties failed.”

Strategic radicalism played a role here. Mazin went on about how this idea brought groups together globally. In the West in particular, where dismantling Western power was crucial, those who were invested in slogans walked themselves back and reassessed their effectiveness while remaining committed to their politics. They began to think in terms of patient, effective, sustained, and ethical action. This grew the movement and made it more intersectional and less isolated.Footnote ²³ It allowed majorities, who were naturally risk averse, to join the movement. And once they were in and invested, people became bigger risk takers and fed off each other’s energies to conduct evermore direct action and civil disobedience. It also gave some people the space to use more radical means without harming others in the larger movement. And more importantly, it gave the League and allies a clear way to engage each other even when they did not agree 100 percent.

I could not help but feel impressed as I gathered all this from Mazin. I came from a time when the divisions in the solidarity movement were as he described them. Groups today are fixated on the question of violence—to use armed or nonarmed resistance. It was so refreshing to know that we will overcome this binary. It is one thing to make the analytical case as a writer, and to explain the legitimacy of armed resistance to doubters; it is another to make statements of support as a political group, especially when said political group is not itself partaking in the armed resistance. The BNC’s early positions after the October 7 events that set the Gaza Genocide in motion implied as much. The movement wrote about the “powerful armed reaction,” holding Israeli oppression responsible, without itself taking a position on armed resistance.Footnote ²⁴ Some groups in the West have currently not been able to make a similar distinction, and the enemy is able to exploit this and will continue to do so into the near future.

At one point, I recognized we passed Naqoura on our way to Beirut, and as on a previous journey, my heart skipped when I realized there was no border. In fact, we were still in the same Governorate of the Galilee and would remain so for another 20 minutes. Mazin brought me back to his present, laughing, “People take themselves too seriously sometimes. Like if you aren’t carrying arms, and your only effective strategy is to fight nonviolently and grow people power, your only power, why would you busy yourself with declarations in support of armed resistance? It’s enough to not condemn it, and to explain why it is a legitimate right.” He became more animated and fidgety, “People’s movements can be so frustrating. I guess democratic processes come at a cost. But people in Gaza did not need this infighting as they were slaughtered.”

Mazin’s frustration with the past reminded me of people’s frustrations with the infighting in my time. These tensions emerged because people saw how other communities could legitimately use armed resistance, and they wanted the world to recognize this for Palestinians. Thus, they wanted to normalize armed struggle, but this created complications for organizing and operating in various oppressive Western contexts. Strategic radicalism allowed people to understand that they could make this argument as individuals without forcing the whole movement to adopt a position on it. In this way, groups around the world could unite in gradual, context-sensitive, sustained action, while individuals could continue to make these other important arguments around the right to armed resistance.

All this required time, and I was impatient. People suffering never have time, which makes it difficult to accept ideas of gradualness and incremental accumulation. But Mazin explained that, in fact, it was the opposite. “The people of AlSham, on the ground, understood it,” he said. “Every resistance on the ground worked within this logic. But once we united as a movement in AlSham through the League, it was much easier to assert ourselves and teach Western activists. This despite the implicit colonial relation which made them stubborn listeners.”

I understood from Mazin that the patience of strategic radicalism proved important because, ultimately, there could not be a change of values, mindsets, and ideological underpinnings to the whole project of the nation state in the Levant, there could not be a future revolutionary process, without the terribly slow and painstaking work that the BDS movement was engaged in. The slowness transformed the movement, brought in the masses, and gave rise to the League, which adopted a non-nationalist discourse and articulated the grounds for a Levantine land within an Arab non-nationalist framework. The movement, being nonstatist in nature and driven by principles of liberation and ethical decolonization, began to articulate non-nationalist ways of thinking, and activists became more emboldened to clarify the position on communal life in the Levant post liberation.

The AlSham I researched is a collective and communal place. To get there, communities needed to understand how they would live in a safe and secure world outside the confines of the nation-state. Chief among these communities, you had to convince those in power, either by fighting them through pressure or by shooting them. The global movement chose the former; change occurred under threat of the latter.

Powerful movements, Mazin told me, work bi-directionally. They set agendas, influence masses, layout principles and plans of action, but they are also influenced by interacting with masses and adapting to changed conditions and circulating discourses. Mazin explained how the League and the wider BDS movement set agendas and adapted their discourse and ways of operating. This was familiar to me as I had already observed it in the movement’s first two decades. For example, in the context of Oslo, the BDS call spoke about “genuine peace” to be legible to a broad public, while in later statements, it adopted the language of “liberation.” Similar changes could be observed from early days of relying on letter writing and reactive actions to a decade later, working on proactive campaigns and using methods influenced by the likes of the climate justice and Black Lives Matter movements.

“This was the strength of BDS. It emerged out of radical politics but recognized that building coalitions required a movement to be legible,” Mazin said once we were settled in a coffee shop in Beirut after our short journey from Jerusalem. We stayed for several days at his relative’s apartment in the Hamra neighborhood—its streets and storefronts a reminder of my present but for the quietness, as pedestrians did not have to fight cars, only to watch for passing trams.

“Building coalitions meant having to balance different forces from the left. Carving a principled path while remaining strategic and not slipping into empty sloganeering or one-off actions,” he continued.

I was still recovering from being able to travel through the Levant with ease, no checkpoints, no need to show my passport. And on top of this, I was so perplexed by how Zionism collapsed. I could not hide my obsession with wanting to get it all down on paper. It was as if there was a simple recipe I could bring back with me to the present as a roadmap.

“Let me be honest with you, habibi. Sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves.” This was Mazin’s response to my obsession. “Zionism collapsed not because the BDS movement, or the whole resistance, even beyond the League, was wrong and then did things right. There was no smoking gun act that we somehow discovered for the dismantling of Zionism. It collapsed because the pressure created wider gaps in their wall which transformed the geopolitical situation on a world scale. It collapsed because Europe and the US overextended their influence, and the Majority World fought their fascism and refused their liberalism. The buildup of pressure collapsed a good chunk of the racial capitalist system, and Zionism was one part of that. We mostly had to do more of the same while expanding our tactics to increase pressure. Of course, the League played a key role because we also had to carve out the anti-nationalist, anti-statist arguments without losing sight of the particularities of suffering within Mandate Palestine. We had to recognize that rejecting Zionism meant rejecting nationalism and colonial facts: our borders. And return to seeing and understanding the Levant as one space with many communities that have their distinctive qualities but also shared histories. And importantly, people had to undo the system of property rights which was the bedrock of Western capitalism and Zionism, and impressively, they did this gradually by introducing new forms of public and semi-private property, while also ending speculation on land prices.” Mazin paused and took a deep breath while I listened on.

“But it was always the infighting that slowed us down. That’s why I said the other day that getting people to understand the principles of strategic radicalism was key to creating a movement that could absorb difference.”

“So how were the gaps in the system created and widened?” I pressed him.

Mazin attributed much to the work of the League at the regional and international level that spread its vision of how a non-state AlSham would resolve many key issues. The League made people believe another world was possible and started to materialize the future in ways people could see and understand. He spoke about some specifics, like when the first major US university fell. He named the university, but I leave it out here to protect the movement. Mazin explained how this happened “when power was seized from the board and an anti-Zionist president was installed.”

I looked this up in the archives to get more details on events at that university. I found that three months later, its endowment was divested from companies supportive of the Zionist state. The university took a position that every Israeli on campus had to sign a waiver that they had not served in the Israeli military. That ended all collaborations with Israelis. This happened because students, faculty, and staff worked together and drew support from surrounding institutions and people locally and nationally—all working as one, going after a single large target. They campaigned to expel the board of trustees and install faculty in place.

“When this university fell,” Mazin said, “it was only a matter of time for others to follow. A path to dismantling the power of business and government in the university had been carved, and the reputational cost to the institution no longer served as an obstacle to political action. And I’d say this dismantling also transformed the university as a whole and gave rise to what we call in many places today the People’s University. It happened shortly after the collapse of the institution of the United Nations but before the rise of the new global assembly.”

“Before the Israelis tried to launch their nukes at Turkey?” I asked.

“Yes, well before,” Mazin answered, then stopped a moment to take a sip from his cooling tea with miramiya before continuing.

“It wasn’t easy, of course, and the path was paved with the blood of students. It was worse than the Vietnam era. Western governments and university administrations were all united in the early days of the Gaza Genocide, and could ignore the opinions of millions, but when a few prominent universities fell against the weight of anti-Zionist politics, global Zionists could no longer drown out the moral outrage.”

“The pressure came in different forms. Foremost was the anger that poured violently into classrooms and city streets, with rocks flying in every direction. People who didn’t want to take sides recognized that the only way was to withdraw support from Zionism—and this chorus grew. Even the racists were saying, ‘level the playing field, let the Jews and Arabs fight it out without our support!’”

I initially understood this as the masses going out of control, but this was my state-centric view of the world. Indeed, if to be out of control meant the government could no longer control the people, then this was true. But these were not angry uncontrolled hordes. This was a mass movement that had used its anger in a rational, productive, phased approach. Before resorting to rock throwing, I learned that there were many pressure points that the BDS movement created, with the intent of getting the university on its side. In fact, dismantling it was an unintended consequence and a factor of the system’s own intransigence to drop Zionism.

Before all this, in the US academy, for example, Mazin spoke to me about how scholars managed to get the AAUP to censure universities that adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and cracked down on Palestine speech.Footnote ²⁵ Activism around Palestine became a bellwether for other causes, and everyone was in danger of their rights being curtailed if the US empire was able to suppress Palestine speech. Scholars began lobbying the AAUP to censure major universities as a start. This sent a signal to other schools that succumbing to US government and Zionist demands around suppression of speech would have severe consequences. Unsurprisingly, the universities did not listen.

After the censure, several calls were made to boycott censured universities, and the AAUP censure gave legitimacy to these boycotts. The censure opened more people’s eyes and brought the issue to mainstream circles within academia, especially in STEM fields, and made it less risky to stand up to the repression.

Along with this, I learned that two key things happened. First, there was a concerted battle to counter the IHRA definition by framing anti-Zionism—the rejection of a Jewish state and a Jewish people circumscribed in a national territory—as a human right and lobbying world governments to adopt this stance. It built on UN resolution 3379 from 1975 that defined Zionism as racism, which Zionists had successfully campaigned to revoke in 1991.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, even as the United Nations system was showing cracks, activists were still using it to pressure governments.

Second, BDS campaigns took on more “confrontational positions.” This came from the people, not the leadership. But there was a kind of dance. People wanted to be accurate and began to rely on the leadership for more targets, while the leadership “protected the new confrontational methods.” Those were Mazin’s words, and I wondered if by “confrontation,” he meant the rock throwing. So I asked him to elaborate.

“No, I don’t mean the rock throwing,” he said. “I mean confrontations before that period, before the people realized they were strong enough to dismantle the university across the globe, and before they understood that people, united, in coordinated action and ideological consistency, could overpower the police, even with their fancy artificial intelligence surveillance tools, and even with their ridiculous robocops and robodogs. I mean, on the ground, academic boycott was no longer confined to the university space. People realized the importance of Israeli academia to the Zionist project, so when the League drew attention to a complicit academic event, people would take to the streets. A banal physics or sociology panel involving an Israeli war criminal academic drew protest from 3000 people outside Fordham University in New York; 5000 people showed up to the University of Denver protesting a workshop with Israeli sponsorship; people threw red paint at the offices of Wiley in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the American Anthropological Association in Arlington, Virginia, for their flagship journal publishing an Israeli who served in the military.”

“That’s impressive! People went after individuals too?”

“Mostly those shown to be complicit in war crimes. Many people also refused to normalize with Israeli individuals working in Israeli institutions unless they proved to be anti-Zionist. This forced Israeli academics to rethink their politics.”

“And they did?”

“Some, yes. But remember, between the Gaza Genocide and liberation, the Israeli state could not control emigration, and by the time of liberation ten years ago, the Jewish population had shrunk from seven to around two million. Many academics left. But even for the few that stayed, thinking they could fight Zionism from within, the movement accepted them, hard as it was to stomach sometimes. But there was precedent. The world had accepted Germans even when many of them had been Nazis during WWII.”

He was right, I thought, but I was still stuck on how people went after complicit individuals and probed this further.

“There was a flow of anti-normalization politics to the West that was a big factor in how people dealt with individuals,” Mazin informed me. “This also surprised early BDS activists. They had not expected the West, its unions, churches, and other organizations and groups to adopt versions of this. The genocide radicalized people and the League played a strong role in consolidating sentiments. But there were clear rules. It wasn’t any Israeli. They must have served in the army, made pro-Israeli statements, or not have been supportive of the right of return for Palestinians. Later, in the Arab world, perhaps finally ashamed of their own shame, people began to confront again, taking a page from comrades in the Americas and Europe, and finally revolting against Zionism. And there was no collapse without the rise of people in the Arab world. That might be the key if you’re looking for one.”

“I am!” I shot out with a beaming smile. My interest was piqued.

“But it wasn’t easy. Arab spirits were mangled in the genocide. But with the rise of the League, acts of sabotage against US companies emerged, then against Arab normalizing businesses, and this slowly grew into ever bigger protests against the structure of Arab normalization that had been built.” Mazin lifted his shoulders and spoke more animatedly.

“You couldn’t imagine all the red paint thrown at storefronts. I can’t believe the regimes didn’t ban the color. At great risk to themselves, people began to throw red paint at storefronts of companies like Gap, McDonalds, and others. Maybe you heard of them in history books.”

“Yes,” I said, shocked these household names were no longer there.

“It didn’t matter if they were on a boycott list or not, it was enough they were US owned. This tarnished the brands. And it wasn’t just confined to this, but people also began targeting the assets of Arab businesspeople close to their regimes.”

Between the growth of the BDS movement abroad and the uprisings against Arab leaders in the region, there was a slow transformation of geopolitics and a dismantling of powerful institutions—gatekeepers of Zionism—that opened pathways for new thinking. The League of the Levant played a role as a global power in shaping these geopolitics through the pressure it exerted on world leaders and elite institutions from New York to Shanghai and Capetown to Moscow, and it did this partially through BDS. While protests grew and diversified in style, the League introduced new concepts around identity, private property, reparation, and restoration. Its discursive power served to ignite imaginations, dismantle structures, and transfer knowledge and power to people across the world.

3. What of the present?

Today, upon my return from travels, I see the world with confident clarity. I see how the BDS movement is crucial as one form of global resistance to Israeli settler colonialism and, by extension, to US imperial domination in the Levant. Not because it was the key to liberation. I learned that there was no single key—there are, and will be, other ways to resist, with civil disobedience and even arms, and many things will need to happen and conditions to coalesce for liberation. But BDS was significant to the pressure campaign, and arguably its true power lies in giving birth to the future League of the Levant and in its role transforming the national struggle into a transregional and international one. Mazin articulated the movement’s potential best when he said, “we needed to go after the settler mind.” It was BDS that was best positioned to do this and to make them think anew. Importantly, the struggle also required transformations of discourses that an expansion of the BDS movement could usher. I gathered from Mazin that this transformed the way we, Levantines, saw our region, and made us see it as one, beyond national consciousness and beyond the colonial borders we lived with by force of foreign and, sadly, domestic boots.Footnote ²⁷ Seeing ourselves as one community strengthened the resistance overall, made it an impenetrable force.

As I reflect on all this, on the power of the movement in the years to come, and at the way Zionists globally have lost the argument in 2026, and have resorted to unfathomable violence, whether through law or through the gun, I cannot help but think of the gap between our present and future, especially where I stand in the Arab world. The ability to breathe in the future, to walk freely, to be liberated from the anxiety of state violence, is juxtaposed against fear in the present. Fear governs us today. Fear of deportation. Fear of imprisonment. But also, more mundanely, fear of losing our comforts—our Netflix, our iPhones, our favorite brands, our money. Fear of sacrifice. Fear of imagining and materializing our imagination.

We are, in this sense, neoliberal subjects par excellence. Afraid of being called dogmatic if we adopt any sort of ideological consistency except the consistency of neoliberal ideology. Thus, I can only leave you with Mazin’s words that resonated with me when he said, “all we’ve been discussing these last weeks, ya khayii, is meaningless without one position that liberation required: confrontation. The students, the academics, the musicians, the entrepreneurs, everyone needed to learn to be confrontational. Look up Basil Araj and his concept of the muthaqaf mushtabek, the confrontational intellectual.”Footnote ²⁸

It was amazing the extent to which Mazin’s wisdoms emerged from my present now. We have all the tools. This is what the future made me realize. We just need to confront. With. No. Fear.