BDS co-founder criticises UK settlement trade ban as 'performative' and ineffective

Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to pressure Israel over its occupation of Palestinian land, has criticised the new restrictions introduced by the UK on settlement trade as "performative". "The UK is going after a crime while continuing to be complicit with the serial criminal," he said in a statement. "Aside from its shameless, multi-faceted complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the UK has an unequivocal obligation, arising from the ICJ Advisory Opinion of July 2024, to end all military, intelligence, trade, academic and other relations with Israel that enable its regime of illegal occupation and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem. Insisting on letting ‘humanitarian aid’ into Gaza does not begin to end UK complicity. "Israel has completely and admittedly subsumed the occupation’s economy into its own, making any differentiation between the two nearly impossible, so there is no obligation for any state to differentiate either, even if all a state wants to do is end its complicity just in Israel’s illegal settlements.”