College and University Monitor

Solidarity with the Palestinian people retreated internationally since the early 1990s in view of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) collaboration with the US and Israel to liquidate the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle through the Oslo accords. In recent years, however, this solidarity has made a comeback with the expanding endorsement of the Palestinian campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, or BDS.

As international support of the Palestinians ebbed after 1991 at the level of states and civil societies, the tide has turned again in the last 10 years, with the realization on the part of many initial endorsers of Oslo that the accords were a ruse to deepen Israeli colonization. This is especially so in the civil societies of Western Europe and North America, but also and increasingly at the level of European government policy, with recent murmurings in the Obama administration that its policy might also change in view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent electoral victory and the latter’s frank declaration that no Palestinian state would be established during his tenure. Recapping this ebb and flow in pro-Palestinian solidarity is necessary in order to understand and analyze the more recent solidarity strategies and the anti-Palestinian counter strategies devised by Israel and its friends to defeat them....