“WE WILL REGARD THE GLOBAL, ANTI-ISRAEL BDS CAMPAIGN AS ANTI-SEMITIC,”: POMPEO

Thu 19 November 2020:

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the U.S. will regard the Palestinian-led boycott movement as “anti-Semitic” and cut off government support for any organizations taking part in it, a step that could deny funding to Palestinian and international human rights groups.

“We will regard the global, anti-Israel BDS campaign as anti-Semitic,” Pompeo said, referring to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

“We will immediately take steps to identify organizations that engage in hateful BDS conduct and withdraw U.S. government support for such groups,” he said, adding that all nations should “recognize the BDS movement for the cancer that it is.”

BDS organizers cast their movement as a non-violent way of protesting Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians modeled on the campaign that helped end apartheid in South Africa.

Israel views BDS as an assault on its very existence, and has seized on statements by some supporters to accuse it of anti-Semitism, allegations denied by organizers.

Pompeo announced the initiative during a visit to Israel in which he is expected to make the first-ever appearance by a secretary of state in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. In another first, Pompeo said he would visit the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war and later annexed in a move not recognized internationally.

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