Stop the Wall Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (PGAAWC)

Profile

Country/TerritoryPalestinian Authority
Websitehttp://stopthewall.org/
Founded2002
In their own words“The main national grassroots body mobilizing and organizing the collective efforts against the Apartheid Wall.”

Funding

  • According to Stop the Wall’s website, “Stop the Wall accepts private and organizational donations,” but it does not publish financial information, reflecting a lack of transparency and accountability.

Activities

  • Claims that the “Campaign’s aim to tear down the Wall is aligned with the Palestinian desire for liberation” and desire “to reclaim our history and our ancestral land, and ensure a just future for the Palestinian people…We will not relinquish our right to our lands, and we will not stand by while a new Nakba descends upon our people.”
  • Engages in international advocacy, claiming that “the Palestinian question has been created by the colonial powers and until to date the Israeli project of ethnic cleansing and apartheid is sustainable only due to continued international support.” Therefore, Stop the Wall seeks to “develop effective pressure on institutions, corporations and governments to hold Israel accountable and stop international support to Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid.”

Ties to the PFLP

  • In 2018, credit card donation facilities withdrew services from Stop the Wall “following complaints that they were linked to a terrorist organisation and to the Boycott Divestments and Sanctions movement.”
  • Salah Khawaja, a “leader” with Stop the Wall was “an active member of the blacklisted Popular Front Liberation Party.” He was arrested by Israeli security forces seven times between 1983 and 1992 and served five years in prison between 1992 and 1997.
    • Khawaja was arrested again on October 26, 2016 and as of November 13, 2016 is still being held.
    • Khawaja is also a “member of the secretariat of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement,” which purports to coordinate the “coalition of Palestinian organisations that leads and supports the BDS movement.”
    • Khawaja has stated that “I listened to my mother and my sisters saying “It is not easy with [Israel], Salah. But we are Palestinians and we will resist against them even when you are arrested.”
  • On May 8, 2012, the IDF raided Stop the Wall offices in Ramallah, and confiscated a number of computers.

BDS

  • According to its website, “Stop the Wall has been working since the beginning towards the Palestinian Unified Call for BDS, issued by over 170 Palestinian organizations on July 9 2005…We have been a key player in the formation of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) and are now in the BNC’s secretariat. Stop the Wall contributes significantly at national and international level to the BNC’s efforts.”
  • National and international BDS efforts include promoting military embargoes on Israel and calling for BDS measures against Israeli security company Elbit for playing a “key role in the construction of the Wall and provid[ing] the drones used in ‘targeted assassinations’,” as well as French companies Veolia and Alstom for their alleged involvement in “the construction and maintenance of settler infrastructure in Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
  • In January 2023, Stop the Wall published a call to “Take Action to #DismantleApartheid!” The NGO urged people to “Put pressure on your government to demand the UN re-activate its mechanism against apartheid and take concrete steps to dismantle Israeli apartheid, including an immediate military embargo on Israel.”
  • In March 2022, Stop the Wall was a signatory on a campaign to “call for sanctions on apartheid Israel.” The campaign called for: 
    • “Investigating Israeli apartheid and reactivating the UN mechanisms to combat apartheid to impose targeted sanctions on Israel, including military embargo.” 
    • “governments to ban and shops and supermarkets to deshelve products from Israel’s illegal settlements and campaign to end contracts and investments in companies supporting these settlements, particularly those listed in the UN Database.”
    • “Holding institutions that promote our dispossesion, such as the so-called “Jewish National Fund” (JNF), accountable and join efforts to uncover their complicity with ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” 
  • In August 2021, Stop the Wall signed a letter to the States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty calling to “put an end to Israel’s notorious use of arms and military equipment…by immediately imposing a comprehensive two-way arms embargo on Israel.” According to the letter, “This systematic brutality, perpetrated throughout the past seven decades of Israel’s colonialism, apartheid, pro-longed illegal belligerent occupation, persecution, and closure, is only possible because of the complicity of some governments and corporations around the world.”
  • In May 2021, Stop the Wall participated in a rally with a “united demand for sanctions and arms embargo on Israel.” According to the rally’s statement, “Palestinian trade unions are calling on our brothers and sisters in the trade union movement internationally to stop handling goods imported from or exported to Israel. The trade union movement has a proud history of direct action against apartheid in South Africa, Let’s build a new anti-apartheid movement to end Israel’s impunity.”
  • In April 2021, Stop the Wall participated in an event titled “Decolonizing the Climate Crisis.” The event aimed to “bring activists and organizations from around the world to understand the role of policies of colonialism and land grab as intrinsic to the destruction of our climate, across the globe and in Palestine. We will discuss different ways of holding the JNF accountable for its prolonged ethnic cleansing as part of supporting Palestinian grassroots struggle and decolonizing the climate emergency.”
  • In July 2020, Stop the Wall released a statement “thank[ing] all those activists and movements that have helped to build up consensus that sanctions are absolutely necessary to stop Israel’s annexation plan and apartheid.” According to Stop the Wall, “sanctions need to be imposed, any attempts by Arab leaders to normalize relations with Israel need to be stopped, and effective tools to combat Israeli apartheid have to be put in place.”
  • In June 2020, Stop the Wall launched a campaign calling on the European Union to “demand an end to a drones deal between the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) and Israel’s largest military company Elbit Systems” and “#SpreadSolidarity with those that already take the brunt of injustice – from besieged and occupied Palestine to the overcrowded migrant camps.”
  • In May 2020, Stop the Wall was a signatory on a statement calling for “Immediate targeted sanctions to stop Israel’s annexation and apartheid.” The statement further called for “A ban on arms trade and military-security cooperation with Israel,” “Suspension of trade and cooperation agreements with Israel,” and “Investigation and prosecution of individuals and corporate actors responsible for war crimes/crimes against humanity in the context of Israel’s regime of illegal occupation and apartheid.”
  • In October 2019, Stop the Wall hosted a conference titled “United in Struggle,” that aimed to “bring[] together Palestinian popular struggle towards a national strategy to be able to resist Israel’s settler colonial project and strengthen the role of the BDS.”
    • According to the conference invitation, “Israel employs an intricate system of racist policies and practices to entrench its colonial occupation aimed at the ethnic cleansing of our people from our land.”
  • In December 2018, Stop the Wall promoted a BDS campaign against the Mexican cement company Cemex for its “deep complicity …in Israeli apartheid”
  • In October 2018, regarding the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, Stop the Wall stated that “BDS is Our Most Powerful Tool For Accountability and Justice – Let the bulldozer manufacturers know they have the obligation to stop Israel from using their equipment in the ongoing expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes. Let them know you don’t accept their complicity. Without the machines by JCB and others Israel wouldn’t be able to continue it’s (sic) Nakba!”
  • In July 2018, Stop the Wall participated in a conference titled “Joint Struggles against Militarization, from Latin America to Palestine,” denouncing “the export to Latin America and the world of the Israel’s military model developed and used against the Palestinian people to Latin America and the world… Israeli technology and methodology are used today for the persecution and repression of social movements in Latin America.”
  • In February 2018, Stop the Wall published an article about the EU’s energy projects with Israel, stating that “The EU has a legal duty of non-recognition, including the duty to give no aid or assistance in the maintenance of the unlawful situation created by Israel in the OPT with these serious violations.  EU purchases of Israeli gas would enable substantial revenues to be used in Israel’s militarisation and de facto annexationist policies of the occupied Palestinian territory and appropriation and exploitation of its natural resources.”
  • In December 2017, Juma wrote an op-ed in Middle East Eye supporting the discriminatory UN database of businesses operating across the 1949 Armistice line aimed at bolstering BDS campaigns against Israel, stating that “Ending business as usual is crucial. An excellent start is to ensure that the United Nations Human Rights Council’s database of corporations involved in Israel’s illegal settlement project, including in Jerusalem, be duly released before the end of the year and then guarantee that the listed corporations do not receive public contracts, subsidies or other aids.”
  • In November 2017, Stop the Wall published a fact-sheet titled “Stop Indo-Israeli Military Ties, discussing the “many ways how Indian movements can stand up in support of the Palestinian call for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, including a comprehensive military embargo, and strengthen with this their own struggles and demands.” The report further called to “Ensure that institutions, regional governments stop contracting the Israeli military-industrial-scientific complex.”
  • In February 2017, Jamal Juma, coordinator for Stop the Wall, wrote an op-ed titled “Israel just declared its apartheid regime in the West Bank,” stating that “In the 1980s, still at the beginning of Israel’s annexation policies, the UN Security Council called for banning any support of the settlements and related activity, and the General Assembly passed resolutions for a full set of military embargos and sanctions against Israel. It is time to implement them now.”
  • In January 2017, Stop the Wall released a factsheet on the companies involved in building the security barrier, “with the aim of assisting activists in launching BDS campaigns.”
  • In September 2016, as part of a broad campaign targeting FIFA and as a member of the Palestinian National BDS Committee, sent a letter to FIFA’s chair stating that “there is no option for FIFA other than to suspend the Israeli Football Association to maintain its consistency and credibility…An occupation which is fundamentally racist against Palestinians and which displays all the characteristics of apartheid should not be accommodated by FIFA.”
  • Signatory to the 2005 “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS,” which calls for an end to Israel’s “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” and promotes the right of “Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.” These goals undermine the fundamental right of the Jewish people to self-determination and would effectually mean the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.

Anti-Israel Activity

  • Stop the Wall claims that “The Wall is an integral part of the Zionist project to remove Palestinians from Palestine,” and considers “The Wall to be an integral part of the racist ambitions of Zionism” and “Israel’s occupation, colonialism and apartheid” policies.
  • Stop the Wall’s rhetoric includes accusations of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” “collective punishment,” “Bantustans,” “repression,” “restricting movement,” “water theft,” and a “ghettoization project.”
  • According to its website, “cooperation with Israeli organizations” is based on the “refusal of Zionism and the full respect for Palestinian rights, including the right of return and the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality” and a “critical understanding of cooperation between colonizer and colonized.”
  • Alleges that “Israel has escalated repression against HRDs [Human Rights Defenders] and Human Rights organizations”; “arrests and violence inflicted on individuals is not accidental but follows an established pattern”; “Killings and injuries are inflicted in systematic waves”; and that “youth in particular, are continuously intimidated and threatened.”
  • In August 2022, Stop the Wall signed a joint statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. The statement called for the international community to “take effective measures to end all other actions that deny Palestinians their inalienable human rights” and to “their support and increase funding to the organizations and engage with financial institutions to ensure the transfer of funds to the organizations.”
  • In August 2022, Stop the Wall launched a campaign titled “End Water Apartheid.” According to the campaign, “Israel and its water corporations weaponise water in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. As they battle for water on the ground, Palestinians have repeatedly called on the world to stop financing this water apartheid, to boycott Israel’s water companies and refuse to greenwash Israeli crimes.”
    • The campaign ignored that Israel’s use of water is entirely consistent with international law and practice, and is dictated by the 1995 Interim Agreement (Oslo II) mutually agreed to between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (For more information, see NGO Monitor’s report: Analysis of Palestinian Water Issues and Israel’s Role.)
  • In May 2022, Stop the Wall was a signatory to a flagrantly antisemitic report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council’s permanent Commission of Inquiry against Israel. The submission presented a blatantly false historical account that denied Israel’s right to exist, categorized Israel’s very existence as illegal, and labeled Zionism as a form of racism, demanding that the Commission “Recognise and Address Zionist Settler Colonialism and Apartheid as the Root Causes of Israel’s Ongoing Violations.”
  • In January 2022, Stop the Wall endorsed the “Global Days of Action for Palestine” campaign, meant to “intensify protests against Israel’s dramatic escalation of violence and ethnic cleansing across Historic Palestine.”
  • In April 2021, Stop the Wall welcomed the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch a formal investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israel in the “State of Palestine.” According to Stop the Wall, “This is a long-awaited and a critically important step towards ensuring the rule of law and ending impunity, while ensuring accountability for Israel’s crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court.”
  • In March 2021, Stop the Wall published an article about “Water apartheid,” writing that “The water crisis that Palestinians have been facing is primarily a result of a systemic attack on Palestinian water rights and a planned and ongoing policy of water apartheid and water pillage.” Israel’s use of water is entirely consistent with international law and practice, and is dictated by the 1995 Interim Agreement (Oslo II) mutually agreed to between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (For more information, see NGO Monitor’s report: Analysis of Palestinian Water Issues and Israel’s Role.)
  • In March 2021, Stop the Wall published an article titled “Israel Is Sharpening the Knife for mass ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem.” The article called on the international community to “impose targeted economic and military sanctions on Israel, to publicly support and fully cooperate with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and to hold individuals including corporate actors complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank criminally accountable.”
  • In October 2020, Stop the Wall was a signatory on a call to support “A World Without Walls,” a campaign started in 2017 that has drawn comparisons between “Israel’s apartheid wall on Palestinian land to the US wall of Shame on indigenous land at the border with Mexico.” As part of the 2020 campaign, Stop the Wall will hold a webinar titled the “The EU-Israel nexus: militarization, migration and apartheid,” which will discuss “complicity between the European Union and Israel…[and] how this connection supports the EU’s policies of militarization and racist anti-migration policies and at the same time finances and legitimizes Israeli apartheid.”
  • In June 2020, in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, Coordinator for Stop the Wall Jamal Juma wrote an article stating that “The suppressive measures the police have been using against the peaceful protesters in the US are no different from those used by the Israeli occupation…. The face of George Floyd is now painted alongside our own martyrs in a powerful mural on the apartheid Wall. We all are together in the same struggle….As both the US and Israel are founded on the same principles of white supremacy, otherness and racism, your struggle for justice and equality cannot be separated from ours-your and our struggle can only thrive on internationalism.”
  • In June 2020, Stop the Wall published a “factsheet” on “water apartheid,” falsely alleging “the strategic importance Israel gives to the usurpation and pillage of Palestinian water resources in its efforts to colonize and annex large parts of the West Bank.” Stop the Wall ignores evidence that Israel provides Palestinians in the West Bank with more water than required under the Oslo framework and that theft accounts for up to 50 percent of supplies in some Palestinian areas. For more information on the NGO distortion of water claims see [link to our report on water] .
  • In June 2020, Stop the Wall referred to President Trump’s “Peace Plan” as a “Bantustan reality” that “consolidates the existence of segregated reserves and ghettos for Palestinians, one of the elements defining the crime of apartheid. Such a combination of bantustans mirrors both the structure used by the South African apartheid regime to relegate the Black population into unsustainable, segregated areas, and the confinement of Indigenous peoples to isolated reservations by US and Canadian settler colonial states.”
    • In February 2020, following the release of the plan, Stop the Wall stated that “Today, boycotts, divestment and sanctions are the only way forward and the only realistic peace plan on the table. They have worked in the case of South Africa, they will work in support of Palestinian rights.”
  • In November 2019, Stop the Wall was a signatory on a call to support “A World Without Walls,” a campaign started in 2017 that has drawn comparisons between “Israel’s apartheid wall on Palestinian land to the US wall of Shame on indigenous land at the border with Mexico.” According to the 2019 campaign, “Israeli apartheid is the ideological model for the rising right, which in turn sustains Israeli occupation through growing military and trade ties.”
    • In 2018, the campaign called to “End the architecture of impunity that shields corporations enabling, facilitating and profiting from the construction and growth of visible and invisible walls of injustice.”
    • In October 2017, Stop the Wall co-sponsored the “World Without Walls” delegation featuring “grassroots leaders from and working with communities impacted by the US/Mexico border.” The delegation aimed to allow participants to “meet, learn from, and share with Palestinians resisting Israel’s apartheid wall in order to build together toward a world without walls.”
  • In August 2019, Stop the Wall participated in the construction of a kindergarten in the Jordan Valley as the “Jordan Valley is under constant attack by the Israeli military in order to ethnically cleanse it, accelerate the colonization by illegal settlers and, finally, to annex the Jordan Valley by force.”
  • In May 2018, during the violence on the Gaza border, Stop the Wall stated that “The last weeks have demonstrated not only Israeli inhuman brutality as it perpetuates its regime of occupation and apartheid. They have shown that Palestinian collective, non-violent resistance is becoming the weak spot for Israeli occupation.” Stop the Wall ignored the violent nature of the protests, which have consisted of an organized armed attack on the Israeli border and IDF positions, attempts to destroy and breach the border fence, and sustained arson, rocket, and mortar attacks on Israeli civilian communities.
    • Stop the Wall also shared the BDS National Committee’s statement calling for an end to “all cooperation and/or trade with the Israeli military and “security sector,” and for people to “Join or build campaigns to end all transactions with Israeli banks.”
  • On May 12-13, 2018, Jamal Juma, coordinator for Stop the Wall, participated in a conference organized by BADIL titled the “Palestinian Freedom Conference: Overcoming the Ongoing Nakba” discussing how “In late 1947, colonial Zionist paramilitary forces began the process of ethnically cleansing more than 750,000 Palestinians…70 years later…in Palestine a process of ongoing ethnic cleansing via occupation, colonisation, apartheid, and cruel siege continues apace, with no intervention from the international community.”
  • In April 2018, Stop the Wall organized a tree planting in the Palestinian village of Bardala as “another form of struggle of the Palestinian people, keeping steadfast tending to their lands against all repression and destruction the Israeli military brings upon them in order to abandon their land and homes and accept to be forced into exile or caged in within the ghettoes delimited by the Apartheid Wall” (emphasis added).
  • In September 2017, Stop the Wall was a signatory on a call to restaurant chefs to “Take Apartheid off the Menu” and cancel their participation in the Tel Aviv “Round Tables Tour” as it “uses the time-honored tradition of sharing culinary experiences as a means for whitewashing widespread violation of Palestinian fundamental rights, including the right to food.”
  • In February 2017, Stop the Wall published a report, “The Palestinian Periphery,” showing the “multifaceted methods of Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing and their impacts on our struggle” and the differing forms of resistance, “from the politics of delay to the politics of liberation – that the communities have adopted. Far from being helpless victims, they are the stronghold in our daily resistance.”

Partners

  • According to its website, “Stop the Wall forms as well part of a number of Palestinian coalitions, such as: the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the Civic Coalition for the Protection of Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, the National Committee for the Commemoration of the Nakba.”
  • Stop the Wall is also a member of the Land Defense Coalition, a “coordinating body consisting of grassroots groups working with the people on the ground. The coalition aims to promote the spirit of cooperation and to co-ordinate efforts to face the challenges imposed by the occupying forces and settlers against our people.”
  • According to other available information, Stop the Wall also partners with War on Want and with Grassroots International.
  • Member of the “Displacement Work Group,” an initiative of Badil and OCHA, comprised of NGOs including: Addameer, Al-Haq, Al-Mezan, AIC, ARIJ, Badil, BIMKOM, B’Tselem, CARE Intnl., DCI – Palestine section, Diakonia, EAPPI, Ir Amim, ICAHD, Maan Development Ctr, MAP UK, Oxfam UK, Oxfam Solidarite – Belgium, PA Govt. Spokesperson, PCHR, RHR, Society of St. Yves, Save the Children UK, Shatil, UNFPA, ACRI, UNFPA, WCLAC, World Vision, and Yesh Din.
  • Member of Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network- Friends of Earth Palestine (PENGON).

All Articles about Stop the Wall Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (PGAAWC)