Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice, and equality, and a key organizing strategy against Israeli apartheid. Today and everyday: Support Palestine by boycotting products that uplift the ongoing genocide in Palestine. It's important to put our money where our mouth is. Check out these helpful resources so you can participate in BDS!
Step 1: BOYCOTT!
Support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement and do not purchase anything from these companies.
Not sure if your product supports Israel? Check the No Thanks App on Apple and Google. Or visit the Disoccupied Website.
Maersk
Palestinian Youth Movement is launching a campaign to advance the demand for an arms embargo which will target the shipping and logistics company Maersk. In a recent update Maersk stated, "Maersk is continuing to keep a close eye on the ongoing geopolitical situation involving Israel, with the main aim of ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our staff and the best-possible service to our customers."
This is the logistics company that has been responsible for transporting the most weapons and weapons components to Israel since the beginning of the genocide. This is the company that shipped 90% of the weapons that the US used in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the company that is responsible for shipping thousands of weapons that are being used to massacre our people in Gaza.
Since October, Maersk has transported over $300 Million in weapons components to US arms manufacturers; a full quarter of known US shipments to Northrup Gruman, Woodward, RTX/Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin went through Maersk. While 68% of weapon sales to Israel come from the US, Maersk’s role allows the facilitation of weapons flow to Israel.
PYM's demands:
1. End the transportation of arms and arms components
2. Cut all contracts that fuel genocide
3. Arms embargo now
And take action now! Tell Congress: Arms Embargo Now! No More Weapons to Israel!
Israeli produce in your supermarkets + fast food
- Fruits, vegetables, and wines misleadingly labeled as “Product of Israel” often include products of illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Israeli companies do not distinguish between the two, and neither should consumers.
- Boycott produce from Israel in your supermarket such as Sabra Hummus and demand their removal from shelves.
- Other products to boycott include Dominos Pizza, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, and Burger King.
- McDonalds: In the case of McDonald’s, activists point to the burger chain’s Israel-based locations, which advertised their decision to offer free and discounted meals to Israeli soldiers after Oct. 7. According to an Oct. 22 X post, McDonald’s Israel has given 100,000 free meals to the IOF worth 5 million shekels ($1.3 million). Source
- Starbucks: Starbucks attacked its workers union over one tweet from the Starbucks Workers United account in support of Palestine. It claimed the union’s support for Palestinians in Gaza, who have been under Israeli bombardment for well over four months, was actually support for terrorism, hate, and violence. Starbucks is using Israel’s murder of over 30K Gazans as an opportunity to justify its illegal union busting campaign, intimidating workers with a cease and desist letter and federal lawsuit in an attempt to get them to abandon their union name and logo.
Starbucks Coffee Flyers
Color flyer full page | With white border
Black and white flyer full page | With white border | QR CODE
Mcdonald's Flyers
Color flyer full page | With white border
Black and white flyer full page | With White border | QR CODE
SodaStream
SodaStream is actively complicit in Israel's policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev) and has a long history of racial discrimination against Palestinian workers.
Ahava
Ahava cosmetics has its production site, visitor center, and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory.
RE/MAX
RE/MAX (US) markets and sells property in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, thus enabling Israel’s colonization of the occupied West Bank.
Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc)
HP Inc (US) provides services to the offices of genocide leaders, Israeli PM Netanyahu and Financial Minister Smotrich.
Disney
The Disney-owned Marvel Studios (US) is promoting in the next Captain America film a "superhero" that personifies apartheid Israel. Both companies are therefore complicit in "anti-Palestinian racism, Israeli propaganda, and the glorification of settler-colonial violence against Indigenous people," as Palestinian cultural organizations have stated.
Google and Amazon (US)
As the Israeli military bombed homes, clinics, and schools in Gaza and threatened to push Palestinian families from their homes in occupied Jerusalem May 2021, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud executives signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology to the Israeli government and military. By supporting Israeli apartheid with vital technologies, Amazon and Google are directly implicated in its entire system of oppression, including its unfolding genocide in Gaza. Join the #NoTechForApartheid campaign. While the campaigns targeting these corporations have not called for boycotts, other forms of pressure have been adopted to force them to end their complicity.
Step 2: EDUCATE!
What is BDS? BDS Movement Introduction
Share this TikTok explaining the situation in Gaza
Watch The Right To Boycott, a short film produced by the Freedom2Boycott New York State Coalition, now available online! The 5-minute video sounds the alarm on laws intended to take away Americans’ First Amendment right to boycott Israel.
Step 3: ACTIVATE!
Take other steps to support Palestine besides boycotting:
- Mobilize to pressure your government and parliament to immediately impose a #MilitaryEmbargo on Israel, as called for by the UN Human Rights Council and dozens of UN human rights experts. This should include the sale and transfer of weapons, military equipment and dual-use technology, cutting of military funding in the case of the US, and a ban on importing Israeli arms and spyware and on joint military and security projects.
- Join groups, particularly workers’ unions, in peacefully disrupting the transport of weapons, weapon parts, and other military equipment to Israel, including in transit states.
- Act against the companies profiting from Israel’s genocide and apartheid.
- Wherever possible, join demonstrations in your country calling for: Ceasefire NOW! Lift the Siege NOW! #MilitaryEmbargo.
- Organize or join groups organizing peaceful disruptions, sit-ins, occupations targeting complicit governments’ offices, MPs, complicit public and private institutions, or complicit companies targeted by BDS campaigns.
- Raise awareness around you about Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid and support your community/center/workplace/trade union/organization to declare themselves an Apartheid Free Zone (AFZ). A toolkit and a checklist are available.
- If not done yet, convince your city council/trade union/cultural and academic institution to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and lifting the siege and to cut existing complicit ties with apartheid Israel, its complicit institutions, and companies enabling its genocide and underlying apartheid. Use our Cities for a Ceasefire toolkit now!
Channel your rage, frustration, and grief into effective, strategic BDS action and pressure to stop the genocide and to eventually help Palestinians dismantle Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonial apartheid, the root cause of this oppression and unspeakable violence.
Write to your Member of Congress to call for a ceasefire and no more weapons to Israel!
Support the one and only keffiyeh textile factory in Palestine! Hirbawi Keffiyehs
Show your support for Palestine loud and proud with a pink keffiyeh manufactured in the West Bank! Pre-order yours now! Every purchase supports CODEPINK's mission to end U.S. wars and militarism and spread peace and human rights.
Purchase our Bold "occupation isn't pretty" t-shirts from our Stolen Beauty campaign, condemning Ahava Cosmetics' profiting from Israeli occupation. Click here for our 'Stolen Beauty' T-shirts!
Step 4: WINS!
In 2023, PUMA dropped its contract with the Israel Football Association (IFA).
PUMA has been the target of a worldwide BDS campaign since 2018 over its support for Israeli apartheid oppressing millions of Palestinians. The IFA governs and advocates to maintain teams in illegal Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Leaked internal messages revealed that PUMA was under tremendous pressure to drop the contract.
As Israel carries out its unfolding genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in occupied and besieged Gaza, killing over 18,000, including dozens of footballers, the boycott pressure was only increasing.
The years of relentless, global BDS pressure on PUMA and the damage to its image should be a lesson to all companies supporting Israeli apartheid, that complicity has consequences. It is also a lesson to the deeply complicit, Western-dominated FIFA, which continues to shield Israel from accountability despite the settlement teams violating its own statutes.
We thank the hundreds of grassroots solidarity groups, athletes and teams across the world who supported the call from 215 Palestinian teams to boycott PUMA.
This boycott win is a bittersweet victory as Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues. But it gives us hope and determination to hold all genocide enablers and apartheid supporters accountable until all Palestinians can live in freedom, justice and equality.
Source: BDS Movement
Read about CODEPINK's Campaign against Puma's contract with the IFA here.
In recent months, Starbucks and McDonald's have also seen drops in sales throughout the US and globally. This February, Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan told analysts over an earnings call that the world’s largest coffee chain was reporting slower sales in the first month of 2024, causing a hit in its share price. “We saw a negative impact to our business in the Middle East,” he said, adding that “events in the Middle East also had an impact in the U.S., driven by misperceptions about our position.”
The report came a few days after McDonald’s also sharply missed analyst expectations when it reported slower sales across its international licensed division at the end of December. The burger chain similarly attributed the slowdown to a drop in demand in stores in the Middle East and predominantly Muslim countries like Indonesia and Malaysia.
At the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), the SJP Davis Chapter won their long-time BDS campaign. With an overwhelming 12/14 vote YES, UC Davis successfully passed a resolution of which prevents any of the $20 Million ASUCD budget from being spent on companies complicit in the occupation and genocide of Palestinians. This bill institutionalize a boycott of ASUCD funds in accordance with BDS guidelines.