BDS Finland

Founded in 2005, BDS is a Palestinian-led global movement that seeks to end economic, political, and cultural support for Israel’s apartheid regime through peaceful means. BDS stands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

BDS is based on a simple principle: Palestinians have the same human rights as everyone else. BDS is an inclusive, anti-racist human rights movement that opposes all forms of discrimination, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

The BDS movement is inspired by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the boycotts that accompanied it. The BDS movement was launched by 170 Palestinian trade unions, refugee networks, women’s organisations, the Popular Solidarity Committee and other Palestinian civil society bodies.

Read more about the international BDS movement here.

The BDS Finland working group operates as part of Sumud. The group shares information about the movement and its boycotts and organises various campaigns in Finland.

What to boycott?

The BDS movement’s strategy is to target boycotts, pressure and sanctions at specific companies and products in order to maximize their impact. If a large proportion of consumers refrain from buying a company’s products or services, the company will be under financial pressure to change its operations. It can be challenging for a consumer to boycott thousands of different brands, so a targeted boycott also makes it easier to boycott every day. The BDS movement focuses on companies that have a clear and direct role in Israel’s war crimes and human rights abuses.

Targets are in three sections:

1. Priority boycott targets of the BDS movement

The BDS movement calls for a complete boycott of these brands carefully selected due to the company’s proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid.
2. Pressure targets of the BDS movement

The BDS movement actively calls for pressure campaigns against these targets. This includes boycotts when reasonable alternatives exist, as well as lobbying, peaceful disruptions, and social media pressure.
3. Boycotts supported by the BDS movement

These boycotts originated from collective action and have received support from the BDS movement. In Finland, Wolt has been chosen as a local boycott target.

Divestment & Exclusion from Contracts

In addition to boycott and pressure targets, divestment and exclusion targets are indispensable in the BDS movement’s tools against complicit corporations. The BDS movement works to pressure governments, city councils, investment funds, institutions (including universities), trade unions, etc., to exclude from procurement contracts and investments as well as to divest from, as the case may be, as many complicit companies as practical, especially arms companies, tech companies, and financial institutions. We rely predominantly on the following authoritative sources and their research regarding divestment targets:

AFSC list of companies that implicated in arming Israel’s #GazaGenocide.

AFSC Investigate database of companies enabling the occupation.

UN database of businesses involved in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.

WhoProfits database of corporations profiting from the ongoing Israeli occupation.

Don’t Buy Into Occupation list of businesses involved in the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise in the OPT in which European financial institutions have investments.

Learn more about divestments here: www.bdsmovement.net/Get-involved-divestment

Israeli Corporations & Banks

The BDS movement targets complicity, not identity. When it comes to Israeli companies, being non-complicit entails:

1. Not being implicated in Israel’s military occupation, apartheid, or settler colonialism; and
2. Publicly recognizing Palestinian rights under international law, primarily the right of refugees to return in accordance with UN resolution 194.

As far as we know, no Israeli company meets these two conditions. Accordingly, the BDS movement has called for boycotting and divesting from all Israeli companies unless they meet the above two conditions.