The Palestinian BDS movement staged a peaceful demonstration at the Ofar trading checkpoint in Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine was conducted on August 5th, 2019. The purpose was to boycott the cheap Israeli goods being flooded into the Palestinian economy while Israel imposes high tariffs on Palestinian goods, if they allow the goods to cross the checkpoints within the occupied West Bank, so that they can be exported or even transported from one city to the other, to begin with. These illegal actions are purposefully damaging to the Palestinian economy, and are an example of neo-colonial economic strategy. 

Wadi Hummus, the neighbourhood in Sur Baher, between Jerusalem and Behlehem, today is full of rubble. Israeli military invaded the area on Monday and destroyed with bulldozers and explosives in only few hours the homes of almost a thousand of Palestinians. Israel hopes that the Palestinians living there will move on, disappear among the over six million Palestinian refugees that Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing policies have already caused. It assumes we and the people around the world will forget.

Beyond the human suffering of the people in Wadi Hummus, the political callousness of Israel’s apartheid regime and the outrage that should take hold of each of us, in order to build an effective reaction to what happened we have to analyse the context and significance of the large scale demolitions in Sur Baher.