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International Solidarity Movements With Palestine: A History

In the spring of 2024, students at Columbia University erected a small city of tents on the university lawn. Within weeks, encampments had appeared at more than 150 campuses across the United States, then across Europe, Australia, and beyond. Campus security footage and arrest records documented what the naked eye could see: thousands of young people, many of them Jewish, willing to risk suspension and criminal charge to demand that their institutions divest from companies supplying Israel’s military. It was, by any measure, the largest wave of student solidarity with Palestine since the first intifada. It did not emerge from nothing.

The infrastructure of international solidarity Palestine movements had been built over decades — through physical presence in the West Bank, through parliamentary lobbying in Westminster, through synagogue disruptions in San Francisco, through slow and unglamorous coalition work that rarely made front pages. Understanding the scale of 2024 requires understanding what came before it.

The International Solidarity Movement and the Politics of Presence

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) was co-founded in 2001 by Palestinians and internationals — among them Huwaida Arraf and Ghassan Andoni — on a straightforward premise: that the physical presence of foreign nationals in the occupied West Bank and Gaza could offer a limited form of protection to Palestinians facing military operations, settler violence, and home demolitions, while simultaneously generating documentation that could travel to international media. The ISM grounded its work explicitly in international humanitarian law, citing the Fourth Geneva Convention’s protections for civilians under occupation.

The movement drew global attention — and ferocious criticism — in March 2003, when 23-year-old American volunteer Rachel Corrie was killed in Rafah, Gaza, crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer while standing in front of a Palestinian home scheduled for demolition. Her death, documented in photographs published worldwide, became one of the most debated incidents in the history of the solidarity movement. An Israeli military investigation found no wrongdoing; a subsequent Israeli civil court ruling in 2012 dismissed a lawsuit by her family. Human rights organizations and the Corrie family disputed both conclusions. British ISM volunteer Tom Hurndall was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in April 2003 and died nine months later; an Israeli soldier was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

ISM volunteers continued operating in the West Bank through the 2000s and 2010s, participating in the weekly demonstrations against the separation wall in Bil’in and Nabi Saleh that became focal points for joint Palestinian-Israeli-international nonviolent resistance. The wall itself was ruled contrary to international law by the International Court of Justice in its 2004 advisory opinion.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign: Institutional Lobbying and Mass Mobilization in the UK

Founded in 1982, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in the United Kingdom built itself into one of the most durable solidarity organizations in the Western world. Operating as a membership organization with affiliated trade unions — including major affiliates within the Trades Union Congress — the PSC pursued a dual strategy: parliamentary advocacy and street mobilization. It was among the organizations central to calling the February 2003 London march against the Iraq War, which drew an estimated one million people, and it organized multiple national demonstrations specifically on Palestine, including marches in 2009 following Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza and in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge.

The PSC consistently campaigned for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) measures, working alongside trade unions to pass motions at national union conferences. By the mid-2010s, BDS resolutions had passed at the University and College Union and several other major British unions — a model of institutional pressure with a clear genealogical link to the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, during which British trade unions played a central role in isolating the South African regime economically and culturally.

Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Naamod: Solidarity From Within Jewish Communities

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), founded in the United States in 1996, occupied a distinct and politically significant position: a Jewish-led organization explicitly opposing Israeli occupation and, from 2019 onward, formally endorsing the BDS movement. JVP’s significance lay partly in what it denied the Israeli government: the ability to frame all criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitism or as external hostility to Jewish communities. By 2023, JVP reported chapters at over 70 universities and a national membership numbering in the tens of thousands.

IfNotNow, founded in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge by young American Jews, targeted a different audience: mainstream American Jewish institutions and the organized American Jewish community’s political leadership. Its tactics included sit-ins at the offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and at the headquarters of major Jewish federations. Where JVP engaged in broad coalition work, IfNotNow concentrated on internal Jewish communal politics, demanding that organizations like Hillel and the Jewish Federations take public positions against the occupation.

In the United Kingdom, Naamod — the name means “we will stand” in Hebrew — emerged in 2020 as a British Jewish organization explicitly calling for an end to occupation and opposing what it described as the conflation of Judaism with Zionist politics. Smaller than JVP but vocal in British media and at PSC demonstrations, Naamod represented a generational shift within British Jewish political identity that polling organizations including the Institute for Jewish Policy Research had begun documenting — a growing minority of younger British Jews distancing themselves from uncritical support for Israeli government policy.

The Anti-Apartheid Precedent and What It Does — and Doesn’t — Tell Us

Solidarity movements themselves have consistently invoked the anti-apartheid struggle as the closest historical analogue. The comparison has substantive foundations: Archbishop Desmond Tutu made it explicitly, as did Nelson Mandela, who wrote in 1997 that “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Scholar Rashid Khalidi and legal scholar Noura Erakat have both drawn structural comparisons between South African apartheid and Israel’s legal regime in the occupied territories, while acknowledging the differences in colonial history, demography, and geopolitical context.

The anti-apartheid movement’s success was not linear. Decades of international campaigning preceded the divestment decisions of major corporations and US state pension funds in the 1980s, which preceded the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the first democratic elections in 1994. Solidarity organizations took that timeline seriously: the arc was long, the mechanisms of pressure were cumulative, and cultural isolation — sporting boycotts, academic boycotts — mattered alongside economic pressure.

Post-October 2023: Scale, Encampments, and an Altered Landscape

The assault on Gaza that followed the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 — and the scale of Palestinian civilian casualties documented by OCHA, WHO, and UNRWA in the months that followed — transformed the landscape of solidarity organizing. Organizations that had spent years building infrastructure suddenly found themselves coordinating mobilizations orders of magnitude larger than anything in recent memory. The PSC reported the largest demonstration in its history in London in November 2023. JVP organized a sit-in inside the US Capitol rotunda in October 2023 that resulted in hundreds of arrests.

The campus encampment movement of spring 2024 was the most visible expression of this shift. Students explicitly modeled their demands — institutional divestment from weapons manufacturers and companies operating in Israeli settlements — on the divestment campaigns of the anti-apartheid era. The Universities of California, Trinity College Dublin, and several other institutions entered into negotiations with encampment organizers. Arrests at Columbia, UCLA, the University of Texas, and elsewhere numbered in the hundreds. The movement represented something the preceding decades of infrastructure had made possible: a generation that had grown up with access to documentation — footage, satellite imagery, hospital records — and organizations capable of channeling outrage into structured political demand.

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