蘑菇视频

蘑菇视频 Palestinian Rights Committee Engagement with European Civil Society Organisations in Brussels, Belgium

“Engagement with European Civil Society Organizations: Mobilizing the European Union for Peace in Palestine”

Wednesday, 6 May 2026

Remarks by Dr. Shir Hever, Political Economist

Your Excellencies, esteemed guests, colleagues. Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak here.?

Avi Bluth, chief of Israel’s central command, said “it’s a miracle that Palestinians are indifferent to the Jewish terror,” adding “We are killing like we have not killed since 1967.” This has been reported in the media and you may have heard it, but I want to clarify the correct translation from Hebrew. Bluth said that Palestinians are “indifferent” to the atrocities committed against them. I am certain no one here believes that a family can be indifferent to violence — to the killing and injuring of family members, the destruction of homes, the theft of land and property.?

The fact that Israel’s military believes Palestinians are indifferent is a message to us: we have not done our duty to stop the aggression and protect the population. We have not succeeded in ending Israeli impunity.?

Speaking here in Brussels, the seat of the European Union, I think it is important to note that civil society is disappointed with our leaders. Amnesty International, one of the most important civil society organizations, called the European Union the “chief of cowards” last week in Luxembourg.?

I now want to turn to the title of this panel: “Individual best practices” — a title I think needs to be addressed critically. It has a double meaning: are the actors individuals who are held to perform best practices, or are actions broken down into individual acts which should themselves be best practices??

I reject both interpretations. Actors must act collectively, not as individuals. Action must be taken as part of a comprehensive strategy, not as a series of isolated acts.?

The responsibility to act is indeed individual. Every one of us has to ask: what can I do? How do I look at myself in the mirror, or explain to my children, what I did to stop a genocide? We cannot evade responsibility by shifting it to the organization we work for.?

But to act means to act effectively — not to clear our conscience, but to do what we can to stop the atrocities, to hold Israeli criminals to account, to protect the rights of Palestinians from ethnic cleansing, from apartheid, from occupation, and from genocide.?

Civil society is a collective that can effectively focus our efforts and achieve results. We act in unity to demand the implementation of international law, human dignity, and decency — to oppose Israel’s racist policies and Europe’s racist complicity with those policies.?

What is the best practice? Collective action is the best practice.?

Collective action is not only collective in the sense of who performs it, but also in the sense that it forms part of a comprehensive strategy. We all have roles to play. To stop the illegal and immoral arms shipments to Israel, unions in ports and airports must act — and dockworkers have shown again and again that they will stand up and refuse to obey illegal orders. In universities, we have seen students and faculty act to cut ties with Israeli academia as a form of effective pressure, as a way to protect European universities from complicity and to uphold ethical guidelines. Financial institutions — and here I wish to include any organization with an endowment capable of making investments, such as churches — must act to divest from companies that enable the occupation, apartheid, and genocide committed by Israel.?

Together, these actions become formidable and impactful. Israel is experiencing an economic crisis of unprecedented scale — a crisis it is trying to conceal by various means — because it is running out of the materials necessary to commit these crimes, and because hundreds of thousands of Israelis are leaving, seeing no future for Israel. There is no way Israel can continue to violate international law in the face of sustained global collective action.?

Civil society takes different forms in different parts of the world. Here in the West, civil society was established with the purpose of holding political leadership accountable to the public — to ensure that the people will not be ignored. You all know that public opinion, even in Europe, is overwhelmingly against arms deliveries to Israel, against the Association Agreement with Israel, against the impunity of Israeli soldiers who vacation in Europe and then return to kill children in Gaza. Polls show this. Street demonstrations show this. More than a million signatures for the European Citizens’ Initiative to suspend the Association Agreement show this. And yet European governments have so far failed to listen.?

As His Excellency Riad Mansour noted, we have the power. Civil society has the power — but directed against whom??We cannot stop the?tanks, artillery, and warplanes.?We have power?our own governments, and that is how we are obligated to use it. It is our individual responsibility to act collectively within civil society organizations, to compel our governments to impose sanctions on Israel.?

I want to say one more thing about the problem of so-called “individual best practices.” It evokes the logic of the responsibility of conduct. The responsibility of conduct is a legal concept that has been abused by European actors to avoid taking action — with the result that international law has been systematically violated.?

Politicians in Europe claim they lack the capacity to stop Europe’s complicity in genocide because their responsibility of conduct applies only to the office they hold. In my work for the BDS movement, I have seen how European courts abuse this concept. When lawyers organized legal action to stop arms shipments to Israel, courts said they would only rule if European?governments were shown to have violated their responsibility of conduct. Rather than issuing a broad order to stop arms and dual-use items from being shipped to Israel, courts demanded proof that a specific weapon from a specific country was used in a specific location in Gaza, at a specific time, against specific people.?

Israel knows this and exploits it. One organization — which I will not name here — sought a ruling to ban arms exports to Israel, and found a Palestinian in Gaza willing to come forward and testify about a specific use of a weapon at a specific time and place. Israel murdered that witness’s family in order to deter anyone else from testifying in court in this way.?

The responsibility of the court is to act in order to protect international law — not merely within the narrow confines of the responsibility of conduct.?

The most extreme example of this concept being abused to enable and commit genocide is that of the Israeli soldiers who deploy AI systems — the well-known Lavender, Gospel, Where’s Daddy, and others — to generate justifications for striking specific targets. Israeli soldiers testified that they were convinced their targets were legitimate, and that they had upheld their responsibility of conduct in using lethal force according to the rules of war. With nearly 20,000 children killed in Gaza by those soldiers, we can see precisely what the responsibility of conduct is worth when we close our eyes to the larger picture and focus only on the individual actor and the individual act.?

Thank you.?