“We,” Palestinians and Jewish Israelis: The Right Not to Be a Perpetrator

Assuming that the BDS is the largest civil movement today claiming to change the Israeli political regime, what type of “we” does it enable? In this essay, I try to answer this question, based on the premise that the response of Jewish Israeli citizens to the crimes and abuses perpetrated by their own regime cannot be based on external solidarity. Jewish Israelis are governed alongside Palestinians, and they are subjects of the same political regime. Their citizenship is a constitutive element of a regime of differentiations and hierarchy in which Jewish Israeli citizens are the privileged group. Not being able to endorse the boycott from the outside, Jewish Israelis can—and should—participate in it; their participation turns the BDS movement's call into a campaign to redefine citizenship as co-citizenship based on the right not to be perpetrator.