BDS and proprietary software
On 2025-04-07, the Palestinian BDS National Committee officially declared Microsoft a priority target for BDS and called for people who support Palestine to divest from Microsoft. Although their call focuses on Microsoft’s gaming products – Xbox Game Pass, flagship Microsoft games like Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Call of Duty, and all Xbox-related hardware – they also call more generally for “people to pressure Microsoft with divestment and exclusion from contracts, whenever feasible”.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a Palestinian-led movement which asks people to express their solidarity with Palestine by not using certain products or giving money to certain corporations which are complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. This movement is especially inspired by the boycotting and divestment actions encouraged by the Anti-Apartheid Movement which was successful in ending apartheid in South Africa.
I’ve written before about BDS’ role in software acquisition particularly with regards to Ex Libris Group, the Israeli company that dominates the UK and US markets for library systems. Ex Libris produce Ex Libris Alma and Ex Libris Primo and chances are if you’ve searched a university library catalogue then you’ve used Ex Libris Primo. Ex Libris Group is an Israeli company whose headquarters is built on land that used to be the Palestinian village of al-Maliha (المالحة) and you can read more about their complicity in occupation and apartheid in the zine Exposing Ex Libris published by the Librarians and Archivists With Palestine activist group. Despite all the contemporary critical discussion of decolonisation in libraries, there’s very little discussion of enacting decolonisation principles in libraries by divesting from major Israeli software companies who those same libraries send millions of pounds to every year.
BDS is a coordinated political action and though all Israeli companies and companies who provide Israel with technology should be boycotted, the movement specifically prioritises certain targets who will have the most economic impact on the Israeli state. Ex Libris Group is not a priority target but there are plenty of proprietary software and hardware companies who are priority targets including Intel, Dell, HP, and now Microsoft.
“Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Microsoft’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid and genocide is well documented, exposing its strong ties to the Israeli military, its collaboration with Israeli government ministries, and its involvement in the Israeli prison system, which is notorious for systematic torture and abuse of Palestinians. Microsoft knowingly provides Israel with technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), that is deployed to facilitate grave human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity (including apartheid), as well as genocide. [...] Microsoft provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services that are crucial in empowering and accelerating Israel’s genocidal war on 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip. Microsoft’s extensive ties with Israel’s military are revealed in investigations by The Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, demonstrating how the Israeli military turned to Microsoft to meet the technological demands of genocide.”
The BDS movement recognises that it’s not realistic to ask people to completely divest from Microsoft by getting rid of their Microsoft Windows operating systems overnight. I'm not innocent in this: one of my laptops has Microsoft Windows and I use GitHub and LinkedIn regularly. But there is a range of Microsoft software that it is relatively easy to stop using. As I’ve discussed before, there are plenty of free and open source alternatives to all Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly known as Microsoft Office) software, many of which are much better than programs like Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Download LibreOffice; download Apache OpenOffice; get your organisation to set up ONLYOFFICE or Nextcloud Office. Hell, you can just start using CryptPad.fr right now without downloading anything.
If you’re still paying for a subscription to Microsoft 365 Copilot, then your money is supporting the genocide in Palestine. Stop using Microsoft software and encourage your workplace to divest from their expensive Microsoft subscriptions. And, as the BDS movement has specifically requested, stop giving your money to Microsoft in the form of Xbox products, Microsoft games, or Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.