NOVA Centre per la Innovaci Social (Center for Social Initiative)

Activities

• One of Nova’s foremost projects is NOVACT – the International Institute for Nonviolent Action. Based in Barcelona, NOVACT ostensibly “supports nonviolent movements, working for change and social transformation, and develops nonviolent interventions to protect vulnerable communities in conflict situations” in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Anti-Israel Activities

• NOVACT rhetoric includes accusations of “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “collective punishment,” as well as supporting a Palestinian “right of return.”
• In October 2025, NOVACT endorsed the “ACTxPALESTINE” campaign that called for “intensifying international pressure, now that the global mobilization has forced a ceasefire, to end 77 years of occupation, apartheid and human rights violations in Palestine.”
  • ACTxPALESTINE’s launch event in November included an “audiovisual manifesto” that “draws parallels between the boycott of South African apartheid and the current struggle of the Palestinian people.”
• In June 2025, NOVACT called on the Spanish government to “Ensure the establishment of effective accountability mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, to investigate and prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, and to ensure an end to these violations.”
• In June 2025, NOVACT launched “an artistic and political action” titled “Unsilence Gaza” alleging “the genocide that Israel perpetuates against the Palestinian people and denounc[ing] the silence and complicity that allows it to continue.” All profits of the event were allocated to the Palestinian Medical Relief Society,
  • On October 7, 2023, PMRS President Mustafa Barghouti declared: “Today is a glorious day for the Palestinian resistance and people. The resistance paid with interest for the attacks of the terrorist settlers, and for the attacks against the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It paid with interest for those who normalize [their relations] with the occupation.”
  • In May 2023, Israel arrested PMRS member Mohammad Al-Barq alongside five other suspects who were responsible for manufacturing and planting a bomb on a bus in the town of Beitar Illit, on March 9, 2023 on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
• In May 2025, NOVACT published a statement, “The #Nakba is continuous over time due to Israel’s policies and practices, such as the confiscation and annexation of land, the plunder of natural resources, the denial of residency, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, or the suppression of the resistance that follows…The Palestinian people resist Israel’s occupation and colonization daily. The regime of racial domination and oppression that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people must be dismantled. Israel can only continue with the ongoing Nakba thanks to international complicity and the impunity it is afforded.”
• In May 2025, NOVACT filed two formal complaints to the Ombudsman of Catalonia and Barcelona to “denounce that promoting business collaboration between Catalonia and Israel finances the maintenance of the illegal occupation and normalizes the apartheid situation and relations with Israel.”
• In January 2025, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, NOVACT published a statement claiming, “The ceasefire does not put an end to the violations of international law that Israel continues to perpetrate against the Palestinian population. It does not stop the colonization, apartheid, and military occupation that Israel imposes on Palestinians, depriving them of their fundamental rights and freedoms.” The statement called to “Hold war criminals accountable for their actions” and “Demand arms embargo, energy embargo, and sanctions.”
• In March 2024, as “part of the project ‘Human Rights Defenders in Action, through nonviolence, research and capacity building’, coordinated by NOVACT,” Al-Haq published a report that euphemistically referred to terror attacks as “acts of struggle” in asserting that “Even if individual acts of struggle breach provisions of international humanitarian law in bello, never should the Israeli colonial power or the international community categorise the collective resistance of the Palestinian people in pursuit of their inalienable jus cogens right to self-determination as ‘terrorism’, and justify its policy of suppression accordingly.” (emphases added). 
• In February 2024, NOVACT “join[ed] the call for mobilization and solidarity movements with Palestine” to “mark 16 years of blockade in the Gaza Strip by land, sea, and air, and 75 years of colonialism, apartheid, and occupation in Palestine.”
• In February 2024, NOVACT held a webinar with Israeli NGO 7amleh to “share accessible tools so that civil society organizations can improve the impact of campaign actions in the digital field…This manual aims to be an essential tool to improve the effectiveness of NGOs in the digital environment, allowing us to achieve a more significant impact in our initiatives, and includes didactic instructions to democratize the creation of digital campaign content and do so safely.”
• According to NOVACT’s 2023 annual report: “In 2023, all our work has been marked by the genocide that Israel has been perpetuating in Palestine since October 7….We have focused our work on denouncing the genocide and pressuring the international community to break its complicity with Israel. Focusing on demanding that the Spanish government declare a formal arms embargo on Israel, in addition to implementing other urgent measures to end the genocide, such as joining South Africa’s lawsuit in the International Court of Justice and other measures.” 
• In the aftermath of the brutal Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, NOVACT published a statement, “To understand today’s violence, it is necessary to understand the context of colonization, apartheid and military occupation to which Israel has subjected the Palestinian population for more than 75 years, which suppresses the rights and freedoms of the Palestinian people…The annihilation of the population of Gaza and the international support that Israel receives, encourage and legitimize a rise in racist and authoritarian ideologies contrary to human rights and fundamental freedoms. In order to eradicate the violence , our representatives must address its causes, namely the colonial regime and oppression imposed by Israel for seven decades on the Palestinian people.” 
• In October 2021, NOVACT was a signatory on a joint statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to the statement, “This unprecedented designation is merely the latest escalation in Israel’s widespread and systematic institutionalized campaign that has aimed to silence and discredit any Palestinian individual or organization that dares seek accountability for Israel’s grave human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity…the international community, especially the European Union and its member states who are key supporters of and donors to Palestinian civil society, should ensure that banks and financial institutions in their jurisdiction are notified Israel’s designation of Palestinian organizations is unfounded and inapplicable.”
• In April 2021, NOVACT was a signatory on a statement welcoming the decision of the International Criminal Court to launch a formal investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israel in the “State of Palestine.” According to the statement, “This is a long-awaited and a critically important step towards ensuring the rule of law and ending impunity, while ensuring accountability for Israel’s crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court.”
• In February 2017, NOVACT hosted Manal Tamimi and Munther Amira of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC) for a conference titled “Towards a new paradigm: Preventing Violent Extremism.” NOVACT later described the two as “Human Rights Defenders.” The PSCC regularly organizes demonstrations that have often turned violent, and repeatedly employs “martyr” rhetoric and posts on its Twitter account photos of demonstrators hurling rocks.
  • Manal Tamimi, a board member of PSCC, has promoted terrorism, violence, and virulent antisemitism, as well as used Nazi and Holocaust rhetoric on her Twitter account.
  • Munther Amira is the general director of PSCC. In response to a violent demonstration organized by Amira in Bethlehem in December 2016, he told Israeli media outlet Ynet: “we are here to protest and to say that the occupation and terror are two sides of the same coin. We want to tell the world that Palestinians deal with organized terror. We will continue to cope in order to struggle against the Nazi occupation.”
• As part of the project with the Oxford Research Group (see above), NOVACT published a 2015 report titled “The Privatization of Security in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The report states that “Since the Declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, the Israeli government has used the pretext of security to justify the occupation of the Palestinian people, committing terrible atrocities and violating human rights,” and that “The Israeli notion of security is closely linked to their concept of terrorism, drawing an extremely thin line between terrorism and resistance. The right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli military occupation is not only a moral right but also a recognized right under customary international law” (emphases added).
• Supported the “Rumbo a Gaza” initiative, which attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in 2011.
• In 2010, Nova organized the first session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, held in Barcelona from March 1-3, 2010. Topics included “the settlements and plundering of natural resources,” “the annexation of East Jerusalem,” “the construction of the Wall in Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and “the blockade of Gaza and operation Cast lead.”
• Organized a campaign in 2007 titled “Palestina al Cor (Palestine in the Heart),” in a show of “solidarity with the Palestinian people on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the so-called “Naqba”—a day during which the Palestinians and much of the Arab world mourn the “tragedy” of the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. The initiative “aims to generate accurate and timely information to publicize the situation of violation of international law and human rights of the Palestinian people.”

“Apartheid” Rhetoric

• NOVACT is part of a network of NGOs that promote artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel. (Read NGO Monitor’s Policy Paper “False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimise the Jewish State.”)
• In March 2021, NOVACT was a signatory on a statement calling on the Human Rights Council to “establish an independent Human Rights Council fact-finding mission into Israel’s apartheid regime.”
• On February 7, 2017, NOVACT was a signatory on a call to “end the European complicity – marking 100 years of injustice against the Palestinian people.” The call “solemnly reaffirm[ed] that in 2017, after 100 years of dispossession, denial and ethnic cleansing, the rights of the Palestinian people must, at last, be respected.”
• A 2016 report published by NOVACT, as part of the “Human Rights Defenders in Action” project, denies the right for Jewish self-determination, claiming that “the desire to label Israel as a Jewish state goes beyond the denial of freedom of religion. . . This legal discrimination jeopardises the basic principles of democracy and Rule of Law and can amount to a situation of apartheid, under international law” (emphasis added). The report goes on to allege the Israeli “use and abuse of violence against peaceful demonstrators, the recent restrictions and excessive control and meddling in the work of human rights organisations,” and to assert that “The myth of the so-called ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ is falling apart and is losing many supporters abroad due to the continuous violations of human rights and abuses of the Palestinian people and for the total lack of respect for Rule of Law and real democracy” (emphasis added). The report concludes with a call “to monitor governmental complicities and collaborations in arm-trade.”
• In October 2015, NOVACT was a signatory on a call to restaurant chefs to “Take Apartheid off the Menu” and cancel their participation in the Tel Aviv “Round Tables Tour” as Tel Aviv is “the center of Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid and deeply complicit in whitewashing Israeli violations of Human Rights and International Law.”
• In 2009, Nova and a number of other Spanish organizations published a report on “apartheid” in Israel. The report concludes: “Having reached this point and as a result of the analysis carried out, it is clear that the discrimination to which the Palestinian population is subjected by Israel constitutes a crime of apartheid. This crime has certain specific characteristics which distance it from the South African case, but in any case do coincide with the Convention on Apartheid.”

BDS Activities

• NOVACT promotes a number of political campaigns advocating sanctions against Israel and making severe allegations – such as the campaign “Hidden Business,” launched to “denounce the security, military and arms relations between the Spanish state and the state of Israel in order to claim the application of Spanish and European legislation on arms exports,” and the campaign “No More Complicity with Israel,” aiming to “show the role Israel plays in the design, research, implementation and sale abroad of different systems of repression.”
• In May 2025, NOVACT called for institutions to “end their complicity with Israel.”
• In October 2024, NOVACT called on the Spanish government to enact a “formal arms embargo.”
• In March 2024, following the Spanish Congress ending arms trade with Israel, NOVACT published a statement, “We particularly appreciate that it is the first time since 7 October that a Parliament of an European country demonstrates that there is a majority in favour of an Arms Embargo with Israel and that it openly expresses the willingness of not being an accomplice to a plausible genocide.”
• In February 2024, NOVACT demanded an “arms embargo and concrete measures to end the genocide in Gaza…It is necessary to end the armament relations that the Spanish state has with Israel.”
• On October 18, 2023, NOVACT launched the campaign “Stop the genocide in Gaza, stop arms trade with Israel.”
• In September 2021, NOVACT participated in a campaign titled “Don’t Buy into Occupation Coalition.” As part of the campaign, the coalition of NGOs published a report alleging to “investigate and expose the financial relationships between businesses involved in the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and European Financial Institutions (FIs).” The report called for European governments to “prohibit the import of illegal settlement products and services from entering European markets, and ban trade with and economic support for illegal Israeli settlements.”
  • Other pro-BDS NGOs involved in the campaign include Al-Haq, Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), Trocaire, ELSC, Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), and The Rights Forum.
• In August 2021, NOVACT signed a letter to the States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty calling to “put an end to Israel’s notorious use of arms and military equipment…by immediately imposing a comprehensive two-way arms embargo on Israel.” According to the letter, “This systematic brutality, perpetrated throughout the past seven decades of Israel’s colonialism, apartheid, pro-longed illegal belligerent occupation, persecution, and closure, is only possible because of the complicity of some governments and corporations around the world.”
• In February 2021, NOVACT was a signatory on a statement calling for the United Nations to “fulfil its mandate in its entirety by annually updating the UN database to include companies involved in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.” The discriminatory UN database is of businesses operating across the 1949 Armistice line, aimed at bolstering BDS campaigns against Israel.
• In April 2020, as part of a joint project coordinated by NOVACT and funded by the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation, Al-Haq and Global Legal Action Network (GLAN, Ireland) published a report titled “Business and Human Rights in Occupied Territory: A Guidance for Upholding Human Rights.” The report presented a prejudicial account of business activity in the West Bank and implicitly demanded that States impose sanctions on Israel. (Read NGO Monitor’s report “Al-Haq and GLAN’s Not-So-Subtle BDS Agenda: Analysis of Submission on “Business and Human Rights in Occupied Territory.”)