The topic today: Boycott, divestment and sanctions – the movement seems unstoppable!
More and more UK universities are now under occupation by their students, to protest about that other occpation – in Palestine… it seems to be catching, as news is just in that Galsgow University is also under occupation – see link below:
GLASGOW UNIVERSITY STUDENT OCCUPATION
The demands are for Boycott, divestment and sanctions, and for a university statement
Success for King’s College London Student Occupation for Palestine – 7.5 out of 8 demands acheived
Watch the video!
Please sign the petition: Bring Israeli War Criminals to Justice
We the undersigned call upon the UK government to fulfill its responsibilities as a high contracting party to the 4th Geneva Convention, and
To immediately institute a war crimes investigation in the UK into Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip between 27th December 2008 and 18th January 2009 and for the UK prosecuting authorities to search out and prosecute (or extradite for trial elsewhere) all suspected war criminals identified by the investigation; and
To seek a binding resolution at the UN Security Council to establish an international commission of inquiry into the Gaza attacks and the referral of potential cases to the International Criminal Court.’
Panorama on Gaza: BBC
A 30-minute broadcast on the gaza situation, after 22 days of the murderous and criminal action by Israel.
J-BIG at Carmel Agresco
The Zionist Story – part 1 0f 8
Watch this first part of this impressive documentary made by Ronen Berelovich, an Israeli filmmaker. Below, I copy his letter to BRICUP, where he supports the boycott call. All the other parts of his excellent film can be viewed on YouTube, as rerlated to this clip:
The letter to BRICUP:
I would like to congratulate you on the “boycott Israel” initiative. As an Israeli, I can tell you with certainty that the only way to end Palestinian
suffering is through external pressure on Israel. I believe your initiative is really important and I’m grateful that there are people dedicated to
bringing real issues, often ignored and/or misrepresented by the mainstream media, to public awareness.
I have recently finished an independent documentary, ‘THE ZIONIST STORY’, in which I aim to present not just the history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but also the core reason for it: the Zionist ideology, its goals (past and present) and its firm grip not only on Israeli society, but also, increasingly, on the perception of Middle East issues in Western democracies.
These concepts have already been demonstrated in the excellent ‘Ocupation 101’ documentary made by Abdallah Omeish and Sufyan Omeish, but in my documentary I approach the subject from the perspective of an Israeli, ex-reserve soldier and someone who has spent his entire life in the shadow of Zionism.
I hope you can find a moment to watch ‘The Zionist Story’ and, if you like it, please feel free to share it with others. (As both the documentary and
the archived footage used are for educational purposes only, the film can be freely distributed). If you would like a copy of the film on DVD, send me an e-mail with your postal address and I’ll be happy to send it.
I have made this documentary entirely by myself, with virtually no budget, although doing my best to achieve high professional standard, and I hope that this ‘home-spun’ production will be of interest to viewers.
The link to the first part of the film is :
The film is in eight parts, the other seven parts should appear on the right under the “related videos” screen.
I very much look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Ronen
Church of England Divested from Caterpillar: PSC
VICTORY – Church of England Divested from Caterpillar
Over this weekend, 7th and 8th February, the Church of England clarified their position on their investments in companies profiting from the illegally occupied Palestinian territories and now wish to make clear that late last year they removed over £2.2 million in Caterpillar, a company whose bulldozers and heavy plant equipment are been used to destroy the homes of Palestinians by the Israeli government.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) welcomes this decision. Betty Hunter General Secretary of PSC said:
“This is a clear message from the Church of England that they will not have their money tied up in companies that are directly or indirectly engaged in the suppression of the rights of Palestinians. The Church’s removal of £2.2 million is a significant blow to those who say that ethical and morally responsible investments can’t be used as a peaceful weapon against the Israeli Government. I applaud this decision by the Church of England and hope that other organisations that remain invested in Israel will take a look at the moral lead shown to us by the Church of England and disinvest now.”
Another stone in the wall that will surround Israeli intrasigence. Thank you, CoE, for taking amoral and political stand!
Letter from Adrienne Rich to Jewish Peace News
If yoiu know and apprecaite Adrienne Rich poetry, you will be doubly pleased to read her courageous letter, on taking the decision to support the boycott against Israeli institutions. Her reasoning is faultless and reveals the deep schism now existing between Jewish liberals in the US and Israel/Zionism. Due to its great iconic importance, I have included the whole letter below, with thanks from the people of Palestine:
February 3 2009
Dear All,
Last week, with initial hesitation but finally strong conviction, I endorsed the Call for a U.S. Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. HYPERLINK “http://usacbi.wordpress.com/<https://uel-mail1.uel.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://usacbi.wordpres
s.com/> ” http://usacbi.wordpress.com/
<https://uel-mail1.uel.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://usacbi.wordpress.com/> I’d like to offer my reasons to friends, family and comrades. I have tried in fullest conscience to think this through.
My hesitation: I profoundly believe in the visible/invisible liberatory social power of creative and intellectual boundary-crossings. I’ve been educated by these all my life, and by centuries-long cross-conversations about human freedom, justice and power also, the forces that try to silence them.
As an American Jew, over almost 30 years, I’ve joined with other concerned Jews in various kinds of coalition-building and anti-Occupation work. I’ve seen the kinds of organized efforts to stifle in the US and elsewhere–critiques of Israel’s policies–the Occupation’s denial of Palestinian humanity, destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, the “settlements,” the state’s physical and psychological walls against dialogue<and the efforts to condemn any critiques as anti-Semitism. Along with other activists and writers I’ve been named on right-wing “shit-lists” as “Israel-hating” or “Jew-hating.” I have also seen attacks within American academia and media on Arab American, Muslim, Jewish scholars and teachers whose work critically explores the foundations and practices of Israeli state and society.
Until now, as a believer in boundary-crossings, I would not have endorsed a cultural and academic boycott. But Israel’s continuing, annihilative assaults in Gaza, and the one-sided rationalizations for them have driven me to re-examine my thoughts about cultural exchanges. Israel’s blockading of information, compassionate aid, international witness and free cultural and scholarly expression has become extreme and morally stone-blind. Israeli Arab parties have been banned from the elections, Israeli Jewish dissidents arrested, Israeli youth imprisoned for conscientious refusal of military service. Academic institutions are surely only relative sites of power. But they are, in their funding and governance, implicated with state economic and military power. And US media, institutions and official policy have gone
along with all this.
To boycott a repressive military state should not mean backing away from individuals struggling against the policies of that state. So, in continued solidarity with the Palestinian people’s long resistance, and also with those Israeli activists, teachers, students, artists, writers, intellectuals, journalists, refuseniks, feminists and others who oppose the means and ends of the Occupation, I have signed my name to this call.
Adrienne Rich
The National Platform of Maltese NGDOs
Office No 82 National Swimming Pool Complex, Gzira
Call for Suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement
In view of the recent three-week premeditated campaign of bombing of the population of Gaza and its infrastructure by the state of Israel which came after a crippling, illegal two-year siege, we, 14 member organizations of SKOP, the Maltese national platform of development NGOs, call for a suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Freezing the upgrade of its relations with the State of Israel to make it a privileged partner, as the EU has done so far, is simply not enough. If the EU is truly committed to the pursuit of a just peace it must also act in a way that clearly dissociates it from war crimes, while helping to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Like Palestinian, Israeli and other international human rights activists in various parts of the world, we are convinced that the only way to stop this spiral of violence and injustice in non-violent ways is to pressure the state of Israel to respect its moral and legal obligations as set out by various UN resolutions, which include the UN-sanctioned rights of the Palestinian refugees, particularly in accordance with UNGA Res. 194.
The merciless bombing campaign against the occupied people of Palestine highlights once again the need for the state of Israel to respect the resolutions passed by the United Nations which demand a full and unconditional withdrawal from the lands it occupied illegally in 1967. This also means that, in agreement with the people of Gaza, the state of Israel must lift its debilitating blockade immediately. There can be no just peace in Israel and the Palestininian territories it has occupied, if the State of Israel continues to flout international law and violate the human rights of an occupied people. The Occupation has created a spiral of violence that has left its toll on thousands of Palestinians and also on Israeli civilians.
We also request all organizations and people of good will in Malta to pressure the Maltese government, MEPs and prospective MEPs, and the various authorities within the EU to show their true commitment towards a just peace in Palestine by avoiding products and services (like tourism) provided by companies implicated in the Occupation and human rights violations, and to choose services and goods, like fair traded products, provided by communities in Occupied Palestine.
Gaza And Its Aftermath: Noam Chomsky interviewed by Assaf Kfoury
For more than three weeks, starting December 27th, Gaza and its 1.5 million people bore the brunt of a massive Israeli military campaign, supported and abetted by the US government. While Israel has now stopped its devastating air and ground operations in Gaza, it continues the total blockade from both the land and the sea, still pursuing the futile goal of trying to destroy Hamas and allied resistance groups by punishing the population around them.
Noam Chomsky gives a preliminary assessment of the US-Israel war on Gaza and its consequences in an interview conducted by Assaf Kfoury on January 31, 2009. The Arabic translation of the interview will appear in the Beirut daily as-Safir.
The destruction of UCAS in Gaza
To watch this clip, use the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/ccasttv
Reflections of a Troubled Israeli: The Nation
by NAOMI CHAZAN
These are bleak days for progressive Israelis. The offensive on Gaza, which should never have been launched, has left a trail of death, trauma, destruction and despondency. The after-effects of those horrible three weeks are most obvious in Gaza, where the monumental task of emotional and physical rehabilitation is an Israeli as well as a global responsibility. They are also evident within Israel, where bravado and intolerance threaten to eat away at the country’s democratic core and consume its internal moral compass.
When my phone started ringing on December 27 with the news that Israel was bombarding Gaza, I was shocked but far from surprised. I had opposed the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005 because I feared that a pullback without an agreement on the transfer of authority would breed political anarchy. And indeed, the ascendance of Hamas and its takeover of Gaza immediately afterward verified the foolishness of the unilateral approach. The Israeli siege on Gaza, accompanied by rocket attacks on Sderot and targeted killings by Israeli forces, fueled an escalation of violence that transformed Gaza into an enormous, impoverished, dangerously armed cage governed by religious extremists. Its continuous victimization, far from exposing Hamas, has sustained its dominance.
The failure of the six-month truce, brought about by the continuous smuggling of arms into Gaza and Israel’s violation of its commitment to open the crossings, was predictable. Sadly and inexcusably, so too was the timing of Israel’s assault: during the last days of the Bush administration and on the eve of yet another general election in Israel. Under immense public pressure to “do something,” which saw Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu soar in the polls, the Olmert-Livni-Barak governing trio banded together to salvage their reputations and perhaps their careers under the guise of protecting Israel and reasserting its deterrent capacity.
Read the whole article to fully appreciate the moral and political decline of the so-called Israeli left; Chazan seems to have aesthetic disagreement with this criminal war of destruction, rather thana political analysis of Zionism and its colonial policy; as if before this murder in Gaza all was well. That such left-leaning people in Israel have all but been left in the wilderness is also not surprising – the differences between them and Livni or Barak are difficult to discover. As an American acadmic she is getting this important platform, but seems unable to use it for any progressive policial statement, beyond reporting her deep concern. Palestine cannot expect anything from the bunkrupt Israeli left, that much is clear!
‘The Jewish majority should be afraid: The Guardian film clip
‘The Israeli-Arab town of Umm al-Fahm is at the centre of a struggle between Israel’s far right and its Arab minority. Local politicians say the rise of anti-Arab sentiment is a threat to the whole country. Watch the fascist Avigdor Lieberman in action.
national-lawyers-guild: Press statement by Natioanl Lawyers Guild
[Gaza City] We are a delegation of 8 American lawyers, members of the National Lawyers Guild in the United States, who have come here to the Gaza Strip to assess the effects of the recent attacks on the people, and to determine what, if any, violations of international law occurred and whether U.S. domestic law has been violated as a consequence. We have spent the last five days interviewing communities particularly impacted by the recent Israeli offensive, including medical personnel, humanitarian aid workers and United Nations representatives. In particular, the delegation examined three issues: 1) targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure; 2) illegal use of weapons and 3) blocking of medical and humanitarian assistance to civilians.
Final day of Israeli campaigning: BBC
Politicians in Israel are making their final appeals to voters before a general election on Tuesday.
The favourite to become prime minister is Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing opposition party, Likud.
But his opinion-poll lead has been clawed back in recent weeks by Tzipi Livni, who heads the centrist Kadima, the largest party in the government.
The BBC’s Tim Franks, in Jerusalem, says opinion polls suggest the far-right will make the biggest gains.
The final polls on Friday showed the Israel Beiteinu Party led by Avigdor Lieberman eclipsing Labour as third party in the Israeli Knesset.
Unstable politics plague Israel: BBC
The pink-shirted man in the advert holds two pairs of white underpants, one in each hand, and talks about his friend.
“Every day he changes his dirty underwear… This is the way also he votes in elections – when there is a dirty government, he replaces it with a clean one. “And when the second government is more dirty than the first, we swap them back.” With this sales pitch, Haisraelim, a new, single issue party has entered the political fray ahead of Israel’s 10 February elections, pushing for a change in the electoral system. The activists behind it, gathered around a wooden table in an upmarket apartment north of Tel Aviv, say they are tired of bickering, scandal-prone politicians and governments too unstable to take decisive action. While rockets from Gaza and potential nuclear bombs from Iran are looming large in the minds of Israeli voters, the party’s leader, political science Professor Gideon Doron, says the voting system itself is a “threat to Israel’s existence”.
Well, with those candidates and their politics, we should expect the worse, I feel.
Gaza activist detained in Egypt: BBC
A German-Egyptian activist has been detained north of Cairo during a rally in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Philip Rizk has been an outspoken activist on Palestinian issues and lived in Gaza for two years. He previously worked on aid projects with Canon Andrew White, special envoy to the Middle East for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Eyewitnesses said he was bundled into a white van with no licence plates, which then sped off.
The German embassy has been informed of his detention and is trying to locate him.
Israel’s election cliffhanger as Livni closes gap with Netanyahu: The Guardian
Rightwing parties hold key to power as a fifth of voters remain undecided on eve of poll
Israelis go to the polls to elect a new government tomorrow in what is becoming a cliffhanger contest between the rightwing opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his rival Tzipi Livni, the centrist foreign minister. Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, is slightly ahead, and given the combined size of the rightwing parties that would support him he is thought most likely to lead the next coalition government. But up to a fifth of voters are thought to be undecided, according to opinion polls. Israel’s proportional representation voting system is complicated and no single party will be able to form a government without bringing four or five other parties into a coalition. Even if Livni’s Kadima party emerges with the largest number of seats most analysts think she would struggle to put together a like-minded coalition with enough seats to have a majority in the Knesset, or parliament.
Well, we know who is on the right in Israel OK; the question behind the arguemnt in such pieces as this one – who do you think is the left in Israel? Not quite answered in this piece, of course.
The Lieberman effect: The Guardian
Capitalising on voter disillusionment, the Israel Our Homeland party and its charismatic leader should poll well tomorrow
Moshe goes to a health clinic, but needs to register before a doctor can see him. “Occupation?” the clerk asks. “No,” Moshe replies, “I am just on vacation.” In real life, occupation rarely takes a vacation. While the spotlight of the world’s attention has been trained on the destruction in Gaza, more buildings owned by Palestinians in East Jerusalem, territory that Israel has annexed, were demolished. The United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, which issues a weekly report on the protection of civilians, found that the Israeli authorities had demolished 21 Palestinian homes and buildings displacing 76 people, including 42 children. All in three days.
While the fighting was raging in Gaza, the Israeli group, Peace Now, similarly observed a sudden spurt of road building by settlers in the West Bank. New roads appeared between the settlements of Eli and Shilo, around Haro’e, towards the outpost of Hayovel and from the outpost of Adi. Could all this be coincidence?
Israeli Arabs fear a Gaza backlash as far right prepares for power role: The Guardian
The elections have been overshadowed by Gaza – and the man most likely to gain takes the hardest line on the conflict
Fadi Mustafa is a successful young PR executive. He has an office in Tel Aviv and another in the northern Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, where his family home is. He encourages other young Israeli Arabs to break through the glass ceiling of discrimination. He was what Israeli Arabs call a “straight back”, in contrast to a previous generation – the “bent backs” who were bowed down by the experience of the creation of the Israeli state and the wars that followed. He will look any Israeli in the eye as an equal, he insists, and shows me a painting that was given to him by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman. But right now Fadi is an angry man, enraged by the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Homeland) Party. On Tuesday, if all the polls are right, Lieberman will emerge as the most significant beneficiary of an Israeli general election campaign played out against the bloody background of the three-week assault on Gaza in which more than 1,300 Palestinians died, many of them civilians. The rightwing Likud party of Benyamin Netanyahu will probably emerge as the winner ahead of the Kadima party of Tzipi Livni. But most Israelis also recognise the wider significance of the moment: these elections are likely to mark the emergence of a far-right force, with a racist anti-Arab agenda, as the country’s power broker.
Avigdor Lieberman: Harnessing the Russians of southern Israel and beyond: The Guardian
Ultra-rightwing leader’s security views strike chord beyond immigrants from former USSR to Israelis across nation
The first thing I notice is the nails. I’m in the campaign office of Yisrael Beiteinu, the ultranationalist party of Avigdor Lieberman, in the Mediterranean city of Ashdod. Most of the volunteers are women of a “certain age”. And I’m fixated on their nails. There are nails in two colours. Built-up false nails. And long, pampered nails that curve to dull points like the unsheathed claws of cats. They tick-tick-tick on keyboards of the office’s computers. Pick at stickers on the campaign board. Punch at keys on mobile phones. The nails are paired with big hairstyles: bleached blonde and permed, or tinted in two shades. The “hair-nail thing”, a friend explains, is a Russian thing. Not that there is any question about this being a Russian thing in every sense. When the phones ring they are answered in accents from across the former Soviet Union – although some of these volunteers have been Israelis for two decades. I notice more posters with Cyrillic script than Hebrew letters, imprinted beneath the pictures of Lieberman himself. There are two versions of Lieberman. The young aspirant and Lieberman in middle-age. The images of the former nightclub bouncer from Moldova, who threatens to push Israel’s Labour party into a humiliating fourth place in next week’s elections, appear almost identical at first.
Will Israel make the right choice?: The Guardian
The likely outcome is another centre-right coalition – unless ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman redraws the political map
What’s at stake in the Israeli election? Everything and nothing.
Start with the nothing. The battle to be prime minister comes down to two candidates, former PM Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu of Likud and current foreign minister Tzipi Livni of Kadima. As the race between the two has tightened, with the last polls showing only a two-seat gap between them, the pair have scrambled to define themselves more sharply. “Livni at last let the word peace come out of her mouth,” says Aluf Benn of the liberal daily Haaretz, while “Bibi planted a tree in the Golan [Heights] and went for a walkabout in East Jerusalem.” In those moves, Livni and Netanyahu were both acting out age-old roles, the peace candidate doing battle with the hawk. But no one seriously believes that Livni is about to deliver an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, just as no one kids themselves that Bibi is going to realise the now-fading Likud dream of Greater Israel. Instead, in the words of one senior Israeli official, “Whoever wins, it will be more of the same: convergence on the pragmatic centre.” If Livni were somehow to pull off a double upset, emerging with both the most seats and a presidential invitation to form a government – and the latter does not automatically follow the former – she would continue in the same vein as the outgoing Olmert administration she served: more talks with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, more of the Annapolis process started in November 2007 and more isolation of Hamas.
The right choice is never even on the Israeli agenda, of course – the end to occupation and Zionist racism, but this never stopped Mr. Freedland from expecting the dawn of peace at any point of the conflict… He always believes that if only Israel followed his advice, all will be well…
Breaking the Palestinian impasse: Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada
To end the Palestinian political impasse, elections for the Palestine National Council (PNC) should be the top priority for all Palestinian parties. The 669-member Palestinian “parliament-in-exile” has not held a meeting since 1998 and its members have never been elected. Once a central body of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), what is left of the PNC lacks all legitimacy.
Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal caused an uproar recently when he stated that in its current form the PLO is no longer a reference point for Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas, whose term as president of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority expired on 9 January, reacted with fury. Having himself lost all legal and political legitimacy, Abbas told a crowd in Cairo that “There will be no dialogue with those who reject the PLO.”
Of course Meshal did not reject the PLO, but he asserted that the PLO has become “a center of division for the Palestinian household.” Speaking to Al-Jazeera on 30 January, Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan clarified that the “PLO represents a good framework that can be used to solve a lot of our problems and disputes.” Hamdan added that the body “is the only organization that is capable of continuing the negotiations and the signing of political agreements with internal factions and external sides alike.” Fawzi Barhoum, another Hamas spokesperson, said that when Hamas made the suggestion to create “a new representation” it was not meant to suggest the creation of an alternative to the PLO. “We want to add opposition factions to the PLO, factions that are still not included within the body,” he told reporters.