Apologies for the long delay in blogging here, caused by ill health , which is now under control!

BDS and the Cultural Boycott are hotting up! Over the last week, two film events have come to the fore as locations of the debate over BDS, with the director of the Melbourne Film Festival, Mr. Ricahrd Moore, blogging in the Guardian Comment is Free, in a bizarre attack on Ken Loach, who has not agreed for his film to be shown at the festival, unless the festival agreed to NOT accept funding from the Israeli government. Mr. Moore called this an act of ‘censorship’ and refused to relent, in the name of artistic freedom… see the entries related below:

Censorship has no place in film: CommentisFree, The Guardian

Chinese efforts to censor our festival overshadowed Ken Loach’s equally insidious attempt to prevent sponsorship from Israel

This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival was beset by attempts to censor our programme. The most celebrated effort came from the local Chinese consulate – demanding the withdrawal of the documentary 10 Conditions of Love about Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled voice of the Uighur minority. The festival’s refusal to comply with this diktat produced an extraordinary response: the withdrawal of several Chinese films, hackers assaulting our website and ticketing system and waves of abusive emails, faxes and phonecalls. The Kadeer controversy overshadowed an equally insidious attempt to censor our programme by the English filmmaker Ken Loach. While the Chinese wanted to silence Kadeer, Ken Loach demanded that we refuse any cultural sponsorship from Israel.

The Israeli state has been a sponsor of the film festival for several years and is one of many cultural bodies who support our independent organisation. The list varies depending on the composition of our programme, this year our cultural partners included the British Council, the Japan Foundation, the Taipei Trade and Economic Office and the Danish Film Institute. Sponsors generally proffer financial support for their respective national cinema, and they are never granted any programming rights or any right of veto over the festival programme.

In this case the Israeli embassy in Australia offered to fund an airfare for Tatia Rosenthal, the director of the first Israeli/Australian co-production, $9.99. The funding allowed New York-based Rosenthal to introduce the Melbourne premiere along with two of its stars, Geoffrey Rush and Anthony La Paglia.

But for Loach the only question was the origin of that money. We were told that unless we rejected Israeli funding Loach would withdraw his latest film, Looking For Eric, already confirmed and printed in the official guide. This isn’t the first time that Loach has pulled this stunt. Earlier this year the Edinburgh Film Festival buckled after complaints from Loach that Israel had provided £300 to fly director Tali Shalom-Ezer to the screening of her film Surrogate. The funding was withdrawn. This was a repeat of a shameful 2006 episode when Edinburgh returned a travel bursary funding flights for another Israeli director, Yoav Shamir.

This curse must not be allowed to spread to other film festivals. Politics will always walk hand in hand with film, and with film festivals, but at the core of every festival, from Melbourne to Montreal, is the independence and integrity of the programme: it is a festival’s primary asset and part of an inviolate bond of trust between a festival and its audience. To allow the personal politics of one filmmaker to proscribe a festival position would not only open a veritable floodgate, but also goes against the grain of what festivals stand for. Not that I felt the need to justify ourselves but in my response to Loach, explaining why Melbourne’s film festival would not comply with his demands, I reminded him that it had had a long interest in the Middle East and has programmed many films about the Israel-Palestinian question – most, if not all, sympathetic to the Palestinians.

Loach’s reply was:

Film festivals will reflect many points of view, which are often radical and progressive. It is also true that there are many brutal regimes and many governments, including our own, which have committed war crimes. But the cultural boycott called for by the Palestinians means that remaining sympathetic but detached observers is no longer an option.

In other words, everyone has been given a royal dispensation from Loach to commit war crimes bar the Israelis. Far be it for me to act as an apologist for Israel but the logical extension of Loach’s position is absurd. Aside from ignoring the fact that film festivals fulfil an important role in allowing filmmakers to circumvent national censors, is he saying we can continue to programme films from North Korea, from Iran, from China – but we must boycott Israel? On a moral relativity scale does that mean that Iran’s treatment of women is acceptable? Should we keep quiet about how North Korea treats its citizens? Loach disagreed with George Bush’s approach to foreign policy; so was it OK to programme American films during the Bush era?

Loach’s demands were beyond the pale. As a supporter of independent film and filmmaking he should be ashamed of himself.

My own comment on the site is below:

It is befitting the director of an Australian film festival, one suspects, to show gross insensitivity to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the brutal occupation which lasted over four decades, not to mention the severe war crimes by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. After all, what does Israel do which Australia has not done so many centuries before? As one of the few countries which was cleansed of its indigenous population by European settlers of a somewhat questionable character, and has almost managed to eradicate them altogether, like the mighty USA, one expects nothing less, of course, from such intellectuals of Mr. Moore’s calibre.

One can sense from his reaction that the question of not only past iniquities, but of the current injustice continuing, has never occurred to Mr. Moore as a problem. As a cultural event, then, his film festival shines as an example of those who will overlook murder and pillage in support  of ‘artistic freedom’. Hurrah, the colonialists of mighty Australia!

Prof. Haim Bresheeth, Filmmaker and film studies scholar

The site has recorded many excellent reactions to this attack on Ken Loach, one of the best known and respected filmmakers, by an Apparatchik of a minor film festival, showing total disregard to the plight of Palestinians, as well as to the call of Palestinian artists, filmmakers and intellectuals for a cultural boycott of the Israeli apartheid state. In his text above, he even calls the Israeli state “one of many cultural bodies who support our independent organisation“! Now is that not a nice touch? It is certainly the first time the Israeli regime, responsible for mass killing and ethnic cleansing forr over six decades, was called a ‘cultural body’… To see some of the reactions. , use the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/aug/27/ken-loach-film-festival

The other controversy is the special programme of Israeli films about Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF. A number of filmmakers have withdrawn their films from the festival as a form of protest, led by John Greyson:

Filmmakers protest uncritical view of Tel Aviv at Toronto film festival: Ha’aretz

Several Canadian filmmakers plan to withdraw their movies from next month’s Toronto International Film Festival to protest a weeklong cinematic homage to Tel Aviv. They claim that the screenings will show Israel in a positive light instead of creating a critical forum in which to discuss the occupation. The Tel Aviv-centric week launches the Toronto Festival’s new City to City event and is intended to celebrate Tel Aviv’s centennial.

According to the protesting artists, including culture critic Naomi Klein and director John Greyson, the problem is not the official participation of Israeli films at the festival but the character of the forum in which they will be screened. They refer to an interview given last year by the Israeli consul in Toronto, Amir Gissin, to the Canadian Jewish News, in which he said that Israel’s image would be improved by participating in the festival.
Among the films to be shown are “Kirot” (“Walls”) by Danny Lerner, “Phobidilia” by Yoav and Doron Paz, “Bena” by Niv Klainer, “Jaffa” by Keren Yedaya, “The Bubble” by Eytan Fox, “A History of Israeli Cinema, Part I and II,” by Raphael Nadjari, “Life According to Agfa” by Assi Dayan, “Big Eyes” by Uri Zohar, and “Big Dig,” a 40-year-old film by Ephraim Kishon.
In a letter sent to the Toronto festival administration, Greyson wrote that the protest was not against Israeli films or filmmakers chosen for the festival.
He expressed admiration for film work by Israelis shown at previous festivals and said that he would attend Israeli films in the future.
Rather, he wrote, his protest was about the “spotlight” itself, the business-as-usual atmosphere advanced by the choice of Tel Aviv as a young, dynamic metropolis, in a celebration free of confrontation with less pleasant parts of Israel, such as what he termed the “brutal occupation.”
Greyson questioned whether an uncritical celebration at this time might be compared to having held such affairs in 1991 in South Africa, or in 1963 in Montgomery, Alabama.
Israeli director Udi Aloni is supporting the Canadian protest and is calling on Israeli artists to take the same steps.
In a telephone interview from New York, Aloni told Haaretz that he had talked to the festival curator to try to convince him not to hold an event in a format so uncritical of Israel.
Not Foreign Ministry cadets
According to Aloni, Israeli artists need to rethink their participation in the festival. “Wherever they appear they must decide if they are representatives of the Foreign Ministry or of an uncompromising opposition to occupation and racism in Israel,” he said. “Israeli directors don’t have to be defensive and ask ‘Why are they attacking us?’ but say to the Canadian directors: ‘We’re with you on this. We don’t represent [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman; we represent the opposition.’ There are only two options. It’s no longer possible to shoot and cry.”  In a letter addressed to Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky, makers of “The Bubble,” Aloni asked them: “Are Israeli artists Lieberman’s new foreign service cadets?”
Gal Uchovsky said he preferred not to respond until he sees the letter in its entirety.

Greyson’s letter to the TIFF is reproduced below:

GREYZONE
95 SHAW ST
TORONTO CANADA M6J 2W3
647-272-0386
johngreyzone@gmail.com
August 27, 2009

Piers Handling, Cameron Bailey, Noah Cowan
Toronto International Film Festival
2 Carlton St., 13th floor
Toronto Canada M5B 1J3

Dear Piers, Cameron, Noah:

I’ve come to a very difficult decision — I’m withdrawing my film Covered from TIFF, in protest against your inaugural City-to-City Spotlight on Tel Aviv. In the Canadian Jewish News, Israeli Consul General Amir Gissin described how this Spotlight is the culmination of his year-long Brand Israel campaign, which includes bus/radio/TV ads, the ROM’s notorious Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, and “a major Israeli presence at next year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Gissen said Toronto was chosen as a test-city for Brand Israel by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, and thanked Astral, MIJO and Canwest for donating the million-dollar budget. (Astral is of course a long-time TIFF sponsor, and Canwest owners’ Asper Foundation donated $500,000 to TIFF). “We’ve got a real product to sell to

Canadians… The lessons learned from Toronto will inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said.”This past year has also seen: the devastating Gaza massacre of eight months ago, resulting in over 1000 civilian deaths; the election of a Prime Minister accused of war crimes; the aggressive extension of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; the accelerated destruction of Palestinian homes and orchards; the viral growth of the totalitarian security wall, and the further enshrining of the check-point system. Such state policies have led diverse figures such as John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Bishop Desmond Tutu to characterize this ‘brand’ as apartheid.Your TIFF program book may describe Tel Aviv as a “vibrant young city… of beaches, cafes and cultural ferment… that celebrates its diversity,” but it’s also been called “a kind of alter-Gaza, the smiling face of Israeli apartheid” (Naomi Klein) and “the only city in the west without Arab residents” (Tel Aviv filmmaker Udi Aloni).To my mind, this isn’t the right year to celebrate Brand Israel, or to demonstrate an ostrich-like indifference to the realities (cinematic and otherwise) of the region, or to pointedly ignore the international economic boycott campaign against Israel.  Launched by Palestinian NGO’s in 2005, and since joined by thousands inside and outside Israel, the campaign is seen as the last hope for forcing Israel to comply with international law. By ignoring this boycott, TIFF has emphatically taken sides — and in the process, forced every filmmaker and audience member who opposes the occupation to cross a type of picket line. Let’s be clear: my protest isn’t against the films or filmmakers you’ve chosen. I’ve seen brilliant works of Israeli and Palestinian cinema at past TIFFs, and will again in coming years. My protest is against the Spotlight itself, and the smug business-as-usual aura it promotes of a “vibrant metropolis [and] dynamic young city… commemorating its centennial”, seemingly untroubled by other anniversaries, such as the 42nd anniversary of the occupation. Isn’t such an uncritical celebration of Tel Aviv right now akin to celebrating Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestles infant formula in 1984, or South African fruit in 1991?

You’re probably groaning right now — “inflammatory rhetoric!” — but I mention these boycott campaigns because they were specific and strategic to their historic moments, and certainly complex. Like these others, the
Israel boycott has been the subject of much debate, with many of us struggling with difficult questions of censorship, constructive engagement and free speech. In our meeting, for instance, you said you supported
economic boycotts like South Africa’s, but not cultural boycotts. Three points: South Africa was also a cultural boycott (asking singers not to play Sun City); culture is one of Canada’s (and Israel’s) largest economic
sectors (this spotlight is funded by a Canadian Ministry of Industry tourism grant, after all); and the Israel rebrand campaign explicitly targets culture as a priority sector.

Many will still say a boycott prevents much needed dialogue between possible allies. That’s why, like Chile, like Nestles, the strategic and specific nature of each case needs to be considered. For instance, I’m helping organize a screening in September for the Toronto Palestinian Film Festival, co-sponsored by Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and the Inside Out Festival. It’s a doc that profiles Ezra Nawi, the queer Israeli activist jailed for blocking army bulldozers from destroying Palestinian homes. Technically, the film probably qualifies as meeting the technical criteria of boycott — not because it was directed by an Israeli filmmaker, but because it received Israeli state funding. Yet all concerned have decided that this film should be seen by Toronto audiences, especially Jews and Palestinians — a strategic, specific choice, and one that has triggered many productive discussions.

I’m sorry I can’t feel the same way about your Tel Aviv spotlight. Despite this past month of emails and meetings, many questions remain for me about its origins, its funding, its programming, its sponsors.  You say it was
initiated in November 2008… but then why would Gissen seem to be claiming it as part of his campaign four months earlier? You’ve told me that TIFF isn’t officially a part of Brand Israel — okay — but why haven’t you
clarified this publicly? Why are only Jewish Israeli filmmakers included? Why are there no voices from the refugee camps and Gaza (or Toronto for that matter), where Tel Aviv’s displaced Palestinians now live? Why only
big budget Israeli state-funded features — why not a program of shorts/docs/indie works by underground Israeli and Palestinian artists? Why is TIFF accepting and/or encouraging the support of the Israeli government
and consulate, a direct flaunting of the boycott, with filmmaker plane tickets, receptions, parties and evidently the Mayor of Tel Aviv opening the spotlight? Why does this feel like a propaganda campaign?

This decision was very tough. For thirty years, TIFF has been my film school and my community, an annual immersion in the best of world cinema. You’ve helped rewrite the canon through your pioneering support of new
voices and difficult ideas, of avant-garde visions and global stories. You’ve opened many doors and many minds, and made me think critically and politically about cinema, about how film can speak out and make a
difference. In particular, you’ve been extraordinarily supportive of my own work, often presenting the hometown premieres of my films to your legendary audiences. You are three of the smartest, sharpest, skillful and most
thoughtful festival heads anywhere — this isn’t hyperbole, with all of you I speak from two decades worth of friendship and deep respect — which makes this all the more inexplicable and troubling.

What eventually determined my decision to pull out was the subject of Covered itself. It’s a doc about the 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival, which was cancelled due to brutal anti-gay violence. The film focuses on the bravery of the organizers and their supporters, and equally, on the ostriches, on those who remained silent, who refused to speak out: most notoriously, the Sarajevo International Film Festival and the Canadian Ambassador in Sarajevo. To stand in judgment of these ostriches before a TIFF audience, but then say nothing about this Tel Aviv spotlight — finally, I realized that that was a brand I couldn’t stomach.

Peace,

John Greyson

TIFF Celebrating Israeli colonialism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid! City-to-City Spotlight on Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival: PACBI

Occupied Ramallah, 27 August 2009

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is gravely concerned that the Toronto International Film Festival 2009 (TIFF) has decided to spotlight Tel Aviv for its inaugural City-to-City program. We encourage filmmakers and audiences to boycott the Spotlight as it extends a gesture of “goodwill” to a colonial and apartheid regime which is violating Palestinian human rights with utter impunity.
According to program notes by Festival co-director and City-to-City programmer Cameron Bailey, the City-to-City programme “will showcase the complex currents running through today’s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”
The ‘diversity’ celebrated by the Spotlight is in fact based on the erasure of the physical presence of the Palestinians, their culture, heritage and memory. The adjacent Palestinian city of Jaffa and numerous villages were emptied of their indigenous inhabitants to make way for Tel Aviv. Many refugees from Jaffa and other destroyed villages that Tel Aviv replaced reside in Toronto today, denied the right to return to their homes.
To celebrate Tel Aviv or any Israeli city for that matter is indefensible, particularly after this year’s lethal assault on Gaza, while Israel continues building its illegal Apartheid wall and settlements and extends its network of checkpoints that suffocate the Palestinian population.  Most recently, in the Israeli war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinian civilians were massacred by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, condemned by UN experts and leading human rights organizations as war crimes. This assault left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children, and injured another 5380 [1]. The 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighbourhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment described by UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights as “a prelude to genocide.”
Such a celebration at this time, therefore, can only be seen by Palestinians and supporters of a just peace around the world as an act of complicity in whitewashing Israel’s war crimes and other grave violations of international law. It is a cynical and immoral politicization of the TIFF.
TIFF has argued that the Festival’s focus is on cities and not nation-states. Tel Aviv is the seat of Israeli political and economic power. It houses the masterminds of Israel’s longstanding policies of ethnic cleansing, racial discrimination and military subjugation. It is more emblematic of apartheid and colonial rule than any other Israeli city. The Spotlight on Tel Aviv is akin to celebrating Sun City during apartheid-era South Africa.
This inaugural City-to-City program is receiving funding for filmmaker participation through the Israel Film Fund, an Israeli public body that receives state funding and support, and which is part and parcel of the Israeli effort to normalize Israel’s presence in the global cultural arena.
In 2008, Toronto was selected as a ‘test market’ for a year-long public relations campaign launched by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to improve Israel’s image.  Israel’s consul general, Amir Gissin, announced then that the culmination of this ‘Brand Israel’ campaign would be at the TIFF [2]
TIFF has claimed that the Spotlight on Tel Aviv has no relationship to the rebranding campaign but have not issued a public statement to that effect.  Whether the City-to-City program is officially connected to the ‘Brand Israel’ campaign or not, it is rebranding to the core: it serves to normalize Israel’s international image, an image tarnished by decades of military brutality and violations of international law.
TIFF has a proud history of supporting independent and progressive filmmakers. It must not become yet another tool for Israel’s apartheid public relations machine.

PACBI@PACBI.org
www.PACBI.org

US Army Chief: We’ll Always Stand by Israel’s Side: YNews

By Yitzhak Benhorin
The US will always stand by Israel’s side, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen said overnight Thursday during a farewell party for Israel’s military attaché in Washington Major-General Benny
Gantz, who will be retuning to Israel following his appointment as IDF deputy chief of staff.

Arabs Paying The Price Of The Holocaust: Tutu: Ha’aretz

By Akiva Eldar

He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, “as it should be.” “But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians…

Another great success of the IOF:

Israel kills Palestinian fisherman: medics: Yahoo.com

Mohammed Attar, 25, was hit by shrapnel, according to Muawiha Hassanein, who heads the territory’s emergency medical services. He had apparently been in his boat just off northern Gaza’s shore when he was hit.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090827/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictgazatoll

U.S. drops demand for Israel building freeze in East Jerusalem: ha’aretz

The Obama administration has agreed to Israel’s request to remove East Jerusalem from negotiations on the impending settlement freeze.

Egypt: Israel must halt building in East Jerusalem before talks: Ha’aretz

Egypt’s foreign minister says East Jerusalem must be included in a freeze of Israeli settlement activity before Middle East peace talks can restart.

Merkel pushes Israel on settlements: Al Jazeera

Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has urged Israel to stop settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories and resume the Middle East peace process…

Israel admitted at least one case of Organ harvesting.:

I did notice missing from the discussion the fact that Israeli authorities themselves have acknowledged at least one pathologist harvesting organs but that story from 2002…

Afghanistan, Israel do defence deal: Pakistan Observer

Akhtar Jamal

Islamabad—Afghanistan and Israel have reached an unprecedented defence deal worth tens of million of dollars under which the Jewish state would supply “SUFA” armoured cars and other defence-related equipment to Kabul.
Reliable sources told this correspondent that an order has been place by Afghanistan for the purchase of “Sufa” (Storm) jeeps from Israeli based Automotive Industries. The Israeli armoured vehicle is used to counter guerilla fighters, whose modern portable weapons often make massive tanks ineffective. Sources say that an Israeli defence official had recently visited Kabul and held talks with Afghan Defence Ministry officials. A three-man Afghan military delegation paid a visit to Israel to settle the terms and conditions. Israel’s automotive Industries were until recently running into deficit but after fresh order Galilee armoured vehicle factory was in full production capacity now. It was not clear if Afghanistan would make the payment to Israelis directly or through U.S. military aid it received. Afghan watchers believe that several dozen Israelis were posted in Afghanistan including several in southwestern provinces bordering Pakistan.

Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem: The Jewish Daily Forward

By Rebecca Dube

When an article in a Swedish newspaper asserted that Israeli soldiers were snatching and killing Palestinian men to harvest their organs for transplant, Israelis reacted with outrage.

to be certain, the most incendiary claims in the story, which was published August 17 in Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, the left-leaning Aftonbladet, are clearly false. There is no evidence that Israeli soldiers are killing Palestinians for their organs, and there is no evidence linking those organ-stealing allegations, as the article’s author did, to the July arrest of a suspected black-market kidney broker in New Jersey, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum.
Israeli leaders and citizens alike have denounced the article, as well as the refusal of Swedish government leaders to condemn it. An online petition calling for a boycott of such Swedish retailers as IKEA, Volvo, H&M and BabyBjörn has garnered more than 12,000 signatures.
But one part of the discredited Swedish story — the question of what happens to bodies after they arrive at morgues, whether dead from violence or from natural causes — may be worth closer examination. Black-market sales of organs taken from bodies without family consent is an international problem, one that has sparked scandals in both the United States and Israel, said Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who is a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in global organ trafficking. In 2004, Israel’s chief state pathologist was removed from his post due, in part, to ethical violations surrounding organ “harvesting” from dead bodies.
“Around the world, poor people are terrified of their bodies ending up in a morgue, and really they should be,” Scheper-Hughes told the Forward.
Ghastly stories of illicit organ sales abound. At the University of California, Irvine, the director of the medical school’s willed-body program was fired in 1999 after the university said he sold spines from donated bodies to a private research firm. A morgue employee at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston was fired in 2002 after a university audit found evidence that he’d been selling body parts for illegal profit, including more than 200 fingernails to a pharmaceutical company. And just last year, a New Jersey dentist pleaded guilty to plundering bodies from funeral homes for parts, selling hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of bone fragments and bits of flesh to tissue processors around the country.
Israel had its own body-parts scandal in 2004, when pathologist Yehuda Hiss was removed from his post as head of the state-run L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine. There was a long history of allegations, substantiated by the Israeli government, of Hiss and his lab taking organs from dead bodies without permission and using them for research or selling them to medical schools
The allegations against Hiss first came to light in 1998, after a Scottish tourist suspected of drug dealing died in a holding cell at Ben Gurion International Airport. After an autopsy in Israel that was overseen by Hiss, the Scotsman’s body was returned to his family, who had a second autopsy performed — which discovered that the dead man was missing his heart and a small bone at the base of his tongue. The family sued, and the scandal was well publicized in Israel and Scotland.
In 2001, an Israeli Health Ministry investigation found that Hiss had been involved for years in taking body parts, such as legs, ovaries and testicles, without family permission during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research and training. He was appointed chief pathologist in 1988. Hiss was never charged with any crime, but in 2004 he was forced to step down from running the state morgue, following years of complaints. (The final straw, apparently, was when the body of a youth killed in a road accident was gnawed upon by a rat in Hiss’s lab.)
Scheper-Hughes said that when she interviewed Hiss in 2004, he admitted that he had done “selective harvesting” of organs from bodies that came to his lab.
The state inquiry found no evidence that Hiss targeted Palestinians; rather, he seemed to view every body that ended up in his morgue, whether Israeli or Palestinian, as fair game for organ harvesting. The families of dead Israeli soldiers were among those who complained about Hiss’s conduct.
The July arrest of an alleged black-market kidney broker in New Jersey may have given Swedish journalist Donald Boström a news peg for his most recent story, but the connection doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Boström claims to have learned of organ-harvesting in Israel in 1992, during the period in which Hiss served as chief pathologist. According to the criminal complaint against Rosenbaum, the accused organ broker told an undercover FBI agent that he’d been dealing in kidney transplants since about 1999.
But timeline aside, the alleged link doesn’t make practical sense. First of all, by the time dead bodies get to the morgue, it’s much too late to transplant their organs into other people. Second, Rosenbaum is alleged to have arranged, for a fee, kidney transplants from live “donors” who traveled to the United States from Israel for the operations; there’s no evidence that he ever dealt with postmortem organs.
The real problem of organ trafficking, Scheper-Hughes said, is more widespread, and it often goes unpunished because few people pay close attention to what happens to dead bodies.
“Because it is so secretive, because nobody likes death, nobody checks these places out and they make their own rules,” she said.
Contact Rebecca Dube at dube@forward.com

ANALYSIS / Israeli academics must pay price to end occupation: Ha’aretz

By Anat Matar

Several days ago Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. In that article he explained why, after years of activity in the peace camp here, he has decided to pin his hopes on applying external pressure on Israel – including sanctions, divestment and an economic, cultural and academic boycott.  He believes, and so do I, that only when the Israeli society’s well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it. Gordon looks at the Israeli society and sees an apartheid state. While the Palestinians’ living conditions deteriorate, many Israelis are benefiting from the occupation. In between the two sides, Israeli society is sinking into complete denial – drawn into extreme hatred and violence.
The academic community has an important role to play in this process. Yet, instead of sounding the alarm, it wakes up only when someone dares approach the international community and desperately call for help.
The worn-out slogan that everybody raises in this context is “academic freedom,” but it is time to somewhat crack this myth. The appeal to academic freedom was born during the Enlightenment, when ruling powers tried to suppress independent minded thinkers. Already then, more than 200 years ago, Imannuel Kant differentiated between academics whose expertise (law, theology, and medicine) served the establishment and those who had neither power nor proximity to power. As for the first, he said, there was no sense in talking about “freedom” or “independent thought” as any use of such terminology is cynical.
Since then, cynicism has spread to other faculties as well. At best academic freedom was perceived as the right to ask troubling questions. At worst was the right to harass whomever asked too much.
When the flag of academic freedom is raised, the oppressor and not the oppressed is usually the one who flies it. What is that academic freedom that so interests the academic community in Israel? When, for example, has it shown concern for the state of academic freedom in the occupied territories?
This school year in Gaza will open in shattered classrooms as there are no building materials there for rehabilitating the ruins; without notebooks, books and writing utensils that cannot be brought into Gaza because of the goods embargo (yes, Israel may boycott schools there and no cry is heard).
Hundreds of students in West Bank universities are under arrest or detention in Israeli jails, usually because they belong to student organizations that the ruling power does not like. The separation fence and the barriers prevent students and lecturers from reaching classes, libraries and tests. Attending conferences abroad is almost unthinkable and the entry of experts who bear foreign passports is permitted only sparingly. On the other hand, members of the Israeli academia staunchly guard their right to research what the regime expects them to research and appoint former army officers to university positions. Tel Aviv University alone prides itself over the fact that the Defense Ministry is funding 55 of its research projects and that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Defense Department, is funding nine more. All the universities offer special study programs for the defense establishment.
Are those programs met with any protest? In contrast with the accepted impression, only few lecturers speak up decisively against the occupation, its effect and the increasingly bestial nature of the State of Israel.
The vast majority retains its freedom to be indifferent, up to the moment that someone begs the international community for rescue. Then the voices rise from right and left, the indifference disappears, and violence replaces it: Boycott Israeli universities? This strikes at the holy of holies, academic freedom!

The writer is a lecturer in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Philosophy

Make Zionism History!

Help to stop the next war! Support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of the Israeli regime

Support Palestinian universities – spread the BDS campaign – it is what people under the Israeli jackboot ask you to do!

Israeli War Criminals – to the International Criminal Court, NOW!

Articles are only partially reproduced on this website; To read them in full, please use the links

Breaking silence on Gaza abuses: BBC

A human rights group founded by Israeli veterans has collected what it says are damning testimonies from soldiers who took part in the offensive in January against Hamas fighters in Gaza. BBC correspondent Paul Wood looks at the anonymous claims presented by Breaking the Silence. Standing by the ruins of his home in Gaza, Majdi Abed Rabbo explained how Israeli troops had used him as a human shield. “The Israeli soldiers handcuffed me and pointed the gun at my neck,” he said. “They controlled every step.” In this manner, Mr Abed Rabbo said, he was forced to go in ahead of Israeli soldiers as they cleared houses containing Palestinian gunmen. This same incident was described by one of the Israeli soldiers who spoke to Breaking the Silence.

“A Palestinian neighbour is brought in,” he says. “It was procedure. The soldier places his gun barrel on the civilian’s shoulder.” If true, that was a clear breach of the international laws of war – which say soldiers have a duty of care to non-combatants – and of Israeli law. The Israeli Supreme Court outlawed the so-called “neighbour policy”, of using Palestinians to shield advancing troops, in 2005. Until now, the Israeli army always had a ready answer to allegations that war crimes were committed during its offensive in Gaza.
Such claims were, they said, Palestinian propaganda. Now, though, the accusations of abuse are being made by Israeli soldiers.

Testimonies collected

The common thread in the almost 30 testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence is that orders were given to prevent Israeli casualties, whatever the cost in Palestinian lives. Writing the report’s introduction, the Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard says: “All the witnesses agreed that they received a particular order repeatedly, in a way that did not leave much room for doubt, to do everything, everything, so that they – the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers – would not be harmed.
“The soldiers tell in their testimonies how this unwritten message, which came from brigade, battalion, and company commanders in morale-building conversations before entering Gaza, translated into zero patience for the life of enemy civilians.” The lawyer adds: “Violations of the laws of war are liable to be war crimes.” Here are just a few quotes which give a flavour of the soldiers’ testimony. The accumulation of detail is convincing and, in the eyes of Israel’s critics, damning.
“Things are happening in his battalion of which he (the commander) has no idea. There are people who deserve to go to jail…
“When your company commander and battalion commander tell you, ‘Go on, fire!’ the soldiers will not hold back. They are waiting for this day, the fun of shooting and feeling all that power in your hands…

“Fire power was insane. We went in and the booms were just mad. The minute we got to our starting line, we simply began to fire at suspect places. You see a house, a window, shoot at the window. You don’t see a terrorist there? Fire at the window. In urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents.”Israeli military spokeswoman Lt Col Avital Leibovich dismissed the testimonies as anonymous hearsay, designed to embarrass the army rather than lead to serious investigations. She questioned why Breaking the Silence had not handed over its findings earlier, before the media were informed. “We are investigating many of the requests from NGOs and other groups,” she said. “But when you have a report that is based on hearsay, with no facts whatsoever, we can’t do anything with it.” In the past, says the Israeli military, some allegations of wrong-doing in Gaza have turned out to be second or third-hand accounts, the result of soldiers recycling rumours in the battalion rather than describing what they themselves witnessed.
Credible record
But Breaking the Silence has a long – and to many, credible – record of getting soldiers to talk about experiences which might not reflect well on the Army. The group is funded by the British, Dutch and Spanish governments, as well as the EU.
It says the testimony is anonymous because of orders to Israeli soldiers not to speak out publicly.
Some of the collected testimony is highly specific. In the case of Majdi Abed Rabbo, the Israeli military police have now opened an investigation, lending at least some credibility to the soldier who said the “neighbour policy” was in widespread use.
The military maintains it went to extraordinary lengths to ensure civilians were not harmed in Gaza. The soldiers’ testimony does describe in detail how leaflets were distributed in areas they were about to enter – warning people to leave. But it is what happened after that, says Breaking the Silence, which calls into question the morality of the Israeli army’s actions.

Read here about Israeli justice for Jews. Palestinians are put into life imprisinment with hardly any evidence, not to mention evidence recorded on film. It is different for Jews, of course.

Charges dropped against settler filmed shooting Palestinians: Ha’aretz

The State Prosecution said Tuesday that it was dropping charges against a resident of Kiryat Arba who was caught on film shooting at two Palestinians in the West Bank last December. The prosecution said it made the decision not to try Ze’ev Braude because such a move could expose classified information that might harm the security of the state. Braude, 51, was filmed by the human rights group B’Tselem opening fire on the Palestinians at close range during the evacuation of a disputed house in Hebron. He was initially charged with intending to cause grievous bodily harm. Following the indictment, Defense Minister Ehud Barak signed off on a document guaranteeing immunity concerning sources of information for the Shin Bet, its modus operandi and the units and personnel operating within the framework of the organization. Braude’s attorney Ariel Atari requested that the court instruct the State Prosecution to reveal the secret evidence in order to help Braude’s defense. The prosecution argued that revealing the information would harm state security and added that if obligated to reveal the information, it would drop the charges against Braude.

Israel blocks French envoys from Gaza to protest Shalit captivity: Ha’aretz

Israeli authorities on Tuesday refused to allow more than a dozen French diplomats entry into the Gaza Strip, where they planned to take part in a Bastille Day celebration. A senior security source said the 15 diplomats and East Jerusalem consulate employees were denied entry as part of an Israeli protest over the fact that Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit is still captive in the Gaza Strip without basic rights. “They [the diplomats] should not be allowed to celebrate a holiday marking freedom and human rights for the people of Gaza while Gilad Shalit remains in captivity,” said the source. Israel objected to France’s plan to hold a Bastille Day celebration in Gaza particularly in light of the fact that Shalit, who was abducted by Hamas militants in a 2006 cross-border raid, has dual French-Israeli citizenship.
During a Bastille Day celebration at the French embassy in Jaffa, Ambassador Jean Michel Casa declared that Shalit must immediately be freed, a sentiment shared by President Nicolas Sarkozy. The French Consulate in East Jerusalem serves as liaison with the West Bank and has a small delegation in the Gaza Strip, as well. Israel officially denied the consulate’s request for 15 entry visas – made earlier Tuesday – on the grounds that such requests must be submitted 48 hours in advance. A Foreign Ministry source said that French Consulate must have been well aware that the diplomats would not be granted the permits, accusing them of “trying to be provocative” and blame Israel for ruining the French holiday. “The French consulate employees are known to be provocative and every week it’s a different story with them,” said the source.

Amira Hass / Israeli Jewish worldview sanctifies West Bank inequality: Ha’aretz

The Jahalin tribe sends happy tidings from the West Bank to their brethren in Gaza: The effects of the Israeli siege can be overcome by building homes from used tires filled and covered with mud. This way refuse can be recycled, construction costs minimized and structures insulated from the cold and heat, something concrete buildings cannot do. In one of the Jahalin encampments in the West Bank’s Wadi Qelt region, they’re building a school and kindergarten from used tires. This ignites the imagination – turning rubbish into treasure. Since their expulsion from the Negev in 1948, the Jahalin tribe has lived on privately-owned land leased from neighboring Palestinian villages. This was long before expanding settlements repeatedly encroached on their property and military edicts denied them the chance to wander with their flocks in accordance with the seasons and available water sources. The Jahalin themselves built the school close to their homes because the authorities in charge of the land and planning did not do it. The Israeli government and Civil Administration, which have exclusive control over Area C (60 percent of the West Bank), do not take the Bedouin into account when determining their overall planning. Without a master plan, there is no real procedure for obtaining building permits, not for permanent structures for large families or medical clinics. As a result, the Jahalin and other seminomadic groups in the Jordan Valley are not hooked up to the electricity grid and water system. They live in tents and shacks slated for demolition by the authorities. By extension, the “eco-friendly” school and kindergarten are also considered illegal and have been marked for demolition. Some observers liken the “illegality” of these structures to that of the Israeli outposts. This comparison is not only deceitful but also hypocritical because the outposts are not dismantled despite any demolition orders. Also, behind every outpost is a government agency that has helped establish it. And there is the matter of the settlements, all of which are illegal, not just the outposts.

The root of the problem is not the illegality of the settlements and outposts, but the Israeli Jewish worldview that sanctifies inequality. In other words, what is naturally befitting for the Jews ought to be denied the Palestinians. What is painful and lacking for the Jews is not a problem for the Palestinians. The official talk of two states conceals the prevailing reality of one state, from the river to the sea, a state that embraces the South African ideology of “separate but unequal development of the races.” All on the same strip of land, all under the rule of the same government.
The Jews’ natural growth and their right to enclose balconies on territories that Israel conquered in 1967 have been the subject of discussions between its top officials and world leaders. The Bedouin exercising their right to educate their children under humane conditions in a place they have lived for the last 61 years has come to be considered a violation of the law. The law is determined by man and reflects the current balance of power, either on a global or local scale. Equality, on the other hand, is a human attribute. Throughout history, this attribute has become clearer thanks to never-ending social struggles. Their success – either full or partial – influences the laws. There once was a law that forbade black slaves from learning to read and write. There were also criminals who broke the law by studying and teaching. Anyone who issues the order to raze a school for Bedouin, approves the order or carries it out aligns himself with the thinkers, jurists, and law enforcement officials of the slavery regime.

Is Israel guilty of piracy?: The Electronic Intifada, 13 July 2009

When the Israeli navy seized a small humanitarian boat flying under the Greek flag on Tuesday, 30 June, did the commandos commit acts of piracy when they forced the crew and 21 passengers — including a former US Congresswoman and Nobel Laureate — to port in Israel? May Israeli officials be prosecuted, and if so where?
On the morning of 29 June, the Spirit of Humanity set sail from Cyprus to the Gaza Strip carrying approximately three tons of medical aid, olive saplings, children’s toys and other humanitarian items for the area’s 1.5 million residents. The Spirit traveled through international waters when, at approximately 1:30am, several Israeli gunships surrounded the boat, jammed its GPS, navigation and radar systems and threatened to open fire. Heavily-armed Israeli naval commandos boarded the boat, ordered the Spirit’s passengers to lie face down, roughed up several, and ultimately forced the humanitarian volunteers to Israel where they were held for days in hot, crowded, cells before all but two (both Israeli citizens) were ultimately deported.
The Israeli navy routinely harasses Palestinian fishing boats off the coast of Gaza, and has on occasion seized boats and detained their crews , just as it did with the Spirit of Humanity.
An act of piracy, as defined by the law of nations, includes illegal acts of violence or detention committed on the high seas or outside the jurisdiction of any state. While today piracy often conjures up ideas of buried treasure, sunken ships and Johnny Depp at his best; olden-day pirates instilled a sense of terror in seafarers traveling in no-man’s zones, outside the protection of any state.
Israel’s commandeering of the Spirit last week shares a lot in common with these traditional acts of piracy: the Spirit’s unarmed passengers traveled on the high seas, vulnerable, uncertain if they would live or die when the Israeli navy surrounded them and took them prisoners. But do Israel’s actions constitute piracy? The answer is: Yes.
Israel committed clear acts of violence and detention against the Spirit’s passengers, acts, which, under the UN Convention on the High Seas, are unlawful. A warship may legitimately board a foreign ship on the high seas in only three circumstances: there is reason to believe the boat was engaged in piracy, the slave trade or the boat — despite its flag — is really of the same nationality as the warship. None of these circumstances apply here.
According to a 1 July press release from the Free Gaza Movement, the Spirit of Humanity was in international waters when the Israeli navy captured it. However, even if the boat was in Gazan waters, the above acts still constitute piracy because Gazan waters are outside the jurisdiction of any state — and certainly outside Israel’s jurisdiction. Jurisdiction, it should be noted, is different from control. While Israel exercises de facto control over Gaza, it has no legal de jure jurisdiction over Gaza.
Furthermore, while piracy has traditionally been defined as a private act, there is no reason why Israel’s seizure of the Spirit, its passengers and its humanitarian cargo should not be considered an act of state or state-sponsored piracy.
Israel committed an act of piracy by hijacking the Spirit, forcing its passengers to Israel, imprisoning them and taking their cargo and personal items. But why is it important that Israel be charged with piracy, especially when it already faces a host of new war crimes accusations?
The law of nations has long upheld the principle that pirates are “hostis humani generis” — an “enemy of all mankind.” In the 18th century, nations reached a consensus that piracy was universally wrong and every nation has a right to prosecute pirates of any nationality. In United States v. Smith, 18 U.S. 153 (1820), the US Supreme Court held that the principle of universal jurisdiction applies to punishing all persons, whether “natives or foreigners, who have committed [piracy] against any persons whatsoever ….”
In other words, piracy was one of the first criminal acts recognized by international law. Today, international law confers on piracy, along with slavery and genocide, the status of a jus cogens — a norm or a right that can never be derogated. This means a state is bound by a jus cogens norm whether or not it consents to its application. As an example, a country may not engage in slavery simply because it has enacted laws making it permissible to do so.
Filing indictments against Israeli government officials and senior army commanders for crimes related to piracy is important not only because the perpetrators of the 30 June hijacking must be brought to justice, but also to reinforce the legitimacy of international law, which is increasingly viewed as being selectively used by rich countries as a tool to oppress poorer ones. The War on Piracy has been highlighted most recently by UN Security Resolution 1851, initiated by the US, which calls on all states to actively take part in the fight against piracy off the coast of Somalia, and even authorizes states to take measures inside Somalia.
The laws of piracy should not be selectively applied to poor Africans who hijack huge tankers belonging to rich corporations. Just as US prosecutors in the Southern District of New York indicted a Somali national on ten counts including piracy and hijacking, similar charges should be brought against the Israelis who committed, aided and abetted in the 30 June act of piracy and any others against Palestinian vessels. But more importantly, governments and international civil society must do all they can to pull Israel back into the bounds of international law and truly support the self-determination and human rights of all peoples, including Palestinians.
Radhika Sainath is a Los Angeles-based civil rights attorney. She recently returned from a National Lawyers Guild fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip and is an editor and author of Peace Under Fire: Israel/Palestine and the International Solidarity Movement.

The victory of defeat: The Electronic Intifada

Jonathan Cook,  10 July 2009

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has been much criticized in Israel, as well as abroad, for failing to present his own diplomatic initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to forestall US intervention. Netanyahu may have huffed and puffed before giving voice to the phrase “two states for two peoples” at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but the contours of just such a Palestinian state — or states — have been emerging undisturbed for some time. In fact, Netanyahu appears every bit as committed as his predecessors to creating the facts of an Israeli-imposed two-state solution, one he and others in Israel’s leadership doubtless hope will eventually be adopted by the White House as the “pragmatic” — if far from ideal — option.
While Israel has been buying yet more time with Washington in bickering over a paltry settlement freeze, it has been forging ahead with the process of creating two Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, that, despite supposedly emerging from occupation, are in reality sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill. This is creating a culture of absolute Israeli control and absolute Palestinian dependency, enforced by proxy Palestinian rulers acting as mini-dictatorships. For a growing number of Palestinians, the conditions of bare subsistence and even survival are Israeli gifts that few can afford to spurn through political activity, let alone civil disobedience or armed resistance. The Palestinian will to organize and resist as their land is seized for settlements is being inexorably sapped. It is little mentioned but Israel all but abandoned completing its massive separation wall in the West Bank some time ago. There are significant gaps waiting to be filled, but, with things having grown so quiet and the cost of each kilometer of wall so high, the sense of political and military urgency has evaporated. Suicide bombers, had they the determination, could still slip into Israel. But increasingly Palestinians view such attacks as futile, if not counterproductive: Israel simply wins greater international sympathy and has the pretext to turn the screw yet tighter on Palestinian life. None of this has been lost on Israel’s leaders of either the so-called Left or Right.
Rather than being an aberration in response to rocket attacks, the blockade of Gaza has become Israel’s template for Palestinian statehood. The West Bank is rapidly undergoing its own version of disengagement and besiegement, with similar predictable results.
Gaza’s blockade — and the savage battering it took in December and January — has suggested even to Netanyahu that the Israeli version of the carrot-and-stick approach works. The stick — a devastated Gaza unable to rise from the rubble because aid and basic goods are kept out — has transformed most of the population into a nation dependent on handouts, borrowing where possible to buy necessities smuggled through the tunnels, and concentrating on the lonely art of survival. As the normally restrained International Committee of the Red Cross reported last month: “Most of the very poor have exhausted their coping mechanisms. Many have no savings left. They have sold private belongings such as jewelry and furniture and started to sell productive assets including farm animals, land, fishing boats or cars used as taxis.” The carrot — if it can be called that — is directed towards Gaza’s leaders, Hamas, rather than its ordinary inhabitants. The message is simple: keep the rocket fire in check and we won’t attack again. We will allow you to rule over the remnants of Gaza.
In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more tantalizingly visible. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is colluding in the creation of a series of mini-fiefdoms based on the main cities.
Trained by the US military, Palestinian security forces with light weapons are taking back control of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Qalqilya, Ramallah and so on, while the PA is encouraged by promises of economic charity to prop up its legitimacy. The leader of a Palestinian non-governmental organization in Ramallah confided at the weekend that what is being created are “City Leagues” — a mocking reference to the Palestinian regional militias known as the Village Leagues armed by Israel in the early 1980s to stamp out Palestinian nationalism by threatening and attacking local political activists. Those were a dismal failure; this time Palestinians are less sure Israel will not succeed. Palestinian prisons are starting to fill not only with those suspected of belonging to Hamas but those who dissent from Fatah rule. The ground is being carefully tended by Israel to create a brutal client state. The stick, as in Gaza, is directed at the ordinary population. The news headlines are of the easing of movement restrictions at the checkpoints. That may be true at a few places deep in the West Bank. But at the big checkpoints that separate Israel from what is left of the West Bank, such as the one at Qalandiya between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the monitoring of Palestinian movement is becoming fearsomely sophisticated. These checkpoints are now more like small airport terminals, with limited numbers of “trusted” Palestinians entitled to pass through. To escape the poverty of the West Bank each day to reach manual work inside Israel, they must have a magnetic ID card storing biometric data and a special permit. Cards are denied by Israel not only to those with a record of political activity but also to those who have distant relatives deemed to be politically engaged. The same non-governmental leader concluded, again with bitter irony: “Our leaders are declaring victory: the victory of defeat.” Should Abbas and his PA functionaries sign up to this Israeli vision of statehood, the defeat for the Palestinians will be greater still.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Israel and EU clash over settlements: The Electronic Intifada

Mel Frykberg,  14 July 2009

RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) – The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s concern over an “unusually harsh statement” by the European Commission over Israel’s settlement policy indicates a growing unease between Israel and the EU. The European Commission (EC), the executive arm of the EU, said that Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank was strangling the Palestinian economy and forcing Palestinians there to become more dependent on foreign aid. “It is the European taxpayers who pay most of the price of this dependence,” read the 6 July EC statement.
According to the EC, expropriation of fertile Palestinian land for the settlements, the settler-only bypass roads which serve them, and the hundreds of West Bank checkpoints manned by the Israeli army have stunted Palestinian economic growth.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) states that $509 million is spent annually on maintaining Israeli settler roads and checkpoints. The bypass roads are meant to make it easier and quicker for Israeli settlers to reach Israel proper, while the checkpoints ostensibly serve their security. OCHA released a report in June saying that nearly 30 percent of the West Bank, which under international law belongs to the Palestinians, has been expropriated by the Israelis as closed military zones and for nature reserves. Together with Israel’s more than 100 illegal settlements — home to approximately 500,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank — approximately 40 percent of the territory has been taken by Israel.
The West Bank is divided into area A, which falls under Palestinian control, area B, which falls under both Israeli military and Palestinian civil control, and area C, which falls under full Israeli control. Palestinians pay a high price by losing land while facing difficulties with travel and accessing their agricultural fields. Many are regularly denied building permits by the Israeli authorities to build in areas B and C. They therefore build without the requisite permits and then face the possibility of being evicted and having their homes demolished by the Israeli army. They also struggle to get permits to connect to electricity and water infrastructure. OCHA says that during the last few months it has seen a tightening of restrictions in areas in and around the West Bank’s Jordan Valley, as well as the Bethlehem and Hebron areas. The herding and farming communities which reside in Israel’s self-declared military zones in these regions face particular hardships, with their homes and livelihoods now under threat. Many had lost grazing land to make way for settlement enlargement and security. Now they face eviction. About 300 Palestinians, including 170 children, received evacuation and demolition orders from the Israeli army in May alone.
Osama Jarrer, deputy director of the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Agriculture in the Hebron governorate in the southern West Bank, said many farmers there had been forced to reduce their flocks. “Because hundreds of farmers are in the same position there is a glut of livestock, so they sell at a reduced price. But even when they sell to get out of the business more than half of them will not be able to pay their fodder and concentrated feed debts,” Jarrer told IPS. The situation of Hebron’s 3,000 farmers, and their 30,000 dependents, has been aggravated by rising international fodder prices and a water shortage.
The water shortage is due to inequitable water distribution between Palestinians and Israeli setters, and a drought which has gripped this part of the Middle East for several years. Meanwhile, as Palestinians experience the practical consequences of Israel’s West Bank settlement policy on the ground, Israel and the US continue to haggle over the theoretical intricacies in capitals abroad.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak met with US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell in London a two weeks ago, the latest in a round of meetings over the disputed settlements. With a broad smile and much fanfare Barak announced to the assembled media that Israel would be dismantling 23 outposts in the West Bank in the near future. The outposts comprise a small number of caravans, often unattached to water and electricity. They are illegal under Israeli law. Barak failed to mention the settlements in the West Bank. These range from several hundred residents to small cities with tens of thousands of settlers and associated infrastructure. They are illegal under international law. One of the small outposts slated for evacuation is Migron, near the central West Bank city Ramallah, after Israeli rights group Peace Now petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice.
However, the state asked for a year’s extension before the evacuation would take place, leaving plenty of time for facts on the ground to be established. The 50 families to be evacuated are to be moved to new homes being built in the nearby Adam settlement, a mere reshuffling of settler numbers.
Moreover, according to documents presented to the court, aside from requesting building permits for 50 new housing units in Adam, Barak last month also approved detailed planning for constructing an initial 200 housing units. These will be part of the general construction blueprint for an additional 1,450 units in Adam. Migron was built illegally on privately owned Palestinian land in 2002. In an earlier petition in 2006 an Israeli court acknowledged the Palestinian ownership and the illegality of the outpost. But it will only be evacuated in 2010 in theory, and the chances of the settlers leaving voluntarily are close to nil. Peace Now says the Israeli government is building an additional 73,300 illegal housing units in the West Bank.
Barak’s manner in dealing with the small outpost of Migron portends poorly for Israel’s future evacuation of larger settlements, and represents a huge disparity between Israeli diplomacy and the reality on the ground. All rights reserved, IPS

Argentinian singer urged to cancel performance at Israeli festival: Open letter, PACBI, 11 July 2009

The following open letter was sent to Argentinian musician Leon Gieco by the The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) on 9 July 2009:

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is writing to express its grave concern about your upcoming appearance in the “Festival Argentina-Israel” in Israel on 14 July. As an artist with a great following because of your commitment to justice, we are writing to urge you to cancel your participation in a festival sponsored by a state that is complicit in some of the worst human rights abuses of our modern era. As you well know, the festival is sponsored by the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, the Municipality of Rishon Lezion, and the Israeli national airline El Al, all of which are official organs of the state.
You are an artist who has defined his career by the defense of human rights and moral principles. In light of this, we urge you to consider what it would mean to celebrate your music in Israel, a colonial and apartheid state that represents all that you have fought against throughout your professional life. You recently described yourself as “someone who, rather than worry too much about selling records, tries first and foremost to do important things like work for human rights.” Palestine is the contemporary epitome of a people’s struggle against oppression: it is the struggle of a people who have suffered 61 years of ethnic cleansing, brutal colonial subjugation and apartheid.
You ask in your famous song “Solo le pido a Dios” (I Only Ask of God): “I only ask of God That I not be indifferent to war, It is a great monster that treads hard on the poor innocence of people.” This monster of war is what Palestinians have endured for generations! Most recently, in the Israeli attack on the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinian civilians were massacred by Israel’s ferocious military arsenal. This brutal military assault on the Gaza Strip left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children, and injured another 5,380. The 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This criminal assault came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling Israeli siege of Gaza with the clear goal of shattering all spheres of life and collectively punishing the entire population of Gaza, prompting the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights to describe it as “a prelude to genocide.” International human rights organizations and UN organizations are now carrying out war crimes investigations into Israel’s military assault on Gaza.
You recently described your experience with a general who told you, in reference to “Solo le pido a Dios”, that you cannot compose a song for peace in a time of war. In bold defiance of this relentless oppression, you sang for the people whose voice was suppressed by this general and the tyranny he represented. In this song you only asked of God not to be indifferent to suffering. What are the lives of Palestinians living under brutal Israeli occupation, if not suffering? You asked that you did not want to be indifferent to injustice. What is the situation of Palestine — where the most basic human rights are denied an entire nation by its colonial oppressors — if it is not injustice?
For the last 61 years, Israel has imposed its colonial presence on historic Palestine and for the last 42 years, Israel has militarily occupied the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Despite the “peace process” which began 16 years ago, Israel routinely violates Palestinians’ most fundamental human rights with impunity, as documented by local and international human rights organizations. Israel extra-judicially kills Palestinian leaders and activists; keeps over 8,000 Palestinians imprisoned, including numerous members of parliament. Israel is destroying Palestinian homes; killing Palestinian children; and uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinian trees. As we write, Israel continues to build illegal Jewish colonies on occupied Palestinian land and an apartheid infrastructure of Jewish-only roads, blockades and the Apartheid Wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice at the Hague in 2004. Israel denies millions of Palestinian refugees their internationally recognized right to return to their lands. Moreover, Israel maintains a system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens reminiscent of South African apartheid.
In 1978 people began to sing “Solo le pido a Dios” in the streets, against the military dictatorship. In Palestine we cherish those precious voices that dare to scream this human truth in the face of the power of our occupiers. You are an artist whose career has been defined by your courage to speak truth to power; how can you ignore that role now?
Your fellow Argentinian and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, recently explained:
“It is painful to have to point out the aberrant behavior the state of Israel continues to commit against the Palestinian people, attacking, destroying, murdering and oppressing the population: women, children and young people are victims of these atrocities. We can not be silent. We must condemn it and shout: Enough!”
Allowing your work and your role as an artist to be co-opted by a state that has become the most durable modern symbol of colonialism and apartheid, as recognized by a growing community of conscientious artists and intellectuals the world over, is equivalent to lending your support to this state as well as offering it a means to escape its own oppressive reality. In the face of decades of unrelenting oppression, Palestinian civil society has called upon people of conscience throughout the world to take a stand in support of our struggle for freedom and the realization of our inalienable human and national political rights by heeding our call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Virtually all Palestinian artists and cultural figures stand behind this call and have urged their colleagues worldwide to boycott Israeli cultural and arts institutions due to their complicity in perpetuating Israel’s occupation and other forms of oppression against the Palestinian people. In response, in the past few months, groups of artists, comedians, filmmakers, students and academics throughout the world have consolidated their efforts to show solidarity with Palestinians, to condemn Israel’s war crimes and its apartheid regime, and to call for effective political action such as boycotts, divestment drives, and sanctions (BDS). Many prominent international cultural figures including John Berger, Ken Loach, Arundhati Roy, Roger Waters, John Williams, among others, have declared their support for the boycott.
As was the case in South Africa, where international solidarity played a crucial role in bringing down apartheid by boycotting the economic, sports and cultural institutions of the apartheid regime, we sincerely hope you will stand with us in our call to boycott cultural events until Israel fulfills its obligations under international law and fully recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to live in full equality and freedom in their homeland.

As opposed to Canadian Leonard Cohen, intent on singing to Israeli soldiers in Ramat Gan (and, when under pressure, adding Ramallah to his tour, as a sop to to his many critics…) This other famous Canadian, Naomi Klein, is not confused on the question of whose side she is on!

Naomi Klein in Bil’in – 26-6-09

Watch this video to learn about Israel selling stolen properties of Plaestinian refugees, in breach of international law!

Al Jazeera Video Story: Israel sells Palestinian refugee property – Adalah

Lecturers say IDF officer who justified Gaza strikes should not teach law: Ha’aretz

Professors at Tel Aviv University are protesting a decision to appoint Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch as a lecturer for the Faculty of Law.
The objections come in the wake of a recent story published in Haaretz about Sharvit-Baruch, who heads the Israel Defense Forces international law division. The report said that under Sharvit-Baruch’s command, IDF legal experts legitimized strikes involving Gaza civilians, including the bombardment of the Gaza police course closing ceremony. Sharvit-Baruch is planning on retiring from the army in the coming months and is scheduled to teach at the university’s law department next semester.
Leading the protest against Sharvit-Baruch’s appointment is Professor Chaim Ganz of the university’s Minerva Center for Human Rights. Ganz wrote a letter to Professor Hanoch Dagan, the dean of the law faculty, claiming that Sharvit-Baruch’s interpretation of the law during Israel’s Gaza offensive allowed the army to act in ways that constitute potential war crimes. Ganz also said that Sharvit-Baruch harms Israel’s values system.
Dr. Anat Matar, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s philosophy department, said, “I was shocked to learn that half of the second-year law students will learn the foundations of law from someone who helped justify the killing of civilians, including hundreds of children.” Dagan told Haaretz that Pnina Sharvit-Baruch will be teaching a course on international law in the law faculty during the second semester of 2009, as scheduled.
He added that Faculty officials are not authorized and are not fit to respond to the factual questions and legal complexities raised in the article on which Professor Ganz’s claims are based. As long as these questions have not been cleared there is no room for premature conclusions. Dagan will not respond to the claims of the original story, but said that the Faculty of Law makes every effort to expose its students to a variety of opinions and encourages discussion, even about questions that provoke disagreement.

15 June ’09: Israeli human rights organizations to EU: Use Association Council meeting to stop settlements and open Gaza: B’Tselem

On the occasion of the 9th EU-Israel Association Council meeting on 15 June ’09, three prominent Israeli human rights organizations call upon the EU to link the upgrade of EU-Israel relations to respect for human rights and the rule of law.
In their letter to the EU Foreign Ministers, the organizations emphasized that the shared values of democracy and the rule of law lie at the heart of EU-Israel relations. These values must receive tangible expression, both in the bilateral relationship and in diplomatic efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Specifically, both Israel and the EU must take concrete steps to promote and respect human rights and international humanitarian law. The three organizations, therefore, call upon the EU to use the Association Council meeting to explicitly link the upgrade process to Israeli demonstration of tangible improvements in the protection of human rights and international humanitarian law in the Occupied Territories, including:
An immediate halt to all construction in the settlements and any other permanent changes in occupied territory;
An immediate end to the closure of the Gaza Strip;
Cessation of house demolitions;
Initiation of a criminal investigation into every allegation of torture or ill-treatment of Palestinians in Israeli interrogations;
Impartial accountability mechanisms for human rights violations, including those committed during the most recent offensive in Gaza;
Full cooperation with the UN fact-finding mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone.
According to the organizations, the Association Council meeting is a crucial opportunity for the EU to play a key role in the promotion of a process that will offer peace, dignity and security to both Israelis and Palestinians.

Participating organizations: HaMoked, Center for the Defence of the Individual; Physicians for Human Rights-Israel; and B’Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

Make Zionism History

As the BDS campaign spreads, so more and more Jewish ontellectuals are joining it. This time, the Jerusalem Film Festival is boycotted!

“For Once, the Yes Men Say No”: Tikkun

July 1, 2009

Dear Friends at the Jerusalem Film Festival,

We regret to say that we have taken the hard decision to withdraw our film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (http://www.bdsmovement.net/).
This decision does not come easily, as we realize that the festival opposes the policies of the State of Israel, and we have no wish to punish progressives who deplore the state-sponsored violence committed in their name.
This decision does not come easily, as we feel a strong affinity with many people in Israel, sharing with them our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died. Andy lived in Jerusalem for a year long ago, can still get by in Hebrew, and counts several friends there. And Mike has always wanted to connect with the roots of his culture.
But despite all our feelings, we cannot abandon our mission as activists. In the 1980s, there was a call from the people of South Africa to artists and others to boycott that regime, and it helped end apartheid there. Today, there is a clear call for a boycott from Palestinian civil society. Obeying it is our only hope, as filmmakers and activists, of helping put pressure on the Israeli government to comply with international law.
It is painful to do this. But it is even more painful to hear Israeli policies described as “fascist” – not just from the ill-informed and the clueless, not just from the usual anti-semitic morons, but from well-informed Jewish activists within Israel. They know what they’re talking about, and it’s painful to think that they could be right.

As we’re sure you know and deplore, the Israeli government has recently authorized the construction of new units in an illegal West Bank outpost – one that is illegal even according to Israeli law. On Monday, nine Palestinians were injured as Israeli authorities demolished their East Jerusalem home. Tuesday, the Israeli navy stopped a ship from delivering medicine, toys, and other humanitarian relief to Gaza, and detained over twenty foreign peace activists, including a Nobel Peace laureate. Meanwhile, a UN commission was in Gaza investigating much worse abuses committed early this year.
Whatever words are applied to such actions, our film mustn’t help lend an aura of normalcy to a state that makes these decisions. For us, that’s the bottom line.
There is certainly another way to do things in Israel/Palestine, and that is what we must fight for, however feeble our means. As for our film, there is another way for it to be seen in Israel… and in Palestine, so that the people most in need of comic relief, who would never have been able to see it at the Jerusalem Film Festival anyhow, will be able to see it too. Within the next few months, we will make this happen.
To those who want to see our film, savlanut and sabir (patience)! And for all the rest of us, a little LESS patience, please.

L’shanah haba’ah beyerushalayim,

Andy and Mike
The Yes Men
www.theyesmen.org

Wrute and thank them for this step!

Pro-Israel Lobby Alarmed by Growth of Boycott, Divestment Movement: Z Mag

By Art Young
The movement to call Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people is growing, it is “invading the mainstream discourse, becoming part of the constant and unrelenting drumbeat against Israel.” It could eventually threaten the existence of the Jewish state by undermining the support it receives from its strongest backer, the U. S. government.
That was the message of alarm delivered by the Executive Director of the American Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Howard Kohr, to the AIPAC Policy Conference on May 3.[i]
AIPAC is one of the principal organizations that lobby publicly on behalf of Israel in the United States, where it is an important influence on foreign policy. Among the 6,000 dignitaries who attended its policy conference were more than half of the members of the Senate and a third of the members of the House of Representatives. Featured speakers included Vice President Joe Biden, Senator John Kerry, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli President Shimon Peres.
AIPAC and its allies are often alleged to act as a kind of shadow government in Washington, distorting policy in Israel’s interest rather than that of the U.S. This stands reality on its head. The pro-Israel lobby carries real weight in the halls of power, but only because the U.S. and Israel share the same fundamental interests. The U.S. relies on Israel to keep the Arab states of the Middle East divided, weak, and under constant threat of attack, thus ensuring that they remain subservient to Washington. For its part, Israel could not continue to exist in its present form without the strong political and material support it receives from the U.S. It received more than $2.5 billion in military aid from the U.S. in 2009.[ii] Israel and the United States may be partners with shared objectives, but the relationship is a highly unequal one.
Kohr’s address focused on the growing power of the international movement against Israel’s criminal behavior, identifying support for boycott, divestment and sanctions as a particularly worrisome development.
Kohr pointed to a variety of statements and actions against Israel’s onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, including demonstrations in Spain and Germany. He noted that 400 British academics had demanded that Britain’s Science Museum cancel an event highlighting the work of Israeli scientists and that an Italian trade union calls for a boycott of Israeli products.
“Incredibly, there now is even an Israel Apartheid Week conducted in cities across the globe,” he added.
Kohr noted the strength of opposition to Israel in the Middle East, Europe, and in international forums. But he voiced particular concern over the movement’s progress in the United States “where Israel stands accused of apartheid and genocide, where Zionism equals racism, where a former president of the United States can publicly accuse Israel of apartheid.”
Significantly, the AIPAC leader also insisted on the profound nature of the issues that divide supporters and critics of Israeli policy.
What we are witnessing is the attempted delegitimization of Israel; the systematic sowing of doubt that Israel is a nation that has forfeited the world’s concern; a nation whose actions are, in the strict meaning of the term, indefensible. This is more than the simple spewing of hatred. This is a conscious campaign to shift policy, to transform the way Israel is treated by its friends to a state that deserves not our support, but our contempt; not our protection, but pressured to change its essential nature….
I’m not saying that these allegations have become accepted. But they have become acceptable. More and more they are invading the mainstream discourse, becoming part of the constant and unrelenting drumbeat against Israel. These voices are laying the predicate for an abandonment. They’re making the case for Israel’s unworthiness to be allowed what is for any nation the first and most fundamental of rights: the right to self-defense. …. They are preparing us for a world in which Israel stands alone, isolated, and at risk….
Now, there’s little we can do to stop the boycotts of Israeli goods launched in London or Lisbon or Rome. There’s little we can do to stop Israel Apartheid Week. But there is much we can do to stop this campaign from taking hold here. Here where it matters the most, in Washington, where United States policy is forged, we must stop the delegitimization of Israel. We must not let it penetrate the halls of Congress and the counsels of our president.
To win support for Israel from the U.S. ruling class, Kohr argued, friends of Israel must address “the absolute foundation, the base on which all else rests,” that is, the fact that Israel is
“a Western outpost in the Middle East. To those who make that accusation, I say you are right. Israel is the only democratic country in the region that looks West, that looks to the values and the vision we share of what our society, our country should aim at and aspire to. If that foundation of shared values is shaken, the rationale for the policies we pursue today will be stripped away. The reasons the United States would continue to invest nearly $3 billion in Israel’s security; the willingness to stand with Israel, even alone if need be; the readiness to defend Israel’s very existence, all are undermined and undone if Israel is seen to be unjust and unworthy.”
Kohr’s argument that Israel is a garrison state, “a Western outpost in the Middle East,” the front line of the defense of imperialist interests in the region, is not often stated in such forthright terms. But it is quite accurate, and speaks to the source of the conflict in the region.

I was unable to keep the blogrunning over the last ten days, for which apologies. I will fill the gap as time goes on. Today there aresome incredibly important items!

Pirates of the Mediterranean: Israel attacks and ransacks the FreeGaza Boat!

The Free Gaza Movement will again challenge Israel’s illegal closure of the Gaza Strip and collective punishment of its civilian population by sailing the HOPE FLEET, a flotilla of passenger and cargo ships, to Gaza at the end of June 2009 – to be followed by freedom riders this summer. We are turning to you, our friends & supporters, to help make Hope come alive.

Our small yet committed group has already made five successful voyages to Gaza, delivering needed human rights workers & humanitarian supplies, and helping to lessen Gaza’s terrible isolation from the world. We are confident that with the universal outrage over Israel’s massacres in Gaza, we will be able to send a flotilla of ships to shatter the siege and deliver a message of international hope and solidarity to the people of Palestine.
Israeli policies of racism, ethnic cleansing and the brutal military occupation of Palestine demand determined & direct action to overcome them. When our governments fail to act, we – the citizens of the world – must stand up and make our voices heard. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants all people the right to leave and return to their own country – a right that Israel summarily denies Palestinians.
We are looking for ships wishing to join the Hope Fleet and sail to Gaza in late June, and we are looking for high-profile people, including parliamentarians and celebrities, who want to join us and demand that a besieged Gaza cannot forever remain an open-air prison with no access to the world. The Free Gaza Movement will continue to challenge Israel’s brutal policies. We will go to Gaza again, and again, and again, until the Israeli siege is broken and the people of Gaza have access to the rest of the world.
If you are interested in joining or supporting this action, please email Iristulip [at] gmail.com. We will begin collecting names and information as we ready for this historic voyage. With your help, we will make the HOPE FLEET a reality!

The whole world seems to care about the pirates of the Horn of Africa, so what about the Pirates of Mediterranean? 26 miles from the shore, in international water, Israel commits crimes with impunity. Did Obabma read the papers today? Does he care? Is he there?

Attack on Spirit of Humanity: Pursuing Justice

Breaking News:

While in international waters, the Israeli Navy warships surrounded the SPIRIT of HUMANITY. The captain of the boat is reporting that the Israelis are threatening them, telling them to turn back or they will fire on them. The Israeli Navy are jamming all the navigation systems of the boat.

The Pirates of the Mediterranean are once again on the attack. Israel apparently wants to show the whole world that it is a country with absolutely no moral boundaries. A country that without flinching will use its naval forces and mighty firepower to attack a tiny boat of unarmed civilians sailing in international waters and bringing medical supplies the children’s toys to Gaza. If this is not state terrorism and piracy on the high seas, I don’t know what is.

Free Gaza Movement Update at 21:30 EST:

We just spoke again with our people aboard the Spirit of Humanity. The Israeli Navy is continuing to try and intimidate the ship, and is actively jamming its radar, GPS, and navigation systems in direct violation of international maritime law. This jamming is extremely dangerous and directly threatens the welfare and safety of everyone aboard our civilian ship. Because their instrumentation is being jammed, they are using compass & paper to attempt to navigate. They are in international waters & they believe their location is approximately 110km off of the town of Hadera. Everyone is tired but determined. They are not being deterred by the Israeli aggression & are continuing toward Gaza. Please help them.
Earlier, at 20:14 EST, the Free Gaza Movement released the following report:

We just spoke to the passengers. Everyone is OK, but the situation is still very tense. They continue to be surrounded by Israeli warships which are threatening to open fire. The Israeli Navy is actively jamming all navigation systems in violation of international maritime law, endangering the people on board.

Former U.S. Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, speaking from on board the SPIRIT, stated, “I am extremely angry. We demand that the Israeli government call off their attack dogs. We are unarmed civilians aboard an unarmed boat delivering medical and reconstruction aid to other human beings in Gaza. Why in God’s name would Israel want to attack us and threaten our safety and welfare. I call on President Obama and the international community to intervene now to prevent this situation from escalating with potentially drastic results to the civilians on board.”

CALL or FAX Major Liebovitz from the Israeli Navy at:
Tel + 972 5 781 86248 or +972 3737 7777 or +972 3737 6242
Fax +972 3737 6123 or +972 3737 7175

CALL Mark Regev in the Prime Minister’s office at:
Tel +972 2670 5354 or +972 5 0620 3264 mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il

CALL Shlomo Dror in the Ministry of Defence at:
Tel +972 3697 5339 or +972 50629 8148
mediasar@mod.gov.il

Israelis intercept Gaza aid ship: BBC

Israeli forces have boarded a ship trying to carry aid and pro-Palestinian activists to the Gaza Strip in defiance of Israel’s blockade of the territory.
The 20 passengers include former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Prize winner Mairead Maguire.
The activists also include some Britons, campaigners said.
Ms McKinney described it as “an outrageous violation of international law”, as the boat was on a humanitarian mission and was not in Israeli waters.
The Israeli military said the boat was trying to enter Gaza illegally.
The US-based Free Gaza Movement has breached the blockade five times since August 2008.
Two other attempts by the activist group were stopped by Israeli warships during Israel’s three-week military offensive in Gaza in December and January.
Israel keeps a tight hold on Gaza, which is ruled by the militant Palestinian group Hamas.
The Israeli military said the passengers and crew of the Greek-registered ship Arion would be handed over to immigration authorities in Ashdod, and its humanitarian aid cargo would be taken to Gaza by road after a security check.
“An Israeli navy force intercepted, boarded and took control of the cargo boat Arion… as it was illegally attempting to enter the Gaza Strip,” a military spokesman said.
Reconstruction
The British Foreign Office said on Tuesday it was aware of the situation and was trying to clarify the facts.
“We would be concerned if the stories of the Israeli Navy boarding the boat in international waters were true,” a spokesman said.
“We have made it clear to Israel that we are very concerned for the safety of British nationals.”
The mission is the latest by the Free Gaza Movement, which has renamed the ferry Spirit of Humanity.
“This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip,” said Ms McKinney in a statement.
“President [Barack] Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that’s exactly what we tried to do. We’re asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey.”
On Monday, a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross described the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza as people “trapped in despair”, unable to rebuild their lives after Israel’s offensive.
Donors have pledged $4.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation in Gaza following the 22-day offensive which left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties and 200 schools damaged or destroyed, as well as 39 mosques and two churches.

Activist on boat seized by IDF laments world apathy to Gaza: Ha’aretz

One of the international activists who sought to sail to Gaza on Tuesday lamented the world’s “apathy” to the plight of the Hamas-ruled territory shortly before the Israel Navy seized control of the vessel.
“We didn’t come with guns and weapons, but with just humanitarian aid, in an attempt to break the siege of Gaza and to tell the apathetic world about what is happening in the Strip, especially after the last war,” said Huwaida Araf in an interview with the Nazareth-based radio station Al-Shams.
She added: “I was born in the United States to a family of immigrants from the [Arab Israeli] village of Ma’ilia, and still have relatives in Israel, and I’m sure that everyone supports my step.” The voyage’s organizers, the Free Gaza Movement, said the vessel, renamed the Spirit of Humanity, left the Cypriot port of Larnaca on Monday bound for Gaza with three tons of medical supplies.
The activists were attempting to break a blockade of Gaza, imposed by Israel after the Islamic group Hamas took over the territory in a bloody 2007 coup. Early Tuesday, the navy surrounded the vessel, which was also carrying humanitarian aid, and told the activists to turn back because of security risks in the area and the blockade, according to the IDF. But the boat later entered Gaza’s coastal waters, the IDF Spokespersons’ Office said in a statement, after which a naval force boarded it.
No shots were fired during the boarding of the boat, and the crew was to be handed over to the appropriate authorities, the IDF said.
In the statement, the IDF Spokespersons’ Unit added that it “would like to emphasize that any organization or country that wishes to transfer humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, can legally do so via the established crossings between Israel and the Gaza Strip with prior coordination.” The army said humanitarian goods found on board the boat would be transferred to the Gaza Strip, subject to authorization. The 20 passengers include former U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and other activists from Britain, Ireland, Bahrain and Jamaica. The ship was flying a Greek flag, but no Greek citizens were aboard. The Greek government issued a statement saying it sent a message to Israel demanding that it release the ship, crew and passengers. Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Israel was planning to
free the crew and passengers. ”
Nobody wants to keep them here,” he said. “They will be released as soon as they are checked.” The Free Gaza Movement has organized five boat trips to Gaza since August 2008, defying a blockade imposed by Israel when the militant group Hamas
seized control of the territory from its Palestinian rivals in June 2007.
Two other attempts were stopped by Israeli warships during Israel’s three-week offensive against Hamas in the territory in December and January. Nobody on board was harmed. Israel tightened a blockade on Gaza in 2007 after Hamas seized control of the territory, home to some 1.5 million people.

Please note that the piracy act itself did not merita headline in this ‘liberal’ paper. If there ever was an example for Agamben’s concept of the ‘state of exception’, israeli behavioursupplies it daily.

Jews Confront Zionism: Monthly Review

Daniel Lange/Levitsky
Daniel Lang/Levitsky is a theatre worker and organizer based in New York City, and a co-founder of Jews Against the Occupation/NYC. Current projects include Palestine solidarity work with Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East; supporting the Right to the City Alliance with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra (NYC’s radical brass band) and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice; and staging a new queer & gendertreyf production, “Who Loved You Before You Were Mine,” with Killer Sideburns Nepon.
One of the main accomplishments of the Israeli government’s bombing and invasion of the Gaza Strip last winter was to inspire new vitality within leftist and peace groups in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation. This wave of activity has continued after the supposed ceasefire, with demonstrations and direct actions from New York to Los Angeles, Paris, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv. Most noteworthy has been a coming out of sorts of an increasingly large and vocal segment of the Jewish world that is not only opposed to the Israeli government’s wars and military occupations, but critical of Zionism itself.
Blockades of the Israeli consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco were undertaken in part by members of the recently launched International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. The occupation of the Toronto consulate was carried out by Jewish Women for Gaza, including members of the Canadian anti-Zionist Not In Our Name network. A seven-hundred-person demonstration in New York City was organized by Jews Say No, an ad hoc group of Jewish activists, many of them longstanding critics of Zionism. The London diasporist group Jewdas used a hoax e-mail to cancel a pro-war rally called by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and received a flood of support. And the Israeli antinationalist direct action group, Anarchists Against the Wall, blockaded an Israeli Air Force base in Tel Aviv. Almost all of the most visible public events showing Jewish opposition to the latest escalation in the war on Gaza were organized and carried out largely by non- and anti-Zionist Jews (as well as those who oppose Zionism but prefer not to define their politics in relation to it).

A notefrom PACBI: OmarBatghouti writes about a further defeat for Zionist propoganda in Canada:

Another major BDS achievement in the Canadian trade union domain …

The Centrale des Syndicats du Quebec (CSQ), the third largest labor federation in Quebec, Canada, passed a decisive BDS resolution today.
CSQ represents over 180,000 workers.
Letters of support can be sent to:

Rejean Parent , president of the CSQ  parent.rejean@csq.qc.net
Monique Pauzé  President of Champlain Teachers Union mpauze@synd-champlain.qc.ca

The motion is below in French. A rough google translation follows.

————————————————————————-

http://www.csq.qc.net/

Il est résolu que :

* La CSQ réponde favorablement à la demande de 172 organisations
palestiniennes qui  appellent au boycott d’Israël, au retrait des
investissements dans ce pays et à l’imposition de sanctions contre l’état
israélien.
* La CSQ se joigne à la campagne internationale appelant au boycott
d’Israël, au retrait des investissements dans ce pays et à l’imposition de
sanctions contre l’état israélien.
* La CSQ s’engage aussi à faire la promotion de cette campagne de
boycott et à inciter ses membres à soutenir le peuple palestinien dans sa
résistance au quotidien pour mettre fin à l’occupation israélienne.
* L’appui de la CSQ au  boycott, désinvestissement et sanctions contre
Israël demeure jusqu’à ce que Israël se conforme au droit
international et aux principes universels des droits humains.

__._,_.___

Be it resolved that:
* CSQ responds favorably to the request by172 Palestinian organizations
that call for boycott of Israel, the withdrawal of investments from that country and the imposition of sanctions against the state of Israel.
* CSQ is joining the international campaign calling for a boycott of Israel, the withdrawal of investments from this country and the imposition of sanctions against the Israeli state.
* CSQ is also committed to promote this campaign of boycott and encourage its members to support the Palestinian people in their everyday resistance to end the Israeli occupation.
* The support of the CSQ for a boycott, divestment and sanctions against
Israel remains until Israel complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.

activist Ezra Nawi faces the court and needs solidarity!: Kibush Magazine

Tomorrow, July 1, Ezra will be sentenced according to his conviction
of assaulting a police officer and participating in a riot. The
sentencing will take place at 15.00 at the Peace Court (Magistrate`s Court) of Jerusalem *Russian Compound) by judge Eilata Ziskind. Those who wish to show their support are very welcome.
Ezra has written a letter that was placed on The Nation yesterday:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090713/nawi
As mentioned in his letter, the international pressure did not fall on
deaf ears, as the Israeli Ministry of Justice and other governmental
bodies have responded to our letters with confused and irrelevant
statements such as `Mr. Nawi provokes the local residents. [ie. Jewish
Settlers]` or `…Mr. Nawi who has often uses insults…`; the
official response can be found here:
http://www.supportezra.net/JusticeMinistry.pdf
see recent reports on the case in:
New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/world/middleeast/28westbank.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
YNET http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3738813,00.html

We still demand the complete exculpation of Ezra, and the
investigation of his continual harassment by the Israeli police,
Israeli army and the civil administration.
Please post and forward his letter to your friends; as Ezra says `What
strengthens me and gives me energy is the widespread and constant
support I have always received.`

Thank you,
The Committee Supporting Ezra Nawi

PSC Education Conference in Birmingham: PSC

Palestine Solidarity Campaign

PSC National Education Conference

Justice for the Palestinians – the Moral Issue of our Time

Birmingham 11 July 2009

10.30 – 4.00

Carrs Lane Church Centre, Birmingham B4 7SX

Book your tickets online here: http://www.palestinecampaign.org/store/index2.asp?origin=UK&m_id=1&l1_id=22&l2_id=49

·        1948 and after – ethnic cleansing and the refugee question

Prof Ilan Pappe and Karma Nabulsi

·        The Reality of Occupation:

–     Politics – Prof. Manuel Hassassian

–         Economy – Samia Botmeh

–         Health – Dr. Rita Giacaman

·        Lessons from the Anti Apartheid Movement: Victoria Brittain

–         War crimes – Daniel Machover

–         Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – Betty Hunter, Hugh Lanning, Salma Yaqoob

–           After Gaza – getting active on campus – student activist networking session

Cost:  £10 (£7 concessions) – includes lunch

Venue details: http://www.carrslane.co.uk/travel

This conference is an opportunity following the attacks on Gaza for members and supporters to discuss the current situation in Palestine in its historical context and to address issues of solidarity work.

Please book your place with the PSC office or online:

http://www.palestinecampaign.org/store/index2.asp?origin=UK&m_id=1&l1_id=22&l2_id=49

Tel: 02077006192

Email: psc.admin@palestinecampaign.org

www.palestinecampaign.org

Palestinians ‘treated like animals’: Agence France-Presse

From correspondents in Gaza City

Courier Mail   June 17, 2009

FORMER US president Jimmy Carter today met Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in the Gaza Strip, where he called for a lifting of Israel’s blockade, saying Palestinians are being treated “like animals”.
Following the talks, Mr Carter called for an end of “all violence” against both Israelis and Palestinians.
“This is holy land for us all and my hope is that we can have peace… all of us are children of Abraham,” he said at [a meeting] with Mr Haniya, prime minister of the Hamas government in the Palestinian enclave.
Mr Haniya in turn said Hamas supported the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day war.
While Hamas has made similar statements in the past, it has more often insisted that the future state should encompass not only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also all of Israel.
“If there is a real plan to resolve the Palestinian question on the basis of the creation of a Palestinian state within the borders of June 4, 1967 and with full sovereignty, we are in favour of it,” Mr Haniya said.
He also praised US President Barack Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo to the Muslim world.
“We saw a new tone, a new language and a new spirit in the official US rhetoric,” he said. Such praise is rare coming from Hamas, a group pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state and which is listed as a terrorist group by the United States, Israel and the European Union.
The Islamist movement violently seized power in Gaza two years ago, ousting forces loyal to the secular and Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr Carter also passed to Hamas a letter from the parents of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier seized by Gaza militants including Hamas in a cross-border raid almost three years ago, and who remains in captivity.
“I met earlier with Noam Shalit. He asked me to ask them (Hamas) to accept a letter from him to his son. They accepted the letter,” Mr Carter said in Tel Aviv. “My conviction at this moment is that he is alive and well,” Mr Carter said of the soldier whose father he met in Jerusalem on Friday.
Earlier Mr Carter denounced the Israeli blockade and the destruction wrought by its 22-day military offensive against Gaza in December and January. “My primary feeling today is one of grief and despair and an element of anger when I see the destruction perpetrated against innocent people,” Mr Carter said as he toured the impoverished territory.
“Tragically, the international community too often ignores the cries for help and the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings,” he said.
“The starving of 1.5 million human beings of the necessities of life – never before in history has a large community like this been savaged by bombs and missiles and then denied the means to repair itself,” Mr Carter said at a UN school graduation ceremony in Gaza City. The United States and Europe “must try to do all that is necessary to convince Israel and Egypt to allow basic goods into Gaza”, he said. “At same time, there must be no more rockets” from Gaza into Israel, said Mr Carter, who brokered the historic 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. “I have to hold back tears when I see the deliberate destruction that has been wracked against your people,” he said at a destroyed American school, saying it was “deliberately destroyed by bombs from F16s made in my country”.
Israel’s offensive killed more than 1400 Palestinians and left large swathes of the coastal strip sandwiched between Israel and Egypt in ruins. Thirteen Israelis also died in the conflict. “I feel partially responsible for this as must all Americans and Israelis,” Mr Carter said.

Criticising Israel? Is he antisemitic? Maybe he is just human.

Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) Joins Campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel

Ottawa – Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) voted to join the growing international campaign in support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, at its first Annual General Meeting this past weekend. This decision makes IJV the first national Jewish organization in the world to do so. The adopted resolution states that IJV will “Support the Palestinian call for a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and complies with the precepts of international law, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
“Independent Jewish Voices has voted to join the international boycott campaign because we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and support their right to self-determination,” says Diana Ralph, Co-Chair of IJV. “We are calling on the Canadian government and all Members of Parliament to push for immediate sanctions on Israel.”
“The time has come for people around the world to rise to the challenge in Israel/Palestine, as we did for South Africa,” says Fabienne Presentey, Steering Committee member of IJV. “All voices that can be raised against this injustice must be.”
The resolution, which passed with the support of 95% of voting delegates, also calls on the Canadian government to “1) cease its one-sided and uncritical support for Israel and 2) insist that Israel abide by international law”.
The international call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions originated from 170 Palestinian civil society organizations and has sparked a growing global movement, modeled on the international campaign that successfully ended South African Apartheid. Many prominent organizations around the world have joined the BDS campaign, including the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), UNISON (UK), Transport and General Workers’ Union (UK), Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Canadian Union of Public Employees-Ontario, six Norwegian trade unions, Irish Congress of Trad Unions, Scottish Trades Union Congress, and Intersindical Alternativa de Catallunya.
Independent Jewish Voices is a member-led organization, with chapters in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax.

Continue reading June 17, 2009

Some new and some older video clips, all well worth sending to your list!

Alexei Sayle Tells Leonard Cohen: Do NOT Play in Tel Aviv

Israeli Barrier: Security or Apartheid? – Jeff Halper

Israeli Jewish man says Zionism is the cause of the problems

Orthodox Jews condemning atrocities in Gaza and opposing AIPAC

Zionist Thugs Beating Up Jewish Rabbis

Lessons from Iraq’s nuclear quest

A must-watch film clip on the Iraq war!

Universal jurisdiction once again under threat: The Electronic Intifada, 10 June 2009

Sharon Weill and Valentina Azarov

Currently, the fate of one of the only remaining venues that offers a redress mechanism for Palestinians is at stake. It is one that can bring accountability of Israeli officials and decision-makers who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The amendment of universal jurisdiction laws, often incommensurably restricting access to these mechanisms, is at variance with the effect of certain crimes on humanity as a whole, on which the notion of universal jurisdiction is premised. The pressure exerted on the Spanish government to amend its law is an example of the regrettable phenomenon of the weakening of international law at the price of the individual.
On 22 July 2002, around midnight, an Israeli Air Force plane dropped a one-ton bomb on Gaza City’s al-Daraj neighborhood, one of the most densely-populated residential areas in the world. The military objective of this operation was to target and kill Hamas’ former military leader in the Gaza Strip, Salah Shehadeh, who at that time was in his house with his family. As a result of the operation, Shehadeh and 14 civilians were killed, most of them children and infants, and 150 persons were injured, about half of them severely. Houses in the vicinity were either destroyed or damaged. Seven members of the Matar family, whose neighboring house was totally destroyed, were among the casualties.
More than six years later, in Madrid, just a few days after Israel’s most recent invasion of Gaza ended, Judge Fernando Andreu Merelles decided to open a criminal investigation on the basis of universal jurisdiction against seven Israeli political and military officials who were alleged to have committed a war crime — and possibly a crime against humanity — in the course of that operation. The officials included Dan Halutz, then Commander of the Israeli Air Forces; Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, then Israeli Defense Minister; Moshe Yaalon, then Israeli army Chief of Staff; Doron Almog, then Southern Commander of the Israeli army; Giora Eiland, then Head of the Israeli National Security Council; Michael Herzog, then Military Secretary to the Israeli Defense Ministry; and Abraham Dichter, then Director of the General Security Services.
Although the allegations in the action referred only to war crimes, the court stated that the facts could amount to more serious crimes than what was initially claimed — namely, crimes against humanity. This preliminary legal assessment motivated the legal team to work toward basing a new charge. The lawyers announced that they would redouble their efforts to demonstrate that the al-Daraj bombing was part of a policy of “widespread and systematic” attacks directed against a civilian population, fitting the definition of a crime against humanity.
As the request for Israel to provide information on the existence of any judicial proceedings concerning the military operation was not answered and the state expressed its unwillingness to cooperate with the legal team, the Spanish court thereby ruled that the investigation be conducted by the Spanish jurisdiction. On the same day the decision concerning the commencement of the investigation was rendered, Israeli officials sent a 400-page document to the Spanish legal team, stating that the facts of the complaint regarding the operation were subject to proceedings in Israel, and therefore the Spanish court should have declined to exercise jurisdiction.

Continue reading June 15, 2009