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Jan 16, 2009

                                 Palestinian Civil Society

Calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel Until it Complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights

                                      9 July 2005

One year after the historic Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which found Israel’s Wall built on occupied Palestinian territory to be illegal, Israel continues its construction of the colonial Wall with total disregard to the Court’s decision. Thirty eight years into Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights, Israel continues to expand Jewish colonies. It has unilaterally annexed occupied East
Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and is now de facto annexing large parts of the West Bank by means of the Wall.

Israel is also preparing - in the shadow of its planned redeployment from the Gaza Strip - to build and expand colonies in the West Bank. Fifty seven years after the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners, a majority of Palestinians are refugees, most of whom are stateless. Moreover, Israel's entrenched system of racial discrimination against its own Arab-Palestinian citizens remains intact.

In light of Israel’s persistent violations of international law, and Given that, since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies, and Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine, and In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions;

Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression,

We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.


These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1.
Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;


2.
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and


3.
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.


Endorsed by so far over 170 organisations:

The Palestinian political parties, unions, associations, coalitions and organizations
below represent the three integral parts of the people of Palestine: Palestinian
refugees, Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

List includes:

Unions, Associations, Campaigns

1. Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine

(coordinating body for the major political parties in the Occupied Palestinian Territory)

2. Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizen's Rights (PICCR)

3. Union of Arab Community Based Associations (ITTIJAH), Haifa

4. Forum of Palestinian NGOs in Lebanon

5. Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU)

6. General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW)

7. General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT)

8. Federation of Unions of Palestinian Universities’ Professors and Employees

9. Consortium of Professional Associations

10. Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC)

11. Health Work Committees – West Bank

12. Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC)

13. Union of Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC)

14. Union of Health Work Committees – Gaza (UHWC)

15. Union of Palestinian Farmers

16. Occupied Palestine and Syrian Golan Heights Advocacy Initiative (OPGAI)

17. General Union of Disabled Palestinians

18. Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees (PFWAC)

19. Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

20. Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign

21. Union of Teachers of Private Schools

22. Union of Women's Work Committees, Tulkarem (UWWC)

23. Dentists' Association – Jerusalem Center

24. Palestinian Engineers Association

25. Lawyers' Association

26. Network for the Eradication of Illiteracy and Adult Education, Ramallah

27. Coordinating Committee of Rehabilitation Centers – West Bank

28. Coalition of Lebanese Civil Society Organizations (150 organizations)

29. Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), Network of Student-based Canadian
University Associations

 

 

Refugee Rights Associations/Organizations

1. Al-Ard Committees for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria


2. Al-Awda Charitable Society, Beit Jala

3. Al Awda - Palestine Right-to-Return Coalition, U.S.A

4. Al-Awda Toronto

5. Aidun Group – Lebanon

6. Aidun Group – Syria

7. Alrowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Center, Aida refugee camp

8. Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID), Nazareth

9. BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, Bethlehem

10. Committee for Definite Return, Syria

11. Committee for the Defense of Palestinian Refugee Rights, Nablus

12. Consortium of the Displaced Inhabitants of Destroyed Palestinian Villages and Towns

13. Filastinuna – Commission for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria

14. Handala Center, 'Azza (Beit Jibreen) refugee camp, Bethlehem

15. High Committee for the Defense of the Right of Return, Jordan

(including personal endorsement of 71 members of parliament, political parties and unions in Jordan)

16. High National Committee for the Defense of the Right of Return , Ramallah

17. International Right of Return Congress (RORC)

18. Jermana Youth Forum for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria

19. Laji Center, Aida camp, Bethlehem

20. Local Committee for Rehabilitation, Qalandia refugee camp, Jerusalem

21. Local Committee for Rehabilitation of the Disabled, Deheishe refugee camp, Bethlehem

22. Palestinian National Committee for the Defense of the Right of Return, Syria

23. Palestinian Return Association, Syria

24. Palestinian Return Forum, Syria

25. Palestine Right-of-Return Coalition (Palestine, Arab host countries, Europe, North
America)

26. Palestine Right-of-Return Confederation-Europe (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland,
Sweden)

27. Palestinian Youth Forum for the Right of Return, Syria

28. PLO Popular Committees – West Bank refugee camps

29. PLO Popular Committees – Gaza Strip refugee camps

30. Popular Committee – al-'Azza (Beit Jibreen) refugee camp, Bethlehem

31. Popular Committee – Deheishe refugee camp, Bethlehem

32. Shaml - Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Center, Ramallah

33. Union of Women's Activity Centers – West Bank Refugee Camps

34. Union of Youth Activity Centers – Palestine Refugee Camps, West Bank and Gaza

35. Women's Activity Center – Deheishe refugee camp, Bethlehem

36. Yafa Cultural Center, Balata refugee camp, Nablus

 

Organizations

1. Abna' al-Balad Society, Nablus

2. Addameer Center for Human Rights, Gaza

3. Addameer Prisoners' Support and Human Rights Association, Ramallah

4. Alanqa' Cultural Association, Hebron

5. Al-Awda Palestinian Folklore Society, Hebron

6. Al-Doha Children’s Cultural Center, Bethlehem

7. Al-Huda Islamic Center, Bethlehem

8. Al-Jeel al-Jadid Society, Haifa

9. Al-Karameh Cultural Society, Um al-Fahm

10. Al-Maghazi Cultural Center, Gaza

11. Al-Marsad Al-Arabi, occupied Syrian Golan Heights

12. Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Gaza

13. Al-Nahda Cultural Forum, Hebron

14. Al-Taghrid Society for Culture and Arts, Gaza

15. Alternative Tourism Group, Beit Sahour (ATG)

16. Al-Wafa' Charitable Society, Gaza

17. Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ)

18. Arab Association for Human Rights, Nazareth (HRA)

19. Arab Center for Agricultural Development (ACAD)


20. Arab Center for Agricultural Development-Gaza

21. Arab Education Institute (AEI) – Pax Christie Bethlehem

22. Arab Orthodox Charitable Society – Beit Sahour

23. Arab Orthodox Charity – Beit Jala

24. Arab Orthodox Club – Beit Jala

25. Arab Orthodox Club – Beit Sahour

26. Arab Students' Collective, University of Toronto

27. Arab Thought Forum, Jerusalem (AFT)

28. Association for Cultural Exchange Hebron - France

29. Association Najdeh, Lebanon

30. Authority for Environmental Quality, Jenin

31. Bader Society for Development and Reconstruction, Gaza

32. Canadian Palestine Foundation of Quebec, Montreal

33. Center for the Defense of Freedoms, Ramallah

34. Center for Science and Culture, Gaza

35. Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Ramallah- Al-Bireh District

36. Child Development and Entertainment Center, Tulkarem

37. Committee for Popular Participation, Tulkarem

38. Defense for Children International-Palestine Section, Ramallah - DCI/PS

39. El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe

40. Ensan Center for Democracy and Human Rights, Bethlehem

41. Environmental Education Center, Bethlehem

42. FARAH – Palestinian Center for Children, Syria

43. Ghassan Kanafani Society for Development, Gaza

44. Ghassan Kanafani Forum, Syria

45. Gaza Community Mental Health Program, Gaza (GCMHP)

46. Golan for Development, occupied Syrian Golan Heights

47. Halhoul Cultural Forum, Hebron

48. Himayeh Society for Human Rights, Um al-Fahm

49. Holy Land Trust – Bethlehem

50. Home of Saint Nicholas for Old Ages – Beit Jala

51. Human Rights Protection Center, Lebanon

52. In'ash al-Usrah Society, Ramallah

53. International Center of Bethlehem (Dar An-Nadweh)

54. Islah Charitable Society-Bethlehem

55. Jafra Youth Center, Syria

56. Jander Center, al-Azza (Beit Jibreen) refugee camp, Bethlehem

57. Jerusalem Center for Women, Jerusalem (JCW)

58. Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC )

59. Khalil Al Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah

60. Land Research Center, Jerusalem (LRC)

61. Liberated Prisoners' Society, Palestine

62. Local Committee for Social Development, Nablus

63. Local Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled, Nablus

64. MA'AN TV Network, Bethlehem

65. Medical Aid for Palestine, Canada

66. MIFTAH-Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy,
Ramallah

67. Muwatin-The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy

68. National Forum of Martyr's Families, Palestine

69. Near East Council of Churches Committee for Refugee Work – Gaza Area

70. Network of Christian Organizations – Bethlehem - NCOB

71. Palestinian Council for Justice and Peace, Jerusalem

72. Palestinian Counseling Center, Jerusalem (PCC)

73. Palestinian Democratic Youth Union, Lebanon

74. Palestinian Farmers' Society, Gaza

75. Palestinian Hydrology Group for Water and Environment Resources Development-Gaza

76. Palestinian Prisoners' Society-West Bank


77. Palestinian Society for Consumer Protection, Gaza

78. Palestinian University Students' Forum for Peace and Democracy, Hebron

79. Palestinian Women's Struggle Committees

80. Palestinian Working Women Society for Development (PWWSD)

81. Popular Art Centre, Al-Bireh

82. Prisoner's Friends Association – Ansar Al-Sajeen, Majd al-Krum

83. Public Aid Association, Gaza

84. Ramallah Center for Human Rights Studies

85. Saint Afram Association – Bethlehem

86. Saint Vincent De Paule – Beit Jala

87. Senior Citizen Society – Beit Jala

88. Social Development Center, Nablus

89. Society for Self-Development, Hebron

90. Society for Social Work, Tulkarem

91. Society for Voluntary Work and Culture, Um al-Fahm

92. Society of Friends of Prisoners and Detainees, Um al-Fahm

93. Sumoud-Political Prisoners Solidarity Group, Toronto

94. Tamer Institute for Community Education, Ramallah

95. TCC – Teacher's Creativity Center, Ramallah

96. Wi'am Center, Bethlehem

97. Women's Affairs Technical Committee, Ramallah and Gaza (WATC)

98. Women's Studies Center, Jerusalem (WSC)

99. Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counseling, Jerusalem (WCLAC)

100.Yafa for Education and Culture, Nablus

101.Yazour Charitable Society, Nablus

102.YMCA-East Jerusalem

103.Youth Cooperation Forum, Hebron

104.YWCA-Palestine

105.Zakat Committee-al-Khader, Bethlehen

106.Zakat Committee-Deheishe camp, Bethlehem

Call by Palestinian Civil Society for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (English).pdf

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Posted: Jan 16, 2009 8:30am
Jan 16, 2009


“This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses.
We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”

—Ronnie Kasrils after a 2004 visit to the Palestinian territories, quoted in Chris McGreal, Mail & Guardian, October 24, 2006

“Apartheid was all about land. Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here, particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of
property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank.”

—John Dugard, South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor, quoted in Chris McGreal, Mail & Guardian, October 24, 2006.

“The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure—in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation....These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday’s South African township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the occupied territories….If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined.”

—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Nation, July 15, 2002

 “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”

—Former South African President Hendrick Verwoerd, Rand Daily Mail, November
23, 1961

Quotes by Israeli Individuals and Organizations on the Apartheid Analogy

“The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.”

—Former Israeli Minister for Education and Israeli Prize laureate Shulamit Aloni, Yediot Acharonot, December 20, 2006.

“Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same are and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, as is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

—Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank, May 2002

 “It goes without saying that ‘cooperation’ based on the current power relationship is no more than permanent Israeli domination in disguise, and that Palestinian self-rule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanization.”

—Former mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies, 1995

 “To a Jew, to concede the predominance of a racial world view of subjugating Palestinians is difficult to accept. But, unfortunately, the fact of the absence of a racial ideology is not sufficient because the realities that have emerged in some ways are clearly reminiscent of some of the important trappings of an apartheid regime.”

—Israeli lawyer Daniel Seidemann, quoted by Chris McGreal, “Brothers in arms: Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria,” Mail & Guardian, October 24, 2006

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/downloads/AAFQuotes.pdf

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Posted: Jan 16, 2009 8:18am
Dec 11, 2006
Still think that Palestinians are the 'offenders' and Israelis are the 'victims'?!







Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed Since September 29, 2000

122 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 836 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Source)


Chart showing that approximately 5 times more Palestinian children have been killed than Israeli children












Israelis and Palestinians Killed Since September 29, 2000
Chart showing that 3 to 4 times more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.

1,084 Israelis and 4,379 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000. (View Source)














Israelis and Palestinians Injured Since September 29, 2000

7,633 Israelis and 31,142 Palestinians have been injured since September 29, 2000. (View Source)


Chart showing that Palestinians are injured at least four times more often than Israelis.












Daily U.S. Assistance to Israel and the Palestinians
Chart showing that the United States gives over 26 times more assistance to Israel than to Palestinian development organizations.

The U.S. gives $15,139,178 per day to the Israeli government and military and $232,290 per day to Palestinian NGO’s. (View Source)














UN Resolutions Targeting Israel and the Palestinians

Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none. (View Source)


Chart showing that Israel has been targeted by over 60 UN resolutions, while the Palestinians have been targeted by none.












Political Prisoners and Detainees
Chart showing that Israel is holding over 8000 Palestinians prisoner.

1 Israeli is being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 9,599 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel. (View Source)














Demolitions of Israeli and Palestinian Homes

0 Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 4,170 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since September 29, 2000. (View Source)


Chart showing that 2202 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, compared to one Israeli home.












Israeli and Palestinian Unemployment Rates
Chart depicting the fact that the Palestinian unemployment is around 4 times the Israeli unemployment rate.

The Israeli unemployment rate is 9%, while the Palestinian unemployment is estimated at 40%. (View Source)














New Settlements Built (March 2001 - July 2003)

60+ new Jewish-only settlements have been built on confiscated Palestinian land between March 2001 and July 11, 2003. There have been 0 cases of Palestinians confiscating Israeli land and building settlements. (View Source)


Chart showing that Israel has built at least 60 new Jewish-only settlements on Palestinians land.
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Posted: Dec 11, 2006 4:37pm
Aug 12, 2006

Boycott Now!

By VIRGINIA TILLEY

Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is finally time. After years of internal arguments, confusion, and dithering, the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel. Good cause for a boycott has, of course, been in place for decades, as a raft of initiatives already attests. But Israel's war crimes are now so shocking, its extremism so clear, the suffering so great, the UN so helpless, and the international community's need to contain Israel's behavior so urgent and compelling, that the time for global action has matured. A coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel's aggressive acts and crimes against humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding racist logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem.

That second goal of the boycott campaign is indeed the primary one. Calls for a boycott have long cited specific crimes: Israel's continual attacks on Palestinian civilians; its casual disdain for the Palestinian civilian lives "accidentally" destroyed in its assassinations and bombings; its deliberate ruin of the Palestinians' economic and social conditions; its continuing annexation and dismemberment of Palestinian land; its torture of prisoners; its contempt for UN resolutions and international law; and especially, its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. But the boycott cannot target these practices alone. It must target their ideological source.

The true offence to the international community is the racist motivation for these practices, which violates fundamental values and norms of the post-World War II order. That racial ideology isn't subtle or obscure. Mr. Olmert himself has repeatedly thumped the public podium about the "demographic threat" facing Israel: the "threat" that too many non-Jews will - the horror - someday become citizens of Israel. It is the "demographic threat" that, in Israeli doctrine, justifies sealing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip as open-air prisons for millions of people whose only real crime is that they are not Jewish. It is the "demographic threat," not security (Mr. Olmert has clarified), that requires the dreadful Wall to separate Arab and Jewish communities, now juxtaposed in a fragmented landscape, who might otherwise mingle.

"Demographic threat" is the most disgustingly racist phrase still openly deployed in international parlance. It has been mysteriously tolerated by a perplexed international community. But it can be tolerated no longer. Zionist fear of the demographic threat launched the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population in 1948 and 1967, created and perpetuates Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, inspires its terrible human rights abuses against Palestinians, spins into regional unrest like the 1982 attack on Lebanon (that gave rise to Hezbollah), and continues to drive Israeli militarism and aggression.

This open official racism and its attendant violence casts Israel into the ranks of pariah states, of which South Africa was the former banner emblem. In both countries, racist nationalist logic tormented and humiliated the native people. It also regularly spilled over to destabilize their surrounding regions (choc-a-block with "demographic threats"), leading both regimes to cruel and reckless attacks. Driven by a sense of perennial victimhood, they assumed the moral authority to crush the native hordes that threatened to dilute the organic Afrikaner/Jewish nations and the white/western civilization they believed they so nobly represented.

A humiliated white society in South Africa finally gave that myth up. Israel still clings to it. It has now brought Israel to pulverize Lebanon, trying to eliminate Hezbollah and, perhaps, to clear the way for an attack on Iran. Peace offers from the entire Arab world are cast aside like so much garbage. Yet again, the Middle East is plunged into chaos and turmoil, because a normal existence -- peace, full democracy -- is anathema to a regime that must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify the rejectionism that preserves its ethnic/racial character and enables its continuing annexations of land.

Why has this outrageously racist doctrine survived so long, rewarded by billions of dollars in US aid every year? We know the reasons. For too many Westerners, Israel's Jewish character conflates with the Holocaust legacy to make intuitive sense of Israel's claim to be under continual assault. Deep-seated Judeo-Christian bias against Islam demonizes Israel's mostly Muslim victims. European racist prejudice against Arabs (brown-skinned natives) casts their material dispossession as less humanly significant. Naïve Christian visions of the "Holy Land" naturalize Jewish governance in biblical landscapes. Idiot Christian evangelistic notions of the Rapture and the End Times posit Jewish governance as essential to the return of the Messiah and the final Millennium (even though, in that repellent narrative, Jews will roast afterwards).

All those notions and prejudices, long confounding international action, must now be set aside. The raw logic of Israel's distorted self-image and racist doctrines is expressed beyond confusion by the now-stark reality: the moonscape rubble of once-lovely Lebanese villages; a million desperate people trying to survive Israeli aerial attacks as they carry children and wheel disabled grandparents down cratered roads; the limp bodies of children pulled from the dusty basements of crushed buildings. This is the reality of Israel's national doctrine, the direct outcome of its racist worldview. It is endangering everyone, and it must stop.

Designing the Campaign

Much debate has circulated about a boycott campaign, but hitherto it has not moved beyond some ardent but isolated groups. Efforts have stalled on the usual difficult questions: e.g., whether a boycott is morally compulsory to reject Israel's rampant human rights violations or would impede vital engagement with Israeli forums, or whether principled defense of international law must be tempered by (bogus) calls for "balance". Especially, recent debate has foundered on calls for an academic boycott. Concerns here are reasonable, if rather narrow. Universities offer vital connections and arenas for collaboration, debate, and new thinking. Without such forums and their intellectual exchange, some argue, work toward a different future is arguably impeded.

But this argument has exploded along with the southern Lebanese villages, as Israeli university faculties roundly endorse the present war. As Ilan Pappé has repeatedly argued, Israel's universities are not forums for enlightened thought. They are crucibles of reproduction for racist Zionist logics and practice, monitoring and filtering admissible ideas. They produce the lawyers who defend the occupation regime and run its kangaroo "courts"; the civil planners and engineers who design and build the settlements on Palestinian land; the economists and financiers who design and implement the grants that subsidize those settlements; the geologists who facilitate seizure of Palestinian aquifers; the doctors who treat the tortured so that they can be tortured again; the historians and sociologists who make sense of a national society while preserving official lies about its own past; and the poets, playwrights, and novelists who compose the nationalist opus that glorifies and makes (internally, at least) moralistic sense of it all.

Those of us who have met with Jewish Israeli academics in Israeli universities find the vast majority of them, including well-meaning liberals, operating in a strange and unique bubble of enabling fictions. Most of them know nothing about Palestinian life, culture, or experience. They know strangely little about the occupation and its realities, which are crushing people just over the next hill. They have absorbed simplistic notions about rejectionist Arafat, terrorist Hamas, and urbane Abbas. In this special insulated world of illusions, they say nonsense things about unreal factors and fictionalized events. Trying to make sense of their assumptions is no more productive that conversing about the Middle East with the Bush administration's neo-cons, who also live in a strange bubble of ignorance and fantasy. Aside from a few brave and beleaguered souls, this is the world of Israel's universities. It will not change until it has to - when the conditions of its self-reproduction are impaired and its self-deceptions too glaring.

The Real Goal: Changing Minds

The universities represent and reproduce the bubble world of the Israeli Jewish population as a whole. And no people abandons its bubble willingly. In South Africa, Afrikaners clung to their own bubble - their self-exonerating myths about history, civilization, and race -- until they were forced by external sanctions and the collapsing national economy to rethink those myths. Their resistance to doing so, while racist, was not purely vicious. Many kind and well-meaning Afrikaners simply didn't believe they had to rethink ideas that manifested to them as givens and that shaped their reality. (One valued Afrikaner friend here recalls her life during apartheid South Africa as being like The Truman Show, a film in which a man unknowingly grows up in a television show, set in an artificial dome world designed to look like a small town.) When their reality fell apart, suddenly no one would admit to ever having believed or supported it.

The Zionist worldview is an even more complete system. All historical and geographic details are provided to create a total mythical world, in which Jews have rights to the land and Palestinians have none. It is a fully realized construction, like those Hebraized maps carefully drawn by the Zionist movement in the 1930s to erase the ancient Arabic landscape and substitute Hebrew biblical references. It is also very resilient. The "new historians" have exposed the cherished national historical narrative of 1948 and 1967 as a load of fictions, but the same fictions are still reproduced by state agencies to assure Israeli and diaspora Jews of their innocence and the righteousness of their cause. The vast majority of Israelis therefore remain comfortable in their Truman Show and even see any external pressure or criticism as substantiating it. We need no more graphic evidence of that campaign's success than the overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for the present catastrophic assault on Lebanon, reflecting their sincere beliefs that nuclear-power Israel is actually under existential threat by a guerrilla group lobbing katyushas across the border. Staggering to observers, that belief is both sobering and instructive.

To force people steeped in such a worldview to rethink their notions, their historical myths, and their own best interests requires two efforts:

(1) Serious external pressure: here, a full boycott that undermines Israel's capacity to sustain the economic standards its citizens and corporations expect, and which they associate with their own progressive self-image; and

(2) clear and unwavering commitment to the boycott's goal, which - in Israel as in South Africa - must be full equality, dignity, safety, and welfare of everyone in the land, including Palestinians, whose ancestral culture arose there, and the Jewish population, which has built a national society there.

That combination is essential. Nothing else will work. Diplomacy, threats, pleading, the "peace process," mediation, all will be useless until external pressure brings Israel's entire Jewish population to undertake the very difficult task of rethinking their world. This pressure requires the full range of boycotts, sanctions, and divestment that the world can employ. (South African intellectual Steven Friedman has observed wryly that the way to bring down any established settler-colonial regime is to make it choose between profits and identity. Profits, he says, will win every time.)


What to Target

Fortunately, from the South African experience, we know how to go forward, and strategies are proliferating. The basic methods of an international boycott campaign are familiar. First, each person works in his or her own immediate orbit. People might urge divestment from companies investing in Israel by their colleges and universities, corporations, clubs, and churches. Boycott any sports event that hosts an Israeli team, and work with planners to exclude them. Participate in, and visit, no Israeli cultural events - films, plays, music, art exhibits. Avoid collaborating with Israeli professional colleagues, except on anti-racist activism. Don't invite any Israeli academic or writer to contribute to any conference or research and don't attend their panels or buy their books, unless their work is engaged directly in anti-racist activism. Don't visit Israel except for purposes of anti-racist activism. Buy nothing made in Israel: start looking at labels on olive oil, oranges, and clothing. Tell people what you are doing and why. Set up discussion groups everywhere to explain why.

For ideas and allies, try Googling the "boycott Israel" and "sanctions against Israel" campaigns springing up around the world. Know those allies, like the major churches, and tell people about them. For more ideas, read about the history of the boycott of South Africa.

Second, don't be confused by liberal Zionist alternatives that argue against a boycott in favor of "dialogue". If we can draw any conclusion from the last half-century, it is that, without the boycott, dialogue will go nowhere. And don't be confused by liberal-Zionist arguments that Israel will allow Palestinians a state if they only do this or that. Israel is already the only sovereign power in Palestine: what fragments are left to Palestinians cannot make a state. The question now is not whether there is one state, but what kind of state it comprises. The present version is apartheid, and it must change. However difficult to achieve, and however frightening to Jewish Israelis, the only just and stable solution is full democracy.

Third, be prepared for the boycott's opposition, which will be much louder, more vicious, and more dangerous than it was in the boycott of South Africa. Read and assemble solid documentable facts. Support each other loudly and publicly against the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism. And support your media against the same charges. Write to news media and explain just who the "Israel media teams" actually are. Most pro-Israeli activism draws directly from the Israeli government's propaganda outreach programs. Spotlight this fact. Team up to counter their pressure on newspapers, radio stations, and television news forums. Don't let them capture or intimidate public debate. By insisting loudly (and it must be sincere) that the goal is the full equality of dignity and rights of everyone in Israel-Palestine, including the millions of Jewish citizens of Israel, demolish their specious claims of anti-Semitism.

Finally, hold true to the principles that drive the boycott's mission. Don't tolerate the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism in your own group or movement. Anti-Jewish racists are certainly out there, and they are attracted to these campaigns like roaches. They will distract and absorb your energies, while undermining, degrading, and destroying the boycott movement. Some are Zionist plants, who will do so deliberately. If you can't change their minds (and don't spend much time trying, because they will use your efforts to drain your time and distract your energies), denounce them, expel them, ignore them, have no truck with them. They are the enemy of a peaceful future, not its allies - part of the problem, not the solution.


Boycott the Hegemon

This is the moment to turn international pressure on the complicit US, too. It's impossible, today, to exert an effective boycott on the United States, as its products are far too ubiquitous in our lives. But it's quick and easy to launch a boycott of emblematic US products, upsetting its major corporations. It's especially easy to boycott the great global consumables, like Coca-Cola, MacDonald's, Burger King, and KFC, whose leverage has brought anti-democratic pressures on governments the world over. (Through ugly monopoly practices, Coke is a nasty player in developing countries anyway: see, for example, http://www.killercoke.org.) Think you'll miss these foods too much? Is consuming something else for a while too much of a sacrifice, given what is happening to people in Lebanon? And think of the local products you'll be supporting! (And how healthy you will get).

In the US, the impact of these measures may be small. But in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Arab and Muslim worlds, boycotting these famous brands can gain national scope and the impact on corporate profits will be enormous. Never underestimate the power of US corporations to leverage US foreign policy. They are the one force that consistently does so.

But always, always, remember the goal and vision. Anger and hatred, arising from the Lebanon debacle, must be channelled not into retaliation and vengeance but into principled action. Armed struggle against occupation remains legitimate and, if properly handled (no killing of civilians), is a key tool. But the goal of all efforts, of every stamp, must be to secure security for everyone, toward building a new peaceful future. It's very hard, in the midst of our moral outrage, to stay on the high road. That challenge is, however, well-known to human rights campaigns as it is to all three monotheistic faiths. It is what Islam knows as the "great jihad" - the struggle of the heart. It must remain the guiding torch of this effort, which we must defend together.

Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.

http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley08052006.html

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Posted: Aug 12, 2006 5:01pm
Aug 6, 2006
BEIRUT: A hundred Palestinian cultural activists, and as many film professionals from around the world, have called for artists and filmmakers to participate in an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. "We ... appeal to all artists and filmmakers ... to cancel all exhibitions and other cultural events [due to] occur in Israel, to mobilize ... and not allow the continuation of the Israeli offensive to breed complacency," read an open letter dated August 4. "Like the boycott of South African art institutions during apartheid, cultural workers must speak out against the current Israeli war crimes and atrocities."

The artists argue the boycott is justified on several levels.

First, they say, is the destruction of Palestinian ministries and educational institutions, a power plant, bridges, roads, homes, "hundreds of dunums of agricultural land," and the detention, without charge, of 64 Palestinian deputies, Cabinet ministers and officials.

Then there is the land, sea, and air assault on the Lebanese population and infrastructure, which has seen almost a million Lebanese civilians displaced and left at least 900 Lebanese and 160 Palestinians dead - one-third of whom are children, according to the UN.

There is also the matter of Israel's continued occupation of Gaza, the West Bank (East Jerusalem included), and Syria's Golan Heights - all in violation of international law.

Finally, there is the ongoing imprisonment of 9,600 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails and detention centers without due process, among them 130 Palestinian women and 388 children - in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

"We call upon the International community to join us in the boycott of Israeli film festivals, Israeli public venues, and Israeli institutions supported by the government," the letter continues, "and to end all cooperation with these cultural and artistic institutions that to date have refused to take a stand against the occupation, the root cause for this colonial conflict.

"We call upon you to take a stand to appeal to the Israeli people to give up their silence, to abandon their apathy, and to face up to their responsibility in the destruction and killing their elected government is wreaking. ... Those Israeli artists, academics and intellectuals who continue to serve in the Israeli Army they are directly implicated in these crimes.

"To endorse or answer this call for a cultural boycott of Israel please send an email with your name, position and country to pal.filmmakers@gmail.com."

To read the open letter in full, see http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=315_0_1_0_C

 
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=74538#
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Posted: Aug 6, 2006 10:16pm

 

 
 
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