“Adidas is lending its brand to cover up and whitewash Israel’s human rights abuses [giving] international cover to Israel’s illegal settlements.”
— letter to Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted
Over 130 Palestinian football clubs urged Adidas to end its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA) over its inclusion of teams based in illegal Israeli settlements across Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Currently there are at least 250 Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They are normally accompanied by the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, increased restrictions on Palestinians’ right to movement due to roadblocks and checkpoints, resource grabbing, increased presence of Israeli occupation forces to provide security, and settler-related violence.
A police officer talks to protesters in Auckland, New Zealand, following Israel’s bombing of a UN school in a Gaza, Jan 8, 2008. (photo: Greg Bowker / AP / New Zealand Herald)
Progress on the Israel question is slowly but surely being made, owing to the strong commitment of places like New Zealand, who continue to move forward unafraid of the consequences.
“New Zealand has and has always had an independent foreign policy — we base our decisions on principle, not being bullied. We will always take a principled foreign policy.”
— Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister
If we were to truly honor the late, great Stephen Hawking, perhaps it would pay to remind ourselves of the principles the acclaimed physicist really stood for. One of those principles was Hawking’s commitment to the boycott of Israel in response to Israel’s longstanding policy of egregiously violating the rights of millions of ordinary Palestinians.
In 2013, Hawking publicly withdrew himself from a conference in Jerusalem on the future of Israel — stating that he had decided to “respect the boycott,” having received advice from Palestinian academics.
“A people under occupation will continue to resist in any way it can. If Israel wants peace it will have to talk to Hamas like Britain did with the IRA [Irish Republican Army],” Hawking said in 2009, speaking in regard to Israel’s brutal assault of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. “Hamas are the democratically elected leaders of the Palestinian people and cannot be ignored.” . . .
However, boycotting Israel is nowhere near as risk-free as boycotting and sanctioning states such as Syria, North Korea or Iran. Boycotting Israel comes with unforeseen consequences that shed light not only on the power and reach of the Zionist lobby and to adherents of the Zionist agenda, but also on how weak the argument in favor of promoting Israel’s human rights-abusing agenda is. If their argument were strong, would they need to actively and forcibly silence those who dissent?
Members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) speak on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest on Mar 19, 2018. (photo: Columbia Spectator)
The presenters invoked Barnard and Columbia’s history of being the first colleges to divest from South African apartheid and more recently from private prison systems in the United States.
“I believe that racism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism are evils upon this world. . . . It shouldn’t be how our college is investing it’s money — our money should be reflecting the values of Barnard students.”
— Caroline Oliver, Barnard College sophomore
Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine urged Barnard’s Student Government Association to encourage the Barnard administration to boycott, divest, and sanction companies that profit from or contribute to the subjugation of Palestinian people at an SGA meeting on Monday night.
The groups that collectively launched the Columbia University Apartheid Divest campaign in 2016 requested to meet with SGA several weeks ago and were offered a time to speak. After the release of the SGA meeting’s agenda on Sunday, the executive board of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, a Jewish students group, encouraged its members to attend the meeting to ensure their viewpoint was also represented.
Over 150 students attended, both in support and in contention of the presentation for the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement. . . .
Ahed Tamimi is seen before her hearing at Ofer Military Court near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Jan 17, 2018. (photo: Oren Ziv / Activestills.org)
The 17-year-old was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier on her patio shortly after her cousin was shot by Israeli soldiers. She has already spent three months in prison.
In late February, the army arrested Ahed’s cousin Mohammed Tamimi — still awaiting surgery to reconstruct the part of his skull that was removed—in a pre-dawn raid. He was interrogated without a lawyer or a parent present, and released a few hours later after being pressured to confess that his head injury was caused by falling off a bicycle — and not by an Israeli rubber-bullet, fragments of which were extracted from his skull.
Ahed Tamimi, the teenager from Nabi Saleh arrested after a video of her attempting to push two armed Israeli soldiers off of her family’s porch went viral, signed a plea deal in Israeli military court on Wednesday, and will serve eight months in prison including three months time served.
Her mother, Nariman, and cousin, Nur, also signed plea deals. Nariman will serve eight months, and Nur was sentenced to time served.
The now-famous video of Ahed was filmed shortly after Israeli soldiers shot her cousin, Mohammed, in the head with a rubber-coated bullet and fractured his skull. An Israeli military court denied bail to Ahed and her mother, Nariman — the latter charged with incitement for live-streaming the video of Ahed and the soldiers — in January.
[The court-ordered agreement with the university allowing Bazian to speak] “is a reflection of the strength of our legal position. We look forward to seeking a declaration that the law, in all of its applications, is unconstitutional.”
— Gadeir Abbas, attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
A university lecturer and Palestine rights activist will be allowed to speak at Arizona State University next month, after initially being barred due to a state law blacklisting advocates of an Israel boycott.
A court-approved agreement with the university allowing the event with Hatem Bazian to go forward is “a welcome development,” Gadeir Abbas, attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told The Electronic Intifada.
In February, the Muslim Students Association at Arizona State University had invited Bazian, University of California at Berkeley lecturer and chair of American Muslims for Palestine, to speak about the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign in support of Palestinian rights during an event on campus in April.
Bazian was asked to sign an agreement that included a clause certifying that he is not engaged with a boycott of Israel.
Senator Harris, not only have I lived in Israel, I have hundreds of family members there, most of them descended from German-Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the early 1930’s. I am in touch with many of them, and I am also in touch with many Jewish-Israeli friends who still live in Israel. I know whereof I speak.
I should also mention that three of my Jewish-Israeli family members (including a 9-year-old boy) were killed in the West Bank in July 2002; they were shot at point-blank range by, presumably, Palestinian snipers while they were traveling by automobile to a friend’s home for Shabbat. So I am not untouched by the violence afflicting Israel-Palestine.
I am an 81-year old resident of Alameda County and I have lived here for 19 years. I grew up in the U.S. northeast and in France, and I have also lived in Scotland and Israel. I am Jewish and I am a committed Palestinian solidarity activist.
It therefore pains me to know that you have been drinking the pro-Israel Kool-Aid. With your international background — not to mention your law degree (I come from a family of lawyers) — I would have thought that you might have understood the brutal reality that is today’s Israel. Your pandering March 28, 2017 speech in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was a disgrace which only reflected and highlighted your ignorance and your willful blindness to the brutal and grotesque reality that is today’s State of Israel. Unfortunately, your recent 2018 remarks to AIPAC have not yet been made public.
Let’s not fall into the trap of condemning bigotry when it comes toward people who look like us, but tolerating it when it comes from people who look like us. We are required to be better than that.
Mike Pompeo’s own statements and record of close associations with organizations that have frequently expressed hostility to Muslims and have trafficked in anti-Muslim conspiracy theories raise serious concerns about his fitness to serve as Secretary of State.
— Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO, Anti-Defamation League
Consistency in public life is often honored in the breach. But when it crosses that thin line into hypocrisy, there ought to be consequences.
We are at that moment with Mike Pompeo, the former Congressman and current CIA director who is President Trump’s choice to be the next Secretary of State.
And whereas many self-appointed leaders of the Jewish community raised holy hell when a couple of Congressmen and one of the leaders of the Women’s March refused to denounce the anti-Semitism of the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, we’ve heard precious little from those same critics about Pompeo’s well-documented anti-Muslim bigotry and his close ties with Islamophobic extremists.
“Equality is about treating everyone the same. Equity is about leveling the playing field.”
“I found a system of segregated roads, with nice roads for Jewish Israeli settlers and separate roads for Palestinians. And all around me I saw inspiring Palestinian popular resistance and its violent suppression by Israel, a military superpower armed by my own country, the United States.
“And I knew that Israel would pay me to move on to that Palestinian land, simply because I’m Jewish. I did not know at the time that Israel’s Jewish majority could only exist through the removal of Palestinians. . . .
“There are places where the character of the State of Israel as a Jewish state must be maintained, and this sometimes comes at the expense of equality. Israel is a Jewish state. It isn’t a state of all its nations. There is place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the price of violation of rights.”
— Ayelet Shaked, Israeli Minister of Justice
If scandal-plagued Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, exits his country’s political scene today, who is likely to replace him? And what does this mean as far as Israel’s Occupation of Palestine is concerned?
Netanyahu, who is currently being charged with multiple cases of corruption, misuse of government funds and public office, has, for years, epitomized the image of Israel internationally.
In Israel, Netanyahu has masterfully kept his rightwing Likud Party at the center of power. Even if as part of larger coalitions — as is often the case in the formation of most of Israeli governments — the Likud, under Netanyahu, has shaped Israeli politics and foreign policy for many years.
As Israel’s Jewish population continues to move to the right, the country’s political ideology has been repeatedly redefined in the last two decades.
Growing numbers of Americans and the civil society institutions to which they belong are supporting economic action against Israel. (photo: Mike Groll / AP)
Growing numbers of Americans and the civil society institutions to which they belong are supporting economic action against Israel as a moral and nonviolent way of showing their disapproval of Israel’s oppression.
It should be a no-brainer that Americans can boycott whomever or whatever they choose without risking governmental punishment. After all, the Supreme Court ruled that states have no “right to prohibit peaceful political activity” such as a boycott, which is an “expression on public issues” that “has always rested on the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) concluded its annual policy conference last week with a lobbying day on Capitol Hill. High on its legislative agenda was advocating for bills that would penalise Americans for engaging in their First Amendment-protected right to boycott for Palestinian rights.
AIPAC conference attendees pressed their elected officials to support the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, sponsored by Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD). The original, draconian version of this bill, unveiled at last year’s AIPAC conference, proposed to jail individuals for 20 years if they advanced an international organization’s call for a boycott of Israel, or even of products from its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
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