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BDS: How a non-violent movement has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian debate

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 Bethlehem, Jun 2015. (photo: Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty Images)
Israel sees the international boycott campaign as an existential threat; Palestinians regard it as their last resort.

By Nathan Thrall | The Guardian | Aug 14, 2018

Above all, [BDS] has underscored an awkward issue that cannot be indefinitely neglected: whether Israel, even if it were to cease its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, can be both a democracy and a Jewish state.

The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel — known as BDS — has been driving the world a little bit mad. Since its founding 13 years ago, it has acquired nearly as many enemies as the Israelis and Palestinians combined. It has hindered the efforts of Arab states to fully break their own decades-old boycott in pursuit of increasingly overt cooperation with Israel. It has shamed the Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah by denouncing its security and economic collaboration with Israel’s army and military administration. It has annoyed the Palestine Liberation Organization by encroaching on its position as the internationally recognized advocate and representative of Palestinians worldwide.

It has infuriated the Israeli government by trying to turn it into a leper among liberals and progressives. It has exasperated what is left of the Israeli peace camp by nudging the Palestinians away from an anti-occupation struggle and towards an anti-apartheid one. It has induced such an anti-democratic counter-campaign by the Israeli government that it has made Israeli liberals fear for the future of their country. And it has caused major headaches for the Palestinians’ donor governments in Europe, which are pressured by Israel not to work with BDS-supporting organizations in the Palestinian territories, an impossible request given that nearly all major civil society groups in Gaza and the West Bank support the movement. . . .

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US cutting all funding to Palestinian refugee agency

A Palestinian woman rides in a car after collecting aid provided by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNWRA, in Gaza City, Jan 17, 2018. (photo: Mohammed Abed / AFP)
The US provides almost 30% of UNRWA budget.

By Staff and Agencies | The Times of Israel | Aug 31, 2018

[The US] will no longer commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation.
— US State Department statement
The loss of this organization could unleash an uncontrollable chain reaction.
— German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas

The Trump administration announced Friday it is cutting nearly $300 million in planned funding for the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, and that it would no longer fund the agency after decades of support. Instead, it said it would seek other channels by which to aid the Palestinians.

The administration castigated the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) for failed practices, and indicated that it rejected the criteria by which UNRWA defines Palestinian refugees, whereby the UN agency confers refugee status not only on original refugees but on their millions of descendants. . . .

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My daughter loves the miracle of Israel

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Israeli army soldiers take position during clashes with Palestinian stone throwers in the West Bank city of Hebron on Aug 3. (photo: Abed Al Hashlamoun / EPA-EFE)
It was time for her to see the other side.

By Rabbi Sharon Brous | Los Angeles Times | Aug 26, 2018

The rising generation of American Jews is increasingly alienated from Israel. They say they’re tired of the fantasy, a defensive story of half-truths. Yet many American Jewish community leaders, while wringing their hands over the lost generation, persist in the sanitized approach to teaching young people about Israel. They argue that it’s simply not possible to instill a love of Israel while exposing its faults. They are wrong.

I didn’t want to take my kid to the West Bank city of Hebron. A few years ago, a former Israeli paratrooper had guided me through the silent, “sterilized” streets of its old city, free of any Palestinian presence. I saw Hebrew graffiti triumphantly sprayed on sealed homes and shops, walked by the checkpoints that ensure complete separation of the Jewish and Muslim populations. Hebron is not an easy place to be — I wasn’t sure my 14-year-old was ready for it.

My family and I travel to Israel as often as we can. Our kids’ bedtime stories are tales of the struggles and triumphs of the Jewish people, our people. They have learned Hebrew as a living language. They love Israeli culture and food and they FaceTime their cousins in Tel Aviv nearly every day.

And we speak honestly and critically with them about what’s happening in Israel, just as we do about what’s happening in the United States. We talk about the miracles and the missteps, the dreams fulfilled and those unrealized. And now, at 9, 12 and 14, they’re old enough to begin to understand the complexities.

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Al Jazeera names Adam Milstein as Canary Mission’s funder

Pro-Israel philanthropist Adam Milstein (far right) with Sheldon and Miriam Adelson and Milstein’s wife, Gila. (photo: Adam Milstein / Facebook)
Al Jazeera’s investigative documentary into the US Israel lobby was censored by Qatar over “national security” fears.

By Asa Winstanley and Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | Aug 27, 2018

[Such activities] raise questions about whether the Israel on Campus Coalition and individuals associated with the work he describes are acting as agents of a foreign state without registering, as required by US law, with the counterintelligence division of the Department of Justice.

Israel lobby financier Adam Milstein has been identified as the funder of Canary Mission, the anonymous website that aims to tarnish the reputations of US supporters of Palestinian rights.

Milstein is named as the financier of Canary Mission by Eric Gallagher, a former employee of The Israel Project, in Al Jazeera’s censored investigative film, The Lobby – USA.

The Electronic Intifada is releasing segments it has obtained of the film: one shows Gallagher telling an undercover Al Jazeera reporter about Milstein’s role and the other shows Milstein talking about the need to “investigate” and “expose” critics of Israel, who Milstein believes are not only anti-Semites, but also “anti-Christian” and “anti-freedom” activists who “terrorize us.”

The film also reveals that Israel lobby operatives who rely on information provided by Canary Mission “coordinate” their activities with the Israeli government.

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“We don’t shoot women”

Kristin Foss, after she was shot in the foot with a rubber covered bullet in occupied Kfar Qaddum, Aug 24, 2018. (photo: Mondoweiss)
Norwegian peace activist is shot twice in one week in Palestine.

By Jonathan Ofir | Mondoweiss | Aug 25, 2018

“When in Palestine, you get shot, it fuxking [sic] hurts, but you get up again . . . everyone has been shot at some point. . . . And 9 people got shot today. Including an 8 year old. And a man to his head. They are ok too. Hope they are also with friends!”
— Kristin Foss, Norwegian peace activist after being shot for the second time in a week

“We don’t shoot women,” a Lieutenant in the Israeli army said yesterday, when asked why they shot a Norwegian activist in Kafr Qaddum Saturday last week, shortly before shooting her again. Israeli activist Matan Cohen posted this exchange and occurrence yesterday on his Facebook with photos from the scene.

This time Kristin was not shot in the abdomen, but in the foot, by a rubber-coated steel bullet. I was alerted to Kristin’s injury by her Facebook update from the clinic:

“Went back to Kufur Quaddum to show that solidarity, is stronger than fear! Very nervous though, so kept right at the back, up against the wall. Thought I was safe-ish. But they shot me again!! The protest has been on for 2 minutes. Israeli activists at the front talking to the soldiers earlier . . . so yeah . . . I just go shot twice in a week.”

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BDS targets may differ, but the goal is the same

A protester holds a sign promoting BDS on Jun 9, 2018 in Berlin. (photo: AFP)
In the global quest to attain justice for Palestinians, we must coordinate and celebrate each other’s success, from Beirut to the US.

By Nada Elia | Middle East Eye | Aug 26, 2018

As a movement that exposes, challenges and organizes to dismantle racism, BDS can take many forms, so long as these steer clear of racism itself. . . . In the US, anti-Zionist Israelis play a critical role in the struggle against state-sanctioned disenfranchisement of Palestinians. This flexibility allows us to optimize our organizing, guided by a vision of justice and unshackled by rigid criteria that do not work in all contexts.

With Israel officially enshrining apartheid with its newly passed nation-state law, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was boosted once again as the most viable grassroots strategy to end Israel’s violation of international law. As Professor Richard Falk put it, “If BDS continues to gain momentum around the world, and especially in the West, it will strengthen the will of governments to do the right thing, and gain sufficient momentum to shake the foundations of the Zionist insistence on a Jewish state in what is still essentially a non-Jewish society.”

Meanwhile, there is renewed discussion in the West around whether it is still relevant to boycott only products from the settlements or all Israeli products. After all, the new law affirms that “the state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”

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Palestinians blast Trump’s aid cut as political blackmail

Aid being given out at a United Nations food distribution center in a refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip this month. (photo: Mahmud Hams / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images)
This is the second cut in humanitarian aid this year, now totalling almost $300 million for food, medicine, and schools.

By Isabel Kershner | The New York Times | Aug 25, 2018

“This administration is dismantling decades of US vision and engagement in Palestine. This is another confirmation of abandoning the two-state solution and fully embracing Netanyahu’s anti-peace agenda. Weaponizing humanitarian and developmental aid as political blackmail does not work.”
— Husam Zomlot, the head of the PLO’s general delegation to the United States

“This decision represents a terrible decision by Trump’s team, which seems to think it will put pressure on the Palestinians to come to the table (it won’t).”
— Daniel Shapiro, former US ambassador to Israel

Palestinian officials denounced the Trump administration’s cancellation of more than $200 million in aid, accusing Washington of “weaponizing” humanitarian assistance by using it as a tool to coerce political concessions.

The aid cut, announced Friday, was the latest in a series of measures apparently aimed at forcing the Palestinian leadership to return to the negotiating table with Israel while American officials work on a long-awaited peace proposal, the details of which remain opaque.

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Meet the owner of Canary Mission’s anonymous anti-Palestinian blacklisting website

Students and supporters protest Fordham University’s ban on Students for Justice in Palestine, a student group which advocates the rights of Palestinians. (photo: Joe Catron / MintPress)
Canary Mission has exploited its anonymity to smear college students and faculty with impunity.

By Hamzah Raza and Max Blumenthal | Grayzone Project | Aug 22, 2018

The Sterling-owned website contains profiles of nearly 2000 students and over 500 college professors considered enemies of Israel.

Since it first registered its website in February 2015, Canary Mission has been a source of mystery and menace. Dedicated to blacklisting students involved in Palestine solidarity activism, intimidating them and denigrating their public reputations, Canary Mission’s administrators have gone to great lengths to conceal their identities. The secrecy has enabled them to target legally defenseless students – who are mostly members of minority and immigrant groups — with total impunity.

Now, the Grayzone can identify a key figure behind the malicious blacklisting operation. He is the owner of Canary Mission’s domain name and a wealthy lawyer who is a fervent supporter of Israel. According to documents provided to the Grayzone, his name is Howard David Sterling.

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“Silence Is health” — How totalitarianism arrives

A woman trying to prevent the detention of a young man arrested by police at a protest rally against Argentina’s military dictatorship, Buenos Aires, Mar 30, 1982. (photo: Horacio Villalobos / Corbis via Getty Images)
As a journalist, I witnessed first the erosion and then the total collapse of democratic norms, and how a ruthless autocracy can mobilize popular fears and resentments to crush its opponents.

By Uki Goñi | The New York Review of Books | Aug 20, 2018

A society that separates children from their parents, for whatever reason, is a society that is already on the path to totalitarianism.

The white supremacists chanting “blood and soil” as they marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, last year were probably unaware that the leading Nazi ideologue who used the original slogan of Blut und Boden to promote the creation of a German master race was not himself a native German. Richard Walther Darré, who proclaimed the existence of a mystic bond between the German homeland and “racially pure” Germans, was actually born “Ricardo” on the other side of the Atlantic, in Argentina’s prosperous capital, Buenos Aires.

Sent by his German immigrant family to the Heimat for schooling at the age of nine, Darré later specialized in agriculture, the logical choice for someone with an Argentine background at a time when the succulent beef and abundant wheat of Argentina’s pampas made the country renowned as the “breadbasket of the world.” For a while, during the 1920’s, he contemplated returning to Buenos Aires to pursue a career in farming, but that was before his writing caught the attention of Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi Party. His 1930 book A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, in which he proposed applying selective cattle-breeding methods for the procreation of perfect Aryan humans, dazzled the Führer.

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UN Secretary General proposes armed peacekeeping force to protect Palestinians in Gaza

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks during a press conference , Jun 21, 2018. (photo: Yuri Kadobnov / AFP)

Armed international mission among options floated by Guterres in response to General Assembly request for report on Gaza border clashes.

By Staff | The Times of Israel | Aug 18, 2018

 

“The targeting of civilians, particularly children, is unacceptable,” Guterres said in the report, adding that “those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law must be held accountable.”
— UN Secretary General Antonia Guterres

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday presented four options aimed at boosting the protection of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, from sending UN rights monitors and unarmed observers to deploying a military or police force under UN mandate.

The proposals were contained in a report requested by the General Assembly in response to a surge of violence in Gaza, where 171 Palestinians have been killed during Hamas-led clashes with Israeli troops since late March. Dozens of the dead were members of Hamas and other terror groups, Hamas has acknowledged.

The UN chief stressed that for each of the options, cooperation by Israel and the Palestinians would be necessary. It remained unlikely however that Israel would agree to the proposals . . . .

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