Tag: #TravelBan

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Quakers, Jews and Israel’s BDS Blacklist

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AFSC volunteer Evan Jones meeting with Palestinian refugees, 1949. (photo: AFSC)

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By Brant Rosen | Shalom Rav | Jan 11, 2018

“The AFSC helped thousands of people in the United States transfer small amounts of money to loved ones in French concentration camps, [and helped] hundreds of children, including Jewish refugees and the children of Spanish Republicans, come to the United States under the care of the US Committee for the Care of European Children in 1941–42.”
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Last Sunday, Israel revealed their list of 20 social justice groups from around the world it was henceforth banning from the country because of their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. For me, the list represented more than just another news item of the day. As staff person for one organization included on the list — the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) — this news struck home personally as well as professionally

As a rabbi who works for AFSC, I’m proud of the important historical connections between Jewish community and this venerable Quaker organization. As the US Holocaust Memorial Museum itself has noted, AFSC was at the forefront of efforts to help and rescue Jewish refugees after 1938, “assisting individuals and families in need . . . helping people flee Nazi Europe, communicate with loved ones, and adjust to life in the United States.”

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Israel’s BDS blacklist is straight out of apartheid

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A Palestinian navigates cement blocks at an Israeli checkpoint. Travel bans, evictions, and home demolitions have become part of daily life for Palestinian families. (photo: Abbas Momani / AFP / Getty Images)

Banning NGO’s that support the BDS movement is a desperate attempt to silence human rights defenders.

By Asad Rehman | The Guardian | Jan 9, 2018

The bans and blacklists that we face today are only a shadow of what Palestinians endure every single day. This year we remember that it is 70 years since more than 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes; they are still denied their right to return by Israel.

Over these seven decades, Israel has imposed travel bans, evictions, and home demolitions that have become part of daily life for Palestinian families. So are arbitrary arrest and detention without trial, collective punishment, violence, and torture without redress.

Israel’s “BDS blacklist,” published in the Israeli media on Sunday, bans 20 charities and human rights groups from entering the country, because they support the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement — a campaign that holds Israel to account over violations of Palestinian rights and international law.

This repressive move is borrowed straight from the playbook of South Africa’s apartheid regime, which had the same aim of silencing critics. Ultimately, Israel’s blacklist will fail, just as South Africa’s did. But first and foremost, the ban calls for a robust condemnation from people of conscience around the world — and the UK government, which continues to conduct “business as usual” with Israel. [As does the US government.]

As one of the blacklisted organizations, War on Want is in good company, alongside groups such as the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee — a US Quaker group awarded a Nobel peace prize in 1947 for assisting people persecuted by the Nazis.

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Israel made itself a pariah by barring me and my fellow activists

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(photo: Getty Images)

The author with roots in Palestine speaks to her exile from her family’s homeland.

By Ariel Gold | The Forward | Jan 7, 2018

As BDS grows, builds and succeeds, Israel becomes more and more desperate to contain it. The latest effort is this blacklist. . . . By blacklisting organizations and banning even Jews and Quakers who take principled stances to support Palestinian human rights, Israel is isolating itself even further.

As a Jewish mother, one of the most important things to me is to instill in my children a sense of Jewish identity and values. For my now 15- and 16-year-old children, this has over the years included Tot-Shabbat at our synagogue, Hebrew school, Jewish summer camp and even Jewish youth group trips to Israel.

As a family, our history dates back to Rabbi Joseph Karo of 14th-Century Palestine, writer of the Shulchan Aruch (the codification of Jewish religious law). In 2015, I took my children to visit Karo’s grave, in the holy Jewish city of Safed. It was the most prominent grave in the cemetery. My son, daughter and I placed stones at the gravesite of the ancient rabbi our family descends from and said a short prayer.

But our identity as a Jewish family manifests in another way, too: in the responsibility to think critically and act as effectively and morally as possible. This means a commitment to ending the human rights abuses Israel commits against Palestinians.

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The full Israeli blacklist

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Members of Jewish Voice for Peace and Code Pink, both on Israel’s newly announced BDS blacklist, demonstrate against Israeli military operations in Gaza, Washington, DC, Jul 21, 2014. (photo: Atheer Ahmed Kakan / Anadolu Age)

Here is the complete list of international NGO’s blacklisted by Israel.

US Organizations

  • American Friends Service Committee
  • American Muslims for Palestine
  • Code Pink
  • Jewish Voice for Peace
  • National Students for Justice in Palestine
  • US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

European Organizations

  • The France Association Palestine Solidarity
  • BDS France
  • BDS Italy
  • The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine
  • Friends of Al-Aqsa
  • Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign
  • The Palestine Committee of Norway
  • Palestine Solidarity Association of Sweden
  • Palestine Solidarity Campaign
  • War on Want
  • BDS Kampagne

Other Organizations

  • BDS Chile
  • BDS South Africa
  • BDS National Committee

Read the reference article here →

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Nobel Peace Prize-winning American Friends Service Committee banned from Israel

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Palestinians walk past a sign on a wall in Bethlehem calling for a boycott of Israeli products from Jewish settlements. (photo: Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty Images)

Israel imposes travel ban on 20 foreign NGOs over boycott movement.

By Peter Beaumont | The Guardian | Jan 7, 2018

“This move is reminiscent of South Africa’s apartheid regime which also prepared blacklists in order to punish people and prevent the entry of those opposed to its racist policies.”
— Hassan Jabareen, of the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

The prominent British campaign group War on Want has been listed as one of 20 foreign NGOs whose representatives are banned from visiting Israel over their support of the pro-Palestinian boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) movement.

The publication of the list, which also includes a well-known Jewish anti-occupation group and a Nobel peace prize-winning US Quaker group, had been threatened for months by Israel.

The organizations were singled out by Israel’s rightwing strategic affairs and public security minister, Gilad Erdan, for advocating boycotts of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

Human rights groups condemned the move as an assault on free speech. A number of individuals have been refused entry into Israel in recent months, including a prominent African theologian and official of the World Council of Churches.

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Israel blacklists 20 international organizations

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The Shuafat refugee camp, behind a section of Israel’s separation barrier in Jerusalem. (photo: Oded Balilty / Associated Press

Israel may also be compiling a blacklist of individuals to be barred from entry.

By David Halbfinger | The New York Times | Jan 7, 2018

“When Israel, which aims to portray itself to the world as liberal and democratic, blacklists activists dedicated to nonviolent organizing and dissent, it only further exposes itself as a fraud.”
— Yousef Munayyer, the director of the Campaign for Palestinian Rights

Israel on Sunday published a blacklist of 20 organizations, including a Jewish group in the United States, whose leaders it has barred from entering the country for supporting an economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel.

The list was drawn up under a nearly year-old law enacted to combat the so-called boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which Israelis overwhelmingly oppose, consider anti-Semitic and view as calling for the country’s destruction.

Supporters of the pressure strategy favor the boycott of Israel until it ends the occupation of the West Bank, provides full equality under the law to Palestinian citizens of Israel and grants a right of return to Palestinian refugees. But refugees number in the millions, and their return would probably spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

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