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The Desert of Israeli Democracy
by Max Blumenthal and Tom Engelhardt, October 14, 2013
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In case you hadn’t noticed, Israel has been in the news a lot lately. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the U.N. in the midst of an Iranian "charm offensive," just as presidents Obama and Rouhani were having the first conversation between Iranian and American heads of state since Jimmy Carter’s day, and gave the usual hellfire sermon. He said Israel would, if necessary, "stand alone," implicitly threatening to launch an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities without Washington’s support (an act that is, in reality, increasingly unlikely), and generally acted like the odd man out. Soon after, he made a comment reflecting his ignorance of life among the Iranian young – "If the people of Iran were free, they could wear jeans, listen to Western music, and have free elections " – and the next thing you knew, indignant Iranian tweets were going up along with photos of jeans and Western music albums. And so another round of news stories hit the wires.

Only one problem: just about all the "Israeli" news here is focused on its future policy toward Iran, and remarkably little of it on the way Israel continues to eat up Palestinian lands and displace Palestinians on the West Bank and elsewhere, or the way in which Israeli control over so much of the West Bank is stunting the Palestinian economy. Fortunately, Max Blumenthal, who previously slipped inside the Republican Party and produced a bestselling book, has spent four years researching the on-the-ground realities of Israel. Today, he offers us a powerful, if grim, glimpse of just where Israel has been and where it’s heading, the sort of up-close-and-personal reporting you’re not likely to see in the American mainstream media (not, at least, since President Obama tried – and failed – to get the Israelis to stop building new settlements and other housing on Palestinian or contested lands). But think of today’s TomDispatch post as just a snapshot. The full picture can be found in Blumenthal’s new blockbuster of a book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. It’s an odyssey of a trip into a largely unknown Israel and a remarkable, as well as riveting, piece of reportage. ~ Tom

A Trip Through the Negev Desert Leads to the Heart of Israel’s National Nightmare
By Max Blumenthal

From the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seamlessly blended frightening details of Iranian evildoing with images of defenseless Jews "bludgeoned" and "left for dead" by anti-Semites in nineteenth century Europe. Aimed at U.S. and Iranian moves towards diplomacy and a war-weary American public, Netanyahu’s gloomy tirade threatened to cast him as a desperate, diminished figure. Though it was poorly received in the U.S., alienating even a few of his stalwart pro-Israel allies, his jeremiad served a greater purpose, deflecting attention from his country’s policies towards the group he scarcely mentioned: the Palestinians.

Back in November 1989, while serving as a junior minister in the Likud-led governing coalition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a younger Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University, "Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of demonstrations [at China’s Tiananmen Square], when the world’s attention was focused on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose should be implemented."

Now the country’s top official, Netanyahu has updated the smokescreen strategy. While the prime minister ranted against Iran in New York City and in a meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office, his government was preparing to implement the Prawer Plan, a blueprint for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities that promised to "concentrate" them in state-run, reservation-style townships. Authored by Netanyahu’s planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, and passed by a majority of the members of the mainstream Israeli political parties in the Knesset, the Prawer Plan is only one element of the government’s emerging program to dominate all space and the lives of all people between the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean).

Expulsions in the Desert

On September 9th, I visited Umm al-Hiran, a village that the state of Israel plans to wipe off the map. Located in the northern Negev Desert, well behind the Green Line (the 1949 armistice lines that are considered the starting point for any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) and inside the part of Israel that will be legitimized under a U.S.-brokered two-state solution, the residents of Umm al-Hiran are mobilizing to resist their forced removal.

In the living room of a dusty but impeccably tidy cinderblock home on the outskirts of the village, Hajj al-Ahmed, an aging sheikh, described to a group of colleagues from the website Mondoweiss and me the experience of the 80,000 Bedouin living in what are classified as "unrecognized" villages. The products of continuous dispossession, many of these communities are surrounded by petrochemical waste dumps and have been transformed into cancer clusters, while state campaigns of aerial crop destruction and livestock eradication have decimated their sources of subsistence.

Although residents like al-Ahmed carry Israeli citizenship, they are unable to benefit from the public services that Jews in neighboring communities receive. The roads to unrecognized villages like Umm al-Hiran are lined with electric wires, but the Bedouins are barred from connecting to the public grid. Their homes and mosques have been designated "illegal" constructions and are routinely marked for demolition. And now, their very presence on their own land has been placed in jeopardy.

Under the Prawer Plan, the people of Umm al-Hiran will be among the 40,000 Bedouins forcibly relocated to American-Indian-reservation-style towns constructed by the Israeli government. As the fastest growing group among the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Bedouins have been designated as an existential threat to Israel’s Jewish majority. "It is not in Israel’s interest to have more Palestinians in the Negev," said Shai Hermesh, a former member of the Knesset and director of the government’s effort to engineer a "Zionist majority" in the southern desert.

According to the website of the Or Movement, a government-linked organization overseeing Jewish settlement in the Negev, residents of the unrecognized villages will be moved to towns constructed "to concentrate the Bedouin population." In turn, small Jews-only communities will be constructed on the remnants of the evicted Bedouin communities. They will be guaranteed handsome benefits from the Israeli government and lavish funding from private pro-Israel donors like the billionaire cosmetics fortune heir Ron Lauder. "The United States had its Manifest Destiny in the West," Lauder has declared. "For Israel, that land is the Negev."

When I met al-Ahmed, he described a group of 150 strangers who had suddenly appeared at the periphery of his village the previous day. From a hilltop, he said, they had surveyed the land and debated which parcels each of them would receive after the Prawer Plan was complete. Al-Ahmed called them "the Jews in the woods."

Several hundred meters east of Umm al-Hiran lies the Yattir Forest, a vast grove in the heart of the desert planted by the para-governmental Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1964. The JNF’s director at the time, Yosef Weitz, had headed the governmental Transfer Committee that orchestrated the final stages of Palestinian removal in 1948. For Weitz, planting forests served a dual strategic purpose: those like Yattir near the Green Line were to provide a demographic buffer between Jews and Arabs, while those planted atop destroyed Palestinian villages like Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Imwas would prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. As he wrote in 1949, once Israel’s Jewish majority had been established through mass expulsion, "The abandoned lands will never return to their absentee [Palestinian Arab] owners.”

As darkness came to the desert, I set out with my colleagues into the piney woods of Yattir. In a small car, we wound along its unlit roads until we reached a gate bristling with barbed wire. This was the settlement-style village of Hiran – "the Jews in the woods," as al-Ahmed had put it. We called out into the night until the gate was opened. Then we parked in the middle of a compound of trailer homes. Like a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, the hard-bitten Imperial Russian territory once reserved for Jewish residency, the place exuded a sense of suspicion and siege.

A bearded religious nationalist stepped out of an aluminum-sided synagogue and met us at a group of picnic benches. His name was Af-Shalom and he was in his thirties. He was not, he said, permitted to speak until a representative from the Or Movement arrived. After a few uncomfortable minutes and half a cigarette, however, he began to hold forth. He sent his children, he told us, to school over the Green Line in the settlement of Susiya, just eight minutes away on an Israelis-only access road. He then added that the Bedouins were "illegals" occupying his God-given land and would continue to take it over unless they were forcibly removed. Just as Af-Shalom was hitting his stride, Moshe, a curt Or Movement representative who refused to give his last name, arrived to escort us out without a comment.

"The World’s Biggest Detention Center"

Only a few kilometers from Umm al-Hiran, in the southern Negev Desert and inside the Green Line, the state of Israel has initiated another ambitious project to "concentrate" an unwanted population. It is the Saharonim detention facility, a vast matrix of watchtowers, concrete blast walls, razor wire, and surveillance cameras that now comprise what the British Independent has described as "the world’s biggest detention center."

Originally constructed as a prison for Palestinians during the First Intifada, Saharonim was expanded to hold 8,000 Africans who had fled genocide and persecution. Currently, it is home to at least 1,800 African refugees, including women and children, who live in what the Israeli architectural group Bikrom has called "a huge concentration camp with harsh conditions."

Like the Bedouins of the Negev’s unrecognized villages, the 60,000 African migrants and asylum seekers who live in Israel have been identified as a demographic threat that must be purged from the body of the Jewish state. In a meeting with his cabinet ministers in May 2012, Netanyahu warned that their numbers could multiply tenfold "and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state." It was imperative "to physically remove the infiltrators," the prime minister declared. "We must crack down and mete out tougher punishments."

In short order, the Knesset amended the Infiltration Prevention Act it had passed in 1954 to prevent Palestinian refugees from ever reuniting with the families and property they were forced to leave behind in Israel. Under the new bill, non-Jewish Africans can be arrested and held without trial for as long as three years. (Israel’s Supreme Court has invalidated the amendment, but the government has made no moves to enforce the ruling, and may not do so.) The bill earmarked funding for the construction of Saharonim and a massive wall along the Israeli-Egyptian border. Arnon Sofer, a longtime Netanyahu advisor, also urged the construction of "sea walls" to guard against future "climate change refugees."

"We don’t belong to this region," Sofer explained.

In that single sentence, he distilled the logic of Israel’s system of ethnocracy. The maintenance of the Jewish state demands the engineering of a demographic majority of nonindigenous Jews and their dispersal across historic Palestine through methods of colonial settlement. State planners like Sofer refer to the process as "Judaization." Because indigenous Palestinians and foreign migrants are not Jews, the state of Israel has legally defined most of them as "infiltrators," mandating their removal and permanent relocation to various zones of exclusion – from refugee camps across the Arab world to walled-off West Bank Bantustans to the besieged Gaza Strip to state-constructed Bedouin reservations to the desert camp of Saharonim.

As long as the state of Israel holds fast to its demographic imperatives, the non-Jewish outclass must be "concentrated" to make room for exclusively Jewish settlement and economic development. This is not a particularly humane system, to be sure, but it is one that all within the spectrum of Zionist opinion, from the Kahanist right to the J Street left, necessarily support. Indeed, if there is any substantial disagreement between the two seemingly divergent camps, it is over the style of rhetoric they deploy in defense of Israel’s ethnocracy. As the revisionist Zionist ideologue Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous 1923 "Iron Wall" essay outlining the logic of what would become Israel’s deterrence strategy, "there are no meaningful differences between our ‘militarists’ and our ‘vegetarians.’"

During the Oslo era, the time of hope that prevailed in mid-1990’s Israel, it was the "dovish" Labor Party of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak that began surrounding the Gaza Strip with barricades and electrified fencing while drawing up plans for a wall separating the West Bank from "Israel proper." (That blueprint was implemented under the prime ministership of Ariel Sharon.)

"Us over here, them over there" was the slogan of Barak’s campaign for reelection in 1999, and of the Peace Now camp supporting a two-state solution at the time. Through the fulfillment of the Labor Party’s separationist policies, the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank have gradually disappeared from Israel’s prosperous coastal center, consolidating cities like Tel Aviv as meccas of European cosmopolitanism – "a villa in the jungle," as Barak said.

With the post-Oslo political transition that shattered Israel’s "peace camp," ascendant right-wing parties set out to finish the job that Labor had started. By 2009, when Israel elected the most hawkish government in its history, the country was still full of "infiltrators," the most visible of whom were those African migrants, deprived of work permits and increasingly forced to sleep in parks in south Tel Aviv. According to a report by the newspaper Haaretz on a brand new Israel Democracy Institute poll on Israeli attitudes, "Arabs no longer top the list of neighbors Israeli Jews would consider undesirable, replaced now by foreign workers. Almost 57% of Jewish respondents said that having foreign workers as neighbors would bother them."

Unrestricted by the center-left’s pretensions to tolerance, rightist members of the government launched a festival of unprecedented racist incitement. Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Shas Party (replaced after the 2013 election), for example, falsely described African asylum seekers as infected with "a range of diseases" and lamented that they "think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man."

"Until I can deport them," he promised, "I’ll lock them up to make their lives miserable."

At a May 2012 anti-African rally in Tel Aviv, on a stage before more than 1,000 riled up demonstrators, Knesset member and former Israeli army spokesperson Miri Regev proclaimed, "The Sudanese are a cancer in our body!" Incited into a violent frenzy, hundreds of protesters then rampaged through south Tel Aviv, smashing the windows of African businesses and attacking any migrant they could find. "The people want the Africans to be burned!" they chanted.

As during other dark moments in history, eliminationist cries booming from an urban mob against a class of outcasts signaled a coming campaign of ethnic purification. And following the night of shattered glass, the cells of Saharonim continued to fill up.

Going South

Just as Western media consumers will find details about the Prawer Plan and the Saharonim camp hard to come by, casual visitors to the Negev Desert will find little evidence of the state’s more disturbing endeavors. Instead, highway signs will direct them to a little museum at Sde Boker, the humble kibbutz that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, called home.

In Ben Gurion’s memoirs, he fantasized about evacuating Tel Aviv and settling five million Jews in small outposts across the Negev, where they would be weaned off the rootless cosmopolitanism they inherited from diaspora life. Just as he resented the worldly attitude of Jews from Tel Aviv and New York City, Ben Gurion was repelled by the sight of the open desert, describing it as a "criminal waste" and "occupied territory." Indeed, from his standpoint, the Arabs were the occupiers. As early as 1937, he had plans for their removal, writing in a letter to his son Amos, "We must expel Arabs and take their places."

Ben Gurion’s house is an austere-looking, single-story structure, sparsely furnished and poorly lit. The separate, spartan bedrooms he and his wife slept in are impeccably preserved, as though they might return home at any time. Nearby is a compact, somewhat shabby museum commemorating his legacy in a series of exhibits that do not appear to have been updated for at least a decade.

The site is a crumbling remnant of a bygone era that the country has left in the dust. The enlightened public of Israel’s coastal center has turned its back on the desert, preferring instead to face toward the urbane capitals of Europe, while the rest of the country draws increasing energy from the religious nationalist fervor emanating from the hilltops of the occupied West Bank. In the Negev, perhaps all that endures of Ben Gurion’s legacy is the continuous expulsion of the Bedouins.

On a gravelly path leading towards his home, a series of plaques highlight tidbits of wisdom from that Israeli founding father. One quote stands out from the others. Engraved on a narrow slab of granite, it reads, "The State of Israel, to exist, must go south."

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, the Nation, the Huffington Post, the Independent Film Channel, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English, and other publications. He is the author of the bestselling book Republican Gomorrah. His new book, just published, is Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (Nation Books)

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Israel’s Lost Clout
October 6, 2013
The Israeli government and the neocons have long felt they can dictate U.S. policy in the Mideast, including demands for military strikes against “enemies.” But President Obama’s push for diplomacy on Syria and Iran may be challenging that longstanding reality, writes Lawrence Davidson.


By Lawrence Davidson

The Iran’s new and more moderate President Hassan Rouhani came to the United Nations at the end of September. Amidst numerous interviews and diplomatic discussions, his message was clear: no, Iran will not give up its legal right to enrich uranium and no, Iran will not develop nuclear weapons.

According to Rouhani, Iran is willing to prove this second point by “ensuring full transparency [of its nuclear program] under international law.” In exchange for doing so, Iran will demand “a total lifting” of international sanctions.


Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013. (UN Photo)
In truth, this has been the position of the Iranian government for years. As far back as 2005 Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei declared that nuclear weapons violated Islamic law and Iran would not construct them. It primarily has been due to pressure from the Israelis and their Zionist lobby in Washington that U.S. politicians have refused to believe these Iranian assertions.

To overcome this lobby-induced skepticism, President Rouhani has switched from the in-your-face behavior that characterized his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to a more tactful, forthcoming approach. At least for now this shift has borne fruit.

There was the recent historic 15-minute phone call between him and President Barack Obama, as well as a brief meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif. According to Kerry, Zarif “put some possibilities on the table,” and this has led to a scheduled round of “substantive talks” between Iran and the main Western nations in Geneva on Oct. 15-16.

Favorable White House Response

What has loosened the grip of lobby power and allowed the Obama administration to meet the Iranian initiative favorably? Certainly Rouhani’s so-called charm offensive helped, but it can’t be the only reason.

More fundamentally, the likelihood that a U.S attack on Syria would end in a debacle and the overwhelming popular opinion against such action set the scene for this latest turn toward diplomacy with Iran. According to a Washington Post opinion poll, 85 percent of Americans want better relations with Iran. That is the type of political ammunition that can do successful battle with selfish special interest pressure.

As politician and president, Obama has been caught between a desire to avoid war with Iran, a war that would almost certainly harm the Western world’s economy, and the political pressure of the powerful American Zionist lobby. The Zionists ultimately seek to ensure that U.S. policy falls in line with Israel’s desires to see Iran destroyed. This Zionist position reflects the distorted view of Israeli interests held by its ideologically myopic, militaristic elite, but it conflicts with the long-term interests of the United States.

If nothing else, the disastrous foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration demonstrated that American interests cannot possibly be served by starting a war with dangerous and unpredictable consequences against a country that has never been a direct threat to the United States. Obama knows this and, occasional rhetoric aside, has been hesitant and cautious in his approach to Iran.

The fact that he does not have to face reelection has positioned Obama to better separate out Israeli and American interests when it comes to Iran. American public opinion, first in the case of the Syrian episode and now in the case of Iran, has encouraged him to do so.

However, not all U.S. politicians enjoy this position. As M. J. Rosenberg tells us in a piece entitled “Will AIPAC Defeat Obama on Iran?” many in Congress still stand exposed to Zionist pressure. Rosenberg asserts that “the Netanyahu government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) are both determined to end the process [toward settlement with Iran] and have the ability to do it.”

How so? “They intend to use the United States Congress [to] pass resolutions that will cause Rouhani to walk away by making it clear that Congress will accept nothing short of Iranian surrender on nuclear issues.”

And indeed, the usual suspects in Congress, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, who in a more rational world would be recognized as part-time agents of a foreign power (Israel), are already formulating resolutions and legislation to promote war.

Rosenberg notes that, ultimately, it is money that suborns the Congress. Why, he asks, would any in Congress pass measures that go against the interests of their own country and risk involvement in yet another Middle Eastern war? “The answer is simply that the midterm elections are coming up and that means members of Congress need campaign cash. And AIPAC provides it.”

Fortunately, there is a catch to this rather corrupt process. The alliance between the politicians and the Zionist lobby depends on a passive citizenry that does not threaten electoral defeat of politicians who promote special-interest wars when the voters want peace. Right now, the voters do not seem very passive.

Zionist Blindness

The American Zionists take their marching orders from Israel’s leaders and seem oblivious to this development. In his speech to the UN, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed no interest in compromise with Iran. He dismissed President Rouhani’s diplomatic efforts as deceitful, interpreted every Iranian defensive military move as an offensive threat, and let it be known that Israel wants sanctions to continue and to be backed with threats of hostile action.

The Prime Minister insists that he takes this stance to protect the interests of Israel. However, Netanyahu seems to have never considered the fact that by having the Zionist lobby pressure Washington to do his military dirty work, he makes the whole affair the interest of every American citizen.

Insofar as the Israelis and their Zionist agents increase the likelihood of yet more wars, they expose their allies in the Congress to a political reaction that risks their defeat the first moment they have an opponent willing to follow the public’s demand for diplomacy and peace.

Political Zionists are ideologues, and therefore if something does not happen to call into question their ideology, they will go on believing they are in the right even up to and through the gates of Hell. This blinkered mindset is sometimes called “motivated reasoning,” or more broadly “confirmation bias.”

As explained by author Michael Shermer, people who think this way refuse to consider or give any credit to data that does not “fit their creed.” That describes Benjamin Netanyahu perfectly.

Members of Congress who consistently support the political Zionist position are usually motivated by something other than ideology. They are motivated by money. That does not necessarily make them bad people, it just makes them slaves to a bad political system.

The ability to call into question their financial allegiance to the Zionists is readily possible when a publicly recognized difference evolves between the desires of the voters who put them in office and the desires of this particular special interest. That now seems to be happening in the case of U.S. foreign policy toward Iran.

Of course, the Zionists did this to themselves. They pushed and pushed for U.S. hostilities against Iran and assumed that they had no real opposition except a weakling president. They were wrong. Their opposition was nationwide, but they were blinded to it by their “motivated reasoning” and their hubris.

As for President Obama, he seems to have finally found his courage amidst popular demands for peace and diplomacy. Let’s hope this all-too-rare condition of sanity lasts.

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

West Bank Village Inhabited for 3,000 Years Faces Eviction
By Amira Hass

Source: Haaretz.comMonday, October 14, 2013


His mother gave birth to him “under the sheep,” says Ribhi Al Battat, 60, hence his unique ability to translate the animal’s every bleating and gesture. I forgot to ask him at the end of my visit if this was a metaphor. However, one thing is certain - his mother gave birth to him in one of the caves inhabited by the people of the small Palestinian village of Zanuta in the West Bank, some 30 kilometers northeast of Be'er Sheva.

Battat says his mother, Mariam, gave birth to her own children and midwifed many of his relatives and neighbors in the caves that once served as homes for centuries on end and are now used primarily as pens for sheep, or for storage.

Only the sheep and the goats in the village are unafraid these days, blissfully undisturbed as they go through their daily routine. However, their shepherds and the rest of the village - from children to adults - live each day in tension.

“We are like lost lambs, sheep without a shepherd,” says Battat. “No government cares about us. They just want what we have - this place - and aren't interested in us.”

His sister-in-law Mughaiza shares these sentiments. “All the time we are tired from our thoughts,” she says. “What if they throw us out of our home?”

History repeating

If the story sounds familiar, that is no coincidence. As they did in other West Bank villages such as Susya, Jinba and Duqaiqa that are situated in Israeli-controlled Area C, the Civil Administration is demanding that the residents of Zanuta leave their homes and move elsewhere. They want them to pick up and move to the crowded enclaves in the West Bank's Areas A and B, which are administered by the Palestinian Authority.

Like the other villages, Zanuta is a community of shepherds and farmers whose fathers or grandfathers arrived decades ago from their hometown (ad-Dahariya) in search of fresh grazing and farm land. They have maintained family, social, economic and cultural ties with their home village, which has since become a city, but they live in their own permanent community.

The inhabitants originally lived in the caves, but in the 1980s the caves began to collapse and people were afraid to continue living in them. Instead, they set up tents and re-purposed ancient stone structures as residences. Israel's prohibition on construction in the area prevented the residents from building permanent houses.

As with other villages in Area C, even simple structures such as sheds, cisterns, and tents result in demolition orders from the Civil Administration under the pretext that there is no zoning plan that permits their construction.

Several hundred meters to the east of Zanuta lies the Meitarim industrial zone, established for the benefit of the settlers who live in the area. The same hand in the Civil Administration that approves the zoning plan for the Jews, fails to recognize the Palestinian village that has existed even before the establishment of the State of Israel.

With nightfall, Zanuta is flooded with the harsh stench emitted by the fuel refinery in the industrial zone. The water and electric infrastructure that serves Meitarim does not reach the small Palestinian village. Instead, the village's residents depend on two generators, cisterns that collect rainwater and water purchased from tankers at triple the normal rate because of the added cost of fuel.

The children feel the tension that consumes their elders. “What will become of the sheep?” they ask anxiously. “What will happen if the court rules against us, if it decides to expel us? Where will the sheep go?”

On Monday, the High Court of Justice will discuss the fate of Zanuta's 130 residents. The state is requesting that the village's residents be evicted to the West Bank city of Dahariya or the town of Shweika. The court must also rule on similar plans by the authorities to demolish Susya and the villages in Firing Zone 918 set aside for IDF training.

Zanuta's legal odyssey began in 2007, when the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, on behalf of Zanuta villagers, filed a petition against the Civil Administration demolition orders, and asked the authorities to draw up a zoning plan for the village. An interim injunction froze the demolition orders and the case file fell into a coma.

The case came back to life after the non-profit organization Regavim, which monitors and documents illegal construction by Arabs in the pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank, filed an amicus brief with the court. On its Facebook page, Regavim describes itself as “a public movement that works toward a Zionist land policy in the State of Israel.”

Only following Regavim's amicus filing - three years after the original legal petition - did the state provide its response. It would evict the inhabitants and demolish the structures in the village and it would not approve a zoning plan for the village. Moreover, the response asserted that the village was built atop an archaeological site.

The short time between Regavim's request to join the case and the state's response is not coincidental. Bezalel Smotrich, the group's director, has described the non-profit’s cozy relationship with the authorities. “Another parameter of the success of Regavim's activities is the treatment by authorities in the establishment,” he said in an interview with the settler website Hakol Hayehudi on July 31, 2012. “Among the ranks in the field and in a lot of departments of the Interior Ministry, Israel Land Administration, the Justice Ministry and more, they view Regavim as a positive factor that is coming to their aid to steel them against the pressure they receive from the left. Most of them are good people, idealistic people... happy for the counter-pressure we exercise after years in which they absorbed so much heat in the form of pressure and letters from left-wing organizations.”

After the first hearing of the petition in July 2012, the state declared it had no intention of introducing planning or any other type of solution for the village and its residents. It presented the village as happenstance collection of illegal structures situated on the grounds of an archaeological site. ACRI, for its part, offered an expert planning opinion from the NGO Bimkom, Planers for Planning Rights, that presented an outline for a building plan for the village that would enable its residents to continue to live there while protecting the archaeological site.

Inhabited for three millennia

Shards of pottery found in the area indeed attest that there has been continuous habitation at the site since the Iron Age, with evidence dating back to the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The archaeologist Avi Ofer tentatively identified Zanuta with Dana, an ancient Judean city in the south Hebron Hills. In a letter written by Ofer to the court and submitted by ACRI, he confirmed that most of the tents and sheds at Zanuta were located in the direct vicinity of the archaeological site, but said this was not unusual. “This occurs frequently in the past and present of this type of community amid ancient ruins,” wrote Ofer. He also pointed out that the authorities have permitted the construction of Jewish neighborhoods amid archaeological sites considered much more important than Zanuta, such as in Jerusalem and Hebron. Ofer emphasized that in Zanuta, contrary to what one often finds at such sites, there were no signs of archaeological plundering.

Rashad al-Tal, 37, a village native who works as a porter in Be'er Sheva, promises that the people of Zanuta will continue to protect the archaeological site as they have done until now. “For us it is like a document [proving] that Islam was here.”

Tal says the Israelis are lying in their assertion that the place is important purely because it contains antiquities, especially given the fact that in Hebron, Jerusalem and even the Palestinian city of Dhariya, people live among antiquities without problems. He says the real reason is political.

“If there is an agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel,” says Tal, “Israel will be able to say that this place is empty [of Palestinians], and, therefore, can and should be part of Israel. We here are like a thorn in their eyes, so they want to kick us out.”

Holland abides by EU boycott of Israeli settlements
The EU Foreign Police Chief Catherine Ashton announced prohibiting the funding by way of grants, scholarships or awards to Israeli institutions which have links to illegal settlements.


Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the Netherlands is committed to a European Union boycott of any institutions which have links to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
"We will abide by the boycott, like all other European Union countries," Rutte told Anadolu Agency on Saturday.
In August, EU Foreign Police Chief Catherine Ashton announced prohibiting the funding by way of grants, scholarships or awards to Israeli institutions which have links to settlements.
The decision has infuriated Israeli officials and settlements financers, who called on the Israeli government to put pressure on the EU to reconsider the decision.
Rutte ruled out that the Netherlands would reconsider the decision under pressures.
"This is an EU decision, so pressures would have no effect on us," said Rutte, who is currently in the Palestinian lands to attend the Dutch-Palestinian Cooperation Forum, which opened on Saturday.
Exports from the West Bank settlements to the EU amounted to $12 billion last year, according to the Palestinian Economic Policy and Research Institute.
The Dutch premier invited Palestinian businessmen to familiarize themselves with European quality standards, particularly in relation to agricultural exports and medicinal herbs.

Sorry to go ot, but every time I read the title of this thread I read "Zionism's Lost Shrine," which would interest me.

Boycott Israel
Because it’s the right thing to do

by Justin Raimondo, December 18, 2013

My regular readers may recall one of my more controversial columns, wherein I made the case against boycotting Israel: my argument was essentially that a boycott in this case would be unjust, since many Israelis disagree with the state-enforced racist policies of the current government and it would be unfair to make them suffer for the actions of a state gone rogue.

The basis of my argument was that boycotts of this nature are essentially inimical to libertarianism, which places the individual, and not collective entities like states, at the center of its worldview. Furthermore, this view was bolstered by my stance in favor of Israeli statehood: the Israeli people, I argued, have a right to national self-determination, just like all other peoples. Why single them out, I averred, in a world where states routinely violate rights?

Yet what happens when a state singles itself out by engaging in behavior so egregiously oppressive, so repulsive to the civilized world, that dealing with it in any shape, form, or manner is morally problematic? Israel has reached that point – a tipping point, as Chemi Shalev puts it – as increasing numbers of people the world over reach that conclusion

I changed my mind about the BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement aimed at Israel when I read Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, a book that tears the veil of hasbara off the Jewish state and reveals the crude racism that energizes its policies, both foreign and domestic. The idea that state funds are being used to build "Jews only" housing, roads, and entire communities – and that this is accepted as normal, even beneficial, by Israel’s ostensible "liberals" – is an international outrage. That it is being done with US taxpayer dollars and diplomatic support is unspeakable.

So why not just call for ending US government "aid"? After all, if these exclusivist policies were being pursued with private funding, libertarians – who uphold the right of individuals to associate with whom they please – could have no principled objection to it. Right?

Wrong. Libertarianism is not an ethical stance: it doesn’t tell us how to live, only that we should be free to live without coercion. So, yes, in a libertarian society, setting up racially or religiously-segregated communities would be legal – but would it be moral? Libertarianism has no answer to that question: I, however, have my own personal answer, and it is an emphatic no. In a libertarian world, furthermore, the only recourse I would have in protesting these practices would be an economic boycott. So clearly boycotts are not un-libertarian per se.

Yes, all nations have the right to self-determination, and Israel should be no exception. There are, however, grave problems in the case of the Jewish state, one of which was raised by the great Zionist scholar and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who said it isn’t at all clear anymore who or what are "the Jewish people." Indeed, this trenchant moralist and one of the seminal intellectual figures among the founding generation predicted the conundrum facing the Jewish state after the 1967 war, when Israel took the occupied territories and placed itself in charge of the destiny of millions of Palestinians. The authorities, he said, would be forced to set up a police state, and, furthermore, would have to enforce an ethno-religious caste system that would become increasingly unsustainable. His prescient observation is now encoded in Israeli law, in a thousand regulations that accord Arab citizens of Israel second class status. When it comes to the question of Jewish nationality versus Israeli citizenship, the legal dilemma of Zionist jurisprudence was underscored in a recent court case in which the judges were very specific on this sensitive subject.

The Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled there is no such thing as "Israeli" nationality, and that to even recognize such a concept would involve invalidating Israel’s status as the Jewish state. The court averred:

"[A] person cannot belong to two nations. If Israeli nationality is recognized, members of the Jewish nation in Israel will have to choose between the two. Are they Israelis? Then they will not be Jews. Or are they Jews? Then they cannot be Israelis. This also applies to the minority populations."

The judges’ decision, against allowing the word "Israeli" in the slot reserved for "nationality" on official ID cards, in effect institutionalized the distinction between citizenship and nationality, and ratified the privileging of the latter over the former.

This is crazy, not to mention headache-producing. If there are no Israelis, then what legitimacy does the Israeli state possess?

The fanatics in charge of the current government legitimize their policies in the name of preserving the integrity of the Zionist project, which specifically calls for building a Jewish state, not just any old state, on the land we call Israel. This was less problematic before 1967: today, as professor Leibowitz foretold with his characteristically magisterial truculence, the moral and political degeneration of the post-’67 Zionist project has ushered in what he called "Judeo-Nazism." Leibowitz feared the advent of an era in which the authorities, following the logic of their exclusivist and expansionist policies, would be forced to construct "concentration camps" to contain the Arab insurgency – in which case, he said, "Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it."

Speaking of which: what is Gaza but history’s biggest concentration camp?

What Leibowitz’s critique of the Jewish state implies is that the right of national self-determination is not unlimited, because it is not primary: it is derived from the rights of all individuals to choose their own form of government. If that fundamental right is violated – as is being done in the case of the Palestinians – then one cannot rationalize that violation by invoking a subsidiary right.

Yes, Israel has the right to exist – but that right is dependent on the behavior of the self-proclaimed Jewish state.

Israel’s defenders argue that Gaza is a deadly threat to the nation’s security and the Israelis have every right to periodically pulverize that isolated slum, killing women and children as well as Hamas fighters, "in self-defense." Yet the government’s perpetual war against the indigenous Arab population has inevitably extended to Israeli citizens of Arab descent, who look so much like their oppressors that huge walls have been constructed around "minority" communities to keep the population contained. Israeli law has encoded – and the Supreme Court has all too often upheld – discriminatory practices by the state against its own citizens based on nothing but ethnicity.

This what that otherwise baffling Supreme Court decision over "nationality" versus "citizenship" is really all about. In order to exclude Arabs and privilege Jews, the Supreme Court was forced to deny the very existence of an Israeli nationality – in order to defend the ideological foundations of systematic state-enforced segregation and the creation of an ethnic caste system.

Imagine if some government had an official policy of descending on Jewish communities with bulldozers after seizing Jewish-owned property and forcing the occupants out. We’d never hear the end of it, would we? And rightfully so. There wouldn’t be any argument about whether or not to rebuke the government and isolate the country involved. Why, when the positions are reversed, and it is the government of Israel – the self-proclaimed "Jewish state" – committing these crimes, is a boycott suddenly controversial?

But all of this was perfectly true before I changed my position on BDS, so what’s different now? Yes, I’m reading the minds of some of my regular readers, which I try to do in my efforts to both enlighten and entertain them, and so I’m forced to admit that, yes, this is true. I plead ignorance, however, of conditions on the ground, which Blumenthal’s very readable and informative book filled me in on. The extent to which hatred of Arabs pervades every level of Israeli society and dominates even the most "enlightened" circles is shocking.

Since I’m one of those libertarianism-in-one-country guys who pretty much confine themselves to arguing against US intervention abroad in terms of how it damages American interests and undermines our own system of theoretically limited government, I frankly don’t pay much attention to the internal arrangements of foreign countries. In writing about the relations between countries, I’ve found that their behavior on the world stage – aggressive, pacific, mercantile or militarist – has little if anything to do with the political character of the state: a liberal democracy is just as likely to get in the business of empire as a totalitarian regime.

In addition to the Blumenthal book, what really changed my mind on the BDS question were some of the arguments against it. In a jeremiad directed at the American Studies Association, which recently joined a growing number of academic groups worldwide in endorsing the boycott, Jeffrey Goldberg writes:

"Is it a coincidence that these academics are singling out the world’s only Jewish-majority country for boycott? Only to those who know nothing of the history of anti-Semitic scapegoating. This is not to say that [American Studies Association President] Professor Marez and his colleagues are personally anti-Semitic. Larry Summers, a past president of Harvard University, told Charlie Rose that he considers boycotts of Israel ‘anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.’"

Aside from the presumed relevance of Larry Summers’ reiteration of the Stalinist argument against Trotsky – that he was "objectively" counterrevolutionary, and therefore Stalin was quite justified in having that ice pick implanted in his forehead – one has to ask whether Israel has singled itself out.

In what other country on earth is housing allocated on a purely ethnic basis? Tell me where else certain roads are reserved for those who can prove their adherence to the "right" religious affiliation on a state-issued identification card? Where else do full-fledged citizens of a country suffer de facto internment in ghettoes on account of their official ‘nationality"? And, pray tell, what other supreme judicial authority in which country denies that citizenship confers nationality – and even goes so far as to deny its own national identity in an effort to preserve the purity of the state’s ethnic character?

Israel may be the only country in the world with a Jewish majority population, as Goldberg observes, but this is likely to be a transient phenomenon unless the Israeli government’s policy of ethnic cleansing and de facto population transfer undergoes a dramatic escalation. Indeed, the demographic time-bomb incubating in the very heart of the Jewish state has long been recognized by Israeli policymakers as the principal threat to the Zionist enterprise: the result has been, as Leibowitz predicted, the arrival on the scene of that oxymoronic figure, the "Judeo-Nazi."

When I first heard this expression, my reaction was that it was a bit of an overstatement. After all, the Israelis aren’t herding Arabs into gas chambers. Yet that doesn’t mean there is no such creature. Blumenthal documents their existence – and growing power – in his book, with some shocking interviews with far-right politicians and the more "mainstream" ones who are being pressured into echoing the growing extremism that has infected the Israeli body politic.

I support the BDS concept, although I’ll refrain from endorsing any particular organization or campaign, precisely because I don’t believe Israel is a hopeless cause. Professor Leibowitz has departed this world, and so I can’t ask him, I can only extrapolate from his Casssandra-like warnings of what Israel could and would become if it didn’t divide the land and give Palestinians their own state. I think there is a good chance a successful BDS campaign could make the Israelis change their behavior, and that in itself makes it worthwhile.

Just so there’s no confusion: I understand there’s a campaign to boycott only products made in the occupied territories, and that some activists, such as the writer Peter Beinart, support this limited boycott. Aside from its limited effectiveness, this makes no sense. What is needed is a complete and total embargo – privately enforced, mind you – on Israeli goods and services, including a boycott on travel to Israel. Most importantly, activists should target US aid to Israel, linking it to a prohibition on discriminatory legislation and policies.

The international do-gooder crowd is perpetually calling for US intervention, military or diplomatic, on behalf of supposedly oppressed peoples from Syria to Tibet, but this time – for once! – instead of calling on us to bomb a country they’re just asking us to boycott it. This is a refreshing change of pace and I want to do everything I can to encourage it

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 27-29, 2013

Asymmetric Warfare
The Killings Fields of Gaza
by COLIN GREEN
Revelations from Israeli sources such as ‘Breaking the Silence’ and ‘Physicians for Human Rights-Israel’ that the Israeli assaults on Gaza in 2008/9 (Cast Lead) and 2012 (Pillars of Defence) were planned many months ahead pose many questions about the real motives for the seven year siege and these massive attacks on a helpless concentration of impoverished and imprisoned people. Let us then pose just some of those questions and seek objective answers to:

*Why does the international community and UN allow Israel to blockade and besiege a tiny strip of land called Gaza for near seven years with absolute impunity?

*In a related vein, why is Israel allowed to commit piracy in international waters to prevent unarmed merchant ships reaching Gaza under the nose of NATO naval fleets operating in the Eastern Mediterranean?

*Were the asymmetric assaults on Gaza in 2008/9 and again in 2012 genuinely a response to Qassam rocket attacks or carefully planned attacks for other reasons?

*Could the siege and attacks actually be about testing of new weapons, testing of new missile defence systems, field trials of new strategies of population control and control of the immense energy resources found in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Let’s begin by examining the demographics obtaining at the time of the Cast Lead assault. Gaza is a narrow strip of land, 45 km long by 5-12 km wide, into which 1.5 million Palestinians were concentrated and virtually imprisoned – at a density of 4119/km2, four times the density of Bangladesh. The population is confined mainly to five cities and seven large refugee camps, with one million people registered as UN refugees. There is only about 24 km2 of potentially productive farmland, the best of it adjacent to the north-eastern border with Israel, most of it inaccessible because it falls within the Israeli ‘buffer zone.’ Eighty percent of Gazans, 59% of whom are children, live below the poverty line. Forty percent are unemployed, 60% are food dependent on UNRWA.

Gaza had been ruled by Hamas, a freely elected government, for over a year before the attacks, but Israel and the US designated it a ‘terrorist organisation’ and Gaza a ‘hostile entity’ soon after those elections, and then set out to make life hell for its citizens. From 2006 onward, Israel set out to destroy the Gazan economy, using food insecurity, a kind of controlled starvation, as a means of punishing the population and breaking its will.

The buffer zone inside the border removed 68% of arable farmland, making farming dangerous and impossible. Available fish stocks were reduced by 84%, Palestinian fishermen limited by Israel to three instead of the 20 nautical miles agreed upon in the Oslo process, thus reducing protein intake to dangerous levels and destroying one of the bases of the Gazan economy. No less telling is that by limiting Palestinian access to the sea the Israelis have also prevented Gazan exploitation of natural gas reserves of Gaza Marine 1 and 2 estimated at nearly 1.4 trillion cubic feet, which could have turned the economy around and made Gaza energy independent of Israel.

Analysis of the timelines of both major military assaults is instructive. For six months leading up to the Cast Lead invasion, Hamas observed a ceasefire until an Israeli incursion into Gaza on November 4th (election day in the US) killed six Palestinians, predictably triggering a response of Qassam rocket fire into Israel. This provided just the pretext needed by the Israeli military to attack on a massive scale.

The Israeli attack commenced on December 27, 2008, carefully coordinated to coincide with the changeover in American Presidencies. After three days of intensive air strikes, the Security Council attempted to pass Ceasefire Resolution 1860, but the US blocked it, giving Israel the political space it needed to launch a full ground assault. (Congress supported the invasion overwhelmingly, the House by a vote of 390-5, the Senate by an overwhelming bi-partisan voice vote.)

The Ceasefire Resolution was finally passed by the Security Council on January 8th, almost a week after the ground invasion, but the US abstained, thereby affording Israel the necessary political cover to continue its operations. US President-elect Barack Obama uttered not a word. Tony Blair, the Quartet representative, issued a tepid call for an immediate ceasefire.

Palestinian casualties in the Cast Lead invasion were appalling. About 1400 people were killed, of which 313 were children and 116 were women; less than 20% of those killed were combatants. More than 6000 were badly injured, including 1855 children and 795 women (source: Palestinian Center for Human Rights). My Norwegian medical colleagues Mads Gilbert and Eric Fosse, working in Gaza at the time alongside Palestinian medical staff, reported lesions which they had never seen before and which provided circumstantial evidence that the Israelis had used and tested new weapons as well as white phosphorus in heavily populated civilian areas. Apart from severe burns, there were an abnormally high number of amputations and maiming among the surviving wounded.

For example, 150 amputees had to be referred to Egyptian hospitals; in Jabalia refugee camp there were 165 newly disabled patients of whom at least 90 had amputations, some multiple. These casualties were caused by the full armamentarium of known conventional weapons, but some injuries caused strongly suggest that other ordnance was tested for the first time under battle conditions. Some of these described here were definitely used but others are still in doubt.

White phosphorous shells contain the chemical impregnated into small strips of felt, which scatter over a radius of 100 metres when the shell explodes in mid-air. It is officially used as a smoke-screen device and for illumination at night, but it is also an incendiary device and was used as such in Gaza on several occasions. Flechette shells contain thousands of darts about 4 cm long which disperse in a widening cone when the shell explodes about a metre from the ground; these darts are ballistically designed to tumble on penetration and wreak havoc in soft tissues. They were used in 2008/9 but not in the 2012 assault.

The Keshet rapid fire automated mortar was tried out to devastating effect in a crowded street in Jabalia Refugee camp near the Al Fakhoura School, in full view of the Israeli troops. Kalanit shells were fired from 120mm tank cannons; these explode in the air, stop and release 6 mini-charges which spray a target with shrapnel from above.

Dense inert metal explosives (DIMES) are newly developed ordnance comprising a carbon fibre casing packed with micro-shrapnel of inert metals like tungsten, nickel and cobalt causing a massive implosion within a relatively confined space, supposedly allowing a precise kill without collateral damage over a wide area. Small diameter bombs (SDBs) which glide toward their target under laser direction can be fitted to F16 fighter aircraft, and were used in Gaza (1000 were purchased from the US in early December in readiness for the 2008 attack).

It is thought that they contained dense inert metal shrapnel. However the evidence for the use of DIMES is based on the powdered shrapnel found over the liver surface and other soft tissues, as well as the clean-cut multiple amputations suffered by so many casualties; it is not definitive.

Depleted uranium tipped shells are designed for deep penetration of targets such as tanks and create a high temperature fireball inside; in Gaza they were used to attack large buildings, not tanks. Finally although the Israelis have been accused of using thermobaric weapons in Gaza as bunker busters targeting the Egyptian border tunnels, there is no clear evidence for that.

Operation Cast Lead was a supreme example of asymmetric warfare between, on the one hand, the most powerful military state in the Middle East and, on the other, a besieged concentration camp. To give you an idea of the military might of this prototypic modern warrior state, Israel has at the last count between 240 and 300 nuclear warheads; huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction (yet calling indignantly for the destruction of all in Syria); 620 warplanes including F16 fighters (soon to be replaced with the latest F35 lightning fighters costing $200 million each, 25 of which promised by the US to Israel ahead of all other recipients as they come off the production line), as well as Cobra and Apache helicopters; six German-built and donated Dolphin Class submarines, some capable of being armed with nuclear warheads and two thought to be currently operational in the Persian Gulf; an unknown number of short, intermediate and long range (up to 8000 kilometres) ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload (Jericho1,2,3); a modern navy of 58 combat surface warships many armed with missiles which regularly exercises with the NATO Fleet in the Mediterranean; three squadrons of drones (Hermes, Searcher and Heron), many designed and built in Israel with 100 on order by the UK Government; a highly trained army with 2442 heavy Merkava tanks, 1265 armoured troop carriers and numerous other smaller military vehicles; 2754 pieces of heavy artillery with diabolical ordnance specifically designed to create havoc in civilian populations; and a standing army of 26,000 bolstered by 107,000 conscripts to a total of 133,000 troops (60% bigger than the British Army) which can be rapidly expanded nearly 3-fold in emergency with 400,000 personnel who have been trained for mandatory periods each year of their life from 18 up to the age of 40-50.

Think back to the size of that total population of 7.8 million Israelis, of which at least 20% are ineligible to join the armed forces because they are regarded as a Fifth Column of Israeli Arabs. This represents a massive investment in war both in blood and in money. How much does all this cost? Officially, Israel says it spends roughly 7% of total GDP ($265 billion) on the military (as compared with 4.5% US and 2.5% UK). Once a tiny state like Israel commits itself to such a massive proportion of its GDP for war, the only way to pay for it is through economies of scale, an indigenous arms development programme, partly for domestic use by the IDF and partly for sale.

Based on their 2012/13 sales ($13 billion), it lies 4th in the world league table (UK 3rd with $19 billion in sales). If you factor in, however, Israel’s homeland security trade (perhaps as much as its arms trade, whose goods have been honed over decades of control over the Palestinians), such profitable enterprises as retrofitting and its largely unreported arms trade through the shadow world of arms dealers, its global reach and profits place it among the leading arms and security exporters. The Israeli arms and homeland security industry has certainly made its mark both in hardware weaponry (particularly drones), in IT (avionics, robotics, other forms of electronic warfare, plus the military applications of nanotechnology) and in cyber warfare (where IDF Unit 8200 works closely with the NSA), plus myriad forms of security-for-hire. Labelling their products “Field-tested” or “Combat-proven in Gaza” gives Israeli weapons manufacturers a key edge in the market.

Besides unquestioning bi-partisan support for Israel in Congress for domestic reasons, are there other interests at work that explain why the US routinely vetoes in the Security Council any and every UN resolution critical of Israel (43 times so far, more than all other countries have used their veto on all other issues combined)? Could the ability of the Pentagon and American (and European) arms manufacturers to test their new weaponry in Gaza and the West Bank offer an explanation?

The immediate connection between American financial support of the Israeli anti-missile defence system Iron Dome, its use against Qassam rockets whose firing Israel actually provoked and announcements that the system is being sold to American forces in Afghanistan and to India has to raise questions. Similarly, could a demonstration of “aerial occupation” in which drones complete dominate, intimidate and control the lives of 1.7 million people in Gaza have any effect on Israeli sales of drones as part of its larger export of means of control to governments, armies, security agencies, and police forces around the world? And what about the massive natural gas fields off-shore from Gaza being exploited by Israel while the Palestinians are denied access to their own natural resources through supposed “security” controls?

Israel’s armoury serves as the ultimate extension of Western hegemony in the region. That and the Western military-security-industrial complex being served by Israeli weapons and the opportunity to develop and test weapons in the Palestinian Territories makes the assaults on Gaza and the ongoing repression a case study in what is rapidly becoming Global Palestine – the “palestinization” of us all. For the Gazans are only the guinea pigs. We are the end-recipients. In that sense we all are, truly, Palestinians.

Colin Green is Emeritus Professor of Surgery, University College London (UCL) and Academician in the Ukraine National Academy of Science, as well as a human rights activist with particular interests in the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Stop the War Coalition, Physicians for Human Rights, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Angela Davis: "support BDS, and Palestine will be free"
Submitted by Nora Barrows-Fr... on Fri, 01/17/2014 - 21:10


Angela Davis (JohannaClear / Flickr)
This week on The Electronic Intifada podcast:

Scholar, author and legendary activist Angela Davis talks about Palestine, the struggle against Israeli apartheid, the global prison industrial complex and why transnational security corporation G4S should be boycotted, in a recent speech she gave in London.
The Electronic Intifada podcast is available on iTunes! Click here to view the podcast archive, or subscribe via the iTunes interface (search for The Electronic Intifada).

Listen to the entire Electronic Intifada podcast:


Transcript: Angela Davis in London

Thank you to War on Want, SOAS School of Law and Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

Angela Davis on Palestine, G4S and the Prison Industrial Complex

Angela Davis: First of all, thank you for the wonderful welcome. And thank you Brenna for the great introduction. I see that I’m the professor this evening. And also thank you Rafeef and thank you Frank.

And thank you to everyone who came out this evening. This is an important meeting, in a sense, a major beginning. And I’m happy to see that so many people who are already involved in the campaign against G4S are present this evening as well. You inspire us to continue to work.

I was first asked to participate in this meeting, highlighting the importance of boycotting the transnational security corporation G4S. I could not have known that this meeting would coincide with the death and memorialization of Nelson Mandela. And as I reflect on the legacies of struggle we associate with Mandela, I cannot help but recall the struggles that helped to forge the victory of his freedom, and thus the arena on which South African apartheid was dismantled.

And as a result, I remember Ruth First and Joe Slovo, and I remember Walter and Albertina Sisulu, and Govan Mbeki, and Oliver Thambo and Chris Hani and so many others who are no longer with us. In keeping with Mandela’s insistence of always locating himself within a context of collective struggle, it is fitting, I think, to evoke the names of others who played such an important role in the destruction of apartheid.

And while it is moving to witness the unanimous and continued outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela, I think we should also question the meaning of this sanctification.

I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated to a kind of secular sainthood, as a single individual, but would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle, and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification. He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would have singled him out at the expense of those who are always at his side.

And I think that his profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism. And so therefore I want to take the opportunity to thank the countless numbers of people here in the UK, including the many then-exiled members of the ANC and the South African communist party who built a really powerful and exemplary anti-apartheid movement in this country.

Having traveled here on numerous occasions during the 1970s and 1980s to participate in a whole number of anti-apartheid events, I thank the women and men who were as unwavering in their commitment to freedom as was Nelson Mandela. And I’d like to say that participation in these solidarity movements here in the UK was so central to my own political formation, perhaps even more central than the movements that saved my life.

And so as I mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela, I offer my deep gratitude to all of those who kept the anti-apartheid struggle alive for so many decades, for all the decades that it took to finally rid the world of apartheid. And I would like to evoke the spirit of the South African constitution and its opposition to racism and anti-Semitism, as well as to sexism and homophobia.

This is the context within which I would like to join with you once more to intensify campaigns against another regime of apartheid, and in solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people. As Nelson Mandela said, we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

Mandela’s political development took place within the context of an internationalism that always urged us to make connections among freedom struggles, between the black struggle in the southern United States and the African liberation movements, for example, conducted by of course the ANC in South Africa but also the MPLA in Angola, and Swapo in Namibia and Frelimo in Mozambique and PAIGC in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. And those solidarities were not only among people of African descent, but with Asian and Latin American struggles as well, ongoing solidarity with the Cuban revolution. And of course solidarity with the people who were struggling against US military aggression in Vietnam.

And so, almost a half century later, we have inherited the legacies of those solidarities, however well or badly specific struggles may have tuned out, the solidarities were what produced hope and inspiration. And helped to create real conditions to move forward.

So now we’re confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine, as they battle against Israeli apartheid. Their struggles have many similarities with those against South African apartheid. One of the most salient being the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubrick of terrorism. And I understand that evidence is being made available that indicates that historical collaboration between the CIA — well, we knew the CIA collaborated with the South African apartheid regime — but it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave South African authorities the location of Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, and that led directly to his capture and imprisonment.

And it wasn’t until the year 2008 — that’s like five years ago, right? — that his name was taken off of the “terrorist watch list.” When George W. Bush — maybe you remember him — signed a bill that finally removed him and other members of the ANC from the list … in other words, when Mandela visited the US on several occasions after his release in 1990, he was still on the terrorist list, and there had to be — the requirement that he was banned from the US had to be expressly waived.

The point that I’m making is that for a very long time, he and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinians today. And as the US explicitly collaborated with the South African apartheid government, it supported and continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. The occupation would not be possible without the collaboration of the US government. And that is one of the messages we need to send to Barack Obama.

It is an honor to participate in this meeting, especially as one of the members of the International Political Prisoners’ Committee that was just recently formed in Cape Town, and also as a member of the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

And of course I’d like to thank War on Want for sponsoring this meeting. And SOAS, and particularly the progressive element here for making it possible for us to be here this evening.

This evening’s gathering specifically focuses on the importance on expanding the BDS movement — the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which has been crafted in accordance of the powerful movement of the anti-apartheid movement with respect to South Africa.

While there are numerous trans-national corporations which have been identified as targets of the boycott — Veolia, for example, and I know you know Veolia pretty well here — there’s SodaStream, and and Ahava, and Caterpillar, and Boeing and Hewlett-Packard, and I could go on and on but I’ll stop there, and I will also say that G4S is especially important because it participates blatantly, directly, openly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine. We’re talking about prisons and checkpoints and the apartheid wall.

G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state. And of course Gina presented a critique of that notion of security by suggesting that feminist alternatives may be helpful as we attempt to re-conceptualize what security should mean. The ideologies of security represented by G4S bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare as well, the privatization of health care and the privatization of education.

G4S is responsible for the repressive treatment of political prisoners inside Israel, and through the organization Addameer, which is directed by Sahar Francis, who’s absolutely amazing, and some of you may have had the opportunity to hear her. But she travels all over the country and she and her organization, Addameer, provide us with information about what is happening both inside the prisons and outside.

We’ve learned about the terrifying universe of torture and imprisonment that is faced by so many Palestinians, but we’ve also learned about their spirit of resistance, we’ve learned about their hunger strikes and other forms of resistance that continue to take place behind the walls.

I think that Rafeef may have pointed out that G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world. What is the first? What is the largest private corporation in the world? It’s Wal-Mart. And the number two is FoxConn, which produces devices like iPads, et cetera, et cetera. So I was looking at the website of G4S. It’s really interesting to look at their self-representation. And they point out all of the things they protect. And among all of the objects of their protection are rock stars and sports stars, and people and property. I’m reading directly from their website: “from insuring that travelers have a safe and pleasant experience at ports and airports around the world … to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country.”

They tell you exactly what they’re doing. And again I’m quoting: “in more ways than you might realize … G4S is securing your world.” And we might add: in more ways that we might realize, G4S has insinuated itself into our lives under the guise of security and the security state, from the ways that Palestinians experience political incarceration and torture to racist technologies of separation and apartheid, from the wall in Israel to prison-like schools and the wall along the US-Mexico border.

G4S-Israel has brought sophisticated technologies of control to HaSharon prison, which includes children among its detainees, and Dimona prison, which incarcerates women as well, but let’s look for a moment at the extent to which G4S is also involved in the what we might call the larger prison industrial complex. And I’m not referring to its involvement in prisons — it runs and owns and operates private prisons all over the world, and if I still have time later I’ll talk about that, but I’m actually talking about schools.

In the US, schools, particularly in poor communities, in poor communities of color, are so thoroughly entangled in this prison industrial complex that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails, and they use the same technologies of detection and they use oftentimes the same law enforcement officials. We have elementary schools in the US whose halls are actually patrolled by armed officers.

And as a matter of fact, a recent trend has been to arm the teachers. Particularly by school districts that cannot afford G4S. So if they cannot afford private security, then they teach their teachers how to shoot and give them guns. I kid you not.

If you look at a website that is entitled “great schools,” and you look up a school in Florida that’s called the Central Pasco Girls’ Academy in Land-o-Lakes, Florida, you will only learn that it’s a small alternative public school. But if you look at the “facilities” page of the G4S website, you will discover this entry: Central Pasco Girls’ Academy serves moderate risk females aged 13-18 who have been assessed as needing intensive mental health services. And they go on to write about the way in which they use “gender-responsive services.” And that they address sexual abuse and substance abuse, et cetera.

Now, the reach of the prison industrial complex is far beyond the prison itself. And in that context, we might also think about other ways in which a firm like G4S is complicit with other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid. And the fact that it provides equipment and services to the checkpoints. And it provides services that refer to part of the route of the illegal wall, and so forth and so on. And it’s interesting that we see G4S along the wall in Israel, but we also see G4S providing transportation for deportees — and I’ll talk about the UK in a moment — but I’m referring now to the transportation services that are used to usher undocumented immigrants from the US to Mexico, thus colluding with the repressive immigration legislation and the practices inside the US.

But of course, it was here, in the UK, where one of the most egregious acts of repression took place in the course of the transportation of an undocumented person. The last time I was in London, which actually wasn’t that long ago, it was in October, and I had the opportunity to meet with Deborah Coles, who is a director at Inquest, and she told me about the case of Jimmy Mubenga, the inquest that happened last summer. And she explained how he had died, and this technique that was used by G4S employees to prevent his voice from being heard as he was being deported on a British Airways plane. And apparently he was handcuffed behind his back, he had his seatbelt on, and he was pushed by G4S people against the seat in front of him in what they called a “karaoke carpet,” that is to say he would have to sing into the carpet of the seat in front of him.

It’s incredible, isn’t it, that they have this term for this form — apparently it was not supposed to be legal, but they were using it anyway — and he was restrained in that way for something like 40 minutes, and no one intervened. And of course by the time there was an attempt to give him first aid, he was dead.

And I think this egregious treatment of undocumented immigrants from the US to the UK compels us to make connections with Palestinians who are transformed into immigrants, into undocumented immigrants, on their own land. On their own land. And companies like G4S provide the technical means of carrying out this process.

And then of course G4S is involved in the operation of prisons all over the world, including South Africa. And the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU, recently spoke out against G4S which runs a correctional center in the free state. Apparently, the occasion was the firing of something like 300 members of the police union because they went on strike. And let me read a brief passage from the COSATU statement: “G4S’ modus operandi is indicative of two of the most worrying aspects of neoliberal capitalism and Israeli apartheid — the ideology of ‘security’ and the increasing privatization of what have been traditionally state-run sectors. Security in this context does not imply security for everyone. But rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S security, banks, governments, corporations, et cetera, it becomes evident that when G4S says it is ‘securing your world,’ as the company’s slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation and racism.”

When I traveled to Palestine two years ago, and Gina pointed out that it was with a delegation of indigenous and women of color scholar-activists, it was actually the first trip, the first visit to Palestine for all of us. And most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work. But we were all totally shocked by the blatant nature of the repression associated with settler-colonialism. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they were charged with inflicting on Palestinian people.

Gun-carrying military men and women were everywhere. And some of them looked like they were only 13 years old. I know, when you get older, they look younger. But these were really young people walking around with huge guns. It was — I experienced it as a kind of nightmare. How can this be possible? The wall, the concrete and the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. We were already in prison. And of course, as far as Palestinians were concerned, one mis-step and that person could be arrested and hauled off to prison. From an open-air prison to a closed prison.

G4S, it seems to me, represents these carceral trajectories that are so obvious in Palestine, but that increasingly characterize the profit-driven moves of transnational corporations associated with the rise of mass incarceration in the US and in the world.

In the US, there are some 2.5 million people in our country’s jails and prisons and military prisons, and jails in Indian country, and immigrant detention centers — on any given day, that is to say, there are 2.5 million people, approximately. It’s a daily census, so it doesn’t reflect the numbers of people who go through the system every week, or every month, or every year.

The majority of those people are people of color. The fastest-growing sector consists of women, women of color. Many prisoners are queer, and trans — as a matter of fact, trans people of color are the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for the maintenance, reproduction and expansion of the prison industrial complex. And so, if we say, as we do, abolish the prison industrial complex, we should also say abolish apartheid. And end the occupation of Palestine.

When we have, in the States, described the segregation in occupied Palestine, that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America, especially when we talk about this to black people, the response is often “why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the signs in occupied Palestine? And about the segregated express auto-highways? Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?”

And so, just as we say “never again” with the respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid, in the southern US. But that means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarities with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls. Inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Boycott G4S, support BDS, and finally, Palestine will be free. Thank you.

UN year of solidarity with the Palestinian people begins with boycott success
Posted on January 21, 2014 by Palestinian BDS National Committee


In November of last year, the UN General Assembly designated 2014 as the UN International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Just three weeks into 2014, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has again shown that it represents an increasingly effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.

In early January, high profile Norwegian singer Moddi announced that he was cancelling his performance in Tel Aviv out of respect for the Palestinian call for a cultural boycott of Israel and following appeals from activists in Gaza.

On January 8, campaigners in the US were celebrating after Veolia lost out on a $4.5 billion contract in Boston following a vigorous campaign denouncing the company’s provision of infrastructure to illegal Israeli settlements.

In a potentially precedent-setting move, Dutch pension fund PGGM announced on January 13 that it is divesting from 5 of Israel’s biggest banks due to their deep involvement in Israeli violations of international law. The fund manages the pensions of 2.5 million people. Media reports now suggest that other European banks are considering similar steps.

On January 17, Villar Focchiardo became the sixth local council in Italy to condemn Pizzarotti for its role in an Israeli railway that passes through occupied Palestinian territory

The start to 2014 has also brought further evidence of the impact of BDS. Israeli politicians have again spoken of their growing fears about the growth of BDS, with Justice Minister Tzipi Livni describing BDS as advancing “exponentially”. Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley have complained that retailers in western Europe are increasingly unwilling to purchase their products, hurting profitability, and the BDS movement has been featured heavily in mainstream Israeli media outlets in recent days.

These significant developments so early in the year follow a 2013 during which the BDS movement stepped further into the political mainstream and saw major institutions join the boycott, as our round-up of 2013 successes and developments in the BDS movement shows. Some of the most important successes of 2013 included:

- Security company G4S faced mounting international criticism and lost contracts worth millions of dollars with public bodies in South Africa and across Europe due to its role providing services to Israel’s checkpoints and settlements and prisons where Palestinian political prisoners are held without trial and tortured.

- French multinational Veolia lost contracts worth millions of dollars across the US, UK and in France, and announced that it was pulling out completely of running bus lines for Israeli settlers in occupied Palestinian territory. Veolia still operates the illegal Jerusalem Light Rail project.

- World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and academic unions and associations across Europe and the US endorsed the academic boycott of Israeli institutions.

- Scores of trade unions, church organisations and student associations across the world endorsed the Palestinian call for BDS and joined our increasingly powerful and effective movement.

- Banks and pension funds in Europe and the US divested from companies that profilt from Israeli apartheid including Veolia and SodaStream.

- The European Union and the Dutch, British and Romanian government adopted some of the long overdue measures which are required from states in order to avoid complicity in Israel’s colonization of occupied Palestinian land, including measures aimed at stopping the flow of EU funds, foreign labour and business to the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise.

While there remains a long road before us, the Palestinian BDS National Committee is immensely proud of the way in which the BDS movement developed in 2013.

On behalf of our member organisations, we thank the each and every one of the campaigners and organisations whose dedication and skilled and strategic campaigning led to the inspirational continued growth of the BDS movement during 2013.

This year will mark 10 years since the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s apartheid wall and colonial settlements are illegal and that countries around the world are legally obliged to hold Israel accountable and not to support Israeli violations of international law.

Most international governments are yet to comply with this ruling and remain active accomplices to Israel’s system of occupation, colonisation and apartheid. Yet the international grassroots BDS movement is proving increasingly capable of ending international complicity with Israeli apartheid and pushing governments, corporations and institutions to take action.

We look forward to working with campaigners and civil society organisations across the world to continue to develop the BDS movement as a vital tool in the struggle for freedom, justice and equality of the oppressed Palestinian people, including the exiled refugees, Palestinian citizens of Israel

American Dream » 26 Jan 2014 21:50 wrote:Thanks also for posting the Angela Davis BDS article- great stuff.

BDS takes on the ivory tower
Purdue University professor Bill Mullen assesses the effect of the recent advances in the effort to spread the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

January 27, 2014

RECENT VICTORIES in the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli apartheid have opened up new possibilities for the movement.

First, the American Studies Association (ASA), with more than 4,000 members worldwide, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) voted to join the boycott of Israeli universities. Then, the 27,000-member Modern Language Association (MLA) passed by a narrow margin a resolution criticizing Israel for restricting the right of U.S. scholars to enter the West Bank to work at Palestinian universities. Earlier in 2013, the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) passed its own boycott resolution.

Predictably, this wave of anti-apartheid activism has been met with an apartheid wall of opposition.

More than 150 university administrators, mostly well-paid university presidents, leapt to condemn the ASA vote and defend Israel's denial of rights and self-determination. Leading newspapers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, editorialized against the ASA. And 134 members of Congress signed on to an open letter attacking the ASA and supporting Israel.

But the impact of the courageous stance taken by these academic associations is nevertheless unmistakable: Israeli apartheid is on the defensive, and the global BDS movement has inched closer to what co-founder Omar Barghouti has called a "tipping point."

Students and Palestinian solidarity activists around the country are strategizing about how to build on these victories; public discussion of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and U.S. support for Israel has broken into the mainstream media; and chinks in Israel's armor of political and diplomatic support are beginning to emerge.

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THE RECENT actions by these academic organizations reflect the steady growth of the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). In the aftermath of Israel's violent assault on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009, USACBI was launched in solidarity with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

PACBI and USACBI are modeled on the movement against apartheid in South Africa, which included an academic and cultural boycott to raise global consciousness of the many injustices of apartheid.

Both PACBI and USACBI stand in solidarity with the three demands of global BDS movement: an end to Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, its colonization of Arab lands and its apartheid wall; full, equal rights for Arab-Palestinians in Israel; and full implementation of UN Resolution 194 guaranteeing the right of return for Palestinian refugees forcibly displaced since the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) of 1947-49. Today, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimates that there are nearly 5 million Palestinian refugees worldwide.

The ASA resolution, which passed by a 2-to-1 margin, targeted the complicity of Israeli universities in Israel's illegal occupation and other violations of international law. Several Israeli universities, for example, Tel Aviv University, are built on stolen Palestinian land. The Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion, develops weapons that have been used against Palestinian civilian populations in violation of international law.

The ASA resolution pointed out that scholars and students at Palestinian universities face restrictions on travel and research and live under constant threat of violence. In December 2008, the Islamic University of Gaza was partly destroyed by Israeli bombs. Just days ago, dozens of students at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem were injured during an Israeli campus raid.

The ASA resolution also argued that the U.S. government "plays a significant role in enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the expansion of illegal settlements and the Wall in violation of international law, as well as in supporting the systematic discrimination against Palestinians."

Making explicit the role of U.S. imperialism in the Israeli occupation has made the ASA the target of a predictable counterattack that exposes the unspoken alliance between American university administrators, many of them former government officials, and the state itself.

For example, leading the attack on the ASA was former Harvard President Lawrence Summers. On the Charlie Rose Show, Summers, also a former chief economist of the World Bank and an appointee of both the Bush and Obama administrations, called the boycott movement a violation of academic freedom and "anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent."

After Summers' criticism was featured on PBS, university presidents lined up behind him, invoking "academic freedom" in order to criticize the ASA--while of course ignoring the many arguments that opposing Israeli apartheid is part and parcel of extending academic freedom.

What the ASA and MLA resolutions really challenge is the pursuit of U.S. economic and political interests in the Middle East, such as oil, while running roughshod over international law and human rights. As was well documented in both resolutions, the U.S. provides more than $3 billion a year in military and other assistance to Israel. The Israeli occupation is also supported by a roster of multinational corporations, according to the "BDS Handbook Targeting Israeli Apartheid," issued by the London-based Corporate Watch.

The ASA and MLA resolutions have also helped draw attention to the role of Middle East capitalism in sustaining the occupation. As Adam Hanieh, author of Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, said in a recent interview: "In the case of Palestine...we need to go beyond considering the Palestinian struggle as just a 'human rights' issue, but rather see it as integrally connected to the ways that capitalism in the Middle East has formed under the aegis of Western domination."

Hanieh documents in his book and elsewhere the many ways that the Palestinian Authority is propped up by neoliberal policies that make life more difficult for an already subjugated and colonized Palestinian working class--which explains the support given by workers' rights groups and unions within Palestine to the PACBI movement and the ASA resolution.

In fact, more than half a dozen unions have endorsed PACBI, including the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions--and the Birzeit University Professors and Employees Union in Ramallah, representing more than 700 university staff, has issued a solidarity statement with the ASA boycott resolution.

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IN THE wake of these boycott successes, 2014 will likely see an increase in BDS campaigns and the struggle for Palestinian liberation globally. Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers, has reported that even U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu of a "boycott campaign on steroids" if current "peace talks" with the Palestinian leadership fail.

The ASA, MLA and NAISA resolutions have also energized Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters across the U.S. More than 30 SJP campus chapters affiliated with the national SJP endorsed the ASA boycott, and SJP members at Tufts, Bowdoin, Harvard, Ohio State and Northwestern have written open letters denouncing their university leaders for their criticism of the ASA's stance.

Activists of all sorts--in the labor movement, for civil rights, immigrant rights and so on--should seek out opportunities to work in solidarity with existing BDS and Palestinian rights networks, including SJP chapters, to broaden education about the Israeli occupation, advance new boycott resolutions and underscore the essential role of U.S. imperialism in sustaining Israel's colonization of the Middle East. In the process, we can encourage solidarity between struggles that will strengthen the cause of justice generally.

Anti-racist and anti-imperialist organizing around BDS also needs to spread to U.S. labor unions and workers' associations--as it has in Palestine. It should be remembered that strikes by South African trade unions and solidarity actions taken by U.S. unions and employee organizations spread the strategy of divestment and helped bring down apartheid.

The Palestinian struggle for economic, political and social justice is one that can and should unite the multiple strands of existing struggles against the system as a whole. BDS is one important tool in that struggle.

Salt of the Earth: Palestinian Activists Reclaim and Defend Jordan Valley's Arab History
by Abby Zimet


In a new campaign seeking to reaffirm Arab history in the West Bank's contested Jordan Valley, hundreds of Palestinian activists and residents have erected an encampment in the ruins of Ein Hijleh, an ancient Arab village forcibly depopulated in the 1967 war, and successfully repelled three attempts by Israeli forces to storm it. Despite Israel's closing off the area to media and everyone else, setting up "flying" checkpoints and arresting at least nine people, activists are reportedly still arriving and campers are still getting food and other supplies from nearby communities. The action - dubbed Milh al-Ard or “Salt of the Earth” - comes in response to Israel's ongoing destruction of Palestinian homes and other colonizing moves in the water-rich Jordan Valley, which the U.N. has condemned. Organizers say the new encampment is even more vital than other similar actions because it renews their historic connection to the area.

“This is different because we are actually reclaiming a Canaanite village that used to exist, actually linking it to our Palestinian history on the land and our existence (here).”

Must Watch Video: ‘Stone Cold Justice’ – Israel’s maltreatment of Palestinian children

On February 10th the longest running current affairs program in the world, ABC Australia’s ‘Four Corners’ ran a 45 minute piece on the maltreatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli occupation forces. This video is shocking, horrifying and contains images that may disturb viewers. Nevertheless, it is essential viewing. This is not how a normal state acts, and by refusing to sanction this rogues state for its abuses, Western governments become complicit in these crimes against children

seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 12, 2014 5:38 pm wrote:

Must Watch Video: ‘Stone Cold Justice’ – Israel’s maltreatment of Palestinian children

On February 10th the longest running current affairs program in the world, ABC Australia’s ‘Four Corners’ ran a 45 minute piece on the maltreatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli occupation forces. This video is shocking, horrifying and contains images that may disturb viewers. Nevertheless, it is essential viewing. This is not how a normal state acts, and by refusing to sanction this rogues state for its abuses, Western governments become complicit in these crimes against children