The European Union is actively supporting Israel with its current trade agreements. Enough is enough; keep the pressure up, 2013 is the time for justice in Palestine.
As more and more of us become aware of the systematic denial of Palestinians human rights by Israel military occupation, it is time to make our elected representatives aware of the growing and unstoppable pressure for peace and justice.
The EU should be playing a leading role in implementing policies to ensure that Israel ends its illegal occupation, uphold international law and respect Palestinian human rights.
Instead, they are supporting Israel’s occupation by:
allowing illegal settlement products to be traded across Europe
by using EU tax-payers money to fund Israeli military companies that are responsible for killing civilians and supporting Israel’s military occupation
As recommended by European Union consuls general in East Jerusalem and Ramallah in a recent report, the European Union must divest from settlements and economic sanctions should be put on bodies and companies involved in settlement industry. A report submitted to the UN´s Human Rights Council by an independent fact-finding mission, has also called on all relevant international actors, private or state-connected to take “all necessary steps” to ensure that they were respecting human rights, “including by terminating their business interests in the settlements”.
This is a step forward but not enough; keep the pressure on EU representatives to suspend trade agreements with Israel until they fully and completely abide by international law.
It is time for actions, not words. Tell the EU to act now.
22 January 2013 | Palestinian agriculture organisations, Occupied Palestine
Palestinian agricultural organisations and the Palestinian BDS National Committee call for the launching of worldwide campaigns on February 9 against Israeli agricultural export corporations in light of their deep complicity in Israel’s ongoing violations of international law and Palestinian human rights. Following the successful campaign against Israel’s former leading agricultural export corporation Agrexco, and in light of the growing international consensus on the duty to enforce an effective ban on trade with the illegal Israeli settlements, we invite social movements, nongovernmental organisations, trade unions and human rights campaigners to take creative and effective action on February 9th in support of Palestinian farmers defending their land and natural resources.
The sale and purchase of goods from Israeli agricultural companies, such as Mehadrin and Hadiklaim, finance and reward the on-going illegal Israeli exploitation and colonisation of Palestinian land and further undermine the chances for a just peace based on international law and respect for universal human rights. As was demonstrated in the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa and the wide international solidarity movement with it, citizens can make a difference by refraining from buying products of complicit companies and by working to convince their supermarkets to stop trading with them.
Agriculture is a vital part of the Palestinian economy and national heritage, yet Palestinian farmers are being displaced from their lands and prevented from accessing it. Israel systematically exploits Palestinian natural resources in violation of international law and implements a range of restrictions on Palestinian agriculture in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, while allowing Israeli agricultural corporations to profit from Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.
As Palestinian agricultural organisations have noted, Israeli agricultural export companies are at the heart of Israel’s system of domination over the Palestinian people. They are an integral component of the on-going process of colonisation and environmental destruction of Palestinian land, the destruction of Palestinian agriculture, the theft of water, and the abuse of Palestinian workers’ rights, including child labourers.
Supermarkets should follow the lead of the Co-Operative Group in the UK, which has pledged to end trade with any company exporting goods from illegal Israeli settlements. Governments must meet their legal and moral obligation to take action in support of Palestinian self-determination and ban all forms of trade and cooperation with Israeli agricultural export companies complicit in the illegal settlement enterprise. People of conscience around the world can make sure such measures are taken. We count on your support to end business as usual with Israel’s agricultural companies as a contribution to our struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
Endorsed by:
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee
General Union of Palestinian Peasants and Cooperatives
Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees
Palestinian Farmers Union
Popular Struggle Coordination Committee
Stop the Wall
Union of Agricultural Work Committees
Union of Palestinian Agriculture Engineers
Please contact info@bdsmovement.net to let us know about your planned campaigns and actions or to discuss your ideas.
It has come to our knowledge that One Voice, “an international grassroots movement that amplifies the voice of mainstream Israelis and Palestinians, empowering them to propel their elected representatives toward the two-state solution” has started recruiting youth from The Gaza Strip. This is supposed to be part of its work “to forge consensus for conflict resolution and build a human infrastructure capable of mobilizing the people toward a negotiated, comprehensive and permanent agreement between Israel and Palestine that ends the occupation, ensures security and peace for both sides…” The movement recognizes that violence by either side will never be a means to end the conflict. (emphasis added). In its new Gaza initiative, One Voice “planned an intensive 36-hour training program in leadership skills and teamwork.”
The Palestinian Students Campaign for the Academic boycott of Israel, like Palestinian Youth Against Normalization, considers One Voice a normalizing organization since it ignores the reality which is Israel’s oppression and systematic discrimination against the Palestinian people in its three components: 1948, 1967, and the Diaspora. OV, amongst other organizations, targets Palestinian youth to engage them in dialogue with Israelis without recognizing the inalienable rights of Palestinians, or aiming to end Israel’s occupation, colonization, and apartheid.
We reiterate our commitment to the statement issued by Palestinian youth against normalization which was endorsed by almost all Palestinian youth and student organizations.
We consider One Voice to be an organization that aims to normalize apartheid and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that took place in 1948. One Voice Movement’s vision is based on a “two-state solution”, without any commitment to international parameters — which assumes equal responsibility of “both sides” for the “conflict”, and suspiciously fails to call for Israel’s full compliance with its obligations under international law through ending its illegal military occupation, its denial of Palestinian refugee rights (particularly the right of return), and its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens.
Some of the events organized by One Voice, like the One Million Voices, are sponsored by Israeli institutions (mostly from the private sector) and endorsed by mainstream Israeli political figures from parties including the Likud, Labour and Shas. These Israeli “partners” are unquestionably complicit in maintaining Israel’s occupation and other forms of oppression.
One Voice seems to ignore the fact that the reason why Palestinians and Israelis cannot get together is because the former are colonized and the latter are settler colonists. It also ignores the fact that Israel is an apartheid state, as former American president Jimmy Carter and anti-Apartheid activist and Nobel Laureate Desmund Tutu called it; a state that discriminates not only against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but also against the 1.2 million Palestinians living in it as third class citizens.
We, Palestinian youth of Gaza, ask if One Voice trainers and leaders in Tel Aviv are willing to admit that the creation of the state of Israel was responsible for the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people since 1948? That it illegally occupies the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and racially discriminates against the 1948 Palestinians in what the United Nations Special Rapporteur John Dugard described as, “the only remaining case after South Africa of a Western-affiliated regime that denies self-determination and human rights to a developing people and that has done so for so long”. A state responsible for ongoing house demolitions, illegal settlement expansions and the building of a monstrous Apartheid Wall — not to mention the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza, who are subjugated to a brutal, medieval siege entering its fifth year?
The One Voice website never alludes to the children and teenagers killed by Israel in the last two genocidal wars against the Palestinians of Gaza. Or is that considered a form of “dialogue” between “two equal parties” engaged in a “conflict?” Will there be a reference to the violence of the colonizer; the fourth largest army in the world with more than 450 nuclear heads? Will it state the fact that two thirds of the Palestinians of Gaza are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from the towns and villages where Israeli One Voice trainers and leaders live now?
Instead, One Voice is working on “building a mass grassroots movement that will amplify the voice of the moderates on both sides“, wanting to “show that there are partners for negotiations and peace on both sides” Where are the “two sides” of this “conflict?” Palestinian resistance is considered a “form of violence…(which) brings more violence and suffering to people on both sides! ” This is an issue of injustice around continuous dispossession and subjugation of one people by another people. Do we understand from One Voice that there was a “conflict” between the native Blacks of South Africa and the White supremacists of the apartheid regime?
The One Voice programme is one more arrogant attempt to equate the colonizer and colonized; oppressor and oppressed; victim and executioner. This is camouflaged by changing its name in Arabic to “Palestinian Voice!” We ask: will One Voice ever condemn Israel’s policy of apartheid and ethnic cleansing? Will it openly support the Palestinian right to self-determination?
We, therefore, consider One Voice projects in Gaza a continuation of a campaign of normalization that aims at whitewashing Israel’s tarnished image and does nothing but falsely creates the facade that there are actually two equal sides to “the conflict.” No wonder that tens of cultural and other civil society organizations in Palestine and the Arab World called One Voice “peace activities” as “camouflaging of Apartheid.”
We call on all Palestinian youth not to take part in this public relations charade that conceals a misleading political program that falls significantly short of international law tenets and the Palestinian national program. We expect the Palestinian participants to withdraw their support for this movement that only serves to blind the Palestinian public and sidetrack it from struggling, with the solidarity of its international supporters, for its UN-sanctioned rights, for justice, equality and freedom.
Signed by:
The Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)
Progressive Student Union Bloc
Fateh Youth Organization
Islamic Bloc
Palestinian Student Labor Front
Union of the Palestinian Students struggle committees
Islamic League of Palestinian Students
The Palestinian Popular struggle Front Union
Union of the Palestinian Students struggle committees
In 2008/2009 Gaza was bombed by Israeli Apache helicopters and F16 and V58 fighter planes for 22 days, ultimately causing the deaths of more than 1400 Palestinians, predominatly civlians. Israel, with all the impunity it has enjoyed since its establishment on the ruins of Palestinian society, returned to Gaza two weeks ago and repeated some of the same crimes in 8 days, launching 1800 aerial strikes, killing more than 175 Palestinians — including 34 children, 11 women, 19 elderly — and injuring 1399 people, including 465 children, 254 women, and 91 elderely, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Israel’s academic institutions have played a key role in the planning, development, implementation and justification of this and many other Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv University, for instance, takes pride in playing the central role in the development of the Israeli military doctrine of “disproportionate force” against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.[1] Technion, Israel’s institute of technology, takes credit for developing many of the deadly weapon systems used against civilians in Gaza and elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territory.[2] And the list goes on. This entrenched and fatal academic complicity in the commission of crimes against civilians has made PACBI and its partners around the world intensify their campaign for a comprehensive academic boycott of Israel in light of the latest massacre in Gaza.
Israel’s belligerent and entirely disproportionate air, land and sea bombardment of the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip always damages vital infrastructure and terrifies the civilian population and is therefore considered a form of collective punishment against the Palestinian people. Such war crimes are forbidden under international humanitarian law, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prescribes the manner in which armies must treat civilians during times of conflict.
But Israel has been getting away with these war crimes and crimes against humanity. The “international community,” under U.S. hegemony, seems apathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people. In fact, from diplomatic support to intricate military, academic and economic relations, the US-European establishment has been deeply complicit in prolonging and strengthening Israel’s system of occupation, colonialism and apartheid, as well as in justifying and whitewashing it.
The U.S. president, followed by a chorus of European leaders, duly jumped to Israel’s defense, upholding its “right to defend itself,”[3] ignoring the fact that international law unequivocally stipulates that any injustice or unlawful act cannot give rise to a legal right or entitlement. Missing in such mantras is the right of the Palestinian people, the occupied, ethnically cleansed and oppressed, to self-determination and to defend itself against foreign occupation, a right that is granted by international law, within specific parameters. The British FM William Hague performed skillful acrobatics to spin the blame from the aggressor to the victim of aggression, claiming that “Hamas bears the greatest responsibility for the current crisis, as well as the ability to bring it most swiftly to an end!”[4]
It is crucial to contextualize Israel’s latest war of aggression as part of an ongoing strategy of depriving Palestinians, especially in Gaza, of means of sustenance in order to “sear into their conscience” Israel’s upper hand and the futility of resistance. The hermetic siege imposed on Gaza for more than 5 years, epitomized by Israel’s use of a ‘calorie count’ to limit the flow of food into Gaza, is the most deadly dimension of this patently criminal strategy [5].
This strategy, characterized by a former editor of Haaretz, a leading Israeli daily, as one of “expulsion” as well as “territorial seizure and apartheid”[6] has shaped Israel’s policy for a long time. As far back as 1992, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wished Gaza “would just sink into the sea” [7]. The overwhelming majority of Gaza is made up of refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias and later the state of Israel during the 1948 Nakba. The fact that Gazans are not born to Jewish mothers – the criterion used by Israel to determine who is Jewish — is enough reason to deprive them of their UN-stipulated right to return to their homes and lands from which they were uprooted and exiled. The deeply colonial and racist Israeli logic views Palestinians, like the Afrikaner establishment viewed the Black natives of South Africa, as an inferior, hostile group of people that must be isolated in Bantustans, in accordance with the Oslo Accords’ terms, without calling them so; and if they show any resistance to this plan, they must get punished severely by transforming these Bantustans into “open-air prisons” or walled ghettos.
As a result of Israel’s blockade on most imports and exports and its other policies designed to punish Gazans, about 40% of Gaza’s workforce is now unemployed or without pay, and about 60% of its residents live in grinding poverty, according to various United Nations agencies’ reports. About 1.2 million of them are now dependent for their day-to-day survival on food handouts from U.N. or international agencies; an increasing number of Palestinian families in Gaza are unable to offer their children more than one meager meal a day, often little more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit and vegetables are beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken are impossibly expensive. And fish is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has curtailed the movements of Gaza’s fishermen.
The UN, EU and the “international community,” by and large, have remained silent in the face of atrocities committed by Israel. Hundreds of dead Palestinians have failed to convince them to act. We are, therefore, left with one option; an option that does not wait for the United Nations Security Council, namely: people’s power. This remains the only power capable of counteracting the massive imbalance between the oppressed Palestinians and their Israeli oppressors.
The horror of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa was challenged with a sustained campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions initiated in 1958 and given new urgency in the wake of the 1976 Soweto Uprising. This campaign led ultimately to the collapse of white rule in 1994 and the establishment of a multi-racial, democratic state.
Similarly, the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) has been gathering momentum since 2005. Gaza 2012, like Soweto 1976, cannot be ignored: it demands a response from all who believe in a common humanity. Now is the time to boycott the apartheid Israeli state, to divest and to impose sanctions against it. A crucial dimension of BDS that is more urgent than ever is an academic boycott of Israel’s universities, which have once again been shown to be full partners in crime.
24 October 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
VIDEO from the action:
Dozens of Palestinians and internationals protest at Rami Levy Supermarket near the illegal settlement of Sha´ar Benyamin on October 24th. This direct action aims to highlight the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) Campaign that seeks to promote a boycott of Israeli goods.
Four people, including Bassem Tamimi, the head of the Popular Committee of Nabi Saleh, were arrested by Israeli police today as Palestinians staged a peaceful direct action in an Israeli supermarket near the illegal settlement of Shaar Binyamin, north of Ramallah, calling for a boycott of Israeli goods. Two Palestinians were injured and removed in ambulances. Before he was arrested, Tamimi’s ribs were reportedly broken.
Two of those arrested were international human rights activists. One is an American and the other is from Poland. The American activist was dragged away by four Israeli officers.
Starting at around ten this morning, Palestinians and international activists gathered in the parking lot of Rami Levi supermarket, which is frequented by Israelis from the surrounding illegal settlements. The activists entered the market and walked up and down the aisles, holding Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) placards and waving Palestinian flags.
Demonstrators left the market voluntarily when the Israeli army arrived on the scene. As activists exited the building, about forty police, border police and soldiers were waiting in the parking lot. There, the Israeli authorities attacked the demonstrators and fired sound bombs at them.
Even though the demonstrators remained non-violent, soldiers punched, dragged and choked them. As one Palestinian man was pulled away from the soldiers by other demonstrators, to prevent his arrest, his walking stick was taken away as he lay on the ground – following this, he could not walk without assistance. A sound bomb was thrown just metres from the head of another Palestinian man who was already unconscious following attacks from the authorities.
Bassem Tamimi is the head of the popular committee of Nabi Saleh, a village that has suffered drastically from the creation and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank. Halamish settlement was created less than 1km away from Nabi Saleh, stealing a great deal of the villages’ land, as well as a spring that provided a vital water source for the village. Tamimi was released from prison in April of this year after spending 13 months in an Israeli prison for being accused of “taking part in illegal gatherings.” He was released on bail in April in order to take care of his elderly mother who had suffered a stroke.
The action today aimed to highlight the BDS campaign (www.bdsmovement.net ), which calls for a boycott of Israeli goods.
The status of the detained demonstrators is currently unknown, they remain held in the police station of the illegal settlement of Shaar Binyamin.
A Paletinian demonstrator gets arrested by Border Policemen during the protest at the Rami Levi SupermarketA demonstrator gets first aid help after being injured by a sound grenade at the protest
