Tag: BDS

Commemorating Palestinian Land Day: Join the BDS Global Day of Action on 30 March 2012!

10 February 2012 | Palestinian BDS National Committee

Commemorating Land Day, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) invites people of conscience around the world to unite for a BDS Global Day of Action on 30 March 2012 in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom, justice and equality and for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it fully complies with its obligations under international law.

Let’s showcase our BDS successes through creative actions and media efforts and mobilize for the World Social Forum Free Palestine in November 2012.

First launched at the World Social Forum in 2009, the BDS Global Day of Action on 30 March coincides with Palestinian Land Day, initiated in 1976, when Israeli security forces shot and killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel and injured many in an attempt to crush popular protest against ongoing theft of Palestinian-owned land. Thirty-six years on, Israel continues to entrench its regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid and intensify its grave violations of the basic rights of Palestinians everywhere, whether those living under occupation, citizens of Israel, or the majority of the Palestinians, the refugees.

In the past year we have continued to witness a historic outburst of people power motivated by the desire for justice and freedom from tyranny and corporate greed. There is renewed belief in popular struggles as a means to achieve human emancipation and empowerment. Ordinary people have bravely stood up to the decades-old regimes of the Arab region, overcoming their fears and challenging their longstanding subjugation. Largely inspired by the Arab popular upheavals and earlier, similar uprisings across Latin America, people across the world have vocally “occupied” the centers of corporate exploitation or otherwise mobilized to demand social justice and an end to devastating wars. The ‘Arab Spring’ has given new impetus to the ongoing struggle against imperial hegemony in the global south and a new reach for the alternatives to neoliberalism. The global 99% are further uniting and connecting their struggles for justice, rights and dignity.

In this spirit of shared struggle, we invite Palestine solidarity activists and all those active in social justice and human rights causes worldwide to use this day of action to launch a far reaching mobilization effort towards the upcoming World Social Forum Free Palestine to be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in November 2012 and to take action to highlight and develop the key campaigns of our global movement.

The Forum will provide a unique space for discussion of a unified global strategy to uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to self-determination and end Israeli violations of international law.

Ideas for action

The BDS Global Day of Action is an opportunity to showcase the achievements of our diverse and global movement through visible and creative actions. The BNC calls on supporters of Palestinian rights to focus on developing thoroughly researched, broad based and strategic BDS campaigns that are based on the three operational principles of the movement: context-sensitivity, gradualness and sustainability.  Developing such a long-term vision is essential for the growth and sustainable success of the movement.

With these criteria in mind, the BNC suggests the following forms of action for this BDS Global Day of Action:

1. Organize a visible and creative protest, flash mob or action that promotes an existing long-term campaign to a new audience;

2. Prepare outreach meetings or events or media initiatives that seek to bring BDS to new audiences;

3. Launch mobilization initiatives for the WSF Free Palestine, to be held in late November in Port Alegre, Brazil. Consider announcing the formation of national, regional or sector mobilizing committees and to start public and media outreach. The mobilizing committees for the WSF Free Palestine serve to mobilize and to discuss how to use this opportunity to strengthen local solidarity efforts and provide them with global reach and exposure. More information here.

4. Where possible, use the Global BDS Day of Action as a launching pad for new BDS campaign initiatives;

5. Call on governments to implement incremental sanctions against Israel, by heeding the call from Palestinian civil society for a military embargo on Israel or by suspending free trade agreements or other agreements;

6. Publicize, promote and make use of the recently published report issued by EU heads of mission to occupied Jerusalem calling for preventing and discouraging “financial transactions in support of [Israeli] settlement activity.” This can be accurately interpreted as a call for a ban on colonial settlement products from entering the EU market and for effective measures against all actors implicated in Israel’s colonization of East Jerusalem and the rest of the OPT.

Join the BDS Global Day of Action on Land Day, 30 March 2012!

For information on how to join this global event and how to develop ongoing BDS action in your country, organization and network, please contact the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) at: bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net.

We’ll be highlighting all of the day’s actions on the bdsmovement.net website, so please send any information about planned actions ahead of time to bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net.

On the day itself, let’s all use Twitter hashtag #bds to promote our actions and don’t forget to follow @bdsmovement to follow the action as it unfolds!

For further inspiration:

BDS Global Day of Action 2011 press release
BDS Global Day of Action 2010 press release

Stop the Jewish National Fund greenwashing ‘Green Sunday’ February 5, 2012

27 January 2012 | Stop the JNF Campaign

The Jewish National Fund has designated Sunday 5th February as ‘Green Sunday’, when it encourages people to donate money to ‘plant trees in Israel’.  The JNF claims to have environmental objectives.  Don’t be taken in.  The JNF’s tree planting is a cover for ethnic cleansing.

The JNF exists to acquire land in Israel/Palestine for the sole use of Jewish people.  For more than 100 years, the JNF has been complicit in expulsions of Palestinians from their homes, the destruction of their villages and prevention of the return of refugees – by planting trees over the remnants of the destroyed homes.

Environmentalists are asked to use the opportunity of the JNF’s ‘Green Sunday’ to take a stand against this greenwash, when ethnic cleansing masquerades as environmental action.  Don’t support the JNF’s ‘Green Sunday’, but publicly denounce the JNF.

Environmental groups throughout the world are adding their support to the international call from Palestinian civil society to Stop the JNF.

Don’t support the JNF’s ‘Green Sunday’. Instead, use the opportunity to:

In Palestine, to exist is to resist

by Melinda Tuhus

24 January 2012 | In These Times

Behind the headlines, Palestinians are using nonviolent direct action to protest the status quo.

WEST BANK, PALESTINE – On November 15, Mazin Qumsiyeh and other Palestinian activists boarded public bus number 148, an Israelis-only bus that normally takes Jews from the Israeli West Bank settlement of Ariel to Jerusalem. The bus took the group to the Hizma checkpoint, just outside the northern entrance of Jerusalem, where activists resisted authorities’ efforts to remove them. Eventually, as a camera broadcast the action online, eight people were pulled from the bus and arrested. They were charged with “illegal entry to Jerusalem” and “obstructing police business.”

Qumsiyeh hopes this recent “freedom ride” – possible because a bus driver let them ride by mistake, he said – will spark the same kind of response that its namesake did across the United States in the early 1960s, when interstate bus trips helped end racial segregation in the South. Qumsiyeh, author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment says other examples of nonviolent resistance says, include protests of the separation barrier (which many Palestinians call an “apartheid wall”) that has effectively turned 10 percent of Palestinian land into Israeli land since its construction began in 2002; school girls holding class in the street when they can’t get to their schools because of Israeli interference; and farmers braving Israeli intimidation to harvest olives. “For us to exist on this land is to resist,” says Qumsiyeh, who teaches at Bethlehem and Birzeit universities.

Most readers of mainstream media in the United States think of the First Intifada (1987-92) as the stone-throwing uprising and the Second Intifada (2000-2004) as the attack of the suicide bombers. They may have heard of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, started in 2005 by more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups. (The movement aims to curtail benefits accruing to businesses that benefit from the occupation.) But few are aware of Palestinians’ longstanding creative efforts to use nonviolent direct action in their struggle for self-determination. Those efforts, from the tax revolt in Beit Sahour during the First Intifada to creative actions led by Palestinians like Qumsiyeh, are often supported by both international and Israeli activists. And they are proliferating.

Ghassan Andoni, cofounder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and a leader of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between People, says nonviolent direct action by Palestinians opposed to the Israeli occupation started before the First Intifada. “Activities included throwing military identity cards issued by the occupation as a way to tell the occupier that we don’t recognize your authority and there is no contract between us,” Andoni said in an interview in Bethlehem in mid-November. “Then we stopped paying taxes and submitting monthly reports saying, ‘No taxation without representation.’”

The First Intifada also saw the creation of autonomous communities all over the West Bank. “We established our own economy to detach from the occupation,” Andoni explained. Large protest marches and solidarity campaigns were also organized with international activists and Israelis. ISM has staged “die-ins” in front of Israeli tanks, and its members have chained themselves to homes the Israeli government wants to demolish, and obstructed the Israeli army from imposing a curfew. As popular resistance among Palestinians has spread, Andoni increasingly sees ISM’s role as supporting local nonviolent initiatives.

Bil’in, a village near Ramallah, is one such initiative. Residents of Bil’in have mobilized against Israel’s West Bank security barrier. Since construction of the fence began there in 2005, villagers have staged various events. After the release of the film Avatar, with its story line of the occupation of Pandora and the rape of its resources, Palestinians painted themselves blue to look like Pandorans. On another occasion, they lugged a television to the fence and cheered their favorite teams during a World Cup tournament to show that normal life would go on.

Bil’in activists photograph and videotape every protest. “The camera is our gun,” says Iyad Burnat, who heads the resistance committee in the village. In 2011 the barrier was moved a short distance away from its initial location in Bil’in, on orders from the Israeli High Court. But much of the village remains on the Israeli side of the fence, and protests continue.

What is the ultimate goal of nonviolent action, beyond stopping the security wall and ending the occupation? “One state or two states?” is not the right question to start with, Qumsiyeh says. “The right question to ask is, ‘What is the right thing to do that will guarantee the safety and security and peace and humanity of everybody in the long run?’ Once we can agree, we’ll work toward that.”

Melinda Tuhus is an independent journalist with 25 years of experience in print and radio, including In These Times, The New York Times, Free Speech Radio News and public radio stations.

Connect with the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)

23 January 2012 | US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

A collective of students in Gaza has formed the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI). These students are seeking to expand their collaboration and participation in events and activities with solidarity activists at international universities.

PSCABI members participate in many activities here in Gaza and are heavily involved in supporting the international student solidarity movements, especially with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns. PSCABI members frequently write letters out of Gaza, some of which we have listed below, encouraging people to participate in the boycott and thanking people who have supported the Palestinian cause.

PSCABI members are available to share ideas, participate via Skype or other technology in remote events, organize and strategize together, hear about your activities and provide information and narratives as Palestinian university students for your distribution, and provide access to voices speaking directly from besieged Gaza.

If you are interested in:

  • communicating with PSCABI
  • hosting a Skype conference with a PSCABI member
  • developing your organization’s relationship with PSCABI

please contact us at pscabi@usacbi.org.

Past Letters from PSCABI:

Palestine doesn’t ask for aid, but for freedom and recognition

by Emma

13 January 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

I always knew I would go to Palestine one day. It wasn’t until I met my four friends from Gaza, Motasem, Mohammed, Hussein and Mo’min, during my time as an exchange student at a Turkish university, that I finally decided to go. Their humble and honest account of what was happening in Palestine inspired me to come and experience the situation myself. After three months in the West Bank, I wish everyone would take the opportunity to come here and see the situation themselves.

Being an international in Palestine means that you share the everyday life of ordinary people who have the same aspirations as everyone else. It’s a small act of solidarity and a way of saying, “I see you and I stand with you.” You will not only have a family and a home but also an incredible insight to a beautiful culture which most often is forgotten when headlines from this region reach the world.

Whether I’ve been up north in Nablus or down south in Al Khalil (Hebron), people have welcomed me and treated me as one of their own. Never in my life has my family been this big. Maybe because of this, the occupation seem a lot more personal to me now than when I first arrived here. Palestinians are not just Palestinians, but my brothers and sisters, friends and family.

The young teenager being detained at the checkpoint could be my brother, and the young girls who are being assaulted by soldiers on their way to school could be my sisters.

The middle aged man who tries to stop the bulldozer from demolishing his family’s home could be my father, and the middle aged woman who is quicklypicking olives  because of looming, violent settlers, she could be my mother.

The very old man who has to take the long way up the stairs carrying his bags (because all Palestinians are forbidden from entering Shuhada Street in Hebron) could be my grandfather, and the very old lady who is afraid of soldiers because they enter her home in the middle of the night could be my grandmother.

Every one of them could be family and indeed, for three months in Palestine, all of them were. When I left Sweden my friends and family worried that I might be hurt or injured because the Palestinian territory is supposed to be a dangerous place. However as I immediately discovered, Palestine is not a violent place and Palestine is not dangerous. What is dangerous and violent is the 64 year old occupation which has been imposed on Palestinians since 1948.

When I say that it is violent I want to distinguish between two sorts of violence. As an international in Palestine you see mainly the structural violence or the everyday violence in forms of military presence, checkpoints, watch towers, roadblocks, verbal assaults and harassment. If you stay long enough you will also experience or see some direct violence such as random arrests, house raids, home demolitions, prevention of Palestinian peaceful protests in form of rubber coated steel bullets, live ammunition, sound bombs, teargas and people being shot and abused.

The list can easily be made longer. These abuses of basic human rights are not only illegal under international law but very dangerous and violent both for the individual and the community. Occupation deprives Palestinians of their basic human needs, rights and recognition as human beings. It is violent and dangerous because it denies them the right to stay, live, and exist on their own land.

As such, occupation is visible and institutionalized in every aspect of life in Palestine.

I was in the beautiful and very old Ibrahimi mosque in Al Khalil, when Israeli male and female soldiers entered in uniforms, with boots and weapons among praying Muslims. In addition all Israeli female soldiers refrained from covering their hair, which is a custom when entering a holy sanctuary in Islam. Religion doesn’t have a nationality but is something that transcends borders and should be respected as part of human dignity. The choice to enter the mosque in this way meant that they not only degraded Islam as a religion, but they also made sure to violate the most important place and last resort that Palestinians can go to in order to seek some peace and privacy. And this is the very idea of the occupation. It has nothing to do with security or Israel trying to protect itself. Rather it’s a strategy of occupation which aims at making life unbearable for Palestinians so that they will move and eventually leave whatever land they have left.

Soldiers harassing Palestinians and  roadblocks, checkpoints, and temporary closure of roads are part of the strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with security or protection. Since the beginning of the occupation, Israeli citizens are protected by civil law while Palestinians are under military law. This implicates several things. First of all, Israeli soldiers are not allowed to arrest or detain any Israeli citizen.

In the West Bank where settler violence against Palestinians has increased, soldiers in charge are not allowed to interfere with their citizens since their mandate is directed towards Palestinians only. There are several accounts where Israeli soldiers have either stood by or assisted settlers in committing violent acts against Palestinians. Second, the military law means that any Palestinian can be put in administrative detention without access to lawyer, not knowing what the charge is and how long they will be kept. Moreover, Defense for Children International (DCI) estimated in 2011 that more than 7,500 Palestinian children have been prosecuted in Israeli military courts since 2000. The report further concludes that ill treatment begins at the moment of arrest which often happens during night time military raids. The child is being abducted from the home with little or no information of where they are going. In most cases, parents are not allowed to visit their children, send them new clothes, and they get little information about their child’s well-being.

Military courts have no obligation to follow Israeli law or international legal obligations. Many reports from different sources have documented the use of ill-treatment, torture and a general failure to meet international standards in detention centers and prisons. When Israel is continuously being referred to as “the only democracy” in the Middle East, this is something we should keep in mind. For most people, abduction of children in the middle of the night and administrative detentions are a grave contradiction to concepts of “democracy.”

The question is, what more do the Palestinians have to negotiate with when more and more land is being confiscated by settlements including East Jerusalem? What should Palestinians negotiate with when not even their own president Mahmoud Abbas can leave Palestine without Israeli permission? There is something very wrong with the idea that when every peaceful Palestinian attempt at expression is being met with violence and immediate crackdown, the international community continues to stress Israel’s right to protect itself. Protect itself from what?

After three months in the West Bank, I am more than convinced that this is not a conflict nor a war–not between Arabs and Israelis and certainly not between Palestinians and Israelis. This is an occupation rooted in deep injustice with Israel as the aggressor. For every action there is a reaction. Simple as that. Just as much as Israel has the right to defend itself so should Palestinians too. Security is a mutual concept, and if the argument is that Israeli citizens have to be protected so should the Palestinians. Palestinians are the ones who have to endure Israel’s “security” measures, and Palestinians are the ones living under occupation while Gaza endures a siege. Israel is the one who is expanding settlements, building the wall, continuously demolishing Palestinian private property and confiscating more land.

Having walked under the EU sponsored metal net that is supposed to prevent rubbish, stones and liquid thrown by violent settlers from reaching targeted Palestinian pedestrians in Hebron’s Old City, I feel ashamed of being a part of an international community which allows this to happen. Of course it is easier to sponsor a net rather than coming to terms with the real problem. But Palestine doesn’t ask for aid, more NGOs, and certainly not another metal net, but simply for freedom and recognition.

A system is not static or superior to the individuals that give it power, but it is the organization of these individual capacities which create these systems. Diplomats, officials, politicians, soldiers and civilians who say they are only doing their job and are limited at doing otherwise are simply wrong.  Likewise the international community is wrong if it states it cannot do much. We’re all part of the society in which we function, and we all have a personal responsibility. We all have a possibility to do something, no matter how small that act may be.

An international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against buying into Israeli occupation should be the top priority for civil society around the world.  A boycott of Israel and Israeli products would also mean a new debate, where the international community allows Palestinians to raise their voice economically rather than us just hearing Benjamin Netanyahu’s so called economic peace plan.

As it is time for me to leave, I remember all the wonderful people I’ve met and the beautiful places and villages I visited in Palestine. Never in my life have I been surrounded by so much love and generosity as I have experienced here in Palestine.

Indeed Palestine was my home for three months because Palestinians made it my home. As I say goodbye to Palestine for now, memories of my time here put a smile on my face and tears run down my cheeks.

As we look forward to a new year and new possibilities, Palestine has been under occupation for 64 years . As Palestine welcomes us to share the year of 2012, we should all remember that freedom means nothing without the freedom, equal rights, and the international recognition of Palestinians.

Emma is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).