Tag: BDS

To view original article, published by Gulf News on the 19th September, click here

Tel Aviv: The chosen location for the new UK embassy in Tel Aviv has proven controversial, with human rights activists arguing that it contravenes the country’s policy towards Jewish colonies on Palestinian land.

Palestinian rights activists in the UK, Israel and beyond have been pressuring the British Foreign Office to revoke its decision to rent the embassy venue from diamond mogul and notorious Jewish colony builder Lev Leviev.

Abe Hayeem, founder of the UK-based Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine, wrote in The Guardian earlier this month that renting from a Leviev owned company sends Israel “the wrong message”.

“Rewarding Leviev with the contract for our new embassy shows that Her Majesty’s government is not serious about stopping Israeli settlements. Rather than mouthing admirable but empty platitudes about freezing settlements, for the sake of all Israelis and Palestinians, let us apply serious sanctions to stop Israel expanding illegal colonies and the Wall, and take our business elsewhere,” he wrote.

Protest campaign

News of the new UK embassy location was followed by a letter writing campaign to the Foreign Office by eight advocacy groups and prominent opponents of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, according to New York based Adalah.

Ex-BBC Middle East Correspondent Tim Llewelyn wrote to the Foreign Office that, “If this goes ahead it makes a nonsense of Gordon Brown’s pledges to Palestinian prime minister Abu Mazen.”

Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, chaired by Daniel Machover, warned that renting space from Leviev’s company, “would be tantamount to condoning Israel’s colony building, supporting clear violations of international law, in some cases amounting to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention” and “in violation of third party obligations”.

US academic Norman Finkelstein said that, “It would be regrettable if the British government elects to collaborate with someone involved in on-going war crimes.”

Boycott

The Foreign Office has responded with an email saying that “no decision on a site has been taken and no leases have been signed,” and that “colonies contravene international law,” according to advocacy groups, but activists said the statement was not enough and the office should explicitly state not to rent from Leviev.

British charity organisation Oxfam and the UN Children’s Fund Unicef have both recently stated that they will not accept donations from Leviev due to his companies’ construction of Israeli colonies. The Arab League told Gulf News earlier that it will consider placing Leviev and his companies on the body’s boycott list.

To view original article, published by Maan News Agency on the 16th September, click here

Bethlehem – Ma’an – Former Beatle Paul McCartney’s insistence on going ahead with a planned concert in Israel was denounced on Tuesday by Palestinian activists who say the gig will whitewash Israel’s human rights record.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) issued a statement on Tuesday saying the concert “will convey a message that McCartney either condones or apathetically ignores Israel’s reality as a colonial power and an apartheid state that oppresses the indigenous Palestinians and occupies Arab land.

PACBI added, “Just as in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Palestinians are asking international artists to exercise their moral responsibility by staying away from Israel until freedom, justice, equality and human rights are respected for all.”

“I was approached by different groups and political bodies who asked me not to come here. I refused. I do what I think and I have many friends who support Israel,” McCartney told Israeli reporters.

McCartney received death threats from extremist activists for the planned Israel concert. PACBI, a coalition of civil society organizations, said it “strongly and unequivocally condemns” these threats.

The 25 September concert in Tel Aviv will be McCartney’s first in the country. The Israeli government cancelled a planned Beatles concert in 1965. According to an official document quoted in the Guardian newspaper, the concert was cancelled “because several politicians in the Knesset believed at the time that [their] performance might corrupt the minds of the Israeli youth.” Israel recently apologized to McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two surviving members of the band.

Britain seems reluctant to take a firm stand against the illegal colonisation activities by Jewish settlers

By Abe Hayeem

To view original article, published by the Guardian on the 9th September, click here

When Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, visited Ramallah in mid-July, he told the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas: “We want to see a freeze on settlements. Settlement expansion has made peace harder to achieve. It erodes trust, it heightens Palestinian suffering, it makes the compromises Israel needs to make for peace more difficult.”

In that case, the decision by the British government to rent space for our new embassy in Tel Aviv from the Africa-Israel Investments company chaired by businessman Lev Leviev sends precisely the wrong message.

Leviev, a Russian-Israeli real estate and diamond billionaire who recently became a UK resident, is also a major settlement builder. Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of Leviev’s Africa-Israel group, has built homes in three West Bank settlements – Mattityahu East, Har Homa, and Ma’ale Adumim.

Additionally, Leviev is a major donor to the Land Redemption Fund (LRF), which is affiliated with the radical fundamentalist Gush Emunim settler movement. The LRF uses highly questionable methods to secure Palestinian land for Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, in clear violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva convention.

The settlement of Mattityahu East along with Israel’s wall, which was built mostly inside the occupied West Bank to grab land for settlements, seizes 50% of the village of Bil’in’s land, including olive groves that its residents have relied on for centuries. Leviev’s Zufim settlement, again along with Israel’s Wall, seizes as much as two-thirds of the village of Jayyous’ agricultural land and six wells, effectively annexing one of the West Bank’s most fertile agricultural zones. Since 2002, residents of Bil’in and Jayyous have held more than 250 nonviolent protests, with the support of Israeli and international activists, in an effort to save their lands.

The Israeli army meets the protesters with clubs, teargas, bullets, curfews, arrests and stink sprays.

The settlements where Leviev’s companies have recently built homes trap Palestinians in disconnected enclaves, destroying the possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. The settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Har Homa constitute part of an outer ring of settlements that cut off East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank, and separate its north from its south.

Israel’s facts on the ground, created by companies like Leviev’s, make the two-state solution impossible, resulting in a de facto one-state solution, in which half the population lives under apartheid-like conditions – contradicting Israel’s proclaimed democracy. Having raised this issue in petitions and pressure on Israel’s architects and construction industry, Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine has protested at Leviev’s Bond Street jewelry boutique, in conjunction with Adalah-NY, which has also carried out a series of protests at Leviev’s Madison Avenue store in New York. These actions respond to a call for a boycott of Leviev’s companies issued by the villages of Jayyous and Bil’in – a call that has also been taken up by US and Israel-based peace groups and the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, which represents 171 Palestinian civil society organisations.

Yet the British government seems to be immune to taking positive action. In late June, after three Israeli settler leaders were invited to the Tel Aviv home of the UK ambassador, Tom Phillips, for the Queen’s birthday, Crispin Blunt MP sent a blistering protest letter to Foreign Office minister Kim Howells. “Entertaining the pioneers of this colonisation movement has certainly given the strong impression that Britain tacitly endorses it or no longer objects to it,” demonstrating a “weakening in the government’s long-held position that settlements were illegal and an obstacle to peace”.

Blunt demanded that British taxpayers’ money should not be “spent entertaining those who violate the Fourth Geneva Conventions and whose very presence has been an obstacle to a vital and much needed peace deal in the Middle East”. Kim Howells responded that the settlers’ presence “was not helpful” and that they would not receive such invitations again.

Rewarding Leviev with the contract for our new embassy shows that Her Majesty’s government is not serious about stopping Israeli settlements. Rather than mouthing admirable but empty platitudes about freezing settlements, for the sake of all Israelis and Palestinians, let us apply serious sanctions to stop Israel expanding illegal settlements and the Wall, and take our business elsewhere.