Tag: BDS

Ha’aretz: “Sweden boycotts air force drills due to Israel’s participation”

By Ha’aretz Service

Sweden called off its participation in international air force exercises to take place in Italy next month because of the involvement of the Israel Air Forces in the drills.

Sweden was supposed to send nine aircraft to Italy for Volcanex 2006.

“Israel is not currently acting in the name of peace, and therefore, it should not take part in the demonstration,” senior officials in Stockholm said.

A Swedish Foreign Ministry official said, “The point of the operation is to prepare for international cooperation in preserving world peace. The participation of the Israeli air force changes the prerequisites of the drill.”

While not mentioning Israel by name, Swedish Defense Minister Leni Bjorklund said that her country is withdrawing because of the participation of “a state that does not take part in preserving international peace.”

Israeli officials responded harshly to the decision.

One government source said, “The lack of sympathy for Israel in Sweden is out of proportion. Some government ministers spearhead the most anti-Israel approach in all of Europe, and particularly in Scandinavia. In meetings between senior Israelis and Swedish ministers, the Swedes refuse to listen to Israel’s positions.”

National Religious Party Chairman MK Zevulun Orlev, called Sweden’s decision anti-Semitic, saying, “Just a day after the commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day, an enlightened nation has risen and surrendered to the Islamic axis of evil.”

Sir Gerald Kaufman MP: Israel “would be a rogue government” if Refuses to Prosecute Killer Soldiers

We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished

We can demand these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes

by Sir Gerald Kaufman MP

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0412-26.htm

In a marvellous book of essays, “The Slopes of Lebanon,” the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz advanced an audacious thesis. He contended that the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust – they included many members of my own family – must not be used as justification for the oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.

Recent Israeli governments, led first by Ariel Sharon and now by Ehud Olmert, have launched a new twist on the argument refuted by Oz. They operate actively on the policy that the murder of 1,000 Israeli Jews by Palestinian terrorists allows the Israeli forces to do anything they think fit in what their government claims is national self-defense. Over the past few days they have killed 13 Palestinians, including a five-year-old girl.

Those of us who believe in a two-state solution, a secure Israel alongside a free and internationally recognised Palestine, are denounced as sympathisers with terrorism – or, in cases such as mine, self-hating Jews – if we attack the appalling suppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.

We point out that the evacuation of the Gaza Strip by Israeli troops last summer was not a move towards a two-state solution but simply self-defensive action. We point out that Olmert’s plans to base Israel’s permanent border by the year 2010 on the illegal Israeli wall is not a peace formula but an imposed settlement that the Palestinians will never accept. We point out that every withdrawal of funding from the Palestinians by the European Union and the US increases support for Hamas among the Palestinians. We point out that the road map for peace in the Middle East, of which our own government is a key initiator, is moribund. We are all but ignored.

But, when it comes to the murder of Britons by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, the self-serving apologia of Israeli atrocities by right-wing Israelis and their sympathisers loses all credibility.

New territory is opened by the verdict of the inquests in Britain that the British peace activist Tom Hurndall and the British film-maker James Miller were murdered by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. As Britons we have the right to require action by our own government when our own nationals are stated by legal authorities in our own country to be the victims of homicide by a foreign power. If the Speaker allows me when the Commons reconvenes next Tuesday after the Easter recess, I shall be asking my friend and colleague Jack Straw what action he proposes to take about the murder of Hurndall and Miller.

It seems to me that we have three choices. We can ask for these killers to be extradited for prosecution under war crimes legislation in this country. After all, even Colonel Gaddafi agreed eventually to the Libyan Lockerbie killers being put on trial. Alternatively, we can demand that these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes before an international court, as Slobodan Milosevic was. If the Israelis cooperate in neither of these courses, then we should impose sanctions on what would be a rogue government.

Those of us who have visited the Palestinian territories in recent months know that there is an element in the Israeli armed forces which is trigger-happy and well nigh out of control. Last November I led the first ever British Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to the Palestinian National Authority. Twice, during our period there, our group of three members of the Commons and two members of the Lords was held at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers, even when we had explained our mission.

I pointed out to my Parliamentary colleagues that we were being subjected to only transitory harassment, that we were going home on Friday, while for the Palestinians this was their life, much worse, and permanently. And of course brief annoyance for a British team of parliamentarians is less than a minute fraction of what happened to Hurndall and Miller. But it is a meaningful symptom.

Apologists for the Israeli government say that that country is a democracy. So what? The United States is a democracy, yet it almost routinely tortures prisoners held in violation of international law at Guantanamo Bay. A democratically-elected French Government suppressed the Algerians for years.

This current Israeli government, posing as moderate when it is extremist, is, like President Bush’s administration in Guantanamo, also in violation of international law. I look to my own British government to take action on behalf of its own murdered nationals and their families. They must ensure that the Israeli government is made to abide by international law and international decency.

Sir Gerald Kaufmanis Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton, and former Shadow Foreign Secretary, 1987-92.

British Politician Calls for Sanctions Against Israel

Sir Gerald Kaufman, a leading British Member of Parliment has called for sanctions against Israel, and accused elements in the IDF as being ‘out of control.’ He was speaking on the influential BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ program.

Kaufman has made similar charges before, and has been labelled ‘a self-hating Jew’ by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. None the less, the inevitable backlash is bound to occur, so please write or e-mail your support to:

The Today Program:

today@bbc.co.uk

You can contact Sir Gerald Kauffman at the House of Commons, Westminster.

Here is an extract from an article in the Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/12/nisr12.xmlh

Economic sanctions against Israel should be considered if the country
refuses to put its soldiers before the courts in the UK over the death of
two British peace activists, an MP has said.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP for Manchester Gorton, claimed there was an
element in the Israeli military which was “out of control.”

MP’s call for sanctions against Israel over shootings

From The Telegraph

Economic sanctions against Israel should be considered if the country refuses to put its soldiers before the courts in the UK over the death of two British peace activists, an MP has said.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP for Manchester Gorton, claimed there was an element in the Israeli military which was “out of control”.

He was speaking about the deaths of Tom Hurndall, 22, and James Miller, 34, who were both shot in the Gaza Strip in 2003.

Yesterday an inquest jury returned a verdict that Mr Hurndall had been “intentionally killed” by a soldier and last week an inquest found Mr Miller had been murdered by the Israeli Defence Force less than a mile away in Rafah three weeks later.

Sir Gerald told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “One possibility is to ask for those who are accused of these murders to be brought to Britain to be tried in this country.

“The second is to put them before an international war crimes tribunal.

“If the Israelis don’t agree to either of those then I think we have got to consider economic sanctions against Israel.

“The fact that she violates international norms is not justified because she has been a victim of international terrorism.”

But Hendon MP Andrew Dismore, who is also vice chairman of the Labour Friends of Israel group, said Israel had carried out its own judicial inquiries into the deaths and the country was a democracy.

He said: “I don’t think it is going to add a great deal to the position.

“Obviously we have to have great sympathy for the families of the two British citizens who have been killed but the fact remains that Israel is a democracy, it operates under the rule of law.”

He added: “Frankly if we are trying to get a settlement in the Middle East I don’t think talking about war crimes is going to take things a great deal further.”

South African Unions Rally for Palestine

Printed in Morning Star Monday, March 13

by Richard Bagley

Top South African Trade Unionist Willy Madisha issued a white-hot condemnation of Israel’s apartheid policies at a London conference on Saturday.

Addressing the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s trade union conference at TUC Congress House, the COSATU president declared that South Africa’s apartheid policies had been ‘a Sunday picnic’ compared to the state of Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians.

‘Apartheid was characterised by killings, hangings, disappearances, arrests, exile, confiscations, inferior education, rapes and the creation of bantusans.

‘All this was a Sunday picnic compared to what is happening to the Palestinians. I say with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state’ said Mr Madisha.

But he questioned the inadequate global response to the worsening situation.

‘Why are all the things done to apartheid South Africa not being done to Israel?’ he asked.

‘The trade union movement must move beyond resolutions, otherwise history will look back on us and spit on our graves’ he warned.

Mr Madisha proposed a concerted international boycott campaign along the lines of the one that ended apartheid in South Africa.

His speech was greeted with rapturous applause at the day-long event, which brought together dozens of activists to discuss the role that trade unionists can play in winning justice for Palestinians.

Palestinian speakers spoke of the dire social and economic situation facing people in the occupied state.

They explained how Israeli control of communications links and borders had devastated the economy and warned that the withholding of vital international aid in the wake of the Hamas electoral victory risked a social catastrophe.

Palestinian General Delegation representative Husam Zomlot pointed out that ‘it is not aid for the government, but for the people.’

Poverty in some Palestinian areas has already reached 80 per cent, he said.

Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions general secretary Shaher Sae’d received a standing ovation when he explained the severe hardships facing the Palestinian workforce.

He called for trade union pressure to be exerted on the British government to channel funds into job creation programmes.

Mr Sae’d endorsed Mr Madisha’s call for an international conference to organise a boycott campaign to counter ‘the real issue: the silence of the world.’

‘We need to put all our efforts into this’ he added.

British speakers drawn from the 16 trade unions that backed the PSC event expressed their solidarity and called on fellow activists to throw their weight behind the campaign for justice.

CWU general secretary Billy Hayes urged: ‘Get your branch affiliated.’

FBU president Ruth Winters warned that the policies of Israel and the international community risked fuelling the situation.

‘They need to remember what we all know ‘extreme oppression provokes extreme reaction’ she said.

A number of speakers also acknowledged the power of pro-Israeli lobbyists who regularly attempted to label criticism of the state’s actions as anti-semitism.

PSC trade union liaison officer Bernard Regan labelled this a ‘McCarthyite attitude’ and emphasised that the campaign’s targets were simply the government of Israel’s brutal policies.