Tag: BDS

Let The Global Boycott of Israel Begin

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

With the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan hights, in its 39th year, the continuing construction of the Apartheid Wall and Israel refusing any accountability for its crimes against the Palestinian people, it falls on the global community to pressure the State of Israel to comply with International law.

Lend your support for the county of Sor-Trondelag’s Boycott Israel motion, and read the following oped by Norman Finkelstein, which appears on his website and in the January 14 issue of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, “Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified.”

Dear friends

The Norwegian region of Sor-Trondelag has passed a motion to boycott Israeli goods as a way of pressuring Israel to end the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people. You can read the motion in English on http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/1061.shtml. The representatives of Sor-Trondelag have experienced massive Zionist pressure after the passing of the motion and some fear that they will vote against the boycott in a new voting. For example has the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and other Zionist organizations called the elected representatives of Sor-Trondelag “nazis” and “racists”.

We hope you will send a letter of support for the motion to:

Mayor Tore Sandvik
Sør-Trøndelag county municipality
tore.sandvik@stfk.no (please send a BLIND COPY to fup@palestina.no)

Pleases add a copy for:
Arne Braut (faction leader of the Center Party)
arne.braut@stfk.no
Ola Huke (faction leader of Socialist Left Party)
ola.huke@stfk.no
Sor-Trondelag Labor Party
sor-trondelag@dna.no
Yngve Brox (faction leader of the Conservative Party)
yngve.brox@stfk.no
Left Party
fredrik@liberal.no
Heidi Klokkervold (Red Electoral Alliance)
heidi.klokkervold@stfk.no

in solidarity
Lars Klottrup Berge
Youth For the Freedom of Palestine
Norway



Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified

Editor’s Note: This article appears in the January 14 issue of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

http://normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=130

by Norman G. Finkelstein
Aftenposten | 01.14.2006

The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goods has provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rational examination of this issue would pose two questions: 1) Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economic boycott? and 2) Can such a boycott make a meaningful contribution toward ending these violations? I would argue that both these questions should be answered in the affirmative.

Although the subject of many reports by human rights organizations, Israel’s real human rights record in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is generally not well known abroad. This is primarily due to the formidable public relations industry of Israel’s defenders as well as the effectiveness of their tactics of intimidation, such as labeling critics of Israeli policy anti-Semitic.

Yet, it is an incontestable fact that Israel has committed a broad range of human rights violations, many rising to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include:

Illegal Killings. Whereas Palestinian suicide attacks targeting Israeli civilians have garnered much media attention, Israel’s quantitatively worse record of killing non-combatants is less well known. According to the most recent figures of the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem), 3,386 Palestinians have been killed since September 2000, of whom 1,008 were identified as combatants, as opposed to 992 Israelis killed, of whom 309 were combatants. This means that three times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed and up to three times more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians. Israel’s defenders maintain that there’s a difference between targeting civilians and inadvertently killing them. B’Tselem disputes this: “[W]hen so many civilians have been killed and wounded, the lack of intent makes no difference. Israel remains responsible.” Furthermore, Amnesty International reports that “many” Palestinians have not been accidentally killed but “deliberately targeted,” while the award-winning New York Times journalist Chris Hedges reports that Israeli soldiers “entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

Torture. “From 1967,” Amnesty reports, “the Israeli security services have routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects in the Occupied Territories.” B’Tselem found that eighty-five percent of Palestinians interrogated by Israeli security services were subjected to “methods constituting torture,” while already a decade ago Human Rights Watch estimated that “the number of Palestinians tortured or severely ill-treated” was “in the tens of thousands – a number that becomes especially significant when it is remembered that the universe of adult and adolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is under three-quarters of one million.” In 1987 Israel became “the only country in the world to have effectively legalized torture” (Amnesty). Although the Israeli Supreme Court seemed to ban torture in a 1999 decision, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel reported in 2003 that Israeli security forces continued to apply torture in a “methodical and routine” fashion. A 2001 B’Tselem study documented that Israeli security forces often applied “severe torture” to “Palestinian minors.”

House demolitions. “Israel has implemented a policy of mass demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories,” B’Tselem reports, and since September 2000 “has destroyed some 4,170 Palestinian homes.” Until just recently Israel routinely resorted to house demolitions as a form of collective punishment. According to Middle East Watch, apart from Israel, the only other country in the world that used such a draconian punishment was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. In addition, Israel has demolished thousands of “illegal” homes that Palestinians built because of Israel’s refusal to provide building permits. The motive behind destroying these homes, according to Amnesty, has been to maximize the area available for Jewish settlers: “Palestinians are targeted for no other reason than they are Palestinians.” Finally, Israel has destroyed hundred of homes on security pretexts, yet a Human Rights Watch report on Gaza found that “the pattern of destruction…strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat.” Amnesty likewise found that “Israel’s extensive destruction of homes and properties throughout the West Bank and Gaza…is not justified by military necessity,” and that “Some of these acts of destruction amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes.”

Apart from the sheer magnitude of its human rights violations, the uniqueness of Israeli policies merits notice. “Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality,” B’Tselem has concluded. “This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.” If singling out South Africa for an international economic boycott was defensible, it would seem equally defensible to single out Israel’s occupation, which uniquely resembles the apartheid regime.

Although an economic boycott can be justified on moral grounds, the question remains whether diplomacy might be more effectively employed instead. The documentary record in this regard, however, is not encouraging. The basic terms for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict are embodied in U.N. resolution 242 and subsequent U.N. resolutions, which call for a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the establishment of a Palestinian state in these areas in exchange for recognition of Israel’s right to live in peace and security with its neighbors. Each year the overwhelming majority of member States of the United Nations vote in favor of this two-state settlement, and each year Israel and the United States (and a few South Pacific islands) oppose it. Similarly, in March 2002 all twenty-two member States of the Arab League proposed this two-state settlement as well as “normal relations with Israel.” Israel ignored the proposal.

Not only has Israel stubbornly rejected this two-state settlement, but the policies it is currently pursuing will abort any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. While world attention has been riveted by Israel’s redeployment from Gaza, Sara Roy of Harvard University observes that the “Gaza Disengagement Plan is, at heart, an instrument for Israel’s continued annexation of West Bank land and the physical integration of that land into Israel.” In particular Israel has been constructing a wall deep inside the West Bank that will annex the most productive land and water resources as well as East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life. It will also effectively sever the West Bank in two. Although Israel initially claimed that it was building the wall to fight terrorism, the consensus among human rights organizations is that it is really a land grab to annex illegal Jewish settlements into Israel. Recently Israel’s Justice Minister frankly acknowledged that the wall will serve as “the future border of the state of Israel.”

The current policies of the Israeli government will lead either to endless bloodshed or the dismemberment of Palestine. “It remains virtually impossible to conceive of a Palestinian state without its capital in Jerusalem,” the respected Crisis Group recently concluded, and accordingly Israeli policies in the West Bank “are at war with any viable two-state solution and will not bolster Israel’s security; in fact, they will undermine it, weakening Palestinian pragmatists…and sowing the seeds of growing radicalization.”

Recalling the U.N. Charter principle that it is inadmissible to acquire territory by war, the International Court of Justice declared in a landmark 2004 opinion that Israel’s settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the wall being built to annex them to Israel were illegal under international law. It called on Israel to cease construction of the wall, dismantle those parts already completed and compensate Palestinians for damages. Crucially, it also stressed the legal responsibilities of the international community:
all States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction. It is also for all States, while respecting the United Nations Charter and international law, to see to it that any impediment, resulting from the construction of the wall, to the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end.
A subsequent U.N. General Assembly resolution supporting the World Court opinion passed overwhelmingly. However, the Israeli government ignored the Court’s opinion, continuing construction at a rapid pace, while Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the wall was legal.

Due to the obstructionist tactics of the United States, the United Nations has not been able to effectively confront Israel’s illegal practices. Indeed, although it is true that the U.N. keeps Israel to a double standard, it’s exactly the reverse of the one Israel’s defenders allege: Israel is held not to a higher but lower standard than other member States. A study by Marc Weller of Cambridge University comparing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory with comparable situations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, East Timor, occupied Kuwait and Iraq, and Rwanda found that Israel has enjoyed “virtual immunity” from enforcement measures such as an arms embargo and economic sanctions typically adopted by the U.N. against member States condemned for identical violations of international law. Due in part to an aggressive campaign accusing Europe of a “new anti-Semitism,” the European Union has also failed in its legal obligation to enforce international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Although the claim of a “new anti-Semitism” has no basis in fact (all the evidence points to a lessening of anti-Semitism in Europe), the EU has reacted by appeasing Israel. It has even suppressed publication of one of its own reports, because the authors — like the Crisis Group and many others — concluded that due to Israeli policies the “prospects for a two-state solution with east Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine are receding.”

The moral burden to avert the impending catastrophe must now be borne by individual states that are prepared to respect their obligations under international law and by individual men and women of conscience. In a courageous initiative American-based Human Rights Watch recently called on the U.S. government to reduce significantly its financial aid to Israel until Israel terminates its illegal policies in the West Bank. An economic boycott would seem to be an equally judicious undertaking. A nonviolent tactic the purpose of which is to achieve a just and lasting settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Indeed, the real enemies of Jews are those who cheapen the memory of Jewish suffering by equating principled opposition to Israel’s illegal and immoral policies with anti-Semitism.

Threat to divest is Church tool in Israeli fight

by Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times
August 6th, 2005
www.catdestroyshomes.org/article.php?id=454

The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. announced Friday that it would press four American corporations to stop providing military equipment and technology to Israel for use in the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and that if the companies did not comply, the church would take a vote to divest its stock in them.

The companies – Caterpillar, Motorola, ITT Industries and United Technologies – were selected from a list of several dozen possibilities by a church investment committee that met Friday in Seattle. The Presbyterians accused these companies of selling helicopters, cellphones, night vision equipment and other items Israel uses to enforce its occupation.

In an effort to appear even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the church committee also included Citigroup on its list of targets, alleging it had a connection to a bank accused of having a role in funneling money from Islamic charities to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The church said it included Citigroup because it was mentioned in an article in The Wall Street Journal.

A spokeswoman for Citigroup called the church’s assertion “an outrage,” a reaction echoed at several of the other corporations.

The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is in the forefront of a campaign now spreading to other mainline Protestant churches to use corporate divestment as a tactic in the Middle East conflict, a tactic that is roiling relations with Jewish groups.

The Episcopal Church U.S.A., the United Church of Christ, two regions of the United Methodist Church, as well as international groups like the World Council of Churches and the Anglican Consultative Council have all urged consideration of divestment or economic pressure in recent months, though the tone and emphasis of each resolution varies. The Disciples of Christ passed a resolution last month calling on Israel to tear down the barrier it has built to wall off the occupied territories, and other churches are considering similar resolutions.

Some Jewish groups accuse the churches of singling out Israel for blame and failing to address the Palestinians’ role in perpetuating the violence. Several have even said they see anti-Semitism behind the churches’ moves.

The Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., said in an interview: “It’s not a campaign to divest from the state of Israel. We’re fully committed to the state of Israel. But it is a campaign to divest from particular activities that are doing damage and creating injustice and violence, whether that’s the building of the separation barrier, construction related to the occupation, or weapons and materials that lead to suicide bombings.”

Many American churches used divestment in the 1980’s to pressure the South African government to end apartheid. But applying the tactic to Israel has alarmed many American Jewish groups and caused a breach in what has been a long-term alliance between Jews and mainline Protestant churches, like the Presbyterians, that have leaned politically liberal. In decades past, Jewish and Protestant groups have worked together on a range of social issues, from racism to global poverty to women’s rights.

“This is a brilliantly organized political campaign to hurt Israel, and it’s not going to help a single Palestinian,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish watchdog group based in Los Angeles. “When you look at the list of companies, this is basically a recipe for Israel to disarm.”

Rabbi Cooper said the Protestant churches were ignoring the current “reality on the ground” – that Israel is preparing to withdraw this month from Gaza and remove settlements there. “Instead of divesting, these churches should be investing,” he said. “There is so much humanitarian need on the ground in the Holy Land. We’re not telling them: ‘Stay out of it. It’s not your business.’ There’s a ton of work to be done.”

He called the churches’ actions “functionally anti-Semitic.” But he said that after attending the conventions of the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ this year, he concluded that the resolutions were being “rammed through” by denominational leaders and were not reflective of the churches’ grassroots membership.

However, David Elcott, director of interreligious affairs in the United States for the American Jewish Committee, said that he made a distinction between the different church resolutions. He said he found the Presbyterian Church’s resolution “morally reprehensible” because it singled out Israel for blame, but that the United Church of Christ had been more evenhanded, condemning violence in the Middle East no matter the source.

The Presbyterian Church owns hundreds of thousands of shares of stock in the five companies through its pension fund for retired church workers and through church foundations. It did not say how much money it has invested in these companies, but judging by the numbers of shares it said it owns, the church’s investment in the companies totals about $60 million in holdings.

The Presbyterian Church’s committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment has brought similar economic pressure against other companies accused of abetting human rights abuses in countries like China, the Sudan, Myanmar, Nigeria and Guatemala. But church staff members said this was the first time it had focused on companies doing business in Israel.

The Presbyterians gave a variety of reasons for choosing these five companies. It accused Caterpillar of selling Israel heavy equipment used for demolishing Palestinian homes, and of constructing roads and infrastructure in the occupied territories and Israeli settlements.

The company released a statement saying: “For the past four years, activists have wrongly included Caterpillar in a publicity campaign aimed at advancing their much larger political agendas. Over that same period of time we’ve repeatedly evaluated our position, as have our shareholders, and determined that while the protests occasionally succeed in getting headlines, they neither change the facts nor our position.”

The Presbyterian committee said in its announcement that it included United Technologies Corporation, a military contractor, because a subsidiary provides helicopters used by the Israeli military “in attacks in the occupied territories against suspected Palestinian terrorists.”

A company spokesman, Paul Jackson, responded by e-mail: “UTC has been widely recognized as an ethical and responsible corporation. Work on military programs is stringently regulated by the U.S. government, and UTC complies wholly with all policies and related regulations.”

The church said it identified Motorola because the company has a contract to develop wireless encrypted communications for the Israeli military in the territories and is a “majority investor in one of Israel’s four cell phone companies.”

Norman Sandler, a manager for Motorola on global issues, said the church’s action “came completely out of the blue.” He said the company supplies radio products to Israel, as well as to many Arab countries.

ITT also made the church’s list because, the committee said, it supplies the Israeli military with “communications, electronic and night vision equipment used by its forces in the occupied territories.” A spokesman for ITT did not respond to a message left on Friday afternoon.

Leah Johnson, a spokeswoman for Citigroup, said: “Any assertion that Citigroup supports terrorism in any way is an outrage. We take all possible measures to ensure that our institution is not used by criminals or as a conduit to fund terrorist activities.”

Despite the bitterness the divestment moves have evoked among Jewish organizations, Christian and Jewish leaders alike said these developments had prompted intensive and productive dialogue sessions both at the national level and between “hundreds” of churches and synagogues nationwide.

A delegation of prominent Jewish and Christian leaders is set to travel to Jerusalem in September.