Tag: Global Actions

To add your name, email: info@adalahny.org

To view the letter and signatures, click here

New York, May 2 – During the run-up to Mother’s Day in the US, over 100 women from around the world have signed a letter from Adalah-NY calling for a boycott of Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev’s diamonds because his companies are destroying the lives of Palestinian mothers. Mother’s Day, on May 11, is the third biggest shopping period for jewelry in the US. Women will begin flyering on Saturday May 3 at Leviev’s Madison Avenue store, asking shoppers to honor the boycott call. The Mother’s Day boycott call comes just days after government officials in Dubai honored a boycott call from Adalah-NY by announcing that Leviev had no license to open jewelry stores in the Emirate.

The boycott letter, initiated after Leviev placed a quarter-page ad for his New York City jewelry store on The New York Times op-ed page on April 30 as the Mother’s Day shopping period began, garnered more than 100 outraged women’s signatures in 24 hours, and is expected to be signed by many more. Adalah-NY spokesperson Riham Barghouti explained, “With our governments failing to act, the only way to end the suffering of Palestinian mothers and their families is to boycott Israeli companies like Leviev’s that profit from the illegal activities of land confiscation and settlement construction. No diamond is worth the destruction of people’s lives.”

New York women will begin distributing a Mother’s Day card to Madison Avenue shoppers in front of Leviev’s store on Saturday May 3 from 1:30 – 3:00 PM. The Mother’s Day card will highlight Leviev’s companies’ practices that harm Palestinian women and will include the Mother’s Day boycott letter.

The boycott letter includes testimonies from Palestinian mothers Halima Husain from Jayyous and M’azuza Abu Rahmeh from Bil’in, two West Bank villages where Leviev’s companies have recently built homes in expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. M’azuza Abu Rahmeh from Bil’in explains, “I hope that on this important day for mothers that no women in the world will have to live through this type of experience and that instead they will live with their families and homes, in security and peace.” Halima Husain from Jayyous, adds, “I hope that free people around the world will boycott Israel’s occupation and will not support businesses of wealthy Israelis like Leviev who is building the settlement of Zufim, and that they will stand with us to lift this shadow and darkness that hangs over the Palestinian people.”

Like many in their villages, both Halima Husain and M’azuza Abu Rahmeh have seen their family’s farmland bulldozed or cut off for Israeli settlement expansion. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documented in a 2005 report that Israel’s West Bank separation wall was specifically built in a manner so as to isolate Jayyous and Bil’in’s agricultural land and facilitate Israeli settlement expansion. Halima Husain explains that because her family can no longer reach their agricultural land, their income is insufficient to cover her son’s university education and household expenses. M’azuza Abu Rahmeh and her children participated in nonviolent community protests to attempt to prevent their family’s olive trees from being uprooted for settlements, but her son was seriously injured by Israeli soldiers during the protests and later arrested from their home during the night.

In addition to the Zufim settlement on Jayyous’ land and the Mattityahu East settlement on Bil’in’s land, Leviev’s companies have also recently built homes in Har Homa on Jabal Abu Ghneim, and in Maale Adumim, two settlements which aim to isolate East Jerusalem from the West Bank Leviev has also been an important donor to the settler organization the Land Redemption Fund that has used deceit and strong-arm tactics to secure Palestinian land for settlement expansion.

In Dubai, in a sudden reversal, just 16 days after Leviev publicly announced plans to open two new jewelry stores this year the Emirate, a high-level Dubai government official said that Leviev had no trade license to open a store in there. The April 30th report in Dubai’s Gulf News followed a flurry of media coverage of the April 18 call by Palestinians and New York activists for Dubai to boycott Leviev’s businesses over his companies’ settlement construction in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

From Khalid Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem

The government of Dubai recently allowed a major bankroller of Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank to open at least two Jewelry stores in the Gulf emirate. According to reliable sources in the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a key member-state, Israeli billionaire and diamond magnate Lev Leviev is preparing to open two large jewelry stores in Dubai, a world’s hub of Jewelry trading.

The first store will be opened soon at the Burj Dubai Mall (Dubai Mall Tower) while a second store is slated to be opened later this year in the new Atlantis Hotel on the Jumeirah Palm Island. Leviev has already opened one store in Dubai in March, 2008, in the lobby of al-Qasr Hotel on Madinat Jumeirah.
The Dubai authorities were initially reluctant to grant the Israeli billionaire a license to do business in the oil-rich emirate. However, Leviev reportedly successfully lobbied “North American and European connections” to convince Dubai officials to reconsider their objections.

Leviev’s companies, including Africa-Israel and Leader Management & Development as well as several other subsidiaries, have been quite active in displacing Palestinian villagers from their homes and land in several parts of the West Bank.

The two firms have built hundreds of settler units in at least five Jewish settlements constructed on land illegally seized from its Arab proprietors. In recent years, a company called Leader belonging to Leviev built the settlement of Zufim on private Arab land seized from the village of Jayyous. Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of the Leviev-owned company Africa-Israel has built hundreds of settler units on land stolen from the village of Bilin. Numerous additional settler units were built in the two large settlements of Ma’ali Adomim, a few kilometers east of Jerusalem, and Har Homa, near the predominantly Christian Arab town of Beit Sahur.

Israel hopes that these settlements will cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, thus making the Palestinian dream of making the city the future capital of a prospective Palestinian state utterly unrealistic and outright impossible. In addition to his intensive involvement in Jewish settlement expansion, including colonies defined by the inherently unjust Israeli justice system as “manifestly illegal,” Leviev has donated undisclosed but reportedly large sums of money to the Land Redemption Fund, a land-grabbing organization affiliated with Gush Emunim, the ideological group behind Jewish settlement activities in the West Bank.

According to the Israeli newspaper, Yedeot Ahronot, the Land Redemption Fund uses fraud and strong-arm tactics to seize land from Palestinians for settlement expansion. Last year the Israeli group, Peace Now, and other settlement-watch groups, discovered that hundreds of settler units built in the settlement of Matityahu in the Salfit region, in the central West Bank, were actually built on private Palestinian land seized at gun point from its legal and rightful Palestinian owners. However, despite the discovery, the Israeli government refused to dismantle the illegal settler units, with one Israeli official saying that “this problem will be discussed with the Palestinian Authority in the context of final-status talks.”

Leviev’s companies are actually destroying the lives of thousands of Palestinians by narrowing their horizons and dispossessing them of their livelihoods.

Abdullah Abu Rahma from the village of Bilin and Sharif Omar from Jayyous told representative of the human rights group Adalah-NY (www.adalahny.org), which monitors Israeli theft Palestinian land, that “Leviev’s companies are destroying the olive groves and farms that have sustained our villages for centuries.”

“We call on people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied against apartheid South Africa.”

The mayor of Jayyous, which suffered incalculable losses due to Leviev’s destructive rampage in the northern West Bank, told this reporter that “Leveiv is indulging in ethnic cleansing against our community and our farmers.”

“He is building settlements at our expense; he is destroying our land, our farms, and our orchards, and at the same time he is opening business in Dubai in order to finance his crimes against our people. Shame on Dubai and its government.”

Some Jewish organizations opposed to the Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing and apartheid have also called on the countries of the world to boycott Israeli businesses and firms involved in dispossessing Palestinians of their land.

“We call on the government and people of the United Arab Emirates to join the growing international campaign to boycott Lev Leviev’s companies due to their construction of Israeli colonial settlements,” declared Daniel Lang-Levitsky of Jews Against the Occupation-NYC.

“A major Israeli violator of Palestinian rights and international law should not be opening jewelry stores in Dubai,” said Issa Ayoub, a spokesperson for the Adalah-NY group. Adalah-NY organized eight boycott protests outside Leviev’s new Madison Avenue Jewelry store in New York City over the last five months.

The Palestinian Authority has refused to comment on the Dubai government decision to allow the settler bankroller Leviev to open business ventures in the oil-rich emirate.

One Palestinian official contacted by telephone said “I don’t know anything about this affair and I have not heard of Leviev.”

A Hamas official in the Gaza Strip said “the Palestinian people were feeling embittered and betrayed by this scandalous behavior on the part of the Dubai government.”

“We were hoping that Dubai would stand with us against the genocidal Israeli regime and its unrelenting efforts to ethnically cleanse our people from their ancestral homeland. We had never imagined that a day would come when we had to appeal to an Arab country to refrain from harming us and undermining our cause.”