Tag: Global Actions

Global Solidarity Activities Mark 40 Years of Israel’s Occupation of Palestine

by Bahia, 3 June 2007

Ramallah, 03-06-07: Solidarity activities will take place throughout the world this week marking 40 years of Israel’s occupation of West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. In a press conference held today in Ramallah, Minister of Information, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, presented the details of solidarity events taking place in Palestine, Israel, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe, and announced that the Ministry of Information was initiating a series of year-long activities to sustain exposure of Israel’s ongoing military occupation, which he said, had become the longest-running occupation in modern history.

By keeping the Palestinians’ 40-year-old struggle for freedom and self-determination in the media spotlight in this way in addition to global solidarity initiatives, he said that he hoped the campaign would promote greater regional and international efforts to end the occupation.

Dr. Barghouthi also presented a review of 40 years of occupation which began between June 5-10 1967, and in which the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as well as Arab territories were occupied by Israel.

Forty years later, and in contravention of United Nations resolutions, peace agreements and international law, this occupation not only continues, but has mutated into a fully-fledged system of Apartheid worse than that which prevailed in South Africa. Reiterating the words of former US president Jimmy Carter, Dr. Barghouthi underlined that Apartheid can be identified when two peoples living in the same area are segregated by force, as is the case with the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and where one side is oppressing and prosecuting the other .

He pointed to several characteristics of this Apartheid system, focusing on the creation and continued construction of Israeli settlements built illegally on occupied land and inhabited by 460,000 Israeli-Jewish settlers, and which are sustained by an infrastructure of 543 permanent checkpoints and 600 ‘flying’ checkpoints, and settler-only roads forbidden for use by Palestinians, the first time in history roads have been segregated. He added that this system was being consolidated by Israel’s Wall, which was designed to annex these settlements, and swathes of Palestinian land in the process, to Israel.

At the same time, settlements and the Wall are part of Israel’s long term policy to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem of its Palestinian population by physically isolating the city from the West Bank and encircling it with a ring of settlements, thereby ‘Judaising’ East Jerusalem.

Further evidence of this system of Apartheid lies in differing levels of access to natural resource, which see Israeli West Bank settlers allocated 2400 m 3 water per year compared to just 50 m3 for Palestinians.

In addition, while GDP per capita in Israel was 6 times higher than that in Palestine in 1993, it has rocketed to a massive 30 times more than the GDP in Palestine in 2007. Despite this, Palestinians are still obliged to buy products at the same Israeli market price due to the forced dependency of the Palestinian economy on Israel. All this in the context of Israel’s continued withholding of Palestinian tax revenues amounting to some US$ 850 million, said Dr. Barghouthi.

Building Design: Big names urge Israelis to end ‘oppressive’ works

Alsop, Farrell and MacCormac join call to stop work on schemes that oppress Palestinians
by Helen Crump, 25 May 2007

A host of celebrated architects including Will Alsop, Terry Farrell, Richard MacCormac, Rick Mather and Ted Cullinan have waded into the politics of the Middle East with a challenge to fellow professionals in Israel to cease work that “excludes and oppresses” Palestinians.

The architects, who also include RIBA president Jack Pringle and president-elect Sunand Prasad, have signed a petition organised by Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine which accuses construction professionals working on three separate Israeli developments of “social, political and economic oppression.”

“APJP asserts that the actions of our fellow professionals working with these enterprises are clearly unethical, immoral and contravene universally recognised professional codes of conduct,” a spokesman said.

“We ask the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) to meet their professional obligations … to declare their opposition to this inhuman occupation.”

The IAUA was unavailable for comment, but the action was condemned as foolish and damaging by Michael Peters, founder and chairman of the Identica brand agency, who has worked extensively with architects in Israel.

“British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers — Israeli, British and European,” he said.

Last year Richard Rogers faced stinging criticism from US clients after he hosted a meeting of APJP (News March 10, 2006).

The petition, which focuses on the village of Silwan in east Jerusalem, the E1 plan for the expansion of Israeli settlement Ma’ele Adumim, and former Palestinian village Lifta, was strongly defended by Alsop.

“I think the Palestinians are living in a prison and they deserve better than that,” he said. “I’d like fellow colleagues in Israel to feel some responsibility about this shabby treatment. Architects are a fairly humanitarian lot and perhaps they could help.”

He added: “This is not against Israel, it’s for Palestine.”

Petition organiser Abe Hayeem, a London-based architect and APJP chair, called his fellow architect supporters “pretty courageous”, and insisted architects would not be deterred from backing causes they supported.

But Peters said British architects did not understand the situation in Israel.”Getting involved in a lobby group can only do a disservice to the whole architectural profession,” he added. “To accuse [Israeli] architects of being complicit is nonsense.”

Wall and Checkpoints Reach San Jose

US students set up ‘checkpoint’ on campus
by Eyal Marcus, 25 May 2007

Students at San Jose University disguise as soldiers, Palestinians at improvised checkpoint to condemn Israeli army’s occupation of West Bank


Photo by Andrew Schwartz

On Israel’s Independence Day this year, Max Grossman, an Art and Design lecturer at the University of San Jose in California, fell upon a giant wall built on campus by a student organization called Students for Change.

The wall was meant to symbolize Israel’s security fence in the West Bank. Students set up a checkpoint near the wall where fifty students posed as either Kaffiyeh-clad Palestinians or armed Israeli soldiers.

“I was in shock when I saw it,” Grossman said. “I am 40, I learnt at Berkley and Colombia, places where numerous public protests took place, but I never saw something like this. They pretended questioning and torturing detainee.”

Students disguised as soldiers handcuffed, blindfolded and sometimes pretended to execute supposedly Palestinian civilians with their plastic rifles.


Photo by Jonas

“It was like seeing a play,” said Andrew Schwartz, a student at the university. He said students playing soldiers shouted slogans like “Shut up or I shoot you,” “You won’t see your family today,” and “Don’t speak.”

Schwartz added that some female students disguised as pregnant Palestinian women who were shot by students acting as soldiers for disobeying orders at the improvised checkpoint.

‘Free Palestine’ and ‘End Israel’s apartheid’ were among the slogans that could be read on the wall. Some students called on the US to end its financial support to Israel.

Jewish students staged a counter protest wearing shirts reading: “If I were a suicide bomber, you would be dead.”

Grossman tried to have a conversation with a couple of students disguised a soldiers but to no avail. “They said they did not have to speak to me. They did not want dialogue as they had an agenda,” Grossman said.

After the protest, Jewish students pushed for new campus regulations making it more difficult for students to hold protests.

Boycott Israel – Don’t Play another “Sun City”!

An open letter to the Rolling Stones regarding their planned gig in Israel
from PACBI

Dear Rolling Stones,

The Palestinian arts community received in disbelief media reports of your upcoming performance in Israel, at a time when Israel continues unabated with its colonial and apartheid designs to further dispossess, oppress, and ultimately ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland. If the news is accurate, and we sincerely hope it is not, we strongly urge you to cancel your plans to perform in Israel until the time comes when it ends its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and respects fundamental human rights as well as the relevant precepts of international law concerning Palestinian rights to freedom, self-determination and equality.

Performing in Israel at this time is morally equivalent to performing in South Africa during the apartheid era. We all remember how leading Rolling Stones musicians played a prominent role in enforcing a cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa in the 1980’s, and participated in recording the timeless song, Sun City, which had a singular influence on raising public awareness about apartheid and its injustices. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights Prof. John Dugard, and South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils have repeatedly declared, Israel has created a worse system of apartheid than anything that ever existed in South Africa.

Indeed, Israel’s policies throughout its illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory, which have surpassed their South African counterparts, include house demolitions; Jews-only colonies and roads; uprooting hundreds of thousands of trees; indiscriminate killings of civilians, particularly children; incessant theft of land and water resources; denying freedom of movement to millions under occupation, cutting up the occupied Palestinian territory into Bantustans, some entirely caged by walls, fences and hundreds of roadblocks. Sixty years since the Nakba, Israel’s planned campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, and 40 years into its military occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territory, Israel has consistently and relentlessly violated basic human rights and relevant precepts of international law with utter impunity. Moreover, Israel’s war of aggression against Lebanon last year caused more than one thousand civilian deaths, not to mention massive destruction to infrastructure and decimation of entire residential neighbourhoods.

The resounding failure of the international community to date in ending Israel’s occupation, collective punishment, and other forms of oppression was what prompted Palestinians to appeal to international civil society to bear its moral responsibility to put an end to injustice, just as it did against apartheid South Africa. To this end, Palestinian civil society has almost unanimously called for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it fully complies with international law and recognizes the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine. A specific call for cultural boycott of Israel was issued last year, garnering wide support. Among the many groups and institutions that have heeded the Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel are the Church of England; the US Presbyterian Church; a group of top British architects; the British National Union of Journalists in the UK; the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Ontario; Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger; and Palme d’Or winner director Ken Loach. Is it too much, then, to expect conscientious artists like the Rolling Stones to similarly uphold the values of freedom, equality and justice for all by supporting the growing boycott against Israel?

We appeal to your moral principles and your record of standing up for human rights and human dignity. If the reports are true, we sincerely hope that you shall cancel this ill-conceived and particularly harmful concert in Israel. If they are not true, we urge you to issue a statement to clarify where you stand on this issue of principle.

Sincerely,

PACBI
List of signatories is in preparation and will be posted shortly

Letter to Black America on Palestinian Rights

and June 10th March & Rally
from End the Occupation

To Black America:

It is time for our people to once again demand that the silence be broken on the injustices faced by the Palestinian people resulting from the Israeli occupation.

On June 10th, the national coalition known as the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation will be spearheading a march and rally to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
We, the signatories of this appeal, ask that Black America again take a leading role in this effort as well as the broader work to bring attention to this 40 year travesty of justice.

United Nations resolutions have called for the Israeli withdrawal, yet the Israeli government, with the backing of the USA, has ignored them. The Israeli government has appropriated Palestinian land in open defiance of international law and overwhelming international condemnation.

Within the USA anyone who speaks in favor of Palestinian rights and justice is immediately condemned as being allegedly anti-Israel (and frequently allegedly anti-Semitic), shutting down legitimate discussion. A case in point can be seen in the current furor surrounding former President Jimmy Carter who was criticized for his assertion in his best-selling book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, that Israeli obstructionism lies at the root of the failure to achieve a just Palestinian/Israeli settlement.

As Nobel prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written, “People are scared in the US, to say ‘wrong is wrong,’ because the pro-Israeli lobby is powerful–very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.”

Many of those who most outspokenly agree with President Carter and Archbishop Tutu are American Jews. And many American Jews, including the national organization Jewish Voice for Peace, will be among those rallying for Palestinian rights on June 10th – as will many other Americans, including member groups of the leading anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice.

Leaders from Black America have repeatedly and historically been among the most outspoken proponents of justice for the Palestinian people. Our leaders have defended the Palestinian people’s right to full self-determination and an end to the Occupation as central to peace in the region. Our leaders have not criticized the Jewish people but they have expressed outrage at the Israeli government that collaborated with the apartheid South African government (including in the development of weapons of mass destruction) and emulated South Africa’s treatment of its Black majority in its own treatment of the Palestinian people.

As we struggle to build our country’s support for Palestinian human rights, we widen the door for both Arab and Black Americans to deal with the issues that join them together, as well as those that separate them. We will help to energize – and to heal – both communities.

June tenth and Juneteenth: will our struggles lead the way to a new emancipation of others? Our own integrity as a people, let alone our own experience with massive injustice and oppression, demand that we step forward, speak out, and insist on a change in US policy towards the Palestinian people. Since when have an illegally occupied people been wrong in demanding and fighting for their human rights and land? Since when have such people and their cause not been worthy of our support?

* * * * * * *

Signatories:

Salih Booker, former Executive Director of Africa Action
Khephra Burns, author, editor, playwright

Horace G. Campbell, Professor of African American Studies and Political Science
Dr. Ron Daniels, President, Institute of the Black World 21st Century
Bill Fletcher, labor and international activist, and writer
George Friday, United for Peace and Justice Co-Chair, National Coordinator, Independent Progressive Politics Network
Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, Senior Minister, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ; National President, Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice of the United Church of Christ
Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology, Political Science and Public and International Affairs
Manning Marable, Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies

George Paz Martin, National Co-Chair of United for Peace and Justice and Green Party U.S. Activist
E. Ethelbert Miller, literary activist; board chair, Institute for Policy Studies
Prexy Nesbitt, speaker and educator on Africa, foreign policy, and racism
Barbara Ransby, Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies
Cedric Robinson, Professor, Department of Black Studies
The Rev. Canon Edward W. Rodman MDiv.LCH,DD. Professor of Pastoral Theology and Urban Ministry at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Ma.
Jamala Rogers, Black Radical Congress
Don Rojas, former director of communications for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Zoharah Simmons, human rights activist
Chuck Turner, Boston City Councilor
Hollis Watkins, Former Freedom Singer and staff member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; human rights activist (1961 – present)
Dr. Cornel West
Emira Woods, co-director, Foreign Policy In Focus, Institute for Policy Studies

* * * * *

For endorsers, click HERE