27th March 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Marco Varasio | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
On Land Day, 2014, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees in Beit Hanoun, Gaza marched toward the separation barrier in the “no-go zone.” Israeli occupation forces fired tear gas canisters to break up the peaceful demonstration. Two people were overcome by the tear gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evJwcIlbHws
8th March 2014 | The Electronic Intifada, Joe Catron | Gaza City, Occupied Palestine
Agricultural organizations in the Gaza Strip are working with academic and other civil society groups to prepare for Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW).
Local events, as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, will run from Sunday, 9 March through Thursday, 13 March in the besieged coastal enclave.
“On the last day, I can guarantee we’ll have a good activity,” said Saad Ziada, field coordinator with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees in the Gaza Strip and its representative on the local IAW preparatory committee. “I expect 600-700 people will participate, at least.”
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees will organize the last of this year’s local events, a gathering for farmers and fishermen in the Gaza seaport on 13 March.
“Why in the Gaza port?” Ziada said. “Because Palestinian fishermen are prevented from entering and using our sea for their resources. At the same time, Israelis freely use the sea, which is our sea. This is a clear example of Israel’s discrimination and apartheid policies.”
Targeting farmers, fishermen
A joint report, issued a month ago by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rightsand the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, found “522 documented shooting incidents targeting fishermen at sea, resulting in nine civilian deaths, 47 injuries and 422 detentions” off the Gaza coast between 1997 and 30 November 2013.
During the same reporting period, the report states, “The facts available suggest that hundreds of farmers were unarmed when they were shot at and injured” (“Under fire: Israel’s enforcement of access restricted areas in the Gaza Strip,” January 2014 [PDF]
A year ago, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees held a rally in the seaport, as well as another in the so-called “buffer zone” by the separation barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip, to support a boycott of Israeli agricultural products.
These events were part of a “Farming Injustice” campaign that included actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as 40 European cities.
Activating the boycott
“This year, we want to activate the boycott of Israeli products in the Gaza Strip,” Ziada said. “We want farmers and fishermen to be involved in these activities, to know more about boycott and normalization.”
“The boycott movement will not be just for students and academics,” said Mohamed Abu Samra, an activist with the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel. “It must include all sectors of Palestinian society.”
As another member of the preparatory committee, Abu Samra has helped to plan a range of talks, films and presentations in the Nuseirat municipal hall, the Palestine Red Crescent Society building and the Women’s Development Center.
He also worked with other Gaza activists to film an Israeli Apartheid Week promotional video.
“BDS gives us a wide area for the biggest part of the population to participate in a kind of resistance, and it’s succeeding,” Abu Samra said.
Workshops
The Arab Center for Agricultural Development, another organization involved in Israeli Apartheid Week has an ongoing campaign to encourage the boycott of Israeli agricultural products by Gaza Strip farmers.
“Last year, we had three workshops on BDS with farmers and other groups,” said Abeer Abu Shawish, the center’s project coordinator and the Israeli Apartheid Week preparatory committee member. “These workshops aren’t finished. We’ll keep them going, to reach all the farmers in Gaza and encourage them to support BDS.”
The center will focus its other major campaign, organizing accompaniment for olive farmers during the harvest season, on the West Bank and coordinate it with the BDS National Committee this year, Abu Shawish said.
In the Gaza Strip, the center plans to increase its boycott activities.
“ACAD will recruit a coordinator just for BDS, to be responsible for all the activities we will have in the BDS campaign,” Abu Shawish said. “We are going to do more activities in all the Gaza governorates, in cooperation with our partners in the West Bank. We are also producing posters, newsletters, social media, radio announcements and other publicity tools. It is a main program in our strategic plan this year.”
Challenge
Despite enthusiasm for BDS by civil society groups like the Arab Center for Agricultural Development and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and their constituencies, implementing it under occupation and siege in the Gaza Strip poses a challenge.
“You cannot ask people not to buy something for which they don’t have an alternative, especially after the closure of the tunnels,” said Mohsen Abu Ramadan, ACAD’s director in Gaza and one of three representatives of the Palestinian NGO Network on the BDS National Committee. “Most of the commodities now come through Kerem Shalom [crossing from Israel].”
Abu Shawish agreed that the siege presents the biggest obstacle to boycotting Israel from Gaza.
“The main difficulty is that we don’t have alternatives to many, many products,” she said. “We can’t stop using them all. If we don’t have an alternative product, whether local, national or international, we have to use the Israeli one.”
But the local boycott has cultural value, she said, even if its economic impact is necessarily limited.
“It’s a kind of resistance. People can do it themselves, without it costing anything.”
“We try to make the boycott a culture, as part of a resistance mentality,” Abu Ramadan said.
Gaza IAW, and local BDS activities in general, contribute strength to a global effort, Abu Samra said.
“It raises the awareness of BDS among people in the Palestinian community, and support the BDS movement outside Palestine. BDS succeeded in the past, in South Africa, and we think it will succeed in ending the occupation now.”
Joe Catron is a US activist in Gaza, Palestine. He co-edited The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag, an anthology of accounts by detainees freed in the 2011 prisoner exchange. Follow him on Twitter @jncatron.
6th March 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Marco Varasio | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
While Israeli ministers are discussing the usage of lawyers and the Mossad to fight boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), in the besieged Gaza Strip, like in 250 other cities around the world, activists, students and representatives of organizations are preparing for the tenth annual Israeli Apartheid Week, the worldwide campaign to raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli apartheid regime and occupation through lectures, rallies, film screenings and conferences.
One of the changes for IAW 2014 in Gaza, organized by the Preparatory Committee for Resistance to Israeli Apartheid through five preparatory workshops from 22 February to 6 March, will be the key role played by the Union of Agricultural Workers Committee (UAWC), which will involve fishermen and farmers in activities scheduled from 9 March until 13 March.
One of UAWC’s main goal is to make fishermen and farmers aware of the BDS call launched in 2005 and its potential. It organized several workshop about BDS through its local committees.
“The BDS movement must include all Palestinian sectors, such as fishermen and farmers, because the Israeli apartheid policies directly affect them,” said Saad Ziada from UAWC. “Israeli occupation forces prevent our sea from being sailed and worked, while they are using it. This is a clear example of discrimination and apartheid policies.”
The aim of IAW 2014 in the Gaza Strip, where Israel controls the borders, territorial waters, airspace and, due to the Paris Protocol signed in 1994, the economy, is to “raise awareness among the Palestinian people in order to get them to help BDS outside Palestine and Gaza – where goods are supplied through Kerem Shalom checkpoint and Israel often monopolizes the market – showing how the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement affects the Israeli occupation,” said Mohammed Abu Samra, a member of the Preparatory Committee and the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI).
“Why did we choose to fight through BDS movement?” Mohammed says. “First, the experience in South Africa proved that it is effective. It succeeded in the past. BDS gives us a wide area to involve people and is based on international law.”
“We want to thank all the BDS activists around the world for their activities and their huge amount of work,” he added. “This is an historic moment to prove the success of the BDS movement, to prove that we can isolate the Israeli state. We ask for even more pressure. We ask the international community to implement all the resolution to guarantee us, Palestinian people, our main rights.”
In the besieged Gaza Strip, IAW 2014 activities will start on 9 March with an opening ceremony at the Palestine Red Crescent Society offices in Gaza City, where recorded video messages from Omar Barghouti and Ahmad Kathrada will also be displayed. It will then spread across the universities and municipal halls of the Strip, ending in the Gaza seaport with a final demonstration that, according to UAWC, at least 600-700 people should attend.
7th January 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Charlie Andreasson | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
On Saturday, 4th January, the Israeli navby shot at five fishermen and their boat, a hasaka, three nautical miles from the shore of Gaza, well within the highly-restricted part of Palestine waters in which the occupation forces officially allow them to fish. Despite damage to the boat, and water that flooded it, Majed Baker, age 55, and his four relatives managed to return to port and get the boat onto shore. A total of nine bullet holes were counted, some below the waterline.
Previously, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Information in Gaza, the Israeli military had restricted waters in the north. It thereby expanded the nautical “buffer zone” by Israeli waters through military force, and without declaring its intentions in advance. Nor has it made any statement in retrospect. The restriction of the fishing waters in the north is confirmed by the affected fishermen. The same pattern can be discerned in the rest of the increasingly narrowed zone. According to Zakaria Baker, coordinator of the Union of Agricultural Workers Committees (UAWC)’s fishermen’s committee, all boats that tried to sail further than four miles from the coast have been attacked since the beginning of the year, and the “buffer zone” in the south, by Egyptian waters, has been curtailed drastically. This means boats in Rafah must sail north along the coast for some distance before they can venture into fishing grounds.
These restrictions affect the fishing industry severely, especially now, during the peak season. As a result of Israeli aggression, the total catch has fallen by 42% since 2000, and the number of registered fishermen has declined from about 5,000 in the 1980s to less than 3,000 today, according to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Attacks and shootings against Palestinian fishermen, sometimes resulting in fatal and other injuries, arrests and seizures of boats, and destruction of fishing gear, are common and documented by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Since neither the Palestinian fishing industry nor fishermen themselves endanger the State of Israel, these abuses cannot be understood as anything other than collective punishment, which violates the fourth Geneva Convention, Article 33.
Behind all the numbers and statistics lurk people. When an occupying power, in this case Israel, is allowed to continue to violate international conventions by the world community, it allows other nations to do the same. This erosion of established conventions is a threat to the people they are meant to protect, and can eventually affect relations between states. The attack on the five fishermen is therefore a concern for the entire international community, and not an internal matter between Israel and those living under its occupation.
28th November 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Maria del Mar Fernandez and Mohammed Abedullah | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
On Monday, 25th November 2013, a conference on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli apartheid, colonization and occupation was held in Gaza City by the Arab Center for Agricultural Development (ACAD) and Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA).
Abeer Abu Shawish of ACAD coordinated the event.
About 43 people, 22 women and 21 men, attended. They were farmers and representatives of the civil society and national organizations in the agriculture sector in Gaza, NPA representatives, and BDS activists.
“This kind of boycott of Israel is historical in Palestine and has succeeded in making changes in the past,” said ACAD director Muhsen Abu Ramadan. “The South African anti-apartheid movement succeeded using a boycott strategy. We should boycott and also ask for divestment from Israel in general, and also settlements. We also need to promote local products and to encourage investments in Palestinian products, as this will complement the boycott. We have to use international replacements for Israeli products if we don’t have a Palestinian product. Boycott is not only about trade but also educational centers. Israeli universities are used for research to kill Palestinians. Experience of the boycott movements has shown that it is a good way to affect Israel. It is hard to boycott here in Gaza because of the limited options, but we have to encourage the culture of boycotting. We have also to boycott some of the facilities and traders who deal with Israelis, because Israel tries to show that the conflict is just between politicians and not popular among the people. So, they tell other countries, why are you boycotting us when even Palestinians are not boycotting us? Some farmers’ unions in Europe adopted the boycott movement, and we can have a huge influence by boycotting agricultural products. We have to take care about Israeli procedures that intend to create normalization between Palestinian and Israeli products. We demand more serious positions against importing products from Israel at all, not just from settlements. We have to defend the rights of our farmers and their right to import and export products.”
Acting NPA country director Mahmoud Hamada showed the summary and recommendations of his organization’s 2012 report, “Dangerous Liaisons: Norwegian ties to the Israeli Occupation.”
He pointed out that “boycott is a national strategy for taking our rights, especially in the absence of compliance with international law with regard to Palestinians. This is a way to punish Israel, which is using the Palestinian market to make it just a consumer market so they, Israel, can benefit from it. The Israelis intend to create normalization between the occupied and the occupier. We found that 51 Israeli and international companies invest their money in settlements. We have contacted these companies and we contacted the Norwegian pension fund to boycott these companies. One of the companies is G4S , the British/Danish security firm which has held a contract to provide equipment and services to the Israeli prison system and checkpoints since 2007. Caterpillar provides the Israeli military with weaponized bulldozers used to illegally destroy homes and orchards of Palestinian families. And they are the very same bulldozers as the one that killed a 23-year-old American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, in Rafah in 2003, when she tried to protect the home of the Nasrallah family. Hewlett Packard, HP, provides the technology for Israeli gunboats that kill Palestinian fishermen, and provide the tracking system that controls all movements of Palestinians at checkpoints throughout the West Bank. We demand to talk with the investment funds in Europe, and that they boycott all these companies. Sadly, some Arab countries invest in them.”
He asserted the importance of joining the BDS movement, refusing to buy any Israeli product from the local markets and encouraging the national products. “By that, we can support our economy and destroy the Israeli economy.”
“We don’t have real experience in BDS as UAWC, or any other civil society organizations in Gaza,” said Sa’ad Ziada, project coordinator for the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). “We just have some activities boycotting the Israeli products.”
“We established the Palestinian Day for Agriculture, held on 9th February 2013. We have been discussing how we can export our products without the intervention of Israeli companies. We have to create a long-term strategy and we need to talk with all factions in order to encourage them to create a culture of boycotting Israel. We want to make pressure on the Palestinian government to support the idea. We know that it’s really hard to boycott Israel, especially in Gaza, because most of our basic goods are from them, but at least we can boycott the products for which we already have national alternatives. The Israeli occupation is establishing a new form of slow killing, such as with this closure, the lack of jobs, electricity, unclean water, bad education, and using poisons in agricultural materials such as fertilizers and pesticides. That leads to the killing of Palestinians slowly, over the long term, not directly with bombs, but in another way. 95 million dollars is the profit from Israeli goods imported into the Gaza Strip, more than four million dollars per year. So that means if we boycott Israel, we can really affect the Israeli economy and change their policy towards us.”
“Of course the boycott is an important type of resistance. Not all the people are going to do armed resistance, but they can do this kind of resistance.”
Zaid Shuabi, outreach officer of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), gave a report by Skype from the West Bank.
He started his speech with a brief introduction to the BNC, its history, its start and its role and activities in Palestine.
The coalition reflects “the broad consensus among Palestinian civil society about the need for a broad and sustained campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS),” he said. “This resulted in the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel launched in July 2005, with the initial endorsement of over 170 Palestinian organizations. The signatories to this call represent the three major components of the Palestinian people: the refugees in exile, Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the oppressed Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state.”
Efforts to coordinate the BDS movement, which began to grow rapidly after the 2005 call was announced, culminated in the first Palestinian BDS Conference held in Ramallah in November 2007. Out of this conference emerged the BDS National Committee (BNC) as the Palestinian coordinating body for the BDS movement worldwide.”
The BNC’s mandate and role is:
• To strengthen and spread the culture of boycott as a central form of civil resistance to Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid;
• To formulate strategies and programs of action in accordance with the 9 July 2005 Palestinian Civil Society BDS Call;
• To serve as the Palestinian reference point for BDS campaigns in the region and worldwide;
• To serve as the national reference point for anti-normalization campaigns within Palestine;
• To facilitate coordination and provide support and encouragement to various BDS campaign efforts in all locations.
The BNC’s main activities include:
• Campaigning with BDS activists locally and worldwide by preparing and disseminating BNC statements; public speaking; organizing the annual Global BDS Action Day on 30 March (Palestinian Land Day);
• Advocacy by briefing and lobbying policy makers;
• Monitoring and Rapid Response by means of BNC calls for action against projects and initiatives which amount to recognition of or cooperation with Israel’s regime of apartheid, colonialism and occupation (i.e., normalization);
• Media Outreach in Palestine and abroad, based on a professional media strategy;
• Coordination with BDS activists locally and worldwide, including preparation of regional and international organizing meetings and conferences;
• Awareness Raising and Training for activists and organizations about BNC analysis, standards and BDS campaign work; through workshops, BNC information materials and the BDS campaign website;
• Developing the BDS movement in Arab countries;
• Research and BDS Strategy Development.
In the West Bank, they have made some progress boycotting Israel, although they have faced many problems with the Israelis. Shuabi talked about the boycott in many countries and how Palestinian traders are forced to buy Israeli goods, sometimes from settlements, so Israel can argue with Western audiences that Palestinians themselves buy from Israel. He explained efforts to export goods through companies boycotting Israel. This project has made good progress outside Palestine.
After the speeches, there was an animated debate among organizers and participants.
