Jews sans frontieres has posted an excellent guide to the important elections in Israel tomorrow. There is a good chance that far right former prime minister Netanyahu will win the elections along with significant gains for fascist sympathizer Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu.
Here is an excerpt:
"Finally, Israel Beiteinu is the Russian party, whose leader is the former Kahanist Avigdor Lieberman. It held 11 seats in the last Knesset and seems to be the rising surprise of the elections, overtaking Labor as the third largest party. It pushes the Likud compromise from the direction of the populist right, using open racism as the major selling point.
The summary is this. The secular Ashkenazi founders of Zionism built a racist society based on their own political, economic and cultural domination. Since the seventies, that domination has been increasingly challenged by Jews of lower status and different backgrounds. Because racism against Palestinians is the glue that holds the nation together, all Jewish challenges to the founders' hegemony are expressed as a competition in racism. Parties step in front of the electoral mirror and ask,
mirror mirror on the wall, who's the most racist of us all.
The only restraining factor is the fear of alienating the Western alliance that support Israel. The rise of the "extreme" right (as if Labor isn't extreme) expresses a number of trends: 1) the continuing assertion of Palestinian presence in the land 2) an intensification of the internal social struggle among Jewish Israelis 3) the continuing decline of the secular Israeli block and 4) the growing confidence that Israel need not worry about negative repercussions from the U.S. and Europe.
Some say that this confidence is a misreading of the international moment. I hope so but I wouldn't be so sure."
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Israeli elections
Monday, February 9, 2009
British Student Occupations
PFUUPE Salutes UK Students
The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) salutes the solidarity actions of students from universities across England in response to Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Students from eleven universities have occupied buildings in their campuses in solidarity with Palestinian rights, including the right to education, and in outrage over Israel’s rolling massacres and wanton destruction in Gaza, including many educational institutions, in its latest war of aggression on Gaza and the year and a half of its criminal siege of Gaza that continues till today.
Students from the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS), the London School of Economics (LSE), Kings College, Oxford University, University of Warwick, University of Leeds, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Sussex, Newcastle University, University of Birmingham, and the University of Essex have all acted to pressure their respective university administrations to respond to their demands.
In part, the students’ demands have included calls for their universities to condemn the attacks on Palestinian educational institutions as well as urging official mechanisms and programs that would support the right to education for all Palestinians. In light of the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in Gaza, students have also demanded that their universities pursue practical steps towards divesting from companies and institutions implicated in Israeli occupation of Palestine and its violation of international law.
We in PFUUPE are grateful for the hard and principled work of our colleagues in the British academic community over the past years in support of the cause of justice and peace in Palestine and for Palestinian academic freedom, in particular. The University and College Union’s 2008 motion condemning the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in the perpetuation of Israel’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people gives an excellent example of these efforts. We acknowledge the latest forms of student activism in England and elsewhere as a welcome continuation of those efforts aimed at holding Israel accountable for its injustice and crimes.
The bombing of the Islamic University, scores of public and UNRWA schools, and the headquarters of the University Teachers’ Association-Palestine in Gaza is only the latest episode in an ongoing Israeli policy of undermining and directly targeting Palestinian educational institutions. In light of this policy of the occupation, the effective solidarity of academics and students worldwide, particularly in the form of boycott, is particularly significant and highly appreciated by Palestinian academics. By their work in protest of these barbaric acts, our comrades have shown that this destruction cannot and will not occur in silence and without protest.
Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza was described by leading international jurists as constituting a war crime, even a crime against humanity. It has caused over 1300 deaths and the injury of more than 5000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom are civilians. As the dust begins to settle in Gaza, we are only now beginning to comprehend the enormity of the indiscriminate destruction caused by the Israeli attacks.
We strongly admire and support the students in the United Kingdom who are calling for boycott and divestment, urging their universities not just to protest and condemn Israel's massacre in Gaza, but also to join and intensify the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel to end its impunity and to hold it accountable for its persistent violations of international law and Palestinian rights. We agree that, without sustained, effective pressure by people of conscience the world over, Israel will continue with its gradual, rolling acts of genocide against the Palestinians.
We urge academics around the world to intensify their boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and to isolate the Israeli academy in international forums, associations of academics, and other international venues. Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the entrenched system of oppression practiced by the Israeli state, and their silence at this critical moment is only the most vociferous indicator of this complicity.
Dr. Amjad Barham
President
PFUUPE
Sunday, February 8, 2009
IJAZ Statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day
The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has released a statement to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day in a time of deepening Israeli apartheid.
------
How does the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!...
She weeps sore into the night, and her tears are on her cheeks:
among all who loved her she has none to comfort her.
(Book of Lamentations)
Last week, after murdering 1400 people – of whom 400 were children – after bombing hospitals and mosques, schools, universities and humanitarian supplies, and tens of thousand of homes, Israel declared a cease-fire. A shameful parade of European leaders immediately went to Jerusalem to embrace the mass murderers and to pledge their support for the continuing siege of Gaza.
The primary purpose of this massacre was to break the spirit of the Palestinian people until they surrender and accept their fate as lesser human beings. As former Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon said in 2002, "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." European leaders support this goal, as did previous U.S. administrations, as do the ruling elites of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi-Arabia, despite the fury of their peoples. We wait to see if the freshly inaugurated Obama Administration will break with sixty long years of attack on the Palestinian people armed and financed by the U.S. and Europe.
We grieve with the people of Gaza. We see the faces of the children, of the women and the men; we hear their voices. We also hear the silence of the leaders of Western countries, intermittently broken by evasive platitudes. And we are reminded of the time when the world turned a blind eye while our forebears, our families, were slaughtered.
100,000 Palestinians were made homeless in Gaza this month. Most of them became refugees in 1948 when they were expelled at gunpoint from their towns and villages. Now they are homeless again, even in their land of exile, and at risk of being driven out from Palestine altogether.
Yet on January 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the leaders of the U.S. and Europe will be joined in honoring the memory of our dead. Even as we seek to remember and to honor the immensity of that loss, we struggle to find words to convey the hypocrisy of these ceremonies, in which those who are silent today pay homage to the victims of yesterday’s silence.
The radical Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, who died while fleeing the Nazis, wrote, "not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." The Third Reich was defeated, and yet, "the enemy has not ceased to be victorious." Racism, mass murder, and genocide continue to be accepted tools of statecraft. Even our dead are not safe. They have been called up, disturbed, dredged from their mass graves and forced to testify against their fellow human beings in pain, to confess a hatred that was alien to them and to offer themselves up as justification for a new cycle of suffering in Palestine. Their ghosts have been enlisted to help displace fellow Jews from Arab homelands, and to bequeath to them that same alien hatred, conscripting those of us descending from Arab lands to become enemies of our own memory and past.
The Jewish British MP Gerald Kaufman spoke in anguish while the massacres in Gaza were taking place: "My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza." We share and echo that refusal. Let not the memory of Jews murdered by the Nazi regime serve as cover for the attempted destruction of the Palestinian people!
Although the guns are relatively silent, this genocidal assault on the Palestinian people isn’t over. The siege, the lack of food and fresh water, the disease-threatening broken sewage system, and economic collapse and humanitarian crisis persist in Gaza with the full support of the U.S., Europe and the Egyptian government. As the siege of Gaza continues, so does the slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the home demolitions, the building of the apartheid wall, the settlement build-up, the economic devastation of the towns and villages strangled by checkpoints, the assault on Palestinian neighborhoods in Jaffa, Akka, Lydda, the Galilee and the Negev, the mass imprisonment of Palestinians (over 11,000), and all the large and small ways by which Israel is seeking to crush the spirit and erase the presence of the Palestinian people in their homeland.
Faced with the threat of annihilation in Europe, Jews resisted. From ghettos to concentration camps and within countries under occupation, Jews led resistance to the Nazi regime. Today, from the ghetto of Gaza to the Bantustans of the West Bank and from the neighborhoods of Jaffa and Akka to cities across the globe, Palestinians resist Israel’s attempt to destroy them as a people. On January 27th, honoring the memory of our dead is for us inseparable from honoring more than sixty years of Palestinian survival and resistance. Only when the Palestinian people regain their freedom will the dead rest safely. Then we will all celebrate another victory for life.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
International Writers and Scholars Endorse Academic Boycott of Israel
We stand in support of the indigenous Palestinian people in Gaza, who are fighting for their survival against one of the most brutal uses of state power in both this century and the last.
We condemn Israel’s recent (December 2008/ January 2009) breaches of international law in the Gaza Strip, which include the bombing of densely-populated neighborhoods, illegal deployment of the chemical white phosphorous, and attacks on schools, ambulances, relief agencies, hospitals, universities, and places of worship. We condemn Israel’s restriction of access to media and aid workers.
We reject as false Israel’s characterization of its military attacks on Gaza as retaliation. Israel’s latest assault on Gaza is part of its longtime racist jurisprudence against its indigenous Palestinian population, during which the Israeli state has systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited the Palestinian people.
We reject as untrue the Israeli government’s claims that the Palestinians use civilians as human shields, and that Hamas is an irredeemable terrorist organization. Without endorsing its platforms or philosophy, we recognize Hamas as a democratically elected ruling party. We do not endorse the regime of any existing Arab state, and call for the upholding of internationally mandated human rights and democratic elections in all Arab states.
We call upon our fellow writers and academics in the United States to question discourses that justify and rationalize injustice, and to address Israeli assaults on civilians in Gaza as one of the most important moral issues of our time.
We call upon institutions of higher education in the U.S. to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, dissolve study abroad programs in Israel, and divest institutional funds from Israeli companies, using the 1980s boycott against apartheid South Africa as a model.
We call on all people of conscience to join us in boycotting Israeli products and institutions until a just, democratic state for all residents of Palestine/Israel comes into existence.
Mohammed Abed
Elmaz Abinader
Diana Abu-Jaber
Ali Abunimah
Opal Palmer Adisa
Deborah Al-Najjar
Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany
Amina Baraka
Amiri Baraka
George Bisharat
Sherwin Bitsui
Breyten Breytenbach
Van Brock
Hayan Charara
Alison Hedge Coke
Lara Deeb
Vicente Diaz
Marilyn Hacker
Mechthild Hart
Sam Hamill
Randa Jarrar
Fady Joudah
Mohja Kahf
Rima Najjar Kapitan
Persis Karim
J. Kehaulani Kaunanui
Haunani Kay-Trask
David Lloyd
Sunaina Maira
Nur Masalha
Khaled Mattawa
Daniel AbdalHayy Moore
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Nadine Naber
Marcy Newman
Viet Nguyen
Simon J. Ortiz
Vijay Prashad
Steven Salaita
Therese Saliba
Sarita See
Deema Shehabi
Matthew Shenoda
Naomi Shihab Nye
Magid Shihade
Vandana Shiva
Noenoe Silva
Andrea Smith
Ahdaf Soueif
Ghada Talhami
Frank X. Walker
Robert Warrior
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, May 19, 2008
Anti-apartheid Solidarity in Canada
The Canadian journal Upping the Anti has a recent and excellent essay on their blog about efforts of Zionist groups working with the state to step up attacks on anti-apartheid solidarity. In 2004 there was a major push by Concordia university working with the state and Zionist groups to end anti-apartheid solidarity on the campus. When organizers attempted to block far right politician and occasional prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking, the university administration suspended several leading organizers and banned all anti-apartheid work on campus. These are the same liberal administrators who will be telling their grand kids 30 years from now how they were always against Israeli apartheid, just like they supposedly were with South African anti-Apartheid. Yeah right.
Like with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, there is a lot of revisionist history official society does to boost up their legitimacy. They don't tell you at the official NYU "celebrations" every year presided over by Sexton that Dr. King was hysterically denounced and threatened by these liberals when he came out and denounced the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism. Today you have to laugh as they denounce Reverend Wright as a dangerous black man, and then try to turn Dr. King into a symbol in support of contemporary imperialism and white supremacy.
Anyway, this essay on more recent developments in Canadian anti-apartheid solidarity points out a few key issues that are critical for understanding what the struggle of a single campaign on a campus, community or union and the wider movement as a whole is. The Zionists and official society may have all the guns and money and coercive power of the state, which makes it difficult to organize at times (even as many make a lot of disingenuous excuses), but unfortunately for them, reality and history aren't on their side.
The solidarity movement in the U.S. is at a low point of activity at this time. By 2003-2004 things were slowing down. This was partially due to the fact that the second Intifada was devastated by Israeli state terror, but it was also largely due to the liberal political contradictions of many in the solidarity movement. As the U.S. and Israel attempted to resurrect the Oslo framework again and install the Palestinian elite in the West Bank firmly back in control with the Palestinian Authority apparatus at their disposal. Today, the same dynamics are playing out, only now is added the civil war strategy of the American and Israeli regimes, with the creation of death squad mercenary forces, first using this tactic in Iraq in 2004-2005 (learned from Central America in the 1980s and the Phoenix Program in Vietnam in the 1960s), and applied to Gaza as they carried out a coup against the elected Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority in 2007 and now being used in Lebanon as recently as this month.
In the last three years or so some of what was aimed for since 2000-2001 with the outbreak of the second Intifada and solidarity efforts has been achieved and begun to be implemented, but largely in Britain and Canada, not the U.S. The official announcement of the Campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was an important step that could not occur in 2000-2003, important years in U.S. anti-apartheid solidarity. The Zionist establishment and official society by 2003 had gotten back on their feet and organized a bit by the time the U.S. scene was fading some. They hit back in ways described in this essay, but much of the solidarity efforts were slowed down because of their own liberal political contradictions. Were the "negotiations" that the U.S. and Israel orchestrated with their Palestinian puppets legitimate or not? Was a "two-state solution" just a propaganda line or a viable reality that reflected the facts of the Israeli system? Were Zionist attempts in the U.S. to "dialogue" just a means to make relative apartheid or legitimate expressions of the political situation in Palestine-Israel? Were campus administrations and the state potential "neutral" arbitrators of this political struggle or part of the interests that support apartheid? We could go on.
What was at stake then for the Zionists, the state and university administrations was what this essay details well: the question of legitimacy. Just as U.S. imperialism must legitimize itself by saying it is all for "democracy", Israeli apartheid must attempt to maintain its "progressive" image. They benefit by the vast majority of people's lack of knowledge about the real situation and therefore they need to keep it that way. Because if most people really knew about these things they would obviously support the struggle for democracy and freedom that the U.S. and Israel must repress.
Every anti-apartheid campaign is about the struggle for legitimacy. When the British university teachers voted to boycott Israeli academics, the British and U.S. rulers, Zionist elites and university administrations went crazy with statements supporting apartheid, because they know that this is a serious blow against the legitimacy of apartheid. This is why in a campaign it is important to clearly struggle for the public space about how the situation is to be defined. It is important to make them defend apartheid and white supremacy by clearly and relentlessly showing that is what they are.
However, they must back up their always failing attempts at maintaining legitimacy with direct repression. Zionist forces working with the state and with support from the Israeli government have worked with McMaster and York Universities in Canada to expel students, ban events and tabling. In the U.S., Zionist groups and the Israeli government work closely with the FBI and local police to spy on and attack solidarity efforts and protests.
Today, anti-apartheid solidarity goes to the heart of exposing the anti-democratic and racist character of official society, because the legitimacy of the Israeli regime is tied directly to the legitimacy of their rule. It is the reason they do anything to attack free speech and association concerning solidarity work.
The efforts of Canadian anti-apartheid solidarity shows how far these efforts have come since 2000, where things are going, and what still needs to be done.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Cowards and Pigs
