Two days ago in Rafi’ah
nine Arabs were killed,
yesterday six
were killed in Hebron,
and today — just two.
Last year
as we were marching
from Shenkin Street
Activism
[The State of] Minnesota’s investment in two Israel bonds supports Israel’s apartheid system in both Israel and the Palestinian Territories and enables widespread abuse of human rights. Israel Bonds finance infrastructure projects including settlement building on the Palestinian West Bank and in East Jerusalem; these settlements displace Palestinians from their own lands.
Columbia University student Maya Yechieli Wind organizes campus display depicting IDF soldiers abusing Palestinian students at checkpoints. Israeli students form counter-protest. ‘Many think this is what really goes on,’ one of them says.
IOA Editor: Perhaps it is precisely because this is what actually goes on… Flag-wrapping not withstanding, even this ‘pro-Israeli’ coverage of anti-Occupation activism at Columbia University fails to materially challenge the protesters’ message.
I was eager to return to Palestine, to see what Edward Said called “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.”
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine staged a very impressive mock Israeli checkpoint for Right to Education Week – watch video.
Ali Abunimah, speaking at the University of New Mexico, asks the Jewish Federation of New Mexico to apologize for publishing a Dry Bones cartoon which compared BDS supporters with Hitler.
Irene Gendzier, professor of Political Science at Boston University (and IOA Advisory Board member), will present her research on the foundations of US foreign policy in the Middle East in 1945 – 1949. The findings point to very early recognition on the part of US foreign policy planners of the future role the newly created State of Israel could have in protecting US interest in the region.
The talk by Irene Gendzier is THIS Monday, 22 November 2010- Columbia University, 207 Knox Hall, at 12:30pm
Following is a list of the artists who were scheduled to perform in Israel and asked not to cross the picket lines of this struggle, but instead chose to follow the footsteps of Elton John who entertained apartheid South-Africa, and gave their stamp of approval to a reality in which a Palestinian under Israeli occupation is barred from coming to their show in Tel-Aviv.
Tel Aviv, November 15 2010, an anti-apartheid flashmob during the performance of “Porgy and Bess,” performed by South Africa’s Cape Town Opera.
The Hebron Fund has scheduled the “Hebron Aid Flotilla,” a pleasure cruise to raise funds for illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Hebron, Palestine.
PROTEST: Tuesday, November 16th, 5:30 – 7:00 pm. Meet 5:30, Chelsea Piers – 23rd Street & West Side Highway.
A diverse group of Arizona State University students joined together to protest IDF Sargent Nadav Weinberg’s lecture on the “Ethics of the IDF.” We organized a silent protest to give a voice to the Palestinian civilians who have been silenced by IDF policy.
“A number of Knesset members and ministers from Yisrael Beitenu and Likud and other right-wing figures are calling for cutting off funding to artists that this week called for a boycott of the cultural center in Ariel… Threats of this type … do not scare us… As Israeli citizens, the refusal of these theater actors to perform in Ariel, which is not within the borders of Israeli sovereignty, is a democratic right.”
When I envision Israel ending settlement expansion and living in equality with the Palestinians – while Netanyahu’s government confiscates more Palestinian land and builds more settlements every single day – I wonder who is misguided?
Matan Cohen, Israeli who disrupted PM’s speech: We were raised on human rights. Youngster who heckled Netanyahu during GA address in New Orleans says US Jews distancing themselves from community due to “expectation of blind loyalty to Israel.”
IOA Editor: “Raised on human rights” is well intentioned, and an understandable comment when facing the likes of Netanyahu and Lieberman, but it is misleading. Although plenty of individual Israeli (Jewish) families raised their children “on human rights,” Labor Zionism was racist from the very start but, unlike today, mostly below the surface: instituting land laws designed to deprive Arab citizens of most natural and national resources; putting activists under administrative detention without trial, and much more.
Now things are far more out in the open: raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night and putting them away — via trials without the standard rules of evidence that would be required in the West (e.g., most recently, Ameer Makhoul); the ability to legally exclude any Arab citizen from living in much of Israel that is, in effect, designated as Jewish-only; and an “informal,” but well organized and sanctioned by “Higher Authority,” terror campaign against renting to Palestinians when they venture into Jewish towns (even when those had been mostly-Arab towns before 1948), lest their sort mix with our precious daughters (see Jonathan Cook’s Rabbis’ edict bars renting to Arabs). Today’s conditions are far more blatant, and outright scary, but they evolved over a long period of time, starting from the political foundation put in place by Labor Zionism.
Gilbert Achcar – US speaking tour on The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
Prof. Gilbert Achcar is in the US on a speaking tour for his latest book, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Tour schedule includes stops in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
New York event: A discussion with Gilbert Achcar and Amira Hass, moderated by Rashid Khalidi, at the International Affairs building, Columbia University – Tuesday, 9 Nov, 6:00 – 8:00pm.
Africa Israel, the flagship company of Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, announced this week that it is no longer involved in Israeli settlement projects and that it has no plans for future settlement activities. Africa Israel subsequently denied that this was a political decision.
A new joint report exposes routine ill-treatment of Palestinians in interrogations: The treatment of detainees … is consistent with an interrogation doctrine that seeks to break the spirit of the detainee by inducing anxiety and shock, completely removing him from his normal life, and subjecting him to extreme deprivation of sensory stimuli, movement, and human contact. Added to these is the induced enfeebling of the detainee by means of sleep deprivation, food reduction, exposure to cold and heat, and causing pain, mainly through forced stiff postures. This doctrine appeared in the CIA interrogation manuals of the 1960s and 1980s, used … as guides to interrogators operating in Latin American dictatorships.
Haneen Zoabi: “We are struggling for a normal state, which is a state for all of its citizens, [in] which the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews can have full equality. I recognize religious, cultural and national group rights for the Israelis, but inside a democratic and neutral state.”
“Many Jews come to Umm al-Fahm every day and we have no problem, but Marzel and his gang come as enemies and we want to tell them that they are not welcome to …” Before he could finish his sentence police fired a volley of stun grenades, provoking a stampede.
IOA Editor: MPs Haneen Zoabi and Afou Agbaria injured in violent Israeli police actions against demonstrators.
Guardian photos of the clashes: www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/oct/27/israel-protest#/?picture=368107548&index=0
We are writing to you as a group of fellow filmmakers and academics, Palestinians, Israelis and others, to thank you for your principled and courageous step of withdrawing from the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School workshop and “implicitly” joining the cultural boycott of Israel… Your action is striking evidence of growing cultural resistance abroad to Israel’s intransigence. We hope it will encourage others. Only by such concerted action will the situation change in the Middle East.
Silent protest during a University of Michigan visit by two IDF soldiers on 20 October 2010.
Former US president Jimmy Carter and two other Elders visit the weekly Friday Sheikh Jarrah demonstration in Jerusalem.
On October 26th, Brooklyn For Peace, CODEPINK NYC, Adalah-NY, Jews Say No!, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other local groups will bring the Stolen Beauty Ahava boycott campaign to Brooklyn for a third time. Local activists, some dressed in spa attire, and others wearing monster masks to convey the message that Occupation is an Ugly business, will gather on Montague Street to tell Ricky’s NYC: No More Ahava Cosmetics.
Following the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the IDF established a special unit whose purpose was to prevent the leakage of classified information onto the internet via social networks. The unit scans a list of popular websites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace looking for breaches of security.
IOA Editor: Israel’s own violent Occupation actions are the best ‘gifts for Hamas,’ not the reporting of such actions.
British director Mike Leigh has canceled his scheduled visit to Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet approved a controversial amendment to the Citizenship Law last week requiring non-Jews to pledge allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.”
ADL’s Foxman: “These groups are not promoting peace, they are spreading propaganda to assault Israel’s legitimacy. We want to Americans to know who these groups are and what it is they really stand for, which is to delegitimize the Jewish state.”
IOA Editor: From one of Israel’s propaganda chiefs, himself. We’d be honored to join the list.
Over 100 people demonstrated against loyalty oath in Tel Aviv; warn ‘Israel is becoming a fascist state.’
[M]ost Israeli leaders genuinely wish for peace – peace on Israel’s terms: their cherished wish is that the Palestinian people, dispossessed and subjugated, should peacefully accept their lot and give up the struggle… The key to a proper understanding of the conflict is that it is an extremely asymmetric one: between settler-colonisers and the indigenous people. It is about dispossession and oppression.
Celebrate the Freedom Theatre Jenin on October 16th, in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle
(Columbus Avenue at W 60th St., NYC) at 2pm! A symposium with Prof. Alain Badiou, Prof. Slavoj Zizek, and Filmmaker Udi Aloni, on the possibility of reading Antigone in the Jenin Refugee Camp, as well as for subsequent film screenings of Forgiveness and Arna’s Children.
Architecture and planning are instruments of the occupation, and constitute part of a continuing war against a whole people… Since this involves dispossession, discrimination and acquisition of land and homes by force, against the Geneva conventions, it can be classified as participation in war crimes.
Who would have thought it possible to gather members of a particular ideology into one spot on earth, displacing its native people and making them refugees, and yet label the victims as terrorists? Who would have thought that this would be achieved with incredible brutality supported by Western powers, themselves riddled with racism and hatred of non-whites?
Israel Defense Forces soldiers used excessive force while taking over a Gaza-bound aid ship organized by Jewish and Israeli activists, flotilla participants said Tuesday, countering the military’s official version claiming that the takeover had been uneventful.
The Irene, a boat carrying nine passengers and aid for Gaza’s population has been taken over by the Israeli navy and denied access to Gaza.
UPDATES (2)
Israeli nationals released and heading home
They have all had their phones confiscated so we have not had contact with them yet, but we have spoken to their family members, who are all very relieved about their imminent safe return. We will get them to contact us as soon as we can.
Israel’s streets are silent. Supporters of the left can be found mainly on Facebook and on Internet petitions. There you can sign as much as you want and under any name. The political context is not forming the resistance but granting approval to what exists. “Like” – as you say on Facebook when you like something – is the name of the neoliberal game.
Israeli Universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice. While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation… By maintaining links to both the Israeli defence forces and the arms industry, BGU structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation.
