"showcase and celebrate Tel Aviv’s cultural diversity – offering visitors a sense of the city’s tastes, smells, sounds, sights and cultural scene ..."And in those of Israeli minister for public security, information and strategic affairs Gilad Erdan, talking to the Jerusalem Post,
“The festival is of great importance in its very existence in Britain as we mark one century of the Balfour Declaration. This festival is a cultural answer to the calls for a boycott against Israel.”He and Britain's Secretary of State for International Trade Dr Liam Fox attended along with Tel Aviv's mayor Ron Huldai. (For Dr Fox's upbeat rematks see here)
'[O]n Saturday several dozen Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activists verbally clashed with a few very vocal defenders of the Jewish state.“You want to talk in Gaza? These women can’t talk in Gaza! It’s a joke... This is bullshit! It doesn’t matter how many bombs are dropped in Syria or in London, this is just an excuse to hate Jews,” Golan Koresh, who is both Israeli and Brazilian, retorted to female activists chanting “Free Palestine!” “This is just a disgrace,” Koresh said in disgust. “These Jews whose parents stood in the gas chambers are now standing side-by-side with people who want to blow us up.
“London is poison. The atmosphere when it comes to Israeli is toxic,” he added....
“Perhaps if this event wasn’t sponsored by the Israeli government, we wouldn’t be so against it,” Michael Kalmanovitz of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network said.
Pro-Israel activists were quick to lob retorts at those claims. “They’re not standing outside the Chinese or Syrian or Russian Embassy. They’re here in front of a peaceful festival with music,” Shadman Zaman, the first person from Bangladesh to visit Israel, told the Post. “They’re trying to disrupt a peaceful and lovely program into a riot. This is what they always do.”When Tel Aviv chef Shaul Ben Aderet, who was in charge of the event's food fair, offered them some free chocolate mousse, several of the protesting party poopers couldn't resist!
"Several different protest groups have been attempting all week to disrupt preparations for next week's Arms Fair at the Excel Centre. Yesterday when this video was shot it was the turn of Veterans for Peace UK to organize an event - a very effective banned weapons checkpoint - which unfortunately was activated earlier in the morning before I got there...."Meanwhile, in response to this report Seymour makes an aside about 9/11, while Sizer and Tonge have the Saudis in their sights.
Related blog post, http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/12/... Summary: Anti-Israel Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is a repackaging of the Arab anti-Jewish boycotts from the 1920s/1930s and subsequent Arab League boycott, using language of 'social justice' to appeal to Western liberals.
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| http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4663391,00.html |
'BDS is a threat to Israel's very existence
.... The industry of lies spun by the BDS movement is convincing more and more people that Israel is the source of evil in the world. Make no mistake: This is not a campaign against settlements. It's a war on the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
All reasonable forces, from right and left, must act against the economic, academic, and cultural boycott which has become a strategic threat....
.... BDS has been winning the battle for public perception. Those who claim that BDS will not affect the Israeli economy are correct. For now.
The BDS movement has been conducting a campaign for awareness on multiple fronts – on campuses, in workers' unions, and in the media. It is amassing troubling victories. More and more student unions in the US are joining the boycott. Leading newspapers like the New York Times are providing a platform for boycott advocates.
Their influence has invaded the Hillel groups on campuses, as BDS supporters exploit the organization's wish for openness to disseminate their campaign. When you tell a young student that "Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948" and he does not know that in those same years tens of millions underwent such expulsions – as that was once the norm – and that more Jews were kicked out of Arab lands… well, he might tend to believe that Israel was born in sin.
Some of the students then become BDS activists. In recent years, it has happened more and more.
Israel-demoniser Ben White gloats
Support for Israel in the United States is at its peak. But it's an illusion. On campuses, at research institutes, and in media outlets, there has been a consistent, protracted, and dangerous erosion of support for Israel.
.... The success of BDS is particularly impressive because it is a movement that uses the language of rights, but deals in practice with denying Israel's right to exist. The result is a major deception.
Many good and innocent people fall into this trap. When the concept of "tikkun olam" becomes the central motif for the identity of Jewish students, those who are searching for a Jewish identity, then the slippery language of the BDS movement becomes a magnet. The fraud is effective.
This appears to be one of the greatest instances of fraud in our age. Because this is a campaign of demonization with dangerous similarities to propaganda lies against Jews.
The leaders of the campaign, Omar Barghouti and Ali Abunimah, have a lofty stated goal. "The idea of two states was unacceptable from the beginning," said Barghouti in his response to a question on one campus, adding that ending Israeli control of Palestinian territories is only a step on the way to achieving the vision of dismantling Israel. Abunimah said that "the two-state solution is meant to save Zionism". [Emphasis added]
White's forked tongue
....The fact that these are unrelenting lies is reminiscent of anti-Semitic propaganda. Almost everything the Nazis said about the Jews is said today by BDS supporters about Israel, through claims of a genocide that never occurred, or deliberate mass killing of innocents, or that the Jews and/or Israel are the main cause of violence in the world, a danger to humanity or to world peace.
We have become accustomed to the fact that Hamas and the Iranian regime openly support the denial of Israel's right to exist. The problem is that those who were supposed to be enlightened ... join the coalition of insanity, and a worldwide struggle against the very existence of one country of the all countries in the world....
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| An expat Israel-bashing Israeli academic reacts to this article |
Israel cannot be defeated on the battlefield. But Israel can be defeated on the propaganda field. When the Foreign Ministry is split into six, because politicians need the honor, the war against this demonization absorbs a blow. But the war against BDS is not a political issue, it is a matter of national interest. All sane forces, left and right, must be enlisted in this fight against it....' [Emphasis added]Read the entire article (with its many examples of the evils of the BDS movement including its funding, its antisemitism, and its warping of minds) here
'To claim to be acting in solidarity with the Palestinians against their oppressors sounds grandly left-wing, but this is where, in my mind, the politics of Artists for Palestine get muddled. AFP declares that Israel has never faced “sanction, or any threat of sanction, from Western governments." What does that statement imply? AFP seems to be saying that Israel should be punished by the West, with economic isolation, with sanctions, maybe even with military intervention (who knows where it would draw the line?) if Israel doesn't conform to the standards of behavior acceptable to liberal and left-leaning Western artists.
What AFP is really saying is that it treats Israel as no more than any other pariah state that needs to be dealt with sternly by the well-meaning, paternalistic Western powers, in just the same way that they deal with all those other misbehaving rogue states out there. AFP writes approvingly of the “many countries around the world that face retribution by some or all of the ‘international community' for breaching international norms." And while that term “international community" is put in weirdly embarrassed scare-quotes, AFP seems happy for the international community (meaning, I guess, the big Western powers) to get stuck in, only disappointed that it has not done so in Israel. “We" bomb and sanction Syria, Iran, Russia, Zimbabwe etc., etc., so the logic goes, why not Israel too?
AFP's position, then, while sounding like an old-fashioned left-wing declaration of solidarity with those oppressed by the puppet states of Western powers, turns out to be something more like a chorus of liberal cheerleading in favour of yet more Western intervention. As if that hadn't already caused enough chaos and bloodshed in the world. AFP would like Israel to bow down to the “international community's" own proper regard for those other convenient constructs of Western power, “human rights" and “international law"─principles which never seem to apply to our governments when they intervene in the affairs of other, less morally pure states (and always for “humanitarian" reasons, of course).
This isn't really solidarity with the Palestinians, it's moral condescension by the self-righteous and self-regarding over a foreign state they have decided they have the right to pass judgement on. But the tragedy is that the relationship of subservience to Western interests that AFP seeks to impose with regards to Israel, is the same one that will eventually be applied to Palestinians. Any settlement based on bringing Israel “to heel" won't mean the liberation and self-determination of the Palestinian people; it'll mean forcing them, and Israelis, to accept whatever arrangement Western governments will decide is best for them. Whatever AFP may think, the cultural boycott of Israel is an instrument, unwitting or otherwise, for the moral vilification of Israel whose consequence can only be greater interference by Western governments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....
http://edgar1981.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/incredible-new-boycott-announcement.html
[T]o mount grandiose displays of your own moral rectitude, while refusing to think through what power relationship you are actually lending support to, is not something the rest of us should feel obliged to support. Luckily, another group of artists and art world people have mounted their own criticism of the UK boycott, gathering hundreds of signatories to their more critical questioning of the logic of the cultural boycott....'Read more here
'.... Over the past months topics including the occupation of the West Bank, Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, Palestinian resistance and its struggles, international solidarity and boycott movements, and criticism of Israeli policies, have been taken up in the arts arena with heightened intensity. We are deeply concerned by several aspects of how such issues are approached.
....We see dialogue as a critical part of any conceivable peace resolution between Palestine and Israel, and are troubled by the tendency among international boycott movements—particularly cultural boycott movements supported by individuals in the arts—which make dialogue impossible. Such dialogue inside Palestine and Israel is difficult, and is only made more precarious by unilateral international boycott. Underlying these movements, we fear there is an upswing of anti-Semitic attitudes and attacks, which seem to convey varying degrees of intentionality. Neglecting or simplifying significant historical legacies, Israel is treated as a paradigmatic colonial power, and is boycotted in a way that no other country is. Such discrimination and double standards, whether explicitly stated or implied, demand to be addressed.
....All [recent]calls and open letters were signed by a large number of individuals and groups affiliated with the arts fields; respected friends and colleagues among them. All these events took place in a climate where the Gaza war alongside its many atrocities provoked numerous anti-Semitic incidents, including physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions—none of which was reflected or even mentioned by the groups and contexts appealing for boycott. None of these groups condemned Hamas, an organization with an openly anti-Semitic agenda, which seeks the destruction of Israel. We are worried by this silence, which could either imply that the BDS Arts Coalition and similar initiatives are not equipped to discern anti-Semitic discrimination, or that such discrimination is ignored for tactical reasons. So we decided to share some critical reflections, mostly related to the BDS agenda.
.... Boycott is not necessarily an emancipatory act of solidarity with the oppressed and in opposition to the oppressor. The Jewish experience especially in Europe reflects a contrasting effect: anti-Jewish boycotts were once organized against the Jews to exclude them from social, economic, and political life. In these cases, boycott had no anti-colonial implication. Instead, it functioned as a means of oppression by the dominant societies toward Jewish minorities. We are concerned that the language used and political strategies advocated by international boycott movements—among other Left-identified political groups—take the conflict between Israel and Palestine to epitomize neo-colonial evil as such. This view frames the conflict as part of a non-specific eternal battle between good and evil, between “oppressed” and “oppressors.” We ask for a critical approach to dichotomous narratives: Within the tendency to reduce the conflict between Israel and Palestine to that between good and evil, boycott is often romanticized as a political strategy and there is a great danger that the nature of colonial oppression, or of evil, is simplified. Particularly in the case of internationally-staged cultural or academic boycott movements, we fear the tendency to support polarized views.
....If boycott, divestment, and sanctions are considered as appropriate strategies to contest injustice through international solidarity movements, why are they not applied to the other uncountable countries committing injustices? Why didn’t anybody boycott cultural workers from Serbia and Croatia because of the genocidal war crimes committed by their respective countries? Why not boycott Spain for occupying the Basque country, Great Britain for oppressing Northern-Ireland, India for occupying Kashmir or Angola for occupying Cabinda? Shouldn’t we divest from Germany for waging war on Afghanistan, from Russia for invading Chechnya and Crimea or from Turkey for occupying Kurdistan? Why not lobbying for sanctions against China and Myanmar for suppressing freedom of speech, against Brazil and Canada for denying the First Nations’ rights, and against the US for maintaining and deploying the world’s largest military complex? Is it because “someone” decided that Israel ranks as the most unjust country in the world? And if yes: why is that the case?
Could it be that we feel too comfortable in our privileged lives, our civic rights, or our consumerist culture enabled by some of the above-mentioned states and their institutions—but still want to oppose oppression on ideological grounds? We believe that the collective desire for a “signifier of oppression” is exactly what makes Israel the only target of current international boycott movements.
It is important to not ignore the history of anti-Jewish discourse. Anti-Jewish boycott has often accompanied anti-Semitism as one of its dangerous manifestations. Contacts with Jews have been historically avoided; Jews were not accepted in merchants’ guilds, trade associations, and similar organizations. In many European countries toward the end of the nineteenth century, the anti-Jewish boycott became one of the basic weapons used for victimizing the Jewish population. After the Nazi rise to power in Germany the government publicly announced a general anti-Jewish boycott.
....The BDS movement has been criticized by various actors across the political spectrum for applying the double standards we hereby mention. The conflict is emotionally highly charged, especially for most Palestinians and Israelis and for a lot of other Jews, Arabs, and others related to it. It is also understandable that activists are attracted to the subject. But when the emotional and political engagement in this conflict grows out of proportion to the extent that it becomes virtually and publicly a mass phenomenon, it may be time to ask: why Israel?
....In our view, BDS’s simplifying narratives, together with its biased demands, foster an atmosphere that enables and even provokes attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. We are concerned by the under-representation of positions in support of both the Palestinian cause and Israel’s right to exist—and by the tendency to dismiss any questioning of the international Palestinian solidarity movement as right wing pro-Israeli propaganda....'Read it all here
'As members and officers of UAW 2865—current and former; Jewish and non-Jewish—we write to oppose the Joint Council’s decision to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Furthermore, we strongly oppose the proposal calling for divestment and an academic boycott.
The BDS movement is not progressive; it is unjust. It rejects the international consensus position on peace and pushes the most strident demands of the rejectionist camp. It collectively punishes Israelis and Palestinians, and stymies efforts to reach across divides, engage in dialogue, and build mutual trust. Moreover, it rejects basic academic values by opposing cooperation and the free exchange of ideas within the academy. Finally, it manipulates and selectively presents facts to delegitimize Israel, and, in essence, calls for the end of the Jewish State. Support for BDS is unworthy of our union.
Our union leadership has also violated the union’s fundamental principles of democracy, transparency, and solidarity in its efforts to promote BDS. It has announced a membership vote, but stacked the deck in favor of BDS. Our leadership has publicized numerous pro-BDS documents and events, spending thousands of dollars in the process. It has refused to send even a single paragraph representing an anti-BDS viewpoint to its mailing list. Moreover, by promoting an academic boycott against Israel, our leadership stigmatizes and isolates those of us who are Israeli, who do research on Israel, or who have Israeli collaborators. We are saddened that our union leadership would injure its own members to pursue a political goal unrelated to the union’s core mission.
We are proud of the UAW International and the University of California (UC) for taking principled stands against BDS, and urge them to continue rejecting calls for divestment from Israel. The president of the UAW International expressed our sentiments by signing a letter declaring that, “[r]ather than divestment from Israel, we believe that investment of time, energy and material aid is the best means to alleviate the ongoing suffering of Palestinians and Israelis.” The UC also expressed our sentiments by issuing a statement that “isolation of Israel among all of the countries of the world greatly disturbs us and is of grave concern to members of the Jewish community."
We urge all members of UAW 2865 to join us—as well as the leadership of the nine UC campuses, the president of the UC system, over 250 university presidents, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the American Council on Education and the American Association of University Professors—in categorically rejecting proposals to support BDS and academic and cultural boycotts of Israel.
We ask everyone to make their voices heard by voting NO in the statewide vote December 4.'Read more including footnotes and the names of signatories, here/
'Lara Kiswani (executive director of the Arab Resource Organizing Center in the Bay Area) :
'.... Moving forward, so the student movement today and since the 90s has been focused a lot around BDS. Now we talk about Boycott, Divest, Sanctions having started in 2005, but you know BDS started way before that actually. And at the heart of BDS, and why I say BDS, and I know this panel is about labor, but 8:25 BDS is about isolating Zionism, BDS is about isolating Israel economically, politically and culturally and that's a labor issue. And so the only way we can actually do that is by working hand-in-hand with labor, by making sure that the driving forces of the economy are able to disrupt that very system that we're trying to bring down. And that is why labor is so key to it, and that is why BDS also centralizes labor as an aspect of that piece of work. And so in 2000, 8:55 we saw BDS kind of sprouting up at different campuses, I mean SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine, run by American Muslims for Palestine, a Hamas-aligned group], sprouting up at different campuses, and BDS was central to that, and we saw a lot of students also being the main driving force of that movement. But one of the things that was sort of different than it is today, and I'm hoping this conversation will lend itself to this also moving forward, about how 9:17 SJP's and the BDS work on campuses also dismantle the barrier between the university -- the academy -- and the community, because SJPs and BDS were brought from the community onto the campus, and SJP also brought BDS and isolating Zionism into the community. There was really a they were working hand-in-hand in terms of ways of thinking through strategies about how we can isolate Israel all over the world, right? And so here in the Bay Area we saw that happen. I was part of that work, in terms of how we, you know, we locked down Wheeler Hall, it was like, several dozen people that did that but the majority of them weren't actually students, right? So they were students that were involved in that. I was a student at Davis and I came to Berkeley to lock it down, there was solidarity across campuses. 10:02 The idea was to tell students, was to tell professors, to tell academics, to not engage with Zionism or Israeli institutions because doing that is the way we can isolate Israel culturally and economically and the reason for that being is, I don't have to tell you guys this, but you know, graduate students are the ones who do all the work, graduate students are the ones that actually do the work that professors get credit for most often, and the ones who do the work most academic institutions profit off of, right? 10:30 So, if graduate students and undergrad students, even, were to just disrupt that system whether it be by not, you know, participating in an event, whether it's Israeli academics, you know, I take, I think BDS shouldn't just be limited to the points that have been brought out internationally, I think you should boycott any Zionist institution, academic, organization, whether it be from 1967 occupied Palestine or 1948 occupied Palestine because BDS really should be about shifting the cultural framework and shifting how we see Israel and isolating it and making it feel unwelcome anywhere and everywhere, and the only way we can do that is by making it clear that we are not only disengaging ourselves as workers as activists from institutions or organizations or individuals that profit off of occupation in 1967 Palestine. 11:34 The way we do that is we make it clear that the real issue, the heart of the issue is an anti-colonial struggle, we're resisting colonialism in Palestine and colonialism entails all of occupied Palestine from Haifa to Jerusalem to Ramallah, right? So moving forward in terms of how we brought this type of framework into the Block the Boat work which is what we were talking about, I'll try not to talk to long, but, to the Block the Boat work, , when, you know the recent assault on Rasmea [Odeh - see my previous post - D.A.] created an outrage in our community as the Arab/Palestinian community specifically, you know, we saw images we haven't seen, really widely surfacing as widely as they were on social media and even on main stream media, there was a shift of public perception 12:25 as a result and we experienced the assault on Palestine since 1948 or prior, but what we saw during this smear was pretty gruesome and disgusting and really forced us to action and wanting us to really put an end to what we were seeing on the daily basis, in Gaza and also in the West Bank. So we came together and we mobilized various protests in the streets, we had mass mobilizations and that was one way to show the world that the Bay Area is outraged. It's also one way for us as Arabs and Palestinians to bring out our communities to work in solidarity with other communities and to, you know, feel empowered by our numbers and our people power. But that's not enough, right? 12:50 We wanted to feel like we were hurting Israel economically, we wanted to feel like we were actually making a dent in the system and get some tangible results. So we remember in 2010, Palestinians and our allies and activists here in the Bay Area Blocked the Boat, the Zim Ship, in Oakland because of the (couldn't make out the word) incident. We wanted to replicate that action. That was the very first time in history that an Israeli ship was blocked in the United States and Oakland, and the Bay Area made that happen.'
“I’ve seen how divisive anti-Israel BDS campaigns have been on campuses across the country. Western is a warm, respectful, inclusive community. Our mission statement states that WWU ‘brings together individuals of diverse backgrounds and perspectives in an inclusive, student-centered university.
BDS has been a source of disconnect and resentment among students, creating a hostile environment. It divides students, marginalizing those who support Israel. I want to thank our ASWWU for unconditionally supporting this process and for working closely with me to represent the desires of students to keep our campus safe.”Commented the Northwest Regional Director of Stand With Us, Rob Jacobs:
“We salute the ASWWU for taking a strong, moral, and proactive stance against the targeting of students based on their identity.
We’ve seen how anti-Israel divestment initiatives spread hatred and misinformation about Israel. BDS undermines education, mutual respect, and understanding on campuses, and does nothing to promote peace, justice, or human rights in the Middle East."As StandWithUs noted on Facebook:
"The measure protects students from discriminatory BDS campaigns such as the one that is currently targeting Israel with defamation and slander. We applaud the student government and their positive and pro-active approach to this issue. Kol hakavod - well done!"See here and here and here and here
