I'm sorry, but if you rappel onto someone's ship from a helicopter, nothing you subsequently do can be called "self defense". #flotilla
In an ironic twist, some Israelis are now calling for a boycott of Swedish products. I'm tempted to say: Go ahead, and why don't you start with the Volvo-bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes in the occupied territories... And if even Israelis themselves accept boycott as a legitimate way of putting political pressure on countries whose policies we dislike, this should give a boost to the international BDS-movement and the international boycott of Israeli products.
His presence on the 120-member council, sometimes referred to as the Palestinian parliament, is unlikely to make a significant difference to Fatah's policies, which will continue to be largely dictated by Mahmoud Abbas, the president, and his inner circle. But it does have huge symbolic significance.
His polling in the 31st place for one of 80 seats contested by more than 600 Fatah members, he said in an interview, challenged Israel’s suggestion that the Palestinian people and its leaders regard the Jews as their enemies.
Or as one local Palestinian pundit noted of the vote's message: "It is not Judaism that Palestinians are fighting, it is Zionism."
It also finally puts Dr Davis in a position from which he hopes to shake up the complacency that has bedevilled the Fatah leadership and the PLO in their neglect of supporters outside the Palestinian fold.
"In my view [Fatah] is conducting a struggle with one hand tied behind its back," he said, sipping Arabic coffee in the garden of St George’s cathedral in East Jerusalem.
"The PLO represents a democratic alternative for all, including the current coloniser people, the current perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity," he said in reference to Israel and its Jewish population. "In the 25 years since my joining the Fatah and PLO, this message has been marginalised. The mainstream went another direction, the Oslo accords direction."
[...]
His chief task, he said, will be to push Fatah to become a broad-based resistance movement modelling itself on the African National Congress, which brought down apartheid in South Africa.
The reference to South Africa is not unexpected. Dr Davis started describing Israel as an apartheid state in the early 1980s, long before it had become fashionable even on the far left.
His most recent book is Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, published in 2003, in which he argues that discrimination against Palestinians is embedded in Israeli law and sets out what he regards as the four classes of citizenship established by Israel's parliament.
Open letter, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 7 July 2009
The following open letter was sent to the Melbourne International Film Festival by the The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) on 5 July 2009:
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is writing with grave concern over the Melbourne International Film Festival's cultural partnership with the Israeli state, as advertised in your promotional material. We write to urge you not to accept Israeli government funding or sustain this partnership with a state that practices occupation, colonialism and apartheid, as confirmed in a recent, authoritative legal study produced by the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa and, months before, in a strategic position paper issued by the Palestinian civil society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC).
Collaborating with the Israeli government less than six months after Israel ended its bloody war against the occupied Gaza Strip would be tantamount to an implicit endorsement of the war crimes it has committed and is still committing in Gaza. You would be accepting blood money and partnering with the culture of a colonial and apartheid regime that continues to blatantly violate international law and Palestinian human rights with utter impunity.
By sustaining a cultural partnership with Israel in your festival, you would be sharing your artistic stage with a power that attempts to suppress, expropriate or suffocate the art and culture of the indigenous Palestinian people, with its filmmakers, musicians, artists, writers and poets. We hope you agree that this is the opposite of everything that culture and filmmaking should represent.
Israel's most recent brutal military assault on the Gaza Strip left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children, and injured another 5,380. The 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This criminal assault came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling Israeli siege of Gaza with the clear goal of shattering all spheres of life and collectively punishing the entire population of Gaza, prompting the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights to describe it as "a prelude to genocide." International human rights organizations and UN organizations are now carrying out war crimes investigations into Israel's military assault on Gaza.
The recent brutal attack on Gaza is yet another mark in Israel's long and vicious colonial history. For the last 61 years, Israel has superimposed its colonial presence on historic Palestine and for the last 42 years, Israel has militarily occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Despite the "peace process" which began 16 years ago, Israel routinely violates the Palestinians' most fundamental human rights with impunity, as documented by local and international human rights organizations. Israel extra-judicially kills Palestinian leaders and activists and keeps over 8,000 Palestinians imprisoned, including numerous members of parliament. Israel is destroying Palestinian homes; killing Palestinian children; and uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinian trees. As we write, Israel continues to build illegal Jewish colonies on occupied Palestinian land and an apartheid infrastructure of Jewish-only roads, blockades and the apartheid wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice at the Hague in 2004. Israel denies millions of Palestinian refugees their internationally-recognized right to return to their lands. Moreover, Israel maintains a system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens reminiscent of South African apartheid.
In the face of decades of such unrelenting oppression, Palestinian civil society has called upon people of conscience throughout the world to take a stand in support of our struggle for freedom and the realization of our inalienable human and national political rights by heeding our call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Indeed, as the prominent filmmaker Ken Loach said recently, "Who are we, that we should not heed their call?"
Virtually all Palestinian filmmakers, artists and cultural figures stand behind this call and have urged their colleagues worldwide to boycott Israeli cultural and arts institutions due to their complicity in perpetuating Israel's occupation and other forms of oppression against the Palestinian people. In response, in the past few months, groups of artists, comedians, filmmakers, students and academics throughout the world have consolidated their efforts to show solidarity with Palestinians, to condemn Israel's war crimes and its apartheid regime, and to call for effective political action such as boycotts, divestment drives and sanctions. Many prominent international cultural figures including John Berger, Ken Loach, Arundhati Roy, Roger Waters, John Williams, among others, have declared their support for the boycott.
As was the case in South Africa, where international solidarity played a crucial role in bringing down apartheid by boycotting the economic, sports and cultural institutions of the apartheid regime, we sincerely hope you will not partner in any capacity with Israel, until it fulfills its obligations under international law and fully recognizes the Palestinian people's right to live in full equality and freedom in their homeland.
Nablus – Ma’an – Israeli settlers set fire to Palestinian olive groves in the northern West Bank villages of Tell and Madma south of Nablus protesting evacuation of an illegal settlement outpost on Monday.
According to Ghassan Dughlus, a Palestinian Authority official in charge of settlement activity in the northern West Bank, Israeli forces evacuated an illegal outpost near the village of Sinjil on Monday morning. Angered about the evacuation, settlers set fire to Palestinian fields near Yizhar settlement south of Nablus.
Dughlus was also quoted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz saying that 10 settlers riding horses and carrying torches set fire to between 1,500 and 2,000 olive trees.
Firefighters were sent to the fields in an attempt to put out the flames. A Palestinian photojournalist also said he was assaulted by settlers when he attempted to cover the incident.
Settlers also threw stones at Palestinian cars and blocked the road near the Huwwara checkpoint on the outskirts of Nablus. Two Palestinian motorists were lightly injured and five cars damaged, according to Dughlus. Israeli soldiers clashed with the settlers, ultimately arresting two, and escorting the others away from the scene. Palestinian cars were also attacked in the city of Hebron.
The settlers’ attacks on Palestinians were a continuation of what they call a “price tag” campaign, in which they respond violently whenever outposts are removed by the Israeli government.
Hadash Chairman and Member of the Knesset Mohammad Barakeh said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech in Bar-Ilan University indicated that he was "once again choosing the peace of the settlements, which collides head-on with the peace of the region and all of its nations".
"Netanyhau spoke like a chameleon about a Palestinian state, with conditions and dimensions no Palestinian would ever hear of," stated Bakakeh, a leading member of the Communist Party of Israel.
Qalqiliya – Ma’an – Twenty-four-year-old Ahmad Abd Al-Hadi Tayoun was married in the West Bank village of Hajja, east of Qalqiliya on Sunday.
Tayoun was not able to spend the night with his bride, as he was abducted by Israeli soldiers at 2am. The troops raided the house and seized him in front of his wife. He is now being held at an unknown location.
During house-to-house raids in the village, Israeli soldiers also seized 20-year-old Ahmad Bashir.
The Tayoun family said that Ahmad had no political affiliation, and they did not expect him to be detained. They called on rights organizations to intervene and secure his release.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces also stormed the nearby village of Al-Funduq and raided the house of Jamil Jab’iti, beat his 30-year-old daughter Sahar, destroyed furniture and they shredded a copy of the holy Quran.
Tulkarem – Ma'an – Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian teenagers to strip naked in full view of other Palestinians waiting at a military checkpoint near the West Bank city of Tulkarem on Monday afternoon.
Witnesses told Ma'an that three soldiers forced the youths to remove their clothes, and were verbally mocking them.
The witnesses also reported long waits at the checkpoint.
"Professor [John] Dugard is a member of the Institut de Droit International. Since 1997, he has been a member of the U.N. International Law Commission and was, from 2000 to 2006, the Special Rapporteur on Diplomatic Protection to the Commission. From 2002 to 2008, he was a judge ad hoc in the International Court of Justice. From 2001 to 2008, Dugard served as Special Rapporteur to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. His present principal interests are international criminal law and diplomatic protection."
(flag counter added Feb 26, 2009)
