In solidarity with Hebron, London shops get a taste of the occupation

http://mondoweiss.net/2013/02/solidarity-london-occupation.html

by Nancy Kiousi on 25 February , 2013

Israeli produce removed from a Tesco supermarket. (Photo: Nancy Kiousi)

On Saturday, February 23rd activists in London staged multiple boycott actions and a protest at the Israeli Embassy in support of the Palestinians in Al-Khalil (Hebron). In solidarity with the people in Hebron and the Open Shuhada Street movement, London shops got a taste of the occupation. Activists imposed symbolic closures on shops that sell Israeli produce, made in the occupied West Bank, upholding the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). By recreating Shuhada street the activists raised awareness for Al-Khalil and urged people of conscience to boycott all Israeli products until it complies with international human rights law.

Protest at Whole Foods (Photo: Nancy Kiousi)

Israeli products were removed from the shelves, leaving behind a notice to inform shoppers and staff that ‘this product was removed because it was made on stolen land’. At the same time, a checkpoint was set up at the entrances of the shops, and hundreds of leaflets were given to passers by.

Amongst the shops that were targeted was Whole Foods, a brand that boasts of its ethical sourcing, but recently started selling SodaStream products, which are made in one of the fastest growing illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Ma’ale Adumim. Activists asked Whole Foods to remove SodaStream from their shop and encouraged shoppers to express their concern about the store’s ethical standards. Tesco and Argos were also targeted for selling Israeli produce which finances the illegal occupation of Palestine.

Protest outside the Israeli embassy (Photo: Nancy Kiousi)

Later in the afternoon a protest was held outside the Israeli embassy in London, calling for an end to the occupation, and system of apartheid, as well as the opening of Shuhada Street in Al-Khalil. Protesters set up a replica of the wall that Israel has built in the West Bank in front of the embassy and raised Palestinian flags.

At the Israeli embassy (Photo: Nancy Kiousi)

Al-Khalil is a city located in the south of the West Bank which has witnessed an extreme escalation of violence and oppression during the last two decades. In 1994 an armed Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, entered the Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on Palestinians during the Friday prayers, killing 29 people and injuring more that 120. Since then the city has seen dramatic increase of aggression by Israeli extremists, including violent attacks, destruction of Palestinian property and forced evictions of families whose property is then taken over by illegal settlers.

Following the massacre at the Mosque, the Israeli military closed the center of the city for allPalestinians, notably closing down Shuhada Street, which used to be the center of the Old City and a lively market. More than 600 Palestinian shops were forced to close by the Israeli military in Shuhada St, which remains a ghost street to this day. Palestinians are now prohibited from using a number of streets in Al-Khalil and a number of military checkpoints are established to control their access to the old city, making ordinary tasks, such as daily shopping, extremely difficult. Palestinian residents must travel extremely long distances on foot in order to use permitted routes and they are routinely delayed, harassed and refused entry at checkpoints.

Every year, in commemoration of the massacre at the mosque, Palestinians hold their big demonstration against the occupation, demanding the opening of Shuhada Street and the end of the Israeli apartheid. This year they held a big demonstration on Friday, 22 February, which was met with violent oppression. The Israeli occupying forces attacked the protesters with huge quantities of tear gas, skunk water, stunt grenades, rubber-coated-bullets and live ammunition, leading to a number of injuries, including one person who was shot in the leg with a live round and had to be admitted to hospital.

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New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership

For immediate release
For more information: Terri Ginsberg, NYACT@riseup.net
January 22, 2013
 
Protesters outnumbered students on a blustery Martin Luther King Day as the New York Cornell-Technion Partnership held its first day of classes at Google’s Chelsea offices in Manhattan.

Cornell University always holds classes on this holiday, and the annual insult to Dr. King’s memory is sadly fitting with the support for racism the school is showing by pairing with The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel’s foremost research and develop institution for weapons (including drones), surveillance systems, and other instruments of death and destruction used to maintain an apartheid system against Palestinians and for use in wars against Israel’s Arab neighbors.

The 25 New Yorkers leafleting against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (contrasting the eight students inside, according to the New York Times), denounced Google’s gift of free office space to the Partnership, as well as the $100 million in funds and $300 million in real estate given by the City of New York to the questionably fast-tracked venture.

Protesters also gathered signatures on a petition demanding an end to private and public support for the Partnership (online at: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/no-to-technion-in-nyc.html).

The campaign against the Cornell-Technion Partnership is part of a global effort in support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against institutions doing business with apartheid Israel.

Regular classes will be held at the Google offices until the main campus opens on Roosevelt Island in 2017. Among those handing out flyers and talking to workers and students from the Google building as well as Chelsea residents were several Cornell University students outraged at the Partnership’s violation of Cornell’s own rules for consulting staff and faculty over such business deals.

What’s more, Cornell, its partners, and the media have failed to report that Technion is complicit in Israel’s violations of international law and the rights of Palestinians, specifically by designing military weapons and developing technologies that are used to drive Palestinians off their land, suppress demonstrations for their rights, and carry out attacks against people in Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere. For these reasons, Technion is directly implicated in war crimes.  Furthermore, Technion practices institutional discrimination against Palestinian students by severely restricting their freedom of speech and assembly, and rewarding Jewish students who, unlike most Palestinians, perform compulsory military service in Israel. This is in direct contrast to Cornell University’s founding values of universalism and inclusion embodied in the university’s motto “any person any study.”

NYACT has also denounced the callous disregard for the health, safety and housing needs of Roosevelt Island residents. As construction begins for the eventual permanent Partnership site on the Island, homes are being torn down, and patients are being kicked out of the City hospital system’s Coler-Goldwater long-term care facilities. New Yorkers with serious disabilities and life-threatening medical conditions are being displaced by the City in deference to the Partnership. NYACT has attended several Roosevelt Island community meetings to forge an alliance with residents, patients and healthcare workers whose lives are being disrupted or even jeopardized by Cornell and Technion.

  NYACT and supporters will host a regular leafleting vigil every other Tuesday starting January 29th, from 5-7pm, at the Google offices,  111 Eighth Ave (at 15th St), New York City

For more information:
www.NYACT.net <http://www.nyact.net/>
NYACT@riseup.net <http://webmailbb.juno.com/webmail/new/21?folder=Inbox&amp;msgNum=0009VSG0:001Gy9JL00002yV5&amp;count=1358860019&amp;randid=305776959&amp;attachId=0&amp;isUnDisplayableMail=yes&amp;blockImages=0&amp;randid=305776959>
New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT)

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Sign the Petition against the E-1 Plan for which Israel has announced the Go-Ahead!

Israel’s settlements are illegal under international law and the Geneva Convention, and Maale Adumim, its largest settler city stands out as the key factor in Israel’s colonial expansion as far west as possible from Jerusalem towards Jericho. Most of Maale Adumim (87%) is built on Palestinian-owned land. Maale Adumim was planned by the Thomas Leitersdorf (AA dipl) and designed by Elioar Barzacchi (the Mother of Maale Adumim) in the 1980s as the chief architect for the Jerusalem district at the Construction and Housing Ministry which created and is still creating facts on the ground that thwart negotiations on the city's future and is causing infringements of the rights of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and implementing a policy of occupation and annexation, land confiscation, discrimination and expulsion. The "empty" hills of Ma'aleh Adumim were not empty and "Mohammed" was indeed told to get up and go, like all the members of the Jahalin tribe that is now forced to live in the area of the Abu Dis garbage dump, as journalist Gideon Levy earlier wrote.

E1 is the hilly area between East Jerusalem and Maale Adumim that Israel is intending to annex, to form a continuous urban development. Currently Israel is confiscating lands on the northern and western side of the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim just outside of Jerusalem . These confiscations (without compensation) are taking place from the Palestinian villages of Anata, Al-Izariyyah, Abu Dis and A-Zayim. The intention of this action is to expand the municipal area of Ma’ale Adumim westward to join up with Jerusalem . But as ‘Ir-Amim’, the Israeli website on Jerusalem has stated, E1 is not Maale Adumim and cannot be considered as expansion of that town, which is in any case illegal. Currently, Ma’ale Adumim houses some 30,000 settlers. Under the E1 project an additional 5,600 more settlement homes for approximately 25,000 new residents will be added to its municipal area. Additionally, some 1,600 dunums of land are being confiscated to erect Israel ’s Apartheid wall for Ma’ale Adumim.

The police station for E1 has already been built despite its land confiscation and illegality, and the road network and street lights have also been built in readiness for the new housing near that land.

This action is not only in contravention of the US sponsored road map agreement, but it would effectively destroy any future possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state by cutting off east Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and by cutting of the northern part of the West Bank from the southern part..It is a deliberate violation of the Road Map, Oslo , and any basis for negotiating land for peace. When complete the total land area of Ma’ale Adumim and E1 will be 65,000 dunums, an area larger than Tel Aviv, in the heart of what would have been a Palestinian state.

We call on Israeli architects and planners to end their indifference and blindness to the political implications of their professional work and ethics. They should recognize their complicity in the injustices resulting from their participation in consolidating the Occupation, and the terrible suffering being inflicted on the Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank. We call on all parties to halt this illegal project forthwith , as required by the International Court of Justice in its ruling on the Wall in 1994.

We also call on the Israeli government to end all settlement expansion which are against international law and are serious breaches of the 4th Geneva Convention, and thus constitute a war crime.

We call on the high contracting parties of the Quartet to impose immediate sanctions on Israel if it pursues the development of E1 and all other settlement expansion throughout the occupied West Bank and E.Jerusalem.

Click here to add your name to this petition. 

The E1-Lifta-Silwan Petition 

In Opposition to Cornell University’s Collaboration with Technion—Israel Institute of Technology

Petition: We oppose Cornell University’s collaboration with Technion—Israel Institute of Technology

To:

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Cornell University

President David J. Skorton, Cornell University

Vice President Susan Murphy, Cornell University

Provost Kent Fuchs,

On Monday December 19 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the joint bid advanced by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in the multi-billion-dollar competition to create a massive applied sciences and technology campus on Roosevelt Island had won. While this initiative is sure to benefit Cornell University and the City of New York in many ways, the partnership with Technion means that these benefits will come at the expense of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and, thus, also of the moral standing of the University and the City.

More than any other university in Israel, the Technion, which is involved in the research and development of military and arms technology, is directly implicated in war crimes. Its joint programs with the Israeli military and its cooperative research programs with two of Israel’s major weapons corporations, Elbit and Rafael, renders Technion a full participant in the actions carried out by the Israeli military. Those actions include targeting civilians, as in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and the 2008-2009 Cast Lead operation against Gaza, and physically contributing to Israel’s discriminatory practices in the West Bank with the construction of the separation wall that cuts sharply into the occupied West Bank and disrupts the lives of Palestinians in countless ways. The Cornell administration cannot plead ignorance of these facts. We refuse to collaborate with this.

Rafael Advanced Defence Systems LTD., which established a three-year ‘in-house’ MBA program at Technion University, has worked with students and faculty there to develop the ‘Ramtech’ rockets and different unmanned aircraft to be used in Israel’s ongoing occupation. Rafael also developed the armor used by the Merkava-4 tanks, which enabled the Israeli military forces to carry out urban warfare, as they did during the Cast Lead operation. In the course of that warfare, actions were taken that constitute war crimes under international law. We refuse to collaborate with this.

Elbit Systems, which established a training program for engineers in the Technion and has given research grants to Technion consisting of half a million US dollars a year for 5 years, is one of the two main contractors for Israel’s separation wall—which has been declared illegal by the international Court of Justice—and is the producer of the Hermes 450 drones, which were used during the flotilla attack, as well as during some of the deadlier incidents during the 2006 war against Lebanon and the 2008-2009 attack on Gaza. Human Rights Watch has condemned Israel’s use of drones for targeted killings. Such killings have prompted Amnesty International to call for a suspension of UK arms sales to Israel. Technion is complicit in these killings. We refuse to collaborate with this.

Institutional links with Technion will, furthermore, entail complicity in the unjust treatment of Palestinian Israelis within Israeli society and academia. At every level of the Israeli educational system, Israeli-Palestinian students encounter obstacles in terms of access to many programs—especially the ones tied to participation in the IDF—as well as to housing and resources. Beyond these pervasive structural inequalities, freedom of speech for Palestinian-Israelis is curtailed at Technion. For example, in the first few days of June 2010, in the wake of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a pro-military students’ group was permitted to demonstrate, while the mostly Palestinian led rally against the attack was repressed brutally by the police and several demonstrators were arrested. Severe restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly for Palestinian students at Technion are part and parcel of a broader colonial and racist educational system, one that is by now integral to the functioning of the Israeli occupation. We refuse to collaborate with this.

The proposed partnership with an institution like the Technion, because of its direct and indirect assaults on the freedoms of speech and assembly, the right to education and to basic security, and because of its intimate bond with the needs and dictates of a discriminatory and brutal project of military occupation, would give the lie to Cornell’s founding values of universalism and inclusion embodied in the university’s motto “any person any study.’ We refuse to collaborate with this.

At both Concordia University and McGill University there are currently campaigns calling for divestment from Technion by ending the bilateral exchange programs with it. Norway’s pension fund, Europe’s largest investment fund, has divested from Elbit. The Swedish national pension fund, Kommunal Landspensjonkasse (one of the largest life insurance companies in Norway), Danske Bank (the largest bank in Denmark), and PKA Ltd., one of the largest Danish pension funds, have also divested. We, too, refuse to collaborate with this.

Cornell Provost Kent Fuchs commented on this successful bid with the words: "I think we were the only university that had unanimous support from the administration, faculty, staff, students and alumni." This is simply not true. On Monday December 12 2011, some of us met with Cornell Provost Kent Fuchs and with Cornell Vice President Susan Murphy and voiced our concerns about and our opposition to the collaboration with Technion. We informed them of the above facts, yet they decided to disregard them and move on with this collaboration. But we the undersigned do not and will not lend our voices to the “unanimous support” of this collaboration with an Israeli institute that facilitates war crimes. We refuse to be implicated in war crimes and we reject any attempt to normalize them.

We refuse to collaborate with this, and call on Cornell University to end the partnership with Technion!

SIGN THE PETITION

Return the Baramki House to its Palestinian Owners!

The Baramki House   Past/Present

http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1988

PACBI     6 September 2012

Boycott from Within activists Ronnie Barkan and Renen Raz pay tribute to Gabi Baramki by calling on the Israeli museum occupying the Baramki House to return the pillaged house to the Baramki family.

We in the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) call upon international civil society to support our efforts to return the Baramki House in Jerusalem to its rightful Palestinian owners, the Baramki family. 

What is the story? 

In 1932, the prominent Palestinian architect, Andoni Baramki, built his own breathtaking house in Jerusalem. He dedicated it to his wife, Eveline. In 1948, during the Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign, or Nakba, the Baramki family, like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, were uprooted and ended up briefly in Gaza, and then in Ramallah. The Baramki House was transformed into a military outpost: the Turjeman Post. The building stood on the seam line between what became Israel and what became the West Bank, across from Mandelbaum Gate, the only crossing point between the two sides of the divided city of Jerusalem.

After the 1967 war, Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine and put the West Bank and Gaza Strip under its military control.  The Mandelbaum Gate was abolished and the military outpost was abandoned. Since Andoni and Eveline Baramki were residents in the now occupied East Jerusalem, they were issued Israeli identity cards from the Israeli authorities. The Israeli army had no more need for the house as a post, so the Baramki family felt their quest to reclaim the House could finally come to fruition. Alas, the family’s request was denied by the Israeli authorities under the racist Absentees’Property Law of 1950, which was used to pillage the property of Palestinians ethnically cleansed during the Nakba and even those who were internally displaced and declared as “present absentees.”(1) This infamous law recognizes the presence of internally displaced Palestinians as “residents or “citizens” of the state of Israel, but “absent” as far as their own individual property is concerned. 

Until his death in 1972, Andoni Baramki made a habit of visiting his precious house on a daily basis. He would walk around the house a few times every day, but he was never given permission to set foot into it.

After the death of his father, Gabi Baramki continued the effort to reclaim the family home, but to no avail. In 1999, the Baramki House was transformed into “The Museum on the Seam” by the Israeli Jerusalem Foundation, which advertised as its mission its hope to “advance dialogue amongst us despite our different viewpoints. We must commit ourselves to a social dialogue that is based on what we have in common and what unites us rather than on what divides us and keeps us apart.” (2)  This project was made possible through the “generous support of the von Holtzbrinck family of Germany.”

The story of the Baramki House is only one of thousands of similar stories; but this particular case exemplifies the wider injustice.  In August 2012, Gabi Baramki passed away, leaving behind a rich legacy of struggle for Palestinian rights and for developing Palestinian educational institutions. The struggle for freedom, justice and equal rights, to which Gabi dedicated his entire life, continues.

We in PACBI see this Museum as an embodiment of Israeli criminality, hypocrisy, property theft, colonization, oppression and persistent denial of the Palestinians’ very presence and the rights that go along with it. We demand that international law be implemented, and the Baramki House be returned to its legitimate Palestinian owners, the Baramki family.

What can be done? 

Suggestions for action:

● Stopping Israel from attending any architectural or cultural event unless it returns the Baramki House to its rightful owners, admits and redresses the injustice inherent in the massive property confiscation based on its “present absentee” law, and rescinds this racist law;

● Raising the issue of the Baramki House in each architectural and cultural event in which Israel might be present and insisting that Israel must comply with international law and return pillaged property to its respective owners;

● Exploring all possibilities to hold the von Holtzbrinck family of Germany (Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, Holtzbrinck family Publishing/Stuttgart, Germany Revenues: $2.2 billion. Employees: 12,600  www.holtzbrinck.com/eng) complicit in this crime, as this family effectively facilitated the transfer of private Palestinian property to an Israeli cultural institution, in violation of international -- and possibly German -- law. This generous fund by the German company/ family is just one example of how aid to Israel by Germany, Europe or the US, has made these benefactors partners in the larger crimes committed by the state of Israel. That aid to Israel has invariably helped in covering up Israel's old crimes or facilitating new ones; 

● Pursuing all possible legal options available under international law in order to reclaim the House. 

Who is our target?

UNESCO, all architectural and cultural institutions, and all worldwide archeological and cultural organizations.

References:

1) For more information see, for example, Masalha, Nur (1992) Expulsion of the Palestinians: the Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies.

_____ Massalha, Nur (1997) A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians 1949-96. London: Faber and Faber.

Tom Segev, Arlen Neal Weinstein (Tanslator) (1998) 1949 The First Israelis, Henry Holt & Company, Bottom of Form

2) See: http://www.coexistence.art.museum/eng/museum/about.asp

Posted on 06-09-2012