By Kevin Gosztola for Shadowproof Press – The chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), who was involved in firing Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he sent about Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, has announced her resignation yesterday. The announcement comes as a federal judge refused to dismiss Salaita’s lawsuit against the university for violating his free speech. An attorney representing Salaita, Anand Swaminathan of Loevy & Loevy, stated, “The university’s administration took a number of positions that showed contempt for its constitutional obligations, and raise serious doubts about the university’s commitment to academic freedom and its willingness to honor contractual commitments to its scholars. We are extremely pleased that the court has rejected the university’s dubious arguments.”
By Ali Abunimah in The Electronic Intifada. International water near Gaza – Contrary to Israeli claims that the Marianne was taken peacefully, this video shows that armed commandos used brutal violence against unarmed passengers aboard the Gaza-bound boat early on Monday. According to the organizers of the flotilla, 14 of the 18 civilian passengers and crew remain in Israeli custody more than two days after they were violently abducted in international waters to prevent them breaking the Israeli-imposed siege on Gaza. Palestinian citizen of Israel and member of the Israeli parliament Basel Ghattas, former Tunisian president Moncef Marzouki, Spanish European Parliament member Ana Miranda and Israeli journalist Ohad Hemo have been released.
By Paul Weinberg in Rabble – The tragedy of Gaza has largely faded from the spotlight even as the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territory of 1.8 million continues to worsen following last summer’s military assault by Israel. “Blockades, war and poor governance have strangled Gaza’s economy and the unemployment is now the highest in the world,” reports the latest World Bank May 2015 study. Power outages lasting more than 16 hours a day continue to ravage Gaza and make sick patients in hospitals especially vulnerable as insufficient power often decides between life or death. EmpowerGAZA is an organization that wants to provide reliable power to hospitals.
By Shane Hickey in The Guardian. London, UK – The annual meeting of security group G4S has descended into chaos for the second year running after nine activists were bundled out by guards during protests against its operations in Israel. Uniformed and plainclothes security staff intervened frequently at the meeting in London on Thursday. All those attend ing had been banned from bringing electronic devices into the venue. G4S’s supply of security and screening equipment to the Israeli security services dominated a meeting during which only a small number of the questions from the floor focused on its financial performance.
The team of medical experts that authored the report visited Gaza three times as a delegation of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). They collected testimonies from dozens of wounded and from medical teams, documented the army’s terrifying actions during the war. At least 15 people testified about and described incidents in which the army bombed a target, and then — after a short pause or immediately after — bombed it again. The result was especially deadly: family members, neighbors, passersby and/or medical and emergency teams that arrived to help the wounded and extract bodies from the rubble, were bombed themselves, were killed or wounded. “This is a separate phenomenon from that of the so- called ‘roof-tap[s],” explain the authors of the report, which in a separate section addresses the “roof tap” warning strikes — which are small bombs that aren’t supposed to fell buildings. The “double tap” is something else.
Academic freedom is often understood as the protection academics in higher education enjoy against censorship. The type of censorship we are most familiar with is the type that institutions visit upon those whose exercise of academic freedom seems threatening. But there is another, perhaps even more pernicious type of censorship, and that is self-censorship, as it occurs in individuals, and in organizations. Self-censorship announces the successful internalization of all the controls institutions now have no need to exercise from without; those mechanisms are now safely in place within individuals and within organizations. Self-censorship’s relation to the idea of a “commons” is that it effectively removes us from that space; we withdraw into the safety of received opinion and give up the democratic rights and responsibilities which members of an academic commons hold.
Besides the aid to Gazans, there are two outcomes we would love to achieve: One, establish a new way of providing emergency assistance which bypasses the NGO empires and paternalistic controls on people who need aid. People are not products, aid should be a human relationship not a corporate one. If we can set up one trust relationship for Gaza, we hope we can use it as a proof of concept to expand across Gaza and in other places like Syria, Myanmar and everywhere really. The trust networks we set up for direct global communication to bypass corporate media can be used in the same way to provide direct aid and bypass corporate NGOs. Two, we want to start a dialogue about this cycle of destruction and ‘rebuilding’ where corporate empires are feeding off real human torment as a growth industry to enrich themselves.
Block the Boat Tampa will be making waves at the Port once again when the ZIM Alabama docks, attempting to unload goods in our community. ZIM Integrated Shipping Services is an Israeli owned cargo shipping company which docks in port cities from coast to coast offloading internationally shipped products. They are being protested on nearly every shore they sail to along coastal cities because of the siege, occupation and oppression of the people in the embattled enclave that is the Gaza Strip- Because of their colonization and exploitation of Palestinian land, labor and resources. We act in the spirit of the those who fought apartheid and institutionalized racism in South Africa. We act against the genocidal actions carried out by Israeli forces.
Four years ago, after the attack on the Freedom Flotilla and the solidarity port action in Oakland, Vancouver Palestine solidarity activists attempted to block a ZIM ship at Deltaport. The action was successful in bringing attention — especially among truckers and longshore operators — to the destruction of Palestine by Israel, and to ZIM’s connection with the Israeli occupation. Although the action may have cause some delay, the ship unloaded and left. Israel’s massacre in Gaza during July and August this year refocused attention on ZIM as a Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) target. It’s one of Israel’s largest corporations and Israel itself, until 2004, retained equity in the company. Since then it has been owned by the Israel Corporation which is controlled by the Ofer Brothers Group. ZIM Integrated Shipping Services operates dozens of container and bulk ships globally.
Forty-three veterans of one of Israel’s most secretive military intelligence units – many of them still active reservists – have signed a public letter refusing to serve in operations involving the occupied Palestinian territories because of the widespread surveillance of innocent residents. The signatories include officers, former instructors and senior NCOs from the country’s equivalent of America’s NSA or Britain’s GCHQ, known as Unit 8200 – or in Hebrew as Yehida Shmoneh-Matayim. They allege that the “all-encompassing” intelligence the unit gathers on Palestinians – much of it concerning innocent people – is used for “political persecution” and to create divisions in Palestinian society. The largest intelligence unit in the Israeli military, Unit 8200 intercepts electronic communications including email, phone calls and social media in addition to targeting military and diplomatic traffic. The signatories say, however, that a large part of their work was unrelated to Israel’s security or defence, but appeared designed to perpetuate the occupation by “infiltrating” and “controlling” all aspects of Palestinian life.
On September 9, 2014, CODE PINK held a sit-in in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) office in Washington, DC protesting her support for the bombing of schools and hospitals and refusal to criticize Israel. Senator Warren initially ran from people who asked her views on Israel when it was slaughtering defenseless Palestinians living in the outdoor prison of Gaza. She then went on to vote with other senators to support Israel in a resolution. And, at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts when she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Gaza and whether the killing of civilians by Israel was acceptable she defending the bombing of schools and hospitals repeating Israeli talking points when “rocket launchers [are] next to hospitals, next to schools, they’re using their civilian population to protect their military assets.” She explained: “America has a very special relationship with Israel. . . And we very much need an ally in that part of the world.” Warren also said she thought it would be going to far to condition US funding on Israel stopping the expansion of settlements, illegal under international law, on Palestinian lands.
Palestine campaigners have this morning begun a ‘sleep-out’ in Manchester city centre in support of the 108,000 Palestinians in Gaza who had their homes destroyed during Israel’s 52 day attack on Gaza and to call for a boycott of Kedem, an Israeli shop based in the city centre. The sleep-out is taking place at a police authorised protest site near to Kedem Cosmetics, an Israeli owned shop that sources the raw materials for its products from the Dead Sea, part of which is Palestinian territory occupied by Israel. Activists have been organising regular demonstrations calling for a boycott of Kedem. They say that purchasing Kedem products provides financial support to the Israeli military. Kedem is also complicit in Israel’s pillage of natural resources from the Palestinian part of the Dead Sea, campaigners say. Activities planned at the sleep out include the reading of names of Palestinian children killed during Israel’s 6 week assault on Gaza, educational talks and an opportunity for people to take part in the ‘Rubble Bucket Challenge‘, a Palestinian take on the Ice Bucket Challenge. Mohammed Ghaleiny, from Gaza said, “Like most families in Gaza, many of my relatives had their homes destroyed and one attack killed 9 members of my extended family. Manchester Palestine Action are doing this sleep-out to highlight the fact that even though the Israeli bombardment has ceased for now there is a dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. Tens of thousands are without adequate shelter and the whole population of Gaza is suffering from severe water, electricity, food and medicine shortages. Even those sheltering in hospitals and UN schools were bombed.”
On Tuesday August 26, 2014, more than 50 demonstrators protested outside the Newark, New Jersey, offices of U.S. Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker demanding that the legislators stop providing a blank check for Israel’s crimes. Thirteen demonstrators were arrested inside the building as they read out the names of some of the nearly 500 Palestinian children killed in Gaza. The U.S. Senate has played a shameful role during the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, twice voting 100-0 to give its full support to Israel, saying nothing about its violations of international humanitarian law (indeed, condemning the United Nations’ Human Rights Council for deigning to investigate war crimes), nothing about the blockade of Gaza, and nothing about the occupation, while promising Israel still more weapons.
As we approach Labor Day, our thoughts go to the treatment of workers. We will post a number of good articles on this topic in the next few days. Here are a few highlights from the past week. The issue of policing continued to be highlighted this week with the funeral of Michael Brown. Protests stopped for the day at the request of his father and silent vigils were held to mark the death of this young man. Protests against police abuse have intensified around the US as people realize there is a war going on between militarized police and people in many communities. A draft of a new UN report on climate was leaked and it shows devastating climate impact. The People’s Climate March is less than a month away on September 21. We need to be clear in understanding the issues and putting forth demands – as a united movement because climate connects us all – that will actually solve the problem. The final area we’ll cover is the growing #BlockTheBoat protests. This week a handbook was published about how to block a ship, Oakland activists described how they organized their effort despite attempts to derail it and a wide range of information was made available about Israeli ships coming to port so that this burgeoning movement can continue to expand.
Israeli-owned shipping company Zim, the target of recent port blockades organized by Palestinian solidarity activists in California, is importing millions of rounds of small arms ammunition into the United States each year. Pro-Palestinian activists in California stopped Israeli-owned cargo ships from unloading olives, wines and ceramics at busy marine terminals in Oakland and Los Angeles last week. Import records show, however, that Zim Integrated Shipping Services Ltd., the Israeli company that was the target of last week’s “port blockades,” is also delivering millions of rounds of Israeli-manufactured small arms ammunition to the United States each year. Zim also delivers weapons systems components for the Israeli and Greek governments to contractors in the United States for repairs and upgrades. Activists in Oakland picketed the city’s busy port for five days starting August 16, preventing longshore workers from unloading the Zim Piraeus, one of 89 ships in the Zim fleet. The Zim Haifa was scheduled to dock in Long Beach on Saturday, August 23, but protesters there said they delayed its unloading, too. In Washington, protesters rallied at the Port of Tacoma where another Zim ship was scheduled to arrive on August 25. Bills of lading for the vessels that docked in Oakland and Long Beach show mostly agricultural goods and building materials were carried in the ships’ containers.
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