Ron Brummer from Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Hasbara, recently confirmed that there is no separate economic system for Israel inside the occupation and outside it. “If you want to divest from the West Bank… you have to divest from Israel.” This is clarifying. Liberal Zionists who have supported settlement boycotts only need to choose sides. Are they for freedom or apartheid?
Brisbane musicians rework Nick Cave’s classic ballad “The Ship Song” to call on him to cancel his upcoming shows in Israel and respect the Palestinian picket line. #BDS
In 2014 when nine activists climbed onto the roof of the Elbit UK drone factory to protest the Israeli war on Gaza, Nick Cave’s support helped spread the news of their protest. Now, those same nine activists write Cave to ask him to support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and to cancel his upcoming show in Israel.
Nearly 100 activists with the New York City chapter of grassroots organization Jewish Voice for Peace attempted Wednesday night to deliver a petition to the New York headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), calling for an end to ADL sponsorship of annual tactical, policy and technology exchanges between law enforcement in the U.S. and Israel. […]
Israeli musicians write Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to ask them to cancel their upcoming show in Israel: “Israel prides itself for being tolerant and culturally open, but in fact uses culture to limit divergent narratives and voices, and to whitewash its crimes. When performing in Israel one should always remember that they play in a country that discriminates huge populations of invisible people that have no citizenship and no freedom of movement, and are subject to a separate (military) court system. When performing in Israel one should always remember that they play only in front of the privileged. By choosing not to perform you can send them a strong message.”
“Few dozen protesters out front calling us anti-Semites and Nazis as we walked in, telling us we had blood on our hands, etc., and a packed house for the screening — which most of the protesters attended. Interesting thing was that there were no disruptions from them during the screening.”–Filmmaker Loretta Alper, on The Occupation of the American Mind.
Sedq, an international Jewish network for Justice has recently launched a Facebook campaign asking people around the world, and especially in the Jewish Communities, to call and write Israeli embassies and demand Israel stops its arms sales to Myanmar.
Britain fulfilled its promise to the Zionists in full, but broke even its feeble commitment to the Palestinians to protect their civil and religious rights. An apology from Britain is long overdue, as are efforts to repair the damage it initiated 100 years ago.
PEN International believes that Dareen Tatour is being targeted for her peaceful exercise of her right to free expression and continues to call for her immediate and unconditional release one year after campaigning for her on the Day of the Imprisoned Writer 2016.
Musicians Roger Waters, Thurston Moore and Tunde Adebimpe, poet Michael Rosen, philosopher Judith Butler and political activist Angela Davis are among many high profile figures who have called on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to cancel their concerts in Tel Aviv on November 19 and 20 this year.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed an executive order Monday barring state business with those who support BDS. Saqib Ali, co-founder of Freedom2Boycott and a former Maryland state legislator, said Monday’s executive order shows the hubris of staunchly pro-Israel voices and their disregard for democratic institutions. “You don’t have to be somebody who pays close attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be outraged by this,” Ali told Mondoweiss.
PEN America’s featured case for October is the two-year detention by Israel of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. The rights group’s denunciation of Israel for denying Tatour access to the internet is a sign of the firm place Palestinian rights have gained on the American left.
“Considering the impossibility of criticizing Israel, [Steven] Salaita stated that academic freedom remains more of a myth than an actual possibility in modern universities.”–Conor McCarthy, co-organizer of the ‘Freedom of Speech and Higher Education: The case of the academic boycott of Israel’ conference.
Taking on the Jenin Freedom Theatre’s staging in New York of a dramatized episode in the Second Intifada, the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies screened a PBS documentary featuring Israeli colonel Lior Lotan, the chief Israeli negotiator during the siege. And Lotan followed the screening with an hour-long elaboration of events that often felt hackneyed and stale.
Following a report released by Danwatch in January, Denmark’s third largest pension fund, Sampension, moved to exclude four publicly traded companies from their portfolio due to their investments in illegal Israeli settlement activities. Ana Sanchez, speaking on behalf of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, welcomed the move, telling Mondoweiss it represents, “the latest indicator of the mounting pressure on businesses that are deeply complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights to stop profiting from Israel’s military occupation and apartheid.”
Organizers began the D.C. Palestinian Film and Arts Festival with the goal of creating an environment for Palestinian artists in the diaspora to express themselves outside the political frame that has become synonymous with Palestine. One example of this in the recently concluded 7th annual festival was a unique and memorable space for Palestinian storytelling.
Saturday, October 21, Mondoweiss Founder and Co-Editor Phil Weiss will be among several speakers addressing a conference in Minneapolis called “Parallel Liberation Struggles: Lessons in Resistance.” Themes of the conference, organized by a broad coalition of Twin Cities organizations, are the 100-year Palestinian resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial project and the similarities in violence used against Palestinians, African Americans, and Native Americans and their methods of resistance.
Devyn Springer says there is a clear pattern to how pro-Israel supporters attempt to discredit Black advocates for Palestine: “whether it is local rabbis blasting Black Lives Matter activists as ‘ignorant’ for including support of BDS in their demands, Zionist white feminists attacking the women’s movement for standing against Zionism, or the coded language against Alice Walker and NFL players that assumes they simply ‘don’t know what they’re talking about.’ The pattern is the use of anti-Black rhetoric and, in turn, anti-Blackness in whole, to perpetuate the assumption of Black ignorance to silence and belittle Black BDS advocates.”
Palestinian artists from the Washington D.C. metro area and beyond convened at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts on Monday, October 2nd for opening night of the seventh annual D.C. Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. Festival co-founder Noura Erakat tells Mondoweiss, “When we discuss Palestine, we’re discussing a lot of the pain and intensity. There are so few places to celebrate what it is to be Palestinian and what it is to be Palestinian in our global diaspora as we exist. [This festival and its artists] are the iterations of being Palestinian-American.”
Steven Salaita says that one way pro-Palestinian faculty can resist administration efforts to curtail activism is to disaffiliate themselves from the institution: “Failing to name an academic employer in a publication might best be described as dis-identification, but the gesture does deeper work when it informs a broader effort at detaching from the employer’s corporate sensibilities. Where pro-Israel fanatics never stop devising ways of punishing anti-Zionists, and have no trouble finding pliant administrators to intimidate, we can seek ways to transcend and possibly subvert the spaces they control.”
Alice Rothchild attended a benefit dinner for the Institute for Middle East Understanding and found it to be a fundraiser, a celebration, a showcase of the active, committed Palestinian community, and also a uniquely Yom Kippur moment. She writes it was an opportunity “to join the celebration of a movement of creative, thoughtful, very visible Palestinians who are building their own powerful voice in U.S. society, linking arms with others in the struggle for justice.”
California congressman Ted Lieu has had the courage to criticize Trump for bombing Syria and Saudia Arabia for its atrocities in Yemen. But constituent Charlie Zimmerman was disappointed when, in April 2017, he signed on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 1697, the Israel Anti-Boycott bill. Its provisions clash with the strong support for human rights he otherwise espouses.
David Lloyd writes: “Palestinian steadfastness, and in particular the non-violent persistence that daily affirms their determination to stay on their land, is the quiet negation of Israel’s racial regime. As I sat in the Hebron twilight listening to Issa Amro’s calm and confident voice after a long and dismaying day witnessing the sheer ugliness of occupation and settlement, I knew that he would not be going away. He and Youth Against Settlement will persist against all the odds, however long the struggle for justice may take.”
Are the moves by Fatah and Hamas towards new elections and a unity government a genuine push for strengthened Palestinian governance, or simply a strategy by faltering politicians to stay in power?
Read and sign a statement from Jewish supporters of Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, who is currently under attack by an organization identifying itself as “the legal arm of the pro-Israel community.”