Posts Tagged ‘bds’
 
September 24, 2012 0

Anti-Israel Teach-in Held During Occupy Wall Street “Free University Week”

A work­ing group affil­i­ated with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) move­ment held a teach-in over the week­end on advo­cat­ing for and sup­port­ing Boy­cott, Divest­ment and Sanc­tions (BDS) cam­paigns against Israel. The group, known as the “Global Jus­tice Work­ing Group,” used the ses­sion to demo­nize Israel and to demon­strate how the pro-BDS agenda goes hand-in-hand with the goals of OWS.

A sign at the Occupy BDS teach-in New York

The event was held on Sat­ur­day, Sep­tem­ber 22, as part of an OWS-organized week­long pro­gram in New York called “Free Uni­ver­sity Week.”

Speak­ers dur­ing the event con­demned Israel as a “Euro­pean set­tler move­ment” and Israeli pol­icy as extremely oppres­sive. Riham Bargh­outi, a found­ing mem­ber of the Pales­tin­ian Cam­paign for the Aca­d­e­mic and Cul­tural Boy­cott of Israel (PACBI) and activist with Adalah-NY, a local pro-boycott group, described the sit­u­a­tion for Pales­tini­ans as a “strug­gle of indige­nous peo­ple against col­o­niz­ing set­tler tac­tics.” Another speaker accused Israel of hav­ing “vio­lated every arti­cle in the 4th Geneva Con­ven­tion.” The speak­ers rep­re­sented a vari­ety of domes­tic anti-Israel groups, includ­ing Adalah-NY, Punks against Apartheid, New York­ers against the Cornell-Technion Part­ner­ship and CODEPINK’s “Stolen Beauty” cam­paign, which calls for a boy­cott of AHAVA products.

The activists also repeat­edly sought to demon­strate that  the goals of OWS and the BDS move­ment are inter­con­nected. One OWS speaker, for exam­ple, warned the par­tic­i­pants that Israel trains Amer­i­can law enforce­ment and equips police with weaponry and riot con­trol tools. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Occupy Oak­land move­ment then delib­er­ately “con­nected the dots,” alleg­ing that the “same type of tear gas being used against them [Occupy Oak­land] is being used against the Palestinians.”

Saturday’s event rep­re­sents the lat­est effort by anti-Israel activists to inject their cause into the now year-old OWS social protest move­ment. Up until now, these efforts – which included wav­ing anti-Israel signs and chant­ing anti-Israel slo­gans at OWS demon­stra­tions – were not offi­cially sanc­tioned by OWS or any of its affil­i­ated groups. In what could be a pos­si­ble shift, the teach-in was spon­sored by a group for­mally tied to OWS and was pro­moted on the offi­cial New York Gen­eral Assem­bly web­site, which hosts con­tent from “dozens of groups work­ing together to orga­nize and set the vision for the #occu­py­wall­street move­ment.”

While one might imag­ine that a group called “Global Jus­tice Work­ing Group” would focus on a vari­ety of issues of global injus­tice, the group seems to main­tain a sin­gu­lar focus on crit­i­ciz­ing Israel. Indeed, its Face­book page and web­site are reg­u­larly updated with anti-Israel con­tent, includ­ing claims that Israeli check­points are a “tool of sup­pres­sion” and calls for the Red Hot Chili Pep­pers to refuse to per­form in Israel. [The con­cert was held as planned on Sep­tem­ber 10.]

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July 27, 2012 0

Latest Divestment Effort Results in Yet Another Failure for BDS Movement

Oppo­nents of Israel have been engaged in efforts to wage eco­nomic war­fare against the Jew­ish State via Boy­cott, Divest­ment and Sanc­tions (BDS) cam­paigns for sev­eral years now. The lat­est such ini­tia­tive, which failed this week, was a cam­paign to pres­sure Sonoma County in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia to stop work­ing with Veo­lia, a French trans­porta­tion com­pany that is allegedly guilty of “ser­vic­ing Israeli set­tle­ments in the West Bank.”
 
A res­o­lu­tion to con­sider not renew­ing the county’s con­tract with Veo­lia, which pro­vides tran­sit ser­vices worth $7 mil­lion, was con­sid­ered on Tues­day by the county’s Human Rights Commission.The com­mis­sion voted 5–4 against the res­o­lu­tion. It will “hear the issue fur­ther” at its August meet­ing, accord­ing to news reports.
In the seven years since the for­mal launch of an inter­na­tional cam­paign to boy­cott Israel, no Amer­i­can col­lege cam­pus in the United States has divested from Israel or com­pa­nies that work with Israel. No church. No retire­ment fund. Israeli mer­chan­dise, includ­ing beauty prod­ucts, hum­mus, and cous­cous, con­tin­ues to be read­ily avail­able on store shelves around the country.
Despite the obvi­ous lack of main­stream appeal, many domes­tic anti-Israel groups – includ­ing the “North Coast Coali­tion for Pales­tine,” which was respon­si­ble for the recent cam­paign in Sonoma County – seem to be unwill­ing to rec­og­nize defeat. Even a peti­tion cir­cu­lated by the group, which was posted to the US Cam­paign to End the Israeli Occupation’s Web site, gar­nered less than 300 signatures.
While these cam­paigns are used by anti-Israel activists as a dele­git­imiza­tion tac­tic, they have never had much chance of suc­cess. In this case, even if the Human Rights Com­mis­sion would have voted in favor, it has no power to enact pol­icy and would only have been able to present a rec­om­men­da­tion to the county’s Board of Super­vi­sors. Many divest­ment res­o­lu­tions that are con­sid­ered on col­lege cam­puses are sim­i­larly non-binding.

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July 5, 2012 6

Jewish Voice for Peace Lobbying Hard for Church Divestment

Update: The Pres­by­ter­ian Church voted against divest­ment late Thurs­day evening, July 5. While ADL wel­comed the deci­sion, we are trou­bled that the issue was decided on such a nar­row vote (333–331 with 2 absten­tions) and that the debate was biased from start to fin­ish with vehe­ment anti-Israel sentiment.  

Jew­ish Voice for Peace has been a highly vis­i­ble and vocal advo­cate in the Gen­eral Assem­bly in favor of the Pres­by­ter­ian Church’s con­sid­er­a­tion of a vir­u­lently anti-Israel divest­ment res­o­lu­tion. The res­o­lu­tion, which calls for the church to divest from three com­pa­nies that allegedly profit from Israel’s occu­pa­tion (Cater­pil­lar, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard), will be voted on later today by the full ple­nary after it was passed in com­mit­tee ear­lier this week.

There is much to crit­i­cize about the prob­lem­atic nature of the res­o­lu­tion itself, but one of the more dis­turb­ing ele­ments of this cam­paign has been Jew­ish Voice for Peace’s aggres­sive lob­by­ing for it.

The group invested sig­nif­i­cant time and resources to send a del­e­ga­tion of activists to the Gen­eral Assem­bly who report­edly tes­ti­fied on the com­mit­tee floor in favor of divest­ment and are live-tweeting the con­fer­ence. A large por­tion of Twit­ter chat­ter about the res­o­lu­tion has been gen­er­ated by JVP using the hash­tag “#church­di­vest” to pro­vide updates on the res­o­lu­tion. Of tweets using that hash­tag in the last 36 hours, approx­i­mately 25% have been gen­er­ated by JVP and two of its staff people.

JVP activists have also cre­ated and dis­trib­uted a flier called “Divest from Vio­lence. Invest in Peace” which con­tains sev­eral state­ments from Chris­tians who sup­port divest­ment, and is cir­cu­lat­ing a peti­tion that calls on Pres­by­te­ri­ans to sup­port divest­ment. The peti­tion claims that the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity has failed in its efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict and it is clear that BDS (Boy­cott, Divest­ment and Sanc­tions) is now the only option left. The peti­tion ends with, “Can you tell Pres­by­te­ri­ans we’ve got their back?”

It is clear that JVP believes it has a very crit­i­cal role to play in the domes­tic anti-Israel agenda: JVP pro­motes itself as rep­re­sent­ing the views of Amer­i­can Jews and can be seen as try­ing to pro­vide cover against claims that the Pres­by­ter­ian divest­ment ini­tia­tives are anti-Semitic. Nobody should be fooled. JVP is a fringe orga­ni­za­tion with its own anti-Israel agenda.

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