Editor’s note:On Tuesday evening of 9 March, Australians for Palestine held the Israeli Apartheid forum at the University of Melbourne. Moderating the forum was distinguished University of Melbourne Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory, Ghassan Hage. The panel was comprised of eminent academics and a very experienced human rights advocatewho came together to present their perspectives on Israeli Apartheid at a critical point in the 62-year-long tragic history of Palestine and the Palestinians. We urge you to listen to their presentations as each of them draws on history, experience and morality to show the extent of Zionist influence and power to bring about an exclusively Jewish state of Israel at the existential expense of another people. The forum was supposed to begin with a specially-created video by the international prize-winning TV commercials director Anthony Lawson, but technical problems with the audio equipment meant it had to be shown at the end instead. Around 200 people attended the lecture and each of them were given an Israeli Apartheid flyer, a BDS flyer and available on sale were copies of the new book “Israeli Apartheid – A Beginner’s Guide” by Ben White which rapidly sold out. It was without doubt a thought-provoking presentation of facts and ideas that hopefully will open up discussion around the country on a topic too long regarded inflammatory, but is now very timely, as evidence of apartheid mounts.
The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel majorly sandbagged Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday, demonstrating once again that it has not the slightest interest in pursuing a just peace with the Palestinian people or in trading a cessation of its colonization of the Palestinian West Bank for a comprehensive peace with the Arab world.
Biden went to the Mideast to kick off negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and reassured the latter of undying US support for them. On Chris Matthews’ Hardball, Biden explained that when you marry someone, you tell them you love them, but that does not remove the obligation to keep saying it years later. Apparently, however, Washington is henpecked by Tel Aviv to the point almost of being a battered spouse. In response to Biden’s loyal support for Israel over decades, the Likud-led government kicked him in the teeth. Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai abruptly announced that he would build 1600 new households (for 8,000 people?) in a part of the Occupied West Bank that the Israeli government had annexed to Jerusalem District. It was precisely such new and increasing Israeli building on Palestinian territory that had led Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to reject negotiations and to threaten to resign. The announcement put in doubt whether the negotiations would go forward, and made Biden and the United States government look like fools. Read More…
In the city of Haifa, Zionist plans to create an Arab-free land through the expulsions of 1948 did not entirely succeed; the nature of the city is still ambiguous despite the deaths and destruction
Palestinian refugees in Haifa waiting to be ferried out of the city 1948
The editors of David Ben Gurion’s diaries expressed their bewilderment at his lack of interest in the military campaigns in April 1948. Israel’s first prime minister (1) was preoccupied with internal political matters, such as the new state’s relationship with Zionist bodies abroad, as if the fate of the state depended on them. His diaries do not even hint at an “imminent catastrophe” and certainly do not convey the impression that Israel faced a “second holocaust”, terms he used frequently in his public speeches and addresses (2).
In inner circles Ben Gurion spoke very differently. At the beginning of the month, at a special meeting of the secretariat of MAPAI (the leading party), he listed proudly the names of the Palestinian villages already occupied by the Hagana and the other Jewish paramilitary groups. In a long speech, he explained that the next objectives of the military effort would be Haifa and Jaffa. In his words, these principal urban centres were “islands” in the midst of a Jewish sea. They were not islands, and calling them that diminished their spatial span; they encompassed more than 100,000 people, and many thousands more lived in their hinterlands. The process I call “urbicide” (destruction of urban space and expulsion of its residents), happened that April and ended with the forced departure of more than 200,000 Palestinians from their homes up and down the land. Another 70,000 urban Palestinians were expelled from Ramallah and Lydda in July 1948. Read More…
Why exactly does Australia traditionally support Israel, despite that country’s continued defiance of UN resolutions? Ailsa Burns looks at some possible explanations
In the wake of the recent Dubai assassination scandal, Australia has abstained from a vote on human rights abuses during Israel’s attack on Gaza, breaking with its old habit of doing everything it can to support Israel’s defiance of UN resolutions.
The question is: Does this signify a meaningful change in Australia’s official approach to Israel’s behaviour? As I wrote recently, Australian support for Israel comes at a cost to this country, but to understand what might lead to a policy shift that recognises this, it’s necessary to understand how that support itself has been generated. So: why have we been such a loyal supporter of this distant state? Let’s look at some possible explanations. Read More…
Launched on March 4, 2009, “The Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RTP) seeks to reaffirm the primacy of international law (to settle) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (by focusing on) the enunciation of law by authoritative bodies (and) address(ing) the failure of application of law even though it has been so clearly identified. (It begins where the International Court of Justice) stopped: highlighting the responsibilities arising from the enunciation of law, including those of the international community, which cannot continue to shirk its obligations.”
RTP is part of the BRussell Tribunal, named after famed philosopher, mathematician, and anti-war/anti-imperialism activist Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), who warned over 50 years ago:
“Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war” and live in peace, because there’s no other choice. Read More…
The other night I went to a fundraiser for Jewish Voice for Peace that left me so charged that when I walked out of the apartment and on to a downtown New York street I heard myself singing an old Woody Guthrie tune. What was the song– and why did it pop into my head?
The first thing to be said about the evening was that many Jews were gathered who are unapologetic in support for BDS. While the hosts explicitly granted room to those who do not believe in BDS, the spirit was, Look, we are guided in life by a sense of being Jewish, and the only way we can be Jewish now is by having Palestinian solidarity; they want BDS, so we are for BDS. Naomi Klein said she had been “privately” for BDS before Gaza, but Gaza was the gamechanger, and after Gaza she could hold her tongue no longer. While Rebecca Vilkomerson of JVP sought to explain BDS to the party by saying that the situation on the ground has just gotten worse and worse through the peace process and “we look at other tactics and actions that have worked in previous struggles”–BDS. Read More…
An exclusive club of the world’s most developed countries is poised to admit Israel as a member even though, a confidential internal document indicates, doing so will amount to endorsing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territories.
Israel has been told that its accession to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is all but assured when the 30 member states meet in May.
But a draft OECD report concedes that Israel has breached one of the organisation’s key requirements on providing accurate and transparent data on its economic activity.
The information supplied by Israel, the report notes, includes not only the economic activity of its citizens inside its recognised borders but also Jewish settlers who live in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan in violation of international law. Read More…
Blacks in South Africa never faced a 20-foot wall dividing their communities. Palestinians’ land is still being seized, their orchards bulldozed.
For the first two weeks of March, Palestine’s supporters around the world focus public attention on Israel’s continued brutal occupation of the West Bank and its even more vicious siege of Gaza. They do so through Israeli Apartheid Week and this is the sixth year the public education campaign has taken place.
One of the principal signs of its success has been the ferocious counter-campaign by supporters of Israel. Like so much of the history of Israel’s powerful propaganda machine, the facts about Israeli separation of Jews and Arabs — also known as apartheid — are beside the point. The response to criticism of Israel has always been one of self-righteous indignation and outrage, accompanied by charges of anti-Semitism.
Yet there is absolutely no doubt that the system of separation of Arabs and Jews can be compared with the apartheid system in South Africa. Indeed, many experts on how the apartheid system was run claim that Israel’s system of hafrada, or separation, is far more brutal and deliberately humiliating than anything devised by the racist regimes of Pretoria. Read More…
Proximity talks between Palestinians, Israelis and US negotiators will begin next week, but I’m not hopeful, in large measure because the parties have never been further apart and confidence in the US has been diminished.
The Israelis have been up to no good: making provocative statements about keeping the Jordan Valley, staking their claim to sites in Hebron and Bethlehem, and tightening the noose around Jerusalem. At the same time, the Palestinian house remains deeply divided, with reconciliation talks between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas stalled, and Hamas’s leadership participating in a defiant summit in Damascus with Iran and Hizbollah in attendance. Read More…
In two of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most memorable writings, his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence,” he bemoaned the failure of Americans to speak out, to break their silence when witnessing injustice and immoral acts against humankind. He confessed his disappointment that Birmingham’s white Christian and Jewish communities were more devoted to “’order’ than to justice.” Motivated in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech to break “the betrayal of [his] own silences,”
King called for a “true revolution of values” within the United States – a revolution that shifted from profit motives and property rights to a society that valued people. A society, he lamented, that didn’t speak to the social betterment of humanity was not just and thus made the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism . . . incapable of being conquered.” Read More…
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