This video is created by Australians for Palestine and Women for Palestine
as an educational tool to help people gain a better understanding of the clear
principles underpinning the Palestinian BDS call and the global Palestinian
BDS movement.
OMAR BARGHOUTI, founding member of the Palestinian Campaign
for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) explains BDS
and answers the arguments against it
WATCH VIDEO HERE
Australians for Palestine BDS guidelines
Australians for Palestine fully endorses Palestinian Civil Society’s call for
Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) global movement and has decided
to concentrate its efforts on developing material and providing information
about the BDS call and how it can be implemented.Read more..
On May 15, 1948 the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel which erupted into the brutal Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe was also catastrophic for United Nations (UN) ringing the death knell for its stature and authority.
Like medieval kings, the US and Israel employed the UN to be its fool running around with a cap o’ bells and sceptre (rendered useless by US veto) beginning with the 1947 Resolution 181, passed on 29 February by members (under coercion) recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states which was understandably rejected by Palestine but accepted by Israel as a step toward its Zionist expansionist goal for the full realisation of a Jewish Eretz Israel.
Ironically, on 30th February Menachem Begin, head of the terrorist gang, Irgun, brazenly announced the Zionist immutable dogma, “The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognised… Jerusalem was and forever will be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.” Read More…
Be’er-Sheva, Israel - I first heard about the Nakba in the late 1980s, while I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at Hebrew University. This, I believe, is a revealing fact, particularly since, as a teenager, I was a member of Peace Now and was raised in a liberal home. I grew up in the southern city of Be’er-Sheva, which is just a few kilometres from several unrecognised Bedouin villages that, today, are home to thousands of residents who were displaced in 1948. I now know that the vast majority of the Negev’s Bedouin population was not as lucky, and that, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most Bedouin either fled or were expelled from their ancestral lands to Jordan or Gaza.
How is it possible that a left-leaning Israeli teenager who was living in the Negev during the early 1980s (I graduated from high-school in 1983) had never heard the word “Nakba”?
How, in other words, is collective amnesia engendered?Read More…
British rock musician and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters spray-paints the words “No thought control” on Israel’s West Bank separation barrier in Bethlehem. (Photo: AP)
As the world watched the Arab Spring, many Palestinians saw traces of Palestine’s revolution, particularly of the first Intifada—the popular uprising of 1987—and in the beautiful spirit of the young revolutionaries.
The fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt was celebrated in Palestinian households not only because it promised a return of Arab resistance, a constant dimension of the Palestinian cause but hijacked by the dictatorships for so many years, but also because it was a reminder that Palestine continues to bring people together: those struggling in many places around the world against injustice of all kinds.
As we continue to watch the revolutions unfold—from Wall Street to Madrid, from London to Seattle—we can see Palestine in every Tahrir Square. The Egyptian spring is partly a result of the previous regime’s heavy complicity in maintaining Israeli occupation and colonization; the Egyptian student mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine during the second Intifada, in 2000, were important precursors to January 2011. Read More…
For 64 years the Palestinians have patiently and steadfastly continued their struggle for justice, enduring the longest occupation in modern history.
Recently, however, other events throughout the region have dominated the world’s press. First, the ‘war on terror’, then the invasion of Iraq, apprehension about a nuclear Iran, and now the turmoil of the Arab revolutions.
Has the Palestinian cause been side-lined, or even forgotten, in the clamour for democracy and the horror of so much violence? Read More…
Shortly after the IDF entry into the West Bank and the establishment of the military government which continues to this day, it was Meir Shamgar – head of the army’s judicial branch, later Attorney General and still later President of the Supreme Court – who resolved to give occupied Palestinians the option of appealing to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem against the acts of the army set to rule over them. This was considered a significant expression of what was then termed “enlightened occupation” and speakers for Israel took great pride in it during their appearances worldwide.
But there were limits to enlightenment. The Supreme Court flatly refused to hear appeals based on the Fourth Geneva Convention, though the State of Israel had been among the first to sign it, already in 1949. Quite simply, this Convention speaks of the duties and obligations set on an occupying power in its relationship with inhabitants of the Occupied Territory – and the State of Israel refused to recognize that the West Bank is Occupied Territory, and found all sorts of other terms such as “Administered Territory” or “Disputed Territory”. Government jurists were well able to phrase it in learned legal terms. It is always possible to find lawyers ready to formulate a legal case fitting one’s needs. Gangsters know it, as do prime ministers.Read More…
Dora McPhee’s “Catastrophe”, oil on canvas, May 2010 (for AFP Nakba Exhibition)
by William A Cook - sent by author - 13 May 2012
“We dance round in a ring and suppose/ But the secret sits in the middle and knows.”
(Robert Frost)
Victors’ celebrations harbor shadows that lurk in the soul as revelers dance in remembrance, burying in laughter the suffering screams of those displaced and destroyed, furiously hiding forgotten faces framed in fear from mocking the glorious dance should they be awakened once more by the reverie. May 14 and 15 are paradoxically days of celebration and catastrophe; victors “dance round in a ring and suppose,” caught in a never ending quest to know if indeed this celebration is for victory or for defeat, while those vanquished understand “the secret that sits in the middle and knows.” Are the secrets Truth that we are afraid to delve into, too ashamed to acknowledge, or fear of a pending Nakba for the victor signaled by a merciful and just God?
As this May day approaches, a Biblical age of three score and four for the state of Israel, only six years short of Biblical death, an appropriate time for reflection about judgment and retribution, about peace and justice lest the sins of the fathers remain the curse of the children. What is the secret that sits in the middle and knows? What is it keeping secret? Who is it, since it is personified and knows? Who are the dancers this May 14? Are they the children of the next generations whose fathers sinned? What do they suppose? What do they suppose the victory remembrance celebrates? Does it celebrate the men, the fathers and husbands and sons that massacred the fathers and husbands and sons at Deir Yassin? Do they meditate on those relatives of the dead who live now in refugee camps in foreign countries who have not been home for 64 years, nor seen the town now transformed into a psychiatric institution, nor visited the graves across the street, tombstones upended and defaced? What minds contemplated the barbarity of Deir Yassin a month and five days before the state of Israel declared its freedom as a democratic country desiring recognition by the nations of the world? What minds could lie to the President of the United States, even as they laid waste the town and its people, appealing to him to immediately recognize Israel because they would bring peace to Palestine by obeying the Charter and Declaration of Human Rights held sacred by the United Nations? Read More…
John Hurson in Ireland has been keenly conscious of the affinities between the historic Irish hunger strike of 1981 and the ongoing Palestinian hunger strikes. He has travelled to Gaza on several occasions on humanitarian aid convoys, and is the founder of the on line Gaza TV News service. I suggested that we collaborate on an article that might recall the Irish experience, especially the parallels and the potential implications for the future of the Palestinian struggle.
John Hurson ends his reflective essay with a comparison between the hardheartedness of Netanyahu and the British leader at the time, Margaret Thatcher. Although more than 30 years have passed since Bobby Sands and his nine fellow prisoners died as a result of carrying their prison protests to their ultimate point of no return. I hope and pray that no Palestinian hunger strikers die. Their moral authority and political energy is needed to galvanize further these glimmerings of a Palestinian awakening. The impact of Khader Adnan and later Hana Shalabi, after their release from Israeli prisons is illustrative, and helps us all understand that although abusive arrest and administrative detention is the immediate cause of the hunger strikes, their agenda was always far broader than seeking personal relief. Their intention, already partially effective, was to shine a bright light of truth on the manner in which Israel has used administrative detention, as well as on broader concerns about Palestinian imprisonment more generally, and beyond this, to call attention to the unlawful and immoral denial through decades and across generations of fundamental Palestinians rights under a structure called internationally ‘occupation’ but experienced as a lethal blend of annexation, apartheid, and settler colonialism. Read More…
AL-FASAYIL, occupied West Bank (IPS) – “It’s tiring,” said 15-year-old Ibrahim, deep lines running across his forehead. “But there is no alternative.” Ibrahim has been working full-time for three years already.
The eldest son in a family of ten children, he lives in the Palestinian village al-Fasayil in the occupied Jordan Valley, and is forced to work in the nearby Israeli settlement Tomer to help support his siblings. “I work from 6am to 1pm,” he said. “And I get 70 shekels [$18 dollars] per day.”
Al-Fasayil residents say that more than a dozen youths from the village, all under the age of 18, are currently working in Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley. It is estimated that between 500 and 1,000 minors travel from other villages and cities throughout the West Bank to work in the area. Read More…
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