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..
In a recent article, columnist Yaniv Halili described British author Ben White as ‘anti-Semitic’. He also denounced Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi for writing a forward to White’s latest book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy.
Those of us who can see through such distorted thinking know that White is a principled writer who has never displayed a shred of racism in his work. Zoabi is very well-known civil rights leader with a long-standing reputation of courage and poise.
How could anti-racist endeavors themselves become the subject of accusation by Halili and others like him?
It goes without saying there should be no room for any racist discourse – Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or any other – in the Palestine solidarity movement, which aims at achieving long-denied justice and rights for the Palestinian people. A racist discourse is predicated on racial supremacy, which is exactly what Palestinians are resisting in Israel and the occupied territories. Read More…
In search of Palestinian leadership: The collapse of the PLO and the PA
The Palestinian leadership briefly returned to the weathered tables of diplomatic niceties to negotiate a path to negotiations. The return signaled an alarming regression from the confrontational stance the leadership made in September 2011, when it took its case to the United Nations. Then, notably buoyed by President Mahmoud Abbas’s liberation message to the global community, Palestinians thought it possible that the leadership would remove its self-determination struggle from the sterile confines of bilateral negotiations and place it on an international stage. In the event, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) decision to resume negotiations for a while dashed any hope that the Palestinian leadership has a strategic vision for national liberation. During the 18 years of the ‘peace process’ the settler population has more than doubled, the Jordan Valley has been all but declared a closed military zone, the Annexation Wall has expropriated 12 percent of the West Bank, with 62 percent of the West Bank beyond Palestinian control, the Gaza Strip has been reduced to destitution under the heavy-handedness of war and an ongoing blockade, and the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem has dramatically accelerated. In these circumstances, any return to negotiations, however brief, can neither be justified nor forgiven. Absent a Palestinian national liberation strategy, negotiations are counterproductive to Palestinian national interests.
The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) electoral mandate of the West Bank’s 2.5 million Palestinians has long expired and, even were it in force, the PA “represents” only a quarter of the global Palestinian population. Thus, it may be fair to ask whether some other body can responsibly develop a national liberation strategy that will be more representative than what the PA/PLO has been able to offer for more than two decades, and if so, what its goals should be. Read More…
Apologists for Israel’s continued occupation and control over Palestinian lives have long contended that Israel is more interested in peace than the Palestinians. One exaggerated argument, repeatedly put forward to justify military rule, is that Palestinians teach their children to hate Jews.
Politicians in the US, especially during election campaigns, find that bashing Palestinians has no downside and, moreover, yields a vote (and donation) jackpot. Read More…
And Benjamin Netanyahu has been boasting that he was right about Egypt and Tunisia and Libya. He did not welcome their supposedly democratic revolutions last year – and who, he has been asking, blames him now for his silence? And the Israeli Prime Minister’s silence, I notice, continues over Syria. Save for the accusation that the Assad regime was involved in the attempt by Palestinian refugees to cross the border via Golan last year – Netanyahu must be right about that – and a passing comment in June that “the young people of Syria deserve a better future”, that’s it. Israel, the beacon of democracy in the Middle East, has nothing more to say.
For some reason, we – in the press, on television, in our parliaments – are not discussing this silence. But, as Professor Ian Buruma pointed out recently, the political heirs of “deeply racist traditions” are the new champions of the Jewish state, whose policies now owe more to 19th-century ethnic chauvinism than to Zionism’s socialist roots. All kinds of strange people now give their support to Israel. It is disturbing to note that the Oslo mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, supported the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. That’s not Israel’s fault. But Republicans in America are now warning of an Islamic Sharia law takeover in the US. It’s an idea fostered, according to The New York Times, by a 56-year-old Hasidic Jewish lawyer called David Yerushalmi and his Society of Americans for National Existence, who now has former CIA director James Woolsey and Republicans Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann echoing his views. The last two have actually signed a pledge “to reject Islamic law”. Read More…
Peter Kosminsky, director of popular Channel 4 TV serial ‘The Promise’ responds to accusations of inaccuracy and distortion. The research that went into this show was clearly extensive despite the howls of protest emanating from the pro-Israeli crowd, Kosminsky does a good job here of defending his magnificent work.
The Promise received widespread acclaim from many publications. The Daily Express called it “…a little burning bush of genius in the desert of well-intentioned TV dramas…” The Independent said it was “…beautifully shot and extremely well written. It is also extremely balanced…” The Observer said it was “…the best thing you are likely to see on TV this year, if not this decade.” Le Figaro said it was “magnificently filmed and masterfully acted… perfectly balanced… great television.” Finally, The Telegraph predicted that “Bafta judges will be watching. I recommend you do too.” They were right, the BAFTAs are on the 22nd of May, let’s hope they win!
It has become commonplace among violent West Bank settlers to randomly attack Palestinian mosques, homes, olive orchards and individuals in order to send a message to other Israelis. They are called “Price Tag” attacks, after the “signature” the settlers leave scrawled on the walls of the burnt-out buildings. In the dark of night this past Monday, January 23, the IDF carried out its own Price Tag assault on ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
At 11:30 p.m. on that cold, rainy night, I got a panicky phone call from Salim Shawamreh, a Palestinian man from the West Bank town of Anata whose home has been demolished by the Israeli authorities four times and rebuilt as an act of resistance each time by ICAHD. “Army bulldozers are approaching my home,” he cried. “Now they’re beginning to demolish it!” Read More…
The human body is an amazing creation. It’s not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong.
A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals — be they individuals, physicians or politicians — can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs.
The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting — a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of “two states for two peoples” has collapsed.
Like doctors who peddle medications instead of practicing medicine, many politicians are under the influence of their narrow political interests and prefer not to call situations by their name.
After so many years of failure — political, legal, diplomatic and economic — those who are paid to diagnose and treat reality are being replaced with voices from all corners of the world, voices convincingly making the case that the entire premise undertaken by the Palestine Liberation Organization, starting as far back as 1974, is no longer feasible. Read More…
Editor’s note: Heartbreakingly frank, this analysis of the Palestinian struggle and its long tortuous journey from the early days of rugged resistance to today’s slick brigade of negotiators, is something every Palestinian and activist should read. The failure of the Palestinians to obtain the justice and the freedom to which they are entitled is so incredibly tragic, and yet, within that ongoing tragedy, the seeds of hope still find ways of escaping from under the layers of hopelessness. There are the enormously brave spirits in the refugee camps and in Palestine itself who still dare to ignite a flicker of revolutionary zeal in their people, but at enormous cost to themselves and their families. If not death, they can expect imprisonment, with all that it entails – torture, violence, isolation, abandonment – and for their families, the razing and theft of their lands, the destruction of their homes, and hundreds of humiliating laws and acts to make their lives as unbearable as possible. The unrecognisable Palestinian parties of the revolutionary years are no better in suffocating their peoples’ cries today. Don’t mobilise! Don’t protest! Don’t unite! Don’t do anything that might jeopardise the cosy arrangements that the leadership has with Israel and the US to keep the status quo. As if twenty years of failed talks aren’t enough to underscore Israel’s true intentions that its minions never tire of propagating – an exclusively Jewish state in all of Palestine. And yet, the Palestinians remain un-cowed by their never-ending ordeal – one generation after another just as determined as the last to throw off the utter misery forced upon them in the world’s cruellest experiment in human containment. In such circumstances, one can always expect a revolutionary spirit to emerge with the potential to “ignite a mobilisation large enough to create a truly national initiative”. What is rarely mentioned, says Karma Nabulsi, “ is the dangerous and seemingly interminable slog that is required to build up to any revolution’s launch”. Now, after 60 plus years of Israel vainly trying to make the Palestinians non-existent, there may yet be a revolution waiting to happen, especially with the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns so successfully raising the ante around the world.
Nowadays, when Palestinian activists in their twenties and thirties meet up with veterans of the Palestinian struggle, they show an unexpected thoughtfulness towards the older, revolutionary generation, to which I belong. This is nothing like the courtesy extended as a matter of course to older people in our part of the world: it is more intimate and more poignant. What brings us together is always the need to discuss the options before us, and to see if a plan can be made. Everyone argues, laughs, shouts and tells black jokes. But whenever a proper discussion begins, the suddenly lowered voices of our frustrated young people, many of them at the heart of the fierce protests on university campuses and in rights campaigns elsewhere, have the same tone I used to hear in the voices of our young ambulance workers in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s: an elegiac gentleness towards the hopelessly wounded, towards those who were already beyond repair.
The way Palestinians see things, the fragmentation of the body politic – externally engineered, and increasingly internally driven – has now been achieved. This summer, even the liberal Israeli press began to notice that the key people in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority’s capital in the West Bank, no longer discuss strategies of liberation but rather the huge business deals that prey on the public imagination. Every institution or overarching structure that once united Palestinians has now crumbled and been swept away. The gulf between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah, between Palestinians inside Palestine and the millions of refugees outside it, between city and village, town and refugee camp, now seems unbridgeable. The elites are tiny and the numbers of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised increase every day. There is, at this moment, no single body able to claim legitimately to represent all Palestinians; no body able to set out a collective policy or national programme of liberation. There is no plan. Read More…
The country that has long been known to abuse its powers and privileges in the United Nations is now leading a campaign to reform the same organization.
While UN reforms are welcomed, if not demanded, by many of its member states, there is little reason to believe the recent US crusade is actually genuine. Rather, it seems a clear attempt to stifle any semblance of democracy in the world’s leading international institution.
Most American politicians actually despise the UN. While the Security Council is directed or tamed by the US veto (often to shield the US and its close ally Israel from any criticism), other UN bodies are not as easily intimidated.
When the UN education and science agency, UNESCO, accepted Palestine’s bid for full membership last October, following a democratic vote by its members, the US could do little do stall the process. Still, it immediately cut funding to the agency (about 20 percent of its total budget).
The move was devoid of any humanitarian considerations. The UNESCO provides vital services to underprivileged communities all over the world, including the United States. Read More…
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