-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 24, 2007 3:11:05 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: A Boycott Of Israel: Something Has Changed
We Palestinians are the "Jews" now and, like the Jews, we will
never allow you or Israel to forget
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: August 24, 2007 1:19:06 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: A Boycott Of Israel: Something Has Changed
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18248.htm
*A Boycott Of Israel: Something Has Changed*
[[And about GD time, too!!]]
By John Pilger
08/23/07
"ICH" -- From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp
you can see
Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his
son holding
the tail of his long tattered coat. He extended his hand and did
not let go. "I
am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer," he said in measured English.
"Over there, I
played many musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English, and
Hebrew, and
because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum while
the monkey did
its tricks. When we lost our country, we lost respect. One daym a
rich Kuwaiti
stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, "Show me how
a Palestinian
picks up his food rations!" So I made the monkey appear to
scavenge on the
ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti
threw coins
and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was not
right; I was an
artist, not a beggar ... I am not even a peasant now."
"How do you feel about all that?" I asked him.
"Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian?
I never hated
the Jews and their Israel ... yes, I suppose I hate them now, or
maybe I pity
them for their stupidity. They can't win. Because we Palestinians
are the Jews
now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or
you to forget.
The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after them ...".
That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I
recognised
little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a
zigzag of
sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people,
waiting,
swatting flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents
had been
replaced by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were
as long, I was
assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At the
United Nations
office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records
were
consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been "taken
away ... very ill."
No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness
now. Outside,
another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust.
And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called "the greatest moral issue
of the age"
refuses to be buried in the dust. For every BBC voice that strains
to equate
occupier with occupied, thief with victim, for every swarm of
emails from
the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the
Israeli
state's commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is
more powerful
now than ever. Documentation of the violent expulsion of
Palestinians in 1948 is
voluminous. Re-examination of the historical record has put paid
to the fable of
heroic David in the Six-Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and his family
were driven
from their home. The alleged threat of Arab leaders to "throw the
Jews into the
sea", used to justify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and since repeated
relentlessly,
is highly questionable.
In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament zealots leaving
Gaza was a fraud.
The building of their "settlements" has accelerated on the West
Bank, along with
the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers from their crops,
children from
their schools, families from each other. We now know that Israel's
destruction
of much of Lebanon last year was pre-planned. As the former C.I.A.
analyst
Kathleen Christison has written, the recent "civil war" in Gaza was
actually a
coup against the elected Hamas-led government, engineered by
Elliott Abrams, the
Zionist who runs U.S. policy on Israel and a convicted felon from
the Iran-Contra
era.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America's crusade as
Israel's. On
16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn
military "aid
package" for Israel, the world's fourth biggest military power, an
air power
greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No
other country on
earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as
Israel. No
other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the
world's tyrannies
comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation
Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing
like it in
U.N. history.
But something is changing. Perhaps last summer's panoramic horror
beamed from
Lebanon on to the world's TV screens provided the catalyst. Or
perhaps cynicism
of Bush and Blair and the incessant use of the inanity, "terror,"
together with
the day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our
lives, has
finally brought the attention of the international community
outside the rogue
states, Britain and the U.S., back to one of its principal sources,
Israel.
I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A full-page
advertisement
in the New York Times had the distinct odour of panic. There have
been many
"friends of Israel" advertisements in the Times, demanding the
usual favours,
rationalising the usual outrages. This one was different. "Boycott
a cure for
cancer?" was its main headline, followed by "Stop drip irrigation
in Africa?
Prevent scientific co-operation between nations?" Who would want
to do such
things? "Some British academics want to boycott Israelis," was the
self-serving
answer. It referred to the University and College Union's (U.C.U.)
inaugural
conference motion in May, calling for discussion within its
branches for a
boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As John Chalcraft of the
London School
of Economics pointed out, "the Israeli academy has long provided
intellectual,
linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for
an occupation
in direct violation of international law [against which] no Israeli
academic
institution has ever taken a public stand".
The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an important
marker has been
passed, reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against
apartheid South
Africa. Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so
has South
African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious
Jewish members of
the liberation struggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led academic
campaign
against Israel's "methodical destruction of [the Palestinian]
education system"
can be translated by those of us who have reported from the
occupied territories
into the arbitrary closure of Palestinian universities, the
harassment and
humiliation of students at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of
Palestinian children on their way to school.
These initiatives have been backed by a British group, Independent
Jewish Voices,
whose 528 signatories include Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike
Leigh and Eric
Hobsbawm. The country's biggest union, Unison, has called for an
"economic,
cultural, academic and sporting boycott" and the right of return
for Palestinian
families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the Commons' international
development
committee has made a similar stand. In April, the membership of
the National
Union of Journalists (N.U.J.) voted for a boycott only to see it
hastily
overturned by the national executive council. In the Republic of
Ireland, the
Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment from
Israeli companies:
a campaign aimed at the European Union, which accounts for two-
thirds of Israel's
exports under an E.U.-Israel Association Agreement. The U.N.
Special Rapporteur
on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights
conditions in the
agreement should be invoked and Israel's trading preferences
suspended.
This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And that such
grave
discussion of a boycott has "gone global" was unforeseen in
official Israel, long
comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great power
sponsorship, and
confident that the mere threat of anti-Semitism would ensure
silence. When the
British lecturers' decision was announced, the U.S. Congress passed
an absurd
resolution describing the U.C.U. as "anti-Semitic." (Eighty
congressmen have gone
on junkets to Israel this summer.)
This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of American
academics has
denied them promotion, even tenure. The late Edward Said kept an
emergency
button in his New York apartment connected to the local police
station; his
offices at Columbia University were once burned down. Following my
2002 film,
"Palestine is Still the Issue," I received death threats and
slanderous abuse,
most of it coming from the U.S. where the film was never shown.
When the BBC's
Independent Panel recently examined the corporation's coverage of
the Middle
East, it was inundated with emails, "many from abroad, mostly from
North
America", said its report. Some individuals "sent multiple
missives, some were
duplicates and there was clear evidence of pressure group
mobilisation." The
panel's conclusion was that BBC reporting of the Palestinian
struggle was not
"full and fair" and "in important respects, presents an incomplete
and in that
sense misleading picture." This was neutralised in BBC press
releases.
The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a single
democratic state,
to which the Palestinian refugees are given the right of return, is
the only
feasible and just solution, and that a sanctions and boycott
campaign is critical
in achieving this. Would the Israeli population be moved by a
worldwide boycott?
Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa's whites were
moved enough to
support an historic change. A boycott of Israeli institutions,
goods and
services, says Pappé, "will not change the [Israeli] position in a
day, but it
will send a clear message that [the premises of Zionism] are racist
and
unacceptable in the 21st century ... They would have to choose."
And so would
the rest of us.
[This article was first published at "The New Statesman."]
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