Jonathan Hoffman : “I read out the last paragraph of the HRC finding. I was shouted down but managed to ask the question. When I had finished asking the question Hickey said that no-one should answer my question – not in the lecture theatre and not on the Panel. It is all in the video on YouTube.”
See the whole article and the link to YouTube here.
BRICUP is touring some boycott celebrity speakers round the country to talk about ‘Israel, the Palestinians and apartheid: the case for sanctions and boycott’. Perhaps somebody could ask Omar Barghouti to kindly explain about Tel Aviv again, for those of us who still don’t understand how he could demand boycott of a really good university, and then go and privilege himself by enrolling there.
Or perhaps we could just give our attention to something better, because meanwhile in the real world Israel has once again brought new meaning to the word ‘apartheid’. A delegation of senior Israeli police officers is visiting Belfast to find out how to provide a respectful service for minorities:
“The mission, which includes nine brigadier generals from various police departments, is part of an educational program that aims to introduce the officers to practical tools for providing egalitarian and respectful policing services to Israel’s Arab citizens.
The program was developed by the Training and Education Department of the Human Resources Division and the Abraham Fund Initiatives.
This program is part of a joint venture between the Israel Police and the Abraham Fund Initiatives aiming to improve relations between the police and the Arab community. The venture was initiated following the October 2000 events and the publication of the Or Commission recommendations.”
That this has gone ahead under the current Israeli government is a tribute to the Abraham Fund and their friends in the Knesset. As well as advocating for Arab citizens with the Israeli right, the Abraham Fund has to make arguments to Arab citizens who want to turn their backs on Jewish ones. One example is a recent move to boycott “Jewish organisations” by Arab citizens of Sakhnin, to which the Abrahan Fund responded:
“Many of Israel’s supporters understand that just as in the past they contributed toward immigration, absorption, infrastructure development, and project renewal, today the issue of integration of Israel’s Arab citizens is an important and urgent national necessity which needs to be advanced to the top of the agenda.”
To precisely this end, the Abraham Fund is having a global online benefit on December the 9th 2009 during which they will present their work and how it is helping Israeli society. Register to join them real time, free.
Bonus link: The Abraham Fund’s Mohammad Darawshe, speaking in London earlier this year.
Opponents of the boycott may like to know that Bricup will be holding the following meeting in Manchester.
Monday 7th December, 7pm
Lecture Theatre A, University Place,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road.
THE CASE FOR SANCTIONS AND BOYCOTT
Speakers:
Ronnie Kasrils
former minister in Nelson Mandela’s ANC government and
anti-Apartheid activist
Bongani Masuku (International Secretary) / George Mahlangu (Campaigns Coordinator) Cosatu – the South African trade union federation
Omar Barghouti
Palestinian Campaign for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions
Chair: Tom Hickey
National Executive Committee of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) and BRICUP
Some days ago I wondered whether a Norwegian university was going to force its employees to boycott Israelis. The answer turned out to be a no from the board, none of whom objected to a proposal to throw out the motion.
“Some of the people in attendance spoke in favor of scrapping the vote,”Alsberg told Haaretz. “The main arguments raised were that Norwegian universities should not [make] their own foreign policies, and that a boycott would be harmful to NTNU.”
According to Alsberg, who collected signatures from over 100 NTNU scholars against the boycott, the move was prevented due to “a combination of factors.” He said these included media attention; opposition to the boycott by the Norwegian Ministry for Higher Education; and petitions, including his own.
But Erez Uriely, director of the Oslo-based Center against Anti-Semitism, said the boycott was prevented largely thanks to Alsberg’s petition.
“Norwegian politicians often take anti-Israeli positions and then renege when this creates an outcry,” he said. “The petition against a boycott of Israel at NTNU is an unusual event which tipped the scale.”
Norway, Israel and the Jews note the disappointment of boycotters and predicts that they will return:
“For anyone in doubt, please observe that Mr.Lysestøl and his comrades are dedicated, hard working people who honestly believe they are engaged in a battle against ultimate evil. They will regroup and recover. If it had not been for the tremendous effort of people from around the globe in general and professor Bjørn Alsgaard* at NTNU in particular, the motion for boycott might have passed.”
Kudos to the academics at Trondheim who spoke out against the boycott by signing Bjørn Alsberg’s* petition.
*Strange mingled references to Bjørn Alsberg/Alsgaard – not sure why.
Here are some boycotters of Israel after a successful campaign to rid Sussex University Student Union’s shelves of all those mounds of Israeli produce which were there before. But what is this? The feet of our international conscience appear to be clad in Nike. Haven’t these people read Naomi Klein from back when she was good?
And here’s a plan, by the Socialist Action-pwned Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to smash Israeli growers and pickers on pretext of justice for Palestinians (who probably don’t want that kind of help).
Anybody who decides to participate in this boycott should understand that they are hurting modestly-remunerated Israeli growers and pickers.
The boycott can’t touch this Israel – the one with the population of 7m which attracts more venture capital than France and Germany combined. The very young country whose economically successful innovation and entrepreneurialism has, in these authors’ assessment, been largely motivated by adversity. The authors pass over it, but I’m guessing they mean the denial of Israel’s right to exist, the terrorism, constant threat of war, and the boycotting of Palestine’s Jews which hardly missed a beat in 1948 when it turned into a boycott of Israel.
They aren’t repeating Naomi Klein’s slanted and made-up doctrine that Israel manufactures adversity in order to profit from it; rather they are confirming the age-old proverb about necessity being the mother of invention.
How can this boycott, an act of aggression, change the international policy – or any policy for that matter – of a country so well equipped to thrive (economically) on adversity?
From an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg with one of the aforementioned authors:
“JG: Go to one final thing, something that struck me when I was reading this book. You have a boycott movement in Europe, but in the U.S., too, you have forces that want to delegitimize Israel. I realized in reading this that it would be quite something to go tell Intel or Google or IBM to divest from Israel.
DS: They’ll never do it. I mean, it’s impossible. What various companies told us is that if they had to shut down operations in India tomorrow, they could survive because it’s basically a lot of outsourcing and a lot of call centers. They said if we had to shut down our operations in Ireland, we could survive. But what one person after another told us is that the one place in the world that would devastating for them to have shut down would be Israel, because they put so much of their mission-critical work and R&D in Israel. The Intel story we tell is amazing, this key chip that was central to Intel taking off was designed and then manufactured in Israel, so it would be devastating to these companies to lose Israel. And one more thing — the most interesting data point on all of this is that European venture capitalists invest more in Israel than they do in any single European economy.
JG: Is that true?
DS: Yes and, to me, that says it all. For all the ranting from Europe about boycotts and attempts at boycotts, that’s not what European capital is doing. In terms of the U.S., this is even more true. I don’t want to oversimplify, but who do think is more important to Barack Obama: The head of J Street or Eric Schmidt at Google? And if Eric Schmidt said that his company would be devastated if Israel came off-line — and we interviewed Schmidt and he talked about the importance of Israel — then I think I know the answer.”
This boycott is blatantly destined to fail – not only in its stated aims of liberating the Palestinians, but in its unstated aims of crippling Israel and ending its existence. So why would somebody persist in turning their back on ordinary Israelis, far from power, with produce to sell? The only plausible reason I can think of is visceral animosity towards Israel.
If you hate the world’s only Jewish state then you’ll get a certain amount of personal satisfaction out of boycotting and calling for boycott. But if you want a real result, have a read of the rest of the Atlantic piece linked above, which tells you all you need to know. Basically, you need to send your pennies to Ahmadinejad and get that Iranian nuke off the ground.
Or if this makes you pause, then how about sending some money to one of the many organisations in Israel trying to bring about an end to hostilities, hold their government to account and protect the rights of Palestinians and Israelis. Gisha, B’Tselem, Machsom Watch. Help OneVoice fund youth leaders in Palestine and Israel. Contact the International Labour Movement and find out how you can strengthen the agreement between Israeli and Palestinian trade union movements. Send some money to Shatil, which supports Israeli social change activists (they need it!) and teaches strategies to grow their networks and stop them burning out. Write to your elected representatives insisting that they maintain efforts to facilitate the parties to the conflict from their self-serving conflict management routine into sincere conflict resolution activity. Don’t allow the Israeli right to marshall existential fear into votes for themselves – reinforce Daniel Gavron’s sense of Israeli self-confidence and vision for peace
Just do something constructive, and relevant. Don’t boycott Israeli herb farmers and their labourers.
Meanwhile I suppose I’d better develop a taste for thyme.
“In an extraordinary series of blog postings, British trade unionists visiting Israel and Palestine have learned that Palestinian workers and their unions are not enthusiastic supporters of the campaign for boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) targetting Israel.
In fact, they were told bluntly that the BDS campaign is bad news for Palestinians.
USDAW National Executive member Mike Dixon wrote:
“There was a discussion about the boycott and it is clear that Palestinians don’t want it – all they want is equal pay and a living.”
The communications director for the Advance union added:
“Listening to people from both communities on the subject of the proposed international trade union boycott, it is evident that all parties oppose this action. In a meeting with the Jerusalem Municipality workers, one view from the Palestinian contingent was that a boycott would be more detrimental to the Arab workforce than any other. The reason for this was that in the event of economic sanctions, it would cause a detrimental impact on the employment levels of their community.”
The entire blog should be required reading for trade unionists in Britain and elsewhere.”
Read it all, and wonder why British boycotting union activists (because theirs is an activist-led boycott, not a membership-led one) are so incredibly attached to the boycott idea. However, since there is a groundswell of support for Palestinians, it would be good to have a better understanding of the kind of support Palestinian trade unionists hope for from their international community of advocates.
HT Ben
If “the Board of Governors of the University of Trondheim and University College of Sør-Trøndelag [were] to declare at their upcoming meeting that Israeli universities and academic institutions cannot be normal partners of any self-respecting Norwegian institution”, they would be committing an act of discrimination against fellow academics on grounds of nationality, without any prospect of affecting the conflict. As employers, they would be intervening in the scholarly work of their employees. I wonder what a trade union would make of that.
Sue Blackwell was the inspiration, it turns out. Israel unites employers and trade unionists – how beautiful is that?
Seriously though, surely these board members will throw it out. Unless, of course, they’re convinced otherwise by an Israeli academic lecturer, most recent of an series of boycotting lecturers, who will visit the institution a couple of days prior to the vote to discuss Israel’s use of antisemitism as a political tool.
(When wasn’t antisemitism a political tool?)
There’s a petition against the boycott from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
If Trondheim’s Rector is building opposition to the boycott on the board, it’s not public.
A piece in the Jerusalem Post.
Here’s some typical support for the boycott containing many inadvertent ironies and ending paradoxically with a call for “freedom from fear”.
Meanwhile OneVoice is starting its universities tour – more on Facebook. These events are very good because in my experience you get to see how principled peace-makers – peacemakers who are out to build something – take the trouble to respond to boycotters (among other polarising tendencies) with patient but firm refutation, for the sake of peace in their own homelands.
Update: Should have said at the time: this is typical of what anti-Israel boycott campaigns are like – Jews under scrutiny.
Update 2: Another Observer, in the comments below, says:
“The old SUS laws (stop and serach) were universal (i.e. they applied to everyone), but, when examined in practice, was only being used by the Police against the Black population. In other words, whilst all the population of the UK could have been pulled under the laws, the vast, vast, majority of those affected were Black, In that instance, as in the case of the boycott, that “something more” was and is racism. As such, it was part of the anti-racist agenda to end the SUS laws on the gorunds of their racist application (as well as the general abuse of civil liberties).
Nowadays, of course, many, but not all, of the anti-racists openly support what is, in effect, and in practice, a policy of racist exclusion against Jews.”
Update 3: Ben Cohen at Z-Word blog has examined the Trondheim boycott campaign in more detail. At Harry’s Place Gene reminds us: “Trondheim, the city where the NTNU is located, is in the county of Sør-Trøndelag. The county council voted in 2005 to boycott Israel.”
EXETER! Monday, 9th November, Queens Building Lecture Theatre 2, 6.30pm
SOUTHAMPTON! Tuesday, 10th November, Nightingale Lecture Theatre, 6pm
MANCHESTER! Wednesday, 11th November, Student Union Common Room/Club Academy, 1pm
BIRMINGHAM! Thursday, 12th November, The Arts Building, 5pm
SURREY! Monday, 16th November, School of Management Main Lecture Theatre, 5.15pm
LONDON! (LSE, UCL, SOAS, KING’S COLLEGE) Tuesday, 17th November, University of London Union, Malet Street, WC1E 7HY, 5pm
OXFORD! Wednesday, 18th November, Catholic Chaplaincy, 8pm
GLASGOW! Thursday, 19th November, the Debates Chamber, 6pm
Just a sample from the Web.
In Ha’aretz, Bradley Burston has Yom Kippur and the new film Ajami, the Israel-Palestine conflict in microcosm jointly directed by Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, on his mind:
“This week we observe the ancient boycott known as Yom Kippur. We ask forgiveness for sins of a hardened heart, of judgmentalism and hatred, of a willful deceit of others and an unknowing deceit of ourselves.
For the sin of demanding that only others search their souls and repent. And for the sin of finding others guilty and passing sentence, without having the courage to allow the accused to face their accusers.
To the BDS people and their spiritual kin in Toronto, let me say just this: When you criticize Israel, for God’s sake – if only for the Palestinians’ sake – tell the truth. The whole truth. Not just your carefully composed cardboard cutout, the cartoon of the Jewish villain and the Arab martyr. And not from a distance.
Come here. Do the work. Take the risks. Put your slogans and your posters and your buttons and signs and t-shirts and open letters to the test. Put your life where your sloganeering is.
You despise Israel, we get that. You dismiss the capacity of Israelis for good faith and humanism. We get that too. But if you talk struggle in Toronto and San Francisco and Irvine, it’s no more than talk, and wasted breath at that. You can boycott away, all you like. In the end, you’re only drumming up more business for Israel.
Alternatively, as a first step, you might go see Ajami. If it’s hard as hell for you to understand, then you’ve made a beginning. See it again.
It’s Yom Kippur. It’s time to get rattled. Just as in the cartoons, when you run off a cliff, it’s only when you look down, that you begin to plummet.
Look down. We’re all falling here. We’re all trying to keep our families and friends, our children and our elders, from the cliff. Until you understand that, you understand nothing.”
The Forward had a recent editorial on the boycott campaign against Israel.
“While the stated goal of the BDS movement is to isolate and discomfit Israel and support human rights for the Palestinians, it is clear that many followers are not trying to change Israel. They’re trying to eliminate it.
The argument that pushing Israel into economic, academic and cultural purgatory will somehow persuade its government to dismantle the security barrier, evacuate the West Bank and embrace its sworn enemy is misguided. And that’s being generous. Whatever the flaws of the Netanyahu administration — and there are many — it is clearly responding to (and, true, at times stoking) real fears and anxieties among the Israeli population.
The boycotters are either grossly ignorant about the Israeli psyche, or don’t care to understand it. The attempt to isolate and delegitimize “is counter productive because of the nature of who we are. It confirms our worst fears,” says the noted South African journalist Benjamin Pogrund, who now lives in Israel and writes extensively about boycotts, having lived through the apartheid era in his native land.”
From last week’s The Forward, a piece on how the boycott is taking hold.
“The BDS movement is highly decentralized, with each group in the coalition allowed to choose its own targets as it sees fit. It has no articulated political vision. such as a one- or two-state solution to the conflict. The principles that guide the movement — as set out in a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions issued in June 2005 by a wide group of Palestinian civil society organizations — demand instead that Israel adhere to international and human rights law. The amorphous structure and broad goals appear to be responsible for many of the group’s appeal. But some who watch this movement closely contend that, in the end, even a “targetted” boycott is ultimately aimed at all of Israel.
The actual monetary impact of the movement is often unclear. But for activists seeking as much to affect Israel’s image in the public’s mind, money is not always the bottom line.”
And in response, an expression of Jewish solidarity: buycott.
