AFP VIDEO: BDS explained – DID YOU KNOW?

AFP VIDEO: BDS explained – DID YOU KNOW?

 May 21, 2011

BDS explained – DID YOU KNOW? updated 12May11 from Sonja Karkar on Vimeo.

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.

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Boycott, divestment and sanctions in Australia, five years on

Sonja Karkar, The Electronic Intifada, 9 July 2010 River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Australians in Melbourne call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel in the wake of Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. (Takver)

It is five years since Palestinian civil society first made the call for a global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against the apartheid state of Israel. At the time, introducing such action in Australia seemed impossible when the public barely knew anything about the Palestinian struggle for justice and freedom. Education had to be a priority if there was to be any overturning of the long-accepted and indulged Zionist narrative.

A glimmer of hope emerged when a number of prominent Australians and others signed on to two significant nationwide newspaper advertisement campaigns run by Australian advocacy groups against a highly unorthodox motion taken in parliament to congratulate Israel on its 60 years of independence in 2008. The Labor government chose to ignore a strongly-supported request by church leaders, former ministers, judges and various other respected figures, to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians. Nevertheless the people had spoken and by the time Israel had attacked Gaza at the end of that year, Australians were again signing on to another national newspaper campaign in the strongest outcry yet seen against Israel's unfolding slaughter of civilians.

While the newspaper campaigns are not boycotts, they have, in fact, galvanized more and more support for the Palestinian struggle amongst mainstream Australians. People are willing to donate, and even more importantly, they are no longer afraid to have their names openly associated with Palestine.

With a supine government and a media unwilling to investigate Israel's criminal acts, getting the message out to the public has been a real challenge. However, Australian unions look like they might be changing that. The Western Australian members of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA-WA) were the first to take action in response to Israel's three-week bombardment of Gaza in winter 2008-09 by refusing to handle goods arriving from or going to Israel. This year, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) joined the international boycott of Israel, and when the Freedom Flotilla was attacked on 31 May, some 11 trade unions and regional trade councils followed the CFMEU in quick succession.

The resolutions passed by the trade unions to boycott Israeli goods from Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank coincided with the tour of well-known Palestinian advocate Diana Buttu, whose visit was sponsored by six large Australian unions to speak precisely on boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and the apartheid conditions faced by Palestinians, not only under Israeli occupation but also in Israel itself.

Buttu's powerful presentations left no one in any doubt as to the urgency of implementing BDS across the board. In the last 18 months, activists have targeted Connex (a subsidiary of the French transportation giant Veolia which is involved in the building a light rail in occupied East Jerusalem), Israeli-owned Max Brenner chocolates, the Israeli-sponsored Melbourne International Film Festival, and the visits of the Jerusalem Quartet and Israeli tennis player Shaher Peer. But the recent union resolutions supporting the boycott of Israel will give a significant boost to the BDS movement.

However, much education still needs to be done. Australians for Palestine held an Apartheid Forum in Melbourne earlier in the year which was followed by another on "Apartheid and Boycotts" that included Diana Buttu, another eminent Palestinian, Professor Saree Makdisi and Jewish academic Dr. Ned Curthoys, who initiated the academic and cultural boycott of Israel in Australia with his father, Professor John Docker. And that is just the beginning. More information sessions are being organized around the country by many different groups, while a monthly display targeting the local Caterpillar dealership in Western Australia has already played its part in alerting the public to the use of Caterpillar bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes.

Australia is still a long way off from the effective boycott strategies being implemented in the UK, Europe and the US, which includes an increasing number of divestments from Israeli companies by churches, municipal councils, colleges, unions, banks and pension funds and some countries are calling for sanctions on arms trade with Israel. Certainly, the Australian government is most unlikely to impose sanctions regardless of which political party takes over in the coming elections.

The power lies with activists, unionists and people of conscience to turn these first steps into a dynamic boycott movement much like what is already sweeping the world. The catastrophe facing the Palestinians demands that we give BDS our best shot, and indeed, history is on our side.

Sonja Karkar is the founder and president of Women for Palestine and one of the founders and co-convener of Australians for Palestine in Melbourne, Australia. She is also the editor of www.australiansforpalestine.com and contributes articles on Palestine regularly to various publications. She can be contacted at sonjakarkar A T womenforpalestine D O T org.

Talking Palestine to power

Sonja Karkar, The Electronic Intifada, 12 April 2010

Israel claims exceptionalism no matter how extreme its crimes. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

Today, there is no excuse for not knowing the truth about Palestine, especially what is happening in Gaza. Even taking into account the disinformation spread in mainstream media, there are enough glimpses one gets of a ravaged Gaza and a brutalized people that should compel us to ask questions.

There are enoughwebsites and blogs easily available for anyone to learn more, even if it requires sifting through and evaluating the available information. Certainly, the alarm bells should be ringing when our political leaders declare undying fealty to Israel or cavalierly wear it as a badge of honor, despite the documented reports of Israel's war crimes by human rights groups and official enquiries.

But the world lacks courage from government leaders, acquiescent mainstream media, nongovernmental organizations dependent on government support, academics looking for tenure and populations too long fed on a diet of Zionist myths. People are terrified of being labelled anti-Semitic, a mendacious charge against anyone criticizing Israel. Palestinians too, afraid of being further shunned and disadvantaged in countries that give them refuge, so often remain silent. Not only do people fear repercussions, but speaking the truth or even just hearing it has a way of taking people out of their comfort zones. They fear their troubled consciences may require them to act and so they bury their heads deeper into the sand where they hope even the sounds of silence might be extinguished.

This then is the challenge for advocates the world over. How does one talk Palestine to power if one cannot even talk Palestine to the people who are in fear of the powerful?

In the face of media saturation with Zionist viewpoints and the new "Brand Israel" campaigns, many wanting to advocate for Palestine might feel defeated, but time and again we see that the power of one can be enormously effective.

The great scholar and public intellectual Edward Said showed more than anyone else that individuals can make a difference in the public defense of Palestine. He particularly saw the intellectual's voice as having "resonance."

But one does not need to be an intellectual. Said's words can just as aptly apply to any one of us. He said avoidance was "reprehensible" and in his 1994 book Representations of the Intellectual, described it as "that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming too controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is ... to remain within the responsible mainstream ... ."

In 1993 when almost everyone else thought the handshakes at the White House steps would seal the negotiated Oslo accords and at long last give the Palestinians their freedom and bring peace to the region, Edward Said saw that these accords would merely provide the cover for Israel to pursue its colonial expansionism and consolidate its occupation of Palestine. However, he knew to criticize Oslo meant in effect taking a position against "hope" and "peace." His decision to do so flew in the face of the Palestinian revolutionary leadership that had bartered for statehood.

Although Said was denounced for his views, he was not prepared to buy into the deception that he knew would leave the Palestinians with neither hope nor peace. And just as he predicted, each fruitless year of peacemaking finally exposed the horrible reality of Oslo as Palestinians found themselves the victims of Israel's matrix of control, a term first used to describe the situation by Israeli professor Jeff Halper in 1999. And this domination of one people over another without any intention of addressing the injustices against the Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homeland, has undeniably reduced Israel to an apartheid state.

The Palestinians have nothing left worth calling a state and they are facing an existential threat on all fronts. Yet, some intellectuals are still talking about a two-state solution in lock step with politicians, a mantra that is repeated uncritically, even mendaciously, in the mainstream media.

This pandering to an idea for decades has been undermined by the furious sounds of drills and hammers reverberating in illegal settlements throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the catastrophic societal ruptures engineered in Gaza. Now those sounds are muffled by the rhetoric of "economic peace," "institution-building," "democracy," "internal security" and "statehood." They are words that must be challenged at every opportunity, for they are not mere words, but dangerous concepts when isolated from truth on the ground.

It is no use talking about "economic peace" when industrial estates built for Palestinian workers are intended to provide Israel with slave labor and cheap goods. It is useless to support "institution-building" when Israel continues to undermine and obstruct those programs already struggling to service Palestinian society. It is a lie to speak of "democracy" when fair elections in 2006 had Israel and the "international community" denying Hamas the right to govern. It is a charade to accept "internal security" when arming and training Palestinians to police their own people covers for Israel's and America's divide-and-conquer scheme. It is hollow to speak of "statehood" when Israel keeps stealing land and building illegal settlements that deprive the Palestinians of their homes and livelihoods while herding them into isolated and walled-in ghettoes.

Edward Said was proven right. Now, it is our turn to speak the truth and act fearlessly, regardless of the censure we are likely to encounter. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is believed to have said that truth passes through three stages: "first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Today, we are at the third stage: the 11 million Palestinians living under occupation, apartheid and as stateless refugees are the living truth. That is Israel's Achilles' heel.

The Palestinians are no longer the humble shepherds and farmers that Zionist forces terrorized into fleeing to make way for the Jewish State of Israel. A new generation wants justice and it is demanding it eloquently, nonviolently and strategically. Their message: no normal relations with Israel while it oppresses Palestinians, denies their rights and violates international law. And boycott, divestment and sanctions have to be legitimate tools for challenging a state that claims exceptionalism no matter how extreme and criminal its actions.

The temptation of course is always to opt for the path of least resistance. Therefore, we must appeal to the individual, not even to sacrifice for others, but to recognize that no matter where we live in this global village, we are all vulnerable if we do not stand up for universal human rights and uphold the principles and application of international law.

Despite his own Zionist affiliations and loyalty to Israel, Justice Richard Goldstone saw the danger of tailoring his UN-backed report on war crimes in Gaza to exonerate Israel. He had the decency and courage to put the rule of law and humanity ahead of the savage condemnation he knew would come from talking truth to power.

The same can be said of Richard Falk, the Jewish professor emeritus from Princeton University and UN special rapporteur in the occupied Palestinian territories, who was denied entry into Israel because he described Israel's siege on Gaza as a "Holocaust in the making" ("Israel deports American academic," Guardian, 15 December 2008). Israel's treatment was insulting enough, but now shamefully, the Palestinian Authority has asked the Human Rights Council to "postpone" his report on Gaza and, as Nadia Hijab reported, is asking him to resign ("PA's betrayal of human rights defenders the unkindest cut," Nadia Hijab, 14 March 2010).

These are honorable men, but we too can stand on principle in smaller ways, whether that is refusing to buy Israeli goods at our local store, boycotting an Israeli-government sponsored event or exposing and protesting the collusion between governments and corporations with Israel. That is what it means to become part of a worldwide civil movement that will do what our leaders will not: pressure Israel to dismantle the matrix of control on Palestine and make reparations for the decades of injustices it has perpetrated against its people.

It is indeed possible for all of us to "squeeze out of reality some of its potentialities," the reality that University of Melbourne Professor Ghassan Hage has said is found in those utopic moments that come from challenging our own thoughts, fears and biases. In that space lies the untapped power we seek, to speak the truth without fear or favor. In that space lies the potential for political change. In that space, there will always be hope for Palestine.

A version of this essay was originally published on the website of Labour Friends of Palestine & the Middle East (UK)

Sonja Karkar is the founder and president of Women for Palestine and one of the founders and co-convener of Australians for Palestine in Melbourne, Australia. She is also the editor of www.australiansforpalestine.com and contributes articles on Palestine regularly to various publications. She can be contacted at sonjakarkar A T womenforpalestine D O T org.

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Uprooted Palestinian