Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression – Overview

No Israeli Funding of the Arts

IJAN is centrally involved in the No Israeli Funding of the Arts initiative – we want everyone we are in touch with to know that the UKJFF (UK Jewish Film Festival) is taking place this year in cinemas in Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester and Nottingham, between 6-23 November. We have written to all the cinemas – see our letter below – and we are asking that you contact your local (or even a distant) cinema by phone, email website, leaflet or street protest, and let them know what you think of them hosting an Israeli-funded event. (All cinema contact details are at end of this email.) Call or write to the local press or call-in radio to tell them what you think of their not caring for Jewish films, only for the Israeli rebranding. (See below.) Check the UKJFF calendar to find when each cinema is hosting UKJFF films. The opening gala night is at the London BFI on 6 November – we are planning to protest their collaboration with the slaughterers of the Gazan people.

Statement of Solidarity on Land Day 2012 and the Global March on Jerusalem

Yesterday, March 30th, was land day, a day on which we remember the six Palestinian martyrs murdered by the Israeli forces in 1976, while protesting peacefully against the confiscation of land and the Judaization of the Galilee.

Land day is a signpost in the struggle against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that happens every day. Since 1976, over 50 Palestinians protesters were killed on Land Day alone. The confiscation of land and the effort to drive Palestinians out of Palestine and out of their homes and neighborhoods continue very day, and are particularly intense in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, Palestinians suffer brutal oppression, their homes are subject to demolitions and confiscation, their right to live in their city is denied and the apartheid wall strangles their neighborhoods. The wall is another way in which Israel assaults life every day.

The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network salutes the courage and steadfastness of the Palestinian people and stands in solidarity with the grassroots Palestinian struggle for land, liberty and selfdetermination. Yesterday was a day of unity, protest, anger, and resistance throughout Palestine. We stand in solidarity with the protesters. We condemn utterly the illegitimate use force by the Israeli army and police against unarmed protesters.

It is a Palestinian Call: A response to Finkelstein and Beinart on BDS

In response to the recent debate regarding the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, we offer a view from a Jewish anti-Zionist perspective. We welcome debate as a part of the growth and success of an international movement deploying BDS against Israeli occupation, apartheid and colonization.

A claim has been made byDr. Norman Finkelstein (known for his condemnation of Israel’s use of the Holocaust to justify and perpetuate Israeli atrocities both historicand current) that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign will not win over public opinion towards support of Palestinian rights because its goals imply destruction of Israel. This claim contradicts his own eloquent evocation of humanitarian and human rights law – which is precisely the basis for the Palestinian call for BDS.

South Africa was not ‘destroyed’ or ‘dismantled’ when apartheid ended; rather, the illegal nature of the state was transformed. BDS does not call for the ‘destruction of Israel’; it calls for the enforcement of international law.

Meanwhile, a call has been made toZionist American Jews to implement a “Zionist BDS” that isolates and condemns Israeli expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in order to “save Israel.” The Zionist “left” argues that Israel is a “flawed but genuine democracy” with an “ethnically-based non-democracy” beyond the green line (the land occupied in 1967), and that the latter threatens the existence of the former.