IJAN Spain provided on going support over the last severalmonths to the launching of a Spanish BDS website found at www.boicotisrael.net.

Early in May, a group of activists and lawyers met in Edinburgh, Scotland.  The goal of the meeting was the developmentand international coordination of campaigns against the Jewish National Fund(JNF).  The conference was co-sponsoredby four groups - the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the PalestinianBoycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (Palestine), the ScottishPSC and Habitat International Coalition. Several such campaigns were already in existence in variouscountries. 

The Stop the JNFcampaign will expose the JNF's anti-charitable history of political andfinancial support and military intelligence for the ethnic cleansing ofPalestine, building parks and forests to hide villages destroyedin 1948 and 1967, as well as its currentprojects, including land and water theft from Bedouin communities in the Negev,and illegally acquiring lands and houses in occupied Jerusalem through itsprivate subsidiary Hemnuta.

To read the report in Dutch or French, click on "read more" and then scroll to the bottom of the full English report.

Inaddition to the organizing of the Assembly, IJAN, along with the U.S.Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), was a member of the US Social Forum NationalPlanning Committee (NPC). At the US Social Forum (which the Assembly preceeded),IJAN was a part of many historic and revolutionary moments. IJAN supported andparticipated in presenting multiple of the 25+ workshops that made up thePalestine Track and 2 Palestine-centric People’s Movement Assemblies (PMAs). As part ofUnited Against Racism (UAR), IJAN also supported the process of more than sixanti-imperialist, community of color PMAs coming together to publicly declaretheir commitment to joint struggle. 

IJAN organized a workshop on Unlearning Zionism to a full house.There were many participants who engaged respectfully and shared that theworkshop was transformative for them and expressed interest in participating inIJAN and related campaigns. Others reflected less then useful tendencies in themovement—those who bring their anti-Semitism to the Palestine solidarity andanti-Zionist movements, suggesting that Jewish organizing against Zionism ispart of Jewish power and conspiracies; soft Zionists who insist on taking spaceto question the validity of the colonial history that was presented. Overall,we are committed to continuing to offer this workshop across the United Statesfor those interested in struggling with Zionism as a form of racism andimperialism.   

IJAN,as a USSF NPC member, was also a part of discussions and process that led tothe decision to cancel the workshop by an overtly Zionist workshop attemptingto ‘pinkwash’ Israel. This ‘pinkwashing’ was an attempt to present this Zionistorganization as speaking for queers of the Middle East while having no actualconnection to these queer communities and only using the guise of ‘queerliberation’ as another attempt to further the Zionist agenda.  Our hope isthat this situation will allow us to grow and strengthen how we can supportincreasingly effective responses to future attempts by Zionist organizations todivide and infiltrate our movement. Part of our work is to build joint struggleacross our social movements in the United Statessuch that Zionism is understood as a form of racism and the Palestinianstruggle is understood as central to our goals for justice in the US.