"Boycott Israeli Goods" National Day of Action
TheWallMustFall | 27.06.2006 21:25 | Campaign against Carmel-Agrexco | Anti-militarism | Palestine | World
As the British government continues to boycott Palestinians by refusing to recognise their democratically elected government, by joining the EU in a blockade of aid and by entertaining Israeli leader Ehud Olmert in London whilst bombs rain down on Gaza, activists around the country have answered a call from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and the Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign (BIG) to join a day of boycott action against Israeli apartheid.
During the day of action on Saturday, 24th June, pickets and demonstrations took place at stores selling Israeli products across the UK: in Liverpool, Brighton, Camden, Hackney, Islington, Southport, Cardiff, Darlington, Brixton, Oxford, Nottingham, Birmingham, Exeter, Halifax, Brent, Durham, Sheffield and Manchester. Concerned individuals took part in creative actions to persuade the public not to buy Israeli goods and demand that retailers do not stock them.
In Brighton campaigners picketed Waitrose calling on the corporation to adhere to its ethical buying policy by not buying goods from apartheid Israel. Another picket was held outside a highstreet store selling CATerpillar goods, who have a contract with the Israeli military for the supply of military bulldozers used in illegal demolitions of Palestinian homes. In the West Midlands activists drove a replica CATerpillar bulldozer through the high street as a creative way of highlighting the way in which CATerpillar fuels the occupation. Across London activist picketed supermarkets selling Israeli goods and delivered letters to store managers informing them of the boycott.
The actions today were part of a concerted campaign calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions against apartheid Israel. Prevous actions and campaigns include:
Agrexco: Corporate Complicity in the Ethnic Cleansing of the Jordan Valley | Letting Apartheid Bloom | The Uxbridge Seven: Day One | Day Two | Seven Blockaders Acquitted
Caterpillar: Caterpillar Manchester Protest 2005 | Anniversary of Rachel Corries' Death | Film: Caterkiller Shut Down | Anti Caterpillar Motorcade | Rhythms of Resistance Anti Cat Shoes Protest | Caterpillar Trade Fair Action | Caterkiller Awarded Housewrecker of the Year | ESF Florence Action
Supermarket protests: Boycott Van | Marks and Spencers Stencilled | Repression of M&S Protesters
Academic boycott: AUT Boycott | NAFTHE Boycott | CUPE Ontario | COSATU (South Africa).
Sporting boycott campaigns include Stop Arsenal supporting Israeli Apartheid | Scotland Pitch Invasions | Free Jerusalem-Stop Connex and Alstrom.
PSC and BIG aim to build a mass campaign similar to that of a boycott of apartheid South Africa. The campaign focuses on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Apartheid Israel. In addition to its brutal occupation and theft of Palestinian land, the Israeli state also operates an entrenched system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian civilians which is among the reasons many South African activists label it an apartheid state.
The boycott is aimed at showing that Israeli military actions do not happen in a vacuum and that the Israeli state, corporations and institutions will be penalised by civil society for supporting the occupation of Palestine. PSC and BIG are also calling for divestment from Israel, Ariel Sharon once said that Israel could not carry on its policies without support from foreign corporations.
The boycott is not an attack on Israeli civil society but an attempt to break the isolation of groups in Israel and Palestine who oppose the occupation.
The PSC and the BIG campaigns are responding to calls from Palestine and Israel for a boycott of Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights. The call for an international boycott has been signed by 180 civil society organisations in Palestine. Large numbers of trade unions in Palestine spoke out in support of CUPE, a Canadian trade union who had passed a motion calling for a boycott. The Alternative Information Center, a joint Palestinian-Israeli project based in Jerusalem and Beit Sahour, recently published a pamphlet in support of the boycott. Similarly, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) has recently joined the international call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
In 2004, activists supporting the boycott occupied a factory belonging to Caterpillar, a company supplying Israel with military bulldozers for the destruction of Palestinian civilian homes. Later that year a group of activists shut down Agrexco Ltd.s plant in Middlesex by erecting a blockade around their depot. The company is responsible for exporting 75% of fresh produce grown in illegal Israeli settlements. Last month NAFTHE, a union of university lecturers, voted to support an academic boycott of Israeli universities and academic institutions who supported the occupation. There is small but real support in Israel for the academic boycott. Last month an Israeli professor spoke out in support of the boycott.
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, West Bank in 1967 and has been rapidly annexing this occupied territory ever since. The Israeli state has moved 380 000 Jewish settlers into the West Bank as part of this policy of colonisation. The apartheid wall continues to be built, annexing huge swathes of Palestinian land and ghettoising whole communities, despite the advisory ruling of the International Court of Justice in the Hague in 2004. Fifty-five illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank will be on the Israeli side of the wall separated from the West Bank.
Since 2000, Israel has demolished 628 Palestinian houses, home to 3,983 people, in acts of collective punishment. These demolitions constitute a war crime. 3,808 Palestinians have been killed as a direct result of Israeli military actions and 29,456 injured during the current upraising which began in September 2000 (all figures from B'tselem and Palestine Red Crescent Society).
TheWallMustFall
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Boycotts are for Fools
28.06.2006 04:31
Presbyterian Church prepares to overturn Israel boycott motion
Submitted by gehrig on June 12, 2006 - 7:07am.
A group of Presbyterian activists is ramping up efforts to reverse their church's policy advocating divestment from Israel, setting the stage for a showdown over the issue at next week's General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
When the more than 500 national delegates convene June 15-22 in Birmingham, Ala., for the 217th General Assembly, they will be presented with a trove of proposals — known as "overtures" — calling on the church to rescind its current divestment policy. That policy, enacted two years ago at the last General Assembly, called on the church to begin "phased selective divestment in multinational corporations in Israel."
A firestorm of debate has raged within the church's 173 presbyteries — regional governing bodies that submit overtures to the General Assembly — since the divestment measure first passed in July 2004. The initial vote came as a surprise to many within the church itself and shocked Jewish communal leaders, who feared that it would prompt other mainline Protestant churches to follow suit. But Jewish leaders' concerns were allayed the following year, when the Episcopal Church of America rejected a similar divestment proposal.
A total of 29 overtures on the subject of peace in the Middle East have been submitted in advance of this year's Presbyterian General Assembly. Thirteen of the resolutions call for the boycott to be rescinded wholesale, and a handful call to affirm the existing policy; others occupy a middle ground.
"We would like to see a complete rejection of the negative policy of divestment and replace that with a policy of engagement with both Israelis and Palestinians who truly are looking for peace," said Gary Green, a Presbyterian Church elder who sits on the board of directors of the Committee To End Divestment Now, a grass-roots group of pastors and elders that was formed in 2005 to reverse the divestment policy.
Ali ibn Sharmootah
dazzlingly effective
28.06.2006 22:16
But, the absolute and total ineffectiveness of your protests set aside, you looked quite dashing, didn't you, as long as nobody dares raise the pesky question of ineffectiveness.
gehrig
Arabs Claim to Have Launched WMD Against Jews
29.06.2006 02:13
The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the claim by the spokesman from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement.
The group had recently claimed to possess about 20 biological warheads for the makeshift rockets commonly fired from Gaza at Israeli towns. This was the first time the group had claimed firing such a rocket.
“The al-Aqsa Brigades have fired one rocket with a chemical warhead” at southern Israel, Abu Qusai, a spokesman for the group, said in Gaza.
kelly
A more balanced view of things?
29.06.2006 07:47
The west was unwise and unjust in allowing them to steal Palastinian land in the first place, but can you blame the Jew for seizing this opportunity? Of course not. The holocaust is all too quickly forgotten by anarchists and those with a perverse and twisted view of the USA.
The jewish people are a free people - a democracy and they have absolutely no ability to meet the palastinian authority, even half way. How can you possibly deal with a total anarchist state!?. They want Isreal off the face of the map. Isreal is trying to survive in a vast sea of fanatical Islam. Islam is all the freedom loving peoples greatest threat, make no mistake!
Charles Hamilton
e-mail:
charleshamilt77@hotmail.com
Homepage:
http://n/a
The new Nazis that glorify Israeli crimes against humanity
29.06.2006 23:46
Here we have a 'person' using Adolf Hitler's own favourite techniques in order glorify the sickening crimes of Israel.
1) Hitler rose to power by CONSTANTLY refering to past abuses and 'holocausts' that he said had occured against 'his' people. He stated that these past 'crimes' gave nazis the moral right to use any and all means to achieve their victories in the future.
2) Hitler stated that nazi victory in the lands they sought for new 'homelands' would end in DEMOCRACY, because the natives of those lands would be either exterminated or made slaves, allowing the new German occupants the happy ability to successfully vote for their own governments in the future.
There in NO DEMOCRACY IN ISRAEL while those humans raped, tortured, and murdered from their lands are excluded, and those people residing in Israel of the racist basis of merely being 'jewish' (ie., no birth connect to the land) are allowed a vote.
QUOTE
Islam is all the freedom loving peoples greatest threat, make no mistake!
UNQUOTE
I suppose the Indymedia UK censors missed the last thought from this racist psychopath. I hope racists are not exploiting some loophole, like comments being examined only on the content of their first few lines? Look at how this racist begins his comment. Did he KNOW that by doing this, his comment would slip through?
It can't be coincidence that all 4 current comments are clearly racist in intent, even if some of them are a little more subtle than the vile idiot that I discussed above. Indymedia UK should ask itself why so many racist trolls post comments, when most decent people are clearly put off from commenting?
twilight
The truth lies in history
30.06.2006 02:47
Ali ibn Sharmootah
Both Ways?
30.06.2006 15:34
The Arab dispute with Israel is about the independence of the Arab areas of Palestine to be independent of Israel - even as Israel wishes to be independent of the Arab World - & the precise route of borders is subordinate to those principal questions.
To mislabel Israel for keeping out (hostile) people who wish to be independent of her - or so they claim - which is hardly a breech of anybody's civil liberties, confuses issues and sows dragons' teeth of resentments that will make peace making more difficult.
The internal problems of Israel and its minorities would be easy to solve if there were peace with its neighbours - and need never have swollen had the Arab parties agreed to recognise Israel and sign a peace between 1947 and 67. The proof is everytime it is suggested that certain border areas be transferred to the prospective Arab State in Palestine, the relevant Arab town or part of Jerusalem objects. Whatever Israel's faults, in practice the management of Arab territory by Arab governments is a lot worse than anything Israel does or did.
Yours FDA
Frank Adam