Let us not mourn the 'Butcher of Beirut'

For every leader such as Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu who are praising the life of Ariel Sharon, there are countless ordinary people for whom his name is synonymous with ruthless, brutal anti-Palestinian policies.

The story of Sharon, who died on Saturday aged 85, was in many ways, the story of the state of Israel itself. During the British Mandate, Sharon was a member of the paramilitary Haganah group along with other Israeli leaders to come, including Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon.

The Haganah was instrumental in the 1948 catastrophe, or Nakba, which forced a million Palestinians into refugee camps. It was later re-packaged as an “underground resistance movement” when in fact it carried out a terror programme. It was aimed at both the British and the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine, as Abdel Bari Atwan has noted.

After the Haganah was integrated into the Israel Defence Forces, Sharon headed up its infamous Unit 101, which instigated a rule of terror against Palestinian villagers. In 1953 Sharon led a massacre of 69 Palestinian civilians in the village of Qibya.

During the 1960s when the Palestine Liberation Organisation emerged as a major force, he viewed its leader Yasser Arafat as his nemesis and continued on his mission to destroy any Arab opposition to the state of Israel.

He sent bulldozers into the Gaza strip, uprooting 16,000 people. Hundreds were executed and hundreds more deported. But it was Sharon’s role as defence minister under prime minister Menachem Begin that saw him commit the greatest atrocity of his career.

Expelled from Jordan, thousands of Palestinian refugees and their PLO leadership lived in south Lebanon where they had set up a mini-state. Sharon ordered the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and a massive bombardment of Beirut in which 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lost their lives.

Sharon now masterminded the encirclement of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, fully aware that the fascist Lebanese Phalangist movement would massacre their residents. Some 3,500 Palestinians were slaughtered. For some, Sharon was henceforth known as the “Butcher of Beirut”.

 A year later, amidst international outrage, an Israeli tribunal set up investigate the crime found him “indirectly” guilty of being responsible for the massacre and he was forced to resign his post.

But the words “indirectly” were a whitewash since during the Phalangist attack, BBC monitors picked up an IDF Radio broadcast which said: "The intention is that the IDF will not operate tonight to purge the areas of Sabra and Shatila and the nearby refugee camps. It was decided to entrust the Phalange with the mission to carry out these purging operations."

It would have been impossible for the IDF leaders not to have become aware quickly that the intended “purge” of a small part of Beirut had turned into an indiscriminate massacre. It is documented that the IDF fired flares to help the Phalangists identify their targets.

Sharon was also responsible for assassinations by Israeli security organisation Shin Bet of Palestinian leaders, which he termed Israel’s "continuing war of independence".

By 1996, he had managed to rehabilitate himself, becoming foreign minister under Benjamin Netanyahu. He was elected as prime minister in 1999 and made a provocative visit to the Al Aqsa mosque in occupied Jerusalem, sparking the second Intifada of 2000.

Sharon never disguised his desire to see Arafat dead. He was responsible for surrounding Arafat's compound in Ramallah with Israeli armour. As we know, the PLO leader later died in suspicious circumstances, with plutonium poisoning a strong possibility.

Sharon performed a surprising U-turn and pulled Israeli troops out of Gaza, But rather than any “peace making”, his vision was, as one Palestinian writer notes, of a “total surrender on the Palestinian side and its submission to the dictates of a militarily stronger Israel”.  It thus has the effect of making real peace impossible by perpetuating the crimes of past occupation.

Occupied Palestinian land is now criss-crossed with Jewish settlers – over 350,000 in the West Bank while another 300,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem. The Zionist dream of a Greater Israel has become a Palestinian nightmare. Along with the Palestinians, we do not mourn Sharon’s passing.  

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Palestinians start campaign for one state for all citizens

Momentum for a one-state solution for Palestine is building up just as the Israeli state is destroying even a remote chance of success for any Saudi-US Arab peace plan.

Last week, Palestinians marked the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. It was also the day chosen by 22 senior Palestinian figures to announce “a popular movement project for a single democratic state in historic Palestine”.

Those calling for the creation of one democratic country between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan were leading members of Fatah, the movement originally led by Palestine Liberation Organisation founder Yasser Arafat.

Their document, issued after a meeting held in the town of El Bireh in the West Bank, was the result of a two-year discussion. It declared that “the racist Israeli policy of separation and segregation has made the two-state solution ‏(based on pre-1967 borders‏) unrealistic”. Therefore, the most desirable option” left for the Palestinian people and the one that will allow the right of return is, they say:  

“[A] democratic state for all its citizens, which will be based on a democratic constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and will guarantee freedom and equal rights, without discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, skin colour, language, nationality, political opinion, social origin and place of birth.”

Professor Uri Davis, from Al Quds university’s Israel studies department, explained that the concept for such a state was still under discussion, but that he personally was in favour of one state for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The announcement came only a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated Route 20, a new highway connecting Jewish neighbourhoods in northern Jerusalem.

Former Israel Defence Forces leader, Shaul Arieli of the Council for Peace and Security, said the new roads undermined the prospect of the re-division of the city and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. All peace plans put forward so far were based on a division of Jerusalem and transfer of portions of the city to a Palestinian state.

An Israeli expert on Jerusalem’s demography, Danny Seidemann, said that “the purpose of these highways is to clearly integrate the [Jewish] settlement blocs into the national highway network of Israel and thereby place East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs within Israel’s de facto borders”.

Their views were published in the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which notes that road could be “the nail in the coffin for plans to re-divide the capital and attach its Arab areas to a future Palestinian state”.

In other words, the road project completely scuppers the notion of a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine, which the extensive Zionist settlement programme on the West Bank had already made unviable.

The highway has been denounced by United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk who is calling on the Israeli government to halt its construction immediately. He says it will ruin the livelihoods of the 9,300 Palestinian residents. 

Netanyahu’s road-building is hardly surprising considering that the Israeli Prime Minister’s aides have denounced the Arab peace plan as “trick” intended to entrap Israel.

And, as Jonathan Cook, a distinguished journalist writing for the Israeli Occupation Archive, notes, Netanyahu’s government demanded that Google should not use the word “Palestine”, claiming it was damaging the peace process.

Wikileaks has disclosed documents proving that Netanyahu is only the last of many Israeli leaders with total contempt for peace negotiations. In cables from 1975, US diplomats describe Israel as “hell-bent on self-destruction”.

The Fatah leaders’ support for a one-state solution is a crucial break from the conciliatory position taken for years by PLO president Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League negotiators who, under American pressure, conceded Palestinian territory in the hopes of a deal. A World to Win welcomes the initiative, which opens up a way forward for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

         

One solution, one state

The leaked “Palestine Papers” establish beyond any doubt that the Zionist rulers of Israel are not interested in any sort of an agreement, however dramatic the concessions Palestinian negotiators are prepared to make.

Tragically in some ways, the papers also reveal the degeneration of the Palestine Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas. The more intransigent the Israelis, the more PA officials grovelled while hiding the truth about what they were doing from the Palestinian people.

All to no avail. The lingering death of the "peace process" is self-evident.

Al Jazeera TV published the leaked files, which contain more than 1,600 internal documents related to the last decade of peace negotiations. They include memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations.

Among Al Jazeera's significant revelations are major offers by the PA to Israel in the context of settlements in East Jerusalem, including major portions of the Old City that adjoin the Dome of the Rock, the second holiest site in Islam.

PA leaders also proposed "unprecedented" land swaps with the Israeli government, Al Jazeera revealed. In 2008, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas after the PA offered to allow the Israeli state to annex most of the East Jerusalem settlements without demanding concessions in return.

Olmert reportedly showed Abbas a map of the newly-proposed swaps, which outlined Israel's plan to annex more than 10 percent of the West Bank. "Abbas was not allowed to keep a copy of the map, and so the 73-year-old Palestinian president had to sketch a copy by hand on a napkin," the network added.

Desperate for a deal, Palestinian negotiators led by Saeb Erekat privately agreed that only 10, 000 refugees and their families, out of a total refugee population exceeding 5 million, could return to Israel as part of a settlement.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state under George Bush, suggested in 2008 Palestinian refugees could be resettled in South America. "Maybe we will be able to find countries that can contribute in kind," she said. "Chile, Argentina, etc."

PLO leaders also accepted Israel's demand to define itself as an explicitly Jewish state, in sharp contrast to their public position. Erekat privately told Israeli negotiators: "If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want." Israel's 1.3 million Palestinian citizens are particularly opposed to the notion of a “Jewish state” because it undermines their own rights which are constantly being eroded in any case.

The Electronic Intifada’s co-founder and executive director, Ali Abunimah, was given special access to the documents and helped analyse them for Al Jazeera. He said:

What we can discern immediately from these documents is that the US-brokered negotiations, especially under the Obama administration, can never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights and that the two-state solution is basically dead. In the long term, we will have to ask how the peace process charade, revealed in these papers, was allowed to continue for so long as Israel continued its relentless colonisation of Palestinian land and the Palestinian Authority that was supposed to be a step on the road to freedom become a sophisticated tool of continued Israeli occupation.

He is right. But the responsibility for the almost desperate nature of the concessions lies not just with the PA leaders but with also with other Arab regimes, especially Egypt’s who help Israel to enforce a blockade of Gaza, for example. From Damascus to Amman, discredited leaders have watched the Palestinian people’s suffering from a safe distance. Washington, of course, has consistently backed the Israelis and the Zionist view that they have a God-given right to occupy Palestinan land.

A way forward may now be opening up as the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia finds its echo in Cairo today and other Arab cities tomorrow. The sweeping out of the old dictatorships can open the way to a new leadership and the building of a secular, single state which Jews and Palestinians can co-habit as they did in earlier times.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Racism and the state of Israel

One doesn’t have to agree with the wilder, deeply reactionary views of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Jews to spot the hypocrisy of the walk-out by Western diplomats at yesterday’s UN conference on racism in Geneva.

Ahmadinejad’s denial of the historical fact of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis gave Britain and other nations the opportunity to parade themselves as anti-racists. But the walk-out also reinforced their more or less unconditional support for Israel, which nonsensically equates any criticism of it with anti-Semitism, and exposes a continuing indifference to the plight of the Palestinians.

The conference itself was always going to be a farce because the organisers had already determined that there would be no discussion at all, in official or unofficial sessions, on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the questions this continues to raise about racism. In the end, 170 Palestinian groups involved in boycott and disinvestment campaigns organised their own conference in Geneva at the end of last week. At the conference, internationally renowned legal experts, researchers, academics and activists discussed legal strategies to hold Israel accountable for its illegal policies and practices of racial discrimination.

The view that the state of Israel practises racist policies towards the Palestinian people is held by a wide range of people and ought to be debated. In 2002, for example, Desmond Tutu, the South African cleric and anti-apartheid activist, described how he saw on his visit to Israel "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about".

The history of Israel and South Africa are, of course, not the same. However, the actions and laws used against Palestinians, both in and outside Israel, are founded on discrimination by one ethnic group against another. The 2008 annual report of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) found that Arab Israelis are disadvantaged, persecuted, endangered, and live under third-world conditions, especially in "unrecognised villages" in the Negev and Galilee.

In Occupied Palestine, conditions are far worse and oppressive. "For forty-one years, Israel has denied fundamental rights to four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza," effectively controlling their lives, and repressively denying them their rights under military occupation, says the report.

Dealing with the right to equality, ACRI says that Arab Israelis and Palestinians are “fundamentally denied them” in all respects. Though legally entitled to full equality, they're effectively victimised by institutional discrimination. For example, Arab children are educated separately from Israeli Jews.

This blatant discrimination is ignored by the major Western powers like the United States, which continue to fund Israel because it suits their geo-political interests and the strategy of divide and rule in the Middle East. Many Israeli Jews, however, are deeply disturbed by the catastrophe that has befallen the Palestinians and the fact that the country’s new foreign secretary, Avigdor Lieberman is in favour of ethnically cleansing the country of Arabs.

Uri Avnery, who in the period after World War Two fought with the right-wing terror group Irgun to drive the Palestinians out, wrote during last week’s Passover of “the catastrophe that we have caused the Palestinians” and denounced “religious fanatics and fascist hooligans, who claim to be the heirs of the [Zionist] pioneers”.

So civil liberties organisations in Israel can talk of discrimination and Avnery can denounce Jewish fascists, but the UN is not allowed to talk about what’s going on! No wonder the Palestinians have all but given up hope of the UN taking any practical action to further their just claim to self-determination.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Gaza - a crime against humanity

The war against the defenceless people of Gaza by one of the most powerful military machines in the world is another crime against humanity to add to the existing lengthy indictment of the reactionary and racist rulers of Israel. 

Here is a population of 1.5 million crowded into a tiny strip of land without water or electricity and desperately short of food and medical supplies. They are isolated in a Palestinian ghetto, surrounded by Israeli armour on the one side and Egyptian border troops on the other. There is no escape for them from the artillery, tank fire or bombs. While children in Britain prepare to return to school after the holidays, their counterparts in Gaza are being blown to pieces by American-supplied and financed weaponry. 

Of course, many others apart from the Israelis are complicit in the barbaric treatment of the Palestinian people. For there is no doubt that the aerial bombardment followed by a ground invasion could not have taken place without the explicit approval of Washington and the tacit agreement of European governments, alongside those of Egypt and Jordan who blame Hamas for the violence. 

Talk of a “ceasefire” by politicians like Gordon Brown is particularly sickening. New Labour helped make the war on Gaza possible by agreeing to characterise the Hamas regime as a “terrorist” organisation and blocking any contact with it following that organisation’s victory in democratic elections in 2006. Gazans are thus paying the price for the deranged “war on terror”, under which all opponents of major power policies are targets, up to and including governments. 

There are other even more cynical factors behind the present war on Gaza. Sporadic rocket attacks from Gaza have taken place for 18 months or so with few casualties. Now, however, the present Israeli coalition government has collapsed, brought down by corruption allegations. So the timing of the war on Gaza is an attempt to show how tough it can be in a bid to outflank the rival Likud party, which is even further to the right, at the elections scheduled for February.

While most of the British trade union movement remains silent, to their credit the transport union RMT has denounced the slaughter in Gaza, which has claimed over 500 lives. General secretary Bob Crow said: “It has been the failure of governments such as our own to demand an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967 that has encouraged horrific acts such as those we have witnessed in recent days.”

Crow is right but we need to go further. Unions like the RMT should launch a campaign for a trade and cultural boycott campaign of Israel as part of the struggle for a new perspective for the long-standing conflict. Negotiations for a two-state “solution” are doomed because Israel’s leaders have not the slightest intention of allowing it to happen, now or in the future because it runs contrary to their Zionist nationalist dogma which has served ordinary Jews so badly. 

The only viable alternative, therefore, is a single, secular revolutionary state in the area where Jew and Palestinian can live together. Building support for this project will pose the political defeat of reactionary regimes throughout the region. It’s a tall order but all other roads are closed off. 

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor   

Two anniversaries, one catastrophe

Palestinians across the world tomorrow mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba – “the day of catastrophe”. Only hours before, on the evening of May 14, 1948, a group of Zionist Jews declared themselves the independent government of a Jewish state, excluding Palestinians who had lived on the land since time immemorial. They are two very different anniversaries.

A ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion, organised by militias and terrorist groups, had created the conditions for the declaration. In April 1948, future Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Irgun terrorist gang massacred more than 100 men, women and children in the village of Deir Yassin. Many villages outside the land allotted to Jews under the 1947 United Nations partition agreement came under artillery bombardment. Soon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, never to see their homes and land ever again.

And that is a tactic that has served the Israeli government well, right up until today. Whilst going along with so-called “peace talks” and international diplomacy, they use force to establish a very different reality on the ground. Of course they have only been able to do this with the support of the United States, which recognised the state of Israel just eleven minutes after the declaration. They were followed five days later by the Soviet Union – a massive betrayal of the Palestinians. Stalin had taken part in the division of the post-war world, and the Middle East was not in his “sphere of influence”. Under the Stalinist policy of peaceful co-existence, the Soviet Union abandoned the Palestinians to their fate.

And for many years their plight was largely ignored, until a new generation launched a fresh phase of resistance, with the formation in 1964 of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The PLO brought all Palestinian groups under one umbrella and gave them an international voice. At its first meeting in 1964 the PLO adopted the Palestine National Charter, which called for the establishment of a democratic and secular state in Palestine and in 1969 Yassir Arafat became its chairman and symbol of national aspirations.

The demand for a secular state is being given fresh momentum today by a new generation of Palestinians – in Israel, in exile and in the occupied territories. This vanguard are refusing to go along with the “two-state” fraud. They recognise that there is no “peace plan” and that Israel’s rulers have no intention of allowing Palestinians to form a viable state.

Settlements continue to expand and Israel exploits the resources of the occupied territories without their population having any political or economic rights. Gaza is surrounded and under siege, entirely cut off from the West Bank; Hebron is surrounded by thousands of Israeli troops, protecting a handful of crazed Zionist settlers, and 40% of the West Bank is taken up with Israeli infrastructure, according to a recent UN report. There are over 400,000 settlers who have no intention of leaving the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.

As the London One State Group, which organised a packed conference in London last year, puts it: “The birth of the non-racial democracy in South Africa and the implementation of the power sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland have strengthened the belief that partition is not the inevitable, nor the most desirable resolution to the conflict." Jewish anti-Zionist writer Joel Kovel argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel to adopt "state-sponsored racism" and says it is urgent to “envision Israel beyond Zionism”.

The Zionists fear a movement for a one-state solution beyond anything Hamas can throw at it. Prime Minister Yehud Olmert has said: “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want now is the right to vote’. The day they get it we will lose everything.” In 2006 the population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza taken together was: Jewish 5,393,400, Arab 5,328,949.

But Israeli Jews have more to gain than to lose from a one-state solution. Today they live in a militarised society which is far from the co-operative paradise promised by the early Zionist founders. Israel’s military spending is higher than all the countries on its borders combined, and it is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. It cannot be described as a safe haven for Jews – in fact is the most dangerous place for them on the planet.

But a new generation of leaders on both sides is needed to take this project forward. The challenge is to relaunch the Intifada along the lines of civil and economic resistance; to reject the whole two-state fraud once and for all; to find ways to make a principled appeal to Jewish Israelis and to re-establish Palestine national identity, to include Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who were excluded by “two states”.

In his 2007 book, One Country – A bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, Ali-Abunimah (founder of the Electronic Intifada website) writes that this is a time of profound uncertainty and risk but also of “tantalising opportunity”. And he concludes: “There is a need for urgent action on two fronts: One is in the realm of dialogue, imagination and construction of an inclusive vision. At the same time, there is a pressing need for resistance to the outcome Israel is trying to impose on the Palestinians ...”

Penny Cole

Two states no solution for Palestinians

Palestinian leaders meeting the Israelis in Annapolis, Maryland, today will be offered nothing. Instead, they will be asked to sacrifice the right of Palestinian refugees to return, to abandon Palestinians living inside Israel’s 1948 borders and to forget about the aspirations of the Palestinians living in Jerusalem and Gaza. Failed preliminary talks over many weeks mean that all those attending the US-sponsored conference know in advance that no genuine gains can be made.

What is not on offer is a Palestinian state. Where are its borders? Who will control its borders with other countries? Where is its capital? Who has the right to live in it? By consistently postponing the solution of these crucial questions, the Zionist state of Israel has been able to continue to create “realities on the ground” that make any viable Palestinian state impossible. The West Bank and Gaza are two separate prisons. Gaza is a hell on earth for those who live there. On the West Bank, Palestinians continue to be deprived of their land and their right to education and work.

West Bank-based Palestinian leaders have been drawn so deeply into the so-called two-state solution, that they are in danger of sacrificing their own legitimacy to try and achieve it. But 14 years on from the signing of the Oslo Accords, the peace process has become a trap from which the Palestinians must find an exit. Tony Blair’s announcement last week of a handful of meaningless economic initiatives underlined the fact that the only people to benefit from the two-state process so far are a handful of well-off Palestinian businessmen, and the group who are involved in administering and policing the enclave.

Jewish settlements continue to expand into substantial towns, sucking in resources of land and water. The borders between Gaza and the West Bank and neighbouring countries have been cleared of housing and the Israeli army has seized strips of land so that it can control access in perpetuity. The Israeli government has no intention of removing its illegal wall, and further plans include Israeli-only roads. The conditions of most Palestinians have worsened since 1993 and the conflict has claimed more than 4,000 Palestinian lives and more than 1,000 Israeli lives.

A far more significant conference than the one in Annapolis took place in London recently. Organised by the London One State Group - Palestinian and Jewish students who work together - it attracted more than 300 academics, activists and students from all over the world to discuss an alternative way forward that challenges the right of Zionism to rule over a state based on religious exclusivity.

The conference heard from many speakers that the Palestine national cause – made up of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, those living as refugees in other countries and those living as second-class citizens within the borders established in 1948 – has become more and more divided as a result of the doomed two-state process.

At the same time Israeli Jews are more and more sceptical both about the possibility of a peaceful settlement of the conflict, and – after the defeat of the Israeli army in Lebanon – the chance of a military solution. The conference concluded that the time is absolutely right to revive and bring up to date the proposition that the only way forward for Palestinians and Jews is the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state from the Sea to the Jordan River, where all the people of the region can live together with equal rights.

Penny Cole

Israel's harsh 'reality on the ground'

Creating “realities on the ground” is the speciality of the Israeli government. This week Israel has implemented a major land-grab around four Palestinian West Bank villages, precisely in order to create “realities” that will be the starting point for the talks to be held in Maryland in November. The land seized from Palestinian farmers will be used to expand illegal Jewish settlements, split the West Bank in two and create an apartheid road. Palestinian drivers would have to drive deep into the desert to get from Bethlehem to Ramallah, effectively barring them from the central part of the West Bank.

Jeff Halper, an Israeli geographer who specialises in Israel's development of the West Bank, said: "They want to push everything as far as possible before the November meeting…. Anything done before that meeting will be set in stone… part of a timeline in which Israel wants to get all its development of the West Bank finished before Bush leaves office."

Any Palestinian opposing these facts will be branded a terrorist; any opponents outside the Middle East will be branded an anti-Semite. Because the other “reality on the ground” that Zionist supporters are trying to create is that it is unacceptable, unlawful - or at the least career suicide - for anyone to criticise Israel and its brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

For example the UK’s University and College Union recently caved in to pressure and informed its members that it has legal advice that it would be unlawful even to discuss a boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. Members voted at their conference that the union should carry out a regional discussion about implementing a boycott to highlight the failure of Israeli institutions to support Palestinian academic life and institutions, destroyed by the Israeli army’s actions. Many Israeli academics also signed the call for a boycott.

In a very confused statement, the UCU’s Strategy and Finance Committee has told members that discussion cannot go ahead because a boycott call would be unlawful and could not be implemented. A regional debate could “infringe discrimination legislation”. Of course it would only take five minutes to find another lawyer to show that to have a discussion is not in any way unlawful.

Zionist pressure to block debate in the United States has claimed other victims too. Nobel peace prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu has just had an invitation to speak to the Peace and Justice group at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota withdrawn after the university’s president spoke with the local Jewish Community Relations Council and two rabbis. Tutu’s crime? He has dared to suggest that Israel is pursuing apartheid policies. The chair of the Justice and Peace Studies program, Prof. Cris Toffolo has been removed from her post as head of department.

Fortunately she has tenure or she would no doubt have met the same fate as Professor Norman Finkelstein of the De Paul University in Chicago. He finally agreed to resign this week, after a long campaign to deny him tenure, orchestrated by pro-Zionists from outside the university. Finkelstein, himself Jewish, was targeted because of his book “Beyond Chutzpah” which argued that it was wrong to say any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

Back in the UK, Danny Rubinstein, Arab affairs editor of Haaretz newspaper was also in trouble when the Zionist Federation withdrew its sponsorship of a meeting he was addressing in London. This leading journalist had dared to state at a United Nations event, something his Israeli readers can read in his column any day of the week, that “Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities”. That simple home truth is the actual reality on the ground.

Penny Cole
October 10, 2007