Love of the Land: BDS Flames Out in Davis

BDS Flames Out in Davis

Jon
Divest This!
17 March '10

On Monday evening, the forces of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) were handed a major defeat when the Davis Food Co-op, located in Davis California, turned down demands by BDS activists to put a boycott of Israeli goods to a Co-op wide vote.

While this story may not be big enough to hit the national press, the details surrounding the decision make this as significant an event in the continuing annals of BDS failure as the Presbyterian Church’s 2006 decision to abandon divestment altogether (a decision which changed the threat level of BDS from “potential issue” to “serious loser”).

As backdrop, the Davis Food Co-op is a highly successful, member-owned cooperative with a nearly forty year history and over 9000 member-owners. Given the nature of the organization, the institution takes understandable pride in its progressive values and responsiveness to members needs, connections to the community that have contributed to its decades of success.

Sadly, it was these very qualities that made the organization a target for the local branch of the BDS movement, a movement whose two major tactics involve: (1) dressing up their mission of de-legitimization and demonization in a progressive/human-rights vocabulary; and (2) abusing the openness of organizations like the Co-op for their own narrow, political ends.

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Love of the Land: BDS Flames Out in Davis

Love of the Land: BDS Party Crashers

BDS Party Crashers

Jon
Divest This!
09 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

As with previous pieces I’ve written on what BDS does to civil society, it’ll take a couple of paragraphs to get to a recognizable point. So bear with me if you can stand it…

For the fourth year in a row, I attended the variety show at my kid’s elementary school. Neither boy performed (although my older son did share the MC role with another fifth grader). While most numbers are what you would expect (a lot of piano, some Hanna Montana-inspired song and dance numbers, the Star Wars theme on cello), there were a few nice surprises (including a killer kindergartener Hula Hooper and two groups dancing to the closing theme of Slumdog Millionaire).

Best of all, the show was a mere 36 acts (as opposed to 52 last year, with a legendary 90-act show in the distant past that ended only when a group of parents gouged out their own eyes with a vaudeville hook).

Now while I sat at rapt attention for the entire 90-minute performance, I’m forced to confess that my mind started to wander at around the half-hour mark, mostly towards the subject of what I could do to mess with next year’s show. (Getting my seven year old to read Ginsberg’s Howl in its entirety was what I eventually settled on.)

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: BDS Party Crashers

Love of the Land: Running the Numbers

Running the Numbers

Jon
Divestthis.com
05 March '10

Given that the theme of this year’s increasingly fraying “Israel Apartheid Week” is Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), I thought it might be useful to summarize the progress of the BDS movement since it began a decade ago. Because so much of the BDS project is based on words, including competing claims of success and failure, I thought it best to provide a summary based primarily on numbers which (as I recall from my business days) are the only things that tend to get preserved as information travels up or through an organization.

Since these numbers need to be “scored” against some criterion, I’ve decided to abandon my usual critique of the BDS narrative and, in this instance, accept as a given their primary thesis: that economic activity related to Israel translates to political approval or disapproval. Now some people may say this is overly generous in that it allows them to continue to claim that purely economic decisions are actually fueled by partisan considerations. But if we accept (albeit temporarily) their founding principle on a micro level, then they must also be willing to be judged along the same criteria on a macro basis. And regarding that macro basis, here is Exhibit A:



My goodness! During the very period when BDS was supposedly on the march, the size of Israel’s economy (as measured by GDP) nearly doubled from $110B to $190B. Now given that the BDS project is based on their activity having economic consequence for the Jewish state, the takeaway from this chart seems to be that such consequence has been an explosion of growth in the Israeli economy.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Running the Numbers

Love of the Land: The apartheid libel

The apartheid libel

JPost Editorial
02 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

Israeli Apartheid Week kicked off on Monday, promising Israel-bashing, mostly on college campuses.

The sixth international Israeli Apartheid Week kicked off on Monday, promising 14 days of Israel-bashing in about 40 cities around the world, mostly on college campuses. Organizers say the events will “educate” about Israel’s so-called “apartheid system” and encourage BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) against the Jewish state. Punishing Israel into submission will lead to the end of “colonization” of Arab land, the beginning of equal rights for Arab-Palestinians, the dismantling of the security barrier, and instituting the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

Naomi Klein, the Jewish anti-globalization savant who has in recent years branched out to include demonizing Israel in her repertoire, pointed out in the opening speech of last year’s extravaganza that “serious movements have serious enemies,” arguing that the fierce opposition to Israeli Apartheid Week proved its importance. According to that reasoning, perhaps it would be better to simply ignore the festivities and allow the whole thing to blow over.

Problem is, if left unchallenged, proponents of the apartheid analogy are liable to stifle free speech and trample open debate on campuses by using intimidation and bullying tactics. They recently prevented Ambassador Michael Oren from finishing a speech at UC Irvine, and on the same day in Cambridge they interrupted Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, allegedly shouting in Arabic, “Slaughter the Jews.” Meanwhile, Cambridge University’s Israel Society bowed to pressure from Muslim students to cancel a speech by historian Benny Morris.

(Read full article)

Related: Speaking of Apartheid and "Israel Apartheid" week

Love of the Land: The apartheid libel

Love of the Land: Irwin Cotler: The real Apartheid? A Middle-East without Israel

Irwin Cotler: The real Apartheid? A Middle-East without Israel

Akiva
Hadar Israel
03 March '10

The real apartheid in the middle-east is the rejection of the legitimacy of a Jewish State, according to Irwin Cotler, the featured speaker at Hadar’s second public forum February 24 on Lawfare: Fighting False Legal Actions and Boycotts that Demonize Israel. Cotler, former Justice Minister of Canada, a Canadian MP and a renowned international human rights lawyer also told the packed hall at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center that groups like Hadar that mobilize citizen engagement are of vital importance in “delegitimizing the delegitimizers.”

The delegitimization of Israel – while not a new phenomenon - has been “laundered” under the banners of human rights, the UN, and the fight against racism, Cotler explained. The Palestinian narrative with its many falsifications has been adopted as the human rights narrative and Israel is portrayed as an international outlaw. In addition, the recent Goldstone commission was corrupt from its creation by the fundamentally biased UN Human Rights Council, Cotler said.

IDF Lieutenant Colonel (res.) David Benjamin, said that Israel exceeds international legal and moral standards in fighting terrorism, and minimizes civilian casualties. D.J Schneeweiss, Israel’s coordinator of anti-boycott strategy in Europe, said that Israel needs to change the rules of the game and apply a “full court press” in challenging delegitimization.

The forum’s moderator was David Horovitz, Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post.



The main problem Israel faces in its battle for legitimacy, according to Cotler, is the laundering of delegitimization through internationally respected agencies such as the UN and its various arms, international legal conventions and NGOs.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Irwin Cotler: The real Apartheid? A Middle-East without Israel

Love of the Land: Ontario Defies Israel Apartheid Week

Ontario Defies Israel Apartheid Week

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
01 March '10

This week is Israel Apartheid Week on college campuses worldwide — an annual hatefest devoted to demonizing Israel and mobilizing support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), made even more grotesque by the numerous Israelis serving as featured speakers. But this year, pushback came from a surprising direction: the provincial legislature of Ontario, Canada, voted unanimously to condemn this extravaganza, because it “serves to incite hatred against Israel, a democratic state that respects the rule of law and human rights, and … diminishes the suffering of those who were victims of a true apartheid regime in South Africa.”

Two things make this decision remarkable. One is that Ontario has long been a hotbed of anti-Israel activity. For instance, its largest labor union, the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, enthusiastically promotes BDS; in 2006, the chapter voted to boycott Israel until it accepts a Palestinian “right of return,” otherwise known as committing demographic suicide. Thus Ontario legislators defied a powerhouse vote machine over an issue with little political traction, just because they thought it was right.

The second is that not long ago, Canada’s foreign policy was hostile to Israel. In October 2000, for instance, days after the intifada erupted, Canada voted for a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for the violence, without a word of blame for the Palestinians. And that vote was typical, not exceptional. Thus the Ontario decision represents a sharp turnabout in a fairly short period of time.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Ontario Defies Israel Apartheid Week

Love of the Land: Speaking of Apartheid

Speaking of Apartheid

Jon Haber
Divest This!
01 March '10

Given that the organizers of this week's so-called "Israel Apartheid Week" (actually two weeks - they can't even tell the truth when saying the word "week") has dedicated itself to my obsession, BDS, I thought I'd cross-post something from my pal Sol's site here. So, without further ado...

Speaking of Apartheid

Students who will be exposed this week to the so-called "Israel Apartheid Week" need to understand that the entire framework behind the Israel-Apartheid accusation is based on a cover up.

During the 1980s when the Apartheid government of South Africa needed 15 million tons of oil to fuel its military and its economy of repression, virtually all of that oil was imported to Apartheid South Africa from the Middle East. South Africa paid a premium – in gold mined by black slave labor – for that oil, the lifeblood of their racist regime. As the Kenya Daily Nation said at the time "Arabs are buying South African gold like hotcakes, thus helping to sustain that country’s abominable policy of Apartheid."

It was during this period that the accusation that Israel was an "Apartheid State" was born, an accusation designed to throw the unknowing off the track as to who was truly oiling the wheels of Apartheid.

Flash forward to today when organizations like Hamas regularly incite genocidal hatred, yet simultaneously accuse Israelis of doing what they openly advocate (at least in Arabic). For these organizations, the legal segregation of Jews from the rest of the world (their own version of global Apartheid best exemplified by their so-called "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" or BDS program) is of less interest than outright extermination.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Speaking of Apartheid

Love of the Land: BDS, Academic/Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Omar Barghouti

BDS, Academic/Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Omar Barghouti

Ricki Hollander
CAMERA
24 February '10

A Palestinian call for comprehensive economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel was issued in August 2002, a year after the idea was introduced at the first United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism in Durban. The "Durban Strategy"— a term coined by NGO-Monitor's Gerald Steinberg—attempts to demonize the Jewish state as apartheid and isolate it with the same boycott and divestment tactics that were used so successfully to dismantle South Africa's apartheid regime.

While the comparison of Israel to South Africa is a patently false one rejected by people who have lived and suffered under actual apartheid rule and which has been throughly debunked, it is gaining traction among those who seek an end to the Jewish state. And while the Palestinian-initiated Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement has not managed to inflict economic harm upon Israel, BDS is wielded as a propaganda tool with which to delegitimize that country.

One of its few early successes came in 2004 and 2005 through a group of liberal Protestant (or "mainline") churches in the United States that promoted divestment from companies doing business with Israel, although similar anti-Israel resolutions were defeated at subsequent national church gatherings. This campaign was covered in depth by CAMERA's Christian media analyst Dexter Van Zile (see "Mainline American Christian ‘Peacemakers' against Israel") who points out that, "largely because of their shrinking numbers, the churches involved in this campaign have had little impact on the American public's attitudes toward Israel."

Over the past year, however, BDS activists have been ratcheting up their efforts. They seized upon the biased and mendacious Goldstone report to endorse their goals, claiming that "the report, and the media attention given to it, moved the terms of international solidarity with Palestine into a new plane, where calling for BDS is no longer considered ‘unrealistic' or ‘counterproductive.'"

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: BDS, Academic/Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Omar Barghouti

Love of the Land: TAU scholar to advocate Israel boycott

TAU scholar to advocate Israel boycott

Jonny Paul
London/JPost
21 January '10

A Tel Aviv University academic will call for a boycott of Israel, speaking at a London university event next month to commemorate "one year since Israel's attack" on Gaza.

Dr. Anat Matar of TAU's Philosophy Department will be speaking on February 17 at London University's School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) - a campus renowned for anti-Israel activity.

Matar's talk is to be titled "Supporting the Boycott on Israel: A View from Within."

She is taking part in a series of events over the coming weeks organized by the Palestinian societies at five University of London campuses - University College London, SOAS, Imperial College, Kings College and Goldsmiths - as well as at the University of Westminster.

In an article in Haaretz in August, Matar accused her own university of being complicit with the "occupation" and questioned Israel's stance on Palestinian academic freedom and basic education.

A mother of a conscientious objector, on her profile page on the university's Web site Matar lists her main nonacademic activities as "movements against military service" and the "Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners."

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: TAU scholar to advocate Israel boycott

Love of the Land: Boycott Israel and British Lives Will Be Lost

Boycott Israel and British Lives Will Be Lost

Why does the UK want to distance itself from the country best positioned to help protect British troops from IEDs?

Carol Gould
PajamasMedia.com
28 December 09

Britain has become the world center for boycotts of Israeli goods and of academic exchange. It is rare to pass a day without an email from a supporter of the Jewish state bringing to my attention yet another boycott campaign. Whether it is grassroots campaigns to label oranges and avocados in supermarkets or universities stopping academic cross-fertilization of brainpower, the many forces at work in Britain seem never to run out of momentum.

It is therefore all the more lamentable that British soldiers are suffering losses every month in Afghanistan, yet the country does not promote good relations with Israel, the world expert on defusing IEDs (improvised explosive devices). On December 13 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited troops in Kandahar, the first British head of state to visit servicemen in a war zone since Winston Churchill in the Second World War. Brown told the media during his visit that soldiers “were discovering improvised explosive devices every two hours.”

On television in the months leading up to the prime ministerial visit to the war zone, bereaved British mothers, sisters, and widows lamented the shortage of bomb disposal experts and the apparent lack of appropriate equipment and protective gear available to their sons, brothers, and husbands. On BBC television’s Question Time on Thursday, December 10, recorded in Wootton Bassett, a town hit particularly hard by recent war losses, anguished women asked panelist Sir Richard Dannatt, former head of the armed forces, for better care of the fighting men.

In the meantime Israeli bomb disposal experts are available for consultation, but if the word “Israel” so much as appears in any public discourse, those same studio audiences erupt in rage at the “apartheid” state that engages in “ethnic cleansing,” and they refuse to see the connection between Israel’s sixty-year defensive battle against terror and the war their menfolk are facing in Taliban-land.

Researching this article I came upon a compelling screed, “Countering Improvised Explosive Devices” by Colonel David Eshel of the IDF, or Israeli Defense Forces. What is intriguing is that the piece was published in the Royal Tank RegimentJournal, Volume 771, way back in March 2005.

Eshel recounts the events after cessation of initial hostilities in Iraq in 2003, when insurgent attacks began to dominate the landscape, but coalition leaders seemed uninterested in briefings on IEDs. He asserts: “It seems therefore strange, and possibly inexcusable, that the coalition forces failed to take notice of the vast combat experience that could have become willingly available from its Israeli allies, in order to at least try and reduce the heavy loss of life sustained mainly by U.S. forces from IED and suicide attacks.”

Eshel’s article makes it clear that the range and lethality of IEDs are staggering: In the early days of the Iraqi insurgency, attackers pulled out the firing pins of hand grenades and kept them from detonating by holding down the “spoon” and covering it with ducting tape. By dropping it into a canister filled with gasoline, the tape would dissolve in a few hours and cause a terrific explosion. Terrorists would place an obstruction on the road, causing vehicles to stop and investigate; the results were catastrophic.

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Love of the Land: Boycott Israel and British Lives Will Be Lost

Love of the Land: Can they give Britain a loan, please?

Can they give Britain a loan, please?

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
23 December 09

The choir of Clare College, Cambridge and its pro-'Palestinian' conductor are reported to have cancelled a planned performance in 'east' Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria because they are also performing in Israel.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote a letter, signed by more than 200 people, asking that the choir cancel its tour of Israel or risk, in their words, ‘appearing indifferent to Palestinian suffering’. As a result, the PA asked the Bishop of Jerusalem to withdraw the invitation for the choir to sing in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Betty Hunter, the general secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, says that desire to travel to the West Bank does not excuse the choir's tour of Israel. That tour, she says, is ‘surprising and shocking’ - something which, in her words, ‘promotes Israel as a normal state rather than one which represses Palestinians’.

Is that so. Here is the parlous state of the Palestinians of the West Bank:

(Read full article)

Related: Boycott Victorious... Er... Well...

Love of the Land: Can they give Britain a loan, please?

Love of the Land: Anti-Israel Boycott Proposal Costs NTNU Funded Professorship

Anti-Israel Boycott Proposal Costs NTNU Funded Professorship

CAMERA/Snapshots
07 December 09

Former NTNU Donor Olav Thon

Anti-Israel activists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, have cost the university the support of one of its most prominent donors, real estate and hotel magnate Olav Thon, who according to Forbes.com is worth $2 billion. Thon has given the university 300,000 ($52,500) annually for the past few years to support an adjunct professorship.

Not any more.

Two days before the university rejected a proposal to divest from Israel, Thon sent a letter to NTNU stating that while he expected the school to vote the proposal down, he was cutting off future donations to the university.

According to this report (based on a google translation of a Norwegian newspaper article), Thon was not interested in supporting an institution where politics takes precedence over good research.

The $52,000 Thon gave to the school annually may seem like a small amount, but according to this report, he is setting up a charitable foundation to disburse his fortune after his death. The question for the fundraisers at NTNU is whether Thon will relent and allow this foundation to donate to the school after his death, or will his judgement be final?

The lesson for anti-Israel activists? Next time, go play with your own money and future, not somebody else’s!

Love of the Land: Anti-Israel Boycott Proposal Costs NTNU Funded Professorship

Love of the Land: Barkan remains on Gush Shalom boycott list

Barkan remains on Gush Shalom boycott list

Jacob Kanter
JPost
03 December 09

(To tell the truth, I stopped purchasing Barkan when they made their move. I was disgusted with their having caved in, and now the question remains, will they run again?)

Though Barkan winery recently vacated its factory in the Barkan industrial zone in the West Bank, Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom has decided to keep Israel's second largest winery on its list of companies whose products are made in the settlements, along with a call to boycott the winery.

Sa'ar Faraj, Barkan's legal adviser, wrote to Gush Shalom this week asking for the winery to be removed from the list, where it has appeared since the list's creation in 1995.

"I'd like to make it clear that Barkan does not produce materials in settlements whatsoever, nor does it purchase raw materials made in settlements," Faraj wrote. "Please make sure to remove Barkan from the list immediately."

In 2004, Barkan began moving their operations from Barkan to Hulda, a kibbutz within the pre-1967 borders.

Israeli-based beverage company Tempo, which owns Barkan winery, is partly owned by Dutch-based Heineken International. According to Gush Shalom, the Dutch government's opposition to Israeli settlements in the West Bank led Heineken to pressure Tempo to have Barkan move out of the West Bank.

The move has since been completed, but the company still operates three wineries within the Golan Heights, which Gush Shalom considers illegally occupied territory.

(Continue reading...)

Related: Boycott Revival?

Love of the Land: Barkan remains on Gush Shalom boycott list

Love of the Land: A minor correction

A minor correction

Leftist coalition operating anti-Israel boycott website gets it wrong

Hagai Segal
Ynet/Opinion
29 November 09

The leftist boycott industry against Israel is becoming increasingly sophisticated with the passage of time. For example, the Coalition of Women for Peace operates an English-language website that presents a comprehensive list of plants that are related to the settlements in one way or another.

All the plants on the web site are presented as ones that benefit at the expense of an occupied nation. The site is called "Who Profits?"

However, the Coalition of Women for Peace does not make do with just providing the names of plants, the kind of goods they produce, and their exact address. The website also provides the names of the owners, perhaps so that one of these days it would be possible to bring them to trial at the International Court of Justice at The Hague on charges of committing crimes by benefiting from the occupation.

Among other names, until this weekend at least the website noted that a woman called Noa Alon is one of the owners of a Jewish food-processing plant in the West Bank.

Well, for the benefit of the highly moral European followers of the website, I will note that Noa Alon has not been the owner of that plant for a long time now. A Palestinian terrorist murdered her as well as her young granddaughter, Gal Eisenman, in a suicide attack at Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood about seven years ago.

Both grandmother and granddaughter have been laid to rest in the small cemetery in the West Bank community of Ofra, not too far from the industrial zone where the plant was located before it was relocated to the kosher side of the Green Line.

I wonder whether their very burial there also constitutes a type of benefit of the occupation.

Love of the Land: A minor correction

Love of the Land: The Places Stephen Walt Goes

The Places Stephen Walt Goes

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
04 October 09

A Norwegian university has decided to assemble a cast of Israel haters to teach a seminar on Israel. Ilan Pappe, of Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine notoriety, is involved. Pappe, a Marxist Israeli who left his native land for the UK—which is far more welcoming of people like him who support economic and academic boycotts and the destruction of Israel—will be joined by a group of similarly obscure quasi-academics whose major qualification is their hatred of Israel. As Haaretz reports,

Other speakers invited by NTNU Dean Torbjorn Digernes include Moshe Zuckermann, who in a January interview for Deutschlandradio—a widely-heard German program—said that operation Cast Lead cost hundreds of thousands of Gazan lives.

The members of the seminar’s organizing committee—Morten Levin, Ann Rudinow Saetnan and Rune Skarstein—have all signed a call for an academic boycott of Israel.

Who would feel comfortable sharing the stage with such people? Well, Stephen Walt, of course, who has joined the seminar as a lecturer. For someone who was once lauded as one of America’s greatest foreign-policy thinkers, it must be a little embarrassing to be forced to take your act to an obscure university set in a small city of a country whose major export is pacifistic moralizing. Or maybe Walt’s desire to participate in some high-octane Israel-bashing is so intense that he can only get his fix abroad, what with all the intimidation from the Israel lobby in the U.S. Who knows.

During the Chas Freeman controversy, one of Walt’s ways of defending Freeman was to compile lists of American Jews who opposed his nomination and accuse them of dual loyalties and then express puzzlement at how anyone could suspect him of animosity to Israel. After all, as he insisted, he and his co-author, John Mearsheimer,

have consistently declared our support for a Jewish state, said we “admired its many achievements,” and wrote that the United States “should come to Israel’s aid if its survival is ever in jeopardy.”

Stephen Walt is just a concerned friend, you see. Is it really possible that he is traveling all the way to Norway to appear next to Ilan Pappe so he can declare to the assembled his admiration for Israel’s many achievements and his support for the Jewish state?

Love of the Land: The Places Stephen Walt Goes

Love of the Land: Charles Lewis: Boycotting the Israel boycotters

Charles Lewis: Boycotting the Israel boycotters

Charles Lewis

National Post

04 September 09

I picked up the National Post this morning to see the highly glossed faces of a group of actors, musicians and writers who have decided to protest the showing of a 10-film program to be highlighted at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It is no surprise that they are targeting a series of 10 films about Tel Aviv. Every protest today by intellectuals or artists who think they are intellectuals has to be about Israel. It is the worst country in the world, is it not?

The 50 protesters, including David Byrne, Jane Fonda and Naomi Klein, believe the films are actually part of a sinister Israeli propaganda plot, unbeknownst to those running the film festival.

They say, as they always do, that they are not anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli, but they feel they must say something in the “wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza,” and therefore the films should not be shown.

Some of the signatories, including Ms. Klein, are Jewish, so they cannot really be anti-Semitic. There are always the enlightened Jews who know when their coreligionists have gone too far. In fact, that is what Charles Lindbergh said in 1939 when he identified Jews as one of the main forces dragging the U.S. into the war against Germany

Read All at :

Love of the Land: Charles Lewis: Boycotting the Israel boycotters