Love of the Land: Coalition of Women for Peace Supports Israeli Occupation

Coalition of Women for Peace Supports Israeli Occupation

Jonathan Dahoah HaLevi
Shalomlife.com
17 March '10

The Coalition of Women for Peace launched a campaign on January 9, 2009 entitled “Who profits? Exposing the Israeli industry occupation” that is intended to execute “economic activism against the occupation”.[1] Activists of the Coalition have built an online updated database documenting all known financial and commercial activity of Israeli companies, cooperates and institutions in the “occupied territories.”

Economic activism against the occupation

The motives for launching the campaign are explained in the “Who Profits?” website as follows:

“This database reflects an on-going grassroots investigation effort by activists in The Coalition of Women for Peace, a leading Israeli feminist peace organization dedicated to ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights and reaching a just peace in Israel/ Palestine. In exposing companies and corporations involved in the occupation, we hope to promote a change in public opinion and corporate policies, leading to an end to the occupation.”[2]

The Coalition’s goals are not limited to providing general information to the public. Their goal is to spur “economic activism” that in turn will bring about international sanctions against the Israeli companies forcing them to cease any activity related directly or indirectly to the occupation.

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Love of the Land: Coalition of Women for Peace Supports Israeli Occupation

Love of the Land: Getting Israel Right

Getting Israel Right

As the annual hate-circus known as “Israel Apartheid Week” pitches its tent again, it is incumbent on us once more to reconsider what Israel actually is.


David Solway
Pajamasmedia.com
10 March '10

Any open-minded person who has either visited Israel, kept apace of the documentary evidence, or honestly examined the tainted “bona fides” of Israel’s accusers would realize that Israel has been set up as the target for what is nothing less than an illegitimate campaign of delegitimation. Orwell’s Hate Week has escaped the boundaries of the novel, whose “Enemy of the People” is someone with the surname — what else? — Goldstein. (Oddly, the enemy of the Jewish people is someone with the surname Goldstone.) And as Orwell writes about the Two Minutes Hate period instituted by the Party, “Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.”

Watch the YouTube video of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren addressing a group of students at UC Irvine for real-world confirmation.

A triple alliance comprising leftist ideology, Islamic anti-Semitism, and vast commercial interests has coalesced into an aggressive bloc of anti-Zionist calumniators and malevolent defamers of the one genuine democracy in the Middle East. The international left sees Israel as a colonial outpost of the detested United States and a resolute defender of the national patriotic spirit which the left believes is obsolete. Islam continues to prosecute its 1400-year war against the Jews. And powerful economic interests are concerned with opening export markets and preserving and expanding their ties with the oil-rich Muslim states — it truly is all about oil: “Arab oil is thicker than Jewish blood,” Robin Shepherd pointedly writes in his important new book, A State Beyond the Pale.

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Love of the Land: Getting Israel Right

Love of the Land: Oslo Discord

Oslo Discord

Asgeir Ueland
Tablatmag.com
04 March '10

Once staunch supporters of Israel, Norwegians have shifted to a pro-Palestinian stance. What changed?

It is late January, and red-eyed travelers on an overnight train to Oslo can see little of Norway’s frozen capital. Darkness holds the city in its grip, and by 8 a.m. there still is no sign of the sun.

Despite its weather, Norway stands at the top of the yearly U.N. Human Development Index, thanks to massive oil and gas reserves that were discovered in the North Sea in 1969 and changed the face of Norwegian society. Over the last 40 years, the country went from being a poor, frozen outpost of Northern Europe to a social democratic paradise whose capital gave its name to the 1993 peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet over the same period, Norway also went from being a warm ally of Israel to a hotbed of pro-Palestinian sentiment and an unfriendly place for Israelis to visit and do business. The marked shift in Norwegian feeling toward Israel is typical of a larger shift throughout Scandinavia toward demonizing the Jewish state, despite the near-total absence of sizable communities of Jews or Muslims there who might seek to shape domestic opinion or foreign policy. The question of why Norwegians have become so invested in a complex conflict between two very un-Scandinavian peoples on the other side of the globe offers useful insight into the social and political dynamics that have turned once-friendly Europeans against Israel.

“The relations between Norway and Israel are relations between friends, but they lack real content,” said an Israeli diplomat I talked to in Oslo. “The bilateral plate is empty.” In 2003, according to the Israeli trade ministry, overall Israeli exports to the European Union stood at $10.4 billion; exports to Norway were a mere $69 million and have remained at more or less the same level since.

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Love of the Land: Oslo Discord

Love of the Land: BDS State of the Union

BDS State of the Union

Divest This!
03 February '10
Posted before Shabbat

An interesting comprehensive write up of what the BDSers themselves think about the state of their movement was published recently by Australians for Palestine. I’ll likely have more to say about their self analysis in the weeks that follow, although allow a few initial observations:

* Interestingly, outside of the US the BDSers seem to have no problem linking their project with the anti-Israel boycotts that began before the creation of the Jewish state (although they only go back as far as 1936, when Arab boycotts of Jewish businesses can be traced back to the 1920s). Since complying with the Arab boycott is illegal in the US, American boycott/divestment activists have never tried to make this connection, and while (for reasons outlined here) no one in the US has perused a legal strategy against BDS, it’s interesting to see that significant parts of the “movement” consider themselves the heirs of the dubious Arab-boycott legacy.

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Love of the Land: BDS State of the Union