[Peace] Join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement!

[martin smith]

please forward widely...
from Students for Justice in Palestine:

Greetings to all Allies in the Struggle for Justice in Palestine:


You are cordially invited this coming Wednesday, March 18th, to a meeting about starting a "boycott,
divestment, and sanctions" (BDS) campaign against Israel will. It
will be held in the Registered Student Organization Complex on the
second floor of the Illini Union at 5:30 P.M. 

To reach the RSO Complex,
just take the Quad side set of stairs. We want this to be a successful
campaign so we hope to have as many people and ally organizations as possible at this meeting.
Stopping Israeli aggression is only possible when people come together
in solidarity. This meeting will be the start of that.



In Solidarity,

Eric Heim, Students for Justice in Palestine

Why BDS? 
Boycott
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is fast emerging as the required
strategy to stop Israel’s  apartheid policies against the Palestinian
people. After decades of forced dispossession, occupation and
injustice, BDS is the civil-society initiated answer to the failure of
governments to hold Israel accountable for its action. The
non-implementation of Palestinian national rights as recognized by
countless UN resolutions and human rights conventions necessitates that
a proactive approach be taken to stop the machinery which sustains and
facilitates Israel’s actions politically, militarily, and economically.
The basis for this campaign is the Unified Palestinian Civil Society
Call for BDS (9 July 2005), see: http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52


Here is more information on what a BDS campaign looks like:

http://bdsmovement.net/files/JOINtheBDSactionDAY-en-final_0.pdf

******************************
http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/17/responding-to-the-call

Responding to the call to protest apartheid
An action by South African dockworkers is
one of the most important in the growing international solidarity
movement against Israeli apartheid, writes Mike Marqusee.

March 17, 2009
Protesting against Israel's attack on Gaza in Durban, South Africa


SOMETHING SPECIAL took place in Durban last month when dockworkers,
members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union
(SATAWU), refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo. It was an
intervention from below in global politics, driven not by national,
ethnic or religious affinity, but by principle, experience and common
humanity.
The dockworkers were responding to the call for a boycott of Israeli
goods issued by a broad coalition of Palestinian (and some Israeli)
civil society organizations, including human rights groups and trade
unions. That call had already been endorsed by the Congress of South
African Trade Unions, of which SATAWU is an affiliate, and the
dockworkers knew that they had the backing of the wider movement.

Immediately and concretely, the dockworkers were responding to
Israel's three-week attack on Gaza, which left more than 1,300
Palestinians dead, including 431 children, as well as 5,300 injured,
including 1,870 children and 1,600 permanently disabled. Israel's
losses were of a different order: three civilians and 10 soldiers
killed, 113 soldiers and 84 civilians injured.

Gaza's infrastructure was battered. 120,000 houses were damaged and
4,000 demolished. In the course of the operation, the Israelis are said
to have dropped 1.5 million tons of explosives on Gaza--one ton for
each inhabitant.

The dockworkers were also responding to--and respecting--the call
and lesson of their own history. They remembered the importance of
international support in the battle against apartheid. Initially, the
international campaign had been little more than a small-scale
irritant, reliant on the patient, sometimes lonely labors of grassroots
activists. An early success came when dockworkers in various countries
refused to unload South African goods. In time, the boycott grew and
took a material toll on the apartheid regime.
South African trade unionists know this history well. That was seen
last year when they turned away a Chinese ship carrying arms to the
Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.

They also know that throughout the course of their struggle against
apartheid, Israel was engaged in intensive military, economic and
technological (not least nuclear) collaboration with the white minority
regime, whom it saw as an ally in a global conflict.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SIGNIFICANTLY, IN explaining their action in Durban, union leaders
and members have stressed the similarity between Palestinians'
experience of Israeli rule and their own experiences under apartheid.

Supporters of Israel object fiercely to this analogy; for suggesting
it, even as prestigious a figure as former President Jimmy Carter was
anathematized: speaking engagements canceled and funds removed from his
charitable foundations. But how will they resist the analogy now, when
it is being drawn by those with most authority and right to draw it?
There are many who think of international labor solidarity as
something belonging to a distant past. True, far too often it has
amounted to little more than empty rhetoric. But what we saw in Durban
was international labor solidarity not as a slogan or admirable ideal
or bit of wishful thinking but as a living practice, a pointer to the
future. In a world of over-hyped spectacle, this was the real thing.

Most importantly, it is not an isolated event. The Western
Australian section of the Maritime Union of Australia endorsed the
boycott and has urged its members not to handle Israeli goods. In
January, the Norwegian Locomotive Drivers Union stopped all trains in
the country for a two-minute protest against the Israeli onslaught.

In fact, Durban was really a crest in a wave of protest that has
followed Israel's all-out military assault on a captive, besieged,
largely defenseless population. In Britain, students at more than 21
universities have mounted occupations demanding an end to their
institution's ties with Israel and support for Palestinian education.
Victories have been secured: scholarships for students from Gaza,
reviews of investment policies and, in some cases, cancellation of
contracts with Israeli-based corporations.

For the students as for so many others, Gaza epitomized basic
divisions, basic choices. Between the powerful and the powerless,
between the "war on terror" and respect for human rights and human
life. Between Western interests and the interests of the world
majority. Between passively standing by and actively engaging--whatever
the odds--in the pursuit of justice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE WAVE of protest has washed well beyond academia and the trade
unions. A convoy of more than 100 vehicles carrying $1.4 million of aid
assembled in the north of England and is now making its way across
North Africa to Gaza. A crude attempt by British police to smear the
convoy by arresting some of its participants (all later released
uncharged) under anti-terrorism laws deterred no one.

The pro-Palestinian activists, obviously small in number in the
greater scheme of things, draw strength from the fact that they
represent an increasing proportion of public opinion, in Britain and
elsewhere. On this issue, there is a growing fissure between
governments and peoples. International support, whether from
dockworkers of Durban or students in Britain, is critical for the
Palestinians: a vital counterweight to the powerful forces arrayed
against them, which include the U.S. government and the European Union,
due to sign a new preferential trade agreement with Israel.

India is also one of the major culprits. In recent years,
commercial, military and intelligence links with Israel have burgeoned,
under both the BJP and Congress-dominated governments--links justified
by a drastically misconceived paradigm in which Israel and India share
a common enemy in the "war on terror." In this context, the issue is
not as peripheral as it may seem to many in India.

The international boycott and divestment campaign has, of course, a
long way to go. As yet, the pressure on Israel is symbolic, not
material. The bulk of the public there regards the Gaza assault as a
success. The big vote for the right-wing parties in the recent election
suggests they have turned their backs, for the moment, on any
compromise with the Palestinians. It is sobering to note that the U.S.
Congress voted to support Israel's actions in Gaza by a majority of 390
to 5. Meanwhile, Gaza remains under Israeli blockade, even minimal
humanitarian aid is often blocked, and it has been impossible to start
reconstruction. On the West Bank and in east Jerusalem, Israel gobbles
up more territory and makes wider claims.

In these desperate circumstances, economically strangled and
violently assaulted, the Palestinians at least know that they are not
alone, that there are people out there aware of and angry about their
plight.

Common assumptions about the limits of human solidarity have become
routinely and excessively pessimistic. It is taken for granted that our
loyalties--our willingness to sacrifice--are confined to family and
close friends, and beyond that, to ethnic, communal or national groups,
somehow also assumed, like the family, to be "natural" categories.
Anything wider is weighed as too abstract, too remote, too theoretical
to motivate human activity. In their uncompromising, far-reaching and,
at the same time, concrete universalism, the Durban dockworkers and
their global allies have shown that this is not the case.

First published in The Hindu.



      
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