zondag 31 januari 2016

170 academics at Italian universities call for boycott of Israeli institutions

gennaio 27, 2016 stoptechnion Press Releases

PRESS RELEASE

Launch of the Stop Technion campaign urges suspension of all academic collaboration with the Haifa-based technical institute
Italian initiative part of a growing global trend of scholars taking a stand for Palestinian rights
Italy is one of Israel’s key military and academic partners in Europe
For the first time, an Italian academic association will debate the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

170 academics from more than 50 Italian universities and research institutes have signed a pledge committing to a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The call was launched in solidarity with the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with International Law and Principles of Human Rights and is inspired by similar boycotts during the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
This marks the first Italian initiative of academic boycott and shows the existence of a solid, critical block of scholars within Italian institutions who are no longer willing to tolerate complicity with Israel’s violations of international law and human rights. The well-documented and notorious complicity of Israeli academic institutions with Israel’s state violence and the utter lack of any serious condemnation on their part since the foundation of the state of Israel led to the initiative.
The scholars also wished to demonstrate solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues who continue to experience grave human rights violations and denials of their basic academic freedoms. The initiative exclusively targets Israeli institutions while allowing for individual collaborations with Israeli colleagues.
Israel continues to carry out its policies of systematic dispossession and discrimination against the Palestinian population living in the occupied territories, within present-day Israel and in the diaspora. Following almost five decades of military occupation and nearly seven decades after the state of Israel was created mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian indigenous population(including lands on which Israeli academic institutions were built), a majority of Palestinians are refugees, most of whom are stateless.
The call signed by Italian scholars focuses on the Technion Institute of Haifa due to its role in supporting and maintaining Israel’s policies of dispossession and military violence against the Palestinian population. A number of Italian universities have cooperation agreements with Technion, including the Polytechnic Universities of Milano and Turin and the universities of Cagliari, Florence, Perugia, Rome and Turin. The scholars urge Italian institutions and their colleagues to suspend all forms of institutional collaboration with Technion, which is deeply involved in Israel’s military-industrial complex and directly complicit in the violations of international law and the rights of Palestinians.
The Italian initiative is particularly significant considering the strong ties that make Italy one of Israel’s key military and academic partners in Europe. A military cooperation agreement between the two countries provides for joint military research, training exercises and development of weapons systems. In 2012, Italy was Europe’s top weapons exporter to Israel. The hope is that additional Italian, European and international academics will join the effort to ensure human rights and justice for the Palestinian people.
The Italian call is just the latest in a continuing trend of scholars speaking up for Palestinian rights. In recent months, over 500 academics in the United Kingdom, 450 in Belgium, 200 in South Africa and 120 in Ireland have signed similar pledges. The number of academic associations supporting the Palestinian call for boycotts continues to grow and includes the American Anthropological Association, National Women’s Studies Association, American Studies Association, African Literature Association, Association for Asian American Studies, Association for Humanist Sociology, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the Peace and Justice Studies Association.
In mid-March, the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies will host a panel discussion on the academic and cultural boycott campaigns against Israel during its annual conference in Catania, marking the first time an academic association in Italy will publicly debate the BDS/PACBI campaigns.
Contacts: campagnastoptechnion@gmail.com

https://stoptechnionitalia.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/170-academics-at-italian-universities-call-for-boycott-of-israeli-institutions/

dinsdag 19 januari 2016

Stop elke handel met Israelische nederzettingen, aldus Human Rights Watch

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/end-all-business-israeli-settlements-says-human-rights-watch

End all business in Israeli settlements, says Human Rights Watch

There is no way to do business in settlements without participating in Israel’s crimes, says Human Rights Watch.
Issam Rimawi APA images

Human Rights Watch is calling on all corporations to completely end their business activities in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem.
In a report published Tuesday, the New York-based group is also urging governments to withhold aid to Israel.
“Settlement businesses unavoidably contribute to Israeli policies that dispossess and harshly discriminate against Palestinians, while profiting from Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and other resources,” Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights division at Human Rights Watch, said in a press release.
“The only way for businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities is to stop working with and in Israeli settlements,” Ganesan added.
The report, “Occupation, Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights,” will likely enrage Israel.
It will also prove a useful tool for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement to explain to companies why they must end their complicity in Israel’s crimes.
This is the case even though Human Rights Watch insists it is “not calling for a consumer boycott of settlement companies, but rather for businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities by ceasing settlement-related activities.”
According to the report, more than half a million Israelis live in 237 settlements across the occupied West Bank.

The only way is out

With its sweeping new recommendation, Human Rights Watch is departing from its earlier position that firms could “mitigate” the damage of doing business in settlements without necessarily pulling out completely.
Human Rights Watch now concludes that “the context of human rights abuse to which settlement business activity contributes is so pervasive and severe” that companies must end all activities in the settlements, including construction of housing or infrastructure and providing services such as waste disposal.
“They should also stop financing, administering, trading with or otherwise supporting settlements or settlement-related activities and infrastructure,” the report states.
The 162-page report examines in detail the ways businesses benefit from and contribute to Israel’s grave abuses of Palestinian rights, sometimes amounting to war crimes.
These include: benefitting from Israeli discrimination which allows companies to exploit Palestinian resources and workers; benefitting from and participating in the theft of land from Palestinian individuals and communities; assisting Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian economy; and making the settlements more viable by providing them with services and paying taxes to their municipalities.

Crushing Palestinian development

Israel’s colonization is also predicated on favoring development in Jewish settlements while actively suppressing Palestinian economic opportunities.
The report provides a strong refutation to frequent Israeli claims that settlement businesses should be tolerated or even celebrated because they provide employment and development for Palestinians.
It cites, for instance, a World Bank estimate that the Palestinian economy could generate an additional $3.4 billion – a 35 percent boost in GDP – if Israel lifted its discriminatory restrictions on Palestinian economic activity.
Similarly, economists have estimated that up to 200,000 jobs would be created if Palestinians were allowed to farm the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley, most of which Israel has seized for the exclusive use of settlers.
Near the Bethlehem-area village of Beit Fajjar, Human Rights Watch says, Israel has refused to license Palestinian-owned quarries and constantly harasses businesses by confiscating their equipment.
As a result of such policies, jobs are scarce.
Ibrahim, a local worker, told researchers that “If I would find work in Beit Fajjar, I would leave the settlements in the morning.”
By contrast, Israel has licensed a dozen Israeli-run quarries on confiscated Palestinian land.
One of them, Nahal Raba, is run by the German company HeidelbergCement, helping Israel violate international law that prohibits the theft of resources from an occupied territory.

Stealing land

In a case study of a 96-unit development in the Ariel settlement, the report cites the role of the US-based global real estate franchise RE/MAX and an Israeli bank in financing, marketing and profiting from the illegal colonization of Palestinian land.
It also describes the devastating impact Ariel and its ever-growing extensions has had on the villages whose land has been stolen for their development.
By supporting such housing developments, the report states, firms like RE/MAX and the Israeli bank “help the illegal settlements in the West Bank to function as viable housing markets, enabling the government to transfer settlers there.”
This transfer is a crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Human Rights Watch does not name the bank in its case study, stressing that the companies profiled in the report are examples among hundreds doing business in the settlements.
However the official marketing brochure for Green Ariel, the development mentioned in the report, offers mortgages from Mizrahi Tefahot Bank.
This is one of five big Israeli banks from which several major pension funds have recently divested because of their role in financing settlements.

“I don’t sell to Arabs”

Businesses financing, selling and promoting settlements are also active participants in Israel’s officially endorsed system of anti-Palestinian racism.
“Given the character of settlements as almost exclusively Jewish and the rules that effectively bar Palestinian residents of the West Bank from living there, agents selling property there effectively contribute to discrimination against Palestinians,” Human Rights Watch states.
The report cites Israeli sources confirming that separate and unequal development is the raison d’etre of the settlement enterprise; the government-backed World Zionist Organization Settlement Division has said, for instance, that colonization of the West Bank is aimed at “strengthening Jewish settlement in the country’s periphery.”
“I don’t buy from or sell to Arabs. It’s not racism, I just prefer not to deal with [them],” one RE/MAX agent who lists settlement properties in occupied East Jerusalem told Human Rights Watch.
It seems clear that such agents work a discriminatory system both knowingly and willfully.

Exploiting workers

Human Rights Watch also focuses on an Israeli company that produced bed linens for a US retailer in the Barkan Industrial Zone, a West Bank settlement built on land confiscated from Palestinian owners.
It is one of approximately 20 Israeli-run industrial zones in the occupied West Bank where companies can move to avoid environmental regulations.
This company paid Palestinian workers much less than the Israeli minimum wage, taking advantage of the fact that Israel’s labor laws have not been enforced for Palestinian workers in the settlements.
Palestinian women received $2 per hour and said they did not receive vacation, sick days or overtime.
Human Rights Watch did not name the company “because it has since relocated from Barkan to Israel.”
However, the description provided fits a company called Royalife, which markets its linens through the US retailer Pottery Barn.
Hani, a Palestinian university student from Salfit village, worked at a factory in Barkan making Hanukkah candles.
He told Human Rights Watch that he worked 12-hour shifts with a single 30-minute break.
He received $2 per hour, a third of Israel’s minimum wage.
The fact that Palestinian workers are totally dependent on Israeli occupation authorities for work permits makes it all but impossible for Palestinians to effectively challenge these abusive conditions.
Human Rights Watch says the reality belies claims by settlers and their supporters that places like Barkan are models of “coexistence” that build “bridges to peace.”
This kind of pro-settlement propaganda is regularly promoted by liberal Zionists in the US, including Jewish Daily Forward editor Jane Eisner.
In defending Sodastream’s settlement factory, Eisner’s newspaper insisted that the company was providing “well-paying jobs” for Palestinians and was not “profiting from the occupation.”
But such “rosy sentiments ignore the deeply discriminatory environment in which settlement businesses operate, and Palestinian workers’ vulnerability to abuse,” Human Rights Watch states.

Withhold aid to Israel

Among its recommendations, Human Rights Watch urges states to “avoid offsetting the costs of Israeli government expenditures on settlements by withholding funding given to the Israeli government in an amount equivalent to its expenditures on settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank.”
Given the billions it is estimated to spend on settlements, that would all but wipe out aid to Israel.
This call for cutting aid is not likely to please the Obama administration, which regularly boasts that no US administration has been more generous to Israel.
Before he leaves office next January, President Barack Obama hopes to conclude a deal that could see annual US military subsidies to Israel boosted by up to 50 percent.
And while the European Union recently took the minimal step of requiring accurate labeling of settlement goods, the 28-member bloc has continued to generously fund Israel, including its military research and its settlements.
Indeed, staunch Israeli allies, including Greece’s left-wing Syriza government, are actively trying to undermine the already weak labeling policy.
Amid such destructive complicity, the call by Human Rights Watch to end all settlement business is a welcome, if belated, move in the right direction.
It provides a clear endorsement and boost for those who have been working for years to bring real and effective pressure on Israel and its accomplices to end their crimes.

woensdag 13 januari 2016

December 2015: maandoverzicht

The daughter of Mahdia Hammad, shot dead by Israeli Border Police the day before, mourns during her mother’s funeral in the West Bank village of Silwad on 26 December. The police riddled the body of the 40-year-old mother of four with 17 bullets, claiming she had attempted to attack them with her car. But her husband said Hammad was rushing home to feed their baby when she was slain.
Shadi Hatem APA images

The Month in Pictures: December 2015

The month of December closed out a year in which the West Bank traded places with the Gaza Strip as the primary arena of deadly confrontation between Palestinians and the Israeli occupation army.
Dozens of Palestinians were killed this month, mostly in the West Bank, during an ongoing wave of violence that began in October, provoked by Israel’s unchecked assaults and incursions in occupied East Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound.
As noted by the United Nations monitoring group OCHA, the epicenter of that violence soon moved to Hebron, another West Bank city where Israel expands its settlements in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods. Confrontations have since spread throughout the West Bank where for decades Israel has imposed a belligerent military occupation to expand its settler-colonial enterprise.
More than 140 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were slain by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the past three months, including 29 children. At least 20 Israelis were killed by Palestinians or by unintentional police fire during attacks in that same period.
A US citizen volunteering in an Israeli settlement was also slain by a Palestinian attacker, as was an Eritrean refugee who was shot and beaten by an Israeli mob after the fatal shooting of a soldier at a bus station. The refugee was an innocent bystander and his assault, like many of the incidents in which Palestinians were killed, was recorded on video.

Zie verder
https://electronicintifada.net/content/month-pictures-december-2015/15136

dinsdag 12 januari 2016

Iers bedrijf CRH desinvesteert uit Israelische cementindustrie

CRH has admitted that cement from its Israeli affilitate was probably used in the apartheid wall.
Issam Rimawii APA images

Major Irish firm CRH divests from Israel’s cement industry

One of Ireland’s largest companies has divested from Israel after coming under sustained pressure from Palestine solidarity activists.
In a statement, the Dublin-based building materials firm CRH confirmed that it has disposed of its Israeli assets.
For more than a decade, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been urging CRH to cease its Israeli activities. Martin O’Quigley, the IPSC’s chairperson, described CRH’s announcement as an “important victory for Palestinians” living under Israeli occupation.
O’Quigley criticized CRH for taking so long to end its “shameful investment” but added that the decision was “better late than never.”

Toxic

CRH is the second largest company in Ireland, according to a 2015 survey by The Irish Times.
It held 25 percent of the shares in Mashav, owner of Israel’s top cement manufacturer Nesher.
In 2004, CRH admitted that in “all probability” Nesher cement was used during the construction of Israel’s wall in the West Bank. The construction of that wall on occupied Palestinian land was declared illegal that year by the International Court of Justice.
Nesher cement has also been used in constructing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in the light rail network serving Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem
CRH is the latest major corporation to divest from Israel. The French firms Veolia and Orange have both taken similar decisions in the recent past.
Firms seeking to profit from Israel’s apartheid system have received a great deal of negative publicity because of the growing Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
The brand image of Israel has become “increasingly toxic,” said O’Quigley. “It appears that international companies are eventually learning that it doesn’t pay to do business with the apartheid state.”

Adri Nieuwhof's blog

Bron
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/major-irish-firm-crh-divests-israels-cement-industry

PLANT EEN OLIJFBOOM

=> Vul het AbvaKabo-bos aan met FNV-bomen tot een FNV-bos!
Olijfbomen aanplanten als teken van verzet en hoop
"Houd hoop levend - Plant een olijfboom!" is een internationale actie van de YMCA Oost-Jeruzalem en de YWCA Palestina om door middel van het planten van olijfbomen samen met Palestijnse boeren de hoop op een goede toekomst levend te houden. Samen vormen zij de organisatie JAI, Joint Advocacy Initiative. Doel van de actie is het herplanten van olijfbomen in de Palestijnse gebieden, als een krachtig signaal van gerechtigheid en vrede en een praktische bijdrage leveren aan het verzet tegen landconfiscaties van Palestijns land door de Staat Israël.

Meer http://www.planteenolijfboom.nl/over-ons

woensdag 6 januari 2016

Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Ondernemen = Divestment, ondermeer

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Een goed nieuwjaar, en Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Ondernemen hoort daar nadrukkelijk bij!

http://www.fnv-magazine.nl/201504#!/de-samenleving

Dat is een der thema’s, zeker in 2016 in de nieuwe FNV.

Ter herinnering: http://palestinawerkgroep-abvakabo.blogspot.nl/2012/12/psi-congres-steunt-palestina.html

Een mooie opdracht, ook aan ons…..
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En dus, ter herinnering:

Palestina-werkgroep – FNV

De Palestinawerkgroep (voortgekomen uit AbvaKabo) wil binnen de FNV de Palestina-solidariteit, zoals besloten op onze internationale congressen, uitdragen. We steunen de strijd van onze Palestijnse collega's voor fatsoenlijke leefomstandigheden en eerlijke arbeidsomstandigheden.Vooral via MVO-beleid geven we steun aan de zgn. divestmentpolitiek: er mag geen enkele steun zijn voor enige investering die de Israelische bezettingspolitiek steunt. Dat doen we ondermeer via druk op pensioenfondsen. Ook de OR heeft hier een belangrijke taak; wat voor relaties heeft jouw bedrijf of organisatie?

Onze Palestijnse collega's ondersteunen we verder met trainings- en solidariteitsprojecten. Eenmaal per jaar organiseren we een grote themabijeenkomst. Sectoren en lokale netwerken kunnen ons uitnodigen om informatie te geven. Wij bieden concrete handelingsperspectieven zoals het sponsoren van olijfbomen in de olijfboomcampagne, die de Palestijnse boeren steunt hun land te behouden. Ook dat is MVO (Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Ondernemen), olijfbomen betekenen namelijk inkomen, pensioen en arbeidsomstandigheden.