Month: August 2014

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Jews in Britain Thank Tricycle Theatre For Refusing to Accept Israeli Sponsorship

Letter to the Artistic Director of the Tricycle

Dear Indhu Rubasingham,

Protest outside the Tricycle Theatre November 2013
Protest outside the Tricycle Theatre November 2013

We write to thank you for refusing to accept Israeli sponsorship of the Jewish Film Festival.

We particularly appreciate that you distinguish between Jews in Britain and the Israeli State. We could not be further apart from the Israeli state. The insistence of the organisers of the UK Jewish Film Festival on including sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy, even when you generously offered an alternative, has made their priorities clear: not Jewish people or Jewish film but the hijacking of Jewish culture to disguise Israeli policies and particularly its bloodied image. Its murder and maiming of Palestinians and others in the Middle East has been going on for many decades. But its recent unrestrained, sadistic attack on Gaza has reinforced its genocidal intentions against the Palestinians.

We are particularly appalled as Jews that our suffering as a people is the occasion and the excuse for the genocide of others. We are aware of the suffering of others, which is why we have said, unlike Zionists: Never again – for anyone. Including of course Tamils in Sri Lanka, about which you would be familiar.

Those of us who were part of the demonstration in front of the Tricycle last November against Israeli sponsorship of the JFF, which was led by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, welcome this decision of the Tricycle to respect the multi-racial nature of the community of which it is part, by refusing blood money from apartheid Israel.

We are a group of Jews in Britain including from Israel and are appalled that you have been subjected to false accusations of anti-Semitism. Zionism cynically uses the sufferings of Jews to silence critics of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. This is an abhorrent attempt to intimidate a local theatre for refusing to be enlisted to serve the Israeli State, in order to camouflage its most recent assault on hospitals, UN schools in which thousands were sheltering, children, and civilians of all ages.

We take this opportunity to share with you a few examples of how Israel harnesses culture as a propaganda tool.

1) Israeli artists who receive government sponsorship are contractually obligated to promote the state as a condition of their sponsorship, which includes Israeli films that are promoted as being critical; but while they might show some criticism their overall message is to present Israel as a democracy and camouflage its apartheid.

If they receive funding by the state, Israeli artists who play internationally are expected to be political ambassadors and must sign contracts which declare their cooperation with state marketing aims. The standard Israeli sponsorship contract states:

“The service provider (i.e. artists) undertakes to act faithfully, responsibly and tirelessly to provide the Ministry with the highest professional services. The service provider is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel.”

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/putting-out-a-contract-on-art-1.250388

2) In 2005, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry emphasised:

“We are seeing culture as a hasbara (i.e. propaganda) tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between hasbara and culture.”

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/about-face-1.170267?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.225%2C2.239%2C

3) In 2008 the Israeli Foreign Office identified London as one of the hubs it targeted for “Brand Israel”. It stated:

“The Jewish community has to be part of it for it to succeed. It’s very important for us to convey the message to them that a better image for Israel and a better performance of that image is part and parcel with Israel’s national security.” “But it’s mainly it’s an attempt to change the mindset of people when it comes to Israel” “”That doesn’t mean conducting an advertising campaign, but the execution of a program that will support the brand identity… it could include organizing film festivals” “… the hope-for result is a change in peoples’ perception of Israel.”

Source: http://www.jpost.com/International/Israels-rebranding-efforts-to-focus-on-Toronto

In short, any event accepting sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy or from any other Israeli state bodies is legitimising the Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing and its genocidal attacks on the Palestinians, including the Gaza Strip that Israel turned into a concentration camp.

We value the Tricycle and as your loyal supporters, your audience, we ask that you will not renew your association with Israel, as long as it violates international law, and until the 3 conditions set out in the Palestinian call for boycott demanding Israel meets its obligation and comply with international law (see http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1801).

Yours,
Jews in Britain Against Genocide

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British Jews Against Genocide Protest Outside the Offices of the Board of Deputies of British Jews

The Board of Deputies of British Jews is condoning genocide in Gaza. They don’t represent us.

British Jews Against Genocide Protest
British Jews Against Genocide Protest (Copyright)

Today, 4 August 2014, outside of the offices of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, on the 27th day of Israel’s military attack on the Gazan people, Jews in Britain Against Genocide staged a die-in to commemorate the hundreds of Palestinian children deliberately targeted and killed by Israel. We displayed toys, clothes and replicas of mutilated children and babies smeared red to symbolise the blood of Palestinian children murdered by Israeli forces.

We are Jews in Britain outraged at the Board of Deputies’ uncritical support for Israel as it commits genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The Board of Deputies claims to speak in our name when it lobbies in defence of Israeli violence. It organises with the Zionist Federation rallies in support of Israel’s slaughter. It demands that John Prescott be punished for comparing Gaza to a concentration camp (Daily Mirror, 26 July 2014). It attempts to intimidate local councils for flying the Palestinian flag as an expression of solidarity with Gaza, and has written to the prime minister thanking him for his support for Israel’s massacre in Gaza. It cynically uses the Nazi genocide of Jews to silence critics of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

We Jews know, from our history, about persecution, concentration camps, starvation and murder. Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a concentration camp by imposing a seven-year military siege, by restricting access to food, water, fuel and medical supplies, by imprisoning 1.8 million people and squeezing them even further by imposing no-go areas within the Gaza Strip.

In the current assault on Gaza, entire families are killed and neighbourhoods obliterated. UNICEF has condemned Israel for deliberately targeting women and children. Nearly 400 children have been murdered in less than four weeks, and more than 2000 have been injured and maimed. Gaza’s dead children are dead simply because they are Palestinians – this is genocide.

At least a quarter of a million Gazans are homeless because of Israeli bombing. There is nowhere safe to escape to — Israel has bombed UN-protected schools, hospitals and other UN buildings, killing civilians seeking refuge. Ten thousand people have been killed or injured. The bombardment of Gaza from the sea, land and air increasingly turns Gaza from a concentration camp into a death camp.

We support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and in particular we demand that the British government end its complicity in genocide by first of all ending its arms trade with Israel.

The Board of Deputies claims it wants Israel to be treated fairly and impartially within British society, but in fact it demands exceptionalism. It wants Israel to be exempted from any sanctions in spite of its apartheid and now its genocidal campaign against Gaza.

We accuse the Board of Deputies of condoning the atrocities the State of Israel commits in Gaza by attempting to silence Israel’s critics. This massive blood stain will not go away.

We accuse the Board of Deputies of joining with the anti-Semites in equating Zionism with Judaism and telling the world that all British Jews support Israel. That is a lie.

Jews in Britain Against Genocide

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NOTES

Genocide is defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as any act committed with the intention of destroying in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. http://www.un.org/pubs/cyberschoolbus/treaties/genocide.asp

Concentration camp is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a place in which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or to await mass execution’

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Children As Grass

golden sheaves
spread in school yard
salt coast grown,
resistant stems
of native centuries
warned from homes
to wretched refuge
without respite
no shafts to freedom
where none are safe

threat of grass
and budding seed
shields real estate
coveted by
lawnmower men
with tunnel vision
of western pretexts,
colonial deterrents
to permanence,
not never again,
but again and again

unseen drone buzz
no fertilising bee
searing scythe
explodes from thirsty sky
row on row ripped
before flower blown
monstrous harvest
in Gaza charnel house
beneath earth strewn
with blood and bone
olive tree kernels awaken

August 2014

Names of Palestinians Killed in the War on Gaza since 8 July

AUGUST 1 UPDATE: Child death toll in Gaza approaches 200 and rising

Related Links

The IDF prepares to attempt to cover its tracks, but thousands of photos of disproportionate death and destruction don’t lie. Israel has been engaged in a deliberate, planned act of genocide, with accompanying war crimes. Its attack on the Occupied people of Gaza breaches the Geneva Conventions in the first place. Israel to the Hague!

Another vile story calls for genocide of Gazans in the Israeli media, this time in JPost and phrased as ‘humanitarian relocation of the non-belligerent Arab population’

The author of this scurrilous piece of incitement, Dr. Martin Sherman of the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies, has the gall to quote Einstein in support of his solution for the Palestinian question “No, periodically mowing the lawn is not a policy that can endure for long – it simply will not cut it. The grass needs to be uprooted – once and for all.”

How do these drooling fascists live with themselves?

More zionist genocidalists – Prof. Efraim Inbar is director and Dr.Eitan Shamir a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

“Against an implacable, well-entrenched, non-state enemy like the Hamas, Israel simply needs to “mow the grass” once in a while to degrade the enemy’s capabilities.”

Another genocidal Israeli lawnmower man: David M. Weinberg is Director of Public Affairs at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies

Racism is the Foundation of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge Joel Beinin:

The viciousness of Mordechai Kedar, lecturer in Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, was even more creative than Shaked and Elitzur’s merely genocidal proposal. “The only thing that can deter terrorists like those who kidnapped the children and killed them,” he said, “is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” As a university-based “expert,” Kedar’s heinous suggestion is based on his “understanding” of Arab culture. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,” he explained, hastening to add, “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts.”

Racism has become a legitimate, indeed an integral, component of Israeli public culture, making assertions like these seem “normal.”
…
Israeli security officials sardonically call these operations “mowing the lawn” because well-informed observers know that Hamas cannot be uprooted and is capable of rebuilding its military capacity. There is no long-term strategy, except, as Gideon Levy put it, to kill Palestinians. Major General (res.) Oren Shachor elaborated, “If we kill their families, that will frighten them.” And what might deter Israel?

Times of Israel publishes a zionist’s defence of genocide – the article was withdrawn but is archived.

Behind the Lying Eyes of Mark Regev

Behind the lying eyes of Mark Regev from One Democratic State Group on Vimeo.

Discrimination against Arab families:

‘In an attempt to lure the small ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism into his new government, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has agreed to pay extra child allowance to religious Jewish families with many children in a way that guarantees the extra payments do not also go to large Arab families.

This is the latest in a long line of manoeuvres by successive Israeli governments to ensure that Jewish and Arab citizens receive differential child allowances so that higher birth rates among Jewish families can be encouraged without also encouraging increased fertility among Arab families.

Such schemes are widely seen as being part of government initiatives to counter the perceived “demographic threat” posed by high Arab birth rates and maintaining Israel’s Jewish majority. Child allowance was only equalised for Jews and Arabs in the mid-1990s.’

Olmert and the ‘demographic threat’:

‘The time is fast approaching when Arabs will constitute a majority in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. Then, Olmert said, Palestinians will abandon their calls for an independent state and instead will demand a one-man-one-vote system in a binational state that they will control.

“The day we come to that, we will lose everything” Olmert said. “Even when they carry out terror, it’s hard for us to convince the world of the justice of our cause.”

“How much the more so,” he continued, “when all they ask for is one man, one vote? I shudder to think that the same liberal Jews who led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will be at the forefront of the struggle against us.”’

More Olmert:

‘Mr Olmert said it was not the first time he had articulated his fears about the demographic threat to Israel as a Jewish state from a faster growing Palestinian population.

He made similar comments in 2003 when justifying the failed strategy of unilateral withdrawals from Israeli-occupied land which holds large Palestinian populations.

“If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,”

Rape of Palestinian women:

‘If the Or Yehuda banner only hinted at rape and the WhatsApp image played coyly with it, a leading Israeli academic blatantly floated the idea of using rape against the Palestinians at the very start of the current round of hostilities.

On July 1, just after the bodies of three Israeli teens who had gone missing in the West Bank were found, Bar Ilan University lecturer Dr. Mordechai Kedar spoke on Israeli radio about raping Palestinian women in order to deter “terrorism,” saying that only the knowledge that Israel could dispatch agents to rape a Palestinian militant’s mother or sister, as retribution for his crimes, could deter him from carrying out those actions.’

Here’s Netayahoo in 2003 bemoaning the ‘demographic threat’ of Palestinian wombs in Israel:

Israel’s growing demographic problem is not because of Palestinians, but of Israeli Arabs, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday.

Speaking at the Herzliya Conference on security, Netanyahu said Israel had already freed itself from control of almost all Palestinian Arabs. He said he could not foresee a future in which “any sane Israeli” could try to make Palestinians either Israeli citizens or “enslaved subjects.” The Palestinians would under all circumstances rule themselves and administer their own affairs, he said.

“If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens,” he said. The Declaration of Independence said Israel should be a Jewish and democratic state, but to ensure the Jewish character was not engulfed by demography, it was necessary to ensure a Jewish majority, he said.

Joseph Massad – “Are Palestinian Children Less Worthy”

Who could forget these IDF T-shirts?

Deliberately killing children:

“Monica Awad, the spokeswoman of the UNICEF, condemned Israel’s targeting of women and children in its ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.”

In an interview with Al-Jazeera on 31 July, Awad said “Israeli forces had deliberately killed 264 children in Gaza, which is equal to 11 children per day, and injured more than 2,000.”

“Where’s the international community’s reactions to the slaughtering of children in Gaza? Where are the international human rights covenants?”

IDF Sniper Admits On Instagram To Murdering 13 Gaza Children