NYU Student Government Passes Israeli-authored BDS Resolution

NEW YORK - The Student Government Assembly at New York University passed a resolution Thursday supporting a divestment of businesses that sell to the Israeli army.

More than 60 organizations and 30 faculty members supported the resolution, which was co-authored by an Israeli-American student.

The resolution calls on the university to divest from companies that “play an active role in funding and perpetuating Israel’s illegal occupation and its violation of human rights, making NYU complicit in these crimes.”

The resolution listed corporations such as Caterpillar Inc., Lockheed Martin, and General Electric as companies that sell bulldozers, helicopters, and engine generators to the Israeli army.

Following a debate that lasted into the night, 35 students voted for the resolution, 14 voted against, and 14 abstained. Israeli and Jewish students and others who oppose the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement protested outside the meeting.

“The resolution will help my family in Israel, along with Palestinians” said Rose Asaf, who co-authored the resolution along with two students affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Leen Dweik and Bayan Abubakr.

The students also listed two faculties at NYU that use General Electric engines or list Lockheed Martin as a corporate partner. The resolution points out as precedent that in 1985 the New York University Student Senators Council unanimously voted for the university to divest from all South African businesses during the Apartheid era.   

Taly Krupkin New York

Dec 08, 2018 1:30 AM

Efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations

The Film the Israel Lobby Does Not Want You to See

The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups to spy on, smear and attack critics who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement

Chris Hedges

Congratulating Code Pink and Airbnb.

This is a huge victory! Moments ago, Airbnb announced they will no longer list vacation rentals in illegal Jewish-only West Bank settlements. It’s been exactly two years since we took the stage at Airbnb Open to confront actor Ashton Kutcher. “Airbnb is profiting off the displacement of Palestinians and human rights abuses.”

It might seem sometimes that we are speaking into the wind, but we know that when we are persistent, our work pays off. In celebration of successfully getting Airbnb to end support for Israeli apartheid, join our next campaign for Palestinian rights: Tell pop superstar Ed Sheeran to support Palestinian rights by refusing to perform in Israel. Share our Ed Sheeran petition with your friends and colleagues and on social media. Help us tell him how important it is to support Palestinian rights.

Tell Booking.com that Jerusalem is Palestine

We are thrilled to be partnering with our friends at Jewish Voice for Peaceto tell Booking.com to stop erasing Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Add your name now.

Shouldn’t you know if you’re going to book a room in an illegal Israeli settlement? Apparently, Booking.com doesn’t think so. Last week, bowing to pressure from fanatical settlers and pro-Israel activists, they started describing all of Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, as a “city in Israel.”

Booking.com’s CEO Gillian Tans is a proud progressive female leader, famous for her openness — so we are sending her a strong and clear message: Booking.com must tell the truth that East Jerusalem is occupied Palestine!

Join CODEPINK, Jewish Voice for Peace and others in sending a message to Gillian Tans.

Tell Booking.com to tell the Truth

History and future of BDS

The more deeply entrenched this one-state reality became, the more resonant the charge of apartheid, and the more difficult to imagine undoing it through partition into two states. A battle against occupation could be concluded with a simple military withdrawal, but a struggle against apartheid could be won only with the end of state policies that discriminated against non-Jews. 

In the case of Israel, these could be found not just in the occupied territories, but everywhere Palestinians came into contact with the state. In the West Bank, Palestinians were denied the right to vote for the government controlling their lives, deprived of free assembly and movement, forbidden from equal access to roads, resources and territory, and imprisoned indefinitely without charge. In Gaza, they could not exit, enter, import, export or even approach their borders without the permission of Israel or its ally, Egypt. In Jerusalem, they were segregated from one another and encircled by checkpoints and walls. In Israel, they were evicted from their lands, prevented from reclaiming their expropriated homes, and blocked from residing in communities inhabited exclusively by Jews. In the diaspora, they were prevented from reunifying with their families in Israel-Palestine or returning to their homes, solely because they were not Jews.

BDS: how a controversial non-violent movement has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian debate

Stand up for Palestinian child prisoners

Stand up for Palestinian child prisoners by endorsing H.R. 4391

AMP joins the millions of Palestinians and their supporters around the world in celebrating the release of teen political prisoner Ahed Tamimi, who has become an important symbol of peaceful Palestinian resistance and resilience. 


On this occasion, we remember the hundreds more Palestinian children who remain incarcerated in Israeli military detention. Today, we ask you to take action on their behalf by adding your name to endorse H.R. 4391, the "Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act," the first-ever bill in U.S. Congress to support Palestinian rights.

Become a citizen cosponsor of H.R. 4391!

A map that he had never seen before

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-map-of-israeli-settlements-that-shocked-barack-obama

One afternoon in the spring of 2015, a senior State Department official named Frank Lowenstein paged through a government briefing book and noticed a map that he had never seen before. Lowenstein was the Obama Administration’s special envoy on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, a position that exposed him to hundreds of maps of the West Bank. (One adorned his State Department office.)

Typically, those maps made Jewish settlements and outposts look tiny compared to the areas where the Palestinians lived. The new map in the briefing book was different. It showed large swaths of territory that were off limits to Palestinian development and filled in space between the settlements and the outposts. At that moment, Lowenstein told me, he saw “the forest for the trees”—not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained.

Code Pink call for RE/MAX to stop selling apartheid

The weekend is the Presbyterian Church’s biannual General Assembly. Among the many social justice issues they will address is a resolution calling on real estate giant RE/MAX to stop facilitating property sales in illegal Israeli settlements.

In 2016, right before the last Presbyterian Church General Assembly, RE/MAX founder and then-CEO Dave Liniger announced that the company would stop receiving revenues from settlement properties. But they continue to allow their Israeli franchise to rent and sell settlement houses, and they continue to include settlement properties in their global database. With your help, this time we will succeed in getting RE/MAX to fully extricate themselves from Israel’s settlement enterprise. Add your name to the letter we are sending to current CEO Adam Contos at this year’s General Assembly!

Israel-based international defense electronics company

Elbit Systems Ltd. is an Israel-based international defense electronics company

OVERVIEW

Israel uses military force and sophisticated technology to maintain its oppression of Palestinians.

Human rights organisations have documented that Israel violates international law and carries out war crimes during its frequent attacks on Palestinians.

Israel is only able to act with such impunity because governments and companies around the world cooperate with its military and with its military companies.

Palestinian civil society has called for a comprehensive and immediate military embargo on Israel. BDS campaigning is starting to have an impact on Israeli military companies such as Elbit Systems.

https://bdsmovement.net/military-embargo

Vassar Israeli Apartheid Week

The coming year (2018) will mark 70 years of Palestinian popular resistance against the ongoing process of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, since the 1948 Nakba.The Palestinian people’s resistance against colonization has in fact been longer than that. From the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the present moment- Palestinians have fought for their dignity, their rights, and their lands. Israeli Apartheid Week is an opportunity to reflect on this resistance and further advance BDS campaigns for the continued growth and impact of the movement. Despite Israel’s legal and propaganda war on BDS internationally, Israeli Apartheid Week and the BDS movement continue to build linkages and solidarity with other struggles to achieve freedom, justice, and equality.

Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, in collaboration with Vassar Prison Initiative, MBSA, WVKR, MENASA (formerly known as MESC) and other campus chapter partners bring you an incredible lineup of events that will bring Palestine solidarity back to Vassar! Israeli Apartheid Week is an international event that takes place in the months of February, March, and April, with campuses, cities, and institutions having engaged their communities for 14 years in support of Palestinian resistance. Through a series of workshops, lectures, performances, and moderated dialogue spaces, we hope to provide multiple entry points to see Palestinian liberation as an integral component to anti-colonial and anti-racist spaces, as well as critical to fighting the pervasive transphobia, homophobia, anti-semitism and islamophobia that is on the rise in our current political climate. 

https://www.facebook.com/events/180469152584681/

Presbyterian Church teaching guide

Why Palestine Matters

The Struggle to End Colonialism

Our Intersectional

Struggle for Justice

Outstanding Youth Activist Group

Columbia University Students for Justice in Palestine | Outstanding Youth Activist Group Award

First awarded in 2016, the Outstanding Youth Activist Group Award recognizes an outstanding youth activist group engaged in Palestine solidarity work in the United States. This award is intended to spotlight and uplift youth and students who are engaged in new, creative, and intersectional activism, often under difficult circumstances and in repressive conditions on US campuses.

Columbia University SJP (CSJP) is a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, and community members from Columbia University and Barnard College, organized on democratic principles to promote justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinian people. Since spring of 2016, CSJP has been organizing around their boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, in conjunction with the Columbia/Barnard chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. The Apartheid Divest campaign calls on Columbia to divest its stocks, funds, and endowments from eight companies that profit from Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights.

Why They Inspire Us

We are inspired by how CSJP centers intersectional and cross-movement work in their organizing for Palestinian rights and against Israeli apartheid. CSJP understands the liberation of Palestine to be inextricably intertwined with the liberation of oppressed groups everywhere, and so they focus on building genuine and deep relationships across struggles.

Big Plans for 2018

In the spring of 2018, CSJP is hosting their annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) at Columbia, a full week of events featuring a diverse array of scholars, activists, and artists speaking on Palestinian liberation. Their plans including constructing a mock apartheid wall on Low Plaza each day of the week to educate and spread information about Palestinian human rights and BDS. IAW culminates with Palestinian Cultural Night, a night of celebration featuring dancers, vendors, speakers, food, and music.

Follow Along
Follow CSJP online at apartheiddivest.org, and on Facebook and Twitter.

https://uscpr.org/awards/

Calling on Dutchess County Legislature

Act locally to put an end to human rights abuses across the globe

I am a strong advocate of the phrase, “think global act local”. However, history is full of examples where countries take collective action. In the 1990s when global leaders focused on eliminating apartheid in South Africa, humanity won. Yet the world failed to act in Rwanda. Our leaders were aware of the extreme cruelty occurring during this time. They decided that apologizing is more convenient than clear, decisive action.

This brings me to the present-day case of Ms. Ahed Tamimi, otherwise affectionately known as “Shirley Temper” by her neighbors. She was born in what former British Prime Minister David Cameron called “the world’s biggest open-air prison,” and yet she has a disarming smile. With nothing more than her bare hands and a strong sense of duty to her community, she keeps an eye on the foreign military personnel who often terrorize her young friends. Now 16, she has practiced nonviolence since her first demonstration. I met Ahed’s father, Bassem, at an event years ago. Hearing him speak about the conditions in which they are forced to live was heart-wrenching. Snipers shoot youth in the legs during marches; their elite training ensures that they will render this child permanently disabled.

And still, Palestinians organize. Peacefully, after 70 years, they drag their wheelchair- ridden families right back to the same spot along the West Bank barrier, a physical wall that spans 440 miles. A modern Berlin wall separates them from the land on which they grew generations old olive trees. It divides families.

ARREST IS MADE: Israel arrests Palestinian girl Ahed Tamimi over viral video of soldier slapping

Back to Shirley Temper. I have been following this curly haired freedom fighter for years. The brutality of Operation Protective Edge in 2014 incited a deep urge for me to act. I took to social media and kept a close watch on the activities in the Occupied Territories long after the world put this siege to bed. That’s when I found Ahed. In her, I witnessed the growth of an unrelenting humanitarian. Her public addresses to the world through underground media connects our shared freedom. She echoes the sentiments of the ever-relevant Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he declared “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”.

My child hero is facing a decade in military captivity for hitting the soldier who shot her unarmed brother at point blank range… in the face.

It serves as a duty to those who fought for America’s freedoms that I take pen to paper. This narrative should be the shot heard ‘round the world. As a patriot, I see the spirit of the Founding Fathers in Palestine’s youth. As a Dutchess County resident, I recognize that we are facing increasing threats to our own liberties. As a human, I urge us to learn from history by making Ahed’s story end differently than that of our beloved Anne Frank. The truth is simple yet heartbreaking. We could have saved Anne. Her diary, although one of the greatest gifts to our collective consciousness, is a testament to our inaction.

There is no debate. Detaining minors in military detention facilities is wrong. Holding people captive in an outdoor prison is wrong. As much as Americans hate to face it during this time of sensationalism, some things are fundamentally unacceptable. Ms. Tamimi’s ability to fight for basic human rights in Palestine will determine the ability of your grandchildren to do the same here, in America. Our connected economies make human oppression a global issue.

Please join me in asking our Dutchess County Legislature to follow the example of the New Orleans City Council by passing a resolution pledging to avoid contracting with or investing in businesses that practice human rights abuses.  Ever since World War II we have said “Never Again”. Ask your legislature to mean it.

Dutchess County resident Jasmin Vazquez is a graduate of SUNY New Paltz, where she received a bachelor's of arts degree in political science with a concentration in international politics.

Victory for free speech

A FEDERAL JUDGE on Tuesday ruled that a Kansas law designed to punish people who boycott Israel is an unconstitutional denial of free speech. The ruling is a significant victory for free speech rights because the global campaign to criminalize, or otherwise legally outlaw, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement has been spreading rapidly in numerous political and academic centers in the U.S. This judicial decision definitively declares those efforts — when they manifest in the U.S. — to be a direct infringement of basic First Amendment rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

More at:
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/31/kansas-bds-law-free-speech/

Truth bomb

Jewish Israeli Comedian

Apartheid Israel blacklisting peace groups

On Sunday, January 7, 2018, the Israeli government published a list of six US organizations, including CODEPINK, and 20 organizations worldwide whose activists will be barred from entering the country because of their support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) in favor of Palestinian rights.

Join us in calling on influential Senators Chuck Schumer and Ben Cardin to denounce this outrageous ban and tell Israel to lift it immediately. These senators should stand up for the right of US citizens to criticize repressive Israeli policies, especially since Israel gets over $3 billion of our tax dollars every year.

The six banned US groups are:

• American Friends Service Committee
• American Muslims for Palestine
• CODEPINK
• Jewish Voice for Peace
• National Students for Justice in Palestine
• US Campaign for Palestinian Rights