Some of the young Norwegians massacred on Utøya island were earlier pictured holding signs supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions) campaign against apartheid Israel. Palestinians, including Yousef Ikhlayl, 17, who was killed near Beit Ommar in an unprovoked settler attack six months ago, are also victims of the same racism and intolerance which motivated the Norwegian gunman. The Popular Committee of Beit Ommar recognizes the need for people to speak out against all forms of terrorism and oppression, wherever they occur.

Despite the meeting requiring over 300 students to attend for it to be quorate and for decisions taken to be binding, the huge level of student support for the motion means that EUSA will be under severe student pressure to adopt it as official policy.

Proposed by students from Edinburgh University Students for Justice in Palestine, the motion noted that Israel is an apartheid state and resolved to affiliate EUSA to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, to boycott Israeli goods in EUSA supply chains and shops, and to mandate the EUSA executive to lobby the University to do the same.

After the motion was discussed for around 15 minutes, it was put to a vote and the result was so comprehensive that no count was required. The passing of the motion led to rapturous applause in the George Square Lecture Theatre, where the General Meeting was held, and was by far the most welcomed result of the night.

Similar motions have been passed at SOAS, Manchester, and Sussex Universities in recent years. This latest result seems a clear indication that students in the UK are continuing to play a prominent role in the campaign for a just peace in Palestine.

The motion came in the wake of recent protests against Israeli officials speaking at the University. In February, student activists shut down a talk by Ishmael Khaldi, advisor to Israeli foreign minister Avidgor Lieberman, and, two weeks ago, over 100 students protested against the invitation of Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor to the University.

The proposer of the motion, second year Maths and Music student Daniel Beesley said “I am overwhelmed with the outcome of the General Meeting. It is great to see students of Edinburgh University once again standing up against injustice, just as they did during Apartheid South Africa. EUSA represents that views of students and we are sure they they will take on board what was clearly the opinion of the vast majority who attended the GM, and endorse the boycott.”

The motion’s seconder, Liam O’Hare, a student of International Relations, said: “Israel has occupied, ethnically cleansed and practised apartheid against the Palestinians for 63 years. The BDS movement seeks to force Israel to abide by international law and is gathering huge momentum year on year. I think the General Meeting proved that the student population at Edinburgh University do not want goods from an Apartheid state on campus and, despite the meeting narrowly not being quorate, I fully expect EUSA to act upon this motion.”

Human rights activists from Vermont, New York and Israel interrupted a performance of the Israel Ballet at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, VT calling attention to the dance company’s complicity in Israeli war crimes.

Using two banners that read “No Tutu is Big Enough to Cover Up War Crimes” and “Sponsored by Apartheid Israel”, the activists, who had purchased tickets to the show, positioned themselves in front of the stage during the opening scenes of the performance. Two audience members attempted to pull the banners down but the activists managed to hold onto them for about 30 seconds before being asked to leave by ushers.

Former Israeli soldier and human rights activist Yonatan Shapira, who took part in the action said, “The Israel Ballet comes to the U.S. during a concerted effort by the Israeli government to use arts and culture to whitewash Israeli war crimes and to conceal facts about its occupation and racial discrimination against the Palestinian people. Rather than distancing itself from the Israeli government, the ballet has proudly embraced its ties with the state.” The Israel Ballet receives around $1 million annually from the Israeli government and is being advertised as a valued cultural representative of the state by the Israeli Consulate in New York. The dance group also boasts holding “special performances” for Israeli soldiers. Shapira is an army refuser who is active with Boycott!, the Israeli group that supports the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the Israel.

Also joining in the action were Burlington-based David Symons who is a performer of Yiddish music, and Brooklyn-based theater artist and teacher Brian Pickett, who commented, “We took this action tonight to educate the public and to deliver a strong message to the Israeli government and affiliated institutions, that while Palestinians are being denied their rights, there will not be business as usual.” In a letter to Israeli news website Ynet, Symons explained the action further, “As performers and people in the arts ourselves, disrupting a ballet was not something we took lightly. It was ultimately decided that there is always a price to pay when one wishes to change the status quo and, in light of Israel’s outrageous and unacceptable behavior toward Palestinians and Lebanese, and its attempt to distract attention from its crimes with brightly-colored artistic and cultural products, the price, in this case, was worth it.”

Video of the action is currently being censored by Youtube who claim it violates a “terms of use” policy, however the video can be viewed at the following links:
http://vimeo.com/9594080
http://samayfield.blip.tv/file/3242921/

The action in Burlington takes place as part of a larger call to boycott Israeli Cultural and Academic institutions that do not openly denounce Israeli crimes against Palestinians and dissociate themselves from Israeli policy. The boycott call has its roots in Palestinian civil society, which in 2004, led by the newly formed Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), called on colleagues in the international community “to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions until Israel withdraws from all the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; removes all its colonies in those lands; agrees to United Nations resolutions relevant to the restitution of Palestinian refugees rights; and dismantles its system of apartheid.”

The Israel Ballet will continue on its 2010 US tour with additional protests planned for its Worcester, Brooklyn, Buffalo and Rockville performances. The call to boycott the Israel Ballet’s U.S. tour was issued by Adalah-NY, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within, and American Jews for a Just Peace .

By Naomi Klein

When I heard the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was holding a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv, I felt ashamed of Toronto, the city where I live. I thought immediately of Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist I met on a recent trip to Gaza. “We had more hope during the attacks,” she told me. “At least then we believed things would change.

Al Shawa explained that while Israeli bombs rained down last December and January, Gazans were glued to their TVs. What they saw, in addition to the carnage, was a world rising up in outrage: global protests, as many as 100,000 on the streets of London, a group of Jewish women in Toronto occupying the Israeli Consulate. “People called it war crimes,” Al Shawa recalled. “We felt we were not alone in the world.” If Gazans could just survive, it seemed that their suffering could be the catalyst for change.

But today, Al Shawa said, that hope is a bitter memory. The international outrage has evaporated. Gaza has vanished from the news. And it seems that all those deaths–as many as 1,400–were not enough to bring justice. Indeed, Israel is refusing to cooperate even with a UN fact-finding mission headed by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone.

Last spring, while Goldstone’s mission was in Gaza gathering devastating testimony, the Toronto International Film Festival was making the final selections for its Tel Aviv spotlight, timed for the Israeli city’s hundredth birthday. There are many who would have us believe that there is no connection between Israel’s desire to avoid scrutiny for its actions in the occupied territories and the glittering Toronto premieres. I am sure that Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s co-director, believes that himself. He is wrong.

For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel’s defiance of international law. It’s no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant topics: film, arts, gay rights–things that underline commonalities between Israel and places like Paris, New York and Toronto. After the Gaza attack, as the protests rose, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, told the New York Times. “This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.” And hip, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, which has been celebrating its centennial with Israeli-sponsored “beach parties” in New York, Vienna and Copenhagen all summer long, is the best ambassador of all.

Toronto got an early taste of this new cultural mission. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that the “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Gissin pledged, “I’m confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has.

Let’s be clear: no one is claiming the Israeli government is secretly running TIFF’s Tel Aviv spotlight, whispering in Bailey’s ear about which films to program. The point is that the festival’s decision to give Israel pride of place, holding up Tel Aviv as a “young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity,” matches Israel’s stated propaganda goals to a T. Gal Uchovsky, one of the directors in the spotlight, is quoted in the festival catalog saying that Tel Aviv is “a haven [Israelis] can run away to when they want to forget about wars and the burdens of daily life.”

Partly in response, Udi Aloni, the wonderful Israeli filmmaker whose film Local Angel premiered at TIFF, sent a video message to the festival, challenging its programmers to resist political escapism and instead “go to the places where it’s hard to go.” It’s ironic that TIFF’s Tel Aviv programming is being called a spotlight, because celebrating that city in isolation–without looking at Gaza, without looking at what is on the other side of the towering concrete walls, barbed wire and checkpoints–actually obscures far more than it illuminates. There are some wonderful Israeli films included in the program. They deserve to be shown as a regular part of the festival, liberated from this highly politicized frame.

It was in this context that a small group of filmmakers, writers and activists, of which I was a part, drafted The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration Under Occupation (torontodeclaration.blogspot.com). It has been signed by the likes of Danny Glover, Viggo Mortensen, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, Ken Loach and more than a thousand others. Among them is revered Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, as well as many Israeli filmmakers.

The counterattacks–spearheaded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the extremist Jewish Defense League–have been at once predictable and inventive. The most frequently repeated claim is that the letter’s signatories are censors, calling for a boycott of the festival. In fact, many of the signatories have much-anticipated films at this year’s festival, and we are not boycotting it: we are objecting to the Tel Aviv spotlight portion of it. More inventive has been the assertion that by declining to celebrate Tel Aviv as just another cool metropolis, we are questioning the city’s “right to exist.” (The Republican actor Jon Voight even accused Jane Fonda of “aiding and abetting those who seek the destruction of Israel.”) The letter does no such thing. It is, instead, a simple message of solidarity, one that says: We don’t feel like partying with Israel this year. It is also a small way of saying to Mona Al Shawa and millions of other Palestinians living under occupation and siege that we have not forgotten them.

By Anat Matar

Several days ago Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. In that article he explained why, after years of activity in the peace camp here, he has decided to pin his hopes on applying external pressure on Israel – including sanctions, divestment and an economic, cultural and academic boycott.

He believes, and so do I, that only when the Israeli society’s well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it.

Gordon looks at the Israeli society and sees an apartheid state. While the Palestinians’ living conditions deteriorate, many Israelis are benefiting from the occupation. In between the two sides, Israeli society is sinking into complete denial – drawn into extreme hatred and violence.

The academic community has an important role to play in this process. Yet, instead of sounding the alarm, it wakes up only when someone dares approach the international community and desperately call for help.

The worn-out slogan that everybody raises in this context is “academic freedom,” but it is time to somewhat crack this myth.

The appeal to academic freedom was born during the Enlightenment, when ruling powers tried to suppress independent minded thinkers. Already then, more than 200 years ago, Imannuel Kant differentiated between academics whose expertise (law, theology, and medicine) served the establishment and those who had neither power nor proximity to power. As for the first, he said, there was no sense in talking about “freedom” or “independent thought” as any use of such terminology is cynical.

Since then, cynicism has spread to other faculties as well. At best academic freedom was perceived as the right to ask troubling questions. At worst was the right to harass whomever asked too much.

When the flag of academic freedom is raised, the oppressor and not the oppressed is usually the one who flies it. What is that academic freedom that so interests the academic community in Israel? When, for example, has it shown concern for the state of academic freedom in the occupied territories?

This school year in Gaza will open in shattered classrooms as there are no building materials there for rehabilitating the ruins; without notebooks, books and writing utensils that cannot be brought into Gaza because of the goods embargo (yes, Israel may boycott schools there and no cry is heard).

Hundreds of students in West Bank universities are under arrest or detention in Israeli jails, usually because they belong to student organizations that the ruling power does not like.

The separation fence and the barriers prevent students and lecturers from reaching classes, libraries and tests. Attending conferences abroad is almost unthinkable and the entry of experts who bear foreign passports is permitted only sparingly.

On the other hand, members of the Israeli academia staunchly guard their right to research what the regime expects them to research and appoint former army officers to university positions. Tel Aviv University alone prides itself over the fact that the Defense Ministry is funding 55 of its research projects and that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Defense Department, is funding nine more. All the universities offer special study programs for the defense establishment.

Are those programs met with any protest? In contrast with the accepted impression, only few lecturers speak up decisively against the occupation, its effect and the increasingly bestial nature of the State of Israel.

The vast majority retains its freedom to be indifferent, up to the moment that someone begs the international community for rescue. Then the voices rise from right and left, the indifference disappears, and violence replaces it: Boycott Israeli universities? This strikes at the holy of holies, academic freedom!

The writer is a lecturer in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Philosophy.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/4/we-support-the-kimmel-occupation

Additionally, CUPE, a Canadian union that was one of the pioneers of the BDS campaign, is also calling for support on behalf of students at Canadian universities that have been facing repression for their support of Palestinian rights.

Here is the meesage from them:

CUPE Needs Your Solidarity for Bravely Standing in Support of Palestinian
Academics

Find below:
* Text of the two historic resolutions;
* Concrete ways to show your support.

Toronto, February 23, 2009 – The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) congratulates CUPE-Ontario’s University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC) conference in Windsor for passing a historic resolution in support of the Palestinian civil society call for an academic institutional boycott of Israel. The resolution calls for education and research into institutional links between Israeli and Canadian Universities that serve to perpetuate apartheid.

An additional emergency resolution was adopted by the OUWCC to protest the violation of free speech and forms of bureaucratic repression that are increasingly targeting Palestine-solidarity organizations and student advocates at several University campuses in Ontario.

Both motions are enormously important as they offer concrete support for academic freedom in Palestine and in Canada. As expected, supporters of Israeli apartheid and militarism are incensed by these resolutions.

Despite the mounting campaign of intimidation launched by pro-apartheid organizations and individuals against CUPE Ontario as a response to these resolutions – including death threats against CUPE Ontario members and their families – the union has stood firm in its commitment to freedom of expression and international solidarity.

Now it is time to show your support for CUPE! Here’s how:

(1) Please send letters of support to CUPE ON president Sid Ryan and the OUWCC committee Chair, Janice Folk-Dawson to cupeont@web.net or fax to 416 299 3480 thanking them for their strong stand in support of Palestinian Human rights (see form letter below for a template you can use to write these letters, though we always like to see people use their creativity and write their own!).

(2) Write to your local paper in support of CUPE-Ontario’s position. You can use Google News to track the story:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=CUPE+boycott&btnG=Search+News.
Also be sure to post online comments in support of CUPE-Ontario wherever the opportunity arises.

(3) Familiarize yourself with the resolutions pasted below and with CUPE-Ontario’s positions. Forward this message and the following link to co-workers, colleagues, friends, allies, partners, relatives, family, and community members: http://www.cupe.on.ca/doc.php?subject_id=152&lang=en and urge them to write in support of CUPE-Ontario.

(4) Write to the administrations of Carleton University (contact information at bottom of http://www2.carleton.ca/about/administrative/president.php), York University (http://vpacademic.yorku.ca/directory/findadm.php?id=1001) and the University of Toronto (http://www.president.utoronto.ca/officeofthepresident.htm) to register
your disagreement with their systematic silencing of pro-Palestinian, pro-human-rights and anti-apartheid voices in Ontario. For specific information on the Free Speech Campaign, visit: http://www.caiaweb.org/.

SAMPLE LETTER TO CUPE-ONTARIO:

Dear Sid and Janice:

I am writing to express my gratitude to the both of you for the incredibly important position you’ve taken in support of human rights in the Middle East. I am especially thankful that you have done so in support of academic freedom for Palestinians and their supporters in both Israel/Palestine and here in Canada as well.

As you know, the Palestinian people are facing an unprecedented attack on their ability to learn and teach. In short, their fundamental rights to education are being violated on a daily basis by Israel’s racist apartheid regime. By affiliating to the Right to Education Campaign, CUPE-Ontario has taken an important step forward in ensuring that Palestinian children have hope for the future – that perhaps someday soon they will be able to go to school without fear of checkpoints, arrests, beatings, or worse.

Furthermore, Israeli academic institutions are often complicit in the oppression of Palestinians. They are deeply integrated into Israel’s military-industrial complex and in the production of studies central to the perpetuation of apartheid over Palestinians. It is important to recognize that brave voices within Israel –both Jewish and Palestinian – have supported the call for a boycott. This is because these voices, those most committed to peace in the region, understand that war and occupation will not end until the institutions complicit in violations of international law are held to account.

Once again, I would like to applaud you for taking the lead in promoting a peaceful way forward in ensuring that justice in the region is achieved. CUPE-Ontario does not stand alone, as the recent global wave of actions in support of the Palestinian campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid demonstrates. Keep up the amazing work. Millions are standing with you.

Regards,

______________________

*** TEXT OF THE TWO RESOLUTIONS THAT PASSED ***

MOTION 1

The OUWCC will:
1. Affiliate to the RIGHT TO EDUCATION campaign at Birzeit University to defend the right of Palestinian students to have access to education and educational institutions in the Palestinian territory, and seek to raise awareness about the issues facing Palestinian education, students and teachers under Israeli military occupation, and further that it will
encourage member locals to affiliate to the Right to Education campaign

2. Encourage its member locals to hold public forums to discuss an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and

3. Ask campus representatives to work with locals to investigate both research and investment links between Ontario Universities and the state of Israel’s military, and

4. Mobilize campus allies to pressure universities from engaging in acts of cooperation that assist and aid military research at the institutional level with Israeli universities;

5. Work with campus and community allies to pressure Ontario universities to refuse collaborations, corporate partnerships and investments that would benefit, either directly or indirectly, military research or the Israeli state military;

6. Request funding and support from CUPE Ontario to conduct an education campaign on the academic boycott, coordinate education sessions and assist in the implementation of resolution 50 as passed in 2006

Because, in response to a call from Palestinian civil society and trade unions, CUPE Ontario’s Resolution 50 (in 2006) calls upon the Union and its locals to support boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) of the state of Israel, so long as that state continues to occupy Palestinian territory and refuses to respect and uphold international law and
covenants, and

Because the latest Israeli attack on Gaza killed over 1300 people, wounded thousands, and destroyed hospitals, schools, roads, power plants, sewage and water infrastructure, and thousands of civilian homes, and as a direct consequence of the attacks by the Israeli military, the Gazan education system has been unable to function, and

Because Israel’s direct bombing of universities and schools and its years-long blockade forbidding educational supplies, fuel and other basic necessities, or movement of people including students and teachers, has brought about the collapse of the education system in Gaza, and Because all three major Palestinian trade union federations are signatories of the Palestinian Civil Society for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions call including: The General Union of Palestinian Workers, PGFTU, and the Federation of Independent Unions.

MOTION 2

Because campus administrators have taken actions that seek to limit free speech and repress public discussions and campus dialogue about the occupation of Palestine.

Because students, staff and faculty members have been threatened with punitive measures for speaking out or organizing events against the state of Israel and have placed obstacles that prevent/limit public debate on campus.

The OUWCC shall;

1. Issue a public statement about our support for free speech on campus and the right of students and campus workers to speak out and organize events that support Palestine and bring awareness to the occupation.

2. Locals of the OUWCC be encouraged to write letters to the administrations of Carleton, Ottawa, York and the University of Toronto to protest the silencing and repression of public debate on campus.

These occupations come after a wave of more than 2 dozen university occupations in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere in Europe which were aimed at ending the war and siege on Gaza and in some cases a call for divestment from Israel, using the same tactic that aided in bringing down the Apartheid regime in South Africa 15 years ago.