Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Interrogation of Omar Barghouti | Going to Palestine | French Zionism | UN Report on Israeli Apartheid | More ...

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Palestinian BNC's Statement on Omar Barghouti's Ongoing Interrogation and Israel's Campaign to Repress BDS

On the morning of Sunday, March 19, Israeli tax authorities barged into the home of Omar Barghouti, the prominent Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for the freedom, justice and equality of the Palestinian people. They detained and interrogated Omar and his wife Safa for 16 hours that first day. Omar is currently enduring a fourth day of interrogation.

Below is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee's (BNC) response to these developments and the Israeli government's systematic efforts to criminalize the BDS movement, intimidate activists and stop free speech:

"A prominent Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, has for years been subjected to intense threats, intimidation and repression by various arms of the far-right Israeli government, particularly after it considered the movement a "strategic threat" to its entire system of injustice against Palestinians.
"At a March 2016 conference in occupied Jerusalem, several Israeli government ministers threatened Omar and key BDS human rights defenders with severe measures, including "targeted civil elimination" - a euphemism for civil assassination. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs last year established a "tarnishing unit," as exposed in the Israeli daily Haaretz. This unit's job is to tarnish the reputation of BDS human rights defenders and networks.
"It is in this context that the Israeli tax department's investigation of Omar and his wife, Safa, must be understood. After failing to intimidate them through the threat of revoking Omar's permanent residence in Israel, and after the effective travel ban imposed on him proved futile in stopping his human rights work, the Israeli government has resorted to fabricating a case related to Omar's alleged income outside of Israel to tarnish his image and intimidate him.
"The fact that this investigation includes a travel ban and that it comes a few weeks before Omar Barghouti is scheduled to travel to the U.S. to receive the Gandhi Peace Award jointly with Ralph Nader in a ceremony at Yale University proves its true motive -repression.
"The fact that the Israeli government publicized the inflammatory fabrications against Omar just 24 hours after he was taken in for investigation shows beyond doubt that the investigation's real goal is to tarnish his reputation.
"No matter what extreme measures of repression Israel wields against the BDS movement or its human rights defenders and vast network of supporters, it cannot stop this movement for human rights. Bullying and repression can hardly affect a grassroots movement that grows in people's hearts and minds, empowering them to do the right thing - to stand on the right side of history, against Israel's fanatic regime of apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing, and for freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people.
"This latest desperate chapter of repression and intimidation by the Israeli government against Omar Barghouti is the strongest indicator yet of the failure of the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid to slow down the impressive growth of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights."

(The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit www.bdsmovement.net and follow @BDSmovement.)

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COMMENTARY

Dear Israeli Government: I Want to Go to Palestine

By Alison Weir

Dear Israeli Government, About Your New Travel Ban

You've recently banned foreigners who support boycotts against Israel or Israeli settlements from being allowed to enter Israel - even Jewish foreigners, a first for the self-proclaimed Jewish state. After all, your "Law of Return" has allowed (and encouraged) Jewish foreigners to freely immigrate to Israel, even as multitudes of Palestinians have been banned from returning to their homes.

People throughout the Western world have objected in outrage to your new law, particularly Jewish Westerners who have family and connections in Israel from whom they'll be cut off in retaliation for their political positions.

Critics, even some who oppose boycotting Israel and who have had no problem with excluding Palestinians, have called out the law for diverse reasons: its quashing of free debate and political expression, its anti-democratic nature, how it will affect them and others personally.

I support these objections.

But I'm not trying to visit Israel.

I want to go to Bethlehem and Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron, Jenin and Tulkarem. I hope to return to Khan Yunis, Rafah, Gaza City, and numerous other towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza.

In other words, I want to go to Palestine - a country recognized by 136 countries around the world. But your law, astoundingly, prevents me from visiting that country. You control entry and exit to the places I want to visit, even though they're not part of your territory, or included in your exclusive democracy.

When I was born, Palestine referred to the whole of the land that your founders then ethnically cleansed and renamed. Now, it officially refers to a few segments of land, surrounded and trapped.

Unlike the residents of every other country on earth, Palestinians are not free to travel to and from their own country unless a foreign country gives them permission - a normally universal right that you routinely deny: to young and old, Muslims and Christians, professors and paupers, men and women.

Visitors are similarly obstructed. You decide whether they can get in, and whether they can get out.

When I try to visit Bethlehem, for example, I must face your armed soldiers manning the Kafkaesque, towering concrete wall you have erected on Palestinian land. These gun-toting youngsters will decree whether or not I and others - including Palestinian descendants of Bethlehem's ancient shepherds - can pass through.

In other words, Israel is essentially imprisoning over 4 million men, women, and children (with some help from Egypt, its proxy to the south). Israeli jailers, euphemistically "border guards," determine who may even visit this incarcerated population, and what supplies may reach them.

Over the years I've seen you prevent numerous individuals and groups, many bringing medicines and life-saving supplies, from visiting this captive population. You've blocked sons from visiting dying mothers, suffering children from receiving critical medical care, malnourished toddlers from receiving help.

It is a profound shame upon the world that this cruel and unconscionable condition has been permitted to persist year after year. There should have been massive and irresistible objections long before your recent legislation.

I remember when the United States opposed the Iron Curtain. Today, the U.S. gives the perpetrator of this current captivity $10 million per day.

Israel already denied me entry once 15 years ago, locking me up for 28 hours in a detention cell in Ben Gurion Airport before expelling me. I remember Israeli officials telling me I was not "allowed into Israel." They didn't even supply a reason.

Next time, they may say it's because I endorse BDS, which I wholeheartedly do.

But I'm not trying to go to Israel. I want to go to Palestine.

- Alison Weir is president of the Council for the National Interest, executive director of If Americans Knew, and author of "Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel." She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

COMMENTARY

'More Royal than the King': An Encounter with French Zionism

By Dr. Samah Jabr

From those who are willing to legitimize killing and torture in support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the fabrication of lies and false accusations to intimidate their opponents is only to be expected.

My latest encounter with international Zionism was in Paris on 10 March, following the screening of the documentary film "Derriere les Fronts" at Cinema 3 Luxembourg. I was there to participate in the debate that followed the screening insofar as I appear prominently in the film itself. But immediately after one of the spectators asked a genuine and sincere question about the psychopathologies that I encounter as a clinician in Palestine, a friend of Israel took the microphone to occupy the occasion with a very long, hateful and chauvinistic speech about "Palestinian paranoia" and "the Arab's natural violence and racism", until finally the audience could no longer tolerate his diatribe and there arose a loud collective outcry demanding that he let someone else speak.

This person's name, gender, color, religion and appearance are less important than his role: to arrive at every possible time and place to any activity that gives recognition to Palestinians and demonstrates them as standing up for their rights. I encountered "him" countless times in the past - when I spoke as a student at Saint Peter's University in New York years ago, when I spoke among professionals at the "Thinking Space Special Event" of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London after the 2014 war on Gaza, and now at a cinema in Paris.

His role is to occupy the time devoted to public debate in order to prevent a meaningful discussion from taking place, to intimidate the speakers and the audience by his aggressive and accusing attitude, and to make use of the occasion in print to defame and threaten the speakers and the people responsible for organizing the activity giving recognition to the Palestinian experience.

At this moment, we see Israel is hastily cooking up new laws to criminalize and punish individuals involved in BDS and in exposing Israel's shameful illegal actions. Within just the past few days, Israel has deported Hugh Lanning, the chairman of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, for his involvement in criticizing Israel and has arrested Kahlil Tufakji, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, an expert in mapping and settlement.

Meanwhile, Israel's friends in Europe and the USA are acting "more royal than the king", with regard to Palestinians and international friends of Palestinians, marking them, weaving lies to smear their reputations and attacking them in their means of livelihood. Everywhere the mighty truncheon of Israel is swayed to threaten all who dare to criticize the occupation or to mobilize nonviolent action to address human right abuses in Palestine.

I have friends who have been receiving threats to their life for their involvement in supporting Palestinian rights. One must wonder what recourse is left for Palestinians when diplomacy fails and nonviolent action is criminalised - to ask this question is not to encourage violence but to observe the way in which supporters of Zionism, through systematically extinguishing all possible avenues of non-violent public responses, are themselves implicated in the episodes of violence that follow.

In this context, the monopoliser of the microphone in the cinema has made the deliberate false claim that the screening of this film had been organised in the framework of "Israel Apartheid Week". He makes the absurd accusation that both I and the director of the film are agents of terrorism and, by so doing, putting in danger our careers, our personal freedom and our physical safety. He further asserts the colossal inflammatory falsehood that I identify Israeli civilians as legitimate targets of armed resistance!

Finally, he admits that he finds the film "incomprehensible!" Maybe because in his conscious and mind remains the well-worn untruth: that the Palestinians "don't exist - where are the Palestinians?" But the film gives life and an undeniable presence to the Palestinians in their beautiful diversity: the Archbishop Atallah Hannah, the hunger striking detainee Sheikh Khader Adnan, former prisoner academic Rula Abu Dahho and Deema Zallooum, the young mother who saved her child from being kidnapped by settlers; all of these Palestinians join me in conveying a unified message: We will continue to share our variant testimonies about the occupation, no matter what power is used to break the tissues of Palestinian solidarity. We will strengthen our networking with the supporters of justice and extend our hands to the decent friends of Palestine.

- Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Jerusalem, who cares about the wellbeing of her community, beyond issues of mental illness. She writes regularly on mental health in occupied Palestine. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. (This article was first published in Middle East Monitor)

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