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| University of Exeter Must Not Normalize Israeli Apartheid to speak openly about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. A sleepy city tucked away in the southwest corner of the United Kingdom, most of the 22,000 students at the well-respected University seem more interested in studying and socializing, than becoming involved in political activism. Surface appearances can be very misleading, however. For the past two months, Palestinian students and their allies, including the University's Friends of Palestine society, have found themselves the targets of a series of attacks on their right to speak out in support of Palestine. These attacks are not unique to the University of Exeter, but instead tell a story of a widespread clampdown, driven by the British Government and pro-Israel lobbying groups, in an effort to ban student-led campaigns in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and Palestinian rights. Early in the year, Jo Johnson, the Minister for Universities and Science, wrote to British universities, asking them to adopt a definition of antisemitism which conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This year's Israeli Apartheid Week, which took place on British university campuses at the end of February and the beginning of March, was the first major test of these directives. Israeli Apartheid Week has been held on campuses internationally, and in most institutions passes off peacefully, with students at their institutions putting forward the facts of Israel's apartheid and settler-colonial policies in both Israel proper and the occupied territories to the rest of the student body. Universities in Britain had generally allowed the events of these weeks to run annually without much interference. However, 2017 was different. Students at several universities in the UK, including the University of Central Lancashire, and University College London, found the events they had scheduled for Israeli Apartheid Week cancelled by university management without warning. At the University of Exeter, the Friends of Palestine society had received the go-ahead from the Guild of Students for the recreation of an Israeli checkpoint on campus. The students wished to show to their colleagues the reality of the system of military checkpoints in the West Bank, which degrade the Palestinian people and impede their free movement; as the students made very clear, however, no student would have been forced to pass through their "checkpoint", which was to have been staged well away from the entrance to any University building. In an extraordinary move, the University cancelled the event, stating health and safety concerns. After several rejected appeals, and a large demonstration of students in favour of holding the event, the University management met with the students. At the meeting, they refused to elaborate on what grounds the checkpoint had been banned, and insisted that the students should feel grateful that they had been allowed to hold any events for Israeli Apartheid Week at all. They also admitted that external pressure had been applied to the University to prevent the action going ahead. The campaign to stage the mock checkpoint as originally planned is ongoing. At the same time, a virulent campaign was made by a pro-Israel lobby group and the right-wing press in Britain against a Palestinian student at Exeter, Malaka Shwaikh. Miss Shwaikh was elected in February as a postgraduate representative, trustee board member and delegate to the conference of the National Union of Students. Coming from Gaza, she lost 66 family members and friends in Israel's bombing of the Gaza Strip in 2014. She had been highly active in campaigning against all forms of racism, including antisemitism, within the student community at Exeter. Taking some tweets, written four years previously, completely out of context, pro-Israel lobby group the Campaign Against Antisemitism, launched a series of attacks on Miss Shwaikh, with the aim of getting her fired from her new positions because of her pro-Palestine stance. 'The point of these attacks is not to determine the truth, but rather to bully those who speak up for Palestinian rights, in order to scare others away from Palestinian activism,' Miss Shwaikh wrote in a statement. After an outpouring of support from Exeter's students, an investigation by the Exeter Guild of Students concluded that Miss Shwaikh had done nothing to bring the Guild into disrepute. Students at Exeter are currently involved in another struggle, one to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinian people, and Palestinian students, through the academic boycott of Israel. The academic boycott has gained much traction in recent years, as the apartheid policies of Israel's academic institutions have been exposed, from discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel in schools, to Israeli universities developing weapons to use against the Gaza Strip. Israel has also arrested tens of Palestinian students, including over 60 from Birzeit University alone. In the face of this, the Vice-Chancellor of Exeter, Sir Steve Smith, has announced that he will visit Israel in May, as a 'show of support for academic links with Israel'. He is to be accompanied by Jo Johnson - the Minister who wrote to UK universities, asking them to clamp down on Palestine activism. A local group, Exeter Palestine Action, has launched a petition calling on Smith and Johnson to cancel their visit. On May 30th, marking Yom al-Ard, or Palestinian Land Day, students at Exeter staged a protest using the hashtag #DontPunishProtest, calling on the University to allow their activism to go ahead, and for other UK universities, including the University of Manchester, to drop disciplinary action against Palestinian student groups for holding demonstrations. They held a "die-in", a protest outside the offices of the management, commemorating the six protestors who were killed by Israel on Land Day 1976. The University of Exeter is a microcosm of university campuses across the UK. Activists for Palestine have been met every step of the way with repression from government bodies, and university managements which do their bidding, and give in easily to pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups. But they have also been met with support from many students. At Exeter, students will continue to fight for their right to protest, to support the work of their elected representatives, and to campaign for solidarity with the Palestinian people. They will not rest until they have achieved Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, knowing that, as with South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, freedom for Palestine will not be far behind. - Alex Clark (Not his real name) is a student at the University of Exeter. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. |
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On the Israeli Campaign Targeting Omar Barghouti Omar Barghouti, one of the most charismatic Palestinian activists, has been subjected to the most intense interrogation by Israeli authorities. He is the outspoken co-founder of the BDS movement, member of the secretariat of the Boycott National Committee (BNC,) and a steering committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Israeli forces kidnapped Omar 12 days ago to prevent him from travelling to the US to receive the prestigious Gandhi Peace Award. They are holding him with false, trumped-up charges as part of their current tactic to start lies and rumors to tarnish the image of BDS activists - and discredit the BDS movement. This attack on Omar is not new, but part of Israel's all-out legal, intelligence and propaganda war on the BDS movement which has intensified since 2016. This intensified focus on the BDS movement is a reaction to the increasing success of the non-violent BDS movement which has seen Israeli ships being prevented from docking at ports across the world, hundreds of artists and musicians refusing to perform in Israel and prominent South Africans freedom -fighters such as Ahmed Kathrada, Archbishop Tutu and Ronnie Kasrils aligning themselves with the BDS movement and declaring Israeli apartheid to be far worse than that endured by South Africans. But it knows very well the success that BDS is achieving globally - and that BDS is the new-old tool of resistance used by the Palestinians, supported by international civil society, to bring Israel to justice and hold it accountable for all the crimes it has been committing against the Palestinian people, namely occupation, colonization and apartheid. This is a global movement with global supporters with a focus on eliminating oppression and injustice in Palestine, but with an address that goes far beyond Palestine and out of the reach of Israel's usual barbaric tool of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including mass murder and collective punishment. Omar's statement and positions emanate from the movement's defense of Palestinian human rights. Its slogans- freedom, equality and justice- pose a very serious threat to the racist foundation of Israel as "the state of the Jews". Put differently to call for equality and return of refugees who were ethnically cleansed in 1948, in accordance with UN resolution 194, as the BDS movement does, questions the very definition of the state of Israel, as made clear by the ESCWA report, which clearly states that it is an apartheid state. To be willing to recognize and accept the exclusivist and racist nature of the State is the precondition for being welcomed in Israel. There is no Israeli nationality, only a Jewish national character and not an Israeli one, which effectively excludes all Palestinians and "non-Jews" living in Israel from citizenship and statehood. This, as noted by the UN Committee on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights, "encourages discrimination and accords second class status to [Israel's] non-Jewish citizens." It is very obvious that the ruling Ashkenazi establishment has become fed up with the rising tsunami of the BDS movement. Last year's Yediot Ahronot conference, which was attended by all spectrums of political life in Israel, reached the conclusion that the movement poses a" strategic" -if not an existential-threat to the Zionist project in the Middle east! Hence the extremist measures taken by the government and laws passed by the Knesset to fight BDS. One of those measures was " civil targeted killing" of BDS activists. Unsurprisingly, two weeks ago the Israeli Knesset passed a resolution to ban all foreign BDS activists and supporters from entering the country. Interestingly, an in accordance with the apartheid South African experience, no Jewish activist has ever been subjected to the kind of treatment Palestinian activists experience at the hands of the authorities - the response to activism is also subsumed to the racist ideology that informs the political statements and actions of Israel and Israeli politicians. A meaningful, just and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian question must include all Palestinians, including those in the West Bank and Gaza, those who remained in Israel, and the 1948 Palestinian refugees. The mechanism to redress this dispossession is not via a Bantustan a la apartheid South Africa as agreed to by the signatories of the Oslo Accords. Instead, a secular democratic state where all citizens are treated equally regardless of their religion, sex or color, is the only just and equitable solution that will end Israeli apartheid. This is what Omar has been calling for - and what he continues to call for in his latest statement. This steadfastness of the BDS movement and its unwavering commitment to justice for all Palestinians is the real reason behind the false campaign against Omar; and this is why the BDS movement must, as Omar has called for - intensify its work, so that Israel is forced to comply with international law. More BDS is the way to end apartheid in Israel as apartheid was ended in South Africa. - Dr. Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. He is also a one-state activist and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He contributed this article this article to PalestineChronicle.com. |
The Sceptic Optimist: Interview with Norman Finkelstein There is another side to Norman Finkelstein, apart from the notorious YouTube clips and public feuds with world known scholars, such as Alan Dershowitz and Benny Morris. As I was preparing my interview with Prof. Finkelstein, I carefully went through his books, interviews and lectures online. I quickly found what motivated him to commit academic suicide, a term Noam Chomsky used when he warned Prof. Finkelstein what would happen if he started a fight with Alan Dershowitz. Being the son of holocaust survivors, it seems as if justice and truth were core values in his upbringing. Those are not only the values that he uses prolifically when describing the purpose of his books. They are also, undoubtedly, the main reasons for his career choice, namely writing about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. I asked Prof. Finkelstein, to what extent it is even possible to claim the truth, when debating the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. "We start off with two basic premises. Premise number one is that we are setting out to search for something called truth. There is something called truth, and that is what we are trying to reach, but on the other hand, we all have to recognize that we are imperfect vessels and that we will never reach truth. We also have to be open to the fact that we think is the truth, might not be. It's as simple as that. With that in mind, it seems that we have enough basic scholarly research to establish some facts, and you might say that by the process of elimination, certain things are no longer plausible explanations. There is always the possibility that our explanation at some point in the future date will be shown to be false". Prof. Finkelstein frequently uses the work of Benny Morris as references in his books, but Morris himself has criticized Prof. Finkelstein for misusing his work, by selectively picking out facts and constructing his own narrative about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. A criticism that Prof. Finkelstein throws back at Morris: "First of all, Morris does his work. He is a conscientious searcher of archives and he comes up with lots of interesting information. In my opinion, he was the most conscientious of those who researched the archives on 1948. He did a lot of research, no doubt about that. He is what Noam Chomsky once referred to, as a good clerk. He goes into the archives, comes up with interesting information, but in terms of reconceptualization of what happened, there is nothing there. That's okay. We should recognize his achievements, but we shouldn't get carried away. He is a good clerk, and a good clerk is better than a bad clerk. Most academics don't even clerk. They just talk nonsense. So I grant him that, for sure. Secondly, what you described is not unusual. I spent some time going through the Human Rights reports on Operation Protective Edge, and there is this huge gap between their factual findings and their legal interpretations. The latter, as far as I could tell, are not connected with what their research found". So, finding the facts and then delivering them truthfully is where Morris went wrong? "There is a certain selectivity in the facts that he takes from the archive, and which then forms his picture of what happened. That's true of everybody, we all have an agenda. There is a famous expression, which is that you are entitled to your opinion but not to your facts. The problem with Morris is that he changes his opinion, but there are no new facts. How is it that on the basis of the same facts you suddenly conclude the reverse. In his case it's literally the reverse, he has just inverted the whole reality, he starts off by saying that Zionists are coming to disposes the indigenous population. The idea of transfer is inbuilt and inevitable in Zionism, and then he said that the fear of territorial dispossession was the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism. Now he just turned the whole thing upside down. Suddenly it was the Arabs who wanted to expel the Jews, and the Jews were resisting". No topic is more debated today than truth. President Trump is currently waging a war against the liberal media, simply referring to them as "fake news". Prof. Finkelstein agrees with Trump in his criticism of the media, but he is not a fan of Trump or his version of the truth: "The whole talk about facts makes me want to comment on the fake news and alternative facts. This is not a new phenomenon at all. I'm not particularly outraged by Trump's lies, because they are simplistic and easy to expose. They don't really cause much damage. In my opinion, the real purveyors of fake news and lies, I agree with Trump, are the media. I will give you an example. During the last month of the election campaign, the media went berserk in its attacks on Trump. It was kind of surreal. In the last month of the election, The New York Times was writing about how Obama turned around the economy, how he has reduced inequality. This was people like Paul Krugman, who called Bernie Sanders' economics voodoo. I was thinking to myself, it really is like Pravda in the Stalin era. I really thought these lies were more disgusting that anything Trump has said. If the economy were so good, can you explain to me why Trump won? Why did Bernie have such a resonance? A majority of Americans supported either Trump or Bernie. The entire corporate media across the US supported Hillary. Trump got the endorsement of only one newspaper in the whole US. The entire political elite class and the Wall Street billionaire class supported Hillary. There has never been an election in the US where a person was elected, but was opposed by the entire corporate elite, political elite and media elite. The masses ignored the media, which I think was a wise thing". The Sceptic Optimist Most Israelis would agree that they live in a democracy. However, this is not the judgement of Prof. Finkelstein. He raises a simple question, which is often forgotten when describing Israel as the only real democracy in the Middle East. "If during 70% percent of your existence, half of the popfulation under your control had inferior or no rights, how can that be a democracy? It may have been a plausible description up until 1967, but after that, it simply cannot be describe as such". You have once said that politics is about reaching the masses, and getting people to act on what they already know is wrong. Given the current situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, when will they reach a common understanding of what is wrong and what is right? "When the occupation begins to hurt, and there is a recognition that we need to end it. Right now, the Israelis have a cost free occupation. The Palestinians do the dirty work, the torture and the jailing, the Europeans pay the bills, and the Americans give them political protection. So why should they care?". Would mass resistance give Palestinians what they want? "During the first Intifada the leadership emerged from the people. Their formal leadership was exiled in Tunis at the time, and it was from the mass organization that they produced a new leadership. But ultimately nothing came of mass resistance. They lost any hope in collective action; there is no mass organization there anymore. That's what makes me hopeless. So long as I see people in motion, you know there are possibilities, but with the Palestinians, there is no resistance any more. They have given up. I would say the financial corruption is the most significant factor". Although pessimistic in his view of the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians, he is more optimistic about the possibilities of a real change in the US. Even though it could go both ways with President Trump, the way to change what he refers to as an elitist system, will always start from a mass resistance. "I see possible danger with Trump. If his economic plans don't produce, he is going to lose his base and do what any person in his position would do, which is starting a war. It could be a war with China, because he is very erratic. On the other hand, we could see that there are real possibilities now in the US. There is a lot of resistance, discontent, rejection of the elites and the policies they put forth. I was not happy Trump won, but I was very happy to get rid of the Obama's and Hillary's of this world. They are still there of course, you can't stop these people. Obama's reputation is still good, and because of political correctness and him being black, we are all supposed to say what a genius he is. He still hasn't been exposed, unfortunately". In one of his lectures on John Stuart Mill, Prof. Finkelstein predicted that the next step in human development would be equality for animals. This prediction encapsulates one of Prof. Finkelstein's values, namely justice. It should therefore come as no surprise that his thoughts on the future of human beings recall those of Immanuel Kant. Perpetual peace is possible, according to Prof. Finkelstein: "I don't find that a remote possibility. There is an increasing awareness about how small our planet is. I don't find the prospect of the abolition of war inconceivable. I think other issues like abolishing gross inequality is a problem, and of course, power is the toughest one there is. The power lust is very tough. The ego, you see it everywhere in such petty ways. In academia for example. In that sense, I'm not optimistic about taming the ego". But you are optimistic about people not slaughtering each other? "Yes, I don't find that part so far-fetched, but I'm not optimistic about the problems of power and ego, and the corruption that attends them. I'm much less idealistic about that. I have seen too much". (This article was first published in the Republic Paper and was contributed to the Palestine Chronicle by Jotam Confino.) |
 By Alex Clark to speak openly about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. A sleepy city tucked away in the southwest corner of the United Kingdom,... Apr 5 2017 / Read More » / Israeli human rights NGO B'Tselem released a report on Tuesday, condemning Israeli forces for the "unjustified" killing of a Palestinian woman in Jerusalem last week.... Apr 4 2017 / Read More » / A new poll was released by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on Tuesday, revealing that a majority of Israelis oppose any Israeli withdrawal from... Apr 4 2017 / Read More » / By William A. Cook Since 1948 the state of Israel has celebrated annually its independence as a nation, though it is not clear from what... Apr 4 2017 / Read More » / By Haidar Eid Omar Barghouti, one of the most charismatic Palestinian activists, has been subjected to the most intense interrogation by Israeli authorities. He is... Apr 3 2017 / Read More » / The United Nations has lambasted the Israeli government after it approved the construction of its first new settlement in the occupied West Bank in decades.... Apr 3 2017 / Read More » / Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has officially announced that a new system designed to intercept medium-range missiles has become operational and Tel Aviv's enemies have... Apr 3 2017 / Read More » / Dear friends and colleagues, Finally, I was allowed to access my email account after 12 days of being banned from doing so during the most... Apr 2 2017 / Read More » / By Jotam Confino There is another side to Norman Finkelstein, apart from the notorious YouTube clips and public feuds with world known scholars, such as... Apr 2 2017 / Read More » /
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