As part of the “Don’t Dance for Israeli Apartheid” campaign in Ireland ― organized by the Irish Palestine Solidarity Committee (IPSC) ― activists in Dublin are protesting Irish dance troupe Riverdance’s decision to perform in Israel in September, ElectronicIntifada.net said on August 11.
IPSC is organising a protest on August 18 outside the Gaiety Theater ― “the final action in our series of ongoing protests before Riverdance heads to perform for Israeli Apartheid”.
Israel
This years global uprisings remind us how infectious the revolutionary spirit can be. In recent weeks, a social movement within Israel has sprung to life in an almost spontaneous manner.
A small housing protest that started on July 14 has swept hundreds of thousands of people into protest across the country.
As in many other countries, people in Israel face rapidly rising living costs and the privatisation of public assets.
Israel once saw itself as a welfare state (though its policies have been designed to benefit mainly the Jewish population since its inception).
For more news on the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, see Electronic Intifada's BDS Beat
South African students renew call to boycott Israel
Representatives of South Africa’s oldest and largest student bodies in Johannesburg denounced an upcoming visit by a delegation of Israeli officials and propagandists to South African college campuses in an August 3 press conference, ElectronicIntifada.net said on August 5.
In recent weeks, something unprecedented has erupted in Israel. Protesting the high cost of living, especially of housing, predominantly young people have established protest camps.
The campaign was sparked by a young single mother who, in desperation over her housing situation, pitched her tent outside the Knesset (Israeli parliament). Now the tent protests have spread like wildfire all over Israel.
It was a Palestinian legislator who made the most telling comment to the Israeli parliament last week as it passed the boycott law, which outlaws calls to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied territories.
Ahmed Tibi asked: “What is a peace activist or Palestinian allowed to do to oppose the occupation? Is there anything you agree to?”
Celebrated US author and poet Alice Walker is among 38 people who will join Audacity of Hope, the ship sponsored by US Boat to Gaza as part of an international effort to break Israel’s maritime siege of Gaza.
Walker has authored more than thirty books, the best known of which is the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple.
“During the first years of the siege, we could still manage, but nowadays we have no alternatives,” says Dr Hassan Khalaf, deputy health minister in Gaza.
“It is a major crisis: many health services have stopped, and I’m afraid this will spiral out of control, because Gaza doesn’t have the essential medicines and supplies needed.”
Cancer, kidney, heart and organ transplant patients, as well as patients needing routine surgeries, including eye and dental surgery, have been suffering for the past five years under the Israeli-led, internationally-backed siege of the Gaza Strip.
Hundreds of Palestinian and Syrian refugees marched on June 5 from Syrian-controlled territory to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Refugees in Palestine and elsewhere marked the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Egyptian Sinai and Syrian Golan Heights.
On the frontier with the occupied Golan Heights, hundreds were injured and more than 20 killed when Israeli soldiers opened fire with live ammunition on unarmed demonstrators.
On a section of the apartheid wall in Occupied Palestine someone spray-painted a quote from Edward Said that says: "Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?"
It is worth considering the wisdom of this statement.
This month marks the 44th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians are coming face to face with their worst nightmare: there may never be a Palestinian state.
On June 1, formal Israeli festivities were held around the country to commemorate “Jerusalem Day”.
One of the main events of the “Jerusalem Day" celebrations is the “Dance of Flags”. Tens of thousands of people, waving Israeli flags, march through Palestinian parts of the city.
This year, the marchers chanted slogans such as “butcher the Arabs”, “burn their villages”, and “death to the leftists”.
The marchers also surrounded a mosque, frantically chanting “Muhammad is dead” and “They are only Arabs, they are only fleas”.
This article is reposted from http://gazatvnews.com . Protesters fired on by Israeli forces were commemorating al Nakba ("the catastrophe"), as Palestinians refer to the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the founding of Israel.
See also
Remembering al Nakba
VIDEO: Sydney community discusses Marrickville Council's 'boycott Israel' stance
Sydney conference discusses BDS, Palestine solidarity
A Palestinian solidarity conference held in Sydney over May 14-15 brought together more than 200 people to discuss the campaign in Australia in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
The conference took place on the anniversary of al Nakba (“the catastrophe”) — as Palestinians call the day that marks their dispossession that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
See also:
Sydney community discusses the 'boycott Israel' campaign
It’s wonderful that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are getting good publicity and support for their great efforts exposing the lies and deceptions of the US, Israel and others. But I also would like to draw some attention to the fate of two Israeli whistleblowers and political prisoners held in Israel, Mordechai Vanunu and Anat Kamm.
In 1986, Vanunu took a courageous moral stand against nuclear weapons. Vanunu exposed Israel’s secret nuclear weapons arsenal to the world after becoming disillusioned with his work at Dimona Nuclear Research Centre in Israel.
A ferocious media campaign, led by the Murdoch press, has been unleashed against Sydney’s Marrickville Council over a motion it passed endorsing the global campaign of boycott, disinvestment and sanctions targetting Israel. The council debated the motion, which was originally supported by all Greens and Labor Party councillors, on April 19.
Below is a letter published in March by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network that endorses the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
The letter was issued in response to a February 15 statement by Zionist (pro-Israel) groups that said the BDS campaign was anti-Semitic and “antithetical to freedom of speech”.
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Because academic, cultural and commercial boycotts, divestments and sanctions of Israel:
• are being called for by Palestinian civil society in response to the occupation and colonisation of their land,
Below is an extract of a letter Archbishop Desmond Tutu sent to the student leaders at UC Berkeley in March 2010 regarding Berkeley’s decision to divest from Israel.
* * *
I am writing to tell you that, despite what detractors may allege, you are doing the right thing. You are doing the moral thing. You are doing that which is incumbent on you as humans who believe that all people have dignity and rights, and that all those being denied their dignity and rights deserve the solidarity of their fellow human beings.
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