Aviv Geffen to open for U2

Israeli rock musician chosen to warm up legendary Irish band during mega concert in Athens' Olympic stadium

Israeli musician Aviv Geffen will be the opening act for legendary Irish rock band U2, which will perform at the Olympic stadium in Athens, Greece on September 3.

Geffen will join forces with acclaimed band SnowPatrol, and the two acts will warm up the crowd before Bono and his friends take the stage.

On Thursday, Geffen published a confirmation on his MySpace page. "We are proud to announce Aviv Geffen will open for U2 on September 3, 2010 on their '360' Tour at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, Greece! 

Church boycott calls ring louder

The world's churches have long been one of the battlegrounds of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. With the strengthening of the BDS movement, a number of churches across the globe have seen the boycott of Israeli and Israeli settlement goods hotting up, and recent weeks have witnessed some notable victories. 

BUST ELBIT: Stop bankrolling Israeli wars and ghettos

I. Introduction
The call to divest from Elbit Systems Ltd. has become a key element of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at ending Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid against the Palestinian people.

One and a half years after Stop the Wall Campaign initiated campaigning efforts within the framework of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) to pressure international investors and public authorities across the world to divest from the Israeli corporation, victories for the Bust Elbit campaign are beginning to mount rapidly. The Bust Elbit campaign is part of the wider BDS efforts which seek to hold Israel and its supporters accountable by pressuring Israel on all fronts - politically, culturally, and economically.

Founded in 1967, the Israeli company has become one of the world’s premiere “security and defence,” firms, specializing in military electronics, surveillance systems, Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs or “drones”), and security systems. It is a symbol for the Israeli economy, which essentially thrives on and fuels war, repression and control in Palestine and around the globe.

Elbit Systems is built on the expertise of the Israeli Ministry of Defense Research Institute and has profited greatly from supplying the Israeli military with a variety of equipment used to sustain Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people. It produces the drones used in the wars and attacks against Gaza and Lebanon and provides equipment for the Israeli Merkava tanks. The Israeli Apartheid Wall, which is crippling Palestinian communities by isolating them in walled-in ghettos, has provided a massive source of revenue for Elbit. Elbit Systems provides “intrusion detection systems” for the Wall, in particular around Jerusalem1. Subsidiaries Elbit Electro-Optics (El-Op) and Elbit Security Systems supplied and incorporated LORROS surveillance cameras in the Ariel settlement section as well as around Ar Ram2. One product made by Elbit Systems, “Torch”, is manufactured specifically for use on the Wall3.

Elbit offers its experience in ghettoizing and killing Palestinians to repress other people. In 2006 its American subsidiary Kollsman Inc. won a contract to participate in the creation of the US – Mexico border wall, dubbed by activists the ‘Wall of Death’4.

On Local Boycott and Deception

By Khalil Nakhleh
Like many thousands of Palestinians in Ramallah, I feel utterly confused by the dishonesty of being railroaded concerning local boycott of 'settlements' products. Because we—my wife and I—are committed to the principle and act of boycott, as a means of resistance, I decided to clarify the primary issues involved, in order to minimize, as much as possible, daily contradictions.  I embarked on sorting out, systematically, methodically and with clarity, related major issues.
Enemies and Friends
The distinction is not as clear as it sounds. The Ramallah “Government”, its ministries, agencies, and commissions, repeat one line, and want to ram it down our throats. This line can be simplified as follows:
“Our primary enemy, at this historical juncture, is the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Therefore, and in order to punish these settlements, and force them out, we, and our international ‘friends’, must boycott their products.”
The words used do not reflect conviction, on the part of the “Government”, that: these are Zionist settler colonies; and having been established on stolen Palestinian lands in the West Bank, since 1967, is only another phase of the Zionist settler-colonial project that started in the rest of Palestine, since much earlier than 1948; and this is not, necessarily, the final phase of this onslaught. But we are “dooped” into thinking that this is so.

Israeli ships not welcome in Vancouver

Vancouver – Locally-based activists, called out by the Boycott Israeli Apartheid Coalition (BIAC), are mounting a picket line at the Port of Vancouver’s Delta Port facility at Roberts Bank, south of Vancouver, as part of a mounting international campaign to put pressure on the government of Israel.
The Israeli ship Djibouti, owned by Zim, one of the ten largest shipping companies in the world, is scheduled to land at Delta Port at 7:00 a.m. this morning.

“The behaviour of the Israeli government has been going from bad to worse,” explained BIAC spokesperson Gordon Murray. “We are going to be out there today to tell Zim and other Israeli companies that their business won’t be allowed to continue normally as long as Israel’s blockade on Gaza continues,” he said.
“Israel has been behaving as a rogue government,” said Mike Krebs, the other BIAC spokesperson for the demonstration. “People from Vancouver are coming out to emulate actions that have already been taken in South Africa, Scandinavia, India and Oakland, California, where Israeli ships have been prevented from unloading their cargo in a normal manner.”
“Israel has been violating international law and acting with impunity for far too long,” Murray said. “It’s obvious to us that they won’t change their behaviour unless their forced to,” he concluded.

Protester Arrested In Chicago While Challenging Israeli Segregation

In a demonstration organized by the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago on 23 August, more than two dozen activists converged on downtown Millennium Park to call on city leaders to sever ties with Israel and drop Petach Tikva, Israel from the Chicago Sister Cities program. During the annual Chicago Sister Cities' International Festival, protesters rallied outside -- and later, inside -- the venue. One activist was arrested and released later that day.

"Petach Tikva -- an officially segregated city, the first Jewish-only settlement in historic Palestine and the site of the primary detention center where Israeli forces abuse and torture Palestinian political prisoners -- has been dubbed by rights group Amnesty International as 'Israel's Guantanamo,'" PSG stated in a press release.

"Upholding the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions measures on apartheid Israel, PSG and its allies object to business-as-usual with Israel. Under the false premise of promoting culture and education, Petach Tikva's inclusion in Chicago Sister Cities promotes Israel-US business ties while it whitewashes Israel's occupation and human rights abuses," the statement added.

During the protest activists entered the festival venue and chanted "Drop Petach Tikva!" Activists reported that a pianist who was performing in the hall at the time "stood at attention out of respect once he heard the protesters' message."

"The PSG and allies were compelled to bring the message directly into the festival because for the last year and a half, the Chicago Sister Cities International has refused to meet with PSG and members of the community to hear about Petach Tikva's special role in Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people," PSG stated.

The group said it plans to keep up the pressure on city officials until the Chicago's Sister Cities program drops its partnership with Petach Tikva.

Scientists want inquiry into absence of Israelis at Jordan chemistry conference

The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities has asked an international chemistry association to examine whether organizers of an upcoming conference in Jordan deliberately excluded Israeli researchers from the list of invited speakers.

The request followed a call by Roald Hoffman, a Nobel laureate in chemistry at Cornell University, to boycott the event, whose 110 speakers do not include a single Israeli.

The 11th Eurasia Conference on Chemical Sciences, scheduled for October 6-8 at a conference center on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, is aimed at exposing young scientists from developing countries to some of the world's leading researchers. The biennial event has previously been hosted in countries as varied as Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Waging Peace From Afar: Divestment And Israeli Occupation

When Israeli commandos launched their assault on the unarmed flotilla of ships carrying hundreds of humanitarian aid workers and 10,000 tons of supplies for the besieged Gaza Strip, killing at least nine activists and injuring scores more, part of the operation was “Made in the USA.”

Decades of uncritical U.S. financial, military, and diplomatic support has ensured that Israel’s military power—nuclear and conventional—remains unchallengeable. A U.S. pattern of using UN Security Council vetoes to protect Israel from accountability has ensured that Israel can essentially do whatever it likes with those U.S.-provided weapons, regardless of what U.S. or international laws may be broken.

Israel has long relied on the numerous U.S.-made and U.S.-financed Apache and Blackhawk war helicopters in its arsenal—it’s a good bet those were in use in the May 31st assault in international waters. Use of U.S.-provided weapons is severely limited by our own laws: The Arms Export Control Act (AECA) prohibits any recipient from using U.S. weapons except for security within its own borders, or for direct self-defense. And no amount of Israeli spin can make us believe that an attack by heavily-armed commandos jumping onto the decks of an unarmed civilian ship in international waters has anything to do with self-defense.

So yes—our tax dollars and our politicians’ decisions play a huge part in enabling not only the flotilla attack but Israel’s violations of human rights overall. But increasingly, across the country, people and organizations are standing up to say no to U.S. support for those policies of occupation and apartheid.

The main strategy is known as “BDS”—boycott, divestment, and sanctions. Based on the lessons of theSouth African anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, BDS brings non-violent economic pressure to bear in order to end Israeli violations of international law. In 2005, a coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations issued a call for a global campaign of BDS. The call was based on the understanding that the Palestinian struggle for human rights, equality, and the enforcement of international law needed international support—and civil society organizations would have to step in, given that the traditional Palestinian leadership hadn’t created a strategy for mobilizing such support.

الصندوق السيادي النرويجي يستبعد مجموعتين اسرائيليتين بسبب الاستيطان

اوسلو ـ ا ف ب: اعلنت الحكومة النرويجية الاثنين ان الصندوق العام النرويجي للمعاشات الذي يعد من اكبر الصناديق السيادية في العالم، استبعد لاسباباخلاقية مجموعتين اسرائيليتين متهمتين بالمساهمة في استيطان الاراضي الفلسطينية.وقالت وزارة المالية ان الصندوق الذي تودع فيه الدولة كامل عائداتها النفطية تقريبا، باع كل اسهمه في شركة 'افريكا اسرائيل انفستمنتس' التي تملك غالبية اسهم 'دانيا سيبوس' وهي مجموعة للبناء والاشغال العامة ناشطة في 'الاراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة'. وقال الوزير سيغبورن جونسن 'ان قرارات عدة لمجلس الامن الدولي ورأي محكمة العدل الدولية خلصت الى ان بناء المستوطنات الاسرائيلية في الاراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة محظور بموجب اتفاقية' جنيف.

واضاف في بيان 'لذلك استبعدت افريكا اسرائيل انفستمنتس ودانيا سيبوس من محفظة استثمارات الصندوق'. وباع الصندوق النرويجي جميع اسهمه في افريكا اسرائيل انفستمنتس التي تقدر بـ 7.2 مليون كورون (حوالي مليون يورو) في اواخر العام 2009، كما رفض الاستثمار في فرعها. واستبعد الصندوق ايضا الشركة الماليزية ساملينغ غلوبال ردا على 'انتهاكات واسعة ومتكررة' للقانون في نشاطاتها المؤذية للغابات في ولاية سرواك في ماليزيا وغويانا.

واوضح جونسن 'ان مجلس الاخلاق (الذي يعطي توصيات لوزارة المالية) تفحص (نشاطات) ساملينغ غلوبال واستنتج ان نشاطات الشركة في الغابات المدارية في سرواك وغويانا اسهمت في القضاء على الغابات بشكل غير مشروع والتسبب باضرار بيئية خطيرة'. وفي اواخر 2009 كان الصندوق النرويجي يملك اسهما تقدر بـ 8.1 مليون كورون في ساملينغ غلوبال وقد بيعت امس. وكان الصندوق النفطي النرويجي - كما هو معروف عموما - الذي يعتبر اول مستثمر في البورصات الاوروبية، يملك اسهما وسندات دولية بـ 2792 مليار كورون (353.2 مليار يورو) في اواخر حزيران (يونيو).

وتخضع ادارته لمعايير اخلاقية صارمة جدا بحيث تستبعد شركات صناعة الاسلحة 'اللانسانية بشكل خاص'، وصناعة التبغ والمجموعات المدانة بانتهاكات حقوق الانسان والفساد او بالحاق اضرار خطيرة بالبيئة. وباتت نحو خمسين شركة عالمية مدرجة على لائحتها السوداء بينها بوينغ ووال مارت والمجموعة الاوروبية للصناعات الجوية والدفاعية (اي ايه دي اس) ومجموعة سافران وبي ايه اي سيستمز.

Heineken Music Conference, Tel Aviv

By Carlos Lattuf

Israel tells schools not to teach nakba

NAZARETH // Government officials warned Israeli teachers last week not to cooperate with a civic group that seeks to educate Israelis about how the Palestinians view the loss of their homeland and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Israel’s education ministry issued the advisory after Zochrot – a Jewish group that seeks to raise awareness among Israeli Jews of the events of 1948, referred to as the “nakba” by Palestinians – organised a workshop for primary school teachers.
The ministry said the course had not been approved and told teachers not to participate in Zochrot-sponsored activities during the coming school year.
In a letter to the education ministry protesting against Zochrot’s activities, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, an advocacy group for Jewish settlers, had called the group’s educational materials “part of a criminal vision to wipe Israel off the face of the earth”.

It was unclear whether participants in the workshop for primary school teachers would be punished, but a teacher identified as a trainer for the seminar might be investigated by the education ministry, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The warning is the latest move by the education ministry, headed by Gideon Saar, a member of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, to use school curricula to advance a more strident Zionist agenda.

In March, for instance, the ministry banned Israeli schools from distributing a booklet for children about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Critics had objected to parts of the declaration that refer to freedom of religion and protection of asylum-seekers.
The ministry’s latest move involves the controversies that still swirl over the events that led to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 - what Israelis describe as their “War of Independence” and what Palestinians call the nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”.

Eitan Bronstein, Zochrot’s director, said the ministry was trying to “frighten off” teachers from learning about a period in Israel’s history that until now, he said, had been presented in schools only from a “triumphalist perspective”.
The group, which was founded eight years ago and whose Hebrew name means “remembering”, has provoked controversy by organising visits to some of the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israeli army during and after the 1948 war.

Zochrot members place signposts at the former villages using their original Arabic names, and bring Palestinian refugees back on visits, upsetting Jewish residents who live in communities built on those lands.

Government Fund Divests from Settlement Companies

Last year, Norwatch revealed that the Norwegian government pension fund had invested Africa Israel Investments and in its subsidiary Danya Cebus Ltd, which build settlement on occupied West Bank. Today, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance announced that the Pension Fund has divested from both firms, as well as a Malaysian forest company.

Africa Israel Investments Ltd. is the parent company of several subsidiaries with interests in property development, infrastructure and energy. The company holds a majority stake in Danya Cebus, a construction company involved in developing settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

The Fund's Council on Ethics emphasises that the construction of settlements in occupied areas is a violation of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (the fourth Geneva Convention) and that the Pension Fund runs an unacceptable risk of contributing to serious violations of individual rights in situations of war and conflict by investing in these two companies.

“The Council on Ethics bases its recommendation on the fact that the international community is united in the view that the area east of the 1967 line is occupied territory and as such comes under the purview of the fourth Geneva Convention. Several United Nations Security Council resolutions and an International Court of Justice advisory opinion have concluded that the construction of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory is prohibited under this Convention. I have therefore accepted the recommendation of the Council on Ethics and am excluding Africa Israel Investments and Danya Cebus from the fund’s investment portfolio,” says Minister of Finance Sigbjørn Johnsen in the press release.

The Malaysian firm Samling Global was thrown out because the fund’s Council on Ethics finds that the company has contributed to illegal logging and severe environmental damage. 31 December 2009, the investment of the Norwegian governmetn in Samling amounted to 8,1 million Norwegian kroners.

Also Danske Bank sold Africa Israel-shares earlier this year following the revelations by Norwatch.

The press release of the Norwegian Ministry of Finances, says nothing of the investment in Africa Israel Investment’s sister firm Africa Israel Properties. By 31 December 2009, the Norwegian government owned 2,2 million kroners in Africa Israel Properties.

Support Builds for Boycotts Against Israel, Activists Say

WASHINGTON - In May, rock legend Elvis Costello canceled his gig in Israel. Then, in June, a group of unionized dock workers in San Francisco refused to unload an Israeli ship. In August, a food co-op in Washington state removed Israeli products from its shelves.

The so-called "boycott, divestment, and sanctions'' movement aimed at pressuring Israel to withdraw from land claimed by Palestinians has long been considered a fringe effort inside the United States, with no hope of garnering mainstream support enjoyed by the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa of the 1980s.
But in recent months, particularly after an Israeli raid on a flotilla delivering supplies to Palestinians, organizers are pointing to evidence that the movement has picked up momentum, even as Israelis and Palestinians are moving toward a new round of peace talks.

Ra Ra Ramallah booms to Boney M

The Jamaican band that was founded in Germany in the mid-70s offered a repertoire of songs like "Daddy Cool", "Belfast", "Ma Baker" and the iconic "Rasputin" – many of which have won gold and platinum discs.

For many Palestinians, old and young alike, who attended the concert, the chorus – Ra Ra Rasputin – was sweet music that sounded more like "Ra Ra Ramallah."

The band was feted with thunderous applause when Maizie Williams, a founding member of the band, shouted: "We love Palestine. We love you all, people of Palestine."

The event is being held to highlight the problems faced by Palestinians in accessing water resources in the West Bank, where Israelcontrols shared resources.

Rights groups say the water supplied by Israel falls short of Palestinian needs, but also point out that the Palestinians have failed to set up the infrastructure and institutions needed in the water sector.

Letter of thanks to Italian grocery chain Coop Italia for not selling settlement produce

Following lobbying efforts by the Italian Coalition Against Carmel-Agrexco - created in the fall of 2009 and which fully endorses the Palestinian BDS call, together with a growing number of Italian and international organizations - two major Italian supermarket chains, COOP and Nordiconad, since they could not recognized which products were rom the settlement in the occupied territories, announced the suspension of sales of products from Agrexco, the principal exporter of produce from Israel and the illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 

Following the letter I sent to marketing direction of Coop and Nordiconad to express gratitude for their decision. 

Best regards, 

Luisa Morgantini
Former vice President of European Parliament
Italian Peace Association