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Boycott and Disinvest in Israel, in Solidarity and Self-Defense

Glen Ford | 22.02.2009 21:15 | Anti-militarism | Anti-racism | Palestine | World

"Black Americans, who have experienced apartheid at home and fought successfully against it in Africa," feel most intensely the need to register their opposition to Israel's version of apartheid. Yet their elected officials cower at the feet of the pro-Israel lobby, which has successfully targeted independent-minded Black officials for defeat.




Editorial note;

"Black Americans, who have experienced apartheid at home and fought successfully against it in Africa," feel most intensely the need to register their opposition to Israel's version of apartheid. Yet their elected officials cower at the feet of the pro-Israel lobby, which has successfully targeted independent-minded Black officials for defeat. A boycott Israel movement will have to roll over cowardly Black elected officials, but so be it. "If solidarity with Palestinians who suffer the aggressions of a regime as fundamentally racist as apartheid South Africa is not a compelling enough reason - and it surely is - then self-defense against Zionist subversion of domestic Black politics should move us to action."


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Boycott and Disinvest in Israel, in Solidarity and Self-Defense


"The corporate Right and the Israel lobby act in tandem."

African Americans must take a leadership role in the movement to boycott and disinvest in Israel, both for reasons of elemental justice and to defend our own people from the raging rightwing, corporate assault, of which the pro-Israel lobby is an integral component. If solidarity with Palestinians who suffer the aggressions of a regime as fundamentally racist as apartheid South Africa is not a compelling enough reason - and it surely is - then self-defense against Zionist subversion of domestic Black politics should move us to action. There can be no prospect of global peace or domestic progress while Israel runs amok in the Mid-East and its operatives wreak havoc in the African American political arena.

The moral imperative to answer the call "to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era," is overwhelming - so much so that failure to act amounts to a kind of self-mutilation, a defiling of one's legacy. Every iota of African American past and present existence tells us that no people can be allowed to superimpose themselves, their history, their supra-national rights on another people and their land, thus negating the Other's humanity - the essential facts of Zionism.

"There can be no prospect of global peace or domestic progress while Israel runs amok."

1948 saw the creation of civilization's greatest document to date - possibly the founding document of the truly modern era - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The year also witnessed the founding of a state based on the antithesis of those values: Israel.

Both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tapped the deep reservoirs of the Declaration in their struggle for African Americans' human rights, and both understood the indivisibility of freedom. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," wrote Dr. King in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Malcolm counseled Black activists that "if they would expand their civil rights movement to a human rights movement it would internationalize it."

That movement was internationalized, culminating in the 1980s South Africa corporate disinvestment and boycott campaign. As Black writer/activist Kevin Alexander Gray wrote in a piece earlier this year, calling for a similar campaign against Israel:

"What's happening in Palestine is not fundamentally different from what occurred in apartheid South Africa. Kids are being killed. People have been herded into the (more deadly) equivalent of Bantustans. Political leaders are targeted for assassination.... Israel's behavior demands the same response from the world human rights community as was mustered against South Africa."

"African Americans are represented in public offices by abject cowards."

The obligation to respond is felt most intensely among Black Americans, who have experienced apartheid at home and fought successfully against it in Africa - but who are represented in public offices by abject cowards. Thirty members of the Congressional Black Caucus shamed themselves and us by endorsing a Resolution affirming the Jewish State's "right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza" and absolving Israel of any blame for the slaughter. Seven Black lawmakers sought cover in voting "present" - as if that would cloak their slavish fear of the Israel lobby - while only two voted Nay: Reps. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Gwen Moore (D-WS).

The man- and womanhood was scared out of the Black misleadership class in general, and the Congressional Black Caucus in particular, in 2002, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) joined with corporate moneybags to unseat two Black lawmakers. Reps. Cynthia McKinney, of suburban Atlanta, and Earl Hilliard, from Alabama, could not be counted on to bend their knees to Israel. They had to go.

"Reps. Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard could not be counted on to bend their knees to Israel."

As Hilliard told me in July, 2002, tons of money suddenly rained down on his opponent, Artur Davis, "not just [from] corporations, but organizations like AIPAC. Mostly Republican operatives and Jewish operatives that were sent by different organizations and groups and corporations."

Was it their intention to make a public display of their power, I asked? "Oh, definitely - the seed of fear," Hilliard replied. "It sends a message to every member of Congress."

The same message was sent the next month, with Cynthia McKinney's defeat in Georgia. "I was targeted by AIPAC and others for my opposition to the Israeli occupation of and genocidal policies toward Palestine," said McKinney, who last year ran for president on the Green Party ticket.

2002 was the beginning of a joint corporate/pro-Israel offensive to subdue or eject "unreliable" Black Democrats. The dramatic deterioration of the Congressional Black Caucus, as an agent for progress on Capitol Hill, dates from that year. The corporate Right and the Israel lobby act in tandem. Their purge of Black politicians has been so successful, they're running out of live targets. Maxine Waters and Gwen Moore are the last two righteous sisters standing on Capitol Hill - where Black manhood is extinct. Down the street at the White House, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel stands guard - although President Obama appears to be an entirely voluntary captive of Israel.

So we see that the tentacles that strangle Gaza and once helped South Africa build nuclear weapons, are throttling the life out of independent Black politics in the United States. Boycott and disinvest in Israel! If not in solidarity, in self-defense.


Glen Ford
- e-mail: Glen.Ford [at] BlackAgendaReport.comThis
- Homepage: http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1025&Itemid=1

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US Trade Unionists Support South African and Australian Dockers’ Boycott of Isra

22.02.2009 22:17



To endorse the following statement, please go to:

 http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/LaborforPalestine

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U.S. Trade Unionists Support South African and Australian Dockers’ Boycott of Israeli Cargo

February 17, 2009


“For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
–Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam, April 4, 1967


We salute the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) in Durban, and Western Australian dock worker members of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), for refusing to handle Israeli cargo.

Theirs is a courageous response to Israel’s attack on Palestinians in Gaza that, since December 27 alone, have left some 1,400 dead and 5,000 wounded — nearly all of them civilians.

This action is in the best tradition of dock workers in Denmark and Sweden (1963), the San Francisco Bay Area (1984) and Liverpool (1988), who refused to handle shipping for apartheid South Africa; Oakland dock workers’ refusal to load bombs for the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1978); and West Coast dock workers’ strike against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (2008).

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) rightly “calls on other workers and unions to follow suit and to do all that is necessary to ensure that they boycott all goods to and from Israel until Palestine is free.”

COSATU’s appeal is particularly relevant for workers in the United States, whose government stands behind Israel’s war against the Palestinians, and without which Israeli apartheid cannot continue.

In the past ten years alone, U.S. military aid to Israel was $17 billion; over the next decade, it will be $30 billion. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is U.S. aircraft, white phosphorous and bullets that kill and maim on behalf of the occupiers. Both the Democratic and Republican parties condone the slaughter in Gaza.

Such support bolsters Israel’s longstanding role as watchdog and junior partner for U.S. domination over the oil-rich Middle East — and beyond. In that capacity, Israel was apartheid South Africa’s closest ally.

As with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, workers in the United States pay a staggering human and financial price, including deepening economic crisis, for U.S.-Israeli war and occupation.

Yet, in contrast to trade union bodies in South Africa, Australia, Denmark, Britain, Canada and elsewhere, most of labor officialdom in this country — often without the knowledge or consent of union members — is a main accomplice of Israeli apartheid.

For more than sixty years, it has closely collaborated with the Histadrut, the Zionist labor federation that has spearheaded — and whitewashed — apartheid, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians since the 1920s.

U.S. labor leaders have plowed at least $5 billion of our union pension funds and retirement plans into State of Israel Bonds.

In April 2002, while Israel butchered Palestinian refugees at Jenin in the West Bank, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was a featured speaker at a belligerent “National Solidarity Rally for Israel.”

In July 2007, the Jewish Labor Committee, a Histadrut mouthpiece, enlisted top officials of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to condemn British union support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

Now, by their silence, these same leaders are complicit in Israel’s massacre in Gaza.

These policies echo infamous “AFL-CIA” support for U.S. war and dictatorship in Vietnam, Latin America, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

It strengthens the U.S.-Israel war machine and labor’s corporate enemies, reinforces racism and Islamophobia, and makes a mockery of international solidarity.

For all these reasons, we join COSATU in supporting the growing international campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which demands Palestinian self-determination, including an end to Israeli military occupation, the right of Palestinian refugees to return, and elimination of apartheid throughout historic Palestine.

Join us in publicizing the example of South African and Australian dock workers, and working toward the same kind of labor solidarity here at home.

Join us in demanding immediate and total:

1. End to U.S. aid for Israel.

2. Divestment of business and labor investments in Israel.

3. Labor boycott of Israel.

4. Withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from the Middle East.


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link to the statement:

 http://laborforpalestine.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/endorse-us-trade-unionists-support-south-african-and-australian-dockers-boycott-of-israeli-cargo/

Labor for Palestine