Fighting Israeli Apartheid by ‘Besieging the Siege’. By Jooneed Khan

Via: rabble.ca.

The worldwide campaign to boycott Israel as an apartheid state took a giant Canadian leap forward last weekend with a three-day BDS Conference in Montreal (boycott, divestment and sanctions) that saw the coming together of separate and diverse initiatives into what a South African trade union delegate called “an unstoppable movement.”

At a time when the old western-dominated colonialist-militarist world order is in decline, when the loot-and-run, slash-and-burn, bomb-and-rebuild capitalist model is in crisis, when western civil societies are clamoring for a more participative democracy to combat corruption, secrecy and the lies of their security-obsessed states, and mobilizing globally to save the planet, has the Palestinian cause become a symbol of the struggle for human values for a new generation and a new century?

It would seem so, judging from the confident enthusiasm and the thoughtful resolve of hundreds of delegates from across Quebec, Canada, and the world who crammed into auditoriums to listen to guest speakers, reflect on global strategies and devise local tactics, and to deliberate in a closing plenary on an agenda that includes keeping the BDS momentum going on the ground, a projected Canadian ship for a forthcoming Flotilla for Gaza, and a follow-up conference on the issue in October 2011 in Montreal.

Omar Barghouti thanks the Mohawks

After thanking the Mohawk Nation for allowing him to speak in Montreal, “the capital of the BDS campaign in the Francophone world,” as he put it, Palestinian thinker and human rights activist Omar Barghouti, founder of the Boycott National Committee (BNC) and keynoter at the inaugural plenary, said:

“The Old Order is going. BDS is skyrocketing, well-anchored in international law and in the universal principles of freedom, justice and equal rights. We are absolutely anti-racist and we reject anti-Semitism. We believe in ourselves, in our heritage, in our roots. The once “invincible” US-Israeli axis is now shaking. You’d think Netanyahu and Lieberman were working for the BDS movement!”

The BDS Movement was born of a call made on July 9, 2005, on the first anniversary of the ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague condemning the Israeli separation wall and calling for its removal. That was a real SOS launched by nearly 200 Palestinian civil society organizations for global support and solidarity with their BDS campaign as a peaceful and legitimate means of ending the now 43-year-old Israeli occupation, and bringing about a peaceful settlement to the 62-year-old conflict born of the 1948 Partition of Palestine.

The Palestine Question and the U.S. Public Sphere. By Rashid Khalidi

Via: MRZine.

The 2010 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, the Palestine Center, Washington, DC, 7 October 2010

Thank you all for coming today, and, to those of you who are watching, thank you for viewing this talk.  Those of you who live in Washington, who are subjected to the American media, will probably be relieved to hear that I will not be talking about the peace process.  If you insist, I’m happy to answer questions about it.  I’m going to talk about a broader topic, which I think sheds light on why there is not a process that is leading towards peace.  And this is the Palestine question and the American public sphere.  It is a great honor to be doing this in the context of the Edward Said lecture series.  Edward was a dear friend and I think that having a lecture series in his name will help to push the process that he actually personally played a very big role in opening up in this country.

A number of factors played a part in cementing support for Zionism and later for the state of Israel of its two primary international sponsors: Great Britain and the United States.  As you know, each of them in its own era was the greatest power of its time.  In winning over the British and American political classes and their respective publics to the cause of Zionism and to the cause of Israel, a crucial role was played by scholarly and non-academic writings, and later by the cinema and other media.  I think it’s insufficiently recognized that establishing the hegemony of Zionism in the field of ideas in an Anglo-American academic and public discourse was a vital precondition for its successes in the political and diplomatic arenas.  The discursive victories of Zionism preceded its triumphs in the chancelleries of the world and on the battlefields, and the latter would never have occurred, in my opinion, but for the former.  In other words, in addition to being successful as an idea, as a national movement, and as a colonial settler phenomenon, political Zionism has always been a resounding public relations triumph.

Now, the Zionist narrative was already almost uncontested in the United States even before 1948.  My father and my mother — both of them lived in New York in those years — tell me stories about how difficult it was to get out an alternative narrative.  That Zionist narrative has become even more firmly entrenched in the public sphere in the decades since then through extensive writings and through making major inroads into popular culture.  The reason for this is not hard to understand.   Historically, Zionist leaders and after them leaders of the state of Israel, with good strategic sense and with a keen eye to opportunity and with a good story to tell, understood where to focus their efforts to garner international support.  And the United States was a focus of this from a very early period.  This was absolutely vital, they understood, to their efforts to create a Jewish state in what was then an Arab country with an overwhelming Arab majority.  Arabs owned 94 percent of the land.  It was an Arab country with a large Jewish minority.  Not only to create a Jewish state in an Arab country, but also to create an impregnable position for it in a hostile region.  Indeed, as they knew, it would have been impossible for them to have succeeded in their endeavor without massive external assistance.  Therefore, this work in the United States and Britain and elsewhere was essential.

What I am going to discuss today, mainly, is how this Zionist-Israeli narrative attained its preeminent status in this country and then I’ll conclude with a relatively brief assessment of whether the power of this narrative may or may not be waning.

John Berger Reads Ghassan Kanafani’s Letter from Gaza.

Via: New Jersey Solidarity.

Letter from Gaza by Ghassan Kanafani

Dear Mustafa,

I have now received your letter, in which you tell me that you’ve done everything necessary to enable me to stay with you in Sacramento. I’ve also received news that I have been accepted in the department of Civil Engineering in the University of California. I must thank you for everything, my friend. But it’ll strike you as rather odd when I proclaim this news to you — and make no doubt about it, I feel no hesitation at all, in fact I am pretty well positive that I have never seen things so clearly as I do now. No, my friend, I have changed my mind. I won’t follow you to “the land where there is greenery, water and lovely faces” as you wrote. No, I’ll stay here, and I won’t ever leave.

I am really upset that our lives won’t continue to follow the same course, Mustafa. For I can almost hear you reminding me of our vow to go on together, and of the way we used to shout: “We’ll get rich!” But there’s nothing I can do, my friend. Yes, I still remember the day when I stood in the hall of Cairo airport, pressing your hand and staring at the frenzied motor. At that moment everything was rotating in time with the ear-splitting motor, and you stood in front of me, your round face silent.