Unsure about the case for cultural and academic boycott?
This is an excellent film with an introduction by award-winning film director Ken Loach
A panel of speakers makes a compelling case for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel.
Rafeef Ziadah : Palestinian Activist, Performance Poet
Ben White : Author and Journalist
Mike Cushman: Academic
Ronnie Barkan: Israeli Activist
London December 2012.Press Release from West London Palestine Solidarity Campaign:
French Multinational Veolia Retreats From Sponsorship Of Major Exhibition
Campaigners against the business practices of French multinational Veolia are celebrating after the company announced it is ending its sponsorship of the prestigious and internationally acclaimed Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.
For three years regular protests were organised outside the Natural History Museum in London and other venues in the UK which hosted the touring version of the exhibition. Campaigners focused attention on Veolia’s activities by providing thousands of exhibition-goers with information with the message ‘Great Exhibition, Shame About The Sponsor’.
Campaigners recently challenged the Museum by maintaining that its link with Veolia undermined its ethical and social responsibility credentials. The museum was provided with detailed factual and legal analysis which campaigners argued clearly shows that Veolia’s business activities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank help Israel to consolidate its illegal settlements in contravention of international humanitarian law.
Campaigners alerted the Museum to a recent report by Professor Richard Falk – the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories – in which Veolia was one of a number of companies that were specifically mentioned. Professor Falk said ”My main recommendation is that the businesses highlighted in the report – as well as the many other businesses that are profiting from the Israeli settlement enterprise –should be boycotted, until they bring their operations into line with international human rights and humanitarian law and standards.”
Campaigners suspect that Veolia ended its sponsorship of the exhibition rather than face further scrutiny from the Natural History Museum. They also point out that in the last few years Veolia has been the subject of campaigns in localities across the UK and internationally when it has tendered for public authority contracts. As a result, Veolia is estimated to have lost business worth billions of Euros.
Brian Durrans from Palestine Solidarity Campaign in London said: “Veolia used a great Museum to try to launder its reputation when it should clean up its act. Until it does so, human rights supporters will keep up the pressure on Veolia”.
Notes For Editors
1. Veolia is a French multinational engaged in waste, water and
transportation businesses.
2. The factual and legal analysis showing that Veolia’s business activities support Israel’s breaches of international humanitarian law can be found at
http://jfjfp.com/?page_id=30763
3. The UN Website link to Professor Richard Falk’s report and news
release can be found at
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43376&Cr=palestin&Cr1#.ULvGO-S6e3E
For further information, please contact:
Brian Durrans
West London Palestine Solidarity Campaign
nernier@gmail.com
10 November 2012 – Brighton report – weekly demo against Sodastream
Report by Yaar Peretz ( Boycott From Within Activist)
The Scene Outside Sodastream’s Shop In Brighton
From 1 pm to 4 pm, more than 40 activists expressed their solidarity with Palestine. The demonstrators gathered in Western Road, Brighton, UK in front of a Sodastream shop, which is trading as ‘Ecostream’. They had a simple message – saying no to the Israeli occupation and yes to freedom for Palestine.
Some of you may already know that Sodastream is an Israeli carbonated drink company which is based in the heart of Palestine. The company is located in Mishor Adumim, the industrial area of Ma’ale Adumim – an illegal Israeli Jewish settlement of over 36,000 settlers.
Campaigners want the Sodastream shop to close until Sodastream takes actions to respect the basic human rights of the Palestinians. They point out that the company’s factories are built on stolen Palestinian land, and so the company benefits directly from the Israeli occupation over Palestine.
Sodastream is a key target of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (‘BDS’) movement which is responding to the call by Palestinian civil society for people of conscience to take action in support of Palestinian rights.
The activists were warmly welcomed by shoppers in Brighton, many of whom who were keen to add their signature to the petition against Sodastream.
However, a row of 10 Sodastream supporters holding Israeli flags did not agree and expressed their support for the illegal Israeli settlements. They claimed that the campaign against Sodastream was “anti-Semitic”.
In reality many of the campaigners for Palestine rights in front of the Sodastream shop were Jewish and some were even Israeli citizens from Tel Aviv! One of them, Ronnie Barkan, commented about the great discrepancy between the two sets of protesters and their flags that ‘while the Palestinian flag symbolizes today a struggle for freedom and liberation, the Israeli flag is the symbol of a criminal apartheid state.’
He also added that: ‘of all green washing attempts using water to portray Israel as being eco-friendly – is most revealing when about half of the water used by Israel is stolen from the West Bank while 95% of Gaza’s water supply is highly polluted due to Israeli policy.’
(http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/gaza-water-confined)
It is a fact that Sodastream prevents Palestinians access to valuable natural resources and that their factories are built solely for the benefit of Israeli settlers who live in “Gush Adumim” – a cluster of illegal settlements. The factory is therefore connected to Jerusalem by a 15 km highway, which is an apartheid road for Jewish Israeli settlers.
Barkan added that Ma’ale Adumim’s location also serves to create Palestinian Bantustans by cutting right through the West Bank. Indeed, I have seen with my own eyes the main road from Jerusalem to the Sodastream factory. It separates Palestinians communities and prevents them from access to the most fundamental human needs such as food, water, health, education and work.
The campaign against the Sodastream shopin Western Road Brighton is continuing. Protests take place every Saturday from 1pm to 3pm.
Yaar Peretz, Boycott from Within
Saturday 20 October 2012
Today about 10 Palestine Solidarity Campaigners joined together in the weekly campaign against Veolia outside London’s Natural History Museum. We were not alone with our message of solidarity with Palestine. During the action, we reached out to more than 1,000 visitors and we were supported by literally hundreds of them.
Furthermore, we managed to gather more than 100 signatures for our petition against the Museum’s partnership with Veolia.
The support we received from the public was overwhelming; from tourists from Taiwan to students from Brazil. We reached out to people from Britain as well of course, such as a traveller from Brighton who expressed his solidarity with Palestine very enthusiastically.
The Wildlife exhibition is presented not only in the Natural History Museum in London, but also across the United Kingdom. For instance, in Bristol and Oxford. Palestine solidarity activists will demonstrate against Veolia when the exhibitions go to those cities.
It is important to mention that in the past, the Natural History Museum was engaged with Ahava- an Israeli venture located in an illegal Settlement in the West Bank. After public pressure, it seems the Museum decided to break its engagement with Ahava.
However, the museum retains at least one extremely disturbing connection and that is with French multinational Veolia.
If you have not heard about it already, Veolia is a company that is complicit in helping Israel maintain its Apartheid regime in Palestine.
Veolia owns and operates a fleet of buses that Palestinians are not permitted to travel on ; these Veolia buses serve Jewish settlers. The roads that these buses travel on connect the most central districts of Israel, such as Tel Aviv, to the furthest and remotest illegal Israeli settlement in the heart of Palestine. For instance, one of these roads is route 443. It was built in heart of the West Bank on stolen Palestinian land on the pretence of being used for the benefit of the Palestinian population. However, in practice it is an Israeli-only highway which is used for Jewish settlers to travel rapidly from the smallest settlements to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This practice violates the most fundamental principles and regulations of international law.
Secondly, Veolia owns and operates light rail services in east and west Jerusalem – services that connect more than one hundred thousand illegal settlers.
Finally, Veolia owns and operates a landfill- in the Jordan Valley – located on stolen Palestinian land. You may have guessed at this point that the landfill wholly or mainly serves the illegal Settlements. This practice similarly violates international law.
To sum things up – this is Apartheid – and Veolia stands behind it without scruples.
However, the Natural History Museum chose to overlook the evidence and decided to ignore the racist practices of Veolia. The Museum still stands cold heartedly against the public in the UK which is completely disgusted by the apartheid practices of Veolia in Palestine.
The Museum must acknowledge the fact that Veolia’s actions are aggressive and directly violate the fundamental human rights of the Palestinians. It must admit that Veolia is directly responsible for the Palestinians inability to work, to go to school, to study at the university, to reach the hospital or to take a trip to visit friends and relatives.
The Palestinians are totally segregated – and Veolia plays a major role in maintaining their isolation.
Today, some of the visitors at the museum shared with us their experiences and some of them even visited Gaza and the West Bank.
It brought up haunting memories from my first experience in Palestine. There, among the olive groves of the village Dir-Kadis, I saw a Palestinian child shot in the head by a rubber bullet. I still don’t know his name and whether he survived.
As it is unlawful and immoral to shoot a child in the head, so are the practices of Veolia. Veolia’s complicity in serving, maintaining and linking Israel’s illegal Settlements means Veolia is helping Israel to crush on a daily basis fundamental human rights of the Palestinians such as the freedom of movement, freedom of employment, right to education, right to health, right to water, right to food and the right to life. We hope that the Natural History Museum will come to its senses and cut off its connections with Veolia – and other companies in the United Kingdom and worldwide will follow in its footsteps.
Richard Millett, UK Zionist Federation activist and blogger- April 2012
The UK Zionist Federation portrays itself as a reputable organisation. The behaviour of its activists, though, suggests it is anything but so.
Here is an example :
UK Zionist Federation activist and chief blogger- Richard Millett- was warned by police that he would be arrested if he remained in the vicinity of the hall where a memorial service was being held for Hannah Braun in London earlier this year (April 2012).
Millett had been spotted with his camera after he had sneaked into the memorial service. Asked what he was doing there Millett told one witness that he had come to check on anti-semitic activities.
The police warning to Millett came after he was finally ejected for videoing individual attendees and proceedings at close quarter. Millett had refused to leave previously and had ignored pleas by relatives of the deceased that he should do so.
The memorial service, attended by family, friends and colleagues of Hannah, was both a celebration and remembrance of her life as a long-standing human rights campaigner. Hannah had arrived in Palestine in 1937 aged 10 as a Jewish refugee and had participated in Israel’s creation but she became a committed and active supporter of Palestinian rights in the years after that.
Millett’s presence at the memorial service was seen by many attendees of the memorial service as a cruel and deliberate provocation aimed at those who were in mourning. As one witness said Millett’s tactics and behaviour speak volumes about the state of the pro-Israel lobby in the UK.
