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US unions condemn ‘unacceptable’ Oregon pension fund link with NSO

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Written by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington
Published: 31 March 2022 31 March 2022

AFL-CIO in Oregon calls for urgent divestment from fund that owns Israeli spyware company alleged to have targeted union members

When labour organisers passed a resolution this month calling for Oregon’s $100bn state pension fund to divest from a fund that owns NSO Group, it pointed to ways in which the Israeli company’s intrusive spyware is alleged to have been used in the past to target union members.

 

“It may seem like a cliche, but an injury to one is an injury to all, and we strongly stand behind that,” said Ira Erbs, a part-time professor at Portland Community College and member of the Oregon chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

Erbs is part of a growing movement of union members in Oregon who are seeking greater transparency from Oregon’s Democratic state treasurer, Tobias Read, about how public employee retirement funds are invested.

Activists such as Erbs have already pressed Read on the retirement fund’s investments in fossil fuels, and in companies that operate private prisons. Now, they are focused on the Oregon fund’s longstanding indirect investment in NSO, the maker of one of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance technologies.

An investigation into NSO by the Pegasus project, an international media consortium led by the French non-profit Forbidden Stories, reported last year that the mobile phone numbers of dozens of Mexican teachers – part of a faction within Mexico’s politically powerful teachers union – had been targeted for possible surveillance in 2016 by the Mexican government, at a time when the union was expressing objections to proposed government reforms.

Read more on The Guardian.

Holding Israel Accountable: Remembering Rachel Corrie. A Zoom Webinar on March 16th.

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Written by Peter Miller Peter Miller
Published: 12 March 2022 12 March 2022

It's Settled That Israel Is Committing the Crime of Apartheid—Now What Should We Do About It?

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Written by PHYLLIS BENNIS PHYLLIS BENNIS
Published: 18 February 2022 18 February 2022

The international movement for Palestinian rights and justice laid the ground for recent declarations by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. Now we have to follow up.

When Amnesty International released its report "Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity" earlier the month, it was clearly part of a rapidly expanding trend. Palestinian human rights defenders, members of Congress and faith leaders in the United States, academics, and activists of the Palestinian rights movement around the world have long recognized and condemned Israeli apartheid, and called for accountability.

More recently, influential human rights organizations and experts have produced a spate of reports analyzing and condemning the phenomenon. Amnesty's report emerged after acclaimed Israeli human rights advocacy organizations published their reports: 18 months after Yesh Din's "The Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion," and a year after B'tselem's "A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid." Amnesty's arrived eight months after Human Rights Watch published "A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution."

The precedents had actually been emerging even earlier—almost five years before, experts commissioned by the UN's Economic and Social Commission of West Asia had authored "Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid" (though pressure from Israel's supporters forced ESCWA to remove the report from its website).

"This slew of recent reports come to the legal conclusion that Israel's actions of discrimination, dispossession, and more, were carried out for the purpose of ensuring the dominance of one racial or national group over another."

The reports all build on each other, though their conclusions differ in some specifics, including where in the varied territories it controls Israel's actions constituted the crime of apartheid, when it started, and more. Yesh Din limited their assessment of apartheid to the West Bank; HRW found the crime of apartheid was being committed in all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)—meaning Gaza, the West Bank, and occupied East Jerusalem—while inside the 1948 border of Israel the crime was that of persecution. B'tselem went further, holding Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid throughout all of historic Palestine—"from the river to the sea" as the statement goes. The UN's ESCWA report, written in 2017 by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, went furthest, by including the Palestinian refugees, whose right to return to their homes Israel has long been denied.

But crucially, this slew of recent reports come to the legal conclusion that Israel's actions of discrimination, dispossession, and more, were carried out for the purpose of ensuring the dominance of one racial or national group over another—for the purpose of empowering Israeli Jews at the expense of Palestinians—and that therefore Israel was committing the crime of apartheid.

Read more at Common Dreams

 

When Desmond Tutu stood up for the rights of Palestinians, he could not be ignored

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Written by Chris McGreal Chris McGreal
Published: 30 December 2021 30 December 2021

 

Desmond Tutu at a press conference in Geneva after Israel blocked his UN mission to Beit Hanun in 2006

 

Desmond Tutu at a press conference in Geneva after Israel blocked his UN mission to Beit Hanun in 2006. Photograph: Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA

Read more on The Guardian

But Tutu’s real crime in the eyes of Israel’s most unrelenting supporters was to liken its rule over the Palestinians to apartheid and then refuse to back off in the face of an onslaught of abuse. On his visits to Israel and Palestine, Tutu would have immediately recognised echoes of his homeland in the forced removals, the house demolitions, the humiliations of checkpoints and systems of control on movement, the confiscation of land for Jewish settlements, and the confining of Palestinians to blobs of territory, reminiscent of the Bantustan black homelands. Above all he saw one people controlling another who, like black South Africans until 1994, had little say in their governance.

Tutu was not alone in his view. Former US president Jimmy Carter drew similarly vitriolic accusations from Dershowitz and others when he published his bestselling book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in 2006. But Tutu was harder to attack. He not only had the authority of a Nobel peace prize awarded for his courageous stand against white rule in South Africa but he knew apartheid when he saw it.

New and Really Old News about Gaza: An Update and Some Simple Truths

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Written by Gilbert Schramm Gilbert Schramm
Published: 21 May 2021 21 May 2021

Gaza, May 20, 2021
An Update and Some Simple Truths

The brutal, ongoing violence in Gaza has brought on the usual handwringing and nonsense. Yet strangely, in some ways, there seems to be a bit of a breakthrough. It is long overdue.

In some quarters, the admissions now made by pundits, policy wonks and reporters would have been unthinkable a few years ago. One is that Netanyahu was never serious about allowing a Palestinian state: barrels of ink were used to insist he did. Some of us have known better for 20 years. We were ignored. Another was the extreme shift to the right in Israel. They are basically now a Zionist supremacist state. Obviously, too, the justifications for extreme violence by Israel have been clearly refuted: if there are this many rockets in Gaza, previous brutal attempts by Israel to destroy them have been a miserable failure. Lots of us knew that too...

When President Carter’s book Peace, Not Apartheid came out in 2006, he was ridiculed and vilified for suggesting Israel was an Apartheid state (a term that has serious implications in international law). That fact is now widely acknowledged. So too is the fact that Netanyahu’s policy not only flagrantly abuses human rights and breaks international law, but a is colossal failure that is more harmful to Israel in the long run than any force the Palestinians might bring to bear.

Other lies and myths are breaking down as well. In the past, many Americans threw up their hands in confusion when this issue came up, believing it too ancient, complex, or insoluble to understand. It is not.

One simple way to look at the current crisis is this: Zionist settlement in Palestine began in about 1895 and continues to this day. In all that time, it is hard to find an example of Palestinians taking land back from the Zionist settlers. That is why today, as Zionist settlers continue to steal Palestinian land, about five generations of Palestinians live in exile or as prisoners and refugees in their own country. Put bluntly, Palestinian violence has always been about defending their land, while Israeli violence has always been about taking it.

In 1895, the ignition point for the violence was Zionist settlers taking Palestinian land and homes. The current episode is no different. What we see today stems directly from Zionist settlers trying to evict Palestinians from their ancestral homes in East Jerusalem. It began in early May as Jewish settlers tried to evict Palestinians from homes in East Jerusalem during Ramadan. Protests began, and at Friday prayers at the sacred Al Aqsa Mosque, Israeli police inflamed the situation by firing on protesting Palestinians. Over 200 Palestinians were wounded. Saturday brought more protests, and around 120 Palestinians were wounded. Some 17 Israeli soldiers were hurt.

Let me make some important distinctions here.

Read more: New and Really Old News about Gaza: An Update and Some Simple Truths

More Articles ...

  1. As a Rabbi Raised in South Africa, I Can’t Ignore Israel Is an Apartheid State
  2. A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid
  3. What Black Lives and Palestinian Lives Have in Common
  4. The New Middle East Peace Plan Promises Projects, Not Peace
  5. Kushner's plan to sugarcoat the occupation of Palestine
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