Galway : Israeli Apartheid Week 2009 & What next for Israel and Palestine?

galway | rights, freedoms and repression | news report

Sunday March 01, 2009 20:02

by TD - Free Palestine Campaign

"I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport" (Chris Hedges)

Yesterday, activists with Galway, Free Palestine Campaign in solidarity with Israeli Apartheid Week (1st to 8th March) and in harmony with the "chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid and to bolster support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign" manned an informaton table in Shop Street dispensing flyers on what Israeli goods/foodstuffs and their purveyors to boycott and gathering signatures for a petition calling on the Board of Eircom "To exclude from consideration the IBM consortium , which includes the Israeli based company Amdocs, for the soon to be awarded contract to provide your company with a new computer billing system."

"Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is taking place in more than 40 cities across the globe (the number of cities is growing daily). This year, IAW happens in the wake of Israel's barbaric assault on the people of Gaza. Lectures, films, and actions will make the point that these latest massacres further confirm the true nature of Israeli Apartheid. IAW 2009 will continue to build and strengthen the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement at a global level" http://atlanta.apartheidweek.org/en/about

Yesterday, participating in IAW, novelist, historian and political campaigner, Tariq Ali and Ronnie Kasrils, Minister for Intelligence Services from 2004 to September 2008 in the South Africa administration spoke in SOAS, Brunei Gallery, London. "This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.” (Ronnie Kasrils after a 2004 visit to the Palestinian territories, quoted in Chris McGreal, Mail & Guardian, October 24, 2006).

On Saturday, March 7th in New York City, son of Jewish refugees from pogroms in the Tsarist Russian Empire and the latest victim of McCarthyite witch-hunting in the US; Joel Kovel, will be discussing "The Israeli attack on Gaza: What is needed for a just solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.? Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College in the Hudson Valley, New York state, he was recently sacked for his "anti-Zionism." This affable and courtly man, during the course of his Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign organized tour promoting his book: Overcoming Zionism spoke in the Victoria Hotel, Galway in April 2007. See his: Statement Regarding Termination By Bard College" on Related Link President of Bard college, Leon Botstein can be protested to on this matter at president@bard.edu also, Executive Vice-President Dimitri Papadimitriou can be contacted at papadimitrou@bard.edu

In the aftermath of Israel's ferocious and wanton attack on Gaza, Galway University's (NUI Galway) Law Society hosted a stormy debate on 21st Jan 2009 : What next for Israel and Palestine.? Sean Gannon, chairman, Irish Friends of Palestine and Tom Carew, chairman, Ireland-Israel Friendship League advocated the case for Israel. Dr. Philomena McKenna of the Galway Palestine Children's Appeal and Khaled Khalil, a Masters student in NUIG put the case for Palestine (Politube video to follow). To address two of Gannon's most most egregious contentions: Israel doesn't deliberately target children" and there is no UN provision for a Right of (refugee) Return. If the facts don't suffice and speak for themselves: 1,487 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000 (and 123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians) http://www.ifamericansknew.org/ we have the eye-witness testimony of Chris Hedges, journalist and author and currently, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and we also have the recently published report of a US lawyers report on Israeli crimes in Gaza :

Chris Hedges : The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker. 'Come on, dogs,' the voice booms in Arabic. 'Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!' I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: 'Son of a bitch!' 'Son of a Whore!…' The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come. A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos. Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo – but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport http://www.doublestandards.org/hedges1.html

Lawyers report : We spoke to Khaled Abed Rabu, who witnessed an Israeli soldier execute his two-year-old and seven-year-old daughters, and critically injure a third daughter, Samar, four years old, on a sunny afternoon outside his home. Two other Israeli soldiers were standing nearby eating chips and chocolates at the time on 7 January 2009. Abed Rabu recounts standing in front of the Israeli soldiers with his mother, wife and daughters for five to seven minutes before one of the soldiers opened fire on his family http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10292.shtml

UN General Assembly Resolution 3236, passed on 22 November 1974 declared the right of return to be an "inalienable right".
(General Assembly resolutions are not binding in international law). however, the right of return for the 1948 Palestinian refugees still exists according to international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) article 13 states that "everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."