Boycotting Israeli Apartheid
June 2007 marks the 40th anniversary of Apartheid Israel’s 1967 war of aggression and subsequent military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights. The assault consolidated the Zionist movement’s hold over the whole of historic Palestine and its total control over the region’s indigenous population. Backed by a steady flow of US tax dollars, Apartheid Israel has continued to brutalize the Palestinian population and deny it the fundamental rights to self-determination, sovereignty and the right of return.
In 2006 alone, 700 Palestinians were killed. There are currently 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners incarcerated within a sprawling network of Zionist military prisons where torture is routinely practised. Since 1967, over 600,000 Palestinians have passed through these jails, torture and detention centres. In the same period, over 12,000 Palestinian houses have been demolished by the Israeli military, leaving over 70,000 homeless. Millions more are ghettoized in their towns and villages, surrounded by settlements, checkpoints and the ever-expanding Apartheid wall. Another five million refugees—the world’s largest refugee population—are literally locked out of their homeland without the possibility of return.
Since the election of Hamas in January 2006, a policy of deliberate starvation of the Palestinian population—with Canadian government complicity—continues unchecked as poverty and unemployment reach unprecedented levels. After the imposition of sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, one of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s main advisers, Dov Weisglass, noted that the sanctions regime is: “… like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.”
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
In the summer of 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations launched a consolidated call for a global campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israeli Apartheid. The call was made in response to the progressively deteriorating situation in Palestine. It is the most significant document issued by the entirety of organized Palestinian resistance, representing major organizations of Palestinians living in the 1948 and 1967 occupied territories, as well as in exile.
The Toronto-based Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) was formed in January 2006 in response to this call. The Palestinian anti-Apartheid movement is a growing, global movement supported by networks of activists, trade unionists, political parties, regional governments, faith organizations, environmentalists, cultural workers, academics, student groups, and other long-standing Palestine solidarity organizations. The movement has spawned strong campaigns from South Africa to England, Ireland and Palestine.
In Canada, CAIA (pronounced “kaya”)—has developed into a wide network of concerned individuals and organizations spread across Toronto. This has inspired similar organizing in other cities, including Montreal, Vancouver, Victoria and Winnipeg. CAIA recognizes Israeli Apartheid as one element of a system of global Apartheid and stands in solidarity with all oppressed peoples across the world, with a particular emphasis on struggles for indigenous sovereignty here on Turtle Island.
Currently, CAIA is mobilizing in support of the most recent call issued by the Active Steering Committee of the Palestinian BDS campaign to mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation this June. A national Day of Action has been organized on June 9th, targeting a boycott of the Chapters and Indigo bookstores whose majority shareholders, Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz, actively support the Israeli military. The June 9th action is a continuation and escalation of the boycott campaign against Chapters and Indigo initiated this past fall. The aim of the boycott is to force Reisman and Schwartz to cut all financial ties to “Heseg—Foundation for Lone Soldiers.”
The Heseg Foundation distributes three million dollars in scholarships to former Israeli “lone soldiers.” These are individuals who have no family in Israel, but decide to travel there to join the Israeli military. At any time there might be 5,000 “lone soldiers” in the Israeli military, working in various capacities including in combat units. As soldiers, they participate in a military that operates checkpoints that restrict Palestinian freedom of movement, enforces the occupation of Palestinian land, and has a documented history of human rights violations.
CAIA is using the boycott as a regular education tool around Israeli Apartheid. Raising awareness about the nature of Israeli Apartheid and about how people contribute to it by buying products from Chapters-Indigo is crucial to CAIA’s work. Working with allied groups, such as the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO), weekly informational pickets have been organized outside Chapters-Indigo stores in Toronto. Similar pickets have been established in other Canadian cities.
Lone soldier supporters
Besides Schwartz and Reisman, Heseg’s board of directors also includes notorious Israeli war criminals holding high-ranking positions in the Israeli military. Among these is Major General Doron Almog, who in 2005 narrowly escaped arrest in Britain as a war criminal thanks to a tip by British officials. Almog was in charge of the Israeli Military Southern Command when a one-ton bomb was dropped on a house in Gaza, killing 14 civillians, 9 of them children.
Other notable figures on Heseg’s board include Shabtai Shabit, former head of the Israeli foreign intelligence, the Mossad, and Lieutenant Colonel Mike Hartman, who heads the marksmanship and sharpshooters division of the Israeli military. This shameful association of Chapters-Indigo with one of the world’s most atrocious militaries has a very fragile base of public support. These ties must be exposed to those genuinely concerned with human rights and social justice.
Controversy is steadily intensifying around Canada’s Israel-Palestine policies, with government support for Israel—and rejection of Palestinian rights—far out of step with popular opinion. Whether or not the shifts in Canadian government policy toward overt pro-Israel partisanship can be consolidated, there is no question that there will be a backlash against Chapters-Indigo for its role in this partisanship.
Boycott, divestment and sanctions formed a critical part of global efforts to end South African Apartheid. They were an expression of popular refusal to participate in and sustain the structures of racial discrimination and oppression. It was widely seen as morally repugnant to be openly associated with South African Apartheid. Today we have an opportunity to once again be part of a global movement for justice. This open support for one of the ugliest vestiges of overt, colonial-era racism in the guise of liberty must be ended.
Charuka Kirinde is an activist and a member of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.
