Antony Loewenstein

The following statement was released by Kairos Palestine this week:

Bethlehem, 17.11.2011. Anything but subtle – that sums up the desperate campaign recently launched by an assortment of anti-Palestinian conglomerates.  Buy Israel Week, to be held from November 28 to December 4, is an apparent attempt to hijack Christmas shoppers and divert attention from the success of the ongoing BDS campaigns around the world.

This is a moment when the BDS movement is claiming colossal successes in many countries around the globe, with an impact that has encouraged its initiators to dare the hope that political change will come sooner rather than later.

Indeed, the Buy Israel Week is rooted in a frantic attempt to sidetrack attention from the deteriorating international tolerance for the crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli military forces in the Occupied Territories. Buy Israel Week’s initiators claim that those who work to undermine Israel do so by boycotting its very right to exist. They call on shoppers to ‘counteract this movement’ by ‘buying Israel’.

The call to ‘Buy Israel’ has a sense of hysteria about it. Rather than come to terms with the illegality of the occupation, the architects of the campaign remain defensive. The initiators are frustrated by their inability to “shape decisions made at the United Nations or on Capitol Hill” and wary of the possible acceptance of Palestine in an increasing number of UN fora in the coming months. They are unleashing ‘Buy Israel’ as a diversionary tactic from the international gaze strengthened by the UN bid and subsequent actions in UNESCO.

Kairos Palestine remains steadfast in its call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.  In our document “A Moment of Truth,” Kairos endorses the call on “individuals, companies and states to engage in divestment and in an economic and commercial boycott of everything produced by the occupation. We understand this to integrate the logic of peaceful resistance. We understand that the object of our BDS stance is not one of revenge but rather to put an end to the existing evil, liberating both the perpetrators and the victims of injustice”.  

Indeed, the BDS movement itself does not seek to punish Israel, nor is it an end-goal unto itself. Rather, it is a means: a measure of non-violent protest in line with democratic rights and responsibilities that we seek to implement until Israel complies with international law and concedes Palestinian rights.

Kairos Palestine strongly urges people who seek justice for Palestine — and those who seek peace for all — to see anxiety of the ‘Buy Israel’ campaign for exactly what it is: a flagrant attempt to distract the world from a powerful non-violent movement that is actually working. Accordingly, Kairos Palestine also urges people to maintain their unwavering support for BDS. BDS is visibly hurting the apparatus of Israeli interests; with solidarity and persistence, we know we will succeed in making Israel accountable to its obligations under international law rather than to the oppression it implements to uphold its own illegal occupation.

Kairos Palestine

Correction Corporation of America’s Stewart facility in Lumpkin, Georgia is the largest private detention center in the nation. Stewart currently profits close to $50 million a year. As if that weren’t enough, CCA often cuts costs by denying basic services to its inmates and by limiting access to their family members.

CCA charges inmates close to $5 a minute to make a phone call. To pay for this, inmates work in the facility and earn a whopping $1 a day. Five days of hard work gives them just enough time for a one minute phone call.

Sigh:

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it’s supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as “kettling”) against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and “rubber” bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use of force. But it is hardly the outer limits of the possibilities.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

One day, and soon, this message will move from the alternative world to the mainstream and anybody defending Israeli behaviour will be shunned as extreme and bigoted:

Professor Norman Finkelstein stormed UK campuses in the week to November 11, lecturing to packed auditoriums in London, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham on How to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

His main message was that since Israeli settlement, occupation and denial of rights to Palestinian refugees are all acknowledged as illegal under international law,  the campaign on these points is as good as won.

He said that Tzipi Livni, when serving as Israel’s foreign minister,  had declared: 

“I’m a lawyer – and I’m against the law, international law in particular.”

She had good reason for saying that because under international law “Israel loses, on Jerusalem, on the West Bank and Gaza, on settlements and right of return for refugees,” said Finkelstein.

The relevance of this to the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) was teased out in discussion between Finkelstein and Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, chair of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) on Friday afternoon, Nov 11, at UCL.

How our capitalist system is increasingly ordered (and sold to the highest bidder):

Late last month, a national backlash forced Bank of America to abandon its plan to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards. But Huffington Post reports that the corporation has quietly been mining other sources of fees, preying on its most vulnerable customers to rake in millions in revenue:

Shawana Busby does not seem like the sort of customer who would be at the center of a major bank’s business plan. Out of work for much of the last three years, she depends upon a $264-a-week unemployment check from the state of South Carolina. But the state has contracted with Bank of America to administer its unemployment benefits, and Busby has frequently found herself incurring bank fees to get her money.

To withdraw her benefits, Busby, 33, uses a Bank of America prepaid debit card on which the state deposits her funds…Busby visits the ATMs in her area and begrudgingly accepts the fees, which reach as high as five dollars per transaction. She estimates that she has paid at least $350 in fees to tap her unemployment benefits. [...]

In short, the same banks whose speculation delivered a financial crisis that has destroyed millions of jobs have figured out how to turn widespread unemployment into a profit center: The larger the number of people who are out of work and dependent upon the state for sustenance, the greater the potential gains through administering their benefits.

Millions of jobless Americans like Busby have little choice but to rely on the bank’s prepaid debit cards to collect their monthly benefits. Forty-one states have contracted with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and other banks to provide access to public benefits, allowing them to collect unlimited fees, both from the unemployed and state governments. South Carolina, for instance, pays Bank of America a fee for each transfer it facilitates on a debit card, and for handling direct deposit of unemployment benefits.