The issue of the Sydney Biennale receiving financial support from Transfield, a company profiting from running detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, has troubled many artists and activists (my recent Guardian column examined it). I was interviewed by Triple R‘s Spoke program yesterday about the politics around boycotts, from Australia to Palestine:
Showing all posts tagged Zionism
Jews backing academic boycott against Israel
Back in January 2013 I signed a statement as a Jew in a global campaign backing the Palestinian right of return. The same New York-based Jews have collected signatures for a new, equally vital statement and my signature appears below: We salute the… American Studies Association’s courageous endorsement… of the… Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)…
Dangers of corporate sponsorship for cultural and artistic events
My weekly Guardian column is below: The 19th… Biennale of Sydney… opens on 21 March. There will be a… range of artists… displaying all manners of artistic endeavour. So far, so good. But a major sponsor is Transfield, a company used by the Australian Federal Government to handle refugee services and which therefore profits from the asylum seeker industry…
Israeli government wants to unleash war against BDS backers
Welcome to the smell of futility. The last months have seen an avalanche of Zionists, liberal Zionists, columnists and fear-mongers claiming that boycotts against Israel are dangerous, yet offering nothing to end the occupation. The latest, via Haaretz, is the Netanyahu government potentially spending huge dollars on attacking BDS backers. There’s one small problem (as…
The day Scarlett Johansson fell in love with Zionist occupation
During the SuperBowl last night, a game I watched here in New York with a mixture of confusion and amazement during the litany of mundane celebrity-endorsed advertisements, the questions over SodaStream were strong. This pro Israeli-occupation company, now supported by actress Scarlett Johansson, found itself in a storm of controversy. Deservedly so. Al Jazeera America…
A new year and BDS already challenging heart of Zionism
Strong piece in this weekend’s New York Times by Palestinian Omar Barghouti on the logic and increasing power of BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] against Israel: The… landslide vote… by the American Studies Association in December to endorse an academic boycott of Israel, coming on the heels of a similar decision by the… Association for Asian-American… Studies, among others,…
Being an Australian, pro-Palestinian Jew
I was recently interviewed for the Executive Style section (!) at Fairfax Media by Gary Nunn, under the headline, Winning By Putting Yourself Second, on my work over Palestine: Antony Loewenstein is an Australian-Jewish opponent of Israel. Having spent time in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and written two books on the subject, he…
Why it's time for UN sanctions against Australia
My weekly Guardian column is published today: This month, the United Nations accused Canberra of… potentially breaking international law… by forcibly repelling refugee boats back to Indonesia.… Adrian Edwards, spokesman for the UN high commissioner for refugees,… said… that the international body was “concerned by any policy or practice that involved pushing asylum-seeker boats back at sea without a proper…
Boycott of Israel makes prime-time coverage in Israel
The Zionist lobby and its various backers can argue that global anti-Semitism is the reason the Jewish state is increasingly isolated. Dream on. Here’s Larry Derfner, writing in +972 Magazine, explaining the sign of the BDS times: On Saturday night the boycott of Israel gained an impressive new level of mainstream recognition in this country.…
How Israeli abuses splinters Jewish identity
Any thinking Jew (and/or human being) has major issues with the ways in which Israel occupies the Palestinians. It’s something I’ve written about and struggled with for years. Al-Jazeera journalist Matthew Cassel (a visitor to Australia in 2011 and we shared a stage talking about the Arab revolutions) has produced a moving, telling, revealing and…