Israeli Justice Minister Calls for 20 Year Prison Sentences for Israelis Who Call for Sanctions

By Swawkbox / Larry’s List 

Israel’s justice minister – and deputy PM – Yariv Levin has responded to a call by the editor of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper for sanctions on the country to force it to recognise a Palestinian state and to end its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, by ordering his minions to draw up a demand for prison sentences of up to twenty years for Israeli citizens who call for sanctions....

Shocken did not even mention Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but the speech provoked a wild reaction from the regime. Levin’s letter, as translated by a well-known online translation service, reads:

Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister

Jerusalem 90 • In Tashir Tashfa October 31, 2024

To him D Gal• in Harav Miara

Legal advice to the government. At issue: legislation against encouraging and supporting the imposition of sanctions on the State of Israel

I would like to contact you regarding the matters in question as follows:

1. Last night it was announced that the publisher of the Haaretz newspaper, Amos Shocken, called on foreign countries to impose sanctions on the State of Israel and Israeli leaders. Is this the first time that Israeli citizens have acted in this way.

2. As we know, for more than a year the State of Israel has been at war on a number of fronts as a murderous terrorist including as a commander of the Hamas organisation. A call to impose sanctions on Israel and its leadership, the members of the security forces and Israeli citizens is a blatant violation of a citizen’s most basic duty of loyalty towards one’s country. It means encouraging and coercing a move whose purpose is to negate Israel’s right of self-defence. This is especially serious when it is done during an existential war, and while we are building and building Held in inhumane conditions by a murderous terrorist organization.

3. In view of all this, I would like you to urgently send me the draft of a legal memorandum, which will state that the actions of Israeli citizens for the sake of killing or encouraging the imposition of international sanctions on Israel, on its leaders, For the members of the security forces and the citizens of Israel, it will be a criminal offense with a prison sentence of ten years I will also request that the burning as mentioned during wartime will be an aggravating circumstance that will allow the doubling of the sentence.

The regime’s reaction to the waking-up of some of its citizens – especially journalists – to its crimes and to the humanity and rights of Palestinians? Bang them up for a similar sentence to what they would get for murder.

Israel claims to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. It is a claim that looks extremely superficial at best.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/03/israeli-justice-minister-calls-for-20-year-prison-sentences-for-israelis-who-call-for-sanctions/

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Why the U.S. Must Lead Sanctions on Israel’s Illegal Occupation

No multilateral sanctions campaign will be effective unless it is backed by the power of the dollar, which dominates global trade and banking.

By Mohsen Farshneshani,

With the Middle East on the brink of full-scale war, the international community, led by the United States and its allies, faces a critical choice in addressing the conflict in Gaza: gamble on eventual peace through a belligerent Israeli government or enforce a new landmark legal judgment.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion just weeks ago declaring Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories unlawful and urging its end “as rapidly as possible.”

Israel’s illegal actions include the transfer of Israeli civilians into occupied territories, confiscation of Palestinian land, and exploitation of natural resources for the benefit of Israeli settlers. The opinion stated that these practices violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations. Israel is party to the former and bound by customary international law to the latter. The ICJ ruling referred implementation of the ruling to the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council, where Washington holds significant sway.

For the opinion to be a step toward accountability, the United States and its allies must demonstrate respect for the same rules-based order they once helped establish­­––yet have failed to uphold when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Washington must employ unilateral or multilateral economic sanctions against the illegal occupation, its settlements, and their institutional underpinnings. Failure to do so risks rendering the ruling a hollow gesture from the highest judicial authority of international law.

THE ICJ OPINION is the latest indication of a growing global consensus that Israel should not be allowed to act with impunity in the Palestinian territories. A senior Australian government source said the ICJ opinion “can’t be ignored”, and Australia subsequently initiated targeted sanctions to address settler violence; the foreign minister of Germany, one of Israel’s strongest allies, also conceded the gravity of the ruling.

Many countries—including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—voted against the U.N. General Assembly resolution that led to this ICJ advisory opinion. Since then, these nations have initiated their own unprecedented sanctions to address at least some aspects of the Israeli occupation—generally following the United States in targeting “bad apples” directly involved in settler violence.

Thus far, Israel as a whole has seen no serious repercussions for its flagrant violations of international law. Israeli leaders, businesses, and organizations involved in the occupation and proliferation of illegal settlements have enjoyed global relationships while flouting international law and human rights standards. Meanwhile, close ties with U.S. donors and institutions have facilitated significant funding and support for Israeli expansionism.

U.S. state and local governments, for example, have invested billions in Israel Bonds, an investment vehicle that directly supports the Israeli government, while millions of tax-deductible U.S. dollars flow to settler organizations. Since the funds raised by Israel Bonds are deposited into the general Israeli state budget and allocated at the government’s discretion, they are fungible with other budgetary resources.

U.S. sanctions targeting settler violence and instability have been slow and performative thus far. On Feb. 1, U.S. President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14115 to address threats to “peace, security, and stability in the West Bank.” The power of U.S. sanctions often lies in the intimidating ambiguity of their scope, which is prohibitive for Americans and imposes a chilling effect on non-Americans dealing with the sanctions’ targets. The initial round of sanctions targeted just four people. Immediately, Israeli banks, despite being non-U.S. entities, swiftly halted financial transactions with the sanctions targets. This action prompted backlash in Israel. Then, in late March, the U.S. Treasury Department informed the Bank of Israel in a guidance letter that Israeli banks could facilitate basic living expenses such as food and rent for the violent settlers in question without exposure to sanctions liability.

While humanitarian exceptions are standard across U.S. sanctions programs, this blanket guidance appears to be a concession in response to Israeli pressure. What’s more, the letter dilutes the sanctions’ impact by setting clear limits on the ambiguity of enforcement and preserving financial normalcy for the targets. For instance, the guidance prioritizes the wellbeing of the sanctioned individuals’ livestock, which play a key role in seizing control over Palestinian land. Just two months after the guidance was issued, a private recording revealed Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s plans to continue using farming outposts, which he described as a “mega-strategic tool” for advancing expansionist goals.

Isolated measures that treat violence, land seizures, and human rights abuses as anomalies rather than inherent features of the occupation are inadequate to adhere to the ICJ opinion. An impactful sanctions program must target not only the direct perpetrators of violence but also the broader infrastructure supporting the occupation. The United States must lead or support these efforts because of its monopoly on sanctions, which it derives from the U.S. dollar’s dominance in global trade and banking.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/14/israel-palestine-us-sanctions-icj-ruling-occupation-settlements-dollar/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without shedding tears…”

         Gus Leonisky

     With the help of the US, Israel exports instruments of oppression abroad, while testing them against Palestinians.

     By

 

Ciudong Ng , 

TRUTHOUT

As Israel tightens its siege, medical supplies in the Gaza Strip are running out, and doctors confront patients with unimaginable injuries.

The orthopedist Hani Bseso operated on his niece Ahed’s leg, after a shell plowed through their home. Bleeding profusely, Ahed remained in an agonizing daze, as relatives carried her downstairs. Reaching a hospital was impossible. So Bseso amputated her leg on the kitchen table where her mother had made bread that morning.

While Gaza’s health system implodes, disease and famine are spreading like wildfire. After 25 years, polio has returned to the strip, and Israeli operations are forcing patients to evacuate Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities. Elsewhere, the scent of uncollected garbage hangs in the air, and water from blasted sewer lines forms pools reflecting the skyline as it turns to rubble. This summer, United Nations experts concluded that Israel’s “intentional and targeted starvation campaign” is “a form of genocidal violence.” Only bombs and bullets enter Gaza in abundance.

That is no coincidence. Between 2018 and 2022, Israel boasted the world’s second-largest military budget in per capita terms, boosting spending by 24 percent in 2023. The Defense Ministry emphasizes that the security sector plays “a monumental role” in the economy, spurring industrial innovation and representing about 10 percent of national exports. As Gaza burns, arms makers report “growing demand” for Israeli weapons “all around the world.”

Israel’s war footing reflects an entrenched pattern of militarism. Over the past 50 years, Israeli leaders have exploited the Occupied Territories and U.S. technical assistance to build an imposing military-industrial complex. Palestinian victims like Ahed are part of this broader process, as Israel exports the violent technologies and expertise that it perfects in Gaza to countries across the globe.

During the Cold War, U.S. military and technical cooperationhelped Israel become the largest per capita exporter of arms. Struggling with foreign debt, Israeli leaders promoted weapons sales to alleviate financial imbalances and fund industrial development. The defense sector became the bedrock of the economy, and the Occupied Territories offered a laboratory for lethal experimentation. “Today, it can be said that no country in the world is as dependent on arms sales as Israel,” the political scientist Bishara Bahbah concluded in 1986.

In particular, Latin American dictators such as Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet became enthusiastic clients. After the October War in 1973, Israeli firms mailed advertisements to his junta, and the Chilean embassy in Tel Aviv drafted reports about the performance of their weapons. Officers regarded Israel as a model, suggesting that military rule secured “conditions of tranquility” in Palestine. Eventually, Israeli leaders helped General Pinochet develop Chile’s aerospace industry, even transferring technology to produce cluster bombs.

Increasingly, U.S. officials encouraged Israel to stifle leftist movements by arming authoritarian regimes aligned with Washington. Facing human rights legislation, President Jimmy Carter and his successors circumvented restraints on national power by outsourcing repression to Israeli leaders. “Israel is the ‘dirty work’ contractor,” Gen. Mattityahu Peled mused. “Israel is acting as an accomplice and an arm of the United States.”

This was brutally clear in Central America. Before his fall in July 1979, Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle relied on Israeli arms shipments to suppress a popular revolution. “The streets of Managua resemble those of Jerusalem,” El Paísobserved. “Israeli materiel is everywhere.” Nicaraguans claimed that Somoza’s forces were “genocidal” because they leveled villages, slaughtered entire families and raped women in front of their husbands.

Their Israeli-made Galil assault rifles became symbols of oppression. Upon liberating Managua, Sandinista rebels confiscated the guns, before expending their ammunition in long volleys — as if purging the country of the past in each burst. Fearing the revolution’s spread, the CIA then encouraged Israeli leaders to arm the remnant of the Somoza regime, while isolating the progressive Sandinista government. Throughout the 1980s, Israel remained a major actor in the region, supplying arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and exacerbating a civil war that killed 30,000 people.

But Israel’s heaviest footprint was in Guatemala, where Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt claimed that his 1982 coup succeeded partly “because many of our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” Over the following year, Ríos Montt escalated a genocidal war against Indigenous communities that claimed more than 200,000 victims. Officers regarded Israeli strategy as a model, pursuing the “Palestinianization” of rural zones. At Dos Erres, Guatemalan forces sprayed villagers with Galil rifles, before splitting the skulls of survivors with sledgehammers.

Journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn found that Israeli leaders had few reservations about weapons sales. “I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms,” Lt. Col. Amatzia Shuali scoffed at them. “The main thing” was that Israeli firms “profit.”

By the end of the Cold War, U.S. financial and military aid had allowed Israel to develop a formidable arms industry. In his landmark study, Bahbah noted that, at times, 40 percent of the country’s industrial workforce labored in the defense sector, and weapons exports were a leading source of foreign exchange. Arms production accelerated a drift toward militarism, turning the occupation of Palestine into an economically sustainable and profit-making enterprise. In essence, Israeli leaders funded aggression against Palestinians by dispossessing others in Latin America and elsewhere.

As the Soviet Union imploded, Israel reinvented the prevailing discourse justifying its military occupation. For decades, Israeli officers had claimed that Palestinian fighters and their socialist allies — like the Sandinistas — were vengeful “terrorists,” dismissing their political grievances and ideals. Yet Zionist leaders now claimed that “terrorism” posed the greatest threat to world peace, while stretching the elastic term to demonize all Palestinian resistance. Depicting mass protests as terror, Israeli officers distributed truncheons in 1988, ordering troops to break demonstrators’ bones. Within two years, the London-based nonprofit organization Save the Children calculated that more than 23,600 Palestinian children required medical attention for beatings. Almost one-third of the victims were 10 or younger.

At this juncture, Benjamin Netanyahu emerged as a conservative firebrand and self-proclaimed expert on global terror, while leading the Likud party. Previously, Netanyahu founded the Jonathan Institute to convince Western policy makers that “international terrorism” posed an existential threat to liberal democracy, while framing Palestinian resistance as evil, irrational and antisemitic. His political agenda celebrated colonial expansion and raw force.

In October 1995, Netanyahu denounced Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for negotiating the Oslo Accords, inciting rabid protests and appearing at a rally with an effigy of Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform. One month later, a right-wing gunman murdered the prime minister.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders leveraged their counterinsurgency expertise to strengthen relations with Washington and shape the “global war on terror.” Conveniently, many advocates of the invasion of Iraq were hardcore Zionists. Vice President Dick Cheney was a former board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, which promotes weapons sales to Israel. Previously, Defense Adviser Dick Perle represented Israeli arms makers, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was an adviser to Netanyahu. The Jerusalem Post emphasized that a leading war architect Paul Wolfowitz was “devoutly pro-Israel,” naming him “Man of the Year” months after the invasion.

Israeli officials hoped U.S. intervention would topple hostile regimes and dash Palestinian dreams of self-governance. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, Haaretz announced that the Israeli “military and political leadership yearns for war.” Netanyahu himself published, “The Case for Toppling Saddam,” in The Wall Street Journal, echoing false claims about an Iraqi nuclear arsenal.

As the war on terror expanded, U.S. and Israeli officers shared counterinsurgency tactics, rubbing shoulders in the Negev desert. “Senior US military delegations came … to learn from Israel’s experiences in hunting terrorists in the Gaza Strip,” defense experts relayed. Foreign aid and demand for security services also fostered a sort of start-up colonialism, as Israeli veterans founded firms such as the NSO Group and Smart Shooter, which develop the latest spyware and gun targeting systems — capitalizing on the occupation to develop new technologies of social control.

Secretly, the U.S. embassy recognized that the country’s war footing propelled its economic growth. “Government investment,” Ambassador James Cunningham marveled, “is strikingly demonstrated in Israel’s military training programs.” Israeli Army engineering students developed “better missile guidance systems,” “drone aircraft,” and other deadly innovations. “After finishing military service,” he explained, graduates were “snapped up by technology firms” like Elbit Systems and Gilat Satellite Networks.

U.S. officials portrayed Israel as a start-up paradise, while isolating the Palestinian victims of its militarized economy. In 2007, U.S. diplomats locked Hamas leaders out of the Annapolis peace talks, despite acknowledging its “sweep in the local-level Gazan elections.” After vetting Palestine’s own delegates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bluntly told them to forget about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (the “Nakba”) during the creation of Israel in 1948. “Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time,” Rice lectured them. “You need to look forward.”

Ultimately, the war on terror justified soaring levels of military aid and cooperation while offering an ideological framework that discredited Palestinian dissent at the outset. For policy makers, the concept of “terrorism” inverted inconvenient truths: turning the resistance of the weak into “irrational violence” and colonial assertion into “self-defense.” Flush with foreign aid, the Israeli economy militarized further. The “peace process” became a tool of aggression, as the U.S. served as “Israel’s lawyer,” according to a U.S. negotiator.

While negotiations sputtered, government and corporate officials continued to embrace the “comparative advantage” of endless war. Citing Hamas rocket attacks, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, portraying the Gaza Strip as a “terrorist nest.” The strip became an arms laboratory with neighborhoods dissolving into rubble and columns of smoke gushing over the horizon. Invading forces showcased new equipment such as the Merkava IV tank and Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle, while reportedly testing the Dense Inert Metal Explosive, an experimental weapon developed by the U.S. Air Force.

“Homes, schools, medical facilities, and UN buildings — all civilian objects — took direct hits from Israeli artillery,” Amnesty International stressed. Soldiers pumped “precision munitions” into children’s bedrooms. Evidence also suggests they tested “a new type of missile” on civilians: killing students waiting for a school bus and an entire family in their home. They even pounded UN buildings with white phosphorus. Human rights experts found shells made in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, still smoldering three weeks after the ceasefire.

Yet U.S. policy remained in lockstep with Israel. Days after the offensive began, the Pentagon planned to ship 1 million pounds of explosives to Israeli forces, including white phosphorus bombs.

Operation Cast Lead deepened a historic pattern with Gaza serving as a testing ground for Israeli and U.S. weapons, while U.S. officials justified operations by referencing anonymous “terrorists.”

But Israel’s violent incursions were often unprovoked. In March 2018, Palestinians organized the Great March of Return, a peaceful movement demanding political and civil rights. Israeli officers responded with a hail of tear gas and bullets — killing 214 civilians and injuring more than 36,100. Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot admitted that he authorized “live fire,” explaining, “The orders are to use a lot of force.”

Health workers claimed that soldiers tested illegal “butterfly bullets” on demonstrators, which pulverized organs and compelled doctors to amputate limbs. Al Jazeera also reported that Israeli forces “experimented with ‘crowd control’ methods,” using drones to spray tear gas and whipping up chemical clouds that sent protesters “thrashing violently” on the ground.

Rather than freeze aid, the Trump administration celebrated the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, as Israel massacred 58 Palestinians. The smug backslapping reinforced a cycle of impunity and victimhood; the next year, Israeli forces intentionally leveled the General Union of Disabled Palestinians, eliminating health services for amputees.

Abroad, military offensives continued to serve as sales pitches. Ironically, Arab states became leading clients. Following the Arab Spring, a symbiotic relationship formed, as Gulf states imported security technology to crush dissent, and Israeli firms gained access to the largest arms export market in the world. Verint Systems shipped surveillance equipment to Bahrain, and the NSO Group sold Pegasus spyware to Saudi Arabia, helping authorities crack down on human rights activists. In 2023, Elbit Systems unrolled plans to build factories in Morocco, while Israeli drones prowled the Western Sahara and struck Sahrawi civilians.

Formalizing this shift, President Donald Trump negotiated the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in September 2020. Within two years, Arab states absorbed nearly 25 percent of Israeli military exports.

The European Union also sought Israel’s violent expertise, while importing security hardware to crack down on immigration. By 2017, Israeli institutions were receiving €170 million each yearin EU research funds. In 2021, Israel joined the Horizon Europe initiative, prompting Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to exclaim that his country was “a central player in the largest and most important [research and development] program in the world.” Horizon finances the development of surveillance and intelligence technology, interrogation tactics, and other projects with a clear military edge. The defense contractors Thales, Safran and MBDA have pursued joint ventures with Israel firms to produce weapons — especially drones. Israeli military experts Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot emphasize that the “Gaza Strip is ground zero for Israel’s drone revolution.”

Following a historical trend, Israel has secured clients by refusing to respect human rights law or weapons embargoes. Katz and Bohbot observe that “not attaching strings to arms sales” is “a key principle,” allowing firms to become “a dominant player in markets.” Over a decade after Cast Lead, Gaza remained a battered arms laboratory. Israel’s military occupation was not only a human catastrophe but a national export: a brand to build.

Yet the conflict itself reflected an irrepressible contradiction: Israeli arms promised total mastery yet made resistance inevitable. By 2018, the UN warned that Israel’s siege was making Gaza “unlivable.” The U.S. embassy confided that at times occupying forces prevented even “children’s toys” and “school supplies” from entering. To unsettle the status quo, Palestinian combatants attacked Israel last October, penetrating borders ringed with blast walls and advanced surveillance equipment, capturing more than 240 people, and dealing a blow to the country’s façade of invincibility.

Their operation provoked a furious response, as Prime Minister Netanyahu exploited the war to showcase the country’s technological prowess. Days into the fighting, a military spokesman announced the combat debut of the Iron Sting mortar, while the local press registered “sharp share price rises” for arms makers and boasted that the new Barak tank “proves itself in Gaza.”

Above all, Israeli leaders suggest that cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology makes strikes precise and humane. But privately, intelligence officers deny that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) exercise constraint. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed … [combatants] in homes without hesitation,” one recalls. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home.” Another officer admits that, “We bombed just for ‘deterrence’” — toppling high-rises “just to cause destruction.”

UN investigators conclude that Israeli leaders have sought the “extermination” of Palestinians, “razing entire residential blocks and neighborhoods to rubble,” while displacing more than 1.7 million victims. Authorities describe soldiers gunning down refugees with flags, “ransacking homes” and using “starvation as a method of war.”

Their violence remains willfully gratuitous: This July, Israel hit four schools in four days, sending refugees flying through the air in a flood of shrapnel and fire. Amid relentless bombing runs, Human Rights Watch recently published a study demonstrating that Israeli soldiers systematically torture Palestinian prisoners, outlining evidence of burnings with cigarettes and lighters, brutal beatings, electrocutions and “sexual abuse” — including an account of IDF members raping a detainee with an M16 rifle.

Authors stress that Israel is targeting medical personnel, further contributing to the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system. The paramedic Walid Khalili informed investigators that his captors suspended Palestinians by their handcuffs, hanging dozens from the ceiling like bloody fruit. One IDF doctor notes that such handcuffing practices frequently impede blood circulation, prompting his colleagues to amputate the limbs of prisoners.

Despite such human rights violations, the Biden administration approved an $18 billion fighter package this August and Israeli arms makers are upbeat. “This is the finest hour of the defense industries,” Smart Shooter CEO Michal Mor insists.

For decades, the dispossession of Palestinians has propelled a cycle of accumulation, as Israel not only builds settlements but arms in the Occupied Territories. Ultimately, U.S. aid has helped turn the country into a techno-dystopia that exports instruments of oppression abroad, while testing them against the refugees along its moving borders. To a disturbing degree, the ongoing genocidal war reflects this ruthless yet impersonal logic: Israel and the U.S. are plunging Palestinians into hunger and desolation, pursuing the next phase in a cycle of accumulation by extermination.

https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-built-an-economy-fueled-by-genocide-at-home-and-abroad/

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Gaza. Montreal Students Use Divestment to Sanction Israel

Though the student camp on the McGill University campus protesting the genocidal war in Gaza was dismantled early in July, its existence made it possible to expose the financial and academic ties between that institution and Israel. Ties which the students and many faculty members of both the English and French language colleges in Montreal are still demanding they be ended.

BY FARAH MEKKI

In the night of 9–10 July, students and other pro-Palestinian protestors present in the camp located at the entrance to the McGill campus found themselves served with an eviction notice. According to the university administration’s press release, the camp represented ‘an increasingly serious threat to health and safety’. A few hours later, cranes, bulldozers and other construction machinery arrived and destroyed the much infrastructure built over a period of 75 days.

On the 1st and 15th of May, the Quebec Superior Court had rejected two applications for a temporary decommissioning injunction. The two parties were to face off again in court on 25 July, but the heads of the university, unwilling to wait for the due process of law, called on Sirco, a private Quebec security company. This decision came because of the breakdown in negotiations between the heads of McGill and Concordia, the city’s two English-language universities – the students of the latter institution having also established their camp at McGill for want of space on their own campus – and their students represented by Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR).

‘This camp will remain historical and revolutionary’, says 20-year-old Ward (pseudo), a Lebanese student in political science and general co-ordinator for SPHR. ‘In Canada, McGill is the equivalent of Columbia in New York. When we saw that they had set up a camp down there, we said to ourselves we must do the same,’ he explains.

Despite the demolition of the camp, the students of McGill and Concordia have maintained their demands. They want the ‘complete disinvestment of the contracts’ signed between their universities and the private companies ‘complicit with the Gaza genocide.’ According to the data published by McGill, it has invested nearly 73 million dollars in companies involved in the crimes committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories.

As of 31 March, McGill held $500,000 worth of stocks in the UScompany Lockheed Martin, supplier of Hellfire 9X missiles to the Israeli army. The French company Safran, in which McGill has invested nearly 1.5 million dollars also collaborates with the Israeli military technology company Rafael, on a project of advanced sensor systems and artificial intelligence – a technology which the Israeli army has used, particularly in Gaza, to kill on an even larger scale. The students also point an accusing finger at an investment of over 1.6 million dollars in the French company Thales, also specialising in defence and aerospace, in view of its collaboration with the Israeli military equipment firm Elbit Systems in June 2023. This association was denounced in a declaration published by the UN General Assembly in 2022, pointing to the use of the firm’s Apache helicopters ‘to bomb Lebanese and Palestinian villages’ but also in ‘the massive surveillance of the Palestinians’ and ‘the reinforcement of the military control over occupied Palestinian territory.’ Ward is outraged:

The college uses out tuition money to throw in with Israel (…) but those of us who come from the Middle East, we have known so many injustices [caused by Israel] in our lifetime, that we’re not afraid to fight one more. We’ve already seen much worse.

At Concordia University, the administration assures us they have ‘moved away from certain investments, especially in the armaments industry’ and that their investments involving Israel ‘represent [only] 0.001%’ yet they refuse to publish the list of their holdings as the students demand they do. ‘We were ignored’ Sara Al Khalid, a former member of SPHR Concordia, deplores. She is 24 and has just got her degree in public affairs and political studies. She’s Palestinian, she’s a member of Montreal Palestine, an action group of young Quebecker Palestinians who organise demonstrations in Montreal in support of Palestine. She goes on: ‘I don’t know what we were expecting. What could a university reply if one of its Palestinian students asks it up front to stop investing in the murder of her people?’

The French-language universities in Montreal have been presented with the same type of grievances. But while the board of directors of the University de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) yielded to its students’ demands and voted a resolution to the effect that ‘no direct investment in funds or companies would finance weaponry, and that it would reveal each year,’ the list of its investments, l’Université de Montréal (UdeM) refused to follow suit.

According to its report for the year 2023, it possesses over 9.2 million dollars worth of shares in Canadian banks, such as the Toronto-Dominion Bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montreal and the Scota Bank. Now all these financial institutions have been taken to task many times by the Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign (BDS Québec) for their investments of several millions of dollars in the armaments companies Elbit Systems and General Dynamics. The latter is the world’s fifth largest military company, providing not only a wide variety of bombs to the Israeli air force, sch as the MK-82 and 84, dropped on Gaza in 2014 and 2021, but also the weapons systems and other components of Israeli fighter planes F-35, F-15 and F-16, implicated in the 2014 bombing of residential tower blocks and the offices of Al-Jazira and Associated Press in Gaza Cit. y. Questioned about the investments made with her money, Geneviève O’Meara, spokesperson for the Université de Montréal, has this to say for her defence: ‘I do not select our holdings one by one […] they are part of investment portfolios rather than direct investments and these portfolios are put together by external asset managers.’

Dov Baum, director of the Action Center for Corporate Accountability with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) based in California, denounces this kind of sophistry.

When universities claim they don’t invest directly in these companies, it means they ought to be able to issue a declaration whereby they pledge themselves publicly not to invest in them. It shouldn’t be such a big deal, since they don’t invest in them directly.

Since 2005, her organisation has been collecting, classifying and publishing information ‘which is public but hard to find’ on the companies involved in the violations of human rights in Palestine, making it available to North American activists. Her opinion is that if University authorities are so firmly opposed to divestment, it’s because they would have to face serious pressures: ‘Political ones in the first place, because they’re afraid of reprisals, of being accused of anti-Semitism by government representatives and other lobbyists, but also economic pressures, because they would lose many alumni donors and their money.’ Because disinvestment remains an effective means of pressure:

That Israeli government can carry on with its genocide and benefits from this impunity only because it still receives too much direct aid from Europe and the USA, especially through the complicity of these companies.

Besides the Quebec universities’ investments, certain collaborative arrangements with Israeli universities are also seen as problematic, by professors as well as students: ‘Israeli universities are not oases of liberal values where critical thinking is cultivated’, says Dyala Hamzah who teaches contemporary Arab history at the Montréal University and belongs to BDS-Québec.

McGill and the Université de Montréal have collaboration agreements. These include research programs with Ben Gurion University in Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and that of Tel Aviv. On the other hand, the contract with Ariel University, located in occupied Palestinian territory, was ‘suspended indefinitely last Autumn’ Geneviève O’Mear tells me. Not only do these establishments host the military programs Talplot and Havatzalot, but also those dealing with strategy development, like the ‘Dahiveh doctrine’. Developed by the Israeli army during the 2006 Lebanese war, this doctrine advocates a disproportionate striking force and a targeting of civilian infrastructure so that the reconstruction process should be long and costly. ‘It is unthinkable that Western institutions that claim to embody liberal values and belong to a humanist tradition should cultivate relationships with universities which deal in death,’ Dyala Hanzah continues.

In March 2024, the McGill administrators declared having decided not to ‘cut themselves off from Israeli universities and research institutes’ in the name of the freedom of academic research. Same story from the Université de Montréal. Dyala Hamzah has been trying, in vain, to push through the university assembly a boycott that would suspend these agreements, yet she remains convinced: the Israeli universities play a direct role in the preservation of the colonial system and the occupation of Palestine.

‘Boycotting Israeli universities won’t give the Palestinians back their freedom or let them live in peace with their Israeli Jewish neighbours overnight,’ she explains.’But depriving it of the capacity for mobilising its soft power and whitewashing its crimes through these agreements, means working towards the country’s isolation, political, economic and social.’And the professor is keen to make clear that this boycott movement is not aimed at individuals but at institutions:

It’s true, we may lose some colleagues and interrupt some collaborative ventures, but there’s a genocide going on. The boycott isn’t just to be chic, it’s an act of resistance.

At the Université de Montréal, the private activities of Chancellor Frantz Saintellemy have also made many on the faculty and in the student body feel uneasy. This businessman of forty-eight turns out to be president and operations manager of Leddar Tech, a Québec Company established in Israel, specialising in automotive technology for autonomous driving systems. Seven of Leddar Tech’s employees were sent to Gaza as reservists following 7 October, and the company is also a member of the military consortium Autonomus Vehicle Advanced Techchnolgies for Situational Awareness (AVATAR). The students and other members of the Collectif UdeM Palestine have circulated an on-line petition demanding of Daniel Jutras, Rector of the University, more transparency as to the link between the Chancellor’s firm and the Israeli military industry. The spokesperson for the Université de Montréal asserted that ‘the Chancellor is appointed by the University Council and his functions at UdeM do not include any role in the choice of the University’s academic partners, any more than in the choice of investments for its endowment fund.’ But in the eyes of Dyala Hamzah there is a glaring conflict of interests here: ‘The Chancellor is head of a firm operating alongside companies at the heart the Israeli militaro-industrial complex, i.e. Rafael and Elbit Systems’, and she concludes:

The Université de Montréal cannot pretend to be a humanistic establishment, cultivating knowledge and critical thought and be headed by an associate of the merchants of death serving an ethno-nationalist project.

https://orientxxi.info/magazine/gaza-montreal-students-use-divestment-to-sanction-israel,7545

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without shedding tears…”

         Gus Leonisky

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As3HEZc5vCw

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without shedding tears…”

         Gus Leonisky

OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN "IN POWER" BILL SHOULD KNOW THAT MANY ISRAELIS KILLED ON THE 7TH OCTOBER 2023 WERE SHOT BY THE IDF (READ FROM TOP). SECOND, ONE GUS LEONISKY — POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951 — STRONGLY SUSPECTS THAT SOME LEADERS IN THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT KNEW OF (OR EVEN INSTIGATED) THE BREAK BY HAMAS.... THIS WAS THE CUE FOR NETANYAHU TO START HIS GRAND PLAN "THE GREATER ISRAEL"...

THINK ABOUT IT, BY MAKING PEACE WITH THE "ARABS" HE HAD NO MOTIVATION TO INVADE LEBANON, DESTROY GAZA, OPEN FIRE ON SYRIA AND THREATEN IRAN....

NETANYAHU NEEDED THE 7TH OCTOBER 2023 — EVEN AT THE COST OF ABOUT 1100 JEWISH PEOPLE (MOSTLY KILLED BY THE IDF — READ FROM TOP) TO BUILD HIS GREATER ISRAEL...

PLACE THIS THOUGHT IN YOUR HEAD.

SEE ALSO: 

Americana Restaurants, West Asia's largest fast-food operator, reported a 48.2 percent decline in profits on 31 October, as consumers boycott US and Israel-linked brands in response to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Kuwaiti firm announced its profits had fallen to $117.4 million over a nine-month period, while revenues had fallen 15.3 percent to $1.61 billion.

"Topline growth continued to be impacted by lower like-for-like sales due to the evolving regional geopolitical situation and slowness in consumer demand observed in some markets, despite support from new store openings," the company said in a statement.

Americana Restaurants is West Asia's franchisee for major US food outlets that include KFC, Pizza Hut, Baskin Robbins, Costa Coffee, and Krispy Kreme.

Mcdonald's has also been a target of the boycott campaign.

According to The New Arab, McDonald's reported that sales had fallen by 1.5 percent between July and September.

Between April and June, sales dropped by one percent — the first consecutive period of falling sales since lockdowns were imposed during the spread of Coronavirus.

The boycott of McDonald's began after its Israeli franchise gave thousands of free meals to Israeli soldiers at the beginning of the genocide, which began in October last year.

In April, McDonald's moved to limit the damage to its brand by buying back its 225 stores in Israel from the franchisee.

Pizza Hut has faced similar boycott pressure after its Israeli franchise shared images of soldiers with its items in January.

Calls for a boycott intensified in May after a Pizza Hut branch in Israel posted a Facebook ad mocking Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli prisons.

Israeli authorities had earlier released a fake video of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who was leading a mass hunger strike in Israeli prisons, secretly eating cookies.

Pizza Hut used a screenshot of the video, editing out the cookies and replacing them with a pizza box. The post in Hebrew read: "Barghouti, if you are going to break your strike, isn't pizza the better choice?" The US coffee chain Starbucks has also suffered losses due to the boycott.

In August, its CEO was ousted after a drop in sales for two consecutive quarters.

Revenues dropped four percent in the first three months of 2024, and three percent in the three that followed.

Calls for a boycott began after the company sued the Starbucks Workers United (SWU) union for trademark infringement in Iowa. Starbucks sued the union after it expressed "Solidarity with Palestine" "in a social media post that included the company's logo following Hamas' Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October.

https://thecradle.co/articles/us-restaurant-chains-see-profits-collapse-as-israel-boycott-bites

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without a drink…”

         Gus Leonisky