Somebody needs to explain why nations formulate international law in impressive manifestos like the Geneva Conventions & then flout every damn one of their terms. What’s the point in all that judicial hot air if there are no provisions for enforcement? US-NATO marines run roughshod over a dozen countries, the Obama regime terrorizes millions of civilians with drone attacks, Israel is an ethnic cleansing catastrophe & in response there are no protests, let alone sanctions from the forces that formulate these laws.
That’s why political movements for social justice have devised their own methods for sanction. One of them is the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel to apply economic & political pressure against Israeli occupation & colonization of Palestinian land, for full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, & the right of return for Palestinian refugees. BDS was effective against South African apartheid & is proving a powerful political weapon to support Palestinian self-determination.
The BDS movement is growing internationally but so has Israel accelerated its colonization of Palestinian property & land along with its global search for Zionist settlers to move in & take over Palestine. One of the sarcasms of Israeli immigration policy mocking its infamous law of return (which allows Jews from anywhere to become citizens of Israel) is that hundreds of Zionist settlers fail the DNA tests looking for that oh-so-special Jewish chromosome. Parties of settlers from Ethiopia, India, Peru, & elsewhere were persuaded by fundamentalist Christian missionaries that they were members of a lost tribe of Israel & have been granted immigration rights on that claim. Does construction of a master race get wackier than that!?
The entire project of Israel since 1948 is a colonial enterprise. But in the past several months Israel uprooted several Bedouin communities by designating their areas as military zones; for the past many years they have militarily occupied & aggressively confiscated acres of Palestinian farm land in the West Bank, tearing up olive trees & fields, bulldozing homes & animal pens, & poisoning water wells; in East Jerusalem, they’ve simply gone hog-wild since its occupation in 1967 in an attempt to force Palestinians to migrate out of Israel. The fact that all this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting forcible transfers of civilians within occupied territory hasn’t deterred Israeli ethnic cleansing in the least.
According to reports by the European Union & several Israeli & international human rights groups, Israel has constructed housing for nearly 200,000 Zionist settlers from all over kingdom come to move into East Jerusalem while hundreds of Palestinian homes are being zoned out of legality & bulldozed & thousands of Palestinian residents made homeless or forced to live in tents, makeshift huts, & temporary shelters. Adding barbarism to barbarism, Israeli bulldozers then mow these emergency structures down & the Israeli government sends residents a bill for the cost of demolition.
This photo is of Khaled Zir & his family whose home was demolished several years ago by Israeli officials. Zir built a makeshift tin shack for the family but when Israeli goons recently bulldozed that, they were forced to move into a cave that formerly served as their animal stable. They had no place else to go.
Oppose Israeli apartheid & support justice for Palestinians by boycotting all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729), support the cultural boycott of Israel, & demand “No US aid to Israel!”
(Photo by Sebastian Scheiner/AP)
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