Public Statement of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine following the conclusion of the London Session on corporate complicity in Israeli violations of international law
Press release : Tribunal finds British and international business complicit in Israeli war crimes Identifies legal remedies and calls for civil society boycott action
The jury concluded there were positive legal ramifications for those took action on boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. “Those who wish to actively protest about this, are entitled to do so,” said Mr. Mansfield. Those prosecuted for criminal damages have a defence: necessity.
Lecture that Ali Abunimah gave at Stanford on Wednesday, November 3rd 2010 entitled “What is the alternative to peace talks to nowhere?” Sponsored by Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI).
“So what precisely does it mean to have a Jewish state? If here in the United States we have the protections and the right to live the way we want to, to raise our children the way we want to, respecting the rights of others, why would we need to declare the United States to be a Jewish state, or a Christian state, or a White state, or any other kind of state. And exactly the same applies in Palestine. If the concept of a Jewish state is a state where you have special privileges and special rights because you are a Jew, that is not a concept of a Jewish state that anyone should defend or support, but if you are talking about a country in which there is a large Jewish community that enjoys all the protections of the law, that it gets to live the way it wants like any other community, then that is a good thing, that’s what I am talking about.”
“Ms. Ashrawi ought to know better than anyone else that it is the totally fraudulent ‘peace process,’ starting with the Oslo Agreement which should never have been signed, which bought time for the occupation to deepen its tentacles in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and to impose — with the complicity of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah — the blockade on Gaza.”
Abunimah said that when Ashrawi argues Palestinians cannot not assemble a global coalition for the one-state solution “she displays a total lack of faith in the Palestinian people and their cause. Palestinian rights and demands are not a gift of ‘global partners,’ but a birthright. When the ANC demanded democracy in South Africa, they set the terms of the agenda, they did not wait for the permission of the US State Department before asking for their rights.
“The one-state solution is the only just, moral and practical solution which restores the rights of all Palestinians — the refugees and the diaspora, the Palestinians within the 1948 territories, and those in the West Bank.”
Abunimah also noted the significance of Ashrawi having to reckon with the one-state solution: “While skeptics and critics of the single state always dismissed it as a marginal idea, they now find it gaining ground to their dismay, and having to defend a so-called two-state solution that everyone knows will never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights.”
