Iceland’s capital declares boycott of all Israeli goods
Source: Times of Israel
Israel’s Foreign Ministry rails at Reykjavik’s ‘volcano of hatred'; city council says move an act of solidarity with Palestinians
Iceland’s capital’s city council voted Tuesday in favor of boycotting all Israeli-made products.
The Reykjavik municipality passed the motion, which approved a boycott of Israeli goods “as long as the occupation of Palestinian territories continues,” Iceland Magazine reported.
Council members said the boycott was a symbolic act demonstrating the Icelandic capital’s support for Palestinian statehood and condemnation of Israel’s “policy of apartheid.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry condemned the move, and, in an apparent reference to Iceland’s status as a hotbed of volcanic activity, said “a volcano of hatred spews forth from the Reykjavik city council building.
Read more: http://www.timesofisrael.com/icelandic-capital-boycotts-israeli-goods/
= new reply since forum marked as read
And of course it's antisemitism. Don't be ridiculous.
Wrong. They weren't herded anywhere. Areas A and B of the W.Bank is where almost all Palestinians have lived in the W.Bank since 1949 when Jordan controlled it.
Wrong. It's nationality. 20% of Israel is ethnically the same as Palestinians.
[font color = "red"]Did you know that Palestinians think Israel's form of Government is better than any other country's government on the planet? That 75% of Israeli Arabs support a Democratic Jewish State? And that Palestinians in the territories prefer Israel's occupation to their own leaders?[/font]
What kind of Apartheid is that?
Not ethnicity. But Nationality.
Forced? No. Israel has offered to end the occupation & settlements in order to give the Palestinians their own contiguous homeland. The Palestinians have said "No" ever since before the state of Israel was established. There wasn't Apartheid then & there isn't Apartheid now.
What's ironic is that if it is Apartheid, it's the Palestinian Leadership who is responsible for it's continuation, as they've had every chance to end it the past 15 years.
See last comment above.
Who is "we"? You won't even find one credible organization calling it Apartheid. No human rights groups like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. Only organizations very sympathetic to or supportive of fascists call Israel Apartheid because they're neo-fascist themselves - and like all fascists - they fucking hate Jews.
[font color = "blue"]Now if you're searching for real Apartheid against Palestinians, look no further north across the border than Lebanon. Generations of Palestinians have been born there & denied citizenship. As well as the rights to healthcare, public schooling, land ownership, & professions in dozens of fields. [/font]
That's the real thing. Genuine apartheid with a capital "A". So where are these humane anti-racists without a shred of Jew-hate in them advocating for these Palestinians of Lebanon? Where are they hiding? Are they on vacation?
He has 311 followers on that blog provided....He should come post here.
political distaste for a state and it's policies. The dynamic I was talking about was saying "that kind of objection to the state (the one that in this case is an objection shared by Palestinians, an oppressed people) is antisemitic and unreasonable, look over here at nice Mr Sanders, this is reasonable objection".
I'm not portraying myself as the target of paternalistic advice, but the Palestinians, who I consider an oppressed people since the positions I've put forward have been articulated by Palestinians themselves (Abbas: Israel is setting up an Apartheid state). OK, maybe it was a difficult analogy. It was just a feeling that I wrote without thinking much about it.
Be careful in parsing what I said about complexity. I meant most protracted ethnic conflicts have complex histories, but it does not follow that there are no clear rights and wrongs. In fact my objection is that complexity is taken to mean moral uncertainty when that is not an automatic corollary. As such, it is used to obfuscate and obscure what is nonetheless clear injustice.
I gave a glimpse of the complexities of my own country's history. Just a glimpse, there's much much more. Apart from Dutch settlers becoming an ethnic group distinct to Africa that speak a language that is now considered a derivative of dutch, not dutch, and their perceived persecution by the British there's the fact that the first people of this land were actually the Khoisan ("Bushmen"
, a very distinct ethnic group from various Nguni tribes who in turn were more recent settlers from the North, albeit much earlier settlers than Europeans by about 700 years to a 1000 years. It was white Afrikaners, on the back of a narrative of persecution and victimhood and in economic competition with Nguni under British colonialism, who eventually used their numerical advantage in mostly whites only elections in post-independence South Africa to implement Apartheid. But they also had an earlier history of extensive procreation with Khoisan, Malay slaves et al, resulting in a large "Colored" population in the Western Cape (the term is not considered racist here, that community self identifies as such) that via their first people ancestory has priority claim to half the country over the black majority's claim - AND the majority of them speak Afrikaans as a home language - which is still considered the language of the Apartheid oppressor. As a white English-speaker I am in complex intersecting relationships with all of these groups
A very complex history indeed. Apartheid was still wrong. It still involved theft of land. It still involved system of governance and control, for the benefit of one ethnicity, to the detriment of another, who not only had land, resources and labour stolen from them, but had a priority claim. Complexity doesn't, necessarily obscure what is just and what is unjust. With reference to Israel, I'm fully aware of the complexities. And they in no way obviate or obscure the clear fact that colonialism and Apartheid has taken place, nor that said has obvious beneficiaries and victims.
That is what I meant, when "complexity" is proffered in an attempt to obscure that, yet very detailed examination of the history makes it perfectly apparent that one side is oppressing another, denying them self-determination and straight up stealing their land and resources, then such deployment of "complexity" is just rationalization of something that is wrong for self serving reasons. Yes, it is complex. No, that changes nothing. The dispensation in the occupied territories is practically similar to Apartheid. The reason it came about is a colonial project. Both of these things are things that the world long ago agreed are wrong.
Anticipating and heading off the claim that a native Jewish population that preceded that colonial project and a two-thousand year old connection to the land by the colonists somehow makes it "not colonialism":
1. The small native Jewish population were natives and were not colonists.
2. A by now robust picture of human migration out of Africa has developed and it is now certain that every one of us has ancestry that at some point lived in East Africa. No reasonable person on earth thinks that that is good reason that any group of us can descend on Somalia or Ethiopia, carve a chunk out of their land, push them out and say "fuck off my ancestors lived here thousands of years ago". Antiquity doesn't strengthen a claim, it diminishes it. Besides that, there were people who lived there before the Jews in antiquity.
3. Not only was it not "a land without a people", genetic testing has shown that the native Jewish population of Israel/Palestine and the native Muslim/Christian population share common ancestry in antiquity. In fact it's probable most Palestinians have significant ancestry that were Jews of Palestine that converted. In this light, claims by European Jewish colonists and colonists from the Maghreb that they have some prior claim from antiquity are no different from distant cousins coming back to a land after two thousand years and saying "bugger off it's ours" to the family who stayed.
It was and is a European colonial project. This statement passes without controversy in most of the world outside of Europe and the Anglosphere, because it's true. There is no complexity that diminishes this fact. Europeans (whether they were persecuted Europeans or not) colonised a land (a small fraction of it by purchase) and drove a native population off large parts of it under cover of war, often wars fought against foreign powers, not the native population thus ejected. Then they instituted a system similar to Apartheid to contain most of the remaining natives and deprive them of self determination, while denying what are today several million refugees who are also natives the right of return. And colonization is still going on. There is nothing unclear about the rights and wrongs here, complexity or no complexity. There's just decades of bullshit narratives being treated as conventional wisdom among political elites in powerful allied nations for decades, just as South Africa's narrative of being the last bulwark against communism and an island of civilization in a sea of barbarism was a mainstream political narrative in Washington and London only a few decades ago.
And it's time for Israelis to acknowledge that and negotiate some kind of just and equitable peace in good faith and in full acknowledgement of that colonial history. Whether it's some kind of one state system with cantons, so those who want a Jewish homeland can have some assurance of that still being possible, or a two state solution with massive concessions by Israel, not by the Palestinians, because they did fucking steal land and oppress people.
Last edited Wed Sep 23, 2015, 10:52 AM - Edit history (14)
Starting in 2002, when outrage at the Iraq war brought me here. Just not very frequently. Sometimes weeks, sometimes months apart. And previous, similar dialog (especially with Shira) hasn't put me off yet 
I'm glad there are like-minded people with first-hand experience like yourself fighting the good fight.
Israel isn't my bete noire and Palestinians, though suffering injustice, are not the most oppressed people on earth, so as a politically-minded person of conscience it obviously doesn't occupy all of my slacktivist time, although it does influence my purchasing decisions. I understand though why it is a topic that consumes the attention of some of my Jewish friends and left wing Israelis on this board, from my own experiences with Apartheid. And yeah, I agree with you about shutting down argument. Although I'm inclined to be charitable. In Defamation Yoav Shamir talks about how deeply inured to a specific narrative many Jewish Israeli children are, to a specific set of ideas about antisemitism in a world that is held to be universally and eternally hostile to Jews, everywhere and always, and rationalizations that flow from that. I recall in my youth school-organized camping trips to "veldskool", where along with fun activities we were lectured by military men on the communist peril and terrorism and existential threat and the influence that had on impressionable young men, many of whom couldn't wait till they reached the age when their national service began and they could fight the terrorists and the communists in the north.
Shamir describes how that is inculcated at a sufficiently early stage of childhood that it is held with the kind of conviction that one attaches to anything that is hammered into you when you're very young. So when faced with such reactions I often think that it's perhaps not a deliberately dishonest tactic, but cognitive dissonance at work, an inability to step outside of a conditioned narrative and actually recognize that not every objection is the fruit of crypto-bigotry or even subconscious bigotry, but sincere egalitarian beliefs coupled with some set of putative facts. That maybe, just maybe, it doesn't come from a place of hatred for you, but concern for the other.
....day one oberliner.......cant you read my sig line ?
I can just imagine everyone in your circle rushing to Iceland ....
Hard to imagine you or anyone in your circle .....have any idea where Iceland is .