"As usual Jim, you give up trying to make a case,"
I've made a case Keith - you are now reduced to dishonesty
You deny the facts and have resorted with stupid stonewalling
I hav long stopped posting for your benefit Keith - you are what you are and as far as I am concerned, the oly thing to do is allow you to underline what you are yourself.
"You might as well hoist a white flag."
You really can't get anywhere wityh someone who adopts a "win at all costs" attitude to debate.
Wo else believes your argument here - I'm sure even Bobad wouldn't lower himself to taking up your stupid argument
Teribus has had the sense to keep away
Aker - well - Ake is like Billy Connolly's policeman = you only have to ask him a question to confuse him.
You are an extremist and in order to win something you have lied and disitoted more than has ever happened on this forum
You have come a long way since you were reprimanded for posting under a fake name
A sad, individual
Jim Carroll

I realise that the opinions od decent working people are not your thing, but this is the call for BDS by the Communication workers here support going out in Ireland at present - perhaps they were "brainwashed to hate Israel as you claimed Irish children were the British

Welcome / Activists / Campaigns / Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions for Israel
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions for Israel

Please note that the CWU's support for the Palestinian-led international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement is not an "Anti-Israel" or "Anti-Semitic" position; it is an answer to Palestinian civil society's call for solidarity. Furthermore, our condemnation of Israel's military actions within Gaza does not constitute, in any way, support for any Palestinian political or military faction.
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet; the 360km sq. enclave is home to approximately 1.8 million Palestinians. Its borders are closed on all sides, controlled mostly by Israel, excluding a small border in the south which is controlled by Egypt. Israel also controls Gaza's airspace and territorial waters, leaving no way out for this besieged people, whether in times of incredible violence or in times of relative calm.

1. WHAT ARE THE ISSUES?

The Siege of Gaza (Israeli Blockade)
Since 2007, Israel has laid siege to the Gaza Strip, blockading the enclave by land, sea and air. The Gaza Strip is now essentially an 'open air prison', with the movement of people and goods severely restricted by the Israeli military. These restrictions are so tight that musical instruments, crayons, canned fruit and fresh meat are among the items banned from entering. This blockade has led to severe hardship and poverty; a situation amounting to collective punishment and which is now considered to be a humanitarian disaster. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories said: "Such a massive form of collective punishment is a crime against humanity, as well as a gross violation of the prohibition on collective punishment in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Home Demolitions
Since 1967, Israel has demolished more than 38,000 Palestinian homes, aimed at collectively punishing Palestinians or making way for illegal Israeli settlements. This practice has continuously been condemned by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Illegal Settlements
Since 1967, Israel has continued to build illegal settlements in Palestinian territories it occupies, despite constant condemnation by the United Nations, including the United States, Israel's main supporter. Israelis are encouraged, through generous state compensation schemes, to settle in these colonies. The aim of the Israeli state is to increasingly colonise the West Bank thus making a viable Palestinian state impossible. These settlements are linked up by segregated roads, which Palestinians are forbidden from using.

Separation Wall
In April 2002, Israel began constructing an enormous wall around the occupied West Bank, ostensibly to prevent potential suicide bombers entering Israel. As a result, more than 10% of the West Bank has been annexed, with families and neighbourhoods divided by the concrete barrier. Widely known as the 'Apartheid Wall', the structure stands 8 metres (25ft) high and will span more than 700km once completed. In 2004, the International Court of Justice (Advisory Opinion 131) found the wall to be illegal because it vastly encroached upon Palestinian land and recommended Israel dismantle it. Despite the finding, Israel has refused to comply. The Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also spoken out against the wall.

War Crimes
Israel's war crimes have been widely documented by human rights monitors, civil society organisations within Palestine, Israel and the wider international community, and the United Nations. For example, in 2009 an UN-backed mission of inquiry found that Israel committed "serious war crimes and breaches of humanitarian law, which may amount to crimes against humanity" (Source: Goldstone Report, 2009). Yet Israel is granted impunity as the United States, its closest ally and largest military aid provider, shields it from any decisive action for such crimes and the EU continues trade, research and civil cooperation projects.


                                                                                                            

2. WHY IS THIS APARTHEID?

The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them". The acts which fall within the domain of apartheid include the following: (1) murder; (2) torture; (3) inhuman treatment and arbitrary arrest of members of a racial group; (4) deliberate imposition on a racial group of living conditions calculated to cause it physical destruction; (5) legislative measures that discriminate in the political, social, economic and cultural fields; (6) measures that divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate residential areas for racial groups; (7) the prohibition of interracial marriages; and (8) the persecution of persons opposed to apartheid (Source: Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, Prof. John Dugard).

The acts prescribed to the crime of apartheid read like a catalogue of Israeli practices and policies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, to wit:

(1) Murder

8,900+ Palestinians killed by Israeli military since 2000 (vast majority were civilians);

(2) Torture

At least 72 Palestinians tortured to death in Israeli prisons since 1967;

(3) Arbitrary Arrest

Israel allows for the arbitrary detention of any Palestinian civilian for up to 6 months without trial and detention orders can be extended indefinitely for additional 6-month periods. In practice, however, many have been detained for much longer periods, some up to or over 7 years. There are now roughly 6,000 Palestinians – including at least 200 children, 17 women and 11 elected Palestinian officials – being held in Israeli prisons or detention centres;

(4) Physical Destruction

The Israeli military made precise calculations of the daily calorie needs of Palestinians in 2008 and restricted the type and amount of food allowed to enter Gaza as a form of collective punishment. This action was taken after Hamas won elections and went on to take control of Gaza in 2007, with Israel subsequently deeming the region a 'hostile territory';

(5) Discrimination

The call to recognise Israel as a 'Jewish State' entrenches the policy of preserving institutionalised Jewish privilege in the majority of the Palestine-Israel region, through ethnic separation and exclusion; Israel operates separate legal systems for Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories and within Israel, Palestinian citizens face a raft of legal discrimination;

(6) Separate Residential Areas

Illegal Jewish settlements – connected by segregated roads – in the occupied West Bank have more than doubled since 2000, exceeding 500,000 settlers living on land beyond the pre-1967 borders. This is in contravention of numerous UN Security Council resolutions deeming these settlements illegal and demanding a halt to construction;

(7) Interracial Marriage

There is no civil marriage in Israel, marriages are only allowed on a confessional basis meaning that without conversion people of different religions cannot marry;

(8) Persecution

The persecution of the Palestinian people has been ongoing since 1947. What was recently witnessed in Gaza was only the latest in a long line of Israeli crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

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3. MYTHBUSTER

(1) Israel does not occupy the Gaza Strip

14% of Gaza's total land and at least 48% of total arable land are taken up by Israel-imposed buffer zones. While 85% of the maritime area promised to Palestinians in the Oslo Accords is taken up by such buffer zones, reducing fishing areas from twenty nautical miles to three (Source: Boston Globe). Furthermore, Israel controls the population registry for residents of the Gaza Strip, despite withdrawing its ground forces and settlements from the enclave in 2005 (Source: Human Rights Watch).

(2) Hamas doesn't want a ceasefire but Israel does

A Hamas spokesperson said the group wants the "aggression to stop tomorrow, today, or even this minute. But [Israel must] lift the blockade with guarantees and not as a promise for future negotiations". The spokesperson went on to say: "we will not shut the door in the face of any humanitarian ceasefire backed by a real aid programme" (Source: Al Jazeera). Hamas proposed a 10-year end to hostilities in return for its conditions being met by Israel, the day after an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire, which had been accepted by Israel but rejected by Hamas (Source: Jerusalem Post, emphasis added). It was also reported that Israel's security cabinet rejected a week-long Gaza ceasefire proposal put forward by US Secretary of State John Kerry "as it stands" (Source: BBC).

(3) Israel doesn't deliberately target civilians

The Guardian newspaper reported that a second [Israeli] shell hit the beach, with those firing apparently adjusting their aim to target fleeing survivors. Journalists standing by the terrace wall shouted: "They are only children" – regarding the murder of four Palestinian boys playing on the beach in July 2014 (Source: The Guardian). The tactics used by the Israeli military in the Gaza offensive are consistent with previous practices, most recently during the Lebanon war in 2006. A concept known as the Dahiya doctrine emerged then, involving the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations. A UN Fact Finding Mission concluded from a review of the facts on the ground that it appears to have been precisely what was put into practice (Source: UN Fact Finding Mission on Gaza Conflict, 2009).

(4) Israel is not guilty of war crimes

The Israeli military may have knowingly or recklessly attacked people who were clearly civilians – such as young boys and civilian structures, including a hospital – laws-of-war violations that are indicative of war crimes (Source: Human Rights Watch). Deliberately attacking a civilian home is a war crime, and the overwhelming scale of destruction of civilian homes, in some cases with entire families inside them, points to a distressing pattern of repeated violations of the laws-of-war (Source: Amnesty International).

(5) Hamas uses civilians as 'human shields'

"I saw no evidence during my week in Gaza of Israel's accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields" (Source: Jeremy Bowen, BBC). It was reported by The Guardian newspaper that it has seen large numbers of people fleeing different neighbourhoods and no evidence that Hamas had compelled them to stay (Source: The Guardian). In 2013 a United Nations human rights body accused the Israeli military of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields (Source: Reuters).

(6) Hamas constantly fires rockets into Israel

The Times of Israel reported that Hamas launched a series of rockets into Israel, the first time in years the group had directly challenged the Israeli state. The Israeli security forces assessed that Hamas had probably launched the barrage in revenge for an Israeli airstrike several hours earlier, killing one person and injuring three. Hamas had not fired any rockets into Israel since 'Operation Pillar of Defense' ended in November 2012 (Source: Times of Israel, emphasis added).

(7) Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers to provoke Israel

It was reported that the Israeli government knew from the beginning that the three Israeli teenagers were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas' West Bank operations. It was clear from the beginning that the kidnappers, from a Hamas-linked Hebron family, acted without the knowledge of Hamas leadership (Source: Jewish Daily Forward).

(8) Israel's blockade is not to blame for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza

Israel confirmed to US Embassy officials on multiple occasions that it intends to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis. Israeli officials have confirmed on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge (Source: US State Department).

(9) The Israeli government wants a two-state solution

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made explicitly clear that he could never countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank. Amid the current conflict, he elaborated: "I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan" (Source: Times of Israel).

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4. THE BDS MOVEMENT: BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS

On the 9th July 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organisations, including trade unions, refugee rights associations, charitable organisations, academics and cultural groups, called for an international movement to impose boycotts, divestment and sanctions on the state of Israel. This nonviolent tactic was inspired by a similar boycott campaign that was used against Apartheid South Africa to isolate the then white supremacist government. Similarly, this boycott campaign is aimed at forcing Israel to guarantee Palestinians their inalienable human rights.

The key demands of the BDS Movement are for Israel to:

(1) End its occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantle the Wall

(2) Recognise the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality

(3) Respect, protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194

The BDS Movement has been growing rapidly in recent years, with a number of high-profile individuals lending their support, including Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking and Ireland's own Damien Dempsey. In 2009, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions reaffirmed its support for the BDS campaign in response to ongoing Israeli human rights violations.

PUT MY NAME DOWN BROTHER
WHERE DO I SIGN