Conference condemns Israeli crimes

By Michael Z. Ladson
Philadelphia

An historic national conference to promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement directed at ending Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people was held at the University of Pennsylvania Feb. 3-5.

Even before the conference began a wave of vicious racist attacks were directed against Palestine solidarity activists by the campus press, on-line blogs and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Penn students active in organizing the conference were verbally attacked by pro-Israeli forces.

Perhaps the most disgusting was the anti-Semitic slur of “kapos” aimed at Jewish pro-BDS students by Professor Ruben Gur in the campus paper The Daily Pennsylvanian. The term refers to Jews who collaborated with Nazis in concentration and extermination camps during World War II.

The night before the conference opened, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz — an apologist for Israeli and U.S. war crimes — addressed an event sponsored by several Penn academic departments and the college chapters of the Republicans and Democrats.

Dershowitz encouraged this audience to deny the brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the creation of the State of Israel, known as al-Nakba.

Conference stresses need for BDS

Yet these attacks did not stop students and their supporters from holding a very successful event. On the opening night of the BDS conference, “The Roadmap to Apartheid” was shown at Penn. Also, Temple University Students for Justice in Palestine hosted Palestinian-American journalist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah for his first speech of the weekend.

Abunimah spoke of the inflammatory press coverage building up to the conference and the BDS movement’s diversity as opposed to the opposition’s. Furthermore, he pointed out the contradiction of many Zionists who demand that Palestinians renounce armed struggle, yet denounce the nonviolent BDS movement.

Abunimah called illegal settlements in the West Bank “Jim Crow.” He said that the British medical journal The Lancet reported how dozens of Palestinian infants died during childbirth at checkpoints because the Israeli military prevented ambulances from passing though, thus forcing women to give birth at these stops.

The first full day of the conference was jam-packed with breakout groups and panels. Susan Abulhawa, author of best-selling novel “Mornings in Jenin” and founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, opened the conference with a talk that alerted participants to the great need for BDS.

She spoke of the hundreds of laws and military orders used by Israel to create a world of oppression for Palestinians in Israel. Abulhawa detailed 20 measures, including Israeli laws prohibiting the growth of Arab villages and military laws that permit detention of Palestinians for months without charges or trials. “Everything we had has been taken from us.”

Breakout groups included discussions of “pinkwashing” whereby, in the words of one lesbian/gay/bi/trans/queer Palestinian speaker, “our voices are used against us” to justify the Israeli state’s crimes against humanity.

Other breakout groups covered the economics of occupation, Jewish anti-Zionism, international law, solidarity with the Black freedom struggle in the U.S., lessons from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, BDS on campus and state repression.

Journalist Max Blumenthal, winner of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Online Journalism Award for his investigative print journalism, addressed the conference and led a discussion of the corporate media’s distortion of the conflict and the multimillion-dollar Zionist disinformation campaign that fuels it.

Other speakers included Palestinian-American journalist Ahmed Moor; Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat; Bill Fletcher, editor of BlackCommentator.com; U.S.-born Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi; Nancy Kricorian from Code Pink; and Rev. Graylan Hagler, who led the Free South Africa Movement for divestiture against the former apartheid regime in South Africa.

Several prominent Jewish activists participated, including Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace; Dr. Dalit Baum, of the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel; Philip Weiss, who describes himself as an “anti-Zionist” writer; and author and human rights activist Anna Baltzer.

This gathering of leaders and activists in the Palestine solidarity movement informed and inspired everyone for the struggles ahead.

The author is a member of Temple University Students for Justice in Palestine.