Israel’s growing ring of isolation

One hundred British artists have announced a cultural boycott of Israel in response to a call by the non-violent Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resistance movement. In a statement issued on February 13, 2015, they said that “along with more than 600 other fellow artists, we are announcing today that we will not engage in business-as-usual cultural relations with Israel”.

The statement included the written support of their move by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem that described the Israeli killing machine in Gaza as “one of the cruellest and deadliest in the entire history of occupation giving the Palestinian people no respite from Israel’s unrelenting attacks on their land, their livelihood and their right to a political existence”.

The Palestinian grass roots movement working around the world for a BDS movement against Israel achieved another major victory in its campaigns on the campuses of the University of California (UC).

The University has 10 campuses, a combined student body of around 239,000; 19,700 faculty members and 135,000 staff members. The UC budget is $25 billion (Dh91.95 billion) with a $13 billion endowment making it bigger than that of many independent countries that are members of the United Nations. The University of California Students’ Association (UCSA) is the official body representing all UC students. In a historic vote that stunned the Israeli government and the Israeli lobby in America, the UCSA passed a motion endorsing the BDS call for “supporting the divestment from companies engaged in systemic violation of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza Strip”.

More than 90 other student organisations in California also endorsed the divestment motion “against companies profiting from Palestinian territories under Israeli military occupation”. Some of these companies included Raytheon, Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar and Comex, which are very active and have never been boycotted in any country in the Arab and Islamic world!

American students joining hands with BDS indicates to one and all that future leaders in America have been awakened to the racist/apartheid and colonial nature of the Zionist state despite the lies of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the strongest Israeli lobby in the US.

American students, labour unions, artists, academics and writers around the world who are now endorsing BDS campaigns are not only responding because it is the right thing to do, but also because such an uncivilised, racist regime with its brutal killing machine, is now the biggest threat to world peace and international security.

Jews in the western world have in the past prided themselves as the true guardians of equal rights, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, colour or creed — values that are being totally violated by the Israeli colonial regime occupying Palestine. Jews had to adhere to such values by an extreme need to ensure survival in a Christian world that looks at them as “the killers of Jesus Christ”.

The majority of American Jews became ‘The Reform Jews of America’ by simply throwing away the racist Talmud, which considers “non-Jews as beasts in human form to only serve Jews”.

This Talmud written by Rabbis is now the book of moral conduct of conservative Jews — the ruling right-wing in Israel now — turning it into an ugly apartheid/colonial domain stigmatising all Jews. For many Jews with conscience, both inside and outside Israel, the Palestinian BDS movement is a stand to save Israel “against its will”, from destructing itself.

General Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency), who is now 80 years old, recently addressed a big rally in Tel Aviv where he said that “the greatest threat against Israel comes from its right-wing leadership — not from its traditional enemies”. Brigadier General Amir Eshel, the former head of the Israeli Air Force, shocked the Israeli public when he asserted that the so-called “Iron Dome will not protect Israel’s urban centres from Iranian-made rockets coming from the south of Lebanon”.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently carried a headline that proclaimed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “destruction contractor”, in reference to his utter destruction of connections with traditional pro-Israel friends in Europe and America. Losing the European Union and challenging the White House by undermining the authority of the American presidency is seen by many in Israel as “cutting Israel’s life-support lines”.

Haaretz even accused Netanyahu of following the dictates of “his master the Jewish billionaire the owner of gambling casinos, Sheldon Adelson” who reportedly has set $300 million for Republican candidates running for the US presidency in 2016.

Many in the US Democratic Party view Netanyahu as allying himself with the right wing of the Republican Party in a racist attack against a black president, which could never have happened if the occupant of the White House were a white man.

In view of the present demographic map of America, where majority of voters are shifting towards the black and Latino side, the election of a Republican president has become a far-fetched proposition, to say the least, and Israel is the biggest loser in this case.

Israel is steadily running out of friends even among Jews who are horrified to be associated with an apartheid/colonial ultra-religious/ultra-nationalist regime falsely claiming to be Jewish as the case is with Muslims opposing the toxic waste of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and Al Qaida, falsely claiming to be Muslims. Both are sliding down the slope towards a bottomless pit.

Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.