From: Tripod Depot (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Dec 04 2006 - 03:14:53 PST
"Keine Juden und Hunde." Ja, ja,
-tripod depot
----- Original Message -----
From: "ben d" <email suppressed>
To: <email suppressed>
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 5:26 AM
Subject: FW: Call for a cultural boycott of Israel
> From: Steven Rose [mailto:email suppressed]
> Subject: FW: Call for a cultural boycott of Israel
>
> Dear all
> Please distribute the call below plus enclosures (with discrimination) to
> writers, artists, film makers, musicians and other culture workers amongst
> your friends who might be appropriate, urging them to sign John Berger's
> appeal, and to return their agreement to sign to me.
>
> Please note that until we have a substantial list of signatures there is an
> embargo on publication.
>
> Steven
>
> There follows the call for a cultural boycott of Israel,
>
> ----
> Dear friends;
>
> John Berger, Eduardo Galeano, Elia Suleiman and I (Steven Rose) are
> circulating this letter to you, calling on artists, writers, film-makers and
> other culture workers to support the call of their Palestinian colleagues
> for a cultural boycott of Israel. We hope that you will add your signature
> to it. John's personal addendum to the letter is also copied below. We
> hope
> to collect enough signatures over the coming few days to publish the letter
> in the London Guardian and other
> newspapers across Europe.
>
> If you are willing to sign, please respond directly to me at
> email suppressed
>
> For publication.
>
> There is a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, albeit daily violated by Israeli
> overflights. Meanwhile the day to day brutality of the Israeli army in Gaza
> and the West Bank continues. Ten Palestinians are killed for every Israeli
> death; more than 200, many of them children, have been killed over the
> summer. UN resolutions are flouted, human rights violated as Palestinian
> land is stolen, houses demolished and crops destroyed. For archbishop
> Desmond Tutu, as for the Jewish (former ANC military commander presently
> South African minister of security), Ronnie Kasrils, the situation of the
> Palestinians is worse than that of black South Africans under apartheid.
> Meantime Western governments refer to Israel1s OElegitimate right1 of
> self-defence, and continue to supply weaponry.
>
> The challenge of apartheid was fought better. The non-violent international
> response to apartheid was a campaign of boycott, divestment, and, finally UN
> imposed sanctions which enabled the regime to change without terrible
> bloodshed. Today Palestinians teachers, writers, film-makers and
> non-governmental organisations have called for a comparable academic and
> cultural boycott of Israel as offering another path to a just peace. This
> call has been endorsed internationally by university teachers in many
> European countries, by film-makers and architects, and by some brave Israeli
> dissidents. It is now time for others to join the campaign as Primo Levy
> asked: If not now, when?
>
> We call on creative writers and artists to support our Palestinian and
> Israeli colleagues by endorsing the boycott call. Read the Palestinian call
> (www.pacbi.org).
>
> John Berger
> Eduardo Galeano
> Elia Suleiman
>
> Steven Rose, Secretary
> British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
> You can find more detail of the campaign on our website:
> www.bricup,.org.uk
>
> Please reply to Steven Rose at email suppressed
>
>
>
>>From John Berger:
>
> I would like to make a few personal remarks about this world-wide appeal
> to teachers, intellectuals and artists to join the cultural boycott of the
> state of Israel, as called for by over a hundred Palestinian academics and
> artists, and - very importantly - also by a number of Israeli public
> figures, who outspokenly oppose their country1s illegal occupation of the
> Palestine territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Their call is attached,
> together with my OEAfter Guernica2 drawing. I hope you will feel able to add
> your signature, to the attached letter, which we intend to publish in
> national newspapers.
> The boycott is an active protest against two forms of exclusion which
> have persisted, despite many other forms of protestations, for over sixty
> years - for almost three generations.
> During this period the state of Israel has consistently excluded itself
> from any international obligation to heed UN resolutions or the judgement of
> any international court. To date, it has defied 246 Security Council
> Resolutions!
> As a direct consequence seven million Palestinians have been excluded
> from the right to live as they wish on land internationally acknowledged to
> be theirs; and now increasingly, with every week that passes, they are
> being excluded from their right to any future at all as a nation.
> As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a
> tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as
> distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain
> pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to
> be an unjust or immoral way. (In white South Africa yesterday and in Israel
> today, the immorality was, or is being, coded into a form of racist
> apartheid.)
> Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks to
> become exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should
> be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott
> is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy
> either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about
> change.
> How to apply a cultural boycott? A boycott of goods is a simpler
> proposition, but in this case it would probably be less effective, and speed
> is of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month (which
> is precisely why some of the most powerful world political leaders, hoping
> for the worst, keep silent.).
> How to apply a boycott? For academics it1s perhaps a little clearer - a
> question of declining invitations from state institutions and explaining
> why. For invited actors, musicians, jugglers or poets it can be more
> complicated. I1m convinced, in any case, that its application should not be
> systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal
> assessment.
> For instance. An important mainstream Israeli publisher today is asking
> to publish thre of my books. I intend to apply the boycott with an
> explanation. There exist, however, a few small, marginal Israeli publishers
> who expressly work to encourage exchanges and bridges between Arabs and
> Israelis, and if one of them should ask to publish something of mine, I
> would unhesitatingly agree and furthermore waive aside any question of
> author1s royalties. I don1t ask other writers supporting the boycott to
> come necessarily to exactly the same conclusion. I simply offer an example.
>
> What is important is that we make our chosen protests together, and that
> we speak out, thus breaking the silence of connivance maintained by those
> who claim to represent us, and thus ourselves representing, briefly by our
> common action, the incalculable number of people who have been appalled by
> recent events but lack the opportunity of making their sense of outrage
> effective.
>
> John Berger
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
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__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.