The unpublicized impact of a successful BDS action
By Roqayah Chamseddine | Al-Akhbar | September 4, 2014
There is no question as to how immensely successful the Block the Boat protest at the Port of Oakland, led by Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) and arranged with the help of countless organizations, was. Unless you are a supporter of Israel or a journalist at the Oakland Tribune. Thousands of protesters, including an estimated 5,000 who marched on the Port of Oakland on August 16, prevented the Zim Piraeus from unloading by keeping workers from crossing their picket line to enter the port for an historic four days, making it “the longest blockade of an Israeli ship” according to AROC.
The Oakland Tribune, Haaretz, and a number of other outlets, reported that the Israeli-owned Zim Piraeus unloaded its cargo after “delays” but after speaking to a number of distributors whose cargo was being transported by Zim Piraeus I found this to be unmistakably false and misleading.
According to a document from PIERS, a database of US international trade which provides maritime logistics, at least 23 companies are clearly listed as having goods aboard Zim Piraeus – ranging from cucumber pickles and sparkling wine to ceramic tiles and solar swimming pool heaters – with some goods originating in Israel. Though building materials and agricultural produce were listed by PIERS it should be noted that Zim Integrated Shipping Services imports ammunition “manufactured by Israel Manufacturing Industries by Federal Cartridge (Federal Premium Ammunition)” which makes defense ammunition used by U.S. law enforcement and has a weapons contract with the Department of Homeland Security. Federal Premium Ammunition is a subsidiary of Alliant Techsystems, which produces Bushmaster autocannons used by U.S. forces and NATO, the AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (an air-to-surface missile), Hellfire missile upgrades, and provides other weapons services to the US military and allies. The import report for Zim shows that the ammunition originated in Israel, at the Port of Haifa and arrived at the Port of Savannah in Georgia.
Zim’s first ship, the Kedmah, was purchased in 1947, before the creation of the State of Israel, and would carry thousand of immigrants to Palestine. In 1948 Zim ships would carry arms and ammunition used to carry out the Nakba, and according to a video published online by Zim Integrated Shipping Services “Zim would play this crucial role every time Israel faced conflict.” Ze’ev Shind, a key Mossad activist who would become managing director of Zim Israel Navigation Co., president of the American-Israel Shipping Co., and Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Communications and Ministry of Defense was a principal figure organizing immigration to Palestine, according to The Canadian Jewish Chronicle. The role of Zim in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is well documented, even by Zim sources.
Esteson Co., a direct food and beverage importer and distributor in California, posted on their Facebook page that their “garlic is now rotting on its way to Russia to be offloaded unto (sic) another vessel,” and when contacted for comment it was mentioned that a container of Zeos beer never arrived due to the Port action. All in all, Esteson Co. has not received any of their products as of September 3.
Good Stuff Distributors, located in San Francisco, California, told Al-Akhbar English that not only did they not receive their shipment of Zadona cucumber pickles as of September 3 they do not know where the cargo is and are still waiting to hear from Zadona as to where the items are. A spokesperson for Good Stuff Distributors informed Al-Akhbar English that not only were they unaware of Zim’s ties to Israel they have made it clear to Zadona, of Sinokrot Food Company, that they are to “find another vessel” as Good Stuff Distributors will no longer be using Zim.
Alfa Omega Co., which has trading partners in France, Spain and Greece, disclosed to Al-Akhbar English that their business was “greatly affected”, as they did not receive any of their products, including olives. The spokesperson was clearly unhappy, stating that the targeting of Zim by the Block the Boat protesters, specifically, is the reason that they will now look for another vessel to use for their products, despite having worked with Zim “for years”.
The sales and marketing manager at Carmichael International Service, a customs broker and freight forwarder with laminated glass aboard Zim Piraeus, told Al-Akhbar English that customers did not receive their products as of September 3, but it was due to “delays” and “port congestion,” which is undoubtedly a brazen spin on what transpired at the Port of Oakland. When examining the vessel schedule for the Zim Piraeus, dating back to July and after August 20, we find that there are no analogous delays as there was in Oakland as the vessels usually left the same day or a day after, unlike at the Port of Oakland where the “delay” was at least four days long.
Cynara Worldwide Sourcing Inc., located in Fresno, California, said that all products on the Zim Piraeus were not only never unloaded but that they were sent to Shanghai and they wouldn’t receive them until at least the end of the month. As a result of Block the Boat, the spokesperson told Al-Akhbar English that they have put an immediate halt to “everything on Zim” and will now be looking for other vessels they can use.
The most curious case in regards to Block the Boat is that of American Metals and Chemicals, located in Hollywood, Florida. A representative told Al-Akhbar English that they did not receive their shipment of alkyl sulfonic acid, and that the cargo was diverted to Russia. When asked who they were contacted by the representative stated that a letter was delivered from an attorney’s office, though they could not find the letter at the time of the phone call so as to disclose which office. The letter stated, in part, that their shipment was “turned away because of the strike” at the Port of Oakland. There was also a follow up telephone call from the same office, letting them know that their products were being diverted.
The remaining consignees listed as having cargo delivered to the Port of Oakland by the Zim Piraeus during the Block the Boat campaign were contacted by Al-Akhbar English but did not immediately return calls for comment on the whereabouts of their goods – based on what was revealed by the 6 companies that did supply information it is not difficult to assume that they faced comparable circumstances. Regardless, Block the Boat was not only successful in keeping the Zim Piraeus from unloading the aforementioned cargo but due specifically to this action a number of companies are now either putting a hold on all products using Zim vessels or reconsidering using Zim, which is not only contrary to what the media has reported but an impressive achievement for the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
Roqayah Chamseddine is a Sydney based Lebanese-American journalist and commentator. She tweets @roqchams and writes ‘Letters From the Underground.‘
Hamas: US is partner to Israeli crimes in Gaza
MEMO | September 2, 2014
Senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar said on Monday that the United States is a partner to the Israeli occupation and its crimes committed in the Gaza Strip.
Speaking to the Palestinian Al-Quds television, he said: “We mean the US administration, not the American people, who took to the streets in large rallies against Israel’s crimes.”
He explained that lifting the Israeli siege of Gaza is not a demand, but a right. “We have the right to exist and lifting the siege is one of our rights,” he said, “it has to be lifted without a price.”
Regarding the Israeli soldiers who were abducted during Israel’s latest invasion of the Gaza Strip, he said their price is the release of the Palestinian prisoners. “This is our policy, which the enemy knows very well,” he said.
He continued: “There are two kinds of prisoners: MPs, former ministers, Hamas leaders and those prisoners freed in previous swaps; and the prisoners who are spending long terms in Israeli jails.”
The first kind should be released without a price, he asserted, while “the Israeli prisoners in our hands” are the price for the second kind of prisoners.
He also spoke about the seaport and airport that Hamas insisted on during the ceasefire talks in Cairo. “The airport was built during the time of late Yasser Arafat, but the occupation forces demolished it,” he said. “It is our right to rebuild it.”
“The seaport was supposed to be built in Gaza’s central port, but the occupation forces have stopped any positive measures from happening in the Strip, including the seaport,” he explained. “The Palestinian Authority was too weak to defend establishing the seaport. It is our right, which we seek to achieve. Whoever attacks us, we will attack them.”
Al-Zahar stressed that the Israeli occupation has to be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court (ICC). If the Palestinian Authority does not carry out this mission, individuals in Europe and Latin America and every free country should pursue Israeli criminals at the ICC.
He concluded by comparing negotiations and resistance as methods to gain Palestinians rights. “There are diplomatic negotiations, which supporters think will gain a Palestinian state,” he said. “However, they have now failed and its supporters warn that they are going to join international organisations if negotiations are not revived.”
Meanwhile, he said the resistance programme is more “successful” and it insists on not making any concessions on Palestinians’ rights.
Israel presses forward plans for Jewish seminary in occupied east Jerusalem
Al-Akhbar | August 28, 2014
Israel on Thursday approved a further stage in plans to build a nine-story Jewish seminary in the heart of a densely-populated Palestinian neighborhood near Jerusalem’s Old City.
According to the Peace Now settlement watchdog, the committee threw out an appeal tabled by a left-wing council member and approved a new stage in plans for a tower block in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied east Jerusalem.
Should the plans be approved by the district planning committee, construction could begin within the coming year, Peace Now’s Hagit Ofran told AFP.
“It might take six months to a year until it gets final approval for them to start building,” she said of the plan which was tabled in February.
The building will be used as a yeshiva, or Jewish seminary, for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian residential neighborhood located to the north of the Old City.
Located on the road which links the Old City to Mount Scopus, the area is considered a strategic location and illegal settlement groups have made persistent efforts to take control of its land.
Israel captured east Jerusalem during the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community.
It considers all of Jerusalem its “eternal, indivisible” capital and does not see construction in the eastern sector as settlement building.
Both the Palestinians and the international community consider all Israeli construction on land seized in 1967 to be a violation of international law.
This has not stopped Israel from continuing its policy of illegal settlement in east Jerusalem and the West Bank over the years.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
The Evil of U.S. Aggression against Iraq
By Jacob G. Hornberger | Future of Freedom Foundation | August 26, 2014
What better confirmation of the manifest failure of the philosophy of foreign interventionism than the renewed U.S. bombing of Iraq?
Just think: All those hundreds of thousands of dead, maimed, detained, and tortured Iraqis, along with those who lost their homes, businesses, and savings. They were all bombed and shot by U.S. troops for nothing. All those Iraqis suffered and died for nothing.
The same holds true, of course, for U.S. soldiers who died or came back maimed or all screwed up in the head. The ones who lost their lives died for nothing. The ones who came back physically handicapped or mentally disturbed are suffering for nothing.
How can anyone still be an interventionist after what has happened in Iraq?
But everyone is expected to continue playing the game. We’re supposed to just keep praising those brave troops who went to Iraq to defend our freedoms and to help the Iraqi people. Never mind that the results of their intervention have turned into a total failure and fiasco.
Let’s first keep in mind one central truth, a truth that interventionists don’t like talking about: In the Iraq War, the U.S. troops were the aggressors. It was Iraq that was the defending power.
A war of aggression, which the U.S. was waging on Iraq, was condemned as a war crime at Nuremberg.
Second, the U.S. government’s war on Iraq was also illegal under our form of constitutional government. President Bush was required by the law of the Constitution to secure a declaration of war from Congress before waging war on Iraq. He refused to do that and instead, on his own initiative, launched a war of aggression with his military and CIA forces.
Third, U.S. officials justified the killing of Iraqis by using a cost-benefit analysis. They said that by killing x number of Iraqis, U.S. forces would be bringing into existence a free and democratic Iraq for the survivors, which, it was said, would serve as a model for the rest of the Middle East.
Where is the morality in killing and maiming people based on a cost-benefit analysis?
Through it all, there was never one iota of genuine remorse for all the Iraqis that were being killed, maimed, tortured, or destroyed in the purported aim to bring the good society to Iraq.
Equally telling, neither the Pentagon nor the CIA ever put an upward limit on the number of Iraqis who could be killed in the quest to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. Any number of Iraqi dead, no matter how high, would be considered “worth it.”
Interventionists are pointing out the evil nature of the Islamic State, the group that is threatening to oust the U.S.-installed regime in Bagdad from power. But simply because one group is evil doesn’t necessarily mean that the term cannot also be applied to what the U.S. government has done to Iraq, especially given it was the U.S. government’s war on Iraq, along with its other Middle East policies, that unleashed the furies that have given rise to the Islamic State.
How can an unlawful and unconstitutional war of aggression, a type of war condemned as a war crime at Nuremberg not be considered evil?
How can a war in which people are being killed and maimed based on a cost-benefit analysis not be considered evil?
Indeed, think back to the brutal sanctions that the U.S. government enforced against Iraq for more than ten years. When “Sixty Minutes” asked U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madelyn Albright whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the U.S. sanctions had been “worth it,” she responded that while the choice was a difficult one, the deaths were in fact worth it.
How can those deadly sanctions — indeed, how can such a horribly callous mindset — not be described as anything but evil?
Or think back to the Persian Gulf War, when the Pentagon ordered the destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment plants, knowing that such destruction would bring infectious illnesses in its wake? And it did. That’s what helped kill all those children, given that the sanctions prevented Iraqi officials from repairing those water and sewage treatments plants that the Pentagon had destroyed.
How can such a thing not be described as evil?
The problem, of course, is that all too many Americans can easily see the evil in other people’s actions but are unable to see the evil in their own government’s actions. That’s because in their minds they’ve raised the federal government to the level of an idol, one that can do no wrong, especially since it operates through courageous American troops and CIA agents who are always defending our freedoms in whatever they do, including waging wars of aggression against Third World countries that have never attacked the United States, killing innocent children with brutal sanctions, or killing people in a cost-benefit analysis intended, supposedly, to bring the “good life” to the survivors of the onslaught.
If the Iraq fiasco has taught us anything, it is that evil means produce evil results. Just ask anyone who is now calling on the U.S. national-security state to drop more bombs on Iraq in order to combat evil.
Largest Canadian students’ union joins boycott of Israel
MEMO | August 22, 2014
The Canadian Federation of Students – Ontario, the largest student union in Canada, has decided to boycott Israel because of its ongoing aggression towards Gaza.
The decision was made unanimously by the participants of the union’s General Assembly meeting which was held at the Ryerson University, Toronto, and affects all 300,000 members.
Anna Goldfinch, a member of the union’s Board of Directors, said the decision to include the boycott of Israel, divestment and the application of sanctions was taken to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The President of the Students Union of the University of Ryerson, Rajean Hoilett said Israel had committed war crimes against the Palestinian people, and the Canadian universities that maintain relations with Israel also engage in war crimes.
Israeli ship blockade continues in California
Al-Akhbar | August 19, 2014
US activists blocked an Israeli cargo ship from unloading at a California port for the third day in a row in protest of the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, organizers of the action reported late Monday.
The vessel, owned and operated by Israeli company Zim Shipping Services, has been trying to unload Israeli cargo in the port of Oakland since Saturday.
Thousands of protesters prevented the ship from unloading on Saturday, with the cooperation of dock workers who refused to unload the boat.
The ship has failed to unload its cargo despite attempting various tactics, including delaying its arrival time until the early morning hours. About a dozen activists continued to hold off the ship early Monday morning, according to activist sources.
One activist who spoke to Al Jazeera said the organizers were thinking of making the block a regular action, as Israeli ships arrive in the port every Saturday.
The blockade is supported by the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Unions, a group which also stood against the South African apartheid regime in 1984.
Israeli Soldiers Assault Palestinian, Seize Tractor
By Chris Carlson | International Middle East Media Center | August 13, 2014
Israeli soldiers assaulted a young Palestinian, on Tuesday, in an area east of Yatta, south of the Hebron District, upon which they seized his tractor.
Rateb Jubour, Coordinator of the Anti-settlement Committee in Hebron, said the soldiers violently beat one Mohammad Shaabin, 21 years of age, before seizing his tractor and an attached water tanker.
Mohammad sustained bruises throughout his body and was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Israeli soldiers and colonial settlers alike routinely attack Palestinian farm workers in the occupied territories, damaging their equipment and lands in the attempt to further islolate Palestinian communities, with the aim of expanding nearby settlements and further disenfranchising the Palestinian people as a whole.
More than 550,000 Israelis live in illegal settlements throughout the region, which has been illegitimately occupied by the Israeli military since 1967, in direct violation of the international laws to which they are signatory.
See also Corporate Watch exposé — Farming Under Siege: Working the Land in Gaza
Hamas: No clear Israeli response to demands
Ma’an – 09/08/2014
GAZA CITY – Israel did not provide a clear response to the Palestinian ceasefire conditions, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Friday as truce talks stalled in Cairo.
At a news conference in Gaza City, Abu Zuhri said that the lack of response undermined Palestinian demands and that “Israeli stubbornness led to not extending the ceasefire.”
A 3-day ceasefire expired Friday morning, leading to renewed clashes between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza. Another unofficial ceasefire mostly held later the same day.
Abu Zuhri accused Israel of stalling and wasting time, adding that its leader must accept all Palestinian conditions.
He said that Israel rejected the establishment of an airport or a seaport and refuses to expand the fishing zone.
Also Friday, Hamas leader Izzat al-Rashq said that the Palestinian delegation in Cairo did not receive an Israeli response to any of the Palestinian demands.
He added in a posting on Facebook that the Israeli delegation was maneuvering and held it accountable for the failure to achieve an agreement.
Demands Israel Has Accepted, And Rejected
IMEMC & Agencies | August 8, 2014
The following is a list of Palestinian demands presented to Israel by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, during indirect talks held in Egypt between Israeli and Palestinians teams, as published by al-Watan News :
1. Israel totally rejects establishing either a Seaport or an Airport in the Gaza Strip.
2. Totally rejects the release of all detainees who were released under the Shalit Prisoner Swap Deal, and rearrested by Israel.
3. Israel “reserves the right” to act against the tunnels in Gaza.
4. Israel “reserves the right” to conduct targeted killings.
5. Agrees to consider the Rafah Border Terminal as an Egyptian-Palestinian issue.
6. Agrees to release the fourth phase of veteran detainees “as a goodwill gesture toward president Mahmoud Abbas.”
7. Agrees to extend the Palestinian fishing zone in Gaza territorial waters.
8. Agrees to allow the transfer of money for paying salaries in the Gaza Strip.
9. Agrees to ease restrictions on Palestinians crossing the Erez terminal, will not relax restrictions on goods.
10. Agrees to the entry of construction equipment, but only under international supervision.
Just before the 72-hour ceasefire ended on Friday morning, Israeli sources said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the army to remain ready for any possible escalation.
When the period came to an end the resistance fired a missile into the Nahal ‘Oz military base, across the border and the army bombarded several areas in the Gaza Strip.
Armed groups also fired shells into Asqalan (Ashkelon) and a number of areas.
Aletho News 