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Prime Minister David Cameron has quietly terminated his status as an Honorary Patron of the controversial Jewish National Fund (JNF). His office confirmed he had “stepped down”. For many years leaders of all three main political parties became Honorary Patrons of the JNF by convention. According to Dick Pitt, a spokesperson for the Stop the JNF Campaign, “Cameron was the only leader of the three major parties remaining as a JNF Patron.
The Hebrew online news site Calcalist reports that some of Israel’s most senior and powerful businessmen conducted a meeting last week to begin promotion of the “Israel Initiates” peace initiative in order to head off the growing international movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
The week just gone has been an excellent one for student activism for Palestine in the UK. The NUS executive council finally adopted a policy that clearly defended Palestinian human rights, and pledged to send NUS officers on future flotillas sailing to Gaza. Then barely days after that we at the University of London Union voted by a large margin – 10 votes to one in favour of supporting, and adopting, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
In the wake of successful/ongoing divestment campaigns at Hampshire College, UC Berkeley, Carleton University, and the University of Johannesburg, a group of students, faculty and community members in Montreal have started to organize a campaign to sever the links between the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and Concordia and McGill university.
"The vast majority of students who voted in DePaul University’s student election last week were in favor of ending the sale of Sabra hummus in campus dining halls.
On April 19th, the Marrickville Council in Sydney’s inner west, Australia, met to debate and eventually overturn its four months old motion supporting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Campaign against apartheid Israel. The experience of the Marrickville Council provides revealing insights into the state of the Palestine solidarity movement in Australia and important lessons for ongoing BDS campaigns locally and internationally.
The arcane world of finance is not something I normally turn to for hope or inspiration. Yet to my surprise, I was filled with both at the annual general meeting of Dexia, a Belgian-French bank.
After years of strenuous denial, Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories, an Israeli cosmetics firm with its main manufacturing plant in an illegal West Bank settlement, is proven by documentary evidence to be in violation of international law through its theft of Palestinian resources. This evidence was recently discovered by Who Profits, a research project of the Israeli Coalition for Peace, which documents corporate activity in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory
Nadia Hijab, director of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, makes reference to the growing strength of the BDS movement in her powerful analysis for The Hill. Hijab argues: