Category: Focus

Portland activist groups say Kulongoski is wrong to ignore Israel’s human rights violations

Several human rights groups, including Portland State’s own SUPER (Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights), have recently criticized Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski for conducting business with Israel despite the nation-state’s ongoing human rights violations.

On Oct. 27, Kulongoski signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the State of Oregon and the State of Israel “to develop and strengthen economic, industrial, technological and commercial cooperation between [them],” according to the governor’s press release.

In response, the organization Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights (AUPHR) composed an open letter to the governor, titled “The Moral Implications of Doing Business with Israel.” This letter outlines the organization’s grievances with Israel, which subsume both Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian lands and its systematic discrimination against Palestinian citizens.

Although Kulongoski declined to meet with AUPHR, Jodi Sherwood, deputy communications director for the governor, sent an e-mail to AUPHR member Peter Miller.

“The Governor believes that the Memorandum is in the best interest of the people of Oregon. Israel is a strong and democratic friend of Oregon and the United States,” Sherwood said in the e-mail. “This agreement will build on our existing trade relationship with Israel, open up new opportunities to share information and foster commercial ties in areas that are vital to Oregon’s economic future.”

However, SUPER President Wael Elasady said that there is a precedent for Oregon to refuse to do business with states that violate international law, namely, Oregon’s “Sudan Divestment Legislation” that arose from growing concern over Sudan’s genocide.

According to Miller, Israel routinely violates the rights of Palestinians by enforcing racist domestic policies that confer second-class citizenship status upon its Palestinian population. This is true for both the Palestinians who reside within Israel and those who reside in the Occupied Territories: the West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem.

“Israel has dozens of laws that privilege Jewish citizens over non-Jewish citizens,” Miller said. “Racism against non-Jews is institutional and in the open.”

Israel’s institutional racism against Palestinians, according to Miller, extends from unequal access to housing and government jobs to limited access to water and the possibility of being jailed indefinitely without due process.

According to Elasady, human rights groups like SUPER and AUPHR make three basic demands of Israel.

First, Israel must end its occupation of Palestinian lands. Second, it must end the second-class citizenship status of Palestinians. Third, it must honor the “right of return” of displaced first-generation Palestinian refugees and their descendents.

SUPER was co-founded in January of 2009 by PSU students Wadah Sofan and Elasady, a student of international studies focusing on the Middle East.

According to Elasady, SUPER is currently working on raising awareness in the PSU community and in Portland at large on the reality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In addition, the organization is expanding an activist tactic known as a “boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign,” in which businesses refuse to carry Israeli products until the nation-state complies with international law.

Elasady said that the campaign is a nonviolent way of placing economic pressure on Israeli society to help abolish Israel’s oppressive policies.

Elasady emphasizes that SUPER is “not anti-Israeli.”

“[SUPER] advocates for equal and full rights for all people, for both Palestinians and Israelis in that region,” he said.

According to Miller, every American should be conscious of Israel’s track record of violations because the U.S. government heavily subsidizes Israel and is, therefore, complicit in Israel’s apartheid-like laws and imperialist posture on the world stage.

“The U.S. gives Israel $3 billion in military aid every year,” Miller said. “That amounts to about $28 million federal tax dollars leaving the State of Oregon and going to Israel as weapons every year.”

Miller added that this figure should concern Oregonians because the state’s decision to ignore Israel’s crimes comes at great cost to its security interests and to the state’s reputation

Struggling as I have for the past decades to grasp the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and find ways to get out of this interminable and absolutely superfluous conflict, I have been two-thirds successful. After many years of activism and analysis, I think I have put my finger on the first third of the equation: What is the problem? My answer, which has withstood the test of time and today is so evident that it elicits the response…“duh”…is that all Israeli governments are unwaveringly determined to maintain complete control of Palestine/Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, frustrating any just and workable solution based on Palestinian claims to self-determination. There will be no negotiated settlement, period.

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Documents, whose existence were denied by the Israeli government for over a year, have been released after a legal battle led by Israeli human rights group, Gisha. The documents reveal a deliberate policy by the Israeli government in which the dietary needs for the population of Gaza are chillingly calculated, and the amounts of food let in by the Israeli government measured to remain just enough to keep the population alive at a near-starvation level. This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are “putting the people of Gaza on a diet”.

In 2007, when Israel began its full siege on Gaza, Dov Weisglass, adviser to then Prime-Minister Ehud Olmert, stated clearly, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” The documents now released contain equations used by the Israeli government to calculate the exact amounts of food, fuel and other necessities needed to do exactly that.

The documents are even more disturbing, say human rights activists, when one considers the fact that close to half of the people of Gaza are children under the age of eighteen. This means that Israel has deliberately forced the undernourishment of hundreds of thousands of children in direct violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

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Published: Tuesday, November 23, 2010, 5:41 AM

Guest Columnist
By Steven Goldberg

As Israel increasingly ignores our government’s objections to the expansion of settlements, its primary concern is with placating its own right-wing parliamentary coalition. And why should Israel be concerned with the protests of the Obama administration when U.S. military aid to Israel – now billions of dollars per year, paid by U.S. taxpayers at a time when they have no jobs and are losing their homes – continues unabated?

Israel is increasingly a rogue nation under international legal standards. Decisions from the International Court of Justice declaring the separation wall illegal, United Nations reports detailing Israel’s illegal actions during its invasion of Gaza (the Goldstone Report), and the recent U.N. Human Rights Council report criticizing Israel’s attacks on the Gaza flotilla are bolstered by ongoing reports by groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch detailing Israel’s illegal actions. In past generations, American policy has often led us to support dictatorships and overlook gross violations of human rights. The Obama administration promised a different path, but not in its unquestioned support for Israel as legal, ethical and moral concerns are readily tossed aside.

Oregon has not done much better. Our progressive politics and concern about the environment don’t seem to apply to the Israeli government’s policy of destroying Palestinian homes and crops as Israel expands its borders. Ethics and morals be damned if Israel promises opportunities for Oregon businesses. Thus our governor leads a trade delegation to Israel, the city of Portland promotes seminars encouraging investment in Israel, and local stores such as New Seasons – which tout their commitment to promoting local communities and agriculture – stock products made in Israel.

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