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Dear Friends,
 
I’m writing now from my home, but I still feel dizzy from shock and nauseated by the sights and smells on my visit to Khan Younis and Khuza’a.
 
Yesterday I decided to use the opportunity of the ceasefire to visit my family in Khan Younis. I especially wanted to see my sister who had open heart surgery before Israel’s assault. I hadn’t seen her for 36 days. I’m lucky that I have enough fuel in my car to drive 24 kilometers (15 miles) so I struck out towards the south.
 
I drove down Salaheddin Road and passed rubble from mosques, houses, and factories. Some buildings were destroyed completely and some partially. Later on in my drive, I saw dozens of big trees uprooted and smashed, fruit trees destroyed and farms and gardens decimated and ruined. The Israeli bombs were aimed to destroy the infrastructure, to destroy Gaza’s economy. Even the main cookie factory was targeted and destroyed.
 
I passed UN trucks distributing food to people in long lines. This siege and assault by the Israelis has made everyone in the Gaza Strip live as a refugee, missing basic needs and struggling to survive.
 
When I drove up to my family’s place in Khan Younis, it was a very emotional moment. We’ve lost many family members and, excuse me, my friends, I’m not going to talk about this meeting because every family in Gaza is going through the same thing.
 
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PRESS STATEMENT: For Immediate Release | Rasmea Defense Committee

Press contact: Hatem Abudayyeh, 773.301.4108, hatem@aaan.org

Judge Borman steps down from the case of Rasmea Odeh

Today, Judge Paul D. Borman removed himself from the case of Palestinian community leader Rasmea Odeh.  Earlier this month, the judge stridently denied a defense motion calling on him to step down.  The motion claimed that his life-long support for the state of Israel—whose arrest, torture, and conviction of Odeh for alleged Jerusalem bombings in 1969 is at issue in this case—would not allow for a fair trial.  Odeh has pleaded not guilty to the charge of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization, and vehemently refutes the Israeli convictions, which were based on a forced confession after extended periods of vicious physical and sexual torture.  

Borman refused the motion, dismissing defense arguments about his decades of trips to and fundraising for Israel, claiming his “religious convictions” did not bring his impartiality into question.

According to supporters, Borman was falsely covering Zionist ideology with Judaism. “We opposed Judge Borman not because of his Jewish faith, but because of his decades of support for the state of Israel,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for Odeh’s defense committee.  “Rasmea overcame vicious torture by Israeli authorities while imprisoned in Palestine in the 70s. She has committed no crime and the government has no case. We need a judge willing to listen to a defense that puts Israel on trial for its crimes against Rasmea, and against all Palestinians.”

In an unexpected turn of events, Borman admitted his financial ties to Israel “could be perceived as establishing a reasonably objective inference of a lack of impartiality in the context of the issues presented in this case.” Defense claims of pro-Israel bias are vindicated, and Borman has removed himself.  The case has been randomly re-assigned to U.S. District Judge Gershwin A. Drain.

Supporters of Odeh hail this as a victory for the defense, but are re-doubling efforts to win justice for Rasmea.

Abudayyeh continued: “This case is a political attack on the Palestine liberation movement, and that means we need a political defense as much as a legal defense. Thousands of people from across the country are fighting for Rasmea, demanding that the government drop the charges against her. If they don’t, we are still going all out for Detroit, to fill the courtroom every day of the trial.”

A status hearing in front of Judge Drain is still planned for Tuesday, September 2nd, in Detroit, and the Rasmea Defense Committee is calling for supporters to pack the courthouse and call the prosecutors to demand that they drop the charges on that day.  The date of the actual trial will be rescheduled.

The national Rasmea Defense Committee includes United States Palestinian Community Network, Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR), Coalition to Protect People’s Rights (CPPR), 8th Day Center for Justice, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)-Chicago, American Muslims for Palestine, Anti-War Committee (AWC)-Chicago, AWC-Minneapolis, Arab Jewish Partnership for Peace and Justice in the Middle East, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, Committee Against Political Repression, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-Chicago, CAIR-Michigan, Friends of Sabeel-North America, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, International League of Peoples’ Struggle-U.S., Jewish Voice for Peace, Lifta Society, National Boricua Human Rights Network, National Lawyers Guild (NLG), National Students for Justice in Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago, Palestine Solidarity Legal Support, Palestinian Youth Movement-USA Branch, St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, United African Organization, United National Antiwar Coalition, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Voces de la Frontera, and Women Against Military Madness.

            As
the direct fighting in Gaza slowly subsides, the struggle for peace and justice
in Palestine will increasingly take place in the media. The argument over what
caused this horrific episode and what it really means is the next battleground.
Since the Israeli position depends almost solely on the statements made by the
Israeli government, and since so many of Israel’s more obvious lies have come
directly from Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, a background and fact check of
this key player should be the order of the day.

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Extremist Rabbi Issues Ruling Saying Jewish Law Permits Destruction of Gaza

Dov Lior: Israel Can Take ‘Steps to Exterminate Enemy’

Published July 24, 2014.

Rabbi Dov Lior, a leading West Bank rabbi who endorsed a book justifying the killing of non-Jews, issued a religious ruling saying that Jewish law permits the destruction of Gaza to keep southern Israel safe.

Lior, chief rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement, issued the opinion after receiving questions about Jewish law’s position on harming civilians during wartime.

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Uri Avnery
August 9, 2014

                    Metro Gaza

TEL AVIV has no metro. It has been discussed for decades. Successive mayors have promised it. Alas, still no metro.

When the Israeli army entered the Gaza strip and found there an astounding system of underground tunnels, an idea made the rounds: Why not invite Hamas to build the Tel Aviv metro? They have the expertise, the technology, the planners, the manpower.

But this war is no joke. It is a terrible tragedy.

AFTER 29 DAYS of fighting (until now), who has won?

It is, of course, much too early to draw final conclusions. The ceasefire has blown up. It will take months and years to sum up all the consequences. But Israeli popular wisdom has already drawn its own conclusions: it is a draw.

This conclusion, by itself, is a kind of miracle. For an entire month, Israeli citizens have been bombarded by a barrage of propaganda. Daily, hourly, they were subject to an endless stream of brainwashing.

The political and military leaders dictated a picture of victory. Tanks and troop carriers coming out of the Gaza Strip have been ordered to fly large flags. All photos of troops leaving the Strip showed happily smiling soldiers. (In my imagination I see the troops training for the exit, with the sergeant-major shouting: “You there, Private Cohen, correct your smile!”)

According to the official line, our glorious army has achieved all its goals. Mission accomplished. Hamas has been beaten. As one of the tame “military correspondents” put it: “Hamas is crawling on all fours to the ceasefire!”

It was therefore a great surprise that in the first poll after the first bout of fighting, 51% of the Israeli Jewish public responded that the war had ended in a draw. Only 36% answered that we had won, while 6% believe that it ended in a victory for Hamas.

WHEN A guerrilla organization with at most 10,000 fighters achieves a draw with one of the mightiest armies in the world, equipped with the most ultra-modern weapons, that is by itself a kind of victory.

Hamas has not only shown a lot of courage during the fighting, but also surprising ingenuity in preparing for this campaign. It is still standing upright.

The Israeli army, on the other hand, has shown very little imagination. It was quite unprepared for the maze of tunnels. The vastly successful “Iron Dome” anti-rocket defense was developed by civilians and installed eight years ago by a civilian Minister of Defense against the express wishes of the army. Without this defense, the war would have looked very different.

Indeed, as a commentator dared to write, the army has become a heavy, cumbersome, conservative machine. It followed its established routine, without employing special forces. Its doctrine was, in essence, to pound the civilian population into submission, causing as much killing and destruction as possible, so as to deter the “resistance” as much and as long as possible. In Israel, the terrible pictures of death and destruction did not evoke compassion. On the contrary. People were proud of it.

In the end, both sides were thoroughly exhausted. Yet in the Cairo ceasefire negotiations, Hamas did not surrender.

For the Israeli leadership, the only alternative to retreat was the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip. This would have enabled it to exterminate Hamas physically and dismantle its infrastructure. But the army strenuously objected and convinced the political leadership, too. An estimated thousand Israeli soldiers would have been killed, the entire Strip would have been turned into ruins.

32 years ago, the Begin-Sharon duo was faced with the same dilemma. The conquest of Western Beirut would have cost an estimated 800 Israeli soldiers. Like the Netanyahu-Ya’alon duo now, they decided against it.

Israeli society has no stomach for so many casualties. And the international outcry against the civilian carnage in Gaza would have been too much.

So now Netanyahu has done what he had sworn never-ever to do: he has conducted negotiations with the “despicable terrorist organization” – Hamas.

THERE IS a mental illness called paranoia vera. Its main symptom: the patient takes a crazy assumption (the earth is flat, Kennedy was killed by extraterrestrials, the Jews rule the world) and builds an entire logical system around it. The more logical the system is, the sicker is the patient.

Israel’s current paranoia concerns Hamas. The assumption is that Hamas is an evil jihadist terrorist organization, bent on the annihilation of Israel. As one journalist put it this week: “a gang of psychopaths”.

The entire policy of Israel is based on this assumption. So was the war.

You can’t talk with Hamas. You can’t make peace with it. You must annihilate it.

This demonic picture has no connection with the real world.

I don’t like Hamas. I don’t like religious parties in general – not in Israel, not in the Arab world, not anywhere. I would never vote for one.

But Hamas is an integral part of Palestinian society. In the last internationally supervised Palestinian election it won a majority. True, it took power in the Gaza strip by force, but only after winning a clear electoral majority in the Strip, too.

Hamas is not “jihadist”‘ in the sense of al-Qaeda or ISIS. It is not fighting for a world-wide Caliphate. It is a Palestinian party, totally devoted to the Palestinian cause. It calls itself “the resistance’. It did not impose religious law (the “sharia”) on the population.

Ah, but what about the Hamas Charter, which demands the destruction of the State of Israel and contains virulent anti-Semitic statements?

For me, this is frustratingly deja vu. The PLO had a Charter that also called for the destruction of Israel. It was paraded around endlessly in Israeli propaganda. A respected professor and former army intelligence chief, Yehoshafat Harkabi, spoke for years about nothing else. Only after the signing of the Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO were the relevant clauses of this document formally struck out, in the presence of President Bill Clinton.

Because of religious restrictions, Hamas itself cannot sign a peace agreement. But, like religious people everywhere (especially Jews and Christians), it has found ways around God’s commandments. The founder of Hamas, the paralyzed Sheik Ahmad Yassin (who wrote the Charter and was assassinated by Israel) proposed a 30-year Hudna. A Hudna is a truce sanctified by Allah, which can be renewed until the Last Judgment.

Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace organization to which I belong, first demanded eight years ago that our government start talking with Hamas. We ourselves had a series of friendly discussions with several Hamas leaders. The current official line of Hamas is that if Mahmoud Abbas succeeds in reaching a peace agreement with Israel, Hamas will accept it – provided it is ratified by a referendum. 

Unfortunately, there is very little hope that Israel will be cured of this paranoia soon.

ASSUMING THAT this war will soon be over, what will remain?

The war hysteria that has submerged Israel during this war has brought with it an odious wave of fascism. Lynch mobs have hunted Arabs in Jerusalem, Journalists like Gideon Levy need bodyguards, university professors who dared to advocate peace were censored (justifying a world-wide academic boycott), artists who voiced mild dissent were dismissed.

Some people believe that this is a milestone in the decay of Israeli democracy. I still hope that the evil wave will recede. But something will surely remain. Fascism has been sanctioned in the mainstream discourse.

One symptom of fascism is the “knife in the back” legend. Adolf Hitler used it all the way to power. Our glorious army was on the verge of victory, when a cabal of (Jewish) politicians stuck a knife in its back. One can already hear this now in Israel. The brave soldiers could have conquered all of the Gaza strip, if Netanyahu and his stooges – the Defense Minister and the Chief of Staff – had not given the order for an ignominious retreat.

At the moment, Netanyahu is at the height of his popularity. An overwhelming 77% of the Jewish citizens polled approve of his conduct of the war. But this can change overnight. The criticism voiced now in whispers, even in his own government, may break into the open.

In the end, Netanyahu may be devoured by the very same super-patriotic flames that he has stoked.

The awful pictures of devastation and death coming out of Gaza have made a profound impression abroad. They cannot be simply erased.  Anti-Israeli sentiment will remain, some of it tinged with outright anti-Semitism. Israel’s (false) claim of being “the nation-state of the Jewish people” and the almost total identification of Diaspora Jews with Israel will inevitably lead to blaming all Jews for Israel’s misdeeds.

The impact on Arabs is far worse. For every child killed, for every home destroyed, new “terrorists” will surely grow up.

THERE MIGHT have been some positive results too.

This war has created temporarily an unlikely coalition of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority.

Two months ago, Abbas was the punch bag of Netanyahu. Now he is the pet of Netanyahu and Israeli public opinion. At the same time, paradoxically, Abbas and Hamas have also been drawn closer together.

This could be a unique opportunity to start a serious peace process, in the wake of the solution of the Gaza Strip problems.

If…

See Mads Gilbert’s powerful speech on Electronic Intifada

“The heart of the Earth beats in Gaza now. It bleeds, but it beats,” says Dr. Mads Gilbert.

The Norwegian emergency surgeon returned to his home city of Tromsø on 31 July, after spending several weeks treating the wounded from Israel’s assault at Gaza City’sal-Shifa Hospital.

He went straight from the airport to give a spontaneous speech at a large solidarity demonstration for Gaza held at the same time.

Tromsø is twinned with Gaza City.

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Please join us and please spread the word
THIS SUNDAY AUG. 10 at 1:00PM
****
VIGIL to honor and remember the over 1800 people killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza
 
Meet at the field just south of the Hawthorne Bridge, across from the Downtown Marriott Hotel (where the Blues Festival is held)

Our goal is to get at least 1800 people to come together to bear witness. We will have signs each with the name of one person who was killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Meet at 1 PM to each get a name to hold and from there we will line up shoulder to shoulder along the waterfront to make a strong statement of what our US tax dollars are being spent on.
 
Together we will stand in vigil and solidarity for all the people of Gaza who were murdered and who must now try to re-build their lives.
 
We need lots of people there to make this effective.  Please come, bring family and friends. ~ Spread the word to all you know~
 
Thanks and with heavy hearts we must work harder than ever for peace and justice.
 
Note: this action is being organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights, Friends of Sabeel North America, and other groups.  Please join us.

—
In Solidarity
-Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights

superpsu.weebly.com

Since virtually every comment on Hamas in American media includes the assertion that the group’s Charter rejects Israel’s right to exist, it’s worth noting the following from the Likud Platform of 1999:

a. “The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.”

b. “Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel.
The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem”

c. “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”

d. “The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.

There have been some updates to the platform more recently, reflecting Israel’s withdrawal of settlements from Gaza in 2005. But the Likud Party has *never* in its statements of principles, accepted a Palestinian State. Its electoral partner, Yisrael Beitenu, has likewise categorically rejected the possibility of an independent Palestinian State, insisting that the idea is nothing more than a ploy to facilitate the destruction of Israel.

The Hamas charter, of course, does more than just reject Israel as a sovereign political entity. It’s a vile document that echoes some of the worst anti-Semitic tropes of the modern era. But on the central question of one side denying the other’s legitimacy — it’s hard to ignore the symmetry between Likud – the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – and Hamas.

Some defenders of Israel become indignant at the mention of these realities as scurrilous and spurious because the Likud platform quoted above is just an “old” statement of principles not reflective of the Party’s actions in power. But by that logic, the Hamas Charter, written over 25 years ago, cannot be said to be the sole controlling document of that organization, since much more recent statements and actions by its leadership have, at least some times, included an expressed willingness to pursue a long-term agreement with Israel. Furthermore, Hamas also agreed to join the Palestinian Authority in a unity government that accepts all previous PA agreements with Israel.

Too much political discussion in the United States about Israel/Palestine proceeds from the premise that Palestinians have no other interest than to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea. Therefore, it is said, well-intentioned Israel has no viable negotiating partner for peace. The political reality on the ground does not conform to such a simple-minded tale of good vs. evil. Israeli hardliners in power have repeatedly rejected any basis for a viable Palestinian state. Indeed, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s qualified statement in support of a two-state solution in 2009 – which his American apologists repeatedly invoke to demonstrate his “moderate” bona fides – was characterized by a member of his own cabinet as “the spin of our lives.” In fact. Likud leaders have said unequivocally that no two-state deal is possible. And just three weeks ago, speaking at a press conference, Netanyahu said:

“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

As David Horovitz wrote in The Times of Israel:

“He wasn’t saying that he doesn’t support a two-state solution. He was saying that it’s impossible. This was not a new, dramatic change of stance by the prime minister. It was a new, dramatic exposition of his long-held stance.”

In other words, no independent Palestinian state. Period. Ever.

Arab leaders are accused *all the time* of making one set of (conciliatory) statements in front of some audiences in English, while revealing their (true) rejectionist feelings in front of others, in Arabic. To the extent that this is true, one could certainly say the same about Netanyahu – relatively conciliatory and reasonable-sounding statements for international audiences. And altogether different rhetoric for internal consumption. Bibi is, after all, a master – like many politicians – at speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

Since Palestine does not exist as a recognized independent state, there is no need for Israel’s rejectionists to call for Palestine’s “destruction.” But the consistent avowals of Israeli leaders – and the plain language of the party platforms that express their parties’ core beliefs – to prevent such a state from coming into being is not substantively different from the expressed desire of the Hamas Charter to reject Israel’s existence.

The beginnings of a more fair and balanced appreciation of the conflict would start with that acknowledgment.

Jonathan Weiler

——-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Netanyahu boasting about Manipulating America and derailing Oslo peace process

A central tenet of Israeli military policy is “deterrence.” This is embodied in the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine,” which dictates the use of overwhelming and disproportionate force – a war crime – and the targeting of government and civilian infrastructure during military operations. It received its name from the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah, which Israel destroyed almost completely during its assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

• In October 2008, Gabi Siboni, Director of the Military and Strategic Affairs Program at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a quasi-governmental think tank with close ties to the Israeli political and military establishments, published a policy paper entitled “Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War.” It stated:
  

  ‘With an outbreak of hostilities [with Hezbollah], the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. ‘Israel’s test will be the intensity and quality of its response to incidents on the Lebanese border or terrorist attacks involving Hezbollah in the north or Hamas in the south. In such cases, Israel again will not be able to limit its response to actions whose severity is seemingly proportionate to an isolated incident. Rather, it will have to respond disproportionately in order to make it abundantly clear that the State of Israel will accept no attempt to disrupt the calm currently prevailing along its borders. Israel must be prepared for deterioration and escalation, as well as for a full-scale confrontation. Such preparedness is obligatory in order to prevent long term attrition.’

• In an analysis piece also published in October 2008 entitled “IDF plans to use disproportionate force in next war,” military correspondent Amos Harel of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper quoted a senior Israeli General, Gadi Eisenkot, commander of Israeli forces in the north, describing the Dahiya Doctrine as applied to a future war with Lebanon:
  

  ‘We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases… This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.’

• Two and a half months later, after breaking a ceasefire that had been in place for six months, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a devastating three-week military onslaught that killed approximately 1400 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, including more than 300 children.
• Subsequent investigations by the United Nations as well as Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights organizations documented numerous cases of Israeli forces committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the disproportionate use of force, the use of white phosphorous in heavily populated areas, and the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. In May 2009, Amnesty International released its country report for Israel and the occupied territories, which found:
  

  ‘[During Cast Lead] Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying out direct attacks on civilians and civilian buildings and attacks targeting Palestinian militants that caused a disproportionate toll among civilians.’

• In February 2009, shortly after the end of Cast Lead, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a cabinet meeting:
  

  ‘The government’s position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate.’

• The Israeli army continues to operate according to the Dahiya Doctrine, despite huge civilian casualties inflicted in Cast Lead and other military operations and the condemnation of human rights organizations.

Read the IMEU’s Casualty Comparison Fact Sheet here.

Soros Fund Management, the family office of the billionaire investor George Soros, has sold its stake in SodaStream, the soda making appliance producer that profits from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and was made popular by actress Scarlett Johansson’s endorsement.

The decision comes as a number of big international investors, including the fund linked to the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, join in a burgeoning financial boycott of Israel amid a push by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and other groups seeking more rights for Palestinians.

SodaStream, headquartered in the Israeli city of Lod, has its main factory in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

“Soros Fund Management does not own shares of SodaStream,” Michael Vachon, a spokesman for the fund, told The National, declining to comment further on when and why it sold the shares.

In a May filing with the US markets regulator, the fund said it had bought 550,000 shares of SodaStream during the first quarter. Bloomberg reported that the fund acquired the shares for $24.3 million, with the new holding making up 0.3 per cent of the fund’s $9.3 billion stock portfolio.

“After pressure from Soros partners in the region and the world, they dropped SodaStream and promised, in private letters so far, to issue guidelines similar to those adopted by the EU to prevent any investment into companies that sustain the Israeli occupation and settlements in particular,” said Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian activist and co-founder of the BDS movement.

Several western investors said earlier this year that they had sold off holdings in companies that make money from business in occupied territories. Norway’s $810bn sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, a Dutch pension fund, and the Presbyterian Church in the US are among those that have excluded some Israeli and US companies from their portfolios this year. The companies operate in the occupied territories, where settlements built by Israel have been deemed illegal by the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice among others.

Financial and economic boycotts have been tried before, most notably when Saudi Arabia and other Opec members stopped selling oil to the West in 1973 in reaction to the support given by the US and other nations to Israel during its war with Egypt.

But with the 1979 peace agreement that heralded a political and economic rapprochement with Egypt and eventually other Arab nations, the momentum fizzled away.

It is only in the past decade that there has been a revival of the boycott movement looking to end the Israeli occupation of land captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, allow Palestinians refugees to return home and end discrimination against Palestinians.

Analysts say that as the two-state solution – the framework in which peace negotiations have been undertaken for the past two decades – flounders, a growing anti-apartheid movement is filling its shoes.

This year has been a strong one for BDS. The Gates Foundation Asset Trust, which manages investments for the $40bn Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said in June that it sold its stake in the UK security services firm G4S, one of the companies targetted by BDS. The movement has also been in focus during the Israeli assault on Gaza and the widespread anti-war protests against the killing of hundreds there.

Earlier this year, Israel’s finance minister acknowledged the impact that a European-wide boycott could have on the country, depriving the economy of $5.7bn and putting almost 10,000 people out of work immediately. The prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also acknowledged the threat posed by BDS. In a March speech in the US, Mr Netanyahu launched an attack on the movement, branding them as racists.

“In America, BDS has really started to pick up in the last year, and there are a couple of other examples apart from the Presbyterian church, such as universities that have taken positions against Israel,” said Andrew Hammond, a Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The whole movement is picking up not so much because the BDS movement is so powerful, but because people want Israel to come to a peace agreement.”

In January, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund decided to ban Africa Israel Investments (AFI Group) and its subsidiary Danya Cebus from its portfolio because of their involvement in building settlements in the West Bank.

In the same month PGGM, the second-largest Dutch pension fund, which manages more than $200bn in assets, said it had liquidated holdings in five Israeli banks for their role in financing settlement building.

In June, the US Presbyterian church said that it excluded three companies – Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola – from its investment portfolios because they were used by the Israeli government in the occupied territories and were not in compliance with its policy on socially responsible investing.

Norway is one of the few countries that have an ethics oversight council to review investments made by its sovereign wealth fund. In January, the finance minister, on advice from the council, told its sovereign wealth fund to sell its holdings in AFI Group and Danya Cebus.

Since the outbreak of fresh violence in Gaza, there have been no new announcements of boycotts by big investors, but funds such as Norway’s are constantly reviewing their investments according to the ethics council that monitors its holdings.

“We cannot comment on companies or cases that we are working on presently,” said Pia Goyer, senior adviser at the secretariat of the ethics council to Norway’s government pension fund. “You have to wait until we issue a recommendation. It takes some time to get all the facts on the table, the involvement of a company in any particular situation. The council only meets once a month and discusses what we should proceed with.”

Lisa Stonestreet, the programme director at the London-based UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, a non-government trade body that promotes sustainable investment, said that institutional investors were increasingly focused on ethical factors.

“First of all there is a public demand for it in terms of people calling into account larger organisations across the board to look at what the impact is in terms of sustainability, in terms of what the impact is and social issues,” she said. For some investors, the main aspect is profitability.

The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, which manages more than $200bn, has investments in a number of Israeli companies, including SodaStream and Bank Halpolim, as part of its foreign portfolio of stocks. Those holdings were part of its indexing investment strategy and the fund had no plans to sell them as it focused only on potential for profit, said its spokeswoman, Linda Sims.

Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/business/industry-insights/economics/soros-fund-drops-shares-in-israels-sodastream?utm_content=buffered4d0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#full#ixzz39Oemji00 
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