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Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab): I was brought up as an
orthodox Jew and a Zionist.  On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box
for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers
building a Jewish presence in Palestine.

I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than
I can count.  I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel.  One of
them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of
them.  The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration
awarded to him, which he presented to me.

I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the
founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.  Golda Meir was my friend, as was
Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for
Israel in the 1948 war of independence.

My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland.  Most of their families
were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust.  My grandmother
was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow.  A German
soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering
Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.  The current Israeli Government
ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over
the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of
Palestinians.  The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the
lives of Palestinians do not count.

On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major
Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800
Palestinians-the total is now 1,000.  She replied instantly that

“500 of them were militants.”

That was the reply of a Nazi.  I suppose that the Jews fighting for their
lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will
have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists.  Tzipi Livni’s
father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun
Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in
Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism.  Jewish terrorists hanged two
British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses.  Irgun, together with the
terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of
Deir Yassin.  Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would
be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the
Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah.  It is too late for that.  They could
have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a
friend of mine.  Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I
visited him.  Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas
won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation,
but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town.  The
boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error,
from which dreadful consequences have followed.

The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for
peace on many platforms, said:

“You make peace by talking to your enemies.”

However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve
this existential problem by military means.  Whenever and however the
fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5
million more on the west bank.  They are treated like dirt by the Israelis,
with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal
Jewish settlements harassing them as well.  The time will come, not so long
from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.

It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that
their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban
on Israel.  It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by
conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for
them to achieve.  They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.

–

Our group, California Scholars for Academic Freedom (approximately 100 educators of conscience teaching in higher education in California) has been informed of the cancellation of an educational event on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that was supposed to be presented this evening at Hillsdale High School by a teacher at the high school.  As we understand it, the event has been advertised all week on flyers and in the school bulletin, and has been promoted by social science teachers at the school.

We are appalled that the school would cancel an event that has such relevance to world affairs.  Are you trying to deprive these Hillsdale students of hearing about the crisis in Gaza?  As we are sure you would agree, it is intellectually stimulating for students to attend presentations beyond what is required for their courses.  It is especially useful if the event they attend is current and relevant in the world today.  Today’s students are woefully uninformed about international affairs.  As the United Nations, the Red Cross, and CARE have attested, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is an important issue right now and the canceled event would have added greatly to both students’ understanding of Gaza and their sense of belonging to the global community.

Since some of these same Hillsdale students will end up in our college and university classrooms, we have a vested interest in learning the reasons for this cancellation.  In addition to our professional and personal motivations as teachers of this next generation, we are also strong defenders of Academic Freedom.  Many of our members are members of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which would certainly condemn the kind of censorship evident in the cancellation of the Hillsdale High School event on Gaza.

We would appreciate a response as to the reasons for this cancellation.  We strongly recommend that you reschedule the event soon.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

California Scholars for Academic Freedom

Ameer Ahmad in Gaza and Ed Vulliamy
Saturday 10 January 2009

A new word emerged from the carnage in Gaza this week: “scholasticide” – the systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of education dear to Palestinian society, as the ministry of education was bombed, the infrastructure of teaching destroyed, and schools across the Gaza strip targeted for attack by the air, sea and ground offensives.

“Learn, baby, learn” was a slogan of the black rights movement in America’s ghettoes a generation ago, but it also epitomises the idea of education as the central pillar of Palestinian identity – a traditional premium on schooling steeled by occupation, and something the Israelis “cannot abide… and seek to destroy”, according to Dr Karma Nabulsi, who teaches politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. “We knew before, and see more clearly now than ever, that Israel is seeking to annihilate an educated Palestine,” she says.

The Palestinians are among the most thoroughly educated people in the world. For decades, Palestinian society – both at home in the West Bank and Gaza, and scattered in the diaspora – has put a singular emphasis on learning. After the expulsions of 1948 and after the 1967 occupation, waves of refugees created an influential Palestinian intelligentsia and a marked presence in the disciplines of medicine and engineering across the Arab world, Europe and the Americas.

“Education is the most important thing – it is part of the family life, part of your identity and part of the rebellion,” says Nabulsi. “Everyone knows this, and in a refugee camp like Gaza, every child knows that in those same schooldesks sat your parents and your grandparents, whose tradition they carry on.”

Schooling and university studies are the fabric of life despite, not because of, circumstances: every university in the occupied territories has been closed down at some point by Israeli forces, many of them regularly. However, the closures and arrests of students (more than 300 at Birzeit university in Ramallah, says Nabulsi) only strengthens the desire to become educated.

In the current offensive, Israel began attacking Gaza’s educational institutions immediately. On only the second and third day of air attacks last week, Israeli planes wreaked severe damage in direct strikes on Gaza’s Islamic University. The main buildings were devastated, destroying administrative records, and, of course, ending studies. The Ministry of Education has been hit twice by direct hits from the air.

The Saturday of the ground invasion was the day on which most students in Gaza sit their end-of-year examinations. In the majority of cases, these had to be abandoned, and it remains unclear whether they can or will be sat again. Other schools were also attacked – most notoriously the UN establishment in the Jabaliya refugee camp where at least 40 people were massacred on Tuesday.

On Sunday, another Israeli air strike destroyed the pinnacle of Palestinian schooling, the elite and private American International School, to which the children of business and other leaders went, among them Fulbright scholars unable to take up their places in the United States because of the Israeli blockade. Ironically, the same school was attacked last year by a group called the Holy Jihad Brigades, and has been repeatedly vandalised for its association with western-style education.

The school was founded in 2000 to offer a “progressive” (and fully co-educational) American-style curriculum, taught in English, from kindergarten to sixth form, and was said by the Israelis to have been the site, or near the site, from which a rocket was fired. A night watchman was killed in the destruction of the building.

The chairman of its board of trustees, Iyad Saraj, says: “This is the most distinguished and advanced school in Gaza, if not in Gaza and the West Bank. I cannot swear there was no rocket fired, but if there was, you don’t destroy a whole school.” He adds: “This is the destruction of civilisation.”

The school has no connection to the US government, Saraj says, and many of the 250 who graduate from it each year go on to US universities. “They are very good, highly educated open-minded students who can really be future leaders of Palestine.”

Young Palestinians playing in Daniel Barenboim’s celebrated East-West Divan Orchestra – which this week again brings Palestinian and Israeli musicians together to play a prestigious concert in Vienna – say that music schools in their communities and refugee camps are “not just educating young people, but helping them understand their identity”, as Nabeel Abboud Ashkar, a violinist based in Nazareth, puts it, adding: “And the Israelis are not necessarily happy with that.”

Ramzi Aburedwan, who runs the Al-Kamandjati classical music school in Ramallah, argues: “What the Israelis are doing is killing the lives of the people. Bring music, and you bring life. The children who played here were suddenly interested in their future”.

In a recent lecture, Nabulsi at St Edmund Hall recalled the tradition of learning in Palestinian history, and the recurrent character of the teacher as an icon in Palestinian literature. “The role and power of education in an occupied society is enormous. Education posits possibilities, opens horizons. Freedom of thought contrasts sharply with the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, the choking prisons,” she said.

This week, following the bombing of schools in Gaza, she says: “The systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel has countered that tradition since the occupation of 1967,” citing “the calculated, wholesale looting of the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut during the 1982 war and the destruction of all those manuscripts and archived history.”

“Now in Gaza,” she says, “we see the policy more clearly than ever – this ‘scholasticide’. The Israelis know nothing about who we really are, while we study and study them. But deep down they know how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.”

FFIPP-I Petition: on the bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza

December 30, 2008

The present Israeli devastation of Gaza is the culmination of years of
a suffocating siege: together they sow death and suffering to an
appalling, insufferable extent. Israeli policy, having already provoked
a vicious cycle of attacks, retaliation, and counter-attacks by Hamas,
now has escalated. Current military action includes the direct shelling
of the Islamic University in Gaza. Israeli bombers have destroyed the
main laboratory buildings and damaged six other buildings, including
the library, lecture halls and the student cafeteria.
As academics, students, and intellectuals, we condemn the Israeli
attack on the Islamic University and call for an immediate cessation of
all military and violent actions by both sides. We demand an end to the
siege on the Gaza strip and full protection and guarantee of the
freedom of education.

To sign the petition and see a letter from Dr. Kamalain Shaath, the President of The Islamic University, please go to:

http://office.ffipp.org/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=23869&qid=16477

Boycott is the key sanction we as citizens can apply to Israel. Palestinian organisations are appealing to us to do it.

See http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents/Gaza/HighFollowUp.pdf and http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents/Gaza/BNC_Gaza.html

We have created a page on the BRICUP website to post key documentation on the Israeli attack http://www.bricup.org.uk/GazaEmergency.html. We are not trying to replicate the the archives being created elsewhere but will post items of special significance to BRICUP’s contribution to the worldwide campaign.

Let us do it!
A Statement of Determination to Boycott Israel Sponsored by The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP)

The Israeli government is sending waves of F16 fighter jets to bomb the Palestinian population of Gaza, many of whom are already weak and sick from two years of siege and encirclement by Israel. Children, says an Israeli spokeswoman, are legitimate targets because if they inhabit a house allegedly being used to manufacture home-made rockets to fire into Israel, they are ‘terrorists’ themselves. On Saturday December 27, Israel says it dropped 100 tonnes of bombs on Gaza.

We say enough is enough. As long as the state of Israel continues to defy humanity and international law, we, the citizens of the world, commit ourselves to boycotting Israel.

When Nazi planes firebombed the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, to advance General Franco’s revolt against the democratically elected Republican government, Britain, France and other European powers continued to refuse military and political support to the Republic, and Franco and his Nazi allies prevailed.

Since our governments decline to take action against Israel, we, as citizens, must act. We declare that, in solidarity with the bombed, maimed, tortured and ethnically cleansed people of Palestine, we will, individually and collectively:

refuse to buy any fruit, vegetable, flowers, cosmetics, underwear, swimwear or piece of technology manufactured or produced in Israel or the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and we will inform shops that we object to them stocking Israeli products;

we will not go on holiday to Israel;

we will research which brands of computer contain Israeli-designed and manuctured components, make the information public, and and press all computer manufacturers to end research partnerships with Israel;

we will boycott Israeli films, theatre companies, dance groups and orchestras, and make known our objections to the management of theatres and cinemas;

we will campaign actively for our governments not to allow citizens of our countries to serve in the Israeli army, navy, airforce and security services;

we will lobby in our professional organisations and trade unions for Israeli institutions to be boycotted unless they state publicly that they oppose their government’s actions, will not co-operate with the state (for instance by teaching courses for the security services, which all Israeli universities do), and support the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

Signed on behalf of BRICUP
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, London
Professor Haim Bresheeth, London
Abe Hayeem, London
Mike Cushman, London
Professor Keith Hammond, Glasgow
Professor Ghada Karmi, Exeter
Jenny Morgan, London
Dr Robert Boyce, London
Dr. Sue Blackwell, Birmingham

If you wish to add your name (which will appear on a signatories page on the BRICUP website send an email to GazaEmergency@bricup.org.uk giving your name and the city where you live.

The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees condemns in the strongest possible terms the bombing today of the campus of the Islamic University in Gaza. This wanton destruction of an academic institution is only the latest in the ongoing lethal campaign launched by the Israeli government and army against Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. This murderous rampage has caused more than 300 deaths and the injury of close to 1,500 Palestinians. And the carnage continues with impunity.

We add our voice to the urgent appeal issued two days ago by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) urging international civil society not just to protest and condemn Israel’s massacre in Gaza, but also to join and intensify the international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel to end its impunity and to hold it accountable for its persistent violations of international law and Palestinian rights. We agree that, without sustained, effective pressure by people of conscience the world over, Israel will continue with its gradual, rolling acts of genocide against the Palestinians, burying any prospects for a just peace under the blood and rubble of Gaza, Nablus and Jerusalem.

Today, at the height of the lethal Israeli assault against the Palestinian people in Gaza, we are met with deafening silence emanating from the Israeli academy. Does it condone the murderous bombing campaign that its government is carrying out in the name of all Israelis? Are the members of the academy dutifully preparing for the reserve call-up just approved by their government, ready to serve in the death squads committing war crimes around the clock? Are Israeli universities willing to call for an end to the occupation? Are they going to cut their organic and deep-rooted ties with the military-security establishment? There is no doubt that the aggression against the Gaza Strip has reached horrendous proportions, described by many international public figures as constituting war crimes and a continuation of the ethnic cleansing unleashed 60 years ago.

We urge academics around the world to intensify their boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and to isolate the Israeli academy in international forums, associations of academics, and other international venues. Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the entrenched system of oppression practiced by the Israeli state, and their silence at this critical moment is only the most vociferous indicator of this complicity.

Dr. Amjad Barham
President
Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees

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