Activists in Denmark with Boykot Israel delivered a message to the German embassy in Copenhagen on 31 May: Stop the criminalization of BDS! Participants in the action carried signs and banners and chanted together against the German Bundestag (parliament) resolution denouncing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) as “anti-Semitic.”

The activists noted that they delivered their letter (full text below) to the German embassy in Copenhagen via the guards stationed there, saying that the embassy is situated in a closed well guarded building. The letter comes as part of the ongoing Palestinian and international protest against the Bundestag resolution, passed with the support of most major German political parties, including the CDU, SPD, Greens and FDP.

It should be noted that the resolution emerged originally as a response to an even more anti-Palestinian, racist proposal by the AfD and ultra-capitalist FDP, which aimed to ban BDS. Given the AfD’s well-known affinity with racism and open arms for apologists for German Nazi fascism, it should be quite clear that there is nothing anti-racist or anti-fascist in the Bundestag’s resolution.

Resisting German racism, official anti-Semitism (that conflates Jews with Israel) and anti-Palestinianism: Human rights activists today rallied for a boycott of apartheid Israel outside the @GermanyDiplo embassy in Copenhagen. Photos via https://t.co/fKj3zZyaXG pic.twitter.com/v5IiLBYd99

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) May 31, 2019

Instead, it reflects official anti-Palestinian racism – as well as a fundamentally anti-Semitic notion that Zionism and Israeli apartheid represent Jews and Jewishness. (In fact, Jews – including Israeli Jews – have been arrested in Germany on multiple occasions for protesting against Israeli apartheid – not to mention the silencing of Rasmea Odeh and ongoing, racist attacks on Palestinian organizing.)

Read the full letter below:

May 31, 2019

Open Letter

To the German Embassy in Denmark

From Boykot Israel

Stop Criminalization of BDS

Boycott of Israel is not anti-Semitism

The Boykot Israel Campaign hereby pronounces its sharp criticism of the anti-BDS resolution passed by the German Bundestag (Parliament) on May 17. In the resolution the BDS is falsely accused of anti-Semitism. But the BDS is not based on religion or ethnicity or fighting against the Jews. The BDS is an anti-racist organization campaigning against the crimes of the Israeli apartheid-state.

By passing the anti-BDS resolution the German state unequivocally places itself on the Israeli side and supports Israel’s more and more desperate struggle against the hastily growing BDS-movement. By the anti-BDS resolution the German state not only violates BDS’ freedom of speech, but at the same time makes itself an accomplice to decades of Israeli crimes against the Palestinians: Ethnic cleansing, massacres, demolition of houses, extension of the illegal settlements, killings of hundreds of  unarmed demonstrators in Gaza etc.

The more the BDS is attacked by Israel and its allies,  the more justice-loving people all over the world will support the rights of the Palestinian people and back up the BDS – such as we do in Boykot Israel in Denmark.

We agree with the words of the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy:

“Germany, Shame on you and your anti-BDS resolution!”

www.boykotisrael.dk

Copy: The media,  the political parties in the Danish Parliament, Amnesty International. The Palestine Network.

New Yorkers took to the streets on Friday, 31 May as part of the international Al-Quds Day events calling for justice in Palestine. Over 100 people joined the Times Square protest on the last Friday of Ramadan, including activists from Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Within Our Lifetime, International Action Center, Decolonize This Place, Struggle/La Lucha, Al-Awda: Palestine Right to Return Coalition, People’s Power Assembly, International League of Peoples’ Struggle and others.

Joe Catron, the US Coordinator of Samidoun, delivered the following speech as part of the afternoon’s program of powerful chants and presentations demanding justice and liberation:

Today, in the 101st year of the Palestinian national movement, we gather at a moment of unprecedented clarity for both it and its enemies. Over the past year, two new developments – the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century,” and the Great March of Return by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – have drawn the existing lines of division more starkly than ever before.

On one side, we see Palestine’s historic enemies – not only the Israeli state, the Zionist movement, and the imperialist powers, but also Arab reaction, led by the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – colluding more publicly than ever before to foist surrender onto the Palestinian people.

On the other, the looming threat of Trump’s “Deal” has inspired a new wave of Palestinian popular unity and struggle, exemplified most spectacularly in Gaza’s Great March of Return.

In 2003, the Irish writer Kevin Toolis, comparing his country’s struggle for liberation with Palestine’s, reflected: “You can’t make a deal with the dead.”

Indeed, the Palestinian national movement’s “red lines” – its unanimous demands for return and self-determination throughout the whole of historic Palestine – have always been drawn in the blood of its martyrs, forming barriers no political figure or faction would ever dare to cross.

Since March 30, 2018 – Palestinian Land Day, and the beginning of the Great March of Return – its hundreds of martyrs have demonstrated not only the strength of this Palestinian national consensus.

Their resistance, along with that of other Palestinians, has also shown where Palestine’s leadership lies: in its brigades, its prisoners, and its popular classes of workers and farmers, whose daughters and sons continue to fill the front lines of the Great March.

Finally, I would like to share a few words from one of these leaders, our comrade Ahmad Sa’adat, general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, written earlier this month from his cell in Israel’s Ramon Prison:

In order for us to accomplish our goals, to achieve our liberation, we must build an international popular front confronting imperialism. This is, was and always will be a task for all revolutionaries around the world. We stand together in one camp confronting common enemies: capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, racism and reaction.

From the battles against repressive forces and isolation here in Ramon prison to the fight to defend indigenous land and popular movements in Brazil to the movement for peasant and worker justice in the Philippines, we are labeled “terrorists” because we work to protect our land and our people; in reality, we face the same forces of terror and domination that extract our wealth and resources and exploit our people in the most brutal of circumstances…

The goal of every struggling revolutionary prisoner, whether in the prisons of the U.S., the Philippines, Turkey or the Zionist jails in Palestine, is to obtain freedom, not a momentary amelioration of torture. We are not simply seeking to moderate or reform the social and economic conditions of our people. We must be clear: we are struggling for socialism, for an alternative world – and in order to achieve victory, we must struggle together.

Samidoun activists in Greece joined fellow Palestinian and Greek organizers to protest on Wednesday, 29 May outside the German embassy in Greece. The protest came as part of an international rejection of a non-binding resolution passed by the German Bundestag (Parliament) on 17 May, labeling the Palestinian movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel as “anti-Semitic.”

The protesters were blocked from reaching the embassy itself by a number of Greek police. When the demonstrators gathered in Syntagma square in the center of Athens, they were aked immediately by police where they were going. Police also demanded that the protesters not unfurl their banners and Palestinian flags before arriving at the German embassy, a 10-minute walk from the Square. Police accompanied the protesters all along the route – and then surprised them with a blockade on the road preventing them from demonstrating directly in front of the embassy.

While the resolution was justified by its supporters – including major political parties like the CDU, SPD, FDP and the Green Party (which, in Germany, has sided repeatedly with Israeli apartheid unlike its counterparts in Belgium, the U.S. and elsewhere) – as some sort of acknowledgment of German responsibility for the country’s crimes under the Nazi regime, in reality the resolution is a racist attack on Palestinian rights. Far from reflecting some sort of anti-fascist sentiment, the resolution followed an even more anti-Palestinian proposal for the criminalization of BDS initiated by the AfD, the far-right party known for its openness to pro-Nazi sentiments as well as its blatant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist propaganda, along with the ultra-capitalist FDP.

Indeed, the resolution came only days after several Jewish and Israeli activists were arrested and forcefully silenced by German police for speaking up against racism and apartheid at the so-called “Israeltag” event celebrating the Palestinian Nakba on 14 May in Berlin. It also comes only two months after former Palestinian political prisoner and torture survivor Rasmea Odeh was banned from speaking in Berlin and stripped of her European visa at the demand of the U.S. ambassador to Germany and the Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, Gilad Erdan. This is not to mention the case of the Humboldt 3, in which a Palestinian activist and two Jewish Israeli activists are facing criminal charges for protesting an Israeli Knesset member’s speech.

Erdan has gone on a global campaign attempting to silence Palestinian and international human rights defenders, particularly those who defend the rights of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails – which he also oversees as the Minister of Internal Security, repeatedly directing crackdowns that saw harsh limitations on water, intensified surveillance of female prisoners and the confiscation of thousands of books from imprisoned Palestinians.

The response in Greece was particularly notable because Germany has been not only a major player in attempting to legitimize Israeli apartheid but also in the economic devastation of Greece. Austerity initiatives in Greece have been initiated by the “Troika” and dominated by German demands for economic control of the country. At the same time, the German government has also recently 75 percent of submitted family reunification requests from refugees living in Greece. The EU, led by Germany, has dictated not only the “Fortress Europe” policies that have intensified death and drownings in the Mediterranean but also aim to cut even the basic housing and financial support received by refugees in Greece, often awaiting a chance to move to Germany themselves.

The protest also comes amid active BDS campaigns in Greece pushing for Greek companies – and the Greek government – to end partnerships with apartheid Israel. Greek popular support for the Palestinian cause remains and has consistently been high. However, the SYRIZA-led government’s capitulation to European Union demands on the Greek economy and austerity was also accompanied by another turn against Tsipras’ initial election program: ramping up military cooperation with the Israeli state. Greece is also a key player in the so-called “East Med Pipeline” project, which aims to transmit stolen Palestinian natural gas to Europe for the profit of Israeli and European corporations; Greek campaigners are urging an end to the project.

BDS campaigners in Greece recently won a victory as two companies, STASY and GEK-TERNA, pulled out of the final stages of the tender to build tram lines in occupied Jerusalem, linking the city with illegal settlements in the West Bank. BDS Greece reported that a range of organizations, including trade unions, student organizations and left political parties, had joined the campaign to call for the companies to pull out. In particular, they condemned the Greek government’s role as STASY is a publicly owned company. Earlier, Canadian firm Bombardier, Australia’s Macquarie and Germany’s Siemens already dropped out of the tender process for the settler tramway.

Samidoun in Greece is continuing to organize events and actions in support of justice for Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people. Get more information or follow the Samidoun Greece Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/%D8%B4%D8%A8%D9%83%D8%A9-%D8%B5%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%86-Samidoun-network-Greece-1114054352135500/