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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
"We have received confirmation [from] BlackRock that Africa-Israel Investments no longer is part of their portfolio. The confirmation of the divestment was sent to Skandiabanken the day before yesterday on 18 August."
BlackRock expects to complete the acquisition of Barclays bank by the end of 2009. Barclays has also been cited as a major owner of Africa-Israel stocks.
The campaign against Leviev, launched in November 2007 by Adalah-NY, is part of a growing global movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) aimed at stopping Israeli rights violations against Palestinians. Ethan Heitner from Adalah-NY explained,
"We are elated at BlackRock's decision, but expect BlackRock to ensure, as it purchases Barclays, another a major owner of Africa-Israel, that Barclays also divests from Africa-Israel. We call on other businesses with investments in Israel to follow BlackRock in ending their complicity in Israel's crimes."
BlackRock's move comes after the March decision by the government of the United Kingdom to drop plans to move its Tel Aviv embassy into a building owned by Africa-Israel. Leviev has also been renounced by UNICEF and Oxfam, and major Hollywood stars have quietly distanced themselves from the settlement-builder.
In a related development in May, 11 organizations, including organizations from Norway, Palestine, Israel and other countries, along with Adalah-NY, called upon the Norwegian Government Pension Fund to divest from Africa-Israel. The fund is reportedly the fifth-largest shareholder of Africa-Israel. In a 15 May response to Adalah-NY, Aslak Skancke of the Norwegian government Pension Fund's Council on Ethics noted that the fund is assessing
"whether companies in the Fund have activities which can be considered supportive of violations of international humanitarian law. One area of such interest is the construction of various forms of infrastructure in occupied territories."
A decision on the Norwegian government pension fund investment in Africa-Israel is expected in the fall.
Israeli settlements violate international law and cut the West Bank into disconnected Bantustans. Leviev's company Africa-Israel has built housing units on occupied Palestinian land in such settlements as Mattityahu East on the land of the village of Bilin, and in the settlements of Har Homa and Maale Adumim. Leviev's company Leader owns and builds settlement homes in the settlement of Zufim on the land of the village of Jayyous.
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Divesting from Israel's 'WMDs'
House demolition has been a central plank in Israel's solution to the 'Arab problem' from the start, and the bulldozers have been highly successful in dislocating Palestinian society and tearing communities apart, notes Stuart Littlewood.
God whispered in the Church of England's ear and it dumped its shares in Caterpillar.
This House of God had about £2.5m invested in a company that manufactures one of Israel's weapons of mass misery and destruction. After saying for years that they couldn't see anything unethical about it, Church bosses finally agreed with the rest of us that Caterpillar's D-9 bulldozer, which is used in the Holy Land for the ugly purpose of demolishing Palestinian homes, uprooting olive groves and destroying civilian infrastructure, is more like a vicious weapon in Israel's hands than a civil engineering tool.
Caterpillar simply didn't look good on the Church's ethical investments list any more.
The wholesale destruction of Palestinian homes, and Caterpillar's part in it, has been going on for a very long time. At the Jenin refugee camp in March/April 2002 Israel's massive, armoured D-9 Caterpillar bulldozers - driven by army reservists - worked non-stop for three days and nights. More than 300 homes in the densely packed camp were flattened. The bulldozer drivers were instant heroes and showered with medals for valour.
One such driver did not get down from the cab of his Caterpillar for 75 hours straight.
"For three days I just erased and erased... the entire area. I took down any house from which there was shooting. To take it down, I would take down several more. The soldiers warned with a speaker, that the tenants must leave before I came in, but I did not give anyone a chance. I did not wait… I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding? Anyone who was there, and saw our soldiers in the houses, would understand they were in a death trap… I didn't give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn't just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders.
"Many people where inside houses we set to demolish. They would come out of the houses we where working on. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn't see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn't mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down…"
This was the largest single orgy of destruction carried out by the Israeli army, according to Amnesty International. The al-Hawashin quarter was completely destroyed and two further areas of the refugee camp were partially destroyed, leaving more than 800 families, totaling some 4,000 people, homeless.
House demolition has been a central plank in Israel's solution to the 'Arab problem' from the start, and the bulldozers have been highly successful in dislocating Palestinian society and tearing communities apart.
ICAHD reports that between 1948 and the 1960s Israel systematically demolished 418 Palestinian villages inside what has become the State of Israel. Residents who were put to flight could not return and their lands were turned over to the Jewish population.
The Israeli township of Sderot, which the world is meant to feel sorry for, is built on stolen lands belonging to a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed and erased.
At the start of the Occupation in 1967 demolition was carried across the 'Green Line' into the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Since then some 12,000 Palestinian dwellings have been destroyed, many of them the homes of people who had fled from the bulldozers in 1948.
Dozens of ancient homes were destroyed in the Mughrabi Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City to make room for a plaza for the Wailing Wall.
In 1971 Ariel Sharon, then in charge of Southern Command, cleared 2,000 houses in the Gaza refugee camps to facilitate military control. After becoming Prime Minister in 2001 he oversaw the demolition of another 1500 homes in Gaza.
At least 2,000 houses in the Occupied Territories were destroyed in a bid to quell the first Intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nearly 1,700 more were demolished by the Civil Administration during the Oslo peace process (1993-2000).
Since the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, the Israeli military has destroyed 4,000 to 5,000 Palestinian homes, including hundreds in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and other cities of the West Bank, and more than 2,500 in Gaza. Tens of thousands of other homes have been left uninhabitable. Altogether around 50,000 people were left homeless. Hundreds of shops, workshops, factories and public buildings, including Palestinian Authority ministry offices in all the West Bank cities, have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
Figures suggest that 60% of the Palestinian homes demolished in the Occupied Territories were bulldozed as part of military "clearing operations", 25% for being "illegal" (not having permits), and 15% for collective punishment. Amnesty International says that more as than 3,000 hectares of cultivated land were cleared during this time. Wells, water storage pools and water pumps which provided water for drinking, irrigation and other needs for thousands of people, have also been destroyed, along with miles of irrigation networks.
None of this takes account of the wanton and incalculable destruction caused by the relentless blitzing of Gaza last month…
When homes are demolished for 'military reasons' or as acts of deterrence and collective punishment, there is no process - no formal demolition order, no warning, no time to remove furniture or personal belongings, and often barely time to escape the building falling down around the victim's ears.
Demolition orders, when issued, are delivered haphazardly. A building inspector may knock on the door and hand it to anyone who answers, including small children. More often it is slipped into the doorframe or left under a stone near the house. Palestinians frequently complain that they never receive the order before the bulldozers arrive and are thus denied recourse to the courts.
What took the Church of England so long to catch onto the Caterpillar scandal?
Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.
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S. African Dock Workers Won't Unload Israeli Goods
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
JOHANNESBURG (AP) -- South African dock workers won't unload ships carrying goods from Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians, a union leader said Wednesday.
Randall Howard, general secretary of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, said it appeared a ship carrying goods from Israel was nearing Durban's port. If once the ship docks its cargo is determined to be Israeli, he said, union workers won't unload it.
''We will make that contribution,'' he said. ''The historic and heroic struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination ... is a struggle that SATAWU supports.''
Last year, South African dock and freight workers refused to unload a ship carrying weapons for Zimbabwe to protest Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's rule of the neighboring country. In the case of Israeli goods, Howard said, it did not matter whether they were weapons of vegetables.
''If it's an Israeli product, we're going to boycott it, plain and simple,'' he said.
In Israel, Foreign Minister spokesman Yigal Palmor said: ''If these people think that by refusing to unload shipments from Israel they are promoting peace they should go back to school because they have misread the situation in the Middle East big time.''
Israel's three-week military offensive against Gaza, which killed hundreds of civilians before ending last month, sparked protests in South Africa. Israel says the operation was aimed at halting Hamas rocket fire from Gaza.
Howard, decrying Palestinian as well as Israeli violence, says Israeli attacks were ''extremely disproportionate.''
Strong South Africa-Israel ties cultivated by the white government in the apartheid era have been maintained since the onset of majority rule. South Africa also has a close relationship with Palestinians, thanks to long-standing connections between the governingAfrican National Congress and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Associated Press Writer Aron Heller in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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Significance Of Dockworkers' Refusal To Offload Israeli Cargo
By Azad Essa
Countercurrents.org
When COSATU and its affiliate SATAWU made it clear that their dockworkers would not be offloading the Johanna Russ, in palpable solidarity with the Palestinian people last week, a largely irrelevant port in the Southern tip of Africa called Durban was making history across the globe once more. Of course, the Israeli goods were offloaded a few days before the scheduled docking, by virtue of scab labour thwarting the blockage and mass protests planned on Sunday. But the message was out: a new wave of civic angst towards injustice had begun. And it was the labour movement at the head of it all.
This is a significant important gesture from COSATU - not only because it is the first of its kind with regards to the Palestinian people and as a symbolic gesture to the Palestinian cause - the stand against Israel by workers is but another case of the infinite possibilities presented by a unified and decisive labour movement towards tackling social injustice beyond the workplace.
Already in 2008, SATAWU, with the support of Anglican Church leaders and other community activists, prevented the An Yue Jiang – the now infamous Chinese ship filled with arms and ammunition – from reaching Zimbabwe. Through SATAWU's linkages with the International Transport Federation (ITF) and unions organizing in Mozambique and Angola, the ship was turned away by workers across the continent, finally sailing back to China.
The actions of COSATU and its affiliate SATAWU suggest a dramatic shift back to the social movement unionism that defined the union movement at the height of the liberation struggle. It was a time when workplace bread and butter issues were not separated from the socio-political inequity and challenges that existed outside the workplace. COSATU, being drafted into the tripartite alliance with the SACP and the ANC at the dawn of a new democracy, became thoroughly formalized entities; often criticized as lacking the fluidity required of a movement.
But SATAWU General Secretary Randall Howard disagrees,
"There will always be particular struggles that seems to have brought upon resurgence in Cosatu's community ambitions, which seemed otherwise dormant. I don't think Cosatu has ever shifted away from the community issues. We always knew that our role was always going to be more than merely workplace based issues."
And while this might be true in principal and in policy, Cosatu's ambivalent role in the tripartite alliance has always been fodder for the purists, convinced that Cosatu's potential will remain compromised whilst in the alliance.
While COSATU has focused on their institutionalization within the alliance, forcing them to stomach neo-liberal discourse including GEAR and its residual products of privatization and casualisation, which invariably resonated harsh realities onto their membership, their level of internationalization as a movement has never been any better.
"Cosatu's philosophy of internationalism is exceptional, far advanced amongst the world's working classes. We've seen great actions against oppression in Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Burma and now Palestine,
says Director of the Centre for Civil Society Patrick Bond.
But SATAWU dock worker aren't alone. During the Gaza blockade, Greek dockworkers raised the alarm on ships carrying arms to Israel, even threatening to block them.
Following SATAWU's decision to boycott Israeli cargo, similar activities are being replicated across the world. Already, the Maritime Union in Western Australia have pledged their support to the Palestinian cause and refuse to off-load Israeli ships or cargo.
Meanwhile, a spate of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) efforts are underway in a number of European countries as well as in Brazil, Malaysia and Spain.
While governments in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Qatar and Mauritania have severed severing diplomatic ties with Israel after the Gaza invasion. International worker solidarity in countries still fulfilling business-as-usual diplomatic ties with Israel are essentially then seeking to rewrite foreign policy from a bottom up perspective; the impact of which is not to be scoffed at. In the early sixties, dock workers in Denmark refused to off-load South African goods, and this was soon followed by dockworkers in England and Sweden.
It was ultimately these boycotts that led to the harsher sanctions on South Africa in the years to come.
"If our Durban transport workers can prevent Israeli ships from offloading, that will be one of the greatest steps forward in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, and will really punish Israeli war crimes",added Bond.
But it is a long and difficult road; especially in a multi-union environment and the reality that there are just enough people who simply can't afford to turn down casual work. And this is precisely what happened: Workers from the United transport and allied union (Utatu) agreed to off-load the ship.
"We tried to persuade them (Utatu) to support the solidarity action, but this didn't work. When we found out they had agreed to off-load the cargo, we chose to stick to our principles which was essentially mobilizing our membership in showing solidarity with the Palestine people. We didn't want to become sidelined with other unions and we also didn't want confrontation between workers on this issue",
explained Howard.
However, this is not the only obstacle towards fulfilling their mandate and objectives.
Howard added that ships often came in with other country's flags and that intelligence will play a crucial part in this campaign.
But SATAWU will not waver, and the boycott is set to continue, if not intensify.
Azad is a free lance journalist, having completed work with the Mail & Guardian, Al-Qalm and Pambazuka online. Azad is passionate about popularizing socio-economic issues, towards advancing awareness, freedom of expression and democratic values. He is the editor of
Commentary by Azad Essa, who is a columnist on Thoughtleader. He may be contacted a studio505@gmail.com
