Palestine Israel Action Group (Ann Arbor Quakers)



Ann Arbor (Michigan) Quakers promoting peace in Israel Palestine

Why PIAG protests Israel’s Occupation
From its earliest inception the Religious Society of Friends has placed rejection of war as basic to our understanding of God’s will.  We believe that human beings are capable of solving conflicts through reason, an empathetic understanding of the other’s point of view, and the courage to take principled, nonviolent action in the face of injustice.  In this spirit, the Palestine Israel Action Group of Ann Arbor Friends Meeting protests the Israeli government’s military repression of the Palestinian people and occupation of their lands, a process of control that contravenes international law, the Geneva Convention, and United Nations mandates. Domination through violence engenders further violence in a tragic cycle that causes suffering to Israelis as well as Palestinians. Such repression cannot assure a nation’s security.

What we have to share
PIAG has produced Educational Resources and Tools for Activists that can be used by religious and secular organizations locally, nationally, and internationally. We invite readers to adapt these materials for use in their own communities and Contact Us with additional ideas or suggestions. Besides our educational materials, PIAG’s Recommended Actions suggest a variety of ways to engage in economic pressure against Israel’s Occupation.  Individuals and groups can also support positive economic engagement by purchasing Palestinian olive oil and handcrafts and selling them at public events.

Should Quakers endorse divestment?
For decades, Friends have called for independence, security, and a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians. This call has been voiced widely by others working for peace, including Israelis, Palestinians, and Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and secular peace groups in the United States and worldwide. This call, however, has gone unheeded.  Our own government in fact continues to fund and support much of the Israeli repression.  The Occupation and suffering continue.

 As a result, religious and secular peace groups are using economic leverage to make a stronger moral and political statement.  They are engaging with U.S. corporations that sell arms, bulldozers, and other products sustaining Israel’s occupation. They are refraining from economic support for such companies and avoiding exports from illegal West Bank settlements. These measures are not meant to bankrupt or destroy Israel, but to pressure Israel’s right-wing government to respect international law, ease its stranglehold on Palestinians, and begin to bargain in good faith.

 PIAG believes that economic engagement is one of many non-violent ways to express a commitment to justice. We are inspired by an earlier Quaker activist, John Woolman, who refused to use the postal service because of the suffering of young post-boys who rode the pony express, and who counseled Friends to avoid supporting the evils of economic exploitation and slavery.   Heeding George Fox’s message to “let your life speak,” we encourage Friends and others to actively oppose Israel’s occupation through a variety of economic measures ranging from dialogue with corporations that supply military equipment to Israel, to shareholder resolutions, to institutional and personal divestment from U.S. and Israeli companies that support the Occupation.

Please see PIAG’s Recommended Actions to support a just and viable peace in Israel/Palestine.

This site was last updated 01/24/2013

The Database of Military and Israeli Security Export

The Database of Israeli Military and Security Export (DIMSE) provides data on trade and use of Israeli military, security and police weapons and equipment as well as other services from the year 2000. The Database support searches by Country and by weapons and aims to be a resource for civil society actors seeking information about this industry.

Israel ranks annually among the 10 biggest arms exporters in the world, but does not report regularly to the UN registry on conventional arms, and has not ratifies the Arms Trade Treaty – the international treaty regulating international arms trade. The Israeli domestic legal system does not require transparency on issues on arms trade, and there are currently no legislated human right restrictions on Israeli arms export beyond obeying by UN security council arm embargos.

Due to this public information about Israel’s arms export is extremely limited. While this database does not include all of Israel’s arms exports globally, its aim is to collect and make accessible publicly published information about Israel’s arms export.

DIMSE is provided by The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization that promotes lasting peace with justice, as a practical expression of faith in action since 1917.

MORE ABOUT AND TO REACH THE DATA BASE

New book by a Quaker Palestinian author about Palestine-Israel

From a review by Steve Chase in Friends Journal, February 2021, of two new books about Palestine-Israel, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa’ed Atshan, and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, by Rashid Khalidi

Adding to the complexity of the current situation, Sa’ed Atshan’s book embraces a post-colonial vision of equality for all people in Israel–Palestine but explicitly includes attention to the rights of queer Palestinians. I remember hearing Atshan speak at Pendle Hill study center in Wallingford, Pa., several years ago. His personal story moved me. He shared his challenges of growing up Palestinian under Israeli military occupation and growing up gay in occupied Palestinian society. In his book, he tells his story in more detail and sheds light on how “social movements are able (or not) to balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis at a time.” As he says, “queer Palestinians face systems from all directions of marginalization, policing, and repression of both Zionism and homophobia.”

Atshan requests we support these two entwined struggles as a moral and strategic imperative. One of the most eye-opening observations in Atshan’s book is the complex way homophobia has been weaponized in the service of the oppressive, U.S.-backed Israeli system of apartheid. On the one hand, the existence of significant Palestinian homophobia has allowed Israeli security forces to entrap queer Palestinians for years and coerce them into being informants and collaborators against the Palestinian national liberation movement by threatening them with exposure. This has, in turn, hardened homophobic attitudes among some Palestinian rights activists, who have come to see LGBTQ Palestinians as traitors to the cause of freedom. On the other hand, the Israeli government has also made strategic use of “pinkwashing” in promoting some real advances on queer rights in Israel, as well as encouraging international LGBTQ tourism to Tel Aviv, in an ongoing effort to brand Israel as a modern and progressive society, while deflecting criticism of its settler colonial policies of dispossession, occupation, and discrimination against Palestinians.

The rise and growth of an organized Palestinian LGBTQ liberation movement in Israel–Palestine since 2002, which Atshan chronicles in this book, has courageously expanded “the spaces for joy, pleasure, and love” for queer Palestinians and holds the promise of disarming the two-pronged weaponization of homophobia the State of Israel uses to oppress all Palestinians. Yet Atshan also documents how the movement “reached a plateau in 2012” and “has neither grown nor retreated” since then. Several of the book’s chapters offer a deep dive into the many social forces, which he collectively calls “the empire of critique,” that have inhibited the movement’s growth and long-term impact by relentlessly “gauging, judging, and critiquing the words and intentions of queer Palestinians and their allies.” His nuanced analysis includes the Israeli state, its Zionist supporters, Palestinian political institutions like Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, religious prejudices and cultural mores, and even the hypercritical perspectives of some transnational solidarity movement activists and some radical academics.

The goal of Atshan’s sensitive “critique of critique” is fostering a “transforming activism with loving energy” that helps the Palestinian LGBTQ movement start to grow again and reach its full potential. His long-term hope is “that Israelis and Palestinians, straight and queer, can all live together as equals.” My hope is that all Friends will seek to find ways to help achieve this healing vision, especially Friends from the United States and the United Kingdom.

Recently, I came across a bold quote on the “Quakers engage to end racism” Facebook group; it had originally been posted by the Palestine Project’s page and then shared by Jewish Voice for Peace. The quote, from Yara Hawari of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, began, “It is time to stop lecturing Palestinians and to start listening.”

Having just read two new books by Palestinians, I agree. The first is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies. The second is Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Quaker author Sa’ed Atshan, assistant professor of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College. Read together, these books offer a compelling and complementary perspective of great value for Quakers trying to clarify their thinking (and action) on the human rights situation in Israel–Palestine.

I bought Khalidi’s book after his author talk in Washington, D.C., last February. There, he described the ongoing conflict as a colonial war initiated by the European Zionist movement in partnership with the British Empire from 1917 until 1948, and then continued by the newly established State of Israel, now backed by the United States. According to Khalidi, the U.S. government’s longstanding support for Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing, military occupation, illegal settlements, and racist discrimination has been obscured by high-sounding rhetoric but is profoundly oppressive and destructive. This is a harsh reckoning, but the overall argument in his book is convincing. The historical research done by Khalidi is extensive and well-documented.

The book opens with Khalidi sharing the 1899 correspondence between Khalidi’s great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, then the mayor of Jerusalem, and Theodor Herzl, a prominent European Zionist leader. In his letter, Yusuf Diya expresses his respect for Herzl’s literary work, his sympathy for the intense problem of antisemitism in Europe, and his recognition of the cultural affinity of Jews with historic Palestine. He goes on, however, to say that the creation of an ethno-nationalist Jewish State in Palestine that displaces and discriminates against Christian and Muslim Palestinians is not a just solution to the problem of European antisemitism. He closes with the plea, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”

Herzl wrote back reassuringly that Zionism only sought the immigration of a limited “number of Jews” from Europe and would not harm Palestinian lives, lands, and livelihoods, or seek to displace a single Palestinian. Unfortunately, reports Khalidi, Herzl lied. Four years before, he wrote in his diary about Zionists colonizing Palestine with Great Power support and needing to displace and dispossess Palestinians to create their envisioned “Jewish State.” Moreover, in the corporate charter Herzl co-wrote for the Jewish-Ottoman Land Company, he specifically included the goal of displacing Palestinians to “other provinces and territories of the Ottoman Empire.”

Other early Zionist leaders were more honest about their objectives, even naming one of the main organizations the Palestine Jewish Colonial Association. In addition, Russian Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, boldly stated in 1925 what Yusuf Diya suspected in 1899: “Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.” Why? As Jabotinsky explained:

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”

All this sounds very different from the common stories about Zionism and the birth of Israel that many of us have grown up with, but Khalidi notes that this is only because “once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten in Israel and the West.” His book restores this understanding and focuses on “six turning points” in the settler colonial war against Palestine, from the British government’s imperial Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the far-right military and diplomatic alliance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former U.S. President Donald Trump. It chronicles this multi-phased war of aggression and the Palestinian national liberation movement’s often confused mix of diplomacy, terrorism, armed struggle, and nonviolent civil resistance. I would hope Friends, as seekers of truth, would all be willing to at least consider Khalidi’s detailed historical narrative and concluding reflections on how to nonviolently dismantle “the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation” offering full equality to all in Israel–Palestine.

Steve Chase is a member of Friends Meeting of Washington (D.C.) and the author of the Pendle Hill pamphlet Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions?: A Quaker Zionist Rethinks Palestinian Rights.

Original article in Friends Journal

Dr Sa’ed Atshan: ‘Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique‪’,‬ podcast by Oxford Society for International Development (October 2020)

What the NGO Monitor Claims about the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

This is highly distorted view of the courageous work of our esteemed quasi-Quaker sister organization, the AFSC. A damning point of view—yet to me, ironically, an affirming catalog of its many campaigns including No Way to Treat a Child, and Gaza Unlocked. I strongly believe understanding the views of one’s adversaries helps us argue and work for the truth. Wikipedia reports that “The on-line communications editor of NGO Monitor, Arnie Draiman, was indefinitely banned from editing articles [on Wikipedia] about the Israeli-Arab conflict for biased editing, concealing his place of work and using a second account in a way that is forbidden by Wikipedia policy.[18]” Please check my links at the end for rebuttals to NGO Monitor. (Skip Schiel)

Some excerpts:

ACTIVITIES

  • Actively promotes boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel; accuses Israel of “apartheid against Palestinians”; and advocates for the “right of return,” meaning the end of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
  • Accuses Israel of “obvious violence in Gaza…slow and systematic ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem through continuing displacement from sprawling illegal settlements, land grabs, the separation barrier…crushing restrictions of Palestinian movement, and a network of racist laws.”
  • AFSC supports efforts to encourage Israeli youth to dodge the draft and promotes “anti-normalization,” rejecting dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.
    • In 2015, “Palestine-Israel Program Director” Mark Merryman-Lotze explained AFSC’s “position supportive of anti-normalization principles,” rejecting “any project, initiative, or activity, in Palestine or internationally, that aims (implicitly or explicitly) to bring together Palestinians and Israelis (people or institutions) without placing as its goal opposition and resistance to the Israeli occupation and structural inequalities.”
  • AFSC operates a project with Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) called “Hamushim” (“Armed”) that “works to expose the true human price of the Israeli military industry and arms trade, as well as to mobilize actions against it.”  The organization’s activists accuse Israel of selling weapons to dictatorships and countries that suppress human rights in exchange for their sympathetic votes in the UN mechanisms.
    • On November 13, 2017, Hamushim held an event titled “The Israeli Arms Empire” which discussed how “In the past 50 years, Israeli weapons have been handed over to almost all perpetrators of crimes against humanity, civil wars and genocide” as well as the “Israeli connection to the suppression of protests by Black Lives Matter in Ferguson, USA.”
  • In May 2018, on the “70th anniversary of the Nakba…[and] 50 years of the Israeli occupation,” AFSC accused Israel of putting Palestinians “under a brutal military regime that systematically denies them their most basic rights” as well  as maintaining “institutionalized inequality and injustice.”
  • In October 2017, Jennifer Bing, director of the Chicago AFSC Palestine-Israel Program, spoke at a conference titled “Parallel Liberation Struggles: Lessons in Resistance” commemorating the “100-year Palestinian resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial project and explor[ing] the similarities in violence used against Palestinians, African Americans, and Native Americans and their methods of resistance.”

BDS ACTIVITIES

  • AFSC is a leader of BDS campaigns on campuses and churches in the United States, and works to increase Palestinian participation in BDS campaigns.
  • In February 2018, AFSC stated its support for “boycott and divestment campaigns that target companies complicit in the occupation.” According to AFSC, “BDS has proven effective as a nonviolent tool for realizing political and social change… AFSC answered the call for divestment from apartheid in South Africa. Supporting the call for BDS from Palestinians seeking freedom, equality, and justice is just as critical today.”
  • AFSC launched an online investment screening tool to “help individuals and institutions identify companies on their investment portfolios that are directly complicit in ongoing severe violations of human rights and international law.”

STAFF MEMBERS

  • Dalit Baum
  • Joyce Ajlouny
    • Ajlouny, General Secretary of AFSC, formerly served as Country Director for the Palestinian territories and Israel for Oxfam GB and Director of the Friends School in Ramallah.
    • On November 6, 2017, Ajlouny signed a letter to members of Congress opposing anti-BDS legislation and “support[ing] nonviolent means to end the 50-year-old occupation.” According to the letter, “bills also conflate Israel and the settlements, erasing the important distinction between Israel and its illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. They further imply that opposition to Israel’s practices in the territories is the same as being anti-Israel. We are troubled by the bills’ intent to penalize or criminalize the use of economic measures as a legitimate means of opposing policies that inhibit human rights.”
    • In a June 2015 interview with the Jerusalem Fund, Ajlouny explained that “As a Quaker school, it is our role to guide students to a nonviolent path. The BDS movement is very big on our campus, too. Our students are always challenging us as an administration to see if we are keeping up with BDS.”
    • In an interview published in 2015, Joyce Ajlouny also accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”

READ THE ENTIRE ANALYSIS

AFSC ON THIS WEBSITE

AN OPINION ABOUT NGO MONITOR ITSELF (in “+972,” an  online journal)

ENGAGING CRITICS OF BDS, A RESOURCE FOR ACTIVISTS (from the Quaker Palestine Israel Network)

Quaker Palestine Israel Network (QPIN)

Coordinating Quaker Efforts to Bring Peace and Justice to Palestinians and Israelis

About QPIN

Over many years, Quakers have worked to support the development of lasting peace with justice in Israel Palestine. In the past few years several monthly meetings and yearly meetings have issued minutes of support for boycott and divestment as a nonviolent approach to advocate for change. Ann Arbor (MI) Meeting, Swannanoa Valley (NC) Meeting, Illinois Yearly Meeting to name just a few have expressed concern and actively advocated for peace and there is a growing energy and movement emerging among Friends. QPIN (The Quaker Palestine Israel Network) was founded in the Fall of 2013 to support the growth of this movement of Friends, to educate about boycott, divestment, and sanctions as a nonviolent approach, and to work together across Quaker meetings and churches and with the interfaith movement for greater impact.

Quakers With a Concern for Palestine-Israel

Working for a Just and Lasting Peace

How can Friends work for a just and lasting peace? What are Monthly Meetings, Quaker organizations, and individual Friends doing to help? What books, speakers, films, articles and websites can help us understand the issues more deeply? How may Friends reach out to others to learn and to share? Find out more on the Quakers With a Concern for Palestine-Israel website.

FOR THE MOMENT, THIS SITE IS DISABLED. WE HOPE TO RESURRECT IT SOON.

FOR THE MOST RECENT VERSION (AUG 31, 2018) OF THE WEBSITE, TRY THIS.

The American Friends Service Committee work in Palestine-Israel

 

 

 

Campaigns and news

Among their issues: ending discrimination, building peace, defending immigrant rights, ending mass incarceration, and building economic justice.

Founded in the aftermath of World War I to serve conscientious objectors and provide humanitarian aid to those suffering the war’s results, the AFSC is a quasi-Quaker organization, meaning it operates along Quaker principles, has a largely Quaker board, and functions with a mixture of staff, some of whom are Quaker.

The AFSC shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 with the British Friends Service Council on behalf of Quakers worldwide for its humanitarian and advocacy work. Currently it takes a leading role in bringing peace, justice, and security to all parties in the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Their website

Britain Yearly Meeting’s 2014 statement

A statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict made by Quakers in Britain at their Yearly Meeting in Bath, 8 August 2014

This minute, coming soon after the violence over Gaza during the summer of 2014, inspired many Quaker meetings to decide what they could say and do about the conflicts.

“The hostilities in Gaza are the latest eruption of the deep and long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Root causes of this conflict, including the structural violence of occupation, must be addressed. Such violence damages all the people of the region. The present time, with its faltering ceasefires and talks, is a time of both crisis and opportunity.”   

© 2014-2023 Quakers Advocating Justice for Palestine
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