Three Young Palestinian Men, graduates of the Ramallah Friends School, shot in Vermont

“Atmosphere of Hate”: AFSC Leader & Palestinian Vermonter on Shooting of 3 College Students—report from Democracy Now (November 28, 2023)

Excerpts from an update on the three university students of Palestinian descent who were shot Saturday in Burlington, Vermont on November 25, 2023. Full program here.

HOST AMY GOODMAN:Two were wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic at the time of the attack. Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmad are now recovering, though Hisham Awartani, who was shot in the spine, has reportedly lost feeling in the lower part of his body. The FBI is reportedly investigating whether the shooting was a hate crime. “This atmosphere of hate” starts “from the federal level,” declares Wafic Faour of the organization Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, who joins us to discuss the recent history of Vermont’s suppression of pro-Palestinian sentiment. “If you talk about Palestinian rights, you’re going to be called ‘terrorist,’” says Faour, yet although “the attacker is a white supremacist, … we don’t call it as is.” We also speak to Joyce Ajlouny, former director of the Ramallah Friends School in the occupied West Bank, where the three victims were students together. She reads poems they wrote in sixth grade and notes that over the course of the decadeslong occupation, “Palestinians of all faiths … have not been offered the humanity and dignity that they deserve.”…

WAFIC FAOUR, VERMONTERS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE:we should talk about what brought this atmosphere of hate. And this is a hate crime, and we should call it as is. From the federal level, the actions of Biden administration’s and Secretary of State Blinken and the defense secretary, they’re supporting Israel unconditionally and talking about the Palestinian victims and questioning the numbers of the Palestinian Health Ministry. This is on the federal level. And here in Vermont, for the past two years we have living under siege, too, from attacks from institutions here. When we brought resolution to talk about Palestinian rights, human rights and the protection of the Palestinian people, we found attacks from administrations in UVM, University of Vermont in Middlebury, and, unfortunately, from many faith-based institutions. And they called us antisemitic. And this atmosphere will bring to the American public that if you talk about Palestinian rights, you’re going to be called “terrorist.” If you wear a keffiyeh like this, you’re going to be called “terrorist.” And this is what brought this crime. And it is hate crime. Unfortunately, our leaders here in Vermont didn’t call it as is. And we should call it as is and use the right words….

JOYCE AJLOUNI, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE RAMALLAH FRIENDS SCHOOL AND THE CURRENT GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE: …Palestinians are — you know, even in our grief, we are depicted as Palestinians “dying” — right? — while Israelis are being “killed” and “massacred.” So language really matters. And I think that is what we have seen time and time again. You know, 47 children died on the West Bank between January and August of this year, way before this war started. And I wonder, like, who cried for them. Who mourned them? Where was the U.S. mainstream media talking about them? And so, it’s not just the language. It’s also the framing — right? — that this is the worst attack since the Holocaust, painting Palestinians as Jew haters, as that this is a religious struggle rather than a people seeking freedom, seeking liberation from a settler colonial system, and remembering, you know, that Palestinians of all faiths are in the same struggle, as well, and they have not been offered the humanity and the dignity that they deserve. And so, I think this is all — this is manifest due to the continued dehumanization, not only by the media but by our government, you know, as Wafic said, that they continue to turn a blind eye. They’re not calling for a ceasefire. They continue to embolden the Israeli atrocities by sending more aid, doubling their aid, and supporting the genocide of our people. And so, that is truly the reason why this is happening….

MORE (video and transcript)

Still from a video by Wayne Savage via AP
Vigil | AP News

Justice for Shadi Khoury, high school student at the Ramallah Friends School: detained and interrogated without charge on Oct 18, 2022

In the early morning hours of October 18, 16-year-old Shadi Khoury was rousted from his bed and beaten by Israeli soldiers who had entered his home to arrest him. Pictures taken at the scene show a trail of blood marking where he was dragged out of his house. Since his detention, Shadi has been held and interrogated without charge or trial. His court case has been postponed three times so far, leaving his family and friends in an ongoing state of anguish and disarray.

Shadi is a student at the Ramallah Friends School, a school that teaches Quaker values of peace and nonviolence. His mom describes him as warm, shy, and confident. He loves music and sports, especially soccer. His parents lead cultural organizations in Jerusalem and his grandmother, who Shadi visits daily, is a prominent Christian activist in Palestine and a long-time friend of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).

READ MORE: From a Palestinian grandmother about what’s happening to her grandson by Alison Weir and Israel-Palestine News by If Americans Only Knew

Please contact your congressional delegation.

New book about Gaza by the American Friends Service Committee

Gaza, home to two million people, continues to face suffocating conditions imposed by Israel. For sixteen years Palestinians in Gaza have lived under a brutal blockade, isolated from the rest of historic Palestine and the world.

AFSCs new anthology, Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, imagines the future of Gaza beyond the cruelties of occupation and Apartheid.  It imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and liberation.

Light in Gaza is a wide-ranging anthology that includes new works by eleven Palestinian writers and poets. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle for liberation and justice. It explores the central question: can a better future for Gaza be imagined as a part of a broader vision for ending the Nakba through return, restoration of rights, and achieving justice?

We hope that Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire will serve as a powerful intervention at an important political moment.

Light in Gaza is available for purchase from Haymarket Books.

Press release announcement of our new publication is here.

More info here.

A series of short video talks about why advocate for justice for Palestine

Jewish, Palestinian, and Quaker voices come together to explore the question “Why do Quakers care about Israel Palestine?” A QuakerSpeak video with a Quaker call to action on Israel-Palestine: Jennifer Bing, AFSC Middle East Program Director; Rabbi Brant Rosen, former AFSC Midwest Education Director; Ayah Bashir in Gaza; and Tamara Tamimi, Jerusalem

Jean Zaru is a Palestinian Quaker from Ramallah Friends Meeting. In 2019, she sent this video message to Annual Sessions.

Chris Jorgenson traveled twice to the region, most recently in early 2020 to volunteer at the Ramallah Friends School

Carole Rein explored the region in 2018 and has spoken about her experiences to numerous Quaker meetings in New England.

Seeing in Palestine, an article by Carole Rein about her 2018 journey to the Holy Land

Skip Schiel has photographed in the region since 2003 and currently concentrates on his project, “The Ongoing and Relentless Nakba.”



More coming from activists, stay tuned to this channel

Expanded Minute For Palestinian Children Spurs Quakers To Further Action Here At Home

Israeli border police arrest a Palestinian youth for throwing stones at their checkpoint in Ras al-Amud neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Friday Sept. 23, 2011, just hours before their president, Mahmoud Abbas, was to deliver his widely anticipated request to the UN. Photo by Mahfouz Abu Turk

Northwest Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, March 7, 2021: No Way to Treat a Child

Minute 2021-03-10

We recognize our own involvement in the incarceration of children and youth, most of them black and brown, here in the United States. Whether in prisons or cages for recent immigrants, this is no way to treat children. We ask New England Yearly Meeting to begin to join in this work.

Spirit leads Northwest Quarterly Meeting to ask New England Yearly Meeting to engage wholeheartedly with American Friends Service Committee’s No Way to Treat a Child campaign “which seeks to challenge and end Israel’s prolonged military occupation of Palestinians by exposing widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system.”  This rights-based effort to halt ongoing infringement of children’s human rights stems from Friends’ belief that no child should be denied due process or tortured.

NEYM Minute 2019-36 urged monthly and quarterly meetings to live into Minute 2017-46, particularly as it applies to Gaza and the West Bank. Consequently, Northwest Quarter requests that New England Yearly Meeting embrace No Way to Treat a Child by calling upon Friends everywhere to endeavor to end these violations of children’s human rights by:

  • Learning how placing children in military prisons violates international law and impedes the right to a childhood;
  • Talking with members of Congress to co-sponsor the bill that replaces H.R. 2407 “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under the Israeli Military;
  • Writing letters in local newspapers as one of many ways of How Quakers can join No Way to Treat a Child;
  • Accompanying  American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—as led locally, nationally, and internationally—in that Quaker organization’s effort to end “the Israeli occupation of Palestinians by exposing the systematic ill treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention;”
  • Connecting what Friends learn about settler colonialism, here in the States, transnationally with Israel Palestine.

—Approved Northwest Quarterly Meeting March 7, 2021

Background information:

While urging Friends everywhere to engage wholeheartedly with American Friends Service Committee’s No Way To Treat A Child program, Quakers in northwestern New England—originally Abenaki/Pennacook land—committed themselves to address systemic racism within our own meetings and communities in Vermont and western New Hampshire: “We recognize our own involvement in the incarceration of children and youth, most of them black and brown, here in the United States.”

The March 7th decision followed earlier approval that Northwest Quarterly Meeting had given No Way To Treat a Child when it convened in Middlebury on December 8, 2019 and again in Burlington on March 8, 2020. This month’s expanded endorsement was an essential and courteous “assist” to New England Yearly Meeting’s presiding clerk who is preparing for Quaker’s upcoming annual meeting in August 2021.

Friends recognized that it is important work that could not wait for three months until their next Quarterly Meeting to continue. The path to their March 2021 decision began 15 months earlier when Northeast Kingdom Quaker Meeting urged Northwest Quarterly Meeting to endorse AFSC’s rights-based campaign, No Way to Treat a Child—“which seeks to challenge and end Israel’s prolonged military occupation of Palestinians by exposing widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system.”

Consequently, Friends acknowledged the enlargement of what we had already approved a year ago by including five action steps. One of these urges local Quakers to apply what they are learning about settler colonialism here in the States, transnationally with Israel Palestine.

Earlier the yearly meeting’s presiding clerk, Bruce Neumann, had urged Northwest Quarter Friends to be as specific as possible—while waiting for the new House Resolution that replaces HR 2407— about naming steps that describe how Friends can “endeavor to end these violations of children’s human rights” as AFSC has urged for a number of years.

Original article on No Way to Treat a Child minute March 2021

Israel must release all Palestinian child detainees amid COVID-19 pandemic (Defence for Children International (April 2020)

Israeli border guards detain a Palestinian boy during a demonstration outside the Lions Gate, a main entrance to Al-Aqsa mosque compound on 17 July 2017 (AFP)

Quakers (and others) can strengthen their opposition to caging children by joining the No Way To Treat A Child campaign.

Image result for children arrested israel

Friends can strengthen their opposition to caging children by joining the No Way To Treat A Child campaign. Spirit continues to lead Northeast Kingdom Quaker Meeting to explore, discern, and season our support of No Way To Treat A Child over a year when Northwest Quarter (comprising Friends from Vermont and western New Hampshire) supported passage of Rep. Betty McCullum’s H.R. 2407: Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under the Israeli Military Occupation Act. Friends in Maine and New Hampshire—Belfast, Midcoast, and Hanover Monthly Meetings—recently sought our help to learn more about this effort to prohibit U.S. taxpayer funding for the military detention of children by any country.

Friends agree that no child should be tortured and no child should be denied due process. AFSC’s campaigns for justice in Palestine and Israel reflect a rights-based approach. Since HR 2407 died in the last Congress, a new “House Resolution” is likely to come forward during the opening months of this current 117th Congress. We urge Friends to engage with your members of Congress to become co-sponsors of legislation supporting the rights of children.

 

Reminding us that “there are 200,000 young people under 18 years old in prisons throughout the United States” AFSC’s Healing Justice Coordinator Lewis Webb asserts that America’s criminal justice system targets black and brown children in the same way that the Israeli military occupiers target Palestinian children. Monthly Meetings can respond to New England Yearly Meeting’s Two Calls to Action transnationally by examining settler colonialism both here in the States and in Israel/Palestine. Join AFSC’s effort to defend immigrant rights and broadcast how enforcement, detention, and deportation is, as Kristin Kumpf calls it, a “cycle grounded in violence.”

H.R. 2407 – Promoting Human Rights For Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation

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

Faith organizations urge Biden administration to work for peace in Israel and Palestine (AFSC)

On Dec. 14, 2020, 17 U.S. churches and Christian agencies, including the American Friends Service Committee, sent a letter to the incoming Biden administration outlining areas of hope and concern regarding the situation in Israel/Palestine, and urging the Biden administration to take steps to work toward peace and justice.

The letter notes that, “Over the last four years U.S. policy has moved in directions that have alienated the U.S. from many of its international partners and supported the deepening of Israel’s occupation while undermining long term efforts to realize a just and lasting peace. If the U.S. remains committed to realizing peace with justice in Israel and Palestine there is a need for an immediate change in policy and approach when your administration enters office.”

Specifically, the letter asks the incoming Biden administration to work in six areas to:
1.    Ensure that all parties are respected and included in negotiations towards a just and lasting peace based on international law;
2.    Restate the U.S. position that settlements are illegal under international law and take action to ensure that any further Israeli settlement construction and growth results in political consequences;
3.    Resume funding to the Palestinian Authority, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and other U.N. and humanitarian actors working in the West Bank and Gaza;
4.    Ensure accountability;
5.    Reiterate the U.S. position that territory controlled by Israel as a result of the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, are occupied territories subject to international law and are not recognized parts of Israel; and
6.    Make clear that criticism of Israel, including support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions actions, is protected and legitimate speech.

The full content of the letter can be read HERE.

Views of Joe Biden about Palestine-Israel (Jewish Virtual Library)

By a American Friends Service Committee staff member in Jerusalem: Protesters demand democracy for all in Israel

By Sahar Vardi (August 14, 2020)

Sahar, the author, getting shot by a water cannon at a protest on July 14th
Sahar, the author, getting shot by a water cannon at a protest on July 14th, 2020 Photo: / AFSC

July 14th is the Bastille day–the day in which the Bastille fell, and that has come to symbolize the French revolution. This year, on this highly symbolic day, a steady, years old anti-corruption movement in Israel morphed itself into something else completely. By the end of that night, more than 50 protesters –including myself–were led to a police station soaking wet after hours of water cannons trying to disperse the hundreds of protesters blocking roads all around Jerusalem.

The background to these protests is a combination of a prime minister who has been indicted and currently stands on trial on multiple charges of corruption, an “emergency coalition government” formed to respond to the COVID crisis after three elections in which Israeli politics were at a complete deadlock, a complete failure of the government to address the spread of the “second wave” of COVID in the country, and the failed economic response to COVID giving symbolic blanket payouts on the one hand while failing to actually address the needs of those who lost their jobs and incomes….

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

Protesters holding a "Democracy for all" sign in Arabic and Hebrew
Protesters holding a “Democracy for all” sign in Arabic and Hebrew
Israelis protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outside the Prime Minister’s official residence in Jerusalem on July 24, 2020. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi

Northwest Quarter Minute on No Way To Treat a Child

An Israeli soldier holds down 11-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed Tamimi in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. ABBAS MOMANI/AFP/Getty
2020­3­8. A number of Meetings in the Quarter have considered the Quarter’s charge to look at the AFSC’s No Way to Treat a Child program. Friends in Bennington, Burlington, and Putney as well as Friends present report being in unity with this program. Others are still considering or have not yet had a chance to complete this task. We spoke of ways to continue with this concern.

We ask New England Yearly Meeting to consider supporting the AFSC program “No Way to Treat a Child” and support the bill HR2407, entitled “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under the Israeli Military Occupation Act” at Sessions.

We might like to hear more information on a Zoom call or a webinar, although we may tap into existing webinars on this topic. We would like to have a Quarter letter-writing campaign, and Progressive Secretary might be a tool to accomplish this. We might host speakers at a future Quarterly Meeting. We are in this for the long haul.

Several people stepped forward to move this work forward. Carl Williams, Connie Kincaid-Brown, Scott Rhodewalt, and Susan Rhodewalt will work on a letter packet. Ruah Swennerfelt will work with Progressive Secretary to post the letter. Ruah Swennerfelt will also invite Brad Parker of the National Defense for Children and Jennifer Bing of the American Friends Service Committee for our Zoom call or webinar. Cliff Bennett and Scott Rhodewalt will help.

We leave the discussion of this topic reminding ourselves again to search for the courage to talk with our neighbors on these hard topics. It is part of a larger picture. Concern for the safety and welfare of children applies not only to the Israeli/Palestinian border but also treatment of children at the U.S.- Mexico border and in our detention system. We need to hold ourselves accountable. We also need to trust in the Spirit.

Defense for Children International-Palestine

Is this disturbing video Israel’s Eric Garner moment? by Max Fishermax, August 31, 2015

Israel-Palestine Working Group of NEYM 2019-2020 Report

Join AFSC in memorializing the 521 Palestinian children killed in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge (2008-2009) while demanding change.

“Great openings” appear as this spring’s massive protests make visible the many connections among oppressed communities seeking justice. The Israel Palestine Working Group (IPWG)—activists nurturing comprehension of shifting realities—asks Friends during 2020 sessions to affirm that the Equality Testimony is universal. Let us embrace our awareness of unity among all who seek justice both nationally and globally.

Can we unite, now, when asked to accompany the oppressed? There was no discussion last year when Friends heard internationally renowned Palestinian Quaker lecturer and author Jean Zaru challenge NEYM to make a decision about whom we are accompanying—the oppressor or the oppressed?

IPWG’s major emphasis this year is AFSC’s No Way To Treat A Child campaign. Northwest Quarterly Meeting’s Minute 202038 asks Friends, at 2020 sessions, to support HR 2407: Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under the Israeli Military Occupation Act. This national effort invites us all to 1) Educate folks about Palestinian children incarcerated in Israeli military prisons and H.R. 2407; 2) Write an op-ed in support of H.R. 2407; 3) Lobby Congress on behalf of H.R. 2407, as an individual or group.

IPWG coordinated an endorsement of AFSC’s call for Israel to release all children from military prisons with the Racial Social Economic Justice Committee; together with RSEJ, we also asked Friends to work for the release of those most vulnerable to Covid-19 in U.S. prisons.

One of our 2019 lunchtime discussions focused on the paucity of Monthly Meeting and Yearly Meeting connections with AFSC’s efforts to achieve justice in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Another looked at Jewish Voice for Peace’s Deadly Exchange campaign to end Israeli military training of police across the United States. More HERE.

Theme-organized informal lunch conversations, this one about the Deadly Exchange campaign of Jewish Voice for Peace about Israel training US security officers, including police

In another 2019 business meeting, the presiding clerk asked Skip Schiel to speak about his 17 years of activism in Palestine: a witness that was visible in an exhibit of Skip’s photographs from his two-month journey last spring. He answered questions about “The Ongoing Nakba” during a dinner presentation.

IPWG makes available The Promised Land Exhibit, a set of traveling panels from The Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience. Monthly meetings find it to be helpful as they search for the meaning of antisemitism, colonization, Islamophobia, racism, and Zionism.

The Promised Land Exhibit by the Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience

In other developments this year: Cliff Bennett attended the Third Conference of Scientists for Palestine at MIT; Northeast Kingdom MM approved a travel minute for Scott and Susan Rhodewalt; and Palestine Museum in Woodbridge, Connecticut featured Skip Schiel’s The Ongoing Nakba photographic project exhibit.

Exhibit by Skip Schiel, The Ongoing Nakba, internally expelled Palestinian refugees in the West Bank

Our WEBSITE is a resource for Friends to discern who to accompany in seeking justice. Knowing that “an injury to one is an injury to all” we remember “there is no justice until there is justice for all.”

*George Fox used the phrase “Great Openings“ many times in his journal to refer to revelations and discoveries of the spirit, as in this passage, “great openings concerning the things written in the Revelations.”

Skip Schiel, Clerk
Scott Rhodewalt, Recording Clerk

NEYM 2020 sessions will be ONLINE. Our working group’s plans include two webinars, The Promised Land Exhibit with Steve Feldman, its founder, and Max Carter, former faculty member of Guilford College, and long time activist for Palestinian rights; and discussion of the annexation of major portions of the West Bank and Jordan Valley, possibly with four American Friends Service Committee staff, Dilit Baum, Sahar Vardi, and Mike Merryman-Lotz, Dawood Hammoudeh, and Jehad Abusalim.

Last summer’s Palestine-Israel program at sessions in Castleton Vermont

Israel-Palestine Working Group 2020 Annual Report

Photographs by Skip Schiel of New England Yearly Meeting sessions, 2019:

Quakers gather in New England

Provoke one another to love and to good works

Selectively ending incarceration during the age of the coronavirus pandemic

Israel raids offices of Palestinian prisoner rights activists ...

Palestinian prisoners sit during visiting hours at Israel’s Gilboa prison (AFP)

Friends’ compassion for those who are imprisoned (about 2.3 million) leads us* to call for monthly and yearly meetings throughout this nation to support:

    1. American Friends Service Committee’s call for compassionate release of elderly people and others who are medically vulnerable;  (AFSC)
    2. Palestine’s request that Israel “take immediate action to release all Palestinian child detainees in Israeli prisons due to the rapid global spread of the COVID-19 virus” as this is No Way To Treat A Child.  (DCIP)

Quakers’ legacy of being imprisoned offers us empathy for all who face the current pandemic while detained in intrinsically unsanitary and crowded conditions. Incarceration during the time of plague is genocide. Consequently, the Israel Palestine Working Group and the Racial, Social, and Economic Justice committee of NEYM urge all Friends to work for the release of the vulnerable.

*The Israel Palestine Working Group and the Racial, Social, and Economic Justice Committee of New England Yearly Meeting

Supreme Court Rules California Must Cut Prison Population : NPR

Inmates at California’s Chino State Prison sit inside a metal cage in the hallway as they wait to be assigned permanent housing or for medical, mental health, counselor or other appointments.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

“What does justice look like? Moving towards a Just Peace in Palestine and Israel,” a conference Dec. 14 to 16, 2018

From Mike Merryman Lotz of the AFSC

The Old City of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives

Join the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker Palestine Israel Network, and Pendle Hill for a weekend of exploring what it will take to realize a just and lasting peace in Palestine and Israel.

From Dec.14 to 16, we’re holding a conference titled “What does justice look like? Moving towards a Just Peace in Palestine and Israel.” We invite you to join us for this exciting opportunity to learn more about Israel and Palestine and what you can do to bring change.

Find more details and register on the Pendle Hill website. Scholarships are available to offset costs.

AFSC and Quakers have engaged in Palestine for over a century and worked for peace with justice since 1948. After decades without change, we want to open up a conversation about what’s needed for a just future.

It has been 70 years since the 1948 war, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and the State of Israel was born. It has been over 50 years since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, gaining control of all of historic Palestine. And it has been 25 years since Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn at the start of the Oslo Peace Process.

But 25 years after the start of what was intended to be a five-year peace process, we must question that framework. Why hasn’t peace yet been achieved? What paradigm shifts are needed to bring change? What are the historic injustices that need to be righted, and what might it look like to address these issues today? What actions can people outside of the conflict take to promote change?

Join us for an interactive weekend of panels and workshops to:

  • Find out what is needed to support change in Israel and Palestine.
  • Gain skills for taking action and building intersectional work toward change.
  • Connect with others interested in building toward a different future.
  • Give and receive support as you continue to work toward change after the conference.

Register for the conference today.

I hope that you can join us at Pendle Hill.

In peace,

Mike Merryman-Lotze
Middle East Program Director

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)

Why Are Palestinians Protesting in Gaza?

 

A wounded Palestinian demonstrator is evacuated during a protest against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba, at the Israel-Gaza border in the southern Gaza Strip May 14, 2018. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Once again, the Israeli military has turned its guns on Gaza — this time on unarmed protestors, in a series of shootings over the last few weeks. Gaza’s already under-resourced hospitals are straining to care for the 1,600 protesters who have been injured, on top of 40 killed.

According to a group of United Nations experts, “there is no available evidence to suggest that the lives of heavily armed security forces were threatened” by the unarmed demonstrators they fired on.

The violence is getting some coverage in the news. But the conditions in Gaza that have pushed so many to protest remain largely invisible. So do their actual demands.

The Great Return March was organized by grassroots groups in Gaza as a peaceful action with three key demands: respect for refugees’ right to return to their homes, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Seventy years ago, Palestinians were expelled from their homes en masse when their land was seized for the state of Israel. Many became refugees, with millions of people grouped into shrinking areas like Gaza. Fifty years ago, the rest of historic Palestine came under Israeli military occupation.

While these refugees’ right of return has been recognized by the international community, no action has been taken to uphold that right. Meanwhile, the occupation has become further and further entrenched.

For over a decade, the people of Gaza have lived under a military-imposed blockade that severely limits travel, trade, and everyday life for its 2 million residents. The blockade effectively bans nearly all exports, limits imports, and severely restricts passage in and out.

In over 20 visits to Gaza over the last 10 years, I’ve watched infrastructure degrade under both the blockade and a series of Israeli bombings.

Beautiful beaches are marred by raw sewage, which flows into the sea in amounts equivalent to 43 Olympic swimming pools every day. Access to water and electricity continually decreases, hospitals close, school hours are limited, and people are left thirsty and in the dark.

These problems can only be fixed by ending the blockade.

As Americans, we bear direct responsibility for the horrific reality in Gaza. Using our tax money, the U.S. continues to fund the Israeli military through $3.8 billion in aid annually.

A group of U.S.-based faith organizations has called out U.S. silence in a statement supporting protesters and condemning the killings: “The United States stood by and allowed Israel to carry out these attacks without any public criticism or challenge,” they said. “Such U.S. complicity is a continuation of the historical policy of active support for Israel’s occupation and U.S. disregard for Palestinian rights.”

The signatories include the American Friends Service Committee, where I work, an organization that started providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Gaza as far back as 1948.

While the U.S. does give money to the United Nations and international aid groups working in Gaza, it’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to our support of the military laying siege to the territory.

As my colleagues in Gaza have made clear, what they need isn’t more aid. That humanitarian aid is needed because of the blockade. What they need is freedom from the conditions that make life unlivable — like the blockade itself — and a long-term political solution.

Ignoring the reasons Gaza is in crisis only hurts our chances to address this manmade humanitarian horror.

Mike Merryman-Lotze has worked with the American Friends Service Committee as the Palestine-Israel Program Director since 2010.

 

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

We forget where we came from. Our Jewish
names from the Exile give us away,
bring back the memory of flower and fruit, medieval cities,
metals, knights who turned to stone, roses,
spices whose scent drifted away, precious stones, lots of red,
handicrafts long gone from the world
(the hands are gone too).

—Yehuda Amichai (from Jews in the Land of Israel)

Other perspectives, the first with photos:

Israeli forces kill dozens of Palestinians in Gaza ‘massacre’ (May 14, 2018)

With the Great Return March, Palestinians Are Demanding a Life of Dignity (April 6, 2018)

‘We want to return to our lands without bloodshed or bombs’ (March 30, 2018)

Bloody Monday, Every Day of the Week,  

AFSC among human rights orgs barred from Israel

PUBLISHED: JANUARY 8, 2018

Yesterday the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was included on a list of 20 organizations whose staff may be denied entry to Israel because of their support for the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

Motivated by Quaker belief in the worth and dignity of all people, AFSC has supported and joined in nonviolent resistance for over 100 years. We answered the call for divestment from apartheid in South Africa, and we have done the same with the call for BDS from Palestinians who have faced decades of human rights violations.

Throughout our history, we have stood with communities facing oppression and violence around the world. In 1947 we were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in part for our support for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. We will continue our legacy of speaking truth to power and standing for peace and justice without exception in Israel, occupied Palestine, and around the world.

All people, including Palestinians, have a right to live in safety and peace and have their human rights respected. For 51 years, Israel has denied Palestinians in the occupied territories their fundamental human rights, in defiance of international law. While Israeli Jews enjoy full civil and political rights, prosperity, and relative security, Palestinians under Israeli control enjoy few or none of those rights or privileges.

The Palestinian BDS call aims at changing this situation, asking the international community to use proven nonviolent social change tactics until equality, freedom from occupation, and recognition of refugees’ right to return are realized. AFSC’s Principles for a Just and Lasting Peace in Palestine and Israel affirm each of these rights. Thus, we have joined others around the world in responding to the Palestinian-led BDS call.  As Palestinians seek to realize their rights and end Israeli oppression, what are the alternatives left to them if we deny them such options?

Quakers pioneered the use of boycotts when they helped lead the “Free Produce Movement,” a boycott of goods produced using slave labor during the 1800s. AFSC has a long history of supporting economic activism, which we view as an appeal to conscience, aimed at raising awareness among those complicit in harmful practices, and as an effective tactic for removing structural support for oppression.

The 17th century Quaker abolitionist John Woolman spoke to the spiritual foundation of this work when he said, “May we look upon our treasures, and the furniture of our houses, and the garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions.”

The ban on entry to Israel for activists who support the Palestinian-led BDS movement is part of a larger effort by the Israeli government to silence and constrain human rights and anti-occupation activists. In recent months, more Palestinian activists have faced arrest, death threats, and imprisonment without charge or trial in response to nonviolent activism for human rights.  In addition, organizations inside Israel have been denied funding and access to event venues and have faced threats of trial and imprisonment.

At a time when the Israeli government is moving to expand settlements, redefine Jerusalem, and annex portions of the West Bank, support for nonviolent activism that seeks freedom, equality, and justice is critical.

Therefore, as long as these and other human rights violations persist, we will continue to support Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions efforts as effective nonviolent tools for realizing political and social change.  We hope one day to see Israelis and Palestinians live together in peace. This will only happen when the human rights of all are recognized and respected.

ORIGINAL STATEMENT HERE (JAN 8, 2018)

AFSC: Boycott, divestment and sanctions explained

Other organizations banned because of BDS advocacy

What is BDS?

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

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