The Goldstone Report- Boycotting Israel

Phyllis Bennis, Diana Buttu, Neve Gordon

on GRITtv

16 September 2009International pressure is mounting on Israel to end the occupation. More than 1,000 filmmakers, actors, and writers recently called for a protest of the Toronto Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel-Aviv. You can read the Toronto Declaration here. Meanwhile an international boycott is growing. Neve Gordon, in a recent editorial, explains why it is time to boycott Israel. Since then he has received harsh criticism from within Israel but also a great deal of support. He says that The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign is the only way to save Israel from itself. Launched by Palestinian activists in 2005 the BDS movement has now become a global effort.

Diana Buttu, a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization, Gordon, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion Univesity and the author of Israel’s Occupation, and Phyllis Bennis, Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies on organizing to end the occupation. To find out more about what you can do visit endtheoccupation.org.

Bennis, author of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer, also discusses the impact of Judge Goldstone’s fact finding mission and report released today.

Then, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a professor of history at Ohio State University and the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Beltir, on the legacy of the African-American struggle for freedom. The roots of the civil rights movement are deep and Jeffries traces them back to the moment of emancipation.

Finally, author and poet Remi Kanazi performs some of his new work.

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