Want to End the Violence in Gaza? Boycott Israel

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -- BDS for short -- was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity.

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US military re-supplying Israel with ammunition through Greece

As the Israeli military continues to pound the crowded, impoverished and imprisoned population of the Gaza Strip with the full force of its military might, Israel's strongest ally, the United States, announced plans to ship large amounts of ammunition to the Israeli forces – as it did during Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, when the Israelis ran out of (internationally-banned) cluster bombs, and the US shipped them tens of thousands more.

The US Military Sealift Command, on December 31st, published a solicitation for bids from shipping companies to ship two boats, each containing 168 TEU's (twenty-foot equivalent container units) of ammunition, from Greece to Israel.

The description of the vessels required was brief:

“Required: Request US or foreign flag container vessel (coaster) to move approximately 168 TEU's [standard twenty-foot containers] in each of two consecutive voyages both containing ammunition.”

Bids were requested by January 5th, but it is unclear whether bids were submitted or if a contract was awarded by January 8th.

According to the US Military's solicitation, "Funds are not currently available for this procurement. In the event funds remain unavailable, this procurement will be cancelled without an award being made."

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Declaration by the Athens Anti-Authoritarian Movement circulated in yesterday's (9 Jan 2009) protest march

[An unofficial translation ]

TO ALL! TO ALL! TO ALL! TO ALL!

The volleys that were fired and that wounded the riot policeman did not deal a blow to the establishment nor to 'democracy' as all the parliamentary forces and journalism's golden boys would like us to believe. The volleys were fired against the multifaceted December movement, against the December uprising, and even against the popular force of the rebellion for which the ones who fired them supposedly give a damn.

Every armed action is not necessarily political. And just by their symbolism both the ones that took place at the University campus and Exarchia were definitely not political.

During periods of popular rebellion all of us lower each political or ideological identification. We know that no one can supplant the movement, to consider that they can make it wear their own 'hat' and define it according to their own pursuits.

This uprising has demanded freedom and dignity. This movement - beautiful, beautiful and lawless - could offer the oppressed the ability to storm the center of political life. The school and university students, the unemployed, the immigrants, the prisoners, the workers have retaken the public arena, asserting their life anew.

The movement is not ebbing. It is not taking a single step back. The movement does not apologize for actions that are alien to it. Its prospects and impetus lie before us: the school and university occupations, the direct democracy assemblies, the mobilizations for those imprisoned culminating in the massive pan-Helladic demonstration in Larisa on the 17th of January. The movement's demands are timely as ever: Disarm the police! Dissolve the riot police! Release those arrested! Abolish the terror-laws and bring down the murderers' regime!

8 January 2009

ATHENS ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN MOVEMENT

A closed horizon

The film director Theo Angelopoulos talks to openDemocracy's Jane Gabriel about the turmoil in Greece and about his new film 'The Dust of Time'

Theo Angelopoulos: We have reached a dead end point in the social and political life of Greece; and if we add to this the economic crisis, we find superimposed on each other three parallel crises, social, political and economic. It is a very severe situation. Who suffers from this? Obviously the more vulnerable social and economic classes, but some other groups as well. Who? The young people. Ahead of them there is a closed horizon, there is no reference point, no future prospect: they live in a world where whatever we hear about public life is scandal, corruption, crises, weaknesses and compromises. Young people become tangled up in this story; they feel the full burden and the weight of this story. The result is that without having full consciousness of what is going on, they have a profound need to break out of this shell, and they take to the streets.

The story in Athens now might not have assumed these wide dimensions had there not been an assassination, which I would say - a little ahead of time - brought about an explosion, which otherwise might have taken more time to mature and led to genuine rebellion. My sense is that we have reached what you would call a fin de saison and that there will be a return of these uprisings, which will become ever more frequent. I also believe that this is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon, I have a feeling that this will turn out to be a European wide phenomenon in the future. In contrast to earlier youth uprisings, like May 1968 or the equivalent uprisings in Greece prior to the installation of the junta, which were focussed around specific political demands, at this particular moment there are no specific demands. There is an opposition, it's as if people are waiting in a waiting room and can hear from outside the door all kinds of alarming sounds and noises, and they reach the point when they want to open the door and see what is going on outside.

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JD Salinger, icon of youth rebellion, turned 90

It's been so long since JD Salinger published anything that it's surprising to realize he's still around and celebrating birthdays - his 90th on New Year's Day.

But for a writer whose last published work was in 1965, Jerome David Salinger's fame has hardly faded. His most famous work, Catcher in the Rye, which foreshadowed the youth rebellion of the 1960s, has remained in print since it first appeared in 1951.

As early as 1944, Ernest Hemingway recognized Salinger as having a "helluva talent." The two met in Europe during World War II, where Salinger served in the US Army.

Salinger's most famous character was Holden Caulfield, the foul- mouthed 16-year-old prep school reject who rebelled against the hypocrisy of adulthood. Caulfield, who has been compared to Johann Wolfgang van Goethe's Werther, first appeared in 1946 in a short story in the elite New Yorker magazine, under the title Slight Rebellion off Madison, and then was fleshed out in Catcher in the Rye - Salinger's only novel.

Salinger's last published work appeared 43 years ago in the New Yorker, a novella Hapworth 16, 1924, part of his series on the Glass family.

But the Glass series remains unfinished, and whatever might be going on in his life as he turns 90 remains a closely held secret.

Repelled by the demands of almost cult-like fame that came with Catcher and his successive works - Nine Stories in 1953 and Franny and Zooey in 1961 - Salinger retreated into an isolated life behind a high fence in Cornish, a small village in the hills of New Hampshire in the US north-east.

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