Students for Palestine

Press Release, Action Palestine , 13 November 2008

Dear Editors,

One of the less reported aspects of the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip is the daily infringements faced by Palestinian students on their fundamental human right to an education. Given that the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - ratified by Israel in 1991 - underlines the fact that “Education is both a human right in itself and an indispensable means of realizing other human rights,” the daily obstructions presented by check points, regular curfews, amongst other oppressive measures, represent a serious infringement of Palestinian entitlements to unhindered access to education. These infringements are particularly harmful because of the importance Palestinian society attaches to education and the equally important role played by Palestinian students in contributing to the resistance of Israeli oppression.

As students in this country we feel it important that as part of our on going campaign of solidarity, we raise awareness of the plight of Palestinian Students. Accordingly, we have accepted a request from Palestinian Student Unions to receive a delegation of Palestinian Student Representatives on a speaking tour of British University campuses. This tour is organised as part of the Right to Education Week starting on the 17th of November; the week of activities aims to mobilise and strengthen partnerships between UK and Palestinian student bodies in order to highlight the severity of the situation, as well as build a solidarity movement that can begin to strategically challenge the prevalent injustices faced by Palestinian students.

This tour will include visits to the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, SOAS, Oxford, Birmingham, Liverpool, Strathclyde and Cambridge, in the hope of relating their experiences living under the Israeli occupation and provide first hand accounts of how the occupation hinders their ability to study in an environment free of oppression.

Two of the students on the delegation represent an affiliate of Action Palestine, the Right to Education Campaign, which is currently based in three universities in the West bank. According to the Campaign, the R2E week is an excellent way of raising international awareness of the obstacles faced by Palestinian students in exercising their right to education, and a means of building an international coalition of organizations to collectively campaign in support of Palestinian students, teachers and educational institutions.

In addition to the speaking tour, the R2E week will comprise of a series of events, activities and campaigns to raise awareness about the issues surrounding the right to education.

To find out more about the R2E campaign or the struggle of Palestinian students for freedom and justice through education contact Action Palestine on media@actionpalestine.org or 07845275197 or visit:
www.actionpalestine.org
*END*

April 17th is Palestinian Prisoners Day – a date to remind the public that thousands of Palestinian are imprisoned in Israeli jails under extremely difficult circumstances and are exposed to various forms of torture and inhumane treatment. A new campaign has been launched to raise awareness about the issue. The campaign asks people (among other things) to “wear black on the day and tell people why they are doing it”.

The Campaign’s objective, as explained by Naji Mohamed, Action Palestine’s campaigns officer is to “shed light on the plight of Palestinian prisoners which is a very crucial issue in the Palestinian cause but is very rarely talked about”.

Palestine student societies will organise actions and events about the issue of student prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centres. The campaign which is supported by several organisations, including, NUS Black Students Campaigns, PSC and FOSIS alongside others, is calling on people to use the logo of the campaign as their facebook profile picture on the 17th of April. Also a petition has been placed on the Downing Street website asking the Prime Minister to apply maximum pressure on the Israeli government for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

Palestinian prisoners from the Occupied Territories, hundreds of whom are under the age of 18, are tried under military courts and sentenced by military judges. Defendants are often convicted on secret evidence and are given serve disproportionately long sentences.

In what is referred to as “administrative detention” the Israeli army is allowed to arbitrarily arrest and detain Palestinian civilians for periods of six months. After this period has ended the sentence can be extended without explanation. These loose guidelines allow the Israeli army to exercise broad and unchecked powers against the Palestinian population.

Naji added that Action Palestine as a student group is especially concerned with this issue as students in Palestine are the most severely affected by it. The Israeli army often launches waves of arrests against university students, particularly first year students, simply to collect information on them. The Israeli army has recently arrested eight Birzeit University students and one employee but none of them have been charged.

Ruqayyah Collector, NUS Black Students’ Officer explained that given the current conditions within these prisons this Prisoners Day is partiularly significant. In addition to the poor treatment and inhumane conditions under which Palestinians are held Palestinian prisoners at multiple detention centres have recently suffered direct attacks. These attacks often occur when Israeli forces attempted to transfer large numbers of prisoners from one detention facility to another. By moving prisoners around every few months Israel seeks to disrupt supportive relationships that form amongst prisoners.

Ruqayyah stressed that it has become of huge importance that the people of the world pressure their governments to hold Israel accountable for its violation to international law, particularly after the failure of the international community in protecting the rights of the Palestinians.

*END*

- To contact Action Palestine please email info@actionpalestine.org
- To view the campaign pamphlet please visit: http://www.actionpalestine.org/temp/Palestinian%20Political%20Prisoners.doc

On Thursday 5th March, The University College London Students’ Union (UCLU) voted overwhelmingly to twin UCL Union with the Unions of Al-Quds and Al-Azhar Secular Universities in the West Bank and Gaza respectively with immediate effect. Furthermore, the Union voted to establish an educational exchange programme between UCL students and students from the Palestinian universities, and finally “To reiterate the UCLU Friends of Palestine society’s right to raise issues that concern the student body, criticise the GOI [Government of Israel] and its policies, as well as highlight atrocities that contravene International Humanitarian law and not be treated unlike other societies for doing such.”

In a maximum capacity lecture theatre of 325, people packed in, spilling over into the stairs, to hear the debate of various topical and constructive motions at the best attended UCLU Annual General Meeting since 2003.

Before the meeting the chances of passing the motion seemed very slim. Not only does UCL have one of the largest and most active pro-Zionist Jewish societies in the country, but also just before the meeting, a hostile amendment was received asking the Union’s students to twin with the Israeli Hebrew University in Jerusalem (and remove twinning with Al-Azhar Secular University in Gaza) also. The speaker for the hostile amendment appealed to the objectivity of sources such as ‘The Harvard Israel Review’ and ‘The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ over ‘United Nations’ organs including ‘The International Court of Justice’ in the original motion submitted and suggested the former reflected “the reality as it is today” better.

This is not to mention recent attacks on the UCLU Friends of Palestine society (FPS). The Union Media and Communications Officer as well as members of The UCLU Jewish Society had slandered the FPS for “inciting racial hatred” following a recent exhibition entitled “Jerusalem Dispossessed”. The exhibition documented “the dispossession of indigenous Palestinians from their native city, Jerusalem, amid rapid expansion of Israeli settlements, the separation wall and home demolitions”. It was provided by ICAHD: The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ (ICAHD) Action Advocacy Project and funded by Irish Aid, The Austrian Development Agency and The Netherlands Representative Office; of course a typical basis for breeding of “terrorism” if there ever was one.

The attack was constructed in the form of a sudden article in the Jerusalem Post entitled ‘London students slam anti-Israel exhibition’. In the article Johnny Paul, who incidentally manages to balance his position as objective “London correspondent” with being President of SOAS Israel Society, made false accusations against the UCLU FPS. Neither the UCLU JSoc, UCLU Media and Communications Officer nor J.Paul bothered to consult the society for their side of the story before publishing the piece. If they had they would have discovered that contrary to claims otherwise, the UCLU FPS had got permission for the exhibition (even though it was not required since the exhibition was not on UCL Union property), as confirmed by the Services and Events Officer of UCL Union. This has led to the Jerusalem Post being forced to accept publication of a response from ICAHD’s Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, herself a Jewish Israeli, who comments that “Any negotiation taking place while borders are aggressively being determined according to one side’s interests is an illusion. Without real freedom and respect of the other’s right to live in dignity, there is no basis for political negotiation.”

Although the meeting opened late, once it was the motion was passed swiftly. Thanks to a superb turnout from various sympathetic societies, those that have so often successfully disrupted such meetings on technicalities such as quorum counts were forced to retort to the farcical in order to desperately claw back votes. This was manifested clearly in the absurd claim that the motion aimed to present conscripted members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) as “evil” for some anti-semitic end- the claim presumably a desperate attempt to vote-grab from potential soldiers-to-be there to oppose another motion to ban recruitment of the Officer Training Corp (part of ‘The Territorial Army’).

The President of the UCLU Friends of Palestine said that the passing of the motion “was an important and constructive step which allows UCL students to get first hand experience and knowledge of the reality on the ground in Palestine in a climate marred by fictitious propaganda” and encouraged “other universities to follow suit”. He also commented that it is important to note that this motion is not out to demonise Israelis or Jews but rather to place emphasis on the impact of Israeli occupation upon ordinary Palestinians and bring that to the attention of UCL students, and the motion should not be taken as part of a package, related to the other motions such as on banning OTC from campus- which is completely unrelated.

- To contact the UCLU Friends of Palestine email uczxfpc@ucl.ac.uk

- The motions and amendments can be viewed at:

http://www.uclunion.org/student-union/noticeboard/index.php
see ‘second ammendment to motion on palestine’, ‘Amendment to the “Emergency Motion on Occupied Palestinian Territories”’ and ‘Emergency motion to AGM On Occupied Palestine’

Today 18th of February 2008, in the third Student Union council meeting, Sussex University Student’s Union officers have voted numerously in favour of a motion that resolves to boycott Carmel Agrexco agricultural products in union outlets and its sponsored market.

The motion was proposed by the Friends of Palestine society, which has been campaigning tirelessly for years to demonstrate moral and practical solidarity with the Palestinian people and Palestinian students in particular. Last year, after the cross campus referendum saw a majority of votes in favour, the union endorsed a twinning initiative between University of Sussex Student Union (USSU) and Al-Quds Open University Student Union in Tubas, Palestine.

The motion noted that Agrexco is responsible for 60-70% of all settlement produce sold abroad, primarily selling produce from illegal settlements in the Jordan Valley, and is 50% owned by the Israeli state; and that the Palestinian villages of Al-Hadidiya and Humza in the Jordan Valley were bulldozed in August 2007 leaving families homeless, to expand settlement agricultural activities for Carmel Agrexco.

Sussex University has recently been granted fair trade status and today’s resolution will enhance the ethical practices which Sussex student demand. The passing of the motion also represents integrity as up until yesterday the union shops which sold goods exported by Carmel Agrexco made the students complicit in the dispossession of the very students they had twinned with. Many of the students in Tubas work on land from which their parents were expulsed and under conditions that violate European Human Rights Legislation, a clause integral to the EU-Israel Trade agreement that Carmel Agrexco violates by labelling produce from the illegally occupied West Bank as “Israel”.

A Sussex humanities student member of the Jewish Society commented: “It has been argued that this motion might put Jewish students on campus in an awkward position. I personally don’t understand why I would feel awkward being a Jewish student after such a decision that clearly states this university is progressive and stays attentive to what is happening in the world.”

In today’s meeting 14 member of USSU council voted in favour of the motion, whilst three other members choose to abstain, no against votes have been registered, making it an overwhelming consensus among the highest decision making body within the Student Union.

*ENDS*

For more details on the motion, on our campaigns or direct quotes contact: palestinesociety@yahoo.co.uk

Friends of Palestine society, University of Sussex, 18/02/08