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We are calling for a week of coordinated actions across the world that confront Zionism and support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) call from Palestine. We are therefore mobilizing practicing and secular Jews across the globe to honor the second intifada and the high holidays by taking action to divest economically, politically, emotionally and spiritually from Zionism and from Israel.

UPDATE: Due to a growing interest in participation in launch in regions across the globe, we are extending the Week of Action to a Month of Action (October 1 - October 31). 

Click here to find out more, to add your ideas for what these actions might look like and to bring additional ideas.

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IJAN-Atlanta plans to support the critical GILEE Campaign which will pick up steam as GSU students return in the fall.  GILEE (Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange), a program currently housed at GSU, facilitates training exchanges between Georgia police departments and others around the world, primarily Israel.  We will also be strategizing on how to address the upcoming JNF conference being held in Atlanta in the fall. For more information, contact us at . 

En juin 2010, les deux extrêmes du spectre politique juif US vont se trouver en rivalité à un moment historique. Alors qu’Israël et le mouvement sioniste se battent pour garder leur influence d’un siècle sur l’esprit des juifs, un nouveau projet émerge qui s’écarte du sionisme et adhère à un engagement renouvelé pour une humanité partagée.

Les 19 et 22 juin, juste avant le Forum social US, les juifs d’Amérique du nord se rassembleront à Detroit pour défier le racisme, le colonialisme et l’impérialisme ; d’abord et avant tout, en participant à la lutte pour vaincre le sionisme et décoloniser la Palestine. L’Assemblée des juifs états-uniens 2010, "S’opposer au racisme et à l’apartheid israélien", tombe à un moment où il y a grande urgence à construire sur les récents succès du mouvement de solidarité avec la Palestine, et où les entreprises et le gouvernement des Etats-Unis continuent de commettre de graves injustices en Palestine - sans parler de celles dans leur propres communautés.

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IJAN is one of the core groups in the Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid (BACEIA), which was initiated by Break the Siege, a group that emerged out of the 2006 attacks on Lebanon and Gaza. In the last month, BACEIA has identified a target for a long-term campaign. In addition, IJAN Bay Area is supporting smaller efforts to target organizations and festivals that break the boycott. As we develop our local JNF campaign, we will bring it to BACEIA.

IJAN-Atlanta members are involved in the Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia (www.meia-g.net).   MEIA-G is currently leading a BDS campaign calling on Georgia State University to end the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), a program currently housed at GSU.   The purpose of the program is to facilitate training exchanges between Georgia police departments and others around the world, primarily Israel.  IJAN-Atlanta joins MEIA-G is calling on GSU to divest from Israel by first breaking its ties with GILEE!

In April, IJAN-Atlanta worked with MEIA-G and others in sponsoring DAM, a Palestinian hip-hop group.  DAM spoke at Kennesaw State University after a screening of the film, Slingshot Hip Hop, and then performed the next day at a local venue in Atlanta where over 200 people packed the place!

On July 29th, IJAN went to two solidarity actions in Oakland and San Francisco in response to the national call of action coming from Arizona against SB1070.  We went to support the movement in Arizona fighting for immigrants’ rights and against the racist law SB1070 along with other new racist policies that criminalize and marginalize mainly Latino communities in Arizona.  We took signs “From Arizona to Gaza - No Apartheid” to make the connections between the criminalizing of and government sanctioned attacks on immigrants in the US and Israel’s attacks on Palestinians.  The apartheid wall separates families and takes over land in Palestine and the border wall does this between the US and Mexico.  There are also parallels between the ongoing repression, racial profiling, arbitrary arrests and detentions, prosecutions, jail, against Latino people (and other undocumented people) in the US  and that which Palestinian people face daily, stemming from racism, the lack of a legal status along with a belief that these groups are lesser humans.  

We participated in the noon action in Oakland at the downtown federal building, and the San Francisco action in the evening in the Mission district of San Francisco.  Both actions were also protesting against Secure Communities (S-Com).  S-Com is a program where the fingerprints of arrested people in participating cities/areas will be cross-referenced with federal databases to determine legal status – which is being protested and challenged.

The 2010 U.S. Assembly of Jews, a national conference held in Detroit in late June, began at an unusual hour for a Jewish conclave: late on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t the most accommodating move for participants who observe the Sabbath, but then, the conference’s organizers may not have expected any: This was the first major gathering of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. Given that the term “anti-Zionist” is an epithet to many in the organized American Jewish community, one might assume that any American Jew who’d schlep to Michigan to discuss strategies for “decolonizing Palestine” would fall outside that community’s religious and cultural margins as well.

So, it came as a surprise when, at 11:30 on that first Saturday night, after an exhausting opening session, about a quarter of the 200 conference-goers, overwhelmingly under 30, gathered to celebrate havdalah, the ceremony that ushers out the Sabbath. As they swayed in a circle singing “Lo Yisa Goy,” a Hebrew folksong—“and into plowshares beat their swords, nations shall learn war no more”—the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network felt for a moment like Jewish summer camp. Many Jewish community leaders would not have been enthusiastic about the scene. And, in echoes that reverberated throughout the conference, neither were some leaders of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

A growing cohort of young Jews actively involved in Jewish life—often in alternative realms like independent minyans, the Yiddish-revival movement, and social-justice organizations—are taking left-wing positions on Israel that leave them feeling marginalized even in the Jewish communities they call home. Ideologically, they range from those who couch their politics in the language of international law and ultimately favor a two-state solution to those who use the more radical language of anti-imperialism and insist that true democracy can never happen within a Jewish state—with countless shades in between. By flirting with the labels “non-Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” without abandoning other traditional affiliations, they have crossed a line into territory where there exists no well-marked space on the American Jewish ideological map.

Into this vacuum came the first conference of the two-year-old International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a still-obscure organization (though one now on the watch list of some mainstream Jewish organizations) with a moniker echoing those of long-defunct groups, like the Jewish Communist Labor Bund, that tethered Jewish specificity to the international left. For many of the young Jews who turned out in Detroit—most en route to the U.S. Social Forum, a major activist expo that was held in the city later that week—the Assembly seemed to promise a distinctly Jewish space in which to engage in or try on the ideas that Zionism does in fact equal racism and that only a one-state solution can mean justice for Palestinians—regardless of whether they take such a hard line in their day-to-day lives.

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Here are some of the press articles & letters arising out of the Never Again - For Anyone tour, beginning with a major piece on Dr Hajo Meyer in the prestigious Huffington Post An Ethical Tradition Betrayed. 

 

The tour began in Scotland - the Glasgow Herald published Auschwitz survivor: ‘Israel acts like Nazis’ but not IJAN's letter in response. The Jewish Chronicle, in one of a number of attacks on the meeting in the House of Commons on Holocaust Memorial Day, wrote Gaza ethnic cleansing talk attacked as ‘an appalling offence’, and did not publish our letter, nor would the Independent on Sunday publish Yael Kahn's letter.

 

The Camden New Journal wrote a very positive article Auschwitz survivor, 86, takes on the protesters, as did Press TV Auschwitz survivor sees Nazi acts in Israel.  The letters column of the Camden New Journal has carried more attacks, and more letters defending Dr Meyer.  And finally East London Lines reported on the "controversial" Goldsmiths meeting Auschwitz survivor sees Nazi acts in Israel.

 

For a video of Dr Meyer's speech on the tour, please click here.  And for three of Dr Eid's speeches, made especially for this tour, please click here & here & here.  See more on the Never Again website.

 

Following the House of Commons meeting, a number of people who had offered testimony on the genocide of their communities, are continuing to work together.  We met at a full-day meeting (no Zionists allowed!). From this came a collective process to challenge the exclusivity of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, and instead speak of genocide rather than holocaust; to make explicit the genocides and ethnic cleansings historically and today; and to confront Zionism and the many forms of racism we all face.  We will soon be giving you a report of this effort, and asking for your input.

 

IJAN participated in a mobilization to press the Board of Supervisors (BOS) in San Francisco to take a strong stand condemning the attack on the Freedom Flotilla and the blockade of Gaza.  On June 8, with about 50 other people, IJAN went to a Board of Supervisors meeting and took part in a powerful speak-out in the Board chambers.

As a result of the strong statements made at the meeting, including by participants of the flotilla, an historic resolution was introduced by four supervisors, which was a breakthrough.  As part of the continued pressure, IJAN lobbied supervisors with Palestinian and other Jewish groups to press them to back the resolution.  We were invited to speak at a press conference outside City Hall on June 15 in support of the resolution.  We again attended a second BOS meeting on June 15 where many people spoke again against the brutal attack on the flotilla and calling for the blockade of Gaza to end.

To read the San Francisco Board of Supervisor's resolution, go to: http://www.sfbos.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/bdsupvrs/bosagendas/materials/bag061510_100767.pdf 

We are excited to announce the formation of a new IJAN chapter in Atlanta, Georgia!  Five members attended the recent US Assembly of Jews and have returned eager to grow and strengthen the presence of anti-Zionist Jewish activism in the A-T-L!  If you are in the Atlanta area and are interested in getting involved, please email us at .

While most IJANers from the Bay Area were at the the 2010 US Assembly of Jews in Detroit, some IJANers who stayed in the Bay took part in the 5am Sunday historic morning picket, with approximately 800 other people, of the Israeli Zim Lines ship in the port of Oakland. It was a very successful action and prevented the ship from being unloaded. This is the first time this has happened in the US and also the first time many local labor groups and unions have taken action in support of Palestinian people and it is a precedent setting action and a big step forward for the BDS movement both in the Bay and nationally.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k0s3o9w9wk&feature=related

Contributing to the heroic Palestinian Resistance, this growing awareness will incidentally precipitate the abolition of the Zionist ideology and its hideous manifestation, just like slavery or Nazism were abolished.

The Palestinian Resistance and its allies represent an exemplary model of diversity and cooperation across borders, race, age, economic circumstances, religion or nationality.

In essence, the Palestinian Resistance is a model of inclusion, the radical contrary of the exclusivist Zionist ideology.

Contrary to the gory Zionist project, our true and sincere aspirations are long lasting Peace, Justice and Freedom.  For us, this will restore of the true foundations of Palestinian society.

After almost a century of unrepentant Zionist terrorism in Palestine, all doubts have vanished: The only real road to Peace is a full and unconditional Liberation of Palestine, liberation from this supremacist ideology and liberation from the perpetrators. That will inevitably mean a return to the original, peaceful society Palestine was before the Zionist invasion.

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This week, thousands of people from dozens of countries are attempting to reach Gaza to break the siege and march alongside Palestinians who have been organising inside the territory.

Each of the individuals traveling with the Gaza Freedom March, Viva Palestina, or other delegations represents perhaps hundreds of others who could not make the journey in person, and who are marking the event with demonstrations and commemorations, visits to their elected officials, and media campaigns.

Against this flowering of activism, Zionism is struggling to rejuvenate its dwindling base of support. Multi-million dollar programmes aimed at recruiting and Zionising young American Jews are struggling to compete against organisations like the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which run not on money but principled commitment to human equality.

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There are many problems with IJAN, which lead me to doubt the purposes of the group. I first question whether they are a Palestinian solidarity group or yet another group that seeks to shield and preserve Jewish power both in Palestine and in the U.S.

In this writer's opinion, Jews – if they are acting in a group that represents Jews in the peace movement – should first and foremost challenge what Akiva Eldar and J. J. Goldberg, among others, call the "Jewish lobby" – the powerful people and institutions (and their rank-and-file supporters) who dominate the US discourse and policy regarding Jews and Israel. Often, these are the very people behind the charge of "self-hating Jews" (and for non-Jews, "anti-Semites") about whom Rebecca Tumposky, national organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, complains. Yet, nowhere in her article does Ms. Tumposky show a disposition to directly do that.

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Jewish Anti-Zionists and Palestinian groups seek to influence U.S. Social Forum. “We are fighting Zionism's appropriation of our identity.“

-Emily Katz Kishawi, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Historically, Jews are overrepresented in progressive causes, so it's no surprise they are likely to be overrepresented at the U.S. Social Forum being held June 22-26 in Detroit.
What is surprising is that the largest organized Jewish presence will be that of Jewish anti-Zionists.

“The 2010 U.S. Assembly of Jews: Confronting Racism & Israeli Apartheid“ will be held in Detroit just prior to the Social Forum. The four-day Assembly is expected to draw 150-200 self-identified anti-Zionist Jews from across the country.
According to its website, the Assembly, running June 19-22, intends to “gather together as anti-Zionist Jewish activists committed to social justice and to challenging racism, colonialism and imperialism -first and foremost, by contributing to efforts to overcome Zionism and decolonize Palestine.“

Following their Assembly, Jewish antiZionist activists will do their best -through workshops, networking and being a visible presence -to engage in their agenda the hundreds of groups attending the U.S. Social Forum.

The San Francisco area-based International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), a major force behind the Assembly, also is represented on the U.S. Social Forum national planning committee as is the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, another group committed to, as posted on its website, “ending Zionist occupation and colonization of Palestine.“

The U.S. Palestinian Community Network has a goal of “making Palestine a part of all social justice movements.“ It lists 70 workshops comprising a “Palestine track“ at the U.S. Social Forum. It will host a four-day Palestinian Tent, sponsor six four-hour “People's Movement Assemblies“ and present Palestinian speakers at the Forum's plenary panel. Additionally, college students will hold the first national conference of Students for Justice in Palestine, concurrent with the Forum.

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Jews need to oppose Zionism to truly hold up our varied traditions of social justice.

As a new and growing organization, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network seeks to challenge the violence and injustice of Israeli apartheid, and to challenge the notion that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

A 2007 survey reported by The Jerusalem Post found that about half of Jewish-Americans younger than age 35 feel little or no identification with Israel or with the Zionist goal of a Jewish state. Alienated from the 52 major Jewish organizations in the United States that support Israel in unison, a great number of American Jews have no organized voice on Israel — a nation that claims to represent them. They therefore have few avenues to exert political influence on Israel in their communities and political structures.

IJAN hopes to provide a countervailing voice to this hegemony, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, not only in the United States but worldwide.

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On June 7, IJAN was part of an action protesting the yearly Israel in the Gardens celebration of Israel at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. This year IJAN participated, with others, to make visible the presence of Jewish people challenging the event’s theme of Standing Proud in support of Israel. Some of our signs asked if Israel is proud, for example, of apartheid or ethnic cleansing. Other signs stated that we are proud to stand with Palestinian resistance.