Michael Riordon

Our Way to Fight has arrived.  Got a message this morning from Victoria, the capitol of British Columbia, Canada:

“Feb 4 Program, Our Way to Fight, is being censored by Shaw.  We have just received an email saying that Shaw TV cannot broadcast our scheduled program:  Our Way to Fight: Peace-work Under Siege in Israel-Palestine, by Michael Riordon, as it is too ‘unbalanced’ and ‘controversial.’  You can watch the program here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxGUJtWVSpo, and decide for yourself.”

Shaw TV is the community cable arm of Shaw Communications, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications corporations.  Based in Calgary, Alberta, it controls telephone, internet and television networks, including digital satellite, and broadcasting stations from Hamilton, Ontario, to Victoria.  As a federally licensed community cable network, Shaw TV is required to air locally created programming.

The program that Shaw banned is a 29-minute video of a talk/reading I gave last November at the University of Victoria.  I read several excerpts from Our Way to Fight, interwoven with commentary.  The event was sponsored by Independent Jewish Voices, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, and University of Victoria: Social Studies.  The talk was recorded by videographer Linda Taffs of Pasifik.ca, a collective of concerned citizens aiming to foster direct democracy.  (Which in itself is a rather ‘controversial’ idea, at least to the 1% who are inclined to prefer a well-managed democracy that protects their stuff and controls dissent.)

As to Shaw’s excuses for banning the program:

Yes, the talk was ‘unbalanced,’ so is the book – but only in the sense that both feature Israelis and Palestinians engaged in non-violent struggle for a just peace in Palestine-Israel, but no settlers, no generals, no presidents or prime ministers, no war-pushers.  All of these have ample outlets to air their views widely and continuously without any help from me.  In fact it is their views that the corporate media defines as ‘balance.’

And ‘controversial’?  Well, yes.  Anything that dares to counter the official version is bound to be ‘controversial.’  That’s the job, isn’t it, to counter or at least to complicate the noisy dominance of the official version.  In that version,  Israeli settlements/colonies, ethnic cleansing and apartheid – all of them illegal under international law – are not deemed to be ‘controversial.’  Not in the eyes of the corporate gatekeepers.

This is exactly why we need – desperately need – principled, courageous independent media like Pacifik.ca, books like Our Way to Fight, and people who care enough about freedom – the real thing, not the official version – to stand with them.

After the talk, a man asked me to sign his copy of the book.  When I asked him to whom I should sign it, he said, “To me, Rabbi ___.”   Because he spoke quietly, standing close to me, I assume that he wouldn’t welcome my passing on his identity via the internet.   He said, “Thank you for what you’re doing.  It takes courage, but it’s exactly what we need.”  He smiled, nodded, and departed.

The banned Pacifik.ca program is here.  Catch it while you can, and decide for yourself.

Same goes for the book.

Sabra hummus, widely sold in food stores, is the target of a growing boycott movement due to its notorious financial support of two Israeli army brigades responsible for war crimes and illegal occupation over many years.

On the Electronic Intifada*, editor Ali Abunimah reported this week that the Strauss Group, the company that makes Sabra hummus, is trying a new tactic to combat the boycott.

* (Founded in 2001, the Electronic Intifada is an excellent online source of news and analysis that focuses on Palestine, its people, politics, culture and place in the world.)

A reader wrote to Electronic Intifada after seeing a new ad for Sabra hummus on a children’s cable channel in the United States:

“On Nick Jr. this morning they had a commercial with hijabi women [Muslim women wearing a head covering] in it and I was excited to see that!  They showed some other multicultural people (I remember a rastafarian looking group) and back to the Muslims weighing chickpeas etc.  Everyone gathers at a huge table in a beautiful field and they reveal the commercial is for Sabra hummus.”

The 30-second ad, called ‘Sabra World Table,’ opens with a young, blonde woman ringing a bell outside a beautiful suburban home – this presumably is the person with whom the ad viewer is supposed to identify.

An Arab woman in a far-away market place hears the bell and is summoned to action, rather like a genie hearing the call of its master.  The marketplace looks strikingly like the markets of Hebron or the Old City of Jerusalem, which Israel has invaded, settled and done its best to place off limits to indigenous Palestinian inhabitants, merchants and customers.

Then another man, who looks like a character from Fiddler on the Roof, hears the bell in what appears to be a caricature of an east European shtetl [historically, a village or small town with a large Jewish population in Central or Eastern Europe], and improbably lifts up a basket of olives.

Other “colorful” ethnic characters – including Africans and Asians – leap into action at the sound of the white woman’s bell and bring “the fresh flavors of the world” to her suburban backyard.

Reading between the lines/images, this ad:

• makes no mention of Israel, where the Strauss Group financially supports the Givati and Golani brigades of the Israeli army.
• The ad depicts hummus, Sabra’s main product, as simultaneously “ethnic” and exotic but at the same time not belonging to any specific culture.  This continues Israel’s attempts to appropriate Arab foods, including hummus, falafel, maftoul (“Israeli coucous”) and most recently Palestine’s traditional olive oil culture and production,  and to erase their origins.
• The linking of Sabra hummus with a happy feast of people from diverse backgrounds is grossly inconguous with the reality of escalating racism against Africans in Israel, and the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians whose traditional ways of life the ad both caricatures and purports to celebrate.

Ironically, the appearance of the new ad strongly suggests that the growing movement to boycott Sabra is having an impact.

Students all over the US have raised awareness about Sabra’s support for the Israeli army.  In May last year, for example, students at Chicago’s DePaul University voted by a huge margin to ban Sabra hummus.

Most recently, Illinois high school student Nadine Darwish wrote about her successful effort to have her school offer an ethical alternative to Sabra-brand hummus.  It’s an inspiring story about overcoming fear and taking principled action.

There are alternatives to Sabra: Make your own.  Buy local brands.  It’s a small thing to do, but better than nothing.  And it will leave a better taste in the mouth.

In their joint propaganda, the Israeli regime and its western backers manage an astonishing feat.  While relentlessly projecting an image of Israelis/Jews as eternal victims, simultaneously they project exactly the opposite image: brutal, invincible power.

A woman of Nabi Saleh argues with Israeli border policemen after they invaded her house, December 30, 2011.  Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills

All tyrants – aka the 1% – devote vast energy and resources to keeping the rest of us convinced that they are invincible, and therefore resistance is futile.  The longer they can keep us under this illusion, the longer they can hold power over us, aka the 99%.  When tyrants fall, nearly always the collapse begins when they can no longer sustain these two illusions, that they are invincible and that we are powerless.

To that end, a very handy power tool has just been released:  ‘Targeting Israeli Apartheid: a BDS handbook.’

It comes from the highly respected UK-based research group, Corporate Watch.  Their mandate is to expose socially and environmentally destructive corporate actions, as well as corrupt links between business and power, economics and politics.  They’ve probed the oil industry, globalisation, genetic engineering, the food industry, toxic chemicals, migration, privatisation and other areas, cataloguing corporate crimes and mapping the often hidden machinery of economic and political power.

‘Targeting Israeli Apartheid: a BDS handbook’ is a lively, meticulously researched, well organized, richly illustrated guide to who exactly is doing what to whom, where, and how we can effectively rebuke those who profit from crime.

Under a Creative Commons licence, the handbook can be downloaded free in pdf format.

As a useful companion resource, I recommend the excellent Who Profits.  They do similar in-depth research from inside Israel.  (Check them out in chapter 17, Our Way to Fight.)

Israel and its backers have at their disposal the most powerful weapons of mass destruction on the planet.  What do we have?  Each other, and a few handy tools.

‘Targeting Israeli Apartheid: a BDS handbook.’  383 pages, downloadable as pdf, or consult it online.

An essential power tool for anyone who cares about a just peace in Palestine-Israel and wants to do something about it but doesn’t know where to begin.

One of many stolen rights that Palestinians are struggling to reclaim is freedom of movement, which most of us take for granted.  An intriguing new example of creative non-violent protest follows below.  First, a little context:

Israel’s growing system of apartheid roads severely limits the free movement of people and goods into, out of, and even within occupied Palestine.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that as of September 2011:

• there were 522 roadblocks and checkpoints throughout the West Bank
• four of the five roads that lead into the Jordan Valley are not accessible to Palestinian vehicles
• an additional 495 ad-hoc ‘flying’ checkpoints obstruct movement around the West Bank each month (on average), compared to 351 in the past two years
• at least 200,000 people from 70 villages are forced to use detours which take two to five times longer than the direct route to their closest city
• in ten of the eleven major West Bank cities, one or more of the main entrances are blocked to Palestinian traffic.

Not surprisingly, in the same spirit as the recent Freedom Rides in Palestine:  Palestinian ‘car protest’ in West Bank challenges road segregation.

The news of this protest arrived today from Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein, via +972 Magazine and Mondoweiss:

“Palestinians attempted to set out in a motorcade of about 50 cars from Jericho en route to Ramallah this morning, to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank….”

Follow the story here.  The article includes photos, video, and links to Twitter updates, with the hashtag #carprotest.