In a further sign that the Palestinian civil society campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is considered by Israel’s allies to be a threat to the impunity it has long enjoyed, the Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls, invited Israeli students to study in France by denouncing BDS as motivated by antisemitism:
This invitation is…the most sincere response to those who talk of nothing but boycott. Behind this boycott we know well what there is: not only an opposition, but also a loathing of the State of Israel, the loathing of a Jewish home, and therefore of Jews as a whole.
Valls was addressing an audience during a ceremony on Sunday at Tel Aviv University in which the George Wise Medal was conferred on him. The medal commemorates Tel Aviv University’s founding President and is awarded to long-standing Israel advocates.
The Prime Minister said that it was France’s ‘role and duty’ to never give way before those that want to ‘hinder a democracy;’ that it was the ‘fight of a lifetime’ against antisemitism, ‘a battle of civilisation.’ To applause, Valls said,
When one attacks Jews, one of course attacks France and attacks civilisation.
Before receiving the medal, university officials praised Valls as ‘a friend of Israel.’ François Heilbronn, president of French Friends of Tel Aviv University, told Valls:
You are not one of those ministers that once appointed instantly forget that they are friends of Israel.
France has introduced anti-democratic legislation and taken other repressive measures to undermine the BDS movement. One activist was arrested simply for wearing a BDS t-shirt.
Tel Aviv University (TAU) is linked to an array of services to the Israeli state including in its most oppressive modes. TAU has particularly intense connections with the Israeli military. The cover story of its Winter Review 2008/9 is an account of the 64 projects for the military that were then ongoing.
From the website of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP):
In July 2014, in the middle of Operation Protective Edge which killed another 2200 Palestinians in Gaza, the university’s President Klafter expressed his “appreciation” for students who went to serve in the army and said “Tel Aviv University has contributed and still contributes greatly to national security.” He announced that the university would be providing students called up to serve in Gaza with one year’s free tuition. Still more recently in May last year the University announced that it was awarding all its honorary fellowships for that year to four Israeli army officials and military company directors. The theme is compelling and continuous. Services to occupation and oppression come in many formats. It is a Geography professor at the university who is credited with coming up with the idea of the separation wall. And a professor of philosophy at TAU developed for the army the doctrine of disproportionate response.
It is of course the case that all Israeli universities are woven into the fabric of the occupation – after all, Israel has been operating its own version of the ‘one state solution’ since 1967. In all that time no university, or body of university staff in Israel has dissociated itself from the state policies which perpetuate the suppression of Palestinian rights. No university, or body of university staff in Israel, has spoken up for the academic freedoms of Palestinian universities which are deliberately hobbled by Israel.
When Stephen Hawking’s acceptance of an invitation to a prominent conference in Israel became a subject of controversy in 2013 BRICUP were in communication with him. At his request we then put him in touch with senior Palestinian academics – as far as I recall all university Presidents. As a result he wrote a letter withdrawing from the conference, in which he said that “Had I attended I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.” However it was the unanimous advice of his Palestinian interlocutors, he said, that he should, rather, respect the boycott.
The Palestinians slash, stab, shoot school buses and love blowing up Jewish kids eating pizza.
Zionists setting families alight in their beds including babies then laughing publicly. Israelis setting about a child , pouring petrol down him and setting him alight. Squatters shouting and spitting at women and children trying to walk down the street. IOF using Palestinian children as shooting targets, killing them as they walk home from school on their own. Bulldozing a young woman to her death. Incarcerating children without trial in filthy prisons against International Laws. Stealing homes and bulldozing them so squatters from other countries can live there, against International Laws. A system of Apartheid getting worse for Arabs in their homeland by the day, not allowed to walk along roads but separated by fences, not allowed to use crossings to get to work, hospitals etc. only when Israel deigns that they can. Water and electricity supplies turned off and water that Palestinians own being sold back to them at huge cost whilst squatters get it far cheaper. Not allowed to worship in their mosque unless Israel says they can…..oh I could go on and on with so many more Genocidal actions that Israel does and you have the gall to say Israelis are hard done by!
I think, in fact I know that I would be “rejectionist” of these people and their ideologies too, as would most ‘normal’ human beings when confronted with the above.
Well said, Avril.
Abbas and the entire Palestinian political and ideological leadership, which is 99% rejectionist. Mainstream Palestinian values are rejectionist. They want the Jews gone and they say it everyday. They brag about terrorizing and murdering Israelis.
Just look how many streets the Palestinian Arabs have named for terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians.
The Palestinians have run out of streets and are now naming park benches after terrorists!
The Palestinians have a GNP of terrorism and is banking on the left and Europeans to continually press Israel into the corner of capitulation
@IsraeliPM
https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/734741691366801408
That remains the core of the conflict: refusal to recognize the Jewish people’s right to have a nation-state in their ancestral homeland.
Their ancestral homeland my arse. The Bible is a book of fairy tales. And nothing in it justifies the expulsion of the majority of the Arab population of Palestine from their homeland to make way for a racist state.
We should stop indulging the crap about Jewish eternal victimhood which justifies these atrocities. Jews are not an oppressed minority today; they are a privileged group in the West and the bullshit about ‘anti-semitism’ is just a lament from racist scumbags that their criminality is being subjected to scrutiny.
Being Jewish does not make war criminals, murderers and rapists one iota less criminal. Netanyahu is a mass murderer. Those who support the crimes of Israel are morally no better than those who support the crimes of Hitler, someone else who thought his ‘chosen’ group had the sacred right to steal land by force from others.
Thanks Ian Donovan… Beautifully phrased… you’re brave Man!
Well said Ian Donovan. Nothing angers me more than the words anti Semetism being misused in the way that they are being lately, mainly by politicians and Zionists .
Manual Valls has the nerve to stand up and say that the BDS Movement is a “loathing of all Jews”, how illogical and wrong is that statement, made to brown nose the Israeli people who are giving him an award! Does he not read and see that there are many Jewish people who also boycott and despise Zionism for the evil political entity that it is? Of course he like most others that suck up to Israel are siding with terrorism as we have witnessed over the decades in the name of self defence and a ” homeland”.
That “homeland” was Palestinians homeland, they were living there until ousted from their villages in the clothes they stood up in and made refugees. What is morally right about that before we get onto the rest of what they have done, illegally, and still they are allowed by our politicians to get away with that which we wouldn’t allow any other country to.
Ian, I and many others are with you and we must fight this erosion of our Human Right, that to Freedom of Expression which BDS is. We won’t be browbeaten by despotic Israeli leaders into giving away that right so they can carry on their Genocidal actions towards the Palestinian people. #BDS
Spot on Ian Donovan. What an idiot that Kelso bloke sounds!