We want Portland occupation-free. (How a coalition is fighting occupation/apartheid)

[guillaumeb]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by In_The_Wind (a host of the General Discussion forum).

Palestine solidarity organizations have come together in an ongoing campaign to get the city of Portland to boycott corporations profiting from the Israeli occupation. Maxine Fookson and Ned Roesh, members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in Portland and steering committee members of the Occupation-Free Portland Coalition, talked to Wael Elasady about what the coalition has already achieved, and what comes next.

CAN YOU talk about the Occupation-Free Portland Coalition and the goals of the campaign it's working on?

Maxine: Occupation-Free Portland is a coalition of all the Palestinian solidarity groups in Portland. Many of the groups had been working together as a coalition on the SodaStream boycott. But based on changes in SodaStream's situation and realizing that we were looking for a different kind of campaign--something more systemic than just de-shelving a product--we decided to take up the Occupation-Free Portland campaign.

One of the criteria of the socially responsible lens for the city is human rights violations, so it just seemed like a logical place to start to ask the city to not invest in companies profiting from human rights abuses of Palestinians and from the occupation of Palestine

The BDS movement is spreading in spite of the well funded efforts by right wingers to conflate any mention of BDS as synonymous with anti-Semitism. The BDS movement is spreading in spite of the corporate media basically ignoring the issue.

Also from the article, and of huge relevance in the US,

Maxine: The HRC also came to understand, like we did, the connections between the struggle for justice in Palestine and questions like police brutality here in the U.S. because Israel was exposed in our testimony as exporting its policing techniques and military technology, which have been tested on the occupied Palestinians and then sent to places like Ferguson or Baltimore or along the U.S./Mexico border. I think that connection was understood well by the
HRC and critical.

What is critical is to make the connections between occupation/apartheid in Palestine as practiced by the Israeli government, and that same occupation/apartheid practiced in the US and enforced by the police.

Read more:
http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/04/we-want-portland-occupation-free

[mwrguy]

1. Thanks for posting. K&R

[In_The_Wind]

3. Locking

Statement of Purpose

Discuss politics, issues, and current events. Posts about Israel/Palestine, religion, guns, showbiz, or sports are restricted in this forum.