When we look back in a few years, Hawking's decision to respect BDS may be seen as a turning point – the moment when boycotting Israel as a stance for justice went mainstream.
Palestine
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Detailed report here on what looks to have been an excellent 4th Annual BDS Conference held in Bethlehem in June this year. 700 people attended. PA Minister forced to leave platform due to criticisms of inaction. Many live link ups. Palestinians certainly support the international BDS campaign - http://www.bdsmovement.net/2013/report-fourth-national-bds-conference-11...
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Sir, the picture accompanying your report on the new Middle East peace talks (World News 26 July) showing Jewish emigrants from the US arriving at Tel Aviv Airport captures the essence of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state. The infamous Law of Return allows anyone with remotely Jewish connections to travel to Israel, become an Israeli citizen and in many cases receive financial aid to live in illegal settlements built on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the descendants of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza cannot even visit their homeland, let alone return to live there. Those Palestinians who do live there, whether within 1948 Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territory, are subject to a Kafkaesque cocktail of discriminatory laws, house demolitions, expulsions, land theft, travel restrictions, harassment and deathly terror attacks by an occupying military. The American Government’s intentions are highly suspect given its own total support for the occupier over the occupied, its refusal to deal with the mandated representatives of the people of Gaza, and its perverse insistence on the ever illusive chimera of a two state solution that its own policies have rendered unattainable. Yours etc. JIM ROCHE,
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The Road to Nowhere - Kerry Mideast Journey By Eric Margolis July 21, 2013 Here we go again, another round of Mideast peace talk kabuki. A process in which Washington, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization hold intense talks over holding talks, a ritual as stylized as the traditional Japanese dance. In the end, it’s the same empty, cynical ritual, year after year. This past week, US Secretary of State John Kerry has been leading the dance in the latest attempt to restart peace talks between Israel and the Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO. As of this writing, the talks appear off. But they may be on again just as quickly. It depends on how much Washington offers its feuding clients, Israel and the PLO. Watching this annual charade is both painful and exhausting. It makes cynics of the most idealistic hopers for Mideast peace. Israel holds all the cards, and knows it. Jewish settlements, roads, and security walls are roaring ahead, relentlessly gobbling up the occupied West Bank, Golan and their water resources. West Bank Palestinians are being crammed into future native Bantustans patterned after South Africa’s apartheid-era reservations for blacks.
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Stephen Hawking's support for the boycott of Israel is a turning point
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Sir, the report on the extrajudicial killing of Haitham Al-Mes-hal by an Israeli air strike attack in Gaza (World Report, 1 May) states that “Islamist militants in Gaza have fired intermittently at Israel in recent weeks despite an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire reached after the November conflict” - thus giving the impression yet again that it is the Palestinians who have broken the ceasefire agreed after the eight day war last November. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israeli soldiers fatally shot four Palestinians in the West Bank and at least one in the Gaza Strip in January alone. The people killed were unarmed and posed no danger to the soldiers. Over eighty Palestinians had been injured by Israeli forces in the same period. Palestinian civilians, whose only crime is to live in the border areas or to fish for their livelihood in the restricted zones in the sea, are terrorized on a daily basis by the Israeli armed forces who do not wait for the excuse of sporadic rocket fire to indulge in their daily harassment and terror. Yours etc. JIM ROCHE,
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