Israel Deploys Nuclear Weapons on German-Built Submarines

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The Dolphin class submarines are built for Israel in a shipyard in Kiel (March 2012 photo).

A German shipyard has already built three submarines for Israel, and three more are planned. Now SPIEGEL has learned that Israel is arming the submarines with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The German government has known about Israel's nuclear weapons program for decades, despite its official denials.

Boycott is a response to a call from Palestinian civil society, which is seeking to mobilise international civil society as a way of realising their basic rights.

A fortnight ago, dozens of actors, playwrights and directors called on The Globe to cancel a planned performance by Israel’s national theatre company Habima, to avoid complicity with “human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land”.

Along with Emma Thompson, Mike Leigh and Caryl Churchill, opposition to the invitation includes Mark Rylance, founding artistic director of The Globe. The letter follows on from an earlier call by ‘Boycott From Within’, a group of Israelis who support the Palestinians’ Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

Since then, the letter’s critics have responded in an over the top fashion, successfully missed the point.

Howard Jacobson reached for absurd clichés (“Kafkaesque”, “McCarthyism”) while Simon Callow and Louise Mensch signed a letter describing the boycott call an example of “the continued persecution of Jews”.

“Theatre ban ‘like Nazi book burning’ say West End stars” ran a headline in The Jewish Chronicle, whose editor Stephen Pollard compared pro-Palestinian protesters at the Proms to “Nazi party members” in “Weimar Germany” (as did Labour MP Denis MacShane who recently linked the murders in Toulouse to Palestine solidarity motions in UK trade unions).

This shameless blustering ignores the specific reasons for the Habima boycott call, namely that the company performs in illegal West Bank settlements – colonies that form a key part of Israel’s apartheid regime – and indeed promised Israel’s Minister of Culture that it would “deal with any problems hindering such performances”.

Yousef Munayyer - New York Times

What exists today is one state, under Israeli control, where 1.5 million Palestinians are second-class citizens, and four million are not citizens at all.

I am a Palestinian who was born in the Israeli town of Lod, and thus I am an Israeli citizen. My wife is not; she is a Palestinian from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Despite our towns being just 30 miles apart, we met almost 6,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where we attended neighboring colleges.

A series of walls, checkpoints, settlements and soldiers fill the 30-mile gap between our hometowns, making it more likely for us to have met on the other side of the planet than in our own backyard.

Never is this reality more profound than on our trips home from our current residence outside Washington.

Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport is on the outskirts of Lod (Lydda in Arabic), but because my wife has a Palestinian ID, she cannot fly there; she is relegated to flying to Amman, Jordan. If we plan a trip together — an enjoyable task for most couples — we must prepare for a logistical nightmare that reminds us of our profound inequality before the law at every turn.

Even if we fly together to Amman, we are forced to take different bridges, two hours apart, and endure often humiliating waiting and questioning just to cross into Israel and the West Bank. The laws conspire to separate us.

If we lived in the region, I would have to forgo my residency, since Israeli law prevents my wife from living with me in Israel. This is to prevent what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once referred to as “demographic spillover.” Additional Palestinian babies in Israel are considered “demographic threats” by a state constantly battling to keep a Jewish majority. (Of course, Israelis who marry Americans or any non-Palestinian foreigners are not subjected to this treatment.)

Eamonn McCann - The Belfast Telegraph

Why pick on Israel when there's so much injustice in the rest of the world? The answer is to be found in the specific circumstances which gave rise to the launch of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign in July 2005.
A year after the International Court of Justice had declared the wall being built by Israel on occupied Palestinian land illegal, not only had Israel refused to demolish the structure, it had conveyed contempt for the court's decision by accelerating the pace of construction.

The wall provided security for armed bands of Jewish settlers establishing colonial outposts, while corralling and controlling Palestinians minded to oppose their dispossession.

The BDS campaign aimed not at the destruction of the Israeli state, or the expulsion of its people, but at an end to the occupation of Arab lands, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel and formal recognition of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and properties from which they had been expelled.

Its declaration was endorsed by Palestinian political parties, trades unions, cultural and community groups, women's and youth organisations, religious denominations, professional associations and others representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and refugees in camps scattered across the Middle East. The strategy reflects the wishes of the people in whose name it is carried out.