28-October-2023 |
Speakers at event call for commitment to a two-state solution and urge Labour government to do more.
Criticism of the Israeli government and calls for tolerance and a commitment to a two-state solution were the major themes of an event in London on Sunday organised by the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The conference, titled Israel After October 7th: Allied or Alone?, featured speakers from across Israeli and UK politics, academia and media. It served in part to show the extent to which some members of the Jewish diaspora have been traumatised not just by the horrors of 7 October but also the response of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Haaretz’s publisher, Amos Schocken, opened the event by saying the Israeli government was so disastrous and had so distorted Zionism that the only recourse lay in the international community applying sanctions, just as it had done to change apartheid South Africa.
David Davidi-Brown, the chief executive of the New Israel Fund, one of the event’s other organisers, said: “We can support Israel and stand against the extremism of Israel’s government.”
Continue reading @ The Guardian.
A quick thought - I might write on this but I've not seen any work on the practicality of sanctions, including by the folks pushing the Occupied Territories Bill in the Dáil. South Africa never had any stable long-term oil supplies from 1970, but Israel has the Saudis and Azeris, as well as their own offshore gas production. South Africa had problems as time went on getting capital investment, but Israel has much better resources from a richer population and with different financial profiles: Some state investment, but also fund venture capital, which is a small investment for a huge payoff or in R&D centres rather than big and long-term minerals investments like SA. Exports for Israel are often tied into multinationals, like with Intel, who have bought out high-growth local tech companies like Intel with Mobileye autonomous cars. With the racial balance being 7 to 1 against them, shortages of white labour and army conscripts was a critical issue for SA, exacerbated by emigration, but Israel seems to have enough man and woman power for industry and its military. The West Bank settlement have some produce sales and tourism, but otherwise either host educational institutions or have commuter populations, so the OT Bill restrictions on trade have a very limited attack service. I'm guessing that the American approach of direct sanctions, especially banking sanctions that criminalise money flows to the settler leaders and important human rights abusers and groups that they control would do better e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/28/us-imposes-sanctions-on-extremist-israeli-settlers-in-west-bank
ReplyDeleteThat last point is very good. It is the settler thugs and terrorists who should be the direct targets of any sanctions.
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