An angry debate was reignited in the Guardian last summer over calls for an academic boycott of Israeli universities by British ones. The United Kingdom’s University and College Union recommended boycotting Israeli academics’ “complicity” in their government’s occupation of Palestine. The act hearkens back to the 1965 academic boycott of apartheid South Africa, which the union considered instrumental in ending state-sponsored segregation.

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Qualified as a “war crime” by Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and illegal “collective punishment” by the European Union and international agencies, the humanitarian and political crisis created by Israel’s five-day hermetic seal on Gaza is taking a toll not only on the 1.5 million inhabitants of the impoverished coastal strip. Damaged “beyond repair”, according to several Palestinians speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly from Rafah, is the image of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is being widely blamed for “turning a blind eye to the misery of his own people in Gaza” while continuing to engage in talks with Israel on peace.

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ZAWTAR WEST, 22 January: Deminers clearing Israeli-dropped cluster bombs in south Lebanon are turning up an average of 10 new sites per month, while Israel continues to ignore requests for data that would assist clearing the estimated one million unexploded bomblets, which continue to kill and maim civilians and decimate rural livelihoods. A single cluster bomb can disperse hundreds of bomblets.

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Last night I received a text message from my dear friend Fida: “It’s coming down — it’s coming down!” she declared ecstatically. “Laila! The Palestinians destroyed [the] Rafah wall, all of it. All of it not part of it! Your sister, Fida.”

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bring banners, signs, placards, noise-makers…

FRIDAY, JANUARY 25th, 2pm
corner of Maisonneuve & Mackay
ends at Square Phillips
(metro Guy-Concordia)
Montreal, Quebec

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Cities across Canada and around the world are participating in a global week of action against Israeli apartheid from 3 to 10 February. Israeli Apartheid Week, initiated at the grassroots level in Palestine, is now in its fourth consecutive year. In 2008, Israeli Apartheid Week occurs during the 60th year of the Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe”)– 60 years of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and exile for Palestinians resulting from the creation of the state of Israel.

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The Palestinian hip-hop group DAM, which has spawned a cult following and a small army of imitators, stars in a new film about the underground music scene in the Middle East, which premiered on Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. “Slingshot Hip Hop,” by director Jackie Salloum, offers a peek into contemporary life in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the Middle East hip-hop culture inspired by the political positions of American rappers such as Chuck D, Tupac Shakur and Eminem.

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At approximately 8:00pm on Sunday, 20 January, the Gaza Strip power plant ran out of fuel and shut down, plunging the Gaza Strip into darkness. The closure of the Gaza power plant, in addition to Israel’s continued, tightened siege on the Gaza Strip, will have a catastrophic effect on the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are already suffering chronic shortages of fuel, medicine and some basic food stuffs. The director of Gaza’s main hospital, al-Shifa, describes the current situation as “potentially disastrous.”

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Nahr el-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp located on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon, near Tripoli, was the setting of massive violence in the conflict between the Lebanese army and the armed faction of Fatah al-Islam, which lasted from the 20th of May to the 4th of September. This conflict ultimately forced 40,000 of the camps’ residents to evacuate against their will. Today, nothing but rubbles remain, the most part of which are inhabitable.

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2007 has been a busy and exciting year for the Palestine solidarity movement. While Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert attempt to hide Israel’s crimes behind the lie of ‘peace negotiations’, thousands of individuals and organizations around the world are building a real and effective alternative centered on boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid. Here in Toronto, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) has been a proud participant in this global movement. This brief report captures some of our activities over 2007.

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