By Rebecca Spence

Wed. May 21, 2008

Los Angeles — If a local activist group has its way, Seattle could soon become the first major American city to divest from companies that provide material support to Israel.

Seattle Divest From War and Occupation, a citizens group, is angling to get an initiative on the ballot that would mandate city pension funds to divest from businesses that profit from the Iraq War, as well as from Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Since late March, when initiative I-97 was approved for petition circulation by the City Attorney’s Office, local Seattle Jewish groups have coalesced to beat back the nascent effort.

The ballot initiative comes as Jewish groups and their supporters emerged victorious in recent weeks from a hard-fought Israel divestment battle with The United Methodist Church. Mainstream Jewish groups undertook a major lobbying effort — at both the grass-roots and leadership levels — to keep five anti-Israel divestment measures from passing at the Methodists’ plenum early this month. Previous efforts to stymie Israel divestment measures proposed by another mainline Protestant church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), also proved successful.

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Sinkable Israel

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Next week Israel will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its declaration of independence in the presence of an enviable number of dignitaries and heads of state. One week later, on 15 May, the Palestinians will commiserate their Nakba -- the day they were driven from their homeland by Jewish paramilitary settlers who established the state of Israel. While Israel will be showered with words of admiration and congratulation, principally by those countries that helped create it, the Palestinians will be huddled together in exile or under military occupation, encircled by the Israeli wall of shame that was probably inspired by the Nazi wall that enclosed the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1940. The only statements making reference to them will be the empty rhetoric of Arab officials calling for peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state, and probably maligning Hamas. Victors will continue writing history, at least as long as they remain powerful.

At 60, Israel appears solid, focussed, constantly expanding and basking in the adulation of its powerful supporters and the resignation of its intimidated neighbours. By contrast, the Palestinians, evicted from their homeland, appear weak, divided, starved, vulnerable and spurned by most Arab leaders. Israel, a warrior state armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons, represents a success for the great powers in more ways than one. Their most important achievement was offloading the centuries old "Jewish question" on the Arabs. Ever since, Israel has proved a belligerent state bent on aggression and expansion, which was also useful to the powers that nurtured it. However, Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians and other Arabs, and its extensive settlement under occupation of their land, makes it appear more like a giant on stilts than a peace-loving nation that lives by the norms of international law.

In spite of the glow of success, two historical factors are corroding the underpinnings of Israel as a state. First, Israel was founded on the 17th century doctrine of settler colonialism -- the New World migration model of which the United States is the unique surviving example. As European settlers arrived in droves to the New World that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492, the land was ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population, especially North American Indians. Hundreds of tribes and ethnic communities were systematically devastated or driven west of the Mississippi river to make room for European colonists. In 1778, even before becoming the nation, new Americans signed a treaty with the Indian Delawares -- the first of what would become a body of more than 380 treaties that never held in the face of the desire to expand. Under those treaties, the nascent US gained more than one billion acres of Indian land in North America, mostly by force, coercion and outright war, with some bought for as little as 10 cents an acre. Consciously or otherwise, this was the model adopted by the Zionist movement to seize Palestine under the fallacy of "a land without a people for a people without a land", with the support of the British via the Balfour Declaration. This shared model of ethnic cleansing and land expropriation is the strongest bond between Israel and the US.

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