Massachusetts Organizing
A 200+ person silent procession in downtown Boston
February 10, 2024
Today (Feb. 10) hundreds of black-clad protesters carrying effigies marched silently through Boston's crowded Back Bay shopping district to express their horror and grief at Israel's war on Gaza which has now taken over 28,000 lives, including those of 12,000 children.
In Boston, at Packard's Corner on the line between Brookline and Brighton:
Jan 1 in Cambridge, MA
January 1, 2024
Today, Jan 1, in Cambridge, MA there was a swearing in of City Councilors when a group of young people demanded that the City Council pass a cease fire resolution. After they were "escorted" out by the police, they used chalk on the steps and sidewalk to the building to make their demands known. The ceasefire resolution did not pass.
Tonight in Boston a HUGE demonstration. 12/31/2023
December 31, 2023
We are here with 1,000 others from the Boston Coalition for Palestine. We will be the largest group in this year's New Year's March in Boston!
The Alliance, Mass Peace Action & friends Stand Up for Palestine 12/31
December 31, 2023
photos and video by Andrei Joseph
Our new banner. Design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press
March & Rally in New Bedford, MA. Nov 10
December 10, 2023
Marching to City Hall
Demo in Boston on 18/12...
December 8, 2023
Marina Park, Boston. “Shutdown Snowport for Palestine”
Dec 5th in Boston...
December 6, 2023
BOSTON - Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on Tremont Street in Boston, Tuesday night, outside of a fundraising event for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
Read more here and watch the video.
Rally in Boston on Dec 2...
December 3, 2023
Several hundred people attended an emergency rally in Copley Square on Dec. 2 to denounce the resumption of bombing and demand a ceasefire and freedom for Palestinians. A centerpiece was the unfurling of a long list of names of the children five years old and younger who had perished as the Gaza Strip was being obliterated by Israel's genocidal onslaught.
Great Signs from Standout in Arlington, MA. Dec 2nd....
December 2, 2023
photo by Susan Jacoby
Standout in Boston on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
November 29, 2023
Today, Nov. 29, is the UN-declared International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Alliance expressed its solidarity with a Stand Out in Downtown Crossing, Boston, where it unfurled its banners and handed out several hundred flyers to largely supportive passersby.
Attleboro, MA stands up for Palestine!
November 19, 2023
Over 200 people call on Rep Jake Auchincloss to let Gazan children live. (11/19) This was a Muslim led Interfaith Ceasefire Now! event, with JVP-Boston helping with the planning.
ALL PHOTOS BY SUSAN JACOBY
Student Demonstration in Boston on Nov 17
November 18, 2023
Students spoke out for Gaza and the right to protest on campus at a Boston Common rally that was joined by Alliance members. About a thousand participants then marched to South Station where they shut down surrounding streets.
Demonstrating in front of Rep Katherine Clark's Office in Malden, Ma.
November 17, 2023
Friday, outside of Representative Katherine Clark's office in Malden, MA.
There are literally dozens of demonstrations and standouts in the Boston area. LET US KNOW IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE ON THE DEMO/STANDOUT LIST by contacting us through our website.
Sign in Boston, MA...
November 12, 2023
This sign is in front of Red Sun Press where the Alliance has our banners, yard signs, and leaflets made.
Boston Rally Protesting Biden Administration...
November 9, 2023
On Nov. 9, hundreds of demonstrators, Alliance members among them, loudly let Vice-President Kamala Harris know that the genocidal policies of the Biden Administration have got to go! Undaunted by the rain, with full throttle chants they demanded a ceasefire in Gaza and freedom for Palestine during her fundraising visit to Boston's Ritz Carlton Hotel.
Boston Rally & March on November 2
November 2, 2023
More than 400 very determined, peaceful, and spirited people marched through downtown Boston yesterday, shouting and singing for a “Ceasefire Now” in Gaza. The march went from the Common to the JFK building to demand that Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren join the global demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
See the video on Democracy Now!
Banner over Memorial Bridge and stand out in Harvard Square
November 1, 2023
Die in at the Federal Building in Boston
October 30, 2023
We listen to names of just a handful of the 8-10 thousand who have been killed in the Israeli bombing. …4 years old … 2 years old …. 7 years old …3 years old ……… #CeaseFireNow
The Alliance, and friends, stands up & stands out...
July 24, 2023
On a sweltering July 20th, activists from the Alliance, Jewish Voice for Peace, allied groups and individuals demonstrated in Coolidge Corner, Brookline.
The theme: PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE WILL NOT BE STIFLED ... NOT THERE, NOT HERE, NOT ANYWHERE!
Stop Israel’s Settler Colonial Apartheid Regime!
* Attack and Murder of Palestinians in Jenin
* $3.8 Billion US Taxpayers Give Israel With No Accountability * Torture of Palestinian Children in the Israeli Military System * Ongoing Theft of Palestinian Land and Water
* Destruction of Palestinian Villages
* Settler Violence
* Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
* Ongoing Siege and Attacks in Gaza
* Etc
Our signs and banners were attention getting. Some attention was hostile, but mostly it was positive.
We passed out approx. 300 Alliance leaflets: STOP SUPPORTING ISRAELI APARTHEID!
Our Annual Standout on Harvard's Graduation day
May 27, 2022
After a two year Covid-induced absence the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine was back in Harvard Square holding banners and passing out flyers on Harvard's graduation day. People attend from all over the world so it’s a great place to engage.
World Water Day 2022 sees little progress in struggle for water justice
March 23, 2022
This year’s World Water Day (March 22) has come and gone, leaving the achievement of water as a human right – which the UN General Assembly declared it to be in 2010 – more remote than ever.
Now we see water being used as a weapon of war in Ukraine where residents have been melting snow to quench their thirst. As Covid-era water shut off moratoriums expire in the US, those who cannot afford spiraling water bills are again being threatened with displacement, making way for so-called ‘development’. Large corporations continue to reap profits by turning water into a commodity that is more valuable than ever as drought conditions deepen in the western US and much of the world. On Indigenous lands, water resources are still being plundered and polluted, with devastating consequences for traditional ways of living and the environment.
In some previous Alliance for Water Justice forums, we have shown how the seizure and diversion of water to drive people from their land has served as a tool of colonial domination from the Americas to Palestine and beyond. We have also highlighted how water is increasingly becoming a potent focus of resistance, and the way Indigenous water protectors have emerged as leaders in the battle against climate change.
The struggle of Palestinians to stay on the land despite Israel’s water apartheid policies was the theme of our March 19th webinar organized jointly with 1for3.org, ‘Parched in Palestine: Resisting Water Apartheid.’ A prelude to our annual World Water Day Stand Out held this year in Cambridge’s Central Square, and to the BDS Movement’s Israeli Apartheid Week, the webinar featured brief film clips and speakers from Palestine who are building cooperative efforts to defend Palestinian land in the Jordan Valley and the UNESCO Heritage Site of Battir, and to develop food sustainability projects in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp and the Gaza Strip.
The webinar also incorporated segments describing Israel’s water apartheid policies, which are spelled out in considerable detail by Amnesty International in its recent 270-page report, ‘Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity’. The report was released in February along with a video, a curriculum on Israeli Apartheid and a toolkit. It was largely ignored by the mainstream media, and immediately dismissed as ‘absurd’ by the US State Department and ‘appalling’ and ‘antisemitic’ by Israel.
This major Amnesty International production was many years in the making. It follows similar, but less detailed reports on Israeli apartheid policies by the Israeli group B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, and earlier reports by eight Palestinian human rights groups including Al Haq, which Israel has (without evidence) designated as a ‘terrorist organization’ in the attempt to silence it along with five other prominent Palestinian civil society organizations. Another of those ‘terrorist’-designated organizations is Addameer which earlier this year partnered with the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School in a joint submission to the UN on ‘Apartheid in the Occupied West Bank’.
In the words of the Amnesty report, “Israel’s control of water resources and water-related infrastructure in the OPT results in striking inequalities between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. The Israeli authorities restrict Palestinians’ access to water in the West Bank through military orders, which prevent them from building any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army. They are unable to drill new wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, and are denied access to the Jordan River and freshwater springs. Israel even controls the collection of rainwater in most of the West Bank, and the Israeli army often destroys rainwater-harvesting cisterns owned by Palestinian communities…. While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements. Israel has transferred 82% of Palestinian groundwater into Israel and for the use of Jewish settlements, while Palestinians must purchase over 50% of their water from Israel.”
Lengthy sections of the Report describe the “devastating impact” of Israel’s discriminatory water policies in the Jordan Valley and the water calamity taking place in the Gaza Strip which, in 2021, “reached a crisis point, exacerbated by the stringent restrictions imposed for over 14 years by Israel on the entry into Gaza of material and equipment necessary for its development and repair.”
It is not just in Ukraine that water is being used as a weapon of war. As the report points out, “during Israel’s 50-day military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2014, Israeli forces destroyed the main water and sanitation infrastructure. Israel also targeted infrastructure during the 10-21 May 2021 military operation in the Gaza Strip. According to OCHA, water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure was severely affected, with wastewater networks, pipelines, wells, a wastewater pumping station and service vehicles damaged in 93 Israeli strikes. Compounded by the lack of power supply, three main desalination plants providing drinking water for more than 400,000 people suspended operations as did sewage treatment facilities, resulting in more than 100,000 cubic metres of untreated or partially treated wastewater being discharged into the sea every day. Further, the limited entry of fuel and the damage to the electricity network reduced access to electricity to a daily average of four to six hours throughout Gaza, further limiting the provision of water and treatment of sewage. An estimated 800,000 people lacked regular access to piped water.”
As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote earlier this year, seven months after the May 2021 Israeli invasion much of the equipment and material needed to repair the damage to the Gaza water infrastructure was still being barred by the 15-year-long Israeli blockade.
At the ‘Parched in Palestine’ webinar, we asked the audience to undertake three actions that can be accessed through the homepage of this website by clicking onto ‘Take Action’.
The first is directed at Congress and demands accountability and conditioning aid to Israel based on its human rights record. Congress just voted an additional $1 billion in military aid to Israel, bringing its yearly total to nearly $5 billion. Incidentally, over $170 million of that amount comes from Massachusetts taxpayers.
The second action item urges the State Department to denounce the silencing of six of the most prominent Palestinian human rights and civil society groups that have been monitoring Israel’s apartheid policies. The third is a call for Massachusetts residents to contact the Massachusetts legislature and ask it to support the state’s Indigenous Legislative agenda.
We hope you will work with us as we demand movement towards water justice for Palestinians and people everywhere. Let’s unite in the fight to make water a human right.
Nancy Murray
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Israel’s water apartheid, funded by US aid, was featured at this year’s World Water Day Stand Out in Central Square, Cambridge.
Letter to Cambridge City Manager and City Council
January 21, 2022
Last year the Cambridge City council voted to investigate whether the city is currently doing business with any companies (including Hewlett Packard) whose business practices contribute to the denial of human rights in any country. To press for implementation of the order and to keep the issue in the public eye, Alliance members solicited over 100 signatures, delivered this letter to the Council and published it in two local newspapers.
—
To Cambridge City Manager and City Council:
On May 17th and May 24th of 2021, as Israel was again wreaking massive destruction on the Gaza Strip, Cambridge residents engaged in nearly a dozen hours of passionate testimony before the City Council.
Hundreds testified in support of a resolution that would terminate purchasing contracts with Hewlett Packard because of its role in providing computers used by Israel to biometrically track Palestinians and maintain Israel’s 54-year-long military occupation, and its involvement in the surveillance, detention, and deportation of immigrants in the United States.
The resolution ordered the City Manager “to review Cambridge’s corporate contracts and identify any companies that are in violation of Cambridge’s policy on discrimination, including (but not limited to) Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Hewlett Packard Incorporated over their role in abetting apartheid in the Middle East.”
This resolution did not come to a vote. Instead, on May 25th, the Cambridge City Council voted 9-0 in favor of a substitute policy order 109 that makes no mention of Hewlett Packard, but mandates the City Manager “to review Cambridge’s corporate contracts and purchases to identify any vendors or manufacturers whose products are used to perpetuate violations of International Human Rights laws,” and to report back to the Council. There is no action required beyond the City Manager reporting to the City Council. Would the Council then recommend terminating contracts with groups complicit in human rights violations? Who knows? Apparently each report would require further action by the Council to execute the boycott.
We write to follow up on the passage of PO 109.
What steps is the City taking to review contracts in search of human rights violations? What are the criteria for defining violations of International Law?
Who is responsible for conducting the review?
When and how often will the review be reported to the public?
Many of us have worked for years to find non-violent ways to implement international human rights law in countries where human rights violations are rampant. The constitutionally protected right to boycott is a powerful tool to accomplish such a goal. We have seen its success in challenging abusive regimes, such as South Africa in the battle to end apartheid.
We welcome the passage of PO 109, but it will make a difference only if it is implemented. Transparency is essential in the process to implement the policy order, and we urge you to assist in developing a process where the policy order leads to decisive action beyond mere reporting, and the public can monitor its implementation.
Signed by over 100 Cambridge residents
Why Gaza's are dying at sea to be free
“The pain and anguish in Yahia's voice resonated deeply with Gaza's beleaguered population. Giant crowds showed up at Anas's funeral because most young Gazans can easily relate to his tragic story. They are intimately familiar with the despair that compelled those 11 asylum seekers to risk their lives on an unseaworthy dinghy to escape the mouth of a shark that Israel's blockade has turned Gaza into.”
Escaping one hell for another: Why Gazans are dying at sea to be free
Palestinian fishermen on their small boat to fish during sunset off the coast of Gaza City, on 24 November 2021. [Getty]
November 29: The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
To mark Nov. 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace – Boston, Democratic Socialists of America – Boston and Mass Peace Action held a rally in Downtown Crossing and then marched to the JFK Building in Government Center to deliver this letter to the offices of Senators Warren and Markey. The letter was endorsed by 28 MA-based organizations.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MASSACHUSETTS CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION
Two decades of ruinous wars in the Middle East have killed up to a million people and extracted more than $6 trillion from US taxpayers, while military contractors have reaped colossal profits. The end of the Afghanistan war has not stopped the Senate Appropriations Committee from proposing a $29 billion increase to the Pentagon’s budget, bringing it to some $726 billion. Included in this amount is $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome
This additional $1 billion is on top of the annual $3.8 billion in military aid the US gives every year to Israel, a country that ranks in the world’s top 20 economies, with a per capita GDP well above that of the UK, Japan and France. Most of those funds are used to purchase US armaments, further inflating the wealth and power of the ‘military-industrial complex’ that President Eisenhower warned the nation about 60 years ago.
What do these tax dollars mean for Massachusetts?
The proportional share of the yearly $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel shouldered by Massachusetts taxpayers amounts to approximately $130 million annually, a sum that could be applied to addressing urgent needs within the Commonwealth that have been intensified by the pandemic.
It is difficult to imagine residents favoring more funding for the bloated US arms industry – in this case Massachusetts-based Raytheon - the builder of the Iron Dome whose head reaped $19,397,106 in total compensation in 2020 – at a time when so many Massachusetts residents are struggling to feed themselves and their families, to avoid eviction, to help their children make up for a lost year of schooling, to find affordable child care and cope with rising health care costs. Hit the hardest are communities of color that have played such crucial ‘front line’ roles since the pandemic began.
What would taxpayers prefer – to give $130 million to Israel for weapons purchases or use it to improve schools and support a thousand teachers, or provide 85,000 people with food assistance?
What do these tax dollars mean for Palestinians?
The more Americans know about how the military aid given Israel is used to kill and oppress Palestinians, the more likely they are to oppose it. It helps sustain a discriminatory Apartheid system, as detailed by the Israel human rights group B’tselem, Human Rights Watch and two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa, Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, among many others.
While Israel’s illegal settlements are being expanded throughout the West Bank, Palestinians are being driven into small enclaves surrounded by walls and checkpoints, as growing numbers lose their land, livelihoods and homes. The Gaza Strip, blockaded from the world for 14 years, has been called an open air prison and a lab to try out advanced US weapons.
On a 2017 visit, Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, stated in an interview that “what we have experienced in South Africa is a fraction of what the Palestinians are experiencing. We were oppressed in order to serve the white minority. The Palestinians are being eliminated off their land…and this is a total human-rights violation. I think it is a total disgrace that the world is able to sit back while such atrocities are being carried out by Apartheid Israel.”
What should the US Congress do?
• Congress should stop giving Israel everything it wants and start enforcing its own laws. The pass given to Israel over the decades to exempt it from the human rights protections in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 and the Leahy Laws must be brought to an end. This would be in line with the wishes of a considerable majority of Democratic Party voters, who are against giving Israel unrestricted military aid if it continues its settlement expansion, according to a May 2021 Arab American Institute poll
• Massachusetts Representatives should stand with Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Rep. Stephen Lynch as co-sponsors of H.R. 2590, ‘Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living under Israeli Military Occupation Act.’ This bill provides a sorely needed measure of transparency on how the aid the US gives Israel is used by requiring the Secretary of State to certify that none of the funds support Israel’s military detention and abuse of Palestinian children, seizure of Palestinian property and displacement. Senators Markey and Warren should sponsor a Senate version of H.R. 2590.
• The Massachusetts delegation should reject an additional $1 billion in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome if this provision is in the final version of the FY22 Defense Appropriations Act. This weapon is not, as argued, ‘purely defensive’ but rather is part of Israel’s system of domination, shielding it as it carries out massive military assaults on what is essentially a captive and defenseless population in the Gaza Strip. Israel is a country whose per capita GDP exceeds $43,000. If it considers the purchase of Iron Dome receptors from Raytheon to be an urgent matter, Israeli taxpayers can pay for it. US taxpayer funds are urgently needed at home!
November 29, 2021, the 44th anniversary of the
UN-declared International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
This letter is endorsed by:
1for3.org
Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
American Friends Service Committee
BDS Boston
Brookline Peace Works
Cambridge Bethlehem People to People Project
Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security
City Life/Vida Urbana
Democratic Socialists of America - Boston
Dorchester People for Peace
Grassroots International
GreenRoots, Chelsea MA
Human Rights Awareness: Palestine Israel
If Not Now
Jewish Voice for Peace – Boston
KAIROS West MA/UCC
Massachusetts Peace Action
MIT Students in the Coalition Against Apartheid
Peace and Social Justice Committee of Friends Meeting at Cambridge
Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 Veterans for Peace
Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East, Harvard MA
Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East – MA chapter
United American Indians of New England
UMass Boston Students for Justice in Palestine
UMass Boston Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Visualizing Palestine
Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment
The Alliance Stands Out & Speaks Up
September 9, 2020
On September 8, the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine highlighted the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip during our Stand Out in Central Square, Cambridge MA. Our message was:
WE SHOULD FUND COMMUNITY NEEDS—NOT ISRAEL’S MISDEEDS!
The U.S. gives Israel 3.8 BILLION of our tax dollars annually—that’s nearly $11 million EVERY DAY! These funds are urgently needed at home.
With the spread of Covid-19, the densely-crowed Gaza Strip faces a humanitarian catastrophe. Its health care sector is on the verge of collapse, 97% of its water is polluted, and electricity is only available 4-8 hours a day.
PLEASE TELL YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS:
Stop funding Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights.
Demand that Israel ends its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
LET GAZA LIVE!
PHOTOS BY NANCY MURRAY
Water as a Weapon against Palestinians
July 7, 2020
Fact
This week, when the Israeli navy attacked a Palestinian fishing boat off the coast of the Gaza Strip, the soldiers abducted four of the fishermen on board. The boat was within the permitted fishing zone.
The Israeli navy regularly shoots at and arrests Palestinian fishermen off the Gaza coast and destroys and confiscates their vessels.
In 2019, 85% of fishermen suffered these violations. Israel opened fire 347 times and arrested and detained 35 fishermen, including three children. Nine of those arrested remain in Israeli prison. Israel wounded 21 people, confiscated 15 boats, destroyed 12 boats, and damaged 11 boats.
The Israeli authorities do not compensate fishermen for damages that occur during their seizure or while the boat is being held in Israel. Owners must forfeit their rights to compensation and release the Israeli military from responsibility for the damages.
Since 2000, the number of registered fishermen in Gaza has dropped from 10,000 to 2,000 actively fishing. The once prosperous fishing community (including 2,000 people working as vendors, equipment traders, and in boat maintenance) is now one of the poorest in Gaza. 95% of Gaza fishermen (and their 50,000 dependents) live below the poverty line—on less than $4.60 a day for food, housing, clothing, health care, and education.
YOUR ACTION IS URGENTLY NEEDED!
March 18, 2020
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has passed S. 3176, the US-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020 without the version of the bill it voted on being made available to the public.
Only after the hearing did we learn that in addition to authorizing various new perks and the $3.8 billion in annual security assistance that Congress in 2016 agreed to give Israel over the period of 10 years, the bill mandates that for the rest of this period Congress is barred from giving Israel less funding – but could give it more.
It is an outrage that the Committee took this step with no transparency and at a time when Israel is poised to annex parts of the West Bank. Senator Markey is a co-sponsor of the bill that will now be sent to the full Senate for a vote. Then it will be reconciled with H.R. 1837, the House version of the bill, cosponsored by Reps. Kennedy, Trahan, and Keating, and passed by a voice vote in July 2019.
Please call both Senators and your Representative with this message:
There should be NO VOTE on S.3176/HR 1837 while Israel threatens the annexation of West Bank land. Why reward Israel for such a massive breach of international law?
Oppose passage of any such legislation which does not hold Israel accountable for adherence to international law and human rights and/or which locks-in military aid over the long term.
If Israel moves to annex Palestinian land, there should be the immediate suspension of US military aid. Rather than subsidizing Israel’s wrongdoing, our tax dollars would be much better used at home to deal with the impact of the pandemic.
Find the telephone number of your Members of Congress here:
Senator Ed Markey, 202-224-2742
Senator Elizabeth Warren, 202-224-4543
Rep. Katherine Clark, 202-225-2836
Rep. William Keating, 202-225-3111
Rep. Joe Kennedy III, 202-225-5931
Rep. Stephen Lynch, 202-225-3984
Rep. Jim McGovern, 202-225-6101
Rep. Seth Moulton, 202 225-8020
Rep. Richard Neal, 202-225-5601
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, 202-225-5111
Rep. Lori Trahan, 202-225-3411
Thank you for making these calls,
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Jewish Voice for Peace Boston
Massachusetts Peace Action
Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East
Take a World Water Day stand for water justice
March 18, 2020
Among the scores of programs that have been cancelled in the Boston area over the last few weeks due to the Corona virus is our March 22 World Water Day event, which the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine has been organizing in conjunction with the North American Indian Center of Boston, United American Indians of New England and 1for3, which works closely with the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, Palestine.
‘Sustainable Futures: Indigenous and Palestinian Perspectives on Water, Land and Self-Determination’ had attracted considerable interest, and we trust it will again when it is re-scheduled in the fall.
Beginning in 2015, the Alliance has held annual stand outs and forums on March 22, the day designated as World Water Day by the UN in 1993. Various UN agencies have declared water to be a human right that “should be treated as a social and cultural good, and not primarily as an economic good.” The UN General Assembly formally recognized water as a human right in 2010.
Visitors to this website are well aware of the many ways Israel has deprived Palestinians of that human right, along with all others. Meanwhile, around the world large corporations have been reaping profits by turning water into a commodity. On Indigenous lands, water resources have been plundered and polluted, with devastating consequences for traditional ways of living and the environment.
The ongoing seizure and diversion of water to drive Indigenous peoples from their land has long been a weapon of colonial domination from the Americas to Palestine and beyond. But around the globe water has increasingly become a potent focus of resistance.
Here in the US, as elsewhere, Indigenous peoples have become water protectors and emerged as leaders in the battle against climate change. During the massive multi-year protests in North Dakota to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline that threatens the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, Palestinians stood shoulder to shoulder with Indigenous activists. Palestinian-Americans joined the protests in North Dakota and Washington DC, and issued a powerful statement of solidarity.
Despite the violent repression at Standing Rock meted out by private security companies and paramilitary police forces that gathered in North Dakota from around the country, struggles for water and the environment continue.
See, for example, the struggle being waged by the Anishinaabe water protectors, among them Winona LaDuke, who was Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate in 1996 and 2000 on the Green Party ticket. They are trying to stop the Canadian company Enbridge Energy from re-routing and enlarging its controversial Line 3, a 1,000-mile-long tar sands oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin.
Enbridge, which owns part of the Dakota Access Pipeline and supported the repression at Standing Rock, has had over 800 spills over the past 15 years, and now plans to transport 915,000 barrels a day across Anishinaabe territory in northern Minnesota, threatening some of the most pristine lakes and best wild rice beds in the world.
In the years ahead, as climate change intensifies, and clean water resources become ever more scarce, it will be difficult to envisage a sustainable future without the strengthening and enlarging of the kind of solidarity ties currently being forged between Indigenous communities and Palestinians, and the engagement of all of us in movement building.
Here are three local actions you can immediately take:
1. Enbridge Energy, the same corporation that is threatening Anishinaabe lands, is planning to install a large fracked-gas Compressor Station at the base of Fore River Bridge In Weymouth, MA. The proposed compressor station will cause air, noise and odor problems, and could create serious health and environmental risks affecting residents in Weymouth, Quincy and Braintree. The gas isn’t even designated for local use, but would be sent through pipelines to the Indigenous Mi’kmaq territory in Canada to be made into liquefied natural gas and shipped to Europe (see https://www.nocompressor.com/home).
Email Governor Charlie Baker at https://www.mass.gov/orgs/office-of-the-governor and tell him you strongly oppose the building of the North Weymouth Compressor Station.
2. Send the Governor another message telling him that Massachusetts should NOT be importing electricity produced by Canada’s dirty megadams which threaten cultural survival, expose Indigenous communities to high levels of methylmercury and would not help solve the climate crisis. For more information see www.northeastmegadamresisance.org
3. The Corona virus crisis has forced the postponement of 1for3’s annual Walk for Water for Palestinian Refugees in Cambridge, MA. Donations for the Walk support water projects in Aida and other West Bank refugee camps, community healthcare for people who are housebound, and the provision of roof top gardens. This year they will also be earmarked for the building of a kindergarten for the children of Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. These projects help keep hope alive at a uniquely difficult time for the people of Palestine. Please make a donation by visiting www.1for3.org and clicking on the Walk for Water box at the top of the page.
This year we may not be able to gather together to mark World Water Day, but we can still take a stand for water and environmental justice.
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Solidarity Day in Boston Meets with Positive Public Response
November 29, 2019
Every year on November 29 the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine holds a demonstration to mark the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
Why November 29? It was on November 29, 1947 that the General Assembly passed Resolution 181, with the intention of partitioning Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish State. What followed was the tragedy of the Nakba, in which some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes.
In 1977 the UN General Assembly set aside November 29 as a day of solidarity with Palestinians to remind the world that the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination was still unmet.
Today, with the Trump administration giving Israel the green light to accelerate its settlement expansion, the fulfillment of that right appears further away than ever, and the ‘two state solution’ envisaged by Resolution 181 appears defunct.
But judging from the overwhelmingly positive reaction we received as we took a stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in the heart of Boston’s shopping district this November 29, people on the street are increasingly out of step with elective representatives who continue to turn a blind eye to the terrible injustices Palestinians are forced to endure.
Our solidarity message to Palestine: the American people are waking up!
Nancy Murray
Anti-BDS Bills Again Get Massachusetts State House Hearing
November 19, 2019
Will the Commonwealth resist the steamroller effort to induce states across the country to pass anti-BDS legislation or issue anti-BDS executive orders?
To date 27 states have taken that step. On November 19, scores of Massachusetts residents wearing ‘Freedom to Boycott’ stickers showed their determination to prevent Massachusetts from becoming number 28.
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine is one of the groups that organized the resistance to the deceptively named ‘Act Prohibiting Discrimination in State Contracts’ (H.2719) and a companion bill (H.2722) that would penalize supporters of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
H.2719 is identical word for word to a former bill, H.1685, which was resoundingly defeated after a hearing two years ago in which testimony was given by many of the more than 100 organizations across the state that had joined together in a ‘Freedom to Boycott Coalition.’
This 2019 attempt to undermine First Amendment freedoms and the right to engage in boycott activity in support of Palestinian rights was vigorously countered by dozens of testifiers from all walks of life who opposed the bill on constitutional grounds, as well as on political, human rights, religious, spiritual, economic, and practical grounds. Some spoke movingly of what they had personally witnessed during visits to Palestine.
Since the first hearing two years ago, three federal court rulings have blocked similar anti-BDS laws in Kansas, Arizona and Texas on First Amendment grounds. And the tide appears to be changing in terms of public opinion.
According to a Brookings poll conducted this September, 62% of Republicans, 80% of Democrats and 76% of Independents agree with this statement: “We should oppose laws that penalize people who boycott Israel because these laws infringe on the Constitutional right to free speech and peaceful protest.”
By next February we should know if members of the State Administration and Regulatory Oversight Committee got this surprisingly non partisan message.
Below the photo is a portion of a report by the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Oct 2019
Anti-apartheid activist Caroline Hunter, who just returned from Palestine, arrives at the State House for the Nov. 19 hearing with a group of Freedom to Boycott activists. They testified that boycotts of Israel are not discrimination but are constitutionally protected speech intended to change Israel’s behavior. Mark Golden photo
Harvard Students Walk Out
November 14, 2019
PRESS RELEASE from Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee
13 November 2019
STUDENTS WALK OUT OF ISRAELI AMBASSADOR’S LECTURE ON “LEGAL” SETTLEMENTS
Over 100 students from across Harvard staged a silent protest at the Harvard Law School lecture given by the Israeli Consulate General in New York, Dani Dayan, entitled “The Legal Strategy of Israeli Settlements.” Students walked out of the auditorium after Dayan was introduced, holding signs that read “SETTLEMENTS ARE A WAR CRIME.” The Israeli Consulate General was forced to deliver his lecture to an almost empty room as students joined forces with the protest organized by the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine outside Austin Hall.
Dayan is a vocal advocate for the illegal expansion of Israeli settlements into Palestinian territory. In a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times, he wrote that the international community should abandon its vain attempts at the two-state solution and accept the Israeli presence in the West Bank as “an irreversible fact.” Israeli settlements are blatant violations of international law, and the Israeli settler movement is a violent project of settler-colonialism in occupied Palestine.
Smiling at the sight of the protesters silently leaving the room, Dayan remarked: “I remember a time doing something similar in my kindergarten.” He later tweeted (translated): “On my way back to NYC I’m thinking why are these people so happy with themselves? A bunch of losers trembling in fear of the disciplinary committees of their school.”
“I’m disappointed that the Harvard Law School would let this kind of propaganda for a colonial project for accumulation by dispossession be framed as “legal.” This is not only complicit but simply dishonest,” a student organizer remarked. “Let us be clear, there is a consensus among the international community that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and a violation of the fourth Geneva Convention,” they added.
Today’s silent protest comes on the heels of the most recent violent Israeli assault on Gaza. The death toll is reported to have surged to 26 Palestinians since early Tuesday, including 3 children and over 80 injured.
This event is part of a growing momentum on Harvard’s campus for justice in Palestine. “We do not intend on sitting out on complicity in oppression,” a student organizer remarked. “Not at Harvard, not anywhere else.”
PRESS CONTACT: harvardpsc@gmail.com
Students join the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine outside Austin Hall
Empty Room after 100+ students walk out of Austin Hall
The Alliance Stands Out for Justice
October 30, 2019
During a week in which 90 Palestinians - 43 of them children - were wounded with live ammunition and rubber bullets at the Friday 'Great March of Return' demonstration, the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine highlighted the siege of Gaza and the Strip's water crisis at our October 28th Stand Out in Harvard Square. We distributed hundreds of flyers to passersby who were generally very receptive. Several thanked us for our efforts, among them students from Palestine who told us we had made their day.
Climate Justice and Palestine
September 20, 2019
“Palestine is faced with a double challenge, global and local. Due to climate change, the average rainfall is decreasing and the Jordan River will soon run dry. The Gazan aquifer is so over-utilized and salinated, experts have been saying that there will be no drinkable water for 1.9 million people by 2016 which is, after all, now. These same people are also crippled by a crushing economic siege and an environment poisoned by toxic munitions. At the same time, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is characterized by water confiscation and contamination.”
Although written in early 2016, this article is even more relevant today~
Climate Justice and Palestine: the New Intersectionality
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On September 20 Alliance for Water Justice members joined the thousands of people who jammed Boston's City Hall Plaza for the student-organized Climate Strike. Our signs attracted considerable interest and thumbs up approval. Photos by Nancy Murray.
Alliance Members in the Summer Streets
July 12, 2019
Susan, an Alliance and JVP member, at the "Never Again" protest on July 2. After walking from the New England Holocaust Memorial to the Suffolk Count House of Correction where many migrants are detained, about 1,000 activists stopped traffic in Boston. They chanted "Never Again" and "close the camps."
On the 4th of July on Cape Cod, Kathy and Chris gave out flyers connecting H.R.2407 with the cruelty being inflicted on migrant children at our border. Chris used the information in the bill from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and UNICEF -military detention. #isnowaytotreatachild."
July 10 demonstration in Newton, MA. in front of Kennedy's office to urge him to so-sponsor the Betty McCollum bill HR2407 Protecting the human rights of Palestinian children in detention under the Israeli Occupation. Several Alliance members joined this determined crowd.
On Sunday May 19 nearly 70 people gathered at Downtown Crossing in Boston to draw attention to the ongoing Nakba (Catastrophe) in Palestine.
The centerpiece of their Stand Out was a 20-poster exhibit created by the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine that illustrates the expulsion of nearly 800,000 Palestinians when the State of Israel was created in 1948 and the dispossession, military rule, repression, mass incarceration and denial of freedom of movement that have blighted Palestinian lives since then.
Several panels drew attention to Palestinian resistance, seen in images of the First Intifada, Land Day protests and the 14-month-long Great March of Return in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip.
What the ongoing Nakba means today to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – where more than 70 percent of the residents are refugees – was described in a message sent to us by Mariam who works with a women’s group in Gaza City. She writes:
“I wonder, shall we return to our Palestine?
“71 years ago, Palestinian people have been subjected to a real catastrophe by the Zionist Israeli occupation, where more than 750,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced and deported from their own lands…The majority of Palestinians have become refugees and displaced persons; as a result of war crimes committed by the Israeli occupation that have violated International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, morality and customs….
“It is on May 15 that we Palestinians commemorate the Nakba and recall memories of such atrocities and displacement…The Nakba is unforgettable in our minds, no matter how the Israeli occupation tries to develop its policy, whether by means of international peace agreements that are useless, or by collective punishment against Palestinians and finally by the ‘Deal of the Century’ proposal…
“It is the Nakba that expelled a nation from their land that has been occupied by people from around the world who have claimed their right to live on this land where they have never been before …
“It is the Nakba where after 71 years, Palestinians are still struggling for freedom, independence and to establish a state, even on 22% of Palestine’s land on what remains of the 1967 borders…
“The Palestinian people dream of living in security and peace on their land. Dream to return to their land, the land of their ancestors. Dream that the world will respect UN resolutions and obligate Israel to implement them…
“We will continue resisting until freedom.
“Still I wonder, Shall we return to our Palestine?”
Nancy Murray
World Water Day in Boston with the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
March 22, 2019
Photo: Lawrence Aaronson
As if on cue, the all-day downpour ended just in time for our standout to commemorate World Water Day began.
“Leave no one behind” is the United Nations title for this year’s week- long series of events to bring attention to water issues and injustices in the world.
Fifty of us from several different organizations, students and individuals dedicated to pursuing the freedom and equality of Palestinians, gathered at the Boston University Bridge. We flanked all four corners of the bridge.
Our signs and banners received many nods and waves of appreciation and acknowledgement of the righteousness of our cause. Of course, not everyone agreed with us, but those who didn’t were surprisingly and happily few in number.
We gave out hundreds of fliers to people passing by and those in cars stopped at red lights.
Our mission is to explain what is happening on the ground regarding Israel’s theft of (with the help of U.S. taxpayer dollars) Palestinian water in the West Bank and Gaza.
Water is a human right. One most of us we take for granted, but denied to Palestinians
We believe it is our responsibility to let our neighbors and the world know that the situation is dire! While Jewish Israeli settlers are swimming in their pools, Palestinians are thirsty!
The Gaza Strip will be unfit for human habitation, next year according to the United Nations. Today in Gaza, 98% of the water is unfit to drink. In the West Bank, Israel’s water policies are forcing farmers off their land.
Palestinians are indeed being “left behind” and we are determined to put an end to this water injustice.
Susan Etscovitz, for the Alliance
March 22, 2019
Photo: Lawrence Aaronson
Eyewitness Palestine: Moving to the Brink
March 13, 2019
The audience that attended the Boston University Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) event on March 7 experienced something of an emotional rollercoaster.
First, they heard from Nancy Murray, who talked about how drastically things had changed for the worse on the ground since her initial visit during the heady days of the Intifada 31 years ago, when Palestinians were convinced that their inspiring civil uprising would succeed in ‘shaking off’ Israel’s occupation.
What her Eyewitness Palestine delegation encountered last November was a feverish surge in Israel’s settlement construction, and the acceleration of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land.
Her bleak description of a Trump-enabled going-for-broke colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the factors which make it difficult to envisage the kind of unified civil uprising of an entire society she had witnessed in 1988 did not, however, mean that there is no hope.
Hubert Murray took up the narrative, conveying in vivid terms how Palestinians we met are still resisting and refusing to be dehumanized and defeated. He talked of three kinds of resistance – agricultural, cultural and political – with slides to illustrate each one.
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond then gave a heartfelt account of her growing awareness of what Israel’s ‘homeland’ has meant for both Palestinians and Israelis. During her first trip to the region in 2015 she remembers thinking, “How can I as a Black woman be in a bus on a segregated highway built by survivors of the Holocaust?”
During the 2018 delegation she found herself horrified by human suffering and ecological devastation. Israel is depriving Palestinians of water to drive them off their land, while depleting West Bank aquifers to maintain its agribusinesses and western life style.
Israel’s weaponization of water was a theme running through all the presentations, and returned to in the Q & A. The audience was urged to join the World Water Day Stand Out at the BU Bridge on March 22 (4:30 – 6 pm) and the 1for3.org Walk for Water for Palestinian Refugees on May 4.
Great March organizer speaks to packed house at Harvard
March 2, 2019
By Nancy Murray
On February 26, the journalist and poet Ahmed Abu Artema was warmly welcomed to Harvard Law School by a standing-room-only audience. The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine was a co-sponsor of ‘The Power of the People: A Conversation with Ahmed Abu Artema, Leader and Organizer of The Gaza March of Return.’
Ahmed at Harvard Law School talk.
Artema described what led him last year to write a Facebook post suggesting that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians gather peacefully near the fence that was keeping them imprisoned to demand a life with dignity and a return to their lands and homes from which Israel had expelled them 70 years ago.
“In this post I said we are a people who want life, and nothing but life! We die in our besieged narrow strip, so why don’t we move before we all die? I ended this post with a proposed hashtag: the Great March of Return.”
Why has the Great March that began on March 30, 2018 endured for nearly a year, despite the brutal repression by the Israeli army that has to date killed more than 260 unarmed Palestinians and caused 26,000 injuries?
“The Great March represents a scream for life,” Artema stated, “and a knock on the walls of the prison after these besieged prisoners decided not to accept the continuation of slow death.”
And why has Israeli repression been so intense?
“We know why the Israeli army kills civilian protesters. It doesn’t kill them because its soldiers are in danger. It kills them because it wants to target the will to live, the will to resist the occupation in the spirit of the Palestinian people. The Return march has given a big headache to Israel, not because the protesters were carrying arms, but because they carried their rights.”
Artema’s visit to Cambridge coincided with the publication of a report compiled on the Great March by a commission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Because Israel barred the entry of the three-person commission, they relied on some 8,000 documents, countless videos and hundreds of interviews to conclude that Israel may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity in gunning down unarmed protesters.
The commission found no evidence that armed groups were coordinating the demonstrations which were “civilian in nature.” With the exception of one incident on May 14 that could have constituted an “imminent threat” to Israeli security forces, the commission found “reasonable grounds to believe that, in all other cases, the use of live ammunition by Israeli security forces against demonstrators was unlawful.”
So what happens now?
Among its recommendations the Commission urges Israel to stop using lethal force against civilians and to lift the blockade on Gaza “with immediate effect” and ensure that the wounded are able to receive medical treatment. It also recommends that individuals identified as responsible for the carnage face sanctions such as a travel ban and asset freeze, and arrest by State Parties to the Geneva Convention.
Judging from past efforts to induce Israel to end the collective punishment of over 2 million people in the Gaza Strip, none of this seems likely to happen in the short term.
But Ahmed Abu Artema is at the beginning of a tour that will take him to nine American cities, and the enthusiastic reception he received at Harvard gives reason to hope that by the time his tour ends a great many people will be fired up to respond to his call:
“Let us all work together for the sake of making our world a better, more stable, more prosperous world for all people. Let us raise our voices high and say farewell to regimes that continue military occupation and racial discrimination. Let’s start an era of equality and human rights for all, and build democratic states that give equal rights to all of its citizens. Let us say it loud, that the 3.8 billion dollars that are taken from American taxpayers every year to fund military aid to Israel are funds that continue the oppression and occupation of the Palestinian people.”
Remembering and Resisting: 70 Years of Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine
More than 300 Palestinians and their allies gathered on Tuesday, May 15 in Boston to mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophic Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and to protest Israel’s massacre of Gazans participating in the Great March of Return.
Hundreds gather in Boston to protest Gaza killings and 70 years of ethnic cleansing in Palestine
Jewish Women for Peace outside of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston. Photo: Hubert Murphy
World Water Day Forum highlighted common struggles against colonialism, corporate power
On March 22 The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine marked the 25th annual World Water Day with a Stand Out for Water Justice in downtown Boston followed by a forum, ‘The Arc of Water Injustice from Palestine to Standing Rock.’
The UN had designated March 22 as World Water Day back in 1993. In the years since then various UN bodies have declared water as a human right which “should be treated as a social & cultural good, and not primarily as an economic good,” in the words of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The UN General Assembly formally recognized water as a human right in 2010.
While these lofty pronouncements were being drafted, a very different neoliberal reality was unfolding on the ground, as large corporations turned water into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit. In indigenous lands around the globe water resources were being plundered and polluted, with devastating consequences for traditional ways of living and the environment. The ongoing seizure and diversion of water to drive indigenous peoples from their land has been a tool of colonial domination from the Americas to Palestine and beyond.
The contradiction between UN rhetoric that water is a common good and the neoliberal drive to make water a commodity exploited by the powerful is particularly glaring every three years, when the World Water Council hosts a giant World Water Forum attended by well over 10,000 government ministers, multilateral corporations, international bodies like the World Bank, development organizations and water industry businesses hawking their wares.
This year, from March 18 – 23, the Eighth World Water Forum took place in Brasilia, Brazil. Simultaneously, an Alternative World Water Forum was taking place in Brasilia, with the theme “water is a right, not a commodity.” It sought to bring together organizations and social movements from all over the world that struggle for water justice and in defense of water as an elementary right to life.
Our forum stood in solidarity with this effort, and focused on the threat to indigenous water resources in Palestine, North America and Latin America.
The first presentation was made by Nidal al Azraq, a Palestinian who grew up in Aida refugee camp in the West Bank and is now the executive director of Boston-based 1for3.org. He used the example of the West Bank village of Walaja to show how the seizure of water resources by Israel, along with the building of Israel’s Apartheid Wall across village land, served as weapons of ethnic cleansing.
Grassroots International executive director Chung-Wha Hong talks about water struggles in Latin America. Photo credit: Justin C. McIntosh
The second presenter was Yasir Kaheil, a hydrologist from the Gaza Strip who worked at the Palestine Water Authority before coming to live in the United States. He described the water catastrophe facing Gaza and repeated efforts to deal with it that were all either destroyed by Israeli military attacks or abandoned for political reasons.
The discussion then switched continents, as Grassroots International executive director Chung-Wha Hong spoke about efforts made by its partner groups in Brazil and Honduras to confront mining interests that appropriated and polluted huge amounts of water, and to stop the building of giant hydroelectric dams that displaced indigenous communities. The courage required to take on massive corporate power became tragically clear when the indigenous human rights and environmental activist Berta Caceres was murdered in March 2016 while leading the battle against Honduras’ biggest hydroelectric dam.
Dorotea Manuela of Boston's Color of Water Project listens as Mark Kenneth Tilsen describes the Lakota struggle to protect water resources.
Next, Dorotea Manuela, a coordinator of Boston’s Color of Water Project, did not mince words when she described the close relationship between race and water access in Boston, and the impact of colonialism on her native Puerto Rico. She outlined how ‘shock doctrine’ – the term coined by Naomi Klein – was playing out in post hurricane Puerto Rico, including in the provision of water resources.
The final presenter was Mark Kenneth Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota poet and educator who had been a non-violent direct action coordinator at Standing Rock. He talked about the campaign of Standing Rock Water Protectors and surveyed Lakota efforts to use treaty rights to prevent the building of dams and other ruinous water projects that destroyed indigenous homes, livelihoods and culture.
In the far-ranging discussion that followed, participants spoke of the importance of learning from each other’s struggles, of recognizing what they had in common, and of striving to build genuine multiracial solidarity movements here in the United States.
Nancy Murray
In Massachusetts, a Victory for the Right to Boycott
Boston, MA, February 8 – Defenders of free speech and Palestinian human rights won a victory in the Massachusetts legislature today when a key committee refused to advance a bill that would have prevented the state government from signing contracts with those who support an economic boycott of Israel.
The legislature’s Joint State Administration and Regulatory Oversight (SARO) committee sent an anti-boycott bill (H1685/S1689) to study, rather than releasing it for a full vote of the legislature, effectively ending its chances of being passed this session. This contentious bill, crafted by the Jewish Community Relations Council and co-sponsored by Senator Cynthia Creem and Representatives Paul McMurtry and Steven Howitt, was part of a nationwide effort to pass legislation that would inhibit the right to boycott companies that profit from the Israeli occupation.
On its face, the bill, entitled “An Act Prohibiting Discrimination in State Contracts”, reiterated anti-discrimination protections that are already on the books in Massachusetts, yet a substantial public paper trail shows that its actual target was the Palestinian civil society movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). As such, it was intended to inhibit the first amendment right to free speech through boycott action, a peaceful expression of dissent.
“Today, Massachusetts lawmakers have defended our right to organize against injustice,” said Jill Charney of Jewish Voice for Peace - Boston. “Palestinians and their allies in the Commonwealth will continue applying economic pressure on Israel until it ends its occupation of Palestinian territories.”
Over 100 faith, legal, community, civil rights and other grassroots organizations in Massachusetts formed a “Freedom to Boycott” coalition to oppose this bill. The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace Boston (JVP Boston), and Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA) spearheaded opposition to the bill, challenging misrepresentations of BDS (including the claim that it is anti-Semitic and that it constitutes a form of discrimination based on national origin). As Eva Moseley, Holocaust refugee and member of MAPA says, “BDS explicitly condemns anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination. Rather than fight BDS, Israel might consider ending its own discriminatory policies which create conditions for Palestinians under which no people – Jews included – would agree to live.”
In a joint letter opposing the bill, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Palestine Legal, the National Lawyers Guild, and Defending Rights and Dissent, concluded that, “This bill offers no new civil rights protections, is rooted in substantial part in animus towards BDS campaigns for Palestinian rights, would violate the Constitution if applied to deny state contracts to persons or entities engaged in BDS and will have a chilling impact on constitutionally protected speech.”
“Boycotts are as American as the Boston tea party, the civil rights movement, and the anti-apartheid movement” said Cole Harrison, executive director of MAPA.
These organizations were joined by the ACLU of Massachusetts and a parade of constitutional lawyers in testifying against the anti-boycott bill at its hearing in July, arguing that whether or not one supports BDS, the right to boycott has been upheld by the US Supreme Court. Since then, the ACLU has filed two federal lawsuits against similar legislation in Kansas and Arizona. On January 30, 2018, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Kansas law barring state contractors from participating in boycotts against Israel, saying the state law violates their free speech rights.
At a time when the Trump administration is threatening basic liberties, we applaud the SARO committee for protecting free speech in the Commonwealth despite heavy pressure from pro-Israel advocates and lobbyists. As Sara Driscoll of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine said, “We are very pleased that our lawmakers understood the long-term implications of attempting to remove the first amendment right to free speech through boycott action – a peaceful, tried and true expression of dissent.”
Massachusetts Peace Action is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to develop the sustained political power to foster a more just and peaceful U.S. foreign policy. We are an affiliate of Peace Action, the nation's largest grassroots peace and disarmament membership organization, with more than 100,000 members and 30 chapters across the country.
Jewish Voice for Peace Boston is one of more than 60 chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that works across the U.S. to achieve a lasting peace for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis based on equality, human rights, and freedom.
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine is a Boston-based organization that raises awareness about Israel's use of water as a weapon against the people of Palestine.
We Organize Balfour’s Legacy Conference. Watch it here.
November 2, 2017 was the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which committed Great Britain to the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine without consulting the indigenous population.
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine and The Trans Arab Research Institute organized an all-day conference in Cambridge, MA to mark the centenary.
Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU0_YCt5s9-WIaryjX_NOxejiTXtCyI9W
The Alliance Stands out–and Stands Up–for Water Justice in Palestine
As The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine gathered on March 22 to mark World Water Day 2017, prospects for water justice were as frigid as the weather.
In Standing Rock, North Dakota ‘water protectors’ were informed that oil would be coursing through the Dakota Access Pipeline that very week. In Flint, Michigan, residents had just learned that it would be years before they would be able to drink unfiltered tap water.
Thousands of miles away in the Gaza Strip, the general manager of the water utility announced that now more than 97 percent of the Strip’s water table is unfit for domestic use by Gaza’s 2 million residents. Doctors meanwhile reported a steep increase in the number of ‘blue babies’ because the water was so high in chloride and nitrates, and of patients admitted to hospital with kidney problems after being forced to drink polluted water.
Things are not much better in the Occupied West Bank, where Israel has this year been ratcheting up its destruction of the water infrastructure serving Palestinian farming communities.
With the swift approach of the year 2020 – when the UN has predicted that the Gaza Strip will be ‘uninhabitable’ - we must ratchet up our efforts to work for water justice, connecting the struggles here and in Palestine. Please join us!
We Do Broad Public Education
February 19, 2017
Alliance members and supporters stood out at the very busy subway and bus hub with our banner and signs on 2/16. In just over a half hour we had given out all of our 400 leaflets explains how Israel uses water as a weapon against Palestinians.
All but two of the passersby were friendly. One person asked us what she could do now. We talked about the anti-bds bill pending in the Massachusetts legislature which would penalize support of BDS. She said she would call her legislator and urge him to not vote for it. One young man stopped and read the leaflet and said, "Thank you for this, this is the truth ..thank you for telling the truth. No one is out there is telling the truth. But all of you here are."
We say YES to Water as a Right
In the evening of August 10, 2016, more than 20 people engaged in a standout on the picturesque bridge in the Boston Public Garden. We represented peace and justice groups organized by the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine. We were there to honor and bring attention to an international acknowledgement of water as a right, and as a necessity for human dignity and survival. The Coalition of Women called this worldwide action; they are part of a larger Water Coalition, composed of twenty NGOs working together for water rights in Palestine. (Read press release from Coalition of Women for Peace here.)
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, dedicated to bringing awareness to the Israeli use of water as a weapon against Palestinians, has four core principles:
Water is a human right
Water should not be privatized
Water should not be used as an instrument of oppression
Water should be distributed equitably
The Alliance has been addressing the Israeli control of water and its devastating impact on the Palestinian people in demonstrations, on our website, and through the electronic media.
Our signs and banner reflected our mission. At the standout, we gave over 100 leaflets to interested passersby and had the opportunity to engage many in conversation about why we were there. We experienced a few raindrops that evening, a reminder that rain and water are rare commodities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
See more information on the world-wide protest here.
Photo credit: Tess Scheflan/ Activestills.org
We say NO to Israel Shutting Off Water for Palestinian People
On July 14, 2016, the Boston-based Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine led a multi-pronged action against Israel’s escalation of its inhumane campaign of water deprivation in the West Bank at the start of Ramadan. While daytime temperatures had often soared above 100 degrees in Palestine, Israel reduced water flows by 60–90% in the Nablus and Jenin areas. (Palestinians’ access to water is always severely restricted, far less than the minimal standard mandated by the World Health Organization of the UN.)
In the morning, the Alliance delivered an open letter to the Israeli Consulate in Boston, expressing collective outrage about Israel’s use of water as a weapon and affirming the right to support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).
A noon rally, endorsed by 17 groups, began on the steps of the Massachusetts State House. Standing in front of the Alliance’s “Water Is Life” banner and other signs about water theft, Susan Jacoby spoke about not being misled by Israel’s public relations smokescreen on water distribution issues, since Israel maintains almost total control of water resources in Palestine.
photo by Barbara Wilhelm
Prior to the rally the group learned that an anti-BDS amendment had been added to a labor/jobs bill and would be debated by the State Senate that afternoon. Jewish Voice for Peace/Boston, the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, and MAPA (Mass. Peace Action) successfully mobilized their members to make calls to legislators’ offices.
As some rally participants stayed outside to distribute the Alliance’s “Water Is a Human Right” leaflet, a large contingent broke off to hand-deliver copies of the open letter to all Massachusetts legislators, the governor, and the attorney general. Several activists met with Cynthia Creem, the senator who had introduced the amendment.
By 5 p.m. the anti-BDS amendment had been withdrawn. A victory that day—but Boston-area groups will stay vigilant.
For more information about this, see this article from the Electric Intifada.
We say YES to 1for3’s Walk for Water
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine was thrilled to play an active part in the first annual Walk for Water 5K in Support of Palestinian Refugees on April 23, 2016. Despite the cold and rainy weather, over 200 walkers participated in the Cambridge Walk, and there were solidarity walks in Detroit, Michigan, Santiago, Chile, and Lebanon. As a result of the success of the event, 1for3.org will be able to build a cistern and implement programs to establish green space to benefit the residents of Aida Camp. Later this year, members of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine will join the collaborative planning process for another successful 5K Walk for Water in 2017. We hope to see you there!
We say NO to Anti-Boycott Legislation
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine is one of 61 Massachusetts organizations protesting anti-boycott legislation.
The March 2016 press release states
Over 60 organizations across the Commonwealth have formed the Massachusetts Freedom to Boycott Coalition, including groups representing Muslims, Christians, Jews, American Indians, students, professors, labor unions, lawyers, and LGBTQ communities; as well as advocates for human rights, peace and justice, anti-racism, housing, criminal justice reform, corporate accountability, civil liberties, and climate change.
“Since at least 1902—with the action led by Jewish women against Kosher butchers charging exorbitant rates for meat in New York—the boycott has been a crucial tactic by which Americans have voiced their conscience and contributed to positive social change,” said Jeffrey Melnick, Professor of American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a member of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. “Today I stand with all who want to protect a time-honored American approach to political protest, which has made such a difference, in New York, in Montgomery, and in Cape Town.”
The Coalition released a letter asking Massachusetts lawmakers to oppose any bill that would legislate against Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) strategies for justice in Palestine/Israel. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston has announced plans to submit such legislation.
We said NO to the Jewish National Fund
On a fall morning in November 2015, a protest line formed as cars pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott Hotel in Newton, MA, where the Jewish National Fund (JNF) was hosting a breakfast meeting about Israeli technology and its use as a solution to water crises. Members of the Boston Alliance for Water Justice (now the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine) stood with signs proclaiming “Water Is a Basic Human Right” and “JNF: Stop Stealing Palestinian Land.”
Created in 1901 to acquire land for a Jewish State in Palestine, the JNF is most commonly known for its campaign to “plant a tree in Israel” in order to “make the desert bloom.” The JNF plants trees and creates parks on land and over villages stolen from Palestinians, attempting to erase the existence of Palestinian life. Many of the trees it plants are not native to the area and therefore require incredible amounts of the water needed by—and taken from—Palestinians.
While Israel congratulates itself on its water technology, treatment, recycling, and “responsible” aquifer drilling, the country does not address the the fact that many of the aquifers they use are on Palestinian land and that they charge Palestinians for the water they steal from them.
We said NO to the Junket to Israel for MA State Senators
In Fall 2015, it was announced that 10 Massachusetts state senators would be traveling to Israel on an all-expenses-paid junket funded by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Greater Boston.
On October 29, Boston Globe staff reporter Frank Phillips raised the ethical issue of a trip being planned by the JCRC for a quarter of the Massachusetts Senate even as the Senate was voting to pass a JCRC-sponsored resolution that opposed “any actions, campaigns, or movements that would in any way undermine, punish, or otherwise limit, isolate, or diminish any relations with Israel.”
As soon as news of the trip was made public, members of the Boston Alliance for Water Justice (now the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine) began calling the offices of the ten Senators who were due to travel to Israel, pointing out the conflict of interest, and asking the lawmakers to reconsider their participation in a delegation designed to present Israel in a positive light and mute international condemnation of its treatment of Palestinians.
In previous years, the Boston Alliance had campaigned against the State’s “Innovative Water Partnership” with Israel, arguing that Massachusetts should not be complicit in its use of water as a weapon against the Palestinian people. Although we were encouraged that the Water Partnership had been placed on hold, we were vigilant that joint water projects with Israel not be on the State’s agenda again.
After a November 2015 press conference at the State House, the Boston Alliance for Water Justice presented the Senators with the following “Ten Reasons” not to go on the Jewish Community Relations Council trip, along with a petition signed by over 1,000 Massachusetts residents.
The heart of our work is public education. With much persistence, members of the Boston Alliance for Water Justice along with Nidal al-Azraq of 1for3, met with eight out of the ten State Senators who went on the junket. We asked them about the trip and learned—not surprisingly—that very little time was spent in the West Bank and very little attention was given to the Occupation. Our impression is that if the whole trip was, metaphorically, a "book" only one "paragraph" was devoted to Palestine. Ironically, both the trip and the anti-BDS legislation opened doors for us to visit our legislators.
We said NO to the Massachusetts-Israel Innovation Water and Clean Energy Partnership
In June 2014, members of the Boston Alliance for Water Justice (now the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine) delivered letters from Palestinian children in West Bank refugee camps to our former governor in response to the launch of the Massachusetts-Israel Innovation Water and Clean Energy Partnership that was formed after Governor Patrick’s 2011 trade mission to Israel. Their letters detail the hardships families face due to the lack of water.
For nearly two years, the Boston Alliance campaigned against the “Innovative Water Partnership,” arguing that Massachusetts should not be complicit in Israel’s use of water as a weapon against the Palestinian people. In October 2015 the Water Partnership with Israel was placed “on hold” for the foreseeable future. Learn more at Mondoweiss.