"To the Ann Arbor City Council, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
We have learnt about an initiative of Ann-Arbor residents to call upon Ann Arbor council to divest Ann Arbor from investments it may hold in companies or funds which do business in Israel. We strongly support this call.
All of us, signed below, are Israeli Jews. We understand that, in the United States, this must be spelled out, because the word of Palestinians is suspected by your media of lacking in credibility, or of somehow being inherently anti-Semitic.
There are many Israeli Jewish human rights activists, including ourselves, who are actively involved in political activity designed to persuade our government to immediately end its military occupation of the Palestinian population and Palestinian land. Many of us remember the effectiveness of the South Africa divestment campaign. Thanks partly to the divestment movement, the Black population of South Africa no longer faces tanks and police while trying to exercise their basic political rights.
We want to thank the Ann Arbor City Council for the courage to stand with the suffering and silenced population of Black South Africans, when they needed you to divest from South Africa. We understand that you passed a comprehensive anti-apartheid divestment resolution in 1986. Some of us were active in similar anti-apartheid campaigns in the 1970's and 1980's, too. Today, many Israeli human rights activists will be grateful if you can do a similar humanitarian service for the Palestinian population. As an act of simple brotherhood. Today, the bulk of the Palestinian population, numbering three million people, lives under the harshest Israeli military occupation.
That is why We hope you will pass the strongest possible resolution to divest Ann Arbor from any investments, transactions, or pension funds it may hold in companies or funds which do business in Israel. We hope you will remember the great good you did for South Africa, and do the same for millions of Palestinians today, who face similar racial and ethnic strangulation, under the control of an extremely powerful and militarized state.
The 'Israeli democracy', which you hear so much about, has absolutely no force when it comes to these three million Palestinian people, who have now lived under generations of Israeli military occpuation. The Israeli military has nuclear weapons, countless helicopter gunships and tanks, and billions of dollars each year from the United States government. That overpowering Israeli arsenal now faces a completely helpless Palestinian civilian population, each person sealed intohis village by tanks and barbed wire.
Let us encourage the Israeli government,whose army is more powerful than all of its neighbors combined, to immediately release the occupied Palestinian population from this most racist of military occupations. We do not want the Palestinian population to remain bottled up, at the mercy of a suffocating military occupation, any longer. The dangers to this population are obvious and do not need to be spelled out further.
Rest assured that Israeli and Palestinian opponents of occupation, who are working together against this most violent and racist military occupation, will be heartened to know that you have given us a hearing in your City Council. Please urgently consider divesting Ann Arbor from companies or funds which do business in Israel.
Thank you. Sincerely,
Rachel Giora, Professor of linguistics, Tel Aviv University
Nicole Cohen-Addad, MD, Tel Aviv
Irit Katriel, Graduate student, Technion - Israel institute of Technology
Jacob Katriel, Professor, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Yehudit Keshet, Organizational Consultant, West Jerusalem
Hanna Knaz, Kibbutz Gan Shmuel
Anat Matar, Associate professor of philosophy, Tel Aviv University
Susi Mordechay, Teacher and Human Rights Activist, Giv'ataim
Allegra Pacheco, Israeli Attorney
Tanya Reinhart, Professor of linguistics, Tel Aviv University
Aharon Shabtai, Poet, Tel Aviv
Russian versia