Feature Archives

Unions, labor federations and other organizations around the world have condemned Israel’s deadly attack against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on May 31. In response on June 20th, a labor and community picket of an Israeli Zim Lines ship was called for the Port of Oakland. The picket has already succeeded in shutting down the port for the morning shift, after the ILWU refused to cross the picket line. Activists have promised to return at 4:30pm the same day to stop the next shift from unloading the Zim lines ship when it arrives from Monterey this afternoon.

Arab Queers write: "We, the undersigned queer Arab organizations, are appalled by the US Social Forum’s decision to allow Stand with Us to utilize the event as a platform to pinkwash Israel’s crimes in the region. Stand with Us is cynically manipulating the struggle of queer people in the Middle East through its workshop entitled LGBTQI Liberation in the Middle East.”

Update: On June 23rd, the leadership of the US Social Forum voted to cancel the workshop in question for "being in violation of the anti-racist principles central to the US Social Forum."

After more than a year in a Tel Aviv hospital, Bay Area activist and photo-journalist Tristan Anderson has returned home to California. Tristan was critically injured when he was shot in the head at close range with a metal high-velocity tear gas canister at the Israeli Separation Wall on March 13, 2009, while taking photos following a demonstration against the apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Ni'lin.

On May 31st, Israeli commandos attacked an unarmed aid flotilla, killing at least nine and injuring dozens of others, in international waters forty miles off the coast of Gaza. On board the ships were hundreds of civilians attempting to bring 10,000 tons of supplies and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, which has been under an illegal Israeli-imposed siege for the past three years.

Demonstrations against the Israeli attack have been taking place around the world with the largest being in Turkey where at least four of those killed were from. At a protest in the West Bank, an American solidarity activist was shot in the face with a tear gas canister and is currently in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem undergoing surgery to remove her left eye.

Protests have taken place all week at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco. The next protest will be Thursday June 3rd at 4pm at Powell and Market with a march to the Consulate at 5pm.

The Berkeley Hills home of Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Tikkun magazine, was vandalized on May 3. Posters attached to the rabbi's door and on his property attacked him personally. They also berated liberals and progressives as being supporters of terrorism and "Islamo-fascism".

Queers who support human rights protested outside the Roxie Theater on Thursday, April 8th, the opening night of the Out In Israel LGBT Cultural Festival. Out in Israel is a marketing event series aimed at convincing LGBT people in the U.S. that Israel is a cool, progressive, gay-friendly country. This is all part of a public relations scheme by supporters of Israel in this country to repair an image tarnished by atrocities, such as its massacres in Gaza last year.

Over 150 unauthorized copies of a poster were hung in BART trains in the early morning of March 31st, replacing the usual advertisements. The stark black and white poster showed a woman clinging to an olive tree with a soldier lurking behind her in a jeep. The poster's tagline read “US Funded Israeli Apartheid.”