Alternative Information Center is geen vredesgroep

In de reisgids voor Israel van Lonely Planet staat het Alternative Information Center als een vredes- en informatiegroep genoemd en wordt aangeraden er een bezoek te brengen. Dat hebben we gedaan, en daar hadden ze onder andere boekjes van het Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), bekend van de radikaal-antizionistische uitspraken van hun leider Jeff Halper, waarin allemaal argumenten stonden om tegen Israel en het zionisme te gebruiken in discussies. Die boekjes waren gefinancierd door de Europese Unie, zo stond achterop  te lezen. Je zou er bijna voor thuisblijven op 4 juni, maar dat is natuurlijk niet de oplossing, hoewel links en pro-Israel stemmen wel tot de onmogelijkheden lijkt te horen. Tips zijn welkom.

 

Het Alternative Information Center, wordt, zoals Ami hieronder ook zegt, vaak gelinkt en genoemd als vredesorganisatie, maar dat zijn ze niet. Ze zijn tegen Israel, tegen zionisme, tegen vrede en tegen een tweestatenoplossing. De Palestijnen moeten doorvechten tot ze hebben gewonnen want het land is van hun, daar komt het op neer. 

 

Onlangs gebruikte Zembla ze als bron voor hun extreme anti-Israel uitzending over Gaza.

 

RP

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"Peace" Group Fighting Peace

http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2009/05/peace-group-fighting-peace.html

 

The Alternative Information Center is funded as a "peace" group by European donors and is linked from "peace" Web sites. Their polemics about Israel are widely quoted in popular travel books, as if they are an objective or moral authority. It seems that they are for anything but peace. In a listing of NGOs for peace that I received, in which each provided information about it itself, Alternative Information Center listed itself as "anti-Zionist." We cannot imagine a group that lists itself as against Palestinian National Rights and declares it is against the right of the Palestinian people to self determination could be listed as a "peace" group. But as Zionism has been given a bad name, perhaps many will want to include such groups as "peace" groups, along with the boycotters and others.

 

But here is an op-ed from the Alternative Information Center, paid for with good European money no doubt, that blasts the Palestinian Panorama Center because they have joint projects with the Peres Peace Center. Here is the peace message of the Alternative Information Center:

One of the red lines established by the Palestinian national movement, and fully endorsed by all the Palestinian movements, parties and NGOs, was the unambiguous rejection of normalization with Israeli institutions, businesses and organizations. Normalization—Tatbiyeh, in Arabic—means collaboration with Israeli institutions aimed at creating the impression of normality, while the context remains one of Israeli military occupation and the depriving of fundamental rights for the Palestinian people. During the Oslo process, and even more so after its failure, tens of millions of dollars and euros were invested by the international community in order to create this false impression of normality, while occupation and its crimes continued and the colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories was growing like mushrooms after a rain. This orchestrated mystification plan was strongly rejected by the entire Palestinian society and its national bodies, and the few Palestinian individuals who dared to cross the line of normalization, were immediately called to order.

Of course, rejection of normalization did not mean the stopping of cooperation with Israeli organizations and movements that were involved in the struggle against occupation and colonization. In that struggle, Palestinians and Israeli anti-occupation forces have been united and will continue to be united.

The present weakness of the Palestinian movement and its internal division gives opportunities for US/European sponsored attempts to try today what failed 10 years ago, using huge sums of money to seduce Palestinian organizations to break the rules, and increase Palestinian disunity. This is how an organization like Panorama is ready to openly cooperate with an Israeli organization that, to say the least, in not at the forefront of the struggle for the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. The Peres Center for Peace is, as its name indicates, connected to Shimon Peres, who has been—until being elected President of the State of Israel—a central actor in the Israeli government. Throughout the past decades, Peres has been either Prime Minister or a cabinet minister in various occupation-governments. More recently, he was Deputy Prime Minister in the government that initiated and led the last aggression against Lebanon. You cannot be for peace and participate in a war/occupation government; or, more precisely, WE should unmask such hypocrisy and definitely not collaborate with it. It is politically unacceptable, and morally disgusting.

Shimon Peres is definitely an enemy of the Palestinian people, of human rights and of peace, and any kind of collaboration by a Palestinian organization with the Peres Center is scandalous. In order to break the boycott, organizations like the Peres Center are offering to Palestinian organizations large amounts of money, which, in the difficult days we are in, could tempt a few of them. The Palestinian civil society can be proud that the great majority of its organization cannot be bribed or corrupted!

This is the same sort of vicious propaganda as was published in Arabic by PACBI - the Palestinian Boycott group (see A program for wrecking Israeli-Palestinian Dialog ). Palestinians are to cooperate only with Israeli "useful idiots" who will do the bidding of extremist organizations. We can imaginage what would happen if Israeli "peace" groups issued similar guidelines, saying that Israeli NGOs must only cooperate with Palestinian groups that recognize the "god given right" of the Jewish people to sovereignty in "Judea and Samaria." Nobody would tolerate such behavior, would they?

Ami Isseroff