SAY “NO” TO ISRAELI SPONSORED FILM FESTIVAL

Protest @ the Tricycle Saturday, 2 November 5.45-7.15pm 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 7JRbring your banners, placards, megaphones & chants! The Israeli Embassy is a sponsor of the Jewish Film Festival.  Last year as the film festival was playing the Israeli state was bombing Gaza. 158 Palestinians were killed; 30 were children and 13 were women. The attack began when Israel murdered Ahmed Jabari, who only hours before had received a draft of, and was expected to respond positively to, a permanent truce agreement between Hamas and Israel. Unrwa School In Beit Lahia, Gaza, bombed with white phosphorus, January 2009 The Tricycle says on its website that it: “views the world through varied lenses, bringing unheard voices into the mainstream . . . is a local venue with an international vision.” The Tricycle has informed us about Afghanistan, Bloody Sunday, Guantanamo, the Steven Lawrence Inquiry, and more.  And would not have hosted a film festival sponsored by the South African Apartheid state at the time of the Sharpeville massacre, or the Argentinian junta while it disappeared and tortured tens of thousands, or the Rwandan state when it was committing genocide. The Tricycle is hosting a film festival sponsored by the state that helped arm  and train the Rwandan military and Hutu militia that committed genocide against the Tutsis; that armed the Argentinian junta even as it killed thousands, many of them Jewish; and broke the international boycott against South African Apartheid - supplying machine guns, missiles, tanks and training and helped build its nuclear industry. How can the Tricycle ignore that Palestinians are forced into Bantustans, complete with pass laws, segregation and other racist violence.  Or the ongoing siege of Gaza, prejudicing the long-term health of its people, particularly malnutrition among children and alarming levels of anaemia among babies and pregnant women. Has the Tricycle forgotten the 2008-9 bombing of Gaza designed to terrorize and humiliate the civilian population, with the systematically reckless use of white phosphorus, forcing civilians to be human shields, the wanton destruction of infrastructure: food production, medical facilities, water, power and sewerage facilities, schools and kindergartens? 1,417 Palestinians were killed: including 313 children and 116 women, and over 5,000 wounded.
	Far from bringing unheard voices into the mainstream, the Tricycle is hiding those voices.  We protest the Tricycle hosting the Jewish Film Festival , not because it’s Jewish, but because its Israeli sponsored, because it acts to misinform and distract from Israel’s murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people, and its complicity with genocide, apartheid, rape and torture around the world.
For more on the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment & sanctions, see www.bdsmovement.net.  And for more on Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression, see http://israelglobalrepression.wordpress.com. INTERNATIONAL JEWISH ANTI-ZIONIST NETWORK www.ijsn.net  07816 251377 uk@ijsn.net