The boycott Israel noose tightens

It’s been a bad month for Israel and a good month for justice – and there’s more to come.

As has been widely reported, on July 19 the European Commission adopted new guidelines that prohibit European Union institutions from giving awards and grants to entities based in the Jewish colonies in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

Three days later we learned from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that the German international supermarket chain Aldi, which has stores in 16 European countries plus the United States and Australia, has also begun boycotting all products from Israeli colonies. This was confirmed by a spokesperson for the retailer to the Amsterdam-based daily Trouw.

As if this were not enough, Hoogvliet, a Dutch retailer, also said it was boycotting goods from the illegal Jewish colonies, and another Dutch network, Jumbo, said it has taken steps to ensure that products bearing its own brand do not contain goods from the Jewish colonies, JTA reports.

Jumbo said it has asked suppliers of products that are labelled as originating from Israel to provide official documents confirming that the products are not from the West Bank “because the client has a right to receive accurate information,” a Jumbo spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, the Guardian newspaper reports that the award-winning film director Mira Nair has rejected an invitation to attend the Haifa International Film Festival, saying she will only visit Israel “when the walls come down”.

According to the Guardian,

In series of messages that Nair posted on Twitter on Friday evening [19 July], she said she was backing the Palestinian campaign for a cultural boycott of Israel in protest at its 46-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

She had been invited as a guest of honour at the Haifa festival following the release this year of her latest film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. “I will not be going to Israel at this time… I will go to Israel when occupation is gone,” she wrote. “I will go to Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when apartheid is over.”

The world is changing, slowly but surely, and soon – sooner than you think – the Zionist state of Israel will find itself in the same position in which South Africa found itself on the eve of the collapse of apartheid.

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