News Highlights:
- Israeli officials give demolition orders for 6 Palestinian homes near al-Tuwani in the south Hebron Hills.
- Israeli settlers vow to continue building and insist the Israeli government has no real desire to halt settlement expansion.
- Brazilian parliamentary commission recommends not ratifying the Free Trade Agreement with Israel.
- American pension fund TIAA-CREF no longer invests in Africa Israel, which helps build illegal Israeli settlement homes.
- Palestinian artists call on Arab directors to withdraw their films from the Toronto Film Festival, to support the protest over the Tel Aviv spotlight at the Festival.
Feature:
The feature was a live interview with bhYael from Toronto about the protest against the Toronto Int’l Film Festival Spotlight on Tel Aviv. Yael, herself a film and video-maker, is a member of the committee that initiated the protest letter to TIFF, and she updated us on the numerous signatories to the letter. She explained that the action was not a boycott of the event, but rather people protesting TIFF’s being “complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine” and its part in the Rebrand Israel PR campaign. There was also discussion of the events around the protest, including a press conference and a lively public meeting with various filmmakers and artists on hand.
Focus on Zionism:
Excerpts of a Sept. 10th, 2009 open letter from the Popular Committee in Bilin to Sweden, calling on the Swedish pension fund to divest from companies supporting Israeli human rights abuses, in particular Israel Discount Bank.
Here is an audio file of this show: