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Randy Dotinga interviews Marjorie Cohn

Randy Dotinga interviews Marjorie Cohn

On the legal front, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have few bigger enemies than Marjorie Cohn, a professor at San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

Cohn, president of the liberal National Lawyers Guild, is a leading voice demanding that members of the Bush Administration be prosecuted for war crimes. She also condemns the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as illegal under international law, which she says the United States. It’s a debate that hinges on whether the wars were launched in self defense.

In a new book, “Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent,” she and a co-author write about members of the military who have resisted service in the current two wars on legal grounds. She’s also written a book about the Bush Administration called “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.”So far, Cohn’s opinions aren’t gaining much traction in Washington D.C., although the Obama Administration is slowly making strides toward some torture prosecutions.

So Cohn fights on. In an interview, she talked about the responsibility of soldiers to disobey wrongful orders, the prosecution of government lawyers and the country’s ability to withstand the distraction of putting a former president and vice president on trial.

What are your biggest recent successes on the war-crimes front?

I have testified as an expert witness in courts martial and military hearings for servicemembers who have refused orders to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. They have argued that those wars are illegal. My testimony has corroborated those beliefs by citing the U.N. charter, which is part of U.S. law, which says one country cannot invade another country unless it’s in self defense or the U.N. Security Council agrees. And neither of those wars is lawful under the U.N. charter.

Under our law, there’s a duty to obey lawful orders, but there’s also a duty to disobey unlawful orders. The order to deploy to an unlawful war is an unlawful order.

My testimony has corroborated the reasonableness of the belief of some service members that it would be illegal for them to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve had some success with that testimony.

How so?

In one case, the servicemember was given no time in custody. In another case, he was separated from the military under very favorable conditions.

I also testified in front of Congress last year on the Bush Administration’s policy of torture and abuse, and that testimony has been useful in the move to bring to justice the people who set the policies and the lawyers who wrote the torture memos to justify the policies.

Can someone be prosecuted for merely having a legal opinion?

They would be prosecuted for advising the president on how he can break the law and get away with it. There were lawyers who were prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity after World War II advising Hitler on how to deport people to secret camps “legally” and get away with it.

What do you think should happen to the lawyers in this case?

They should be investigated and prosecuted under U.S. statutes.

Should they go to prison?

If convicted, yes, they should go to prison.

How far up would you extend the prosecutions for war crimes?

All the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief.

So you would have Bush and Cheney prosecuted?

Absolutely. And there’s tremendous evidence to support prosecutions for torture, which is a war crime, and for leading us into an illegal war under false pretenses which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

When you look at these issues, is it purely from a legal perspective or do you also think about how trials like these might affect the nation?Both. My legal training makes it very clear to me that they have broken laws, and we are a nation of laws.

The Constitution requires the president to faithfully execute the laws.

It’s also clear to me that if we don’t bring people who have committed these high crimes to justice, then future administrations will think they can get away with war crimes. People in other countries will hate us even more because we let our leaders get away with murder and torture.

What do you think will be the negative consequences if Bush and Cheney are prosecuted? Will the country be torn apart, and does that worry you?

The Republicans will oppose it. The country is divided on many issues; it’s divided on health care and the war in Afghanistan.

The fact that some people, especially Republicans, might be upset if members of the Bush Administration are brought to justice should not prevent the president and attorney general from doing the right thing.

What about the issue of distraction? A trial would be all the country would think about for months or years when there are other issues out there.

There are all kinds of distractions. We are capable as a country of taking care of business in many different areas at the same time. That’s a red herring.

What do you think President Obama should do now regarding the wars abroad?

He should pull out and use diplomacy and foreign aid and more peaceful means of resolving problems than escalating the military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

Is there anything that will change the tide in your favor?

What could change the tide is a strong and vigorous anti-war movement. We don’t have that now. We did during Vietnam, and one of the reasons was that we had a draft, and college students protested.

What is your vision of humanity? Some people look at war and conflict and think that humans fight, this is inevitable. Then there are the peace activists who say we can work things out through diplomacy instead of violence.

I’m not a pacifist. There are times when people have to act in self defense. But the United States government has not been acting in self defense.

Most problems between countries and within countries can be handled with peaceful means. Violence and fighting is a last resort. But unfortunately, the U.S. has used it as a first resort too often.

*Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University.

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-188186-109-centerpalestine-winning-the-legitimacy-warbr-i-by-i-brrichard-falkcenter.html

“So why did the Israeli government boycott the commission? The real answer is quite simple: They knew full well that the commission, any commission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach.”
Uri Avnery (Israeli peace activist, and former Knesset member), “On the Goldstone Report” Sept. 19, 2009

Richard Goldstone, former judge of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, the first prosecutor at The Hague on behalf of the International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia and anti-apartheid campaigner reports that he was most reluctant to take on the job of chairing the UN fact-finding mission charged with investigating allegations of war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during the three-week Gaza War of last winter. Goldstone explains that his reluctance was due to the issue being “deeply charged and politically loaded,” and was overcome only because he and his fellow commissioners were “professionals committed to an objective, fact-based investigation,” adding that “above all, I accepted because I believe deeply in the rule of law and the laws of war,” as well as the duty to protect civilians to the extent possible in combat zones. The four-person fact-finding mission was composed of widely respected and highly qualified individuals, including distinguished international law scholar Christine Chinkin, a professor at the London School of Economics. Undoubtedly adding complexity to Goldstone’s decision is the fact that he is Jewish, with deep emotional and family ties to Israel and Zionism, bonds solidified by his long association with several organizations active in Israel.
Despite the impeccable credentials of the commission members, and the worldwide reputation of Richard Goldstone as a person of integrity and political balance, as well as of being an eminent jurist, Israel refused its cooperation from the outset. It did not even allow the UN undertaking to enter Israel or the Palestinian Territories, forcing reliance on the Egyptian government to allow the UN mission entry to Gaza at the Rafah Crossing. As Uri Avnery observes, however much Israel may attack the commission report as one-sided and unfair, the only plausible explanation of its refusal to cooperate with a UN fact-finding mission of this sort and seizing the opportunity to tell its side of the story was that it had nothing to tell that could hope to overcome the overwhelming evidence of the Israeli failure to carry out its attacks on Gaza last winter in accordance with the international laws of war. No credible international commission could reach any set of conclusions other than those reached by the Goldstone Report on the central allegations.

In substantive respects the Goldstone Report adds nothing new. Its main contribution is to confirm widely reported and analyzed Israeli military practices during the Gaza War. There had been several reliable reports already issued condemning Israel’s tactics as violations of the laws of war and of international humanitarian law, including by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a variety of respected Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups. Journalists and senior United Nations civil servants had reached similar conclusions. Perhaps most damning of all the material available before the Goldstone Report was the publication of a document entitled “Breaking the Silence,” containing commentaries by 30 members of the Israel Defense Forces who had taken part in Operation Cast Lead (the official Israeli name for the Gaza War). These soldiers spoke movingly about the loose rules of engagement issued by their commanders, which helps explain why so little care was taken to avoid civilian casualties. The sense emerges from the testimony of these IDF soldiers, who were in no sense critical of Israel or even of the Gaza War as such, that Israeli policy emerged out of a combination of efforts “to teach the people of Gaza a lesson for their support of Hamas” and to keep IDF casualties as close to zero as possible even if meant massive death and destruction for innocent Palestinians.

Given this background of a prior international consensus on the unlawfulness of Operation Cast Lead, we must first wonder why this massive 575-page report has been greeted with such alarm by Israel and given so much attention in the world media. It added little to what was previously known. Arguably, it was more sensitive to Israel’s contentions that Hamas was guilty of war crimes by firing rockets into its territory than earlier reports had been. And in many ways the Goldstone Report endorses the misleading main line of the Israeli narrative by assuming that Israel was acting in self-defense against a terrorist adversary. The report does describe the success of the ceasefire with Hamas that had cut violence in southern Israel to very low levels, and attributes its disruption to Israel’s attack on Nov. 4, 2008, but nowhere does it make the inference that would seem to follow, that the Israeli attacks were an instance of the international crime of aggression. Instead, the report focuses its criticism on Israel’s excessive and indiscriminate uses of force. It does this mainly by examining the evidence surrounding a series of incidents involving attacks on civilians and non-military targets. The report also does draw attention to the unlawful blockade that has restricted the flow of food, fuel, and medical supplies to subsistence levels in Gaza before, during, and since Operation Cast Lead. Such a blockade is a flagrant instance of collective punishment, explicitly prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention setting forth the legal duties of an occupying power.

All along Israel had rejected international criticism of its conduct of military operations in the Gaza War, claiming that the IDF was the most moral fighting force on the face of the earth. The IDF conducted some nominal investigations of alleged unlawful behavior that consistently vindicated the military tactics relied upon and the top Israeli political leaders steadfastly promised to protect any Israeli military officer or political leader internationally accused of war crimes. In view of this extensive background of confirmed allegation and angry Israeli rejection, why has the Goldstone Report been treated in Tel Aviv as a bombshell that is deeply threatening to Israel’s stature as a sovereign state? Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, called the report “a mockery of history” that “fails to distinguish between the aggressor and a state exercising its right of self-defense,” insisting that it “legitimizes terrorist activity, the pursuit of murder and death.” More commonly Israel’s zealous defenders condemned the report as one-sided, biased, reaching foregone conclusions and emanating from the supposed bastion of anti-Israeli attitudes at the UN’s Human Rights Council. The line of response to any criticism of Israel’s behavior in occupied Palestine, especially if it comes from the UN or human rights NGOs is to cry “foul play” and avoid any real look at the substance of the charges. It is an example of what I call “the politics of deflection,” attempting to shift the attention of an audience away from the message to the messenger. The more damning the criticism, the more ferocious the response. From this perspective, the Goldstone Report obviously hit the bulls eye. Being willing to level such a harsh attack against a person as deeply sympathetic to Israel as Judge Goldstone indicates that no truth-teller will be exempted from vilification.

Considered more carefully, there are some good reasons for Israel’s panicked reaction to this damning report. First, it does come with the backing of an eminent international personality who cannot credibly be accused of anti-Israel bias, making it harder to deflect attention from the findings no matter how loud the screaming of “foul play.” Any fair reading of the report would show that it was balanced, took full and sensitive account of Israel’s arguments relating to security, and indeed gave Israel the benefit of the doubt on some key issues. Secondly, the unsurprising findings are coupled with strong recommendations that do go well beyond previous reports. Two are likely causing the Israeli leadership great worry: the report recommends strongly that if Israel and Hamas do not themselves within six months engage in an investigation and follow-up action that meets international standards of objectivity with respect to these violations of the law of war, then the Security Council should be brought into the picture, being encouraged to consider referring the whole issue of Israeli and Hamas accountability to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Even if Israel is spared this indignity by the diplomatic muscle of the United States, and possibly some European governments, the negative public relations implications of a failure to abide by this report could be severe.

The Independent

Report also censures Hamas but accuses Israelis of punishing entire population of the Palestinian Strip

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

Israel targeted “the people of Gaza as a whole” in the three-week military operation which is estimated to have killed more than 1,300 Palestinians at the beginning of this year, according to a UN-commissioned report published yesterday.

A UN fact-finding mission led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone said Israel should face prosecution by the International Criminal Court unless it opened independent investigations of what the report said were repeated violations of international law, “possible war crimes and crimes against humanity” during the operation.

Using by far the strongest language of any of the numerous reports criticising Operation Cast Lead, the UN mission, which interviewed victims, witnesses and others in Gaza and Geneva this summer, says that, while Israel had portrayed the war as self-defence in response to Hamas rocket attacks, it “considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.

“In this respect the operations were in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support,” the report said.

The 575-page document presented to yesterday’s session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva was swiftly denounced by Israel. The foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the UN mission had “dealt a huge blow to governments seeking to defend their citizens from terror”, and that its conclusions were “so disconnected with realities on the ground that one cannot but wonder on which planet was the Gaza Strip they visited”.

The Gaza war began on 27 December 2008 and ended on 18 January 2009.

The UN report found that the statements of military and political leaders in Israel before and during the operation indicated that they intended the use of “disproportionate force”, aimed not only at the enemy but also at the “supporting infrastructure”. The mission adds: “In practice this appears to have meant the civilian population.”

The mission also had harsh conclusions about Hamas and other armed groups, acknowledging that rocket and mortar attacks have caused terror in southern Israel, and saying that, where such attacks were launched into civilians areas, they would “constitute war crimes” and “may amount to crimes against humanity”.

It also condemned the extrajudicial killings, detention and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees by the Hamas regime in Gaza ? as well as by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank ? and called for the release on humanitarian grounds of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal abducted by Gaza militants in June 2006.

While the Israeli government refused to co-operate with the inquiry ? or allow the UN team into Israel ? on the ground that the team would be”one-sided”, Corporal Shalit’s father, Noam, was among those Israeli citizens who flew to Geneva to give evidence.

That said, the greater part of the report ? and its strongest language ? is reserved for Israel’s conduct during the operation. Apart from the unprecedented death toll, the report says that “the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a systematic policy by the Israeli armed forces”. The purpose was not to avert a military threat, but “to make the daily process of living and dignified living more difficult for the civilian population”.

The report also says that vandalism of houses by some soldiers and “the graffiti on the walls, the obscenities and often racist slogans constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanisation of the Palestinian population”.

Amid a detailed examination of most of the major incidents of the war ? albeit one carried out five months after it took place ? it says that:

* The first bombing attack on Day One of the operation, when children were going home from school, “appears to have been calculated to cause the greatest disruption and widespread panic”.

* The firing of white phosphorus shells at the UN Relief and Works Agency compound was “compounded by reckless regard of the consequences”, and the use of high explosive artillery at the al-Quds hospitals were violations of Articles 18 and 19 of the Geneva Convention. It says that warnings issued by Israel to the civilian population “cannot be considered as sufficiently effective” under the convention.

* On the attack in the vicinity of the al-Fakhoura school where at least 35 Palestinians were killed, Israeli forces launched an attack where a “reasonable commander” would have considered military advantage was outweighed by the risk to civilian life. Under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the civilians had their right to life forfeited. And while some of the 99 policemen killed in incidents surveyed by the team may have been members of armed groups, others who were not also had their right to life violated.

* The inquiry team also says that a number of Palestinians were used as human shields ? itself a violation of the ICCPR ? including Majdi Abed Rabbo, whose complaints about being so used were first aired in The Independent. The report asserts that the use of human shields constitutes a “war crime under the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court”.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1114484.html

Outgoing United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockman said Monday he had been restrained by leading UN members in his efforts to improve the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“My greatest frustration this year has been the Palestine situation,” the Nicaraguan said in his final address to the 192-nation assembly before passing on the one-year presidency to Libyan diplomat Ali Treki.

Treki will open the 64th assembly session on Tuesday. The body is already mired in controversies because Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi plans to attend UN meetings next week in the wake of protests against Scotland’s release last month of the Libyan bomber of Pan American Flight 103. The bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 killed 270 people, most of them Americans.

D’Escoto Brockman, a former Sandinista foreign minister in the 1980s in Nicaragua and a Maryknoll priest, said he was urged to exercise “caution” and to give the diplomatic process in the Middle East conflict more time to work.

“Faced with this situation, I sincerely did not know what to do,” he said. “I wanted to help Palestine, but those who should supposedly have been most interested denied their support for reasons of ‘caution’ that I was incapable of understanding.”

He said he found it “disgraceful” that influential members of the UN Security Council had shown “passivity and apparently indifference” on the Israeli blockade of Gaza in the past two years.

He has criticized some western governments during his one-year tenure on issues ranging from the world economic and financial crisis to social injustice suffered by the poor.

The assembly presidency, which rotates among the world’s five regions, has been mostly a protocol position

Washington Post
Sept 6 2009

During the past 16 months I have visited the Middle East four times and met
with leaders in Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, the West
Bank and Gaza. I was in Damascus when President Obama made his historic
speech in Cairo, which raised high hopes among the more-optimistic Israelis
and Palestinians, who recognize that his insistence on a total freeze of
settlement expansion is the key to any acceptable peace agreement or any
positive responses toward Israel from Arab nations.

Late last month I traveled to the region with a group of “Elders,” including
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of
Brazil and Mary Robinson of Ireland, former prime minister Gro Brundtland of
Norway and women’s activist Ela Bhatt of India. Three of us had previously
visited Gaza, which is now a walled-in ghetto inhabited by 1.6 million
Palestinians, 1.1 million of whom are refugees from Israel and the West Bank
and receive basic humanitarian assistance from the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency. Israel prevents any cement, lumber, seeds, fertilizer and
hundreds of other needed materials from entering through Gaza’s gates. Some
additional goods from Egypt reach Gaza through underground tunnels. Gazans
cannot produce their own food nor repair schools, hospitals, business
establishments or the 50,000 homes that were destroyed or heavily damaged by
Israel’s assault last January.

We found a growing sense of concern and despair among those who observe, as
we did, that settlement expansion is continuing apace, rapidly encroaching
into Palestinian villages, hilltops, grazing lands, farming areas and olive
groves. There are more than 200 of these settlements in the West Bank.

An even more disturbing expansion is taking place in Palestinian East
Jerusalem. Three months ago I visited a family who had lived for four
generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to
destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors
carried out the demolition order. On Aug. 27, we Elders took a gift of food
to 18 members of the Hanoun family, recently evicted from their home of 65
years. The Hanouns, including six children, are living on the street, while
Israeli settlers have moved into their confiscated dwelling.

Daily, headlines in Jerusalem newspapers say that certain areas and types of
construction would be excluded from the settlement freeze and that it would,
at best, have a limited duration. Increasingly desperate Palestinians see
little prospect of their plight being alleviated; political, business and
academic leaders are making contingency plans should President Obama’s
efforts fail.

We saw considerable interest in a call by Javier Solana, secretary general
of the Council of the European Union, for the United Nations to endorse the
two-state solution, which already has the firm commitment of the U.S.
government and the other members of the “Quartet” (Russia and the United
Nations). Solana proposes that the United Nations recognize the pre-1967
border between Israel and Palestine, and deal with the fate of Palestinian
refugees and how Jerusalem would be shared. Palestine would become a full
U.N. member and enjoy diplomatic relations with other nations, many of which
would be eager to respond. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad described
to us his unilateral plan for Palestine to become an independent state.

A more likely alternative to the present debacle is one state, which is
obviously the goal of Israeli leaders who insist on colonizing the West Bank
and East Jerusalem. A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met
are seriously considering acceptance of one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. By renouncing the dream
of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their
Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy. In this
nonviolent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi,
Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

They are aware of demographic trends. Non-Jews are already a slight majority
of total citizens in this area, and within a few years Arabs will constitute
a clear majority. A two-state solution is clearly preferable and has been embraced at the
grass roots.

Just south of Jerusalem, the Palestinian residents of Wadi Fukin and the
nearby Israeli villagers of Tzur Hadassah are working together closely to
protect their small shared valley from the ravages of rock spill, sewage and
further loss of land from a huge settlement on the cliff above, where 26,000
Israelis are rapidly expanding their confiscated area. It was heartwarming to
see the international harmony with which the villagers face common challenges
and opportunities.

There are 25 similar cross-border partnerships between Israelis and their
Palestinian neighbors. The best alternative for the future is a negotiated
peace agreement, so that the example of Wadi Fukin and Tzur Hadassah can
prevail along a peaceful border between two sovereign nations.

The writer was the 39th president. He founded The Carter Center, a
nongovernmental organization focused on global peace and health issues.

Ken Loach, Rebecca O’Brien and Paul Laverty
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 September 2009

When we decided to pull our film Looking for Eric from the Melbourne International Film festival following our discovery that the festival was part-sponsored by the Israeli state, we wrote to the director Richard Moore detailing our reasons. Unfortunately he has misrepresented our position and did so again last week on Comment is free by stating that “to allow the personal politics of one film-maker to proscribe a festival position ? goes against the grain of what festivals stand for”, and claiming that “Loach’s demands were beyond the pale”.

This decision was taken by three film-makers, (director, producer, writer) not in some private abstract bubble, but after a long discussion and in response to a call for a cultural boycott from a wide spectrum of Palestinian civil society, including writers, film-makers, cultural workers, human rights groups, journalists, trade unions, women’s groups and student organisations. As Moore should know by now the Palestine Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was launched in Ramallah in April 2004, and its aims, reasons, and constituent parts are widely available on the net. PACBI is part of a much wider international movement for “boycott, divestment, and sanction” (BDS) against the Israeli State.

Why do we back this growing international movement? Over the last 60 years Israel, backed by the United States, has shown contempt for hundreds of UN resolutions, the Geneva convention and international law. It has demonstrated itself to be a violent and ruthless state, as was clearly shown by the recent massacres in Gaza, and was even prepared to further challenge international law by its use of phosphorous weapons. Israel continues to flout world-wide public opinion; the clearest example of its intransigence is its determination to continue to build the wall through Palestinian territories despite the 2004 decision of the international court.

What does the international community do? Nothing but complain. What does the United States do? It continues to voice its “grave concern” while subsidising the Israeli state to some $3bn a year. Meanwhile “on the ground” ? a good title for a film ? Israeli settlers continue to take over Palestinian homes and lands making a viable Palestinian homeland an impossible dream. Normal life, with basic human rights, has become a virtual dream for most Palestinians.

Given the failure of international law, and the impunity of the Israeli state, we believe there is no alternative but for ordinary citizens to try their best to fill the breach. Desmond Tutu said: “The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of the international community ? in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at the end of the Israeli occupation.”

At a recent BDS event in the West Bank town of Ramallah Naomi Klein argued that those who claim there is no exact equivalency between Israel and South Africa should think again. “The question is not ‘Is Israel the same as South Africa?’, it is ‘do Israel’s actions meet the international definition of what apartheid is?’.” And if you look at those conditions which includes the transfer of people, multiple tiers of law, official state segregation, then you see that, yes, it does meet that definition ? which is different than saying it is South Africa. No two states are the same. It’s not the question, it’s a distraction.” Not long after the Gaza invasion we spoke to the head of a human rights organisation there who told us that the Israelis were refusing enough chemicals to adequately treat the civilian water supply; a clear example of vindictive collective punishment delivered to one half of the population.

On this site last week, Neve Gordon, a Jewish political professor teaching in an Israeli university argued: “The most accurate way to describe Israel today is an apartheid state.” As a result he too is supporting the international campaign of divestment and boycott. We feel duty bound to take advice from those living at the sharp end inside the occupied territories. We would also encourage other film-makers and actors invited to festivals to check for Israeli state backing before attending, and if so, to respect the boycott. Israeli film-makers are not the target. State involvement is. In the grand scale of things it is a tiny contribution to a growing movement, but the example of South Africa should give us heart.