The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign started in autumn 2000 in response to the Palestinian second uprising against Israeli occupation (intifada). The SPSC has branches and groups of supporters in several Scottish cities and universities, as well as individual members across Scotland. We are all volunteers, independent of all political formations, and wholly dependent on donations to finance our activities. We are unaligned with any Palestinian factions and support the right of the Palestinian people as a whole to self-determination.

We work with a generally sympathetic Scottish public at every level from the Parliament to street publicity events.

In 2002, Mick Napier, the Chair of the Scottish PSC, received on behalf of the Campaign that year’s Muslim News Award for Excellence for championing a Muslim cause.

We detect a huge shift in popular support away from Israel and towards support for the human and national rights of the Palestinian people. We are committed to building effective solidarity with the people of Palestine - solidarity which can send a message of hope inside the ghettoes Israel is now building across the whole of Palestine, and which will also send a message to people in Israel that they will face mounting world-wide opposition if they continue along their present path.

There is always a need to educate the public about the history of Palestine, its present day realities, and the real danger of Israel accelerating its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the future. We believe, however, despite general press and official UK Government positions of support for Israeli crimes, that a sufficient awareness has been reached among broad sectors of public opinion to sustain a successful campaign of active protest against Israeli crimes in Palestine and the wider region.

All the various activities of the SPSC are related in some way to the Palestinian appeal for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli companies and state-supported institutions. We have identified Israel’s Achilles’ Heel: while the regional super-power can kill lightly-armed Palestinians with virtual impunity, the Zionist State has become deeply unpopular around the world and vulnerable to boycott. Wherever we unearth institutional collaboration with Israel in Scottish society, whether in universities, city councils, and the Scottish Parliament, we are able to challenge it with every chance of succeeding. We are always working to solve the fundamental problem of how the many citizens already sympathetic to Palestine can make a real difference.

Working for BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) against Israel
The major part of our work, therefore, is responding to the appeal from the entirety of Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, as long as the Zionist State denies Palestinian human rights and violates international law. The SPSC focuses on specific targets where we can measure our successes and setbacks.

Sports boycott

• The Israeli cricket team were forced to withdraw from their planned Glasgow games in 2006 after vigorous and prolonged protests during their games.
• The Israeli Under-21s football team played in Hamilton, Scotland in September 2002 in front of well over 500 protesters, many of them protesting publicly for the first time. The Israeli team lost (1-2) and Israeli officials later complained that the players, all but one off-duty soldiers, were upset by the volume and anger of the protests against the murder and dispossession of Palestinians.

Cultural boycott
The Edinburgh International Film Festival returned sponsorship money from the Israeli Embassy after it became clear that protests would be staged at all the EIFF showings and we would launch an appeal internationally for film makers to stay away from this prestigious film festival.

The Jewish National Fund
This Zionist organisation is one of the basic institutions for the past and ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people. The JNF operates in the UK as a charity, although its stated aims are to buy land in Israel/Palestine which can never be re-sold to a non-Jew, and is to be used exclusively for the benefit of Jews. We work to strip the JNF of its charitable status because:

 

• although many others have failed before us, there is in the present climate, a real chance of winning
• most Scottish people, when told of the activities of the JNF, are appalled at it being given charitable status

Download Camcorder Guerillas Film: JNF Protest

View BBC News report

The Israeli-owned Eden Springs water cooler company
We work to spread the boycott against this particular Israeli company, Eden Springs. Contracts with Eden Springs are beginning to be cancelled. We focus on Eden Springs because:

• it is vulnerable: almost everybody in Britain can reach and punish this Israeli company, either using their local council democracy or by petitioning and protesting to their employer. Eden Springs has contracts with most universities, health trusts and local authorities in Scotland.
• it actively and undeniably violates international law in the Occupied Golan.
• it enforces a harsh system of water apartheid which privileges illegal Jewish settlers over resident Arabs.

The Israeli-owned Caledonian Hilton Hotel in Central Edinburgh
This Israeli-owned hotel has written to SPSC, through their lawyers, stating that weekly protests at their door, and SPSC publicity to the effect that they are an Israeli company, is ‘incredibly damaging to their business’. This hotel, and Israeli-owned Scottish Marriott Hotels, are targeted because:

• Scottish PSC has contributed in the past to building a small primary school in Palestine which has been served with a demolition order by the Israeli occupation authorities.
• the general public accepts the argument that Israelis should not be allowed to bulldoze Palestine and build up a property portfolio here in Scotland on a business-as-usual basis.

Other popular campaigns
Wherever we can raise the issue of Israeli crime against Palestine in a popular forum, we tend to be successful:

The case of Israeli political prisoner Mordechai Vanunu and 11,700 others
Scottish PSC has been actively involved in achieving these results.

• The SPSC initiated and ran the campaign to have Israeli prisoner Mordechai Vanunu elected as Rector by the students of Glasgow University, on a programme of support for Palestinian national and human rights. (We also ran a similar, very vigorous campaign on behalf of John Pilger for the same position at Edinburgh University).
• The majority of MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) have signed up to a motion critical of Israel that we worked to put before the Parliament and then worked to build support for.
• The majority of the Ministers in the current Scottish Government have signed a motion that “Vanunu’s election sends an important message to the Palestinian people expressing Scotland’s disgust at their treatment at the hands of the Israeli Government.”
• Glasgow City Council has also recently adopted a position of support for Vanunu, after a debate that raised the issue of Israel’s nuclear weapons of mass destruction and harsh treatment of the Palestinians.

Stanley Grossman, Scottish Friends of Israel, knows who the opposition is: “This was designed to put Mordechai Vanunu back in the public eye. We believe the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign was behind this.”

Educational activities
Any campaign for active boycott of Israeli institutions has, obviously, to be based on convincing enough people that Israel’s crimes are of such a magnitude, and the British Government’s complicity so clearly wrong, that British civil society has to act.

• Scottish PSC runs well-attended public events regularly. We also use video-conferencing technology to link up Palestinian and international audiences and speakers. In this way a large number of Scottish and other universities can combine to participate in pro-Palestinian events, sometimes several thousands of people at a time. Speakers have included the late Edward Said, as well as Azmi Bishara, Noam Chomsky and a host of others
• Delegations to Palestine:
  SPSC organises regular delegations to Palestine with the specific aim of motivating participants to return to Scotland to build the BDS campaign against Israel. The searing testimonies they receive first-hand while in Palestine are powerful motivators to work on their return for effective solidarity with Palestine.

Funds raised through donations and memberships fees assists Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign to develop our agitation throughout Scottish society, using the available weapons of non-violent democratic action, especially our right to boycott and disinvest, to isolate and de-legitimise the apologetics of supporters of Israeli human rights violations, ethnic cleansing and mass killings.

Our Aims

• The withdrawal of the Israeli army from all the Occupied Territories.
• An International Commission of Enquiry into Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians.
• The end of Zionist ethnic cleansing, and the right of all refugees to return to their homelands.
• The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.