2006-26 Successful Cultural Boycott in Scotland

When the curtain rises in a few days on the 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival we can celebrate 20 years of keeping this internationally respected film festival free of any sponsorship and involvement by the genocidal state. In 2006 the EIFF accepted finance from the Israeli embassy in London and only a determined SPSC-led campaign generated enough popular pressure to force the organisers to return the tainted money.

The 2006 successful effort took place against the backdrop of genocidal Israeli violence in Lebanon. The operation had to be repeated on a more vigorous level when the 2009 EIFF again accepted sponsorship money (£300) and allowed the Israeli Embassy logo on the EIFF publicity.

Sufficient pressure was again mobilised from the Scottish public and significant cultural figures, notably film director Ken Loach, to force the return of the tainted money yet again to the Israeli Embassy.

The Zio fightback was intense, not just in Scotland but even up to the highest levels of the US Government, where a couple of multi-millionaires lobbied Hillary Clinton to intervene to reverse the shunning of the Israeli Embassy. In vain. The public political pressure was too strong in the wake of the Israeli massacre earlier that year.

Crucial to the EIFF decision, topping off the widespread public campaign, was the decision by SPSC to mobilise across Scotland to leaflet and protest every screening of the film festival to condemn their acceptance of money from the israel Government. Festival organisers were still refusing to return the £300 as late as the Friday afternoon before the opening ceremony. We rejected a final EIFF organisers' request to call off the boycott protests, and informed them that our call that same day would bring protestors to Edinburgh did the EIFF very reluctantly announce the return of the money to the Israeli Embassy.

BDS is a weapon a peaceful democratic weapon, but a weapon nonetheless, to force complicit entities and individuals to change their behaviour. For a score and more years we have mobilised and disrupted every effort by the genocide state to preent itself as a normal entity deserving of anything other than contempt and and anger at its monstrous crimes against the Palestinian people

Since then we have defeated every other public Israeli state cultural effort in Scotland.
A proud record. An SPSC has been the target of bitter invective and smears from the Israeli embassy, their agents and supporters in the media and the Crown Prosecution Service.

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