Zionist Israel’s propaganda device ARTISRAEL is among the sponsors of the 23rd Flying Broom International Women’s Film Festival, held by the Flying Broom Foundation located in Ankara / Turkey. ARTISRAEL is an organization aiming to whitewash Israel’s crimes against Palestinian people, including Palestinian women, by transfering its propaganda budget to some cultural events around the world. Israel killed at least 8 women just in 2019. (See B’tselem’s web page for details)
Today, Palestinian people call for the boycott of every cultural event that accepts Israeli funding in some way, as a part of a more general boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, namely the BDS movement which we, the Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist Friends of Palestine do support. This movement is inspired by the famous anti-Apartheid movement against the Apartheid South Africa, and became the foremost enemy of the Zionist occupiers in Palestinian lands. In Turkey, there’s a BDS community calling for the cultural boycott of Israel since 2009, which the organisers can not be unaware of.
We strongly appeal to the organizers of the 23rd Flying Broom International Women’s Film Festival, to terminate their relationship with the Zionist occupier. You may find our letter to the foundation below:
An Appeal to the Organizers of the 23rd Flying Broom International Women’s Film Festival
Terminate your sponsorship relationship with Zionist Israel, the murderer of the Palestinian women!
Do not let the Zionist entity whitewash and normalize its crimes over your cultural activities!
Zionist Israel is an illegitimate discriminatory entity, a contemporary replica of the Apartheid regime in the South Africa, which keeps the Palestinian territory under occupation and annexes more lands day by day, alongside imposing a brutal blockade on a 2 million population in the Gaza Strip for 14 years.
That entity has imprisoned 17.000 Palestinian women since 1967. In 2019 alone, 40 Palestinian women were detained by the Zionist invader. They have been kept captives in Israeli prison, being deprived of basic human rights such as privacy and education.
One of those is Mays Abu Gosh (22), a student of journalism, who was detained by Zionist soldiers on August 29th 2019, and has been tortured and mistreated systematically at the Maskubiyeh detention center for 30 days.
On April 28th 2020, Zionists arbitrarily stripped Gosh and two other female Palestinian captives, one of whom was Palestinian politician Khalida Jarrar who was detained on October 31st and is yet to stand trial, of the right to communicate with family.
Zionist snipers targeted and massacred civilians, including women, who in last two years joined the Great Return March held in the north of the Gaza Strip.
We have no doubt that you remember American female activist Rachel Corrie, who was run over by an armored bulldozer in 2003, or Razan al-Najjar, a nurse who was shot dead by live ammunition during the Great Return March in June 2018, not to mention the Palestinian women slaughtered during Israeli shelling in the Gaza Strip, or at the check points in the West Bank.
Dear organizers,
We would like to ensure you that ARTISRAEL, one of your sponsors among many others, is a propaganda instrument funded directly by that state, and established to tout murderous Israel as a heaven of freedom and beacon of democracy. Many organizations, first and foremost the BDS movement, around the world fight against that entity.
We appeal to you for not collaborating with the invaders, and supporting Palestinians resisting against them.
We call on you to adhere to the values that your foundation declares on its website. If you are a pro-human-rights and pro-nonviolence women’s organization that stands against discrimination of any kind, whether it be political, religious, lingual, racial, class or sexual, what you should do today is to heed the call by the Palestinian people and women, and thus terminating your sponsorship relationship with ARTISRAEL, which was established to absolve the crimes committed by Israel.
Friends of Palestine against Imperialism and Zionism
