September 2016
Dear Organisers of Taiwan Designers' Week,
We are citizens of Israel who oppose our government’s policies of oppression, military occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinian people (1). Our long years of anti-apartheid activism have brought us to the understanding that the most effective way to stop Israel's oppressive regime is to boycott it. We strongly support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law, ends its occupation of the West Bank and the siege on Gaza, and respects all rights of its Palestinian citizens and Palestinians refugees (2).
Taiwan Designers' Week exhibition “High Contrast Israeli Contemporary Design” by Israel's Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), presents a false reality of Israel as a place of co-existence and multi-culturalism. By doing so it serves an explicit Israeli propaganda: it uses culture and art as a facade to keep Israel's systematic human rights violations against Palestinians as far away as possible from the public eye.
HIT is a higher-education institute which collaborates with the Israeli military. It hosts educational programs for soldiers, and provides research for the military. This is the same military that holds the indigenous Palestinians under martial law for decades, commits extrajudicial executions, and tortures Palestinians at checkpoints. We ask that you heed the Palestinian non-violent call to boycott Israel and cancel this exhibition.
The exhibition portrays Israel as a ¨high contrast¨ multi-ethnic country with a wide variety of nationalities living ¨side by side¨. It disregards Israel's 50 laws that discriminate against its indigenous Palestinian citizens (3). It disregards the Gaza Strip, where Israel conducts major bombing campaigns on a regular basis, and the siege Israel has put it under for over a decade (4). It disregards Israel’s systematic violence against Palestinian fishermen and farmers (5), and it disregards the occupied West Bank, where Israel continues to perpetrate war crimes, building illegal settlements and demolishing Palestinian homes.
Design has the power to show, teach, and educate. It is a crucial element of social change. The designer community has a responsibility to voice its opposition to Israeli projects that have ties to the Israeli military, and to projects that whitewash Israel's human rights violations and ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.
Please, cancel the exhibition “High Contrast Israeli Contemporary Design”.
Sincerely,
Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within
[1] http://boycottisrael.info/
[2] https://bdsmovement.net/call
[3] http://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771
[4] Israel's assault on Gaza 2 years ago resulted in over 2200 innocent Palestinian citizens massacred, over 500 of whom were children. More than eighty families were completely wiped out and 18,000 homes were destroyed. https://blackfriday.amnesty.org/
[5] http://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771