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Jeff Halper and the Israel Committee against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
- ICAHD is a Jerusalem-based NGO, co-founded in 1997 by Jeff Halper. In 2015, the NGO was closed by court order, citing failure to file annual reports, illegal use of the name of the organization, failure to report donations from foreign political entities, and other violations. ICAHD has since been operating from chapters in the US, UK and other countries.
- Halper and ICAHD are very active in BDS and other forms of political warfare, and their rhetoric includes accusations of “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “collective punishment,” and “apartheid.”
- At a lecture at UC Irvine titled “Exporting Occupation-Israel and the Global Pacification Industry” (February 2011), Halper espoused the theory that Israel is maintaining the occupation in order to retain the “four million people [Palestinians] they can experiment on with no oversight.”
- Halper also claimed that Israel developed “Spectral Dust” sensors to track and kill people based on their DNA, according to a professor who was at the event.
- On May 28, 2016, Halper spoke in the UK on “’BDS for BDS’ (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for a Bi-National, Democratic State),” calling for the dismantling of Israel.
- Halper has opposed the existence of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, saying (2008) that “I think it is impossible to have a Jewish state” and referring to Israel’s “futile attempt to impose an apartheid regime.” Halper is an active participant in “Israel Apartheid Week” activities around the world; is on the board of advisors of the Free Gaza Movement and the Russell Tribunal, a radical forum. Halper is “providing leadership and analysis for the ‘global ICAHD’” and is the co-founder of The People Yes Network.
- In a July 11, 2014 article in Mondoweiss (“Israel’s message to the Palestinians: Submit, leave or die”), Halper accused Israel of “cultural genocide” and claimed that “[Israel’s military operations in Gaza] represent the imposition of a regime of warehousing, of outright imprisonment of an entire people…Warehousing is worse than apartheid…it is a form of cultural genocide that can lead to worse. This is what Israel has left the Palestinians…”
- In 2014, Jeff Halper signed a petition titled “Jews Say: End the War on Gaza — No Aid to Apartheid Israel! BDS!” “embrac[ing] the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions,” as well as stating that “Israel’s relentless war on Gaza” is no different than the Warsaw Ghetto massacre, “Rather, it is but the latest chapter in more than a century of Zionist colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleaning, racism, and genocide.”
- In a 2015 book titled “War against the People” Halper promotes a conspiracy theory that Israel is influencing global politics through its leading role in a “global pacification industry” which “threatens us in fundamental ways not immediately obvious.” In this book he repeats his often promoted claim that Israel maintains the occupation in order to use the “occupied territories as a giant laboratory for developing and testing new ideas, technology, tactics and weaponry.”
- In an interview to Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon (2016), Halper asserted that “Israel is a danger to the world” as well as “a problem for the world” (emphasis added). He also claimed that there is a possibility that Israel “may use nuclear weapons against Europe.”