PSG Chicago

TAKE ACTION: contact Leroy Allala – Sister City Program Executive Director (leroy.allala@cityofchicago.org, 312.744.1372) and demand an end to the Sister City partnership between Chicago and Petach Tikva!

Join the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago (PSG) in calling the Chicago Sister Cities International (CSCI) to demand that they respond to our campaign by scheduling a meeting with us, and to say that Israel has no place at the Chicago Sister Cities International Festival, to be held in Chicago’s Millennium Park August 23-27. PSG and their allies and supporters have been calling for a meeting with the CSCI for more than a year and its director, Leroy Allala, refuses to hear about Petach Tikva’s role in the occupation of Palestinian lands and the historic dispossession and how a sister city relationship with the town whitewashes these human rights abuses.

We reject an official relationship between the City of Chicago and the Municipality of Petach Tikva in Israel. Under the guise of promoting cultural and education ties, and under the false premise of a people-to-people program, Petach Tikva’s inclusion in the CSCI promotes Israel-US business ties and the image of war-profiteering companies like Motorola and Boeing, whose executives are on the board of the CSCI.

Petach Tikva is the first Jewish-only settlement in historic Palestine, partly built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Mlabbes, depopulated and destroyed in 1948. An officially segregated city, Petach Tikva is also the site of a major detention center where Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip are illegally transferred for interrogation, which often involves torture. Arrest and detention has been a primary means Israel has employed in its attempt to suppress the Palestinian movement for self-determination.

Ameer Makhoul, a civil society leader and Israeli citizen, is the latest Palestinian grassroots activist to be held and tortured at Petach Tikva. It is bitterly ironic that the chairperson of the CSCI’s Petach Tikva program, Daniel B. Shure, is also president of the America Israel Business Chamber of Commerce, which earlier this year advertised a “Fight Back Against the Boycott” to undermine the movement grassroots Palestinian activists like Ameer Makhoul have been arrested and persecuted for leading.

At a national meeting earlier this year, Jewish United Fund – one of the racist Israeli government’s main champions in the US – identified the threat posed to Israel’s “legitimacy” by our campaign. Join our campaign and directly challenge Israel’s supporters in Chicago, and demand real policy change! Our campaign has been endorsed by pro-justice and community organizations such as the Chicagoans Against Apartheid in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace-Chicago, Chicago Coalition Against War and Racism, and the US Palestinian Communities Network.

Please email maureenclare@gmail.com to let us know the Chicago Sister Cities International’s response!

http://psgchicago.org/

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