ACTIVISTS TELL MAYOR AT SISTER CITIES PROGRAM BREAKFAST: “NO BUSINESS AS USUAL WITH ISRAEL!”

When: Wednesday, 3 March at 7am
Where: Palmer House Hilton, 17 E. Monroe St., Chicago

Chicago, IL - Calling on the Chicago Sister Cities International to drop Petach Tikva, Israel from its program, the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago will protest the Annual International Business Breakfast hosted by Chicago Sister Cities International with keynote by Mayor Daley. The action is part of an ongoing campaign to end the sister city relationship between Chicago and an Israeli city and falls during the international Israeli Apartheid Week during which actions will take place all over the world that highlight the country’s racist rule over Palestinians.

Heeding the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel to hold it accountable for its human rights violations, the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago rejects an official relationship between the City of Chicago and the Municipality of Petach Tikva in Israel. We reject the use of the Sister Cities program to normalize Israeli apartheid and colonization.

The first Jewish-only settlement in historic Palestine, and known in Israel as the "mother of all settlements," Petach Tikva symbolizes the dispossession and colonization of the Palestinian homeland and is built on the remains of depopulated Palestinian villages whose descendents are denied the right to return home. Petach Tikva is also home to one of the largest interrogation and detention centers in Israel, where Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are illegally transferred for interrogation and routinely subjected to ill treatment and torture. Furthermore, Petach Tikva is an officially segregated city and Palestinian citizens of Israel are subjected to an apartheid legal system and institutional racism.

With Chicago grassroot communities’ long history of fighting the injustices of torture and racism, we demand an end to the Sister City partnership between the City of Chicago and Petach Tikva, a relationship which helps whitewash Israel's crimes against the Palestinians and normalize apartheid. So long as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian and Arab land, so long as Palestinian refugees are refused their right to return home, and so long as Palestinians are denied their right to self-determination, we demand that there be no business as normal with Israel.

The campaign has been endorsed by social justice and community organizations such as the 8th Day Center for Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, Chicagoans Against Apartheid in Palestine, CCAWR, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters throughout the city, and the US Palestine Community Network.