ISRAELI GROUP SUES NEW ZEALANDERS OVER LORDE BOYCOTT

Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab.

New Zealanders Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab are being held responsible by an Israeli group for Lorde cancelling her concert in Tel Aviv. The group, Shurat HaDin, has links to Mossad and Israel's National Security Council. 

IT IS not uncommon for critics of the Israeli government and its policies to find themselves the targets of intimidatory action by supporters of the Israeli regime.

So it does not come as any surprise that Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab are being sued by an Israeli legal rights group who claim that the two women convinced the pop singer Lorde to cancel her performance in Israel scheduled for later this year.

Sachs and Abu-Shanab wrote an open letter to Lorde asking her to cancel the concert. The letter was acknowledged by the singer and it subsequently went viral.

The legal action is being pursued by a group called Shurat HaDin. It claims that Sach and Abu-Shanab, who are Jewish and Palestinian, knew that their letter could trigger a boycott by Lorde, making them open to legal action under Israeli law. They are supposedly  suing on behalf of three Israeli's who say they had wanted to attend the concert. They are seeking $13,000 in damages.

According to the President of Shurat HaDin, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the lawsuit "..is an effort to give real consequence to those who selectively target Israel and seek to impose an unjust and illegal boycott against the Jewish state."

in 2007 Darshan-Leitner privately told a US Embassy official that Shurat HaDin acted on behalf of the Israeli government and received "evidence"  from Mossad (Israel's national intelligience agency) and from Israel's National Security Council. The information was revealed in a leaked  US Embassy cable. It was one of the many US Embassy cables leaked by former US soldier Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning in 2010 and published by Wikileaks in 2011.

Shurat HaDin has a history of harassing and intimidating activists.

In its efforts to curb the growth and influence of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement within Israel, the Israeli government passed anti- boycott legislation in 2011 . Titled the Prevention of Damage to State of Israel through Boycott, the law bans citizens from calling for academic, consumer or cultural boycotts of Israel. Both Israelis and Palestinians incur heavy financial penalties if they are found to have broken the law.

Commenting on the legislation after it was passed in 2011, a Palestinian rights group explained: "This repressive law will disproportionately muzzle the second-class Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Palestinian non-citizens in occupied Jerusalem, and the small but clearly effective minority of Jewish-Israeli supporters of BDS and other selective boycotts of the occupation-related companies and institutions."

Shurat HaDin claim anyone can be sued under the law, regardless of their nationality, and they hope that legal agreements between Israel and New Zealand will help enforce any court ruling against Sachs and Abu-Shanab. We can expect New Zealand supporters of the Israeli regime to promote the views of Shurat HaDin.

Last month the Israeli Government approved a $US72 million budget to be spent on an international campaign against the BDS movement.