Pro-justice activists got creative over the weekend as the Museum of Science in Boston on Sunday hosted a daylong propaganda event sponsored by the Israeli Consulate titled “Israeli Innovation:  Healing the World Through Technology.”

Groups of activists infiltrated the event at continuous intervals, disrupting a panel that sought to entice venture capitalists to invest in Israel technologies. At point, one of the speakers draws a direct comparison between Israeli medical technologies and Israeli weapons manufacturing, calling it a “very nice example”.

According to activists, “panel organizers were overheard multiple times expressing anger and frustration at their inability to determine who was “plastering” the exhibit with this literature.”

The activists also plastered the museum with a mock brochure (“Israel: the world’s leader in cutting edge Apartheid technologies”) highlighting the complicity of Israeli technology in human rights abuses, and replacing the original titles of panels with things like How to run a country without international legitimacy”, “Sustainable darkness: Israeli innovations in torture technology and extra-legal maneuvering” and “Strategic water appropriation in the Middle East: Might Makes Right”.

Sponsor bios were also re-written to reflect their actual “accomplishments”.

Meanwhile, an international group of scientists and scholars issued an open letter condemning the “misuse of science and technology to serve the public relations machine of the State of Israel.”

We, the undersigned group of scientists concerned with human dignity and equality, condemn the Museum of Science’s decision to co-sponsor and host “Israeli Innovation Weekend” (IIW) on May 2.

IIW is far from an innocent educational endeavor. It is part of a propaganda campaign by the State of Israel to present itself as a beacon of progress in a desert of backwardness and deflect attention from its atrocious human rights record and fundamentally discriminatory policies.

Propaganda efforts such as IIW are key to sustaining the virtually unconditional U.S. support for Israel that only exacerbates the conflict. The U.S. singles out Israel for special treatment, lavishing billions of dollars of aid upon it every year and protecting it from any concerted action in the UN Security Council. This assistance supports a state that systematically privileges Jews from anywhere in the world over the country’s non-Jewish inhabitants and which continues to perpetrate war crimes and other human rights abuses to uphold this fundamental inequality.

To learn more about the call for BDS, and to read about other organizations engaged in BDS work who also support the protest of the “greenwashing” of Israel, see:

http://www.bdsmovement.net/ – site of the global BDS movement; you can read the call for BDS here

http://www.pacbi.org/ – site of the Palestinian campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/ – site of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

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