This is from the Ma'an news agency out of Palestine. And it underlines Trita Parsi's point, and As'ad AbuKhalil's too, that the powers of the Middle East have been playing realist footsie for a long time, notwithstanding the rhetoric. In Parsi's book, he reported that at the same time Iran was calling Israel a tumor and holding the American hostages in 1980, Israel was secretly pushing the U.S. to come to terms with Iran, because it served Israel's interest then… From Ma'an:
Bethlehem: Palestinian civil society groups called on Tehran to cut ties with two French companies profiting from work in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday.
A day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took center stage as a critic of Israel at a UN conference in Geneva, the Palestinian Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) criticized Iran for business ties with Veolia Environment and Alstrom.
According to the Tehran Times, the Tehran Municipality is involved in negotiations with Veolia Environment for the development of the city's urban transport system.
Alstom has a headquarters in Tehran and received a number of large contracts, including a 192 million euro contract with Iran's state railways in 1999 and a larger 375 million euro contract to supply 50 turbo compressors to Iran in 2002.
The two firms are the investors behind the Citypass consortium that won a 2002 tender issued by Israeli authorities for a light rail line that connects Jerusalem to settlements in the occupied West Bank. The consortium is responsible for construction, operation and maintenance of the system for a 30-year period.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) called on Tehran to "take the necessary steps to ban Veolia and Alstom and their subsidiaries from any contracts and operations in the country."
I also remember reading that Hezbollah had a two degrees of separation doing business with settlement czar. Add to this the many Palestinians both citizens of Israel and not who helped build that Apartheid wall and you get the idea that the Palestinians are rather a dissected entity that is utterly hopeless.
When one is starving, one takes any job.
Hey, when the list of companies to be sanctioned for doing business in Iran was published, it was almost identical to the BDS list for Israel. Sanctions don't work. They won't work with Iran, and they won't work with Israel.
And of course they had nothing at all to do with the collapse of apartheid S Africa.
No, Citizen, as I've said before, they probably had very little, if anything to do with majority rule. The economic situation is probably worse now than it was during the period of BDS, and, apart from Zola Budd being unjustly accused at the L.A. Olympics, I don't really think that white South Africans felt them. De Clerc was just perceptive enough to see that 20% of the population couldn't continue to rule over 80%.
ALstom is a major international company. Iran's deals with that company doesn't meant that Iran is necessarily playing footsie with Israel, just because ALstom also happens to work in Israel. That's just reaching a bit too much. Note what else Parsi said in his book — that the footsie playing ended when Israel saw a potential rapprochement between the US and Iran as a danger to Israel's strategic value to the US in the post-cold war era. That's why Israel is pushing so hard to place obstacles in the way of improved Iran-US relations. After all, remember before Nixon went to China he had to drop Taiwan. The pro-Taiwanese lobby was strong but not strong enough to prevent that. It remains to be seen if OBama can go to IRan, and whether he can overcome the power of the Pro-Israeli lobby