MK Taleb El-Sana (United Arab List-Ta’al): [The law] “proves the failure of Zionism, which needs to legislate a law in order to force the Zionist narrative and to rewrite history during which the Zionist movement committed crimes against humanity on the Palestinian people.”
2010
Israeli Right poster: “Caution! PLO agent in the White House!”
Rightist: “[W]e will teach those Leftists what democracy is,” he added. “Obama is anti-Semitic, pro-Arab, an agent of the PLO and we stand behind what the poster says.”
IOA Editor: Hardly – but there’s no reason for the Israeli Right not to try pushing Netanyahu further to the right. This latest, made-in-Israel diplomatic crisis is reminiscent of the Bush-Baker-Shamir mini-crisis. We know how quickly the US bounced back to letting Israel carry on with the Occupation and inflict a great deal more damage to the Palestinians.
This month, a civil lawsuit in Israel in the case of our daughter Rachel Corrie will converge with the seven-year anniversary of her killing in Gaza. A human rights observer and activist, Rachel, 23, was crushed to death by an Israel Defense Force (IDF) Caterpillar D9R bulldozer as she tried nonviolently to offer protection for a Palestinian family whose home was threatened with demolition. This lawsuit is one piece of our family’s seven-year effort to pursue accountability for Rachel while, also, challenging the Occupation that claimed her life.
Amira Hass: The army has declared the West Bank villages of Bil’in and Ni’lin a ‘closed military area’ until August 17, it emerged Monday. In arresting a demonstrator on Friday, police cited a military edict closing off the two villages, where weekly protests against the barrier Israel is erecting around the West Bank have often turned violent.
IOA Editor: The latest IDF scheme against non-violent protest against the Wall: If you can’t beat them, ban them. Declaring a ‘closed military area’ is an old Israeli military administration trick used extensively in the 1950s and 1960s to confiscate Palestinian agricultural lands: Owners were first disallowed access to their land; subsequently, and under a seemingly unrelated regulation, the land was confiscated for being allowed to lie fallow. In this case, closing the area means that both protesters and the media will be banned from Bil’in and Na’alin.
The ultimate Israeli dream is that the Coptis and Tibis will disappear from sight. If the so-called demographic problem can’t be solved by driving Arabs out, we’ll try to get rid of them another way: destroy their identity, cloud their national memory and turn them into Israelis, not to mention Zionists. It won’t work. We are not only talking about economic discrimination, but about trampling on national heritage. This won’t work either.
[Israel] is a democracy that historically gerrymandered its electoral constituency by expelling most of the indigenous population outside its borders – now referred to as the Palestinian refugees – to ensure a Jewish majority. It has continued to gerrymander its voting base by giving one ethnic group, Jews around the world, an automatic right to become citizens while denying that same right to another ethnic group, Palestinian Arabs.
[T]he failure of the peace groups is not simply a strategic one but one of understanding and analysis as well: an inability to fully confront the overwhelming evidence that demolishes the most cherished mythologies in Israel and the American Jewish community.
Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. Israel denies their right to return to their homes and land – a right recognised by UN resolution 194, the Geneva convention, and the universal declaration of human rights. Further, “an occupier may not forcibly deport protected persons… or transfer parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory” (article 49).
“I thought they would kill me. I became very scared and wet my pants. I could not shout or say anything because I was too afraid… He pushed me towards the small corridor in front of the bathrooms. He began shouting at me and speaking a language I did not understand… There were two bags in front of me. I grabbed the first one as he stood one and a half meters away. I opened the bag as he pointed his weapon directly at me. I emptied the bag on the floor. It contained money and papers. I looked at him and he was laughing. I grabbed the second bag to open it but I could not. I tried many times but it was useless, so he shouted at me. He grabbed my hair and slapped me very hard across the face.”
IOA Editor: No matter how this indictment turns out, or whether the IDF finds it politically convenient to sacrifice two soldiers for the sake of international propaganda — “the most moral army in the world,” etc. — this is a testimony to the IDF’s actual behavior: one of thousands of rarely told stories that emerges more than a year after the crimes were committed.
Nearly half of Israel’s high school students do not believe that Israeli-Arabs are entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel, according to the results of a new survey released yesterday. The same poll revealed that more than half the students would deny Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.
To wipe the spit off his face, Biden had to say it was only rain. Therefore, he lauded Netanyahu’s assertion that actual construction in Ramat Shlomo would begin only in another several years. Thus Israel essentially received an American green light for approving even more building plans in East Jerusalem.
“The idea that there’s a 501c3 non-profit that raises money for a foreign army seems a little odd,” said Nancy Kricorian, coordinator of CODEPINK in New York, who said “there was something about Cast Lead that was a turning point for us.”
IOA Editor: Video of the demonstration
Also, photos of the demonstration
If the East Jerusalem construction plans are implemented, they will make it impossible to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said [Orly Noy,] an activist of the left-wing Ir Amim non-governmental organization. [T]he East Jerusalem construction “will move Israel beyond the point of no return, as far as an agreed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned,” she said.
IOA Editor: The history of the past 100 years clearly indicates that this is the intended purpose of the planned projects. Bit by bit – “dunam here and dunam there,” as the old Zionist adage goes – the carefully planned expansion will forever eliminate even the theoretical possibility of a Palestinian state. For example, see the following:
Orly Noy: New Construction in East Jerusalem – What It Really Means
EU envoys: Israel trying to sever East Jerusalem from West Bank
New West Bank roads jeopardizing chances for peace accord
Secret Israeli database reveals full extent of illegal settlement
What’s the big deal? Another 1,600 apartments for ultra-Orthodox Jews on occupied, stolen land? Jerusalem won’t ever be divided, Benjamin Netanyahu promised, in another applause-winning move. In that case, why not build in it? The Americans have agreed to all this, so they have no reason to pretend to be insulted.
Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, said the family was still waiting for the credible, transparent investigation Israel first promised into her daughter’s death. “I just want to say to Rachel that our family is here today trying to just do right by her and I hope that she will be very proud of the effort we are making,” she said.
He had been “the man with the suitcase,” who would “appear in an African country a day or two before a major coup and leave a week later after the new regime was firmly in control, often with the aid of Israeli security teams.” Mr. Kimche later supervised agents who infiltrated Arab countries. Haaretz said he was… a founder of Mossad’s research department.
IOA Editor: Kimche was probably involved in the Mossad’s assassination campaign in Europe in the 1970s-1980s, specifically targeting moderate Palestinians – those who posed the greatest threat to Israel’s occupation of lands conquered in the 1967 war.
Meir Margalit, Meretz’s representative to the Jerusalem city council, claimed that the statement was meant to disrupt a visit by US Vice President Joe Biden, saying that he had “no doubt that the timing isn’t coincidental,” calling the announcement Interior Minister “Eli Yishai’s answer to Netanyahu’s willingness to renew indirect peace talks with the Palestinians.”
IOA Editor: Business as usual, Occupation as usual. As we already know, Israel often behaves as an ungrateful client-state. The Obama White House accepts such behavior with love and understanding.
“The OECD seems to be so determined to get Israel through its door that it is prepared to cover up the crimes of the occupation,” said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist. Israel has been lobbying for nearly 20 years to be admitted to the OECD, founded in 1961 for wealthy industrialized democracies to meet and coordinate economic and social policies. It includes the United States and most of Europe.
A massive demonstration will greet IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi when he arrives at the luxury Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan this week to speak at a Friends of the IDF fund-raiser.
UPDATE: It was a large turnout and we marched around the midtown block filled by the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Some so-called “pro-Israel” folks tried to change our minds… and a separate Palestinian protest took place nearby. The authorities were not unfriendly, and one or two individuals — working on behalf of one or more, local or foreign, government agencies — recorded the images of each of us as we passed by their lenses.
Hezbollah is the guerilla force that stymied the Israeli military in southern Lebanon in the 1990’s. The Israeli occupiers and their proxies in the South Lebanon Army finally gave up and withdrew in May 2000. In a return confrontation in July-August 2006, Hezbollah again stood its ground, and the Israeli military was again stunned by a gritty enemy.
Jerusalem – Ma’an – Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein filed a litany of charges against senior Fatah official Hatem Abdul Qader, all in relation to recent civil unrest among Palestinians in Jerusalem.
[The] main theses are two sides of one medal:
1. In Israel the struggle for socialism must be part of a regional struggle; and it necessarily implies a struggle to overthrow Zionism.
2. Conversely, a defensive struggle against the worst effects of Zionism can be waged on its own as a series of one-issue campaigns, by single-issue groupings; but Zionism cannot and will not be overthrown in this way. It can only be overthrown as part of a socialist transformation of the entire region, the Arab East. And it requires an organization set up according to this strategy.
Amira Hass: The boy has been held since his first remand hearing, on March 2, when his father was unable to pay the NIS 2,000 the court required for him to be released on bail. He was released on Sunday without paying bail.
More on child-arrest: IDF arrests two 13-14 old Palestinian boys accused of picking protected flowers, which are said to have been edible greens (Hebrew).
Israeli generals live a life of luxury and extravagance, mostly shaded from public scrutiny, while their soldiers enforce a brutal and criminal occupation upon the Palestinian people. Now they appropriately choose the Waldorf Astoria in New York to solicit more American money. New Profile, an Israeli feminist movement for the civil-zation of Israeli society, asks US citizens to just say NO.
The Israeli peace camp didn’t die. It was never born in the first place. While it’s true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and brave political groups have been working against the occupation – all worthy of recognition – a large, influential peace camp has never existed here.
About 5,000 left-wing activists and Palestinians gathered Saturday to protest the eviction of four Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Protesters carried Palestinian flags and chanted “Stop the destruction of homes” and “There is no sanctity in an occupied city.”
MK Dov Khenin (Hadash): “We have come here today to say clearly that human rights do not end at the borders of Jaffa. We demand that residents of Jaffa receive equal rights, be treated decently by the authorities, especially the police.”
UPDATE: Ajami co-director ahead of the Oscars: I don’t represent Israel
Ajami co-director Scandar Copti on Sunday said that he does not represent Israel, hours before his film competes for the best foreign film Oscar at the Academy Awards, Army Radio reported. “I am not Israel’s national team and do not represent her,” Copti reportedly said… “The film technically represents Israel, but I don’t represent Israel. I cannot represent a country that does not represent me,” he said… (Haaretz – 7 March 2010)
[Secretary-general of the pan-Islamic body] called on the international community and the Quartet on Middle East peace — the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations — to “pay heed to the gravity of the Israeli violations and the threat they pose to the region now and in the future.”
Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are essentially dependent on outside food aid, either from UNWRA or the World Food Program. Not because there isn’t food in the shops – there is – but they can’t afford it, or they can’t afford enough of it because any livelihoods that there were, any jobs that there were outside the government have effectively disappeared. Most private businesses have been destroyed, essentially by the blockade – bulldozed – and the rest finished off by Cast Lead.
Interview with Jeff Halper, Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and author of Obstacles to Peace: A Re-framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and An Israeli In Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel.
[C]riticism was issued by the justices during a court hearing on a petition filed by residents of Sheikh Jarrah, who demanded to be allowed to protest on this coming Saturday night, a demonstration the police hasn’t authorized. The justices sided with the residents and stressed that the police should not seize the residents’ right to protest. “The police’s behavior regarding these protests takes us 30 years backwards,” the justices said.
The truth is that the suicide attacks on civilians gave Israel a golden opportunity to implement plans, which had always existed, to confiscate more and more Palestinian lands, using the excuse of “security.” The use of weapons did not stop the colonialist expansion of the Jewish settlements. On the contrary. And the use of weapons only accelerated a process Israel began in 1991: disconnecting the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.
The alienation between Arabs and Jews can be seen everywhere. It has not arisen solely in the context of the national conflict, but is rather a result of an establishment policy which has expropriated Arabs’ lands to build communities “for Jews only” and has pushed the Arab inhabitants into localities under an “ethno-Zionist siege” on all sides.
“Perhaps they are listening in on our phone calls, looking into our e-mails, or they have a snitch,” [one demonstrator] told Haaretz. “We do not know and do not bother ourselves about these things. We are not an underground organization and our activities are open, but the army has recently been investing a great deal of intelligence effort in preventing us from demonstrating.”
Palestinian Agriculture Minister Ismail Daiq: “The year 2009 was the quietest for Israelis from the security point of view and the most violent for the Palestinians from the point of view of attacks by settlers in the West Bank.”
