It is not our right or responsibility to lecture the Palestinian leadership on what they should do. That is up to the Palestinians to decide. But it is very definitely our responsibility to focus attention on what we should be doing. Of prime importance is to educate and organize the American public and to develop popular forces that can overcome the dominant propaganda images that sustain the US policies that have been undermining Palestinian rights.
IOA Editor: And much more from Noam Chomsky on the US and Israeli dynamics of the Occupation, and on approaches available to the anti-Occupation movement, including detailed comments on BDS.
Adalah lawyer Abir Baker: “The Shin Bet is facing an internal crisis over this arrest and the settlers are trying to exploit that with their campaign. Many members of the Shin Bet are settlers themselves and think of these extremists as their colleagues, not as the enemy. The line between the Shin Bet and these extremist organisations is very blurred.”
In recent years, interest in the pre-state Revisionist underground movements has grown among West Bank settlement youth. These young people want to give the nationalist Lehi and Etzel (Irgun Zvai Leumi) movements a more prominent role in Zionist history and aggrandize figures who sacrificed themselves for the Land of Israel.
IOA Editor: There is a natural continuity between Israel’s pre-state right-wing terrorist organizations and today’s settlers, who are sometime the very same individuals, their children, or followers. The “Lehi” (“Stern-Gang”) and “Etzel” (“Irgun”) mentioned here are best known for their 1948 war crime of the Deir Yassin massacre, which played a key role in the ethnic-cleansing of Palestine that followed.
Israeli settlers took over a Palestinian home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City today, evicting about 45 members of an extended family which has occupied the building for more than 70 years.
Michael Sfard: “Either way, even if wounding of my client was the result of negligence and not criminal intent -even then the State of Israel has a moral, ethical and legal obligation to pay for her treatment.”
Security forces in the West Bank continue to arrest people identified with Hamas… The same security authorities that have won praise from the occupier for the quiet they’ve achieved while the occupier acts: confiscating land, demolishing homes, expelling people, arresting children, preventing free movement and killing.
[A]utomation makes killing cheaper… the demand for remote-controlled machines is stoked by the large savings in defence costs. A drone operator can be trained in a day; a pilot may need years of expertise to fulfil the same mission.
Rashid Khalidi: “The siege is not imposed on the Hamas government, or on a ‘terrorist entity’, as the Israeli government describes the entire Gaza Strip: it is imposed on a population of 1.5 million people, who are effectively imprisoned, and most of whom are deprived of living a normal life. Moreover, it hardly affects that government… This is collective punishment of a civilian population, pure and simple… That is potentially a war crime. Most of Gaza’s population, being children, did not vote for Hamas or anyone else. Any human being of any political orientation should oppose this siege.”
IOA Editor: This is a misleading headline in every respect: Rashid Khalidi (who’s also an IOA Advisory Board member) is not “Obama’s friend,” except for when Haaretz stoops to the level of Right-wing lunatic bloggers. As reported in this story, Khalidi is a sharp critic of the Obama administration, and is not one of the organizers of this project. He is not “raising funds” for this project either. Rather, he signed a letter in support of it.
The basic conflict can be understood in very conventional terms of people enduring and trying to resist an occupation. I don’t think it requires much more profundity in order to understand why Palestinians are opposed to their current condition, and I think Israel is behaving like most occupying powers behave — specifically, it is very hard to evict them.
Ethnic cleansing can be carried out dramatically (as in this country in 1948 and in Kosovo in 1998) or in a quiet and systematic way, by dozens of sophisticated methods, as is happening now in East Jerusalem. But there cannot be the slightest doubt that this is the final stage of the one-state vision of the rightists. The first stage will be an effort to fill the entire country with settlements, and to demolish any chance of implementing the two-state solution, which is the only realistic basis for peace.
They are trying to establish borders on our political identity and say that we cannot have relations with the broader Arab world. They want to redefine the margins of democracy to exclude any political program that calls for full equality. We are calling for equality without Zionism… The fact is, to demand full civic and national equality is actually to demand the end of Zionism. So we don’t hate Zionism. Zionism hates democracy.
Anyone from the US should recognize the Jerusalem District Court’s ruling for what it is: an anti- miscegenation measure on par with the now-defunct US laws against “race mixing” that were once used to uphold white supremacy… Only they like to call it “national purity,” since Jewish privilege in Israel depends on maintaining the Jewish character of the state. In fact, race-mixing is perceived as such a threat that more than half of all Israeli Jews agree that Jewish-Arab intermarriage is a form of treason.
Amira Hass: Since 1967, Israel has prevented Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley from growing, whether by cutting off their water supply, declaring large areas as live fire zones or banning all construction.
We should not romanticise these Likud converts. They are not speaking of the “state of all its citizens” demanded by Israel’s tiny group of Jewish non-Zionists. Most would require that Palestinians accept life in a state dominated by Jews.
IOA Editor: Indeed, we shouldn’t. In the words of an important Beitar song – penned by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Israeli Right’s spiritual leader – “two banks has the Jordan [River], this one is ours and so is the other.”
Recently, proposals to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank, including the right to vote for the knesset, have emerged from a surprising direction: Right-wing stalwarts such as knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin, and former defence minister Moshe Arens, both from the Likud party of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister.
Palestinian freedom and equal rights are unlikely to be secured by a United States committed to false notions of Israeli security. Since his Cairo speech, President Barack Obama has failed to pursue new policies. In the Middle East, he is regarded as full of fine but empty words. Empty because securing Palestinian freedom and equal rights requires standing up to Israel.
Pending court approval, government could assume control over properties of people who moved to enemy states during the War of Independence, as well as structures that belong to people now residing in the [occupied] territories.
IOA Editor: Not “legal” and not “abandoned.” The term “abandoned property” was created by the Israeli legal system after Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s Arab population in 1948, specifically to acquire Palestinian owned properties. In many cases, then and now, the “abandoned” properties belong to a population that was forcibly evicted, or kept out, of the very property that was subsequently deemed “abandoned.”
See also David Shulman: Sheikh Jarrah – July 9, 2010
There are about 35,000 Palestinians who live in the West Bank but are registered as Gazans. Due to Israel’s successful 20-year-old policy of isolating the population of the Strip, they are in permanent danger of deportation.
Jonathan Cook: The “one video Benjamin Netanyahu … must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles… Its contents threaten to gravely embarrass not only Mr. Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama.”
Gideon Levy: “Outrageous”
IOA Editor: Here it is, with English subtitles, the ‘smoking gun’ with which Netanyahu killed the “peace process.” And continues to do so.
Forget the Bar-Ilan University speech, forget the virtual achievements in his last visit to the US; this is the real Netanyahu. No more claims that the Palestinians are to blame for the failure of the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu exposed the naked truth…: he destroyed the Oslo accords with his own hands and deeds, and he’s even proud of it. After years in which we were told that the Palestinians are to blame, the truth has emerged from the horse’s mouth.
Israeli border police destroyed several Palestinian fields in Al Beqa’a Valley just east of Hebron on 6 July 2010, directly affecting the livelihood of more than one hundred Palestinians.
Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live? It’s hard to say.
Some things are amazingly simple. In Sheikh Jarrah you can see pure theft in all its starkness. The Bible says “Thou shalt not steal,” and it – God, that is – was referring to Sheikh Jarrah. Any one can see it. The shocking thing, of course, is that the whole apparatus of the modern state – the municipality, its committees and master plans and grey bureaucrats, the mayor, the government, the Prime Minister, the cabinet, the courts, the police, the secret services – all these have colluded in actively perpetrating the theft.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
IOA Editor: This is a very important series. Among other things, it confirms Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part II: Israel Inflates National Security Concerns in Order to Invalidate Labor and Class Disputes
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part III: Israeli Elite Profited through Privatization of Public Assets – Workers Are Asked to Sacrifice
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part IV: Rational and Irrational Zionism – The Moderates and the Right
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part V: One State or Two, There Should Be Economic Justice – The Only State Now is Israel, It Has Obligations
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part VI: Israel’s Elite and the Far Right – Israel Sells Itself As ‘Frontline’ Against Islam
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part VII: The Boycott Israel Movement – The Reasons for Boycotting Israel
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said one of the homes … was inhabited, although the family was not home at the time. The demolition is the first this year of an inhabited home, according to group … and four of the six people who lived there are children. In the Issawaieh village… one house was being built by a single mother of five, who fainted on the scene of the demolition and was taken to a local hospital.
Yousef Jabareen: “It’s a feeling of frustration and of not belonging … That the … state is excluding you and you are not counted as an equal… In some areas you could identify some characteristics of apartheid that should raise a lot of concern about the future.”
Young Israeli Jew: “It’s a kind of psychological warfare. The idea is to get [Palestinians] to leave.”
Amira Hass: The court agreed with the state’s position that … easing the blockade “did not say anything about extending the present policy about travel,” a policy that allows Gazans to leave “only in humanitarian cases, with the emphasis on urgent medical cases.”
Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin travels to Jenin and Ramallah as a guest of the Palestinian Authority security service.
Neve Gordon: “I am worried about what is happening to the space for debate in Israel. I find that there is a proto-fascist mindset developing. One of the slogans you hear a lot now is no citizenship without loyalty. It is an inversion of the republican idea that the state should be loyal to the citizen.”
The report, prepared by the Office of the Co-ordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, found that thousands of Palestinians have limited access to East Jerusalem hospitals because of the barrier. Ambulances are routinely delayed at checkpoints, and Palestinian vehicles are not allowed to pass through barrier checkpoints, forcing sick or elderly patients to walk.
