Israel will maintain a security presence along the eastern border of a future Palestinian state in order to prevent weapons smuggling, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday.
IOA Editor: This is part of the on-going Israeli snow-job, underway for years now: talking about the borders of the “future Palestinian state” while overwhelming the land of such conceptual state with Jewish settlements and urban neighborhoods thereby assuring that it can never materialize. The “rockets and missiles” excuse is particularly vacuous in that such missiles can be fired into Israel across far greater distances.
[I]n 1948, the Israelis wanted to create a state without Palestinians, and they almost succeeded in driving them out. In 1967, their victory reunited the refugees with those who had remained in Israel. We were scattered, they brought us back together. The Israelis are sowing their own failure by their success. The colonization of Jerusalem and the West Bank, which makes impossible a two-state solution, will force Israel to live with a sizable Arab population and to reconsider its democratic system.
IOA Editor: Sari Nusseibeh has long advocated the Two-State solution. After decades of relentless Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank, he now sees it as a near-impossibility.
Amira Hass: The Interior Ministry has stopped granting work permits to foreign nationals working in most international nongovernmental organizations operating in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, Haaretz has learned.
IOA Editor: This is part of a broader clamp down on non-violent Occupation-resistance activities in the West Bank that has taken place in the past few months. It includes a systematic campaign to arrest Palestinian and Israeli protesters (e.g., in Bil’in, Ni’ilin, Sheikh Jarrah), to expel or prevent entry to journalists, and now to limit visa and work permits to international aid organizations. All the while, Gaza remains under a tight siege controlled by both Israel and Egypt, with US approval.
The clamp down is now mentioned in mainstream US media. The “only democracy in the Middle East” is finally getting less than favorable press, after it illegally “detained the leader of a leading Israeli human rights group during a vigil against the eviction of Palestinian families whose homes were taken by Jewish settlers.” See AP report in the Washington Post: Israel accused of silencing political protest
The discovery was made hours after Israel Defense Forces soldiers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Israeli settlers were seen entering the cemetery… Israelis are forbidden from entering Awarta, although the IDF occasionally organizes group trips for which it provides security.
MK Ahmad Tibi: “Barak continues to permit the infestation of settlements and surrender to Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu. Barak’s decision will only spur the academic boycott of Israel in the world. The Labor Party proves once again that that it is a barrier to reconciliation between the two nations.”
Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative Mustafa Barghouti said on Sunday that returning to negotiations with Israel is not possible until a complete settlement standstill, including in occupied East Jerusalem, is enforced, as well as population growth, during a reception for the European Council. A timeline for negotiations, Barghouti added, must be identified in order to resume talks. “The Israeli government is trying to deceive the world with talks of its settlement freeze while construction is plainly increasing in Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
Sheikh Tamimi further warned that houses in the surround neighborhood are at risk resulting from the Israeli Antiquities Authority working a night and removing dozens of bags with stones from the excavation site south of the mosque.
More on the Jerusalem excavations: Chief Jerusalem digger admits excavation endangers Arab homes
Persistent blockades, destruction of [olive] trees, closure of factories and other repressive and punitive measures by Israel in the occupied territories have massacred the Palestinian economy, widened unemployment and poverty, and killed hopes of the young generation of any recovery under Israel.
Akiva Eldar: Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told Abbas [in October 2009] that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote on the critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a “second Gaza.”
IOA Editor: The “thugs” of Gaza, to quote former Israeli Foreign Minister Livni, don’t seem to hesitate repeating their crimes in the West Bank.
“The Palestinians don’t have a real organization fighting for their rights and they can’t expect others to fight for them… No revolution in history was ever led by a government or a bureaucracy. We’ve became an agency of Israel and of the United States. You can’t lead a revolution and fly to America. Our leaders are too fluid in their views. A revolution requires toughness, not flexibility. In music, you can be flexible, but not when you’re leading a revolution.”
“There is a large variety of international activists here,” he says. “There are those who spend weeks and months in the village and take the political issue seriously, and there are others who, as part of their trip to Israel and Palestine, drop in at Bil’in to see what’s happening. Some of them have a strong political awareness, others come to take pictures.
Anyone who carefully reads the debates about the military government in Arab-populated areas in the 1950s and ’60s will see that… security arguments are linked to preventing Arab farmers from entering the land in question… Whatever the nature of the solution, from the Israeli point of view it always entails the removal of Arabs from areas where Jews live.
Israeli soldiers raided the Ramallah home of Eva Nováková tonight at 3 am near the Manara square. The operation to apprehend Nováková, the ISM’s new media coordinator since three weeks ago, was carried out by a force of both soldiers and members of the “Oz” immigration police unit. Eva was subsequently deported, forced on a plane back to Prague the next morning.
I mark the beginning of the new decade imprisoned in a military detention camp. Nevertheless, from within the occupation′s holding cell I meet the New Year with determination and hope… The price I and many others pay in freedom does not deter us. I wish that my two young daughters and baby son would not have to pay this price together with me. But for my son and daughters, for their future, we must continue our struggle for freedom.
My husband is a school teacher and farmer from the Palestinian village of Bilin. When Israel built its apartheid wall here, it separated Bilin from more than half of its land, in order to facilitate the expansion of the illegal settlement Mattityahu East. In response, Abdallah and fellow villagers began a campaign of nonviolent resistance. Every Friday for the past five years, we’ve marched, with Israeli and international supporters, to protest the theft of our land and livelihoods.
The Israeli authorities must immediately release, or bring before a fair trial, three Palestinian human rights activists detained in Israel following their protests against the construction of the West Bank fence/wall, Amnesty International said today.
None of [the Gaza complexities] makes sense unless you bring in the larger picture of the occupation and the steadfast reluctance of Israeli governments to make peace. Seen in isolation, Gaza is too riddled with ambiguity to galvanize what’s left of the Israeli peace camp into action. The real contrast is with the burgeoning protests in East Jerusalem, in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah where several Palestinian families have recently been evicted from their homes and Israeli settlers planted in their stead.
In Israel… institutional discrimination is meant to preserve the supremacy of a group of Jewish settlers over Palestinian Arabs. As far as discriminatory practices are concerned, it’s hard to find differences between white rule in South Africa and Israeli rule in the territories; for example, separate areas and separate laws for Jews and Palestinians.
According to data collected by… Yesh Din, and by… Peace Now, construction is being carried out in more than 50 settlements and in two other industrial zones – Mevo Huron and Gush Etzion.
A selection of video clips: 2009 – Occupation news, history, and more.
Like many of the names that Israel assigned to the new streets in the eastern part of [Jerusalem], the militaristic names that the rapid-transit stops are supposed to bear reflect the situation accurately: occupation.
IOA Editor: As Segev points out, the renaming of streets and transit stops reflects the Occupation. But he leaves a great deal out: The Renaming of Palestine is an important last part of a process, specifically designed to erase the past, thus enabling the re-Making of History as the victor would like future generations to know it. The current story is only the latest example. After 1948, nearly 500 Palestinian villages were removed: not only were they physically obliterated by the then-young State of Israel, but their names were either erased (from all maps and road signs) or “Hebraized” – turned into Hebrew. This is an important, and sinister, element in the historical process generally known as Ethnic Cleansing. For Israel it means This land is ours, and ours alone.
The state on Wednesday asked the High Court of Justice to reject a petition filed by Peace Now against construction of 15 houses in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Netafim and said it would complete detailed planning which would pave the way for the authorities to grant building permits for the homes.
[A]ccording to a senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau, “everything was carried out with transparency vis-a-vis the Americans, even if there are disagreements.”
IOA Editor: Indeed. The Obama Administration is well aware of Israeli development activities in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories and is not doing what it can, and should, do to stop it.
This highway has told the whole story. They pave a road, expropriate Palestinian land and the High Court of Justice approves the expropriation, in its words, “provided that it is done for the sake of the local population.” Afterwards they prevent the “local population” from using the road, and finally they build a wall with drawings of creeks and meadows so we don’t see and don’t know that we are driving on an apartheid road, that we are traveling on the axis of evil.
Construction of the facility began in 2007, on private Palestinian land from the nearby village of Ein Yabrud, in contravention of the government’s approved master plan for the area. [...] “the state is trying to legitimize the land theft … by seizing land retroactively, for the sake of a settlement that was not long ago classified as ‘the largest illegal outpost in the West Bank.
The war the police and the Israel Defense Forces are openly waging against protests by left-wing and human rights activists has heated up in recent weeks. As a result, concern is growing over Israel’s image as a free and democratic country.
[G]reat efforts have been made to create an artificial symmetry between the systematic rebellion in the settlements and the refusal to serve in the territories that was prevalent at the beginning of the decade.
[I]n two of the three cases the troops behaved as if they were preparing for an execution, not an arrest. Relatives and eyewitnesses told B’Tselem that the two were unarmed and did not attempt to flee, and that the soldiers weren’t trying to stop them, but rather shot them from close range once their identity was revealed.
There is an internal document that has not been leaked, or perhaps has not even been written, but all the forces are acting according to its inspiration: the Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces, Border Police, police, and civil and military judges. They have found the true enemy who refuses to whither away: The popular struggle against the occupation.
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat on Thursday rejected municipal recommendations and cut funding for a toddler health-care center in East Jerusalem, while approving aid to a similar center in a Jewish neighborhood.
“There is no Palestine without Jerusalem no one will accept this. Without Jerusalem there will be no peace,” [Abbas] said.
US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank.
Robert Serry, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process said Thursday that recent activities by both Israel and the Palestinians are not contributing to settling their conflict and confidence remains low as 2009 draws to a close. Serry told the UN Security Council that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to temporarily freeze construction in West Bank settlements… falls considerably short of Israel’s commitments under the road map to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth.”
Catherine Ashton… leveled scathing criticism at the “Israeli occupation,” in her first speech as the European Union’s first high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. The British stateswoman, who has also served as the Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission, said that in the EU’s view, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory, together with the West Bank.”
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert proposed giving the Palestinians land from communities bordering the Gaza Strip and from the Judean Desert nature reserve in exchange for settlement blocs in the West Bank.
When young Israeli police officers force me to sit on the cold ground and soldiers beat me during a peaceful protest, I smolder. No human being should be compelled to sit on the ground while exercising rights taken for granted throughout the West.
