From 2000 to 2007, the Civil Administration approved 5 percent of the applications for building permits submitted by Palestinians in Area C. The total number of building permits issued to Palestinians during these seven years was 91, an average of 13 building permits per annum, reports Bimkom, an Israeli organization for planning rights.
Occupation
IDF Officers serving in the West Bank have reported recently that tensions between security forces and settlers are on the rise. According to one senior office, “the security forces spend more time dealing with incidents involving Israeli citizens than confronting Palestinian terrorism.”
IOA Editor: The monster is finally turning against its creators… Most Israeli Jews have long been innately incapable of seeing who the significant terrorists are.
Sarah Benninga: When the wives of the male attackers saw their husbands hitting male and female protestors alike, they [the settler women] applauded and spat at me: ‘Traitor,’ ‘You deserve it.’ And when they heard their husbands threaten us: ‘We’ll fuck you in the ass,’ they suddenly turned into men themselves, applauding their husbands’ sexual conquests as if they were one of the boys.
Palestinian prisoners in several prisons, including Nafha prison, have reported in the past few days that they were threatened that family visits would be denied in retaliation for their participation in the hunger strike. Israeli prison officials told the prisoners that for each day they spent on hunger strike, they would be banned from family visitation for 1 month.
Israel’s prison administration has refused Palestinian detainees’ demands as prisoners enter their eighth day on hunger strike, the minister of detainees’ affairs in Ramallah said Tuesday… According to latest reports from the Palestinian Authority, 6,000 Palestinians are being detained in Israeli prisons, including 219 in Administrative Detention who are held without charge.
Everyday, throughout the sections of the West Bank exclusively under Israel’s control (Area C), rain water harvesting cisterns face administrative demolition orders from the Israeli Civil Administration due to the lack of building permits. Cisterns are vital to the livelihoods of marginalized Palestinian rural and herder communities in the West Bank who rely on them to provide water for livestock, crops and sometimes for domestic water usage in the absence of an adequate network connection. Since 2009, a total of 44 cisterns and rainwater collection structures in Area C have been demolished, twenty of them between January and July of 2011.
Palestinian detainees in prisons across Israel are on hunger strike for the seventh consecutive day in protest against being forced into isolation cells and being deprived of family visits.
Amid the enthusiastic applause in New York and the celebrations in Ramallah, it was easy to believe — if only a for minute — that, after decades of obstruction by Israel and the United States, a Palestinian state might finally be pulled out of the United Nations hat. Will the world’s conscience be midwife to a new era ending Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians? It seems not.
In Qusra, deep among the terraced hills of the West Bank, fear is on the rise. “The settlers are provoking us continuously,” said Hani Abu Reidi, head of the village council. “They uproot olive trees, kill our sheep, burn our mosques and curse our prophet. They want to drag us into the sphere of violence. We do not want to go there.”
Reality Check: No celebrations were going on in the Jenin refugee camp this week, where families involved in the long struggle with Israel acknowledged that what concerns them now is economics – not empty declarations at the UN.
It goes without saying that Palestinians and Arabs are outraged by the idea that the United States is threatening to block recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations. What is less obvious, perhaps, is that some of the most vociferous critics of the Palestinian bid for upgraded U.N. recognition are Palestinians themselves. How could it be that advocates of Palestinian rights could be suspicious of, if not altogether opposed to, the U.N. gambit? Isn’t the creation of an internationally recognized independent state the goal shared by all Palestinians? Not exactly. The Palestinian cause concerns more than merely statehood.
[The Palestinian] argument is straightforward: If the idea behind a two-state solution is dividing land among the two peoples, how can Israel unilaterally continue to settle the contested land while carrying out negotiations? Israeli unilateralism, in other words, has driven the Palestinians to choose the unilateral path. The only difference is that the latter’s unilateralism is aimed at advancing a peace agreement, while the former’s is aimed at destroying it.
Today, for some Palestinians living under the 44-year occupation simply remaining on the land is a kind of moral victory. This summer, I started hearing a new slogan: “Existence is resistance.” If you remain on the land, then the game isn’t over. And if you can bring attention to the occupation, while you remain in place, so much the better.
Here is colonialism in all its glory. After all, the United States agrees that there should be a Palestinian state, it even twisted the arm of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a little bit, cautiously so it wouldn’t hurt, so that he would blurt out the necessary formula “two states for two peoples.” … After all, Arafat already recognized it. Palestine fulfilled all the threshold conditions. And still, this state has only one chance of being born the American way. Through negotiations that will lead to a consensual agreement and a handshake. And if Israel’s hand is missing, never mind, the Palestinians will wait until it grows.
One proposal would allow police to use force against those being detained – and not only against those being arrested, as they are now authorized to do. While currently the law mandates that a person arrested must be brought before the court in 24 hours from the time of arrest, the proposed regulations would allow the police to extend that to 48 hours. This would mean that for two full days there would be no judicial supervision of the police actions or decision to arrest.
Herein lie the most painful ironies of the PA’s 17-year existence, oft-stated, but still poorly understood in the West: As a non-sovereign entity, it must beseech its overlords for the trappings of autonomy. As the constable of its appointed domains, the PA must crack the heads of the Palestinians it claims to represent if they transgress the boundaries of official discourse. As a creature of the Oslo accords, it cannot transcend the terms of these agreements between an occupying power and an occupied people. No one can doubt who the arbiters of the agreements are: When Palestinians narrowly elected Hamas to head the PA in 2006, Israel and the US imposed a tight physical and diplomatic siege upon the Hamas-affiliated officers and their territorial seat in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops fired tear gas indiscriminately and sometimes dangerously to enforce a daytime curfew inside a West Bank village to stop Palestinians holding a peaceful demonstration on their own land, a military whistleblower has told The Independent.
Reform began after arrest warrant issued in 2009 against opposition leader Tzipi Livni; British Ambassador says change law ‘can no longer be abused for political reasons.’
IOA Editor: The change itself is an abuse of the law for political reason.
The truth is that the Palestinians have just three options: to surrender unconditionally and go on living under Israeli occupation; to launch a third intifada; or to mobilize the world on their behalf. They picked the third option, the lesser of all evils even from Israel’s perspective. What could Israel say about this – that it’s a unilateral step? But it didn’t agree to stop construction in the settlements, the mother of all unilateral steps. What did the Palestinians have left? The international arena. And if that won’t save them, then another popular uprising in the territories.
IOA Editor: Levy is the good, sensible and moral Israeli, addressing an Israeli audience. However, to state that for the Palestinians to mobilize the world on their behalf is “the lesser of all evils even from Israel’s perspective” is problematic, at best.
History shows that all Israeli governments — “Left” or “Right” alike — prefer violent Palestinian resistance to the Occupation over any non-violent protest because it provides Israel the best possible excuse to do what it knows and does best: attack and destroy Palestinian population centers, national infrastructure, agricultural and industrial employment centers — bring about as much destruction so as to crush Palestinian society, push back reconciliation and continue the land colonization process in order to make a Palestinian state physically and geographically impossible.
The experience of Gaza and the Second Intifada provide ample evidence to this assessment. One can only hope that the Third Intifada will be sophisticated enough, and very obviously non-violent, in order not to provide Israel with easy excuses.
This is also why Israel is at such a loss now on how to deal with the legitimate Palestinian demand for statehood, scrambling to deal with global pressure on the UN frontier: if it could only launch a missile-equipped drone to solve it all…
The Civil Administration is expected to begin forcefully moving Bedouin in the West Bank to a permanent location as part of a plan to remove all the Bedouin in Area C (under both Israel’s civilian and military aegis ) from lands they have been living on for decades.
Campaigners for Palestinian rights are celebrating after the primary Israeli agricultural produce export company Agrexco, which has been a key target of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in support of Palestinian rights, has been ordered into liquidation after being unable to pay its creditors… Agrexco is a partially state-owned Israeli exporter responsible for the export of a large proportion of fresh Israeli produce, including 60-70% of the agricultural produce grown in Israel’s illegal settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Peace Now research has revealed that while in Israel the pace of construction since the so-called “settlement freeze” (Oct 2010) was one housing unit for every 235 residents, in the settlements the pace of construction was a housing unit for every 123 residents — nearly twice.
Haneen Zoabi: “Just as Israelis are beginning to seriously consider a new social order, they must also consider a new diplomatic order in which Israel will pay a heavy price for its policy of oppression, occupation, and belligerence.”
The mainstream of the Jewish public decided on its own, and without much internal reflection, that social justice could exist alongside a system of ethnic exclusivism. Thus, while the July 14 movement proceeded through cities across Israel bellowing out cries for dignity and rights, Palestinians remained safely tucked away behind an elaborate matrix of control — the Iron Wall. Ten years of separation had not only rendered the Palestinians invisible in a physical sense. It had erased them from the Israeli conscience.
IOA Editor: A very important article that puts Israel’s July 14 protest movement in an historical context: the Zionist settlement in, and occupation of, Palestine — before and after 1967. So far, there is no evidence that the massive wave of Israeli Jews calling for “social justice” has any intentions of improving the lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel. And it is absolutely clear that ending the Occupation is not on its agenda either.
“Under normal trade and transit conditions … Israel would no longer enjoy overwhelming dominance as the leading OPT trading partner,” the UNCTAD report says.
Last week an unofficial group of protesters released an 11 page document to the media with a list of demands. While the document listed the end of privatization policies as well as housing, education, health care, and taxation reforms, it did not include previously discussed points about the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel that make up a fifth of the population.
We liked military juntas in the Arab world, and in Chile, Argentina and Ethiopia. Military juntas speak a similar language. They understand one another; their interests are narrow and specific; they are scornful of civilians, certain that without them their countries will fall into chaos, and that civilian politics – democracy – is a recipe for the country’s collapse. Juntas operate in the name of a desired value that is supreme to all other values: security.
The one government determines the separate and unequal course of development of each people. An upper-country people and a lower-country people. Those on the first course have the right to live in the country because their forefather immigrated 3,000 years ago. Those on the second course do not have the right to live in their home, because their refugee fathers were born there 80 years ago.
What’s needed very badly … is for Israelis to realize that the occupation is hurting the Palestinians terribly, that it’s driving them to try to kill us, that we are compelling them to engage in terrorism, that the blood of Israeli victims is ultimately on our hands, and that it’s up to us to stop provoking our own people’s murder by ending the occupation. And so long as we who oppose the occupation keep pretending that the Palestinians don’t have the right to resist it, we tacitly encourage Israelis to go on blindly killing and dying in defense of an unholy cause.
IOA Editor: Larry Derfner was fired from The Jerusalem Post after posting this article on his personal blog – despite subsequently removing it and apologizing. Without Derfner, a liberal-Zionist with a strong anti-Occupation record, the Post remains the same house of venom it has long been, even more so now.
If Google intends to operate Street View in occupied territory, it may face strong resistance from activists. Already activists are planning to organize demonstrations along the routes of the Google Street View vehicles, which must be published in advance according to Google’s agreement with the Ministry of Justice.
Israel Aerospace Industries unveiled over the weekend its latest development in the field of secret unmanned aerial vehicles – a miniature aircraft weighing four kilograms, known as GHOST to foreign customers.
IOA Editor: Israel’s approach to dealing with Palestinian civil society has often been via a ‘technology fix:’ Spot and Shoot, robotic fighting machines, Shock Vehicle and, last but not least, the Caterpillar bulldozer.
This most recent addition to Israel’s arsenal will enable occupation forces to observe urban resistance in narrow alleys, ‘around the corner,’ via a device remotely controlled at the platoon level.
As with the other ‘fixes,’ GHOST could potentially lessen IDF casualties thus making the cost of occupation more acceptable to Israeli society, while enabling the IAI to sell yet another product, tested on the backs of Palestinians, to shady governments around the world.
We are profiting from the occupation even as we groan under regressive taxation. Whether our families came from Katrielevka or Baghdad, we are profiting from the structural discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and from the very fact that they have become a minority in their own land.
So this is how the occupation develops into war, which the commentators, in their righteousness, call a war “that neither side wants.” Really? Do Military Intelligence and Shin Bet not know that Hamas will fire rockets if the air force kills people in the Gaza Strip? Of course they know.
Even if the word “occupation” is not uttered, even if no one speaks of a Palestinian state, the smothering trap that successive Israeli governments have put us in for the past 40 years no longer allows us to breathe. There is a sense of hopelessness and pointlessness stemming from the knowledge that everything is the same, and only the citizens’ situation declines from day to day. There’s nothing to look forward to, no prospect for something else in sight.
For the sake of Abir Aramin and all Palestinians who are maimed, killed, or whose homes, farms, and infrastructure are wantonly destroyed in the course of Israel’s brutal military occupation, the US must end taxpayer-funded weapons transfers to Israel and hold it accountable, just like every other country, for its violations of the law. To do anything less would be to unfairly hold Israel to a different standard.
