Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
Head of the Kfir infantry brigade, was censured by IDF Central Command chief Gadi Shamni; was subject to criminal investigation against him, before the case was closed for lack of evidence; and is now to be promoted.
IOA Editor: Advocacy of violence towards Palestinians by a top IDF occupation officer is rewarded with a promotion, naturally.
This time, too, Israel will accuse the Arabs of unilateral steps, ignore the United Nations, expand settlements in the West Bank, and build more neighborhoods for Jews in East Jerusalem.
It’s no accident that the outlines of extreme capitalism, a policy based on the continual splintering of society due to competition among people, is inherent within the occupation. Anyone who travels around the West Bank and the Jordan Valley can witness capitalism’s geographic manifestations. Cantonization, the proliferation of checkpoints and the bureaucratic control of traffic are all components of separation designed to make survival difficult and perpetuate control by the central authority.
As the movement grows, some will continue to think and demand “justice” within the borders of one nation, at the expense of the other nation that lives in this land. Others will understand that this will never be a country of justice and welfare if it is not a state of all its citizens.
UN coordinator for the ME peace process: “If confirmed, this provocative action undermines ongoing efforts by the international community to bring the parties back to negotiations.”
For in this stretch of land, despite the many fences and walls and barriers of all sorts that scar its landscape, the borders are not clear and they are not permanent – not only the physical borders between one power and another and between one authority and another, but also the mental and moral borders between what is permissible and what is forbidden, between good and evil, between stupidity and wickedness, between the humiliated and those who humiliate.
Israel Harel does not deal with the simple fact that the land on which his son and his friends are living is private land, registered properly in the name of Palestinians, who have submitted to the High Court the deeds that prove their family’s ownership of the land. The petitioners’ documents are unequivocal, and the State of Israel is not denying their ownership.
The activists, who belong to the extreme right, claim solution to housing crisis is construction in the West Bank; plan to set up dozens of more tents in coming days.
Forty-two cabinet ministers and MKs, all members of the [right wing pro-settlement] Eretz Yisrael Lobby, signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, calling on him to solve the housing crisis that has swept up the country by building in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
IOA Editor: Turning problems into opportunities…
Unprecedented ruling states that Migron must be razed by April 2012; Israeli government had admitted outpost was built on lands belonging to Palestinians, but has thus far failed to dismantle it.
The great majority of the Israelis demanding affordable housing, even if they may understand the connection, are reluctant to articulate that their economic distress is exacerbated by the cost of the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Israel’s military budget for fear that this stance would discredit them politically. Consequently, it may take a long time before a significant number of Israelis are convinced or compelled to abandon their colonial settlement project and share the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with Palestinians on the basis of equality.
A Palestinian financial crisis? Problems with donor countries? Economist Raja Khalidi offers some different explanations for the PA’s fiscal problems.
Anyone who asserts that there is no construction in Israel should peruse OECD data on building beyond the Green Line. 9% of GDP beyond the Green Line comes from construction, compared with 4.7% of GDP within the Green Line. The difference is even greater for residential construction: within the Green Line, residential construction accounts for just over a fifth of investment; beyond the Green Line, it accounts for almost 45%.
The time has come to stick their hand in the fire and fight for all the issues they have steered clear of so far – the security budget, the settlements, the occupation, the breaches of democracy and the rule of capital, without which no real rectification can be made, not even in the cost of rent.
Six governments preferred to encourage Israelis to go and live on settlements rather than in the periphery of the country. This had a critical effect on the level of supply in various regions, and therefore on the prices of real estate.
Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz confirmed Monday that the state subsidizes bus tickets within West Bank settlements, causing them to be cheaper than tickets for rides within the Green Line.
IOA Editor: Transportation options and costs are an integral part of household location decisions. Therefore, public transportation subsidies to Jewish residents of illegal West Bank settlements, which reduce the cost of living in the West Bank compared to pre-1967 Israel, constitute yet another incentive for Israelis to become settlers.
What will the Palestinians do at the UN in September? The question appears to haunt Washington and Tel Aviv as they prepare to block Palestinian attempts to obtain UN recognition, as though the very idea of such action represents a form of political impudence that merits the harshest international rejection. Sober accounts by Palestinians of what they may expect from a trip to the UN have done little to allay the dark cloud of suspicion that is fostered in mainstream accounts.
Inclusion of Jordan Valley, northern Dead Sea and area surrounding Ariel in ‘settlement blocs’ whose takeover the IDF Civil Administration is advancing, would prevent establishment of Palestinian state with territorial contiguity… Until now it was not known that the administration, which is a military agency, was charged with distinguishing between the blocs Israel is demanding to annex as part of a final-status agreement and the rest of the settlements.
A video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem shows an IDF officer pointing a loaded gun at an unarmed Palestinian in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar, near Hebron, last month.
Basically, the anti-boycott law allows all those who feel they have been harmed by a boycott, whether against Israel or an Israeli institution or territory (i.e. the settlements in the West Bank) to sue the person or organization who publicly called for it, for compensation. This definition is very broad—even a simple call not to visit a place falls under it—and most important, the prosecutor plaintiff doesn’t even have to prove damages.
Uri Avnery: “The boycott law is a sophisticated law. It doesn’t impose criminal sanctions on someone who calls for boycotting the settlements. If it did, we wouldn’t have the slightest problem; we would go to jail. Instead, this law makes everyone who calls for boycotting the settlements liable for paying millions of shekels in compensation to the settlers. There is no limit to the sum that the settlers can demand of us in compensation for damages, without their even having to prove it [the damages]…”
This is a politically opportunistic and anti-democratic act, the latest in a series of outrageously discriminatory and exclusionary laws enacted over the past year, and it accelerates the process of transforming Israel’s legal code into a disturbingly dictatorial document. It casts the threatening shadow of criminal offense over every boycott, petition or even newspaper op-ed. Very soon, all political debate will be silenced.
High Court rejects petition to put 2 Border Guard officers on trial for death of Abir Aramin, but slams police, prosecution for ‘incomplete’ investigation.
IOA Editor: This is the latest chapter in the struggle of a Palestinian family whose daughter, Abir Aramin, who was murdered by Israeli Occupation forces, as they try to put their personal tragedy in the context of the broader struggle for justice and for Palestinian national liberation.
In May, in a closed meeting of many of Israel’s business leaders, Idan Ofer, a holding-company magnate, warned, “We are quickly turning into South Africa. The economic blow of sanctions will be felt by every family in Israel.”
Acting on orders from the government, the Civil Administration declared 189 dunams [approximately 47 acres] of land belonging to the Palestinian village of Karyut to be state land, so as to retroactively legalize houses and a road in the Hayovel neighborhood of the settlement of Eli. This would seem to violate Israel’s long-standing commitment to the US not to expropriate Palestinian lands for settlement expansion.
IOA Editor: The land takeover process described in this news story is typical and has been used for decades, including for dispossession of Palestinians within pre-1967 Israel. Typically, land becomes “uncultivated” after it is declared a closed military area (presumably for IDF training) by military order which prohibits its legal owners to access it. When the legally-required time in which it must remain “uncultivated” in order to qualify for confiscation passes, the government proceeds to reclassify it as state-owned by virtue of being “uncultivated.” Hard to believe? It shouldn’t be. A great deal of the land of the Galilee was transferred from Arab to Jewish ownership in this manner.
Bilin’s popular resistance leader Muhammad al-Khatib: ‘I am not for one state or for two states. I am for equality. The principles of equality and human rights are global principles, and they are no less applicable here than elsewhere.’
Outsourcing, aggressive and vocal diplomacy and ridiculous lies thwarted the flotilla, but they have not taken Gaza off the international agenda. If Israel – which knew full well that there was not one gram of explosives aboard the ships – had let them sail to Gaza, the flotilla would not have preoccupied the international media as it did.
The continuous desecrations taking place in Mamilla are not isolated or random acts. They are part of a pattern of systematically discriminatory policies that have been implemented against Palestinians since 1948, and are still being implemented inside Israel proper and in the territories occupied in 1967. These policies have resulted in the expropriation of most of the over ninety-three percent of the property of Mandatory Palestine that in 1948 was owned by Arabs.
“We Divest From Israel’s Occupation” performs a flashmob in Times Square to call on TiAA-CREF to stop profiting from Occupation. The flashmob comes after TIAA-CREF refused to allow a shareholder resolution holding companies accountable in TIAA-CREF’s portfolio, such as Caterpillar, Elbit, Motorola, Northrup Grumman, and Veolia for doing business with Israel’s Occupation.
The Israeli occupation is the longest military occupation of modern times. The subjects of the occupation in its two forms – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – live under a brutal regime that few other occupations allowed themselves, without any law… The prolonged occupation, a disaster for us and for the Palestinians – [is made possible] because Israel enjoys the support of the West.
IDF officer: “A non-violent protest of 4,000 people or more, even if they only march to a checkpoint or a settlement, and especially if the Palestinian police does not deter them, will be unstoppable.”
Israel should end discriminatory policies that have forcibly displaced hundreds of West Bank Palestinian residents from their homes, Human Rights Watch said today. In demolition operations on June 14 and 21, 2011, Israeli authorities displaced more than a hundred residents of three West Bank communities, including women and children, destroying their homes and other structures. Israeli authorities should compensate the residents and provide them with housing, Human Rights Watch said.
The artificial division between Areas A, B and C was supposed to be erased from the map, and dropped from the discourse, in 1999. Instead, Israel has sanctified and perpetuated it. The largest share – 60 percent – is designated Area C, meaning it is under full Israeli security and civil control. It is self-evident why Israel perpetuates the Area C classification. After all, it gives Israel a free hand to continue emptying that part of the West Bank of Palestinians and encourage more Jews to violate international law and settle there.
On June 27, 2011, the Knesset’s Law, Constitution, and Justice Committee will deliberate the Boycott Bill, in preparation for second and third reading in the Knesset plenum. As part of our ongoing campaign against this anti-democratic legislation, we are now launching the second phase of our “Right to Resist” campaign. The campaign consists of four videos stared by some of Israel’s popular artists and cultural figures: singer-songwriter Rona Kenan, filmmakers Eitan Fox and Gal Ochovsky, the poet Meit Wizeltir, actress Einat Weizman, and cultural figure Muhammed Jabali.
Dr. Salem Ajluni: “Without annual external assistance to the tune of about $1 billion from the donor countries, this is not a sustainable situation. I’m not the only one saying this. So is the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and [Palestinian Prime Minister] Salam Fayyad.”
“My understanding of the Jewish ethical tradition comes primarily from my knowledge of the Jewish historical experience… I feel they are the principal determining factors: our ethical tradition, our struggles for justice, going back to the 19th-century shtetl, where my great-grandmother was hunted by the Cossacks, in pogroms.”
NOAM CHOMSKY:
