We say that most of us are in favor of the two-state solution, but we vote for parties that will do nothing to advance it. We vehemently oppose a one-state solution but we live, in fact for decades, in an apartheid state. We favor free access and worship at Joseph’s Tomb but not at Al Aqsa. We remember 1948 but without the Nakba. We oppose returning Palestinian property from before 1948 but we evict Palestinian inhabitants in Hebron and Sheikh Jarrah on the grounds that their homes were under Jewish ownership before 1948. We shoot passengers in Palestinian cars who refuse to stop at roadblocks, but when the Palestinian police do the same, we call it a “murderous terror attack.” We call the Israeli army Defense Forces, while most of its work is occupation.
IOA Editor: Brilliant!
Despite Netanyahu’s rhetoric, the facts on the ground – illegal outposts, failure to abide by court rulings, unfettered settler activity- make peace a distant dream.
To suggest that Palestinians are equally responsible for this state of affairs would suggest the two sides hold equal power to shape events. They don’t. No matter how many rhetorical checkpoints get thrown up, there are some basic facts you just cannot get around. Israel is the occupier; Palestinians are the occupied.
Former chief IDF rabbi: “A village like this, like Awarta, from which the murderers of the Fogel family and of the Shebo family emerged, must suffer as a village. A situation must be created whereby the inhabitants prevent anyone in this village from harming Jews. Yes, it is collective punishment. They must not be allowed to sleep at night, they must not be allowed to go to work, they must not be allowed to drive their cars. There are many ways.”
UN recognition of a Palestinian make-believe state would be no more meaningful than this fantasy “institution-building”, and could push Palestinians even further away from real liberation and self-determination.
Hamoked director Dalia Kerstein: “There is clearly a policy to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem and Israel to reduce what is called here the ‘Palestinian demographic threat.’ It’s really a case of ethnic cleansing.”
A recent ruling demonstrates the bureaucratic machinery the state has created to restrict the Palestinians’ ability to enter, live and work on land west of the separation fence.
IOA Editor: This is an important news story which points to the ultimate effect of Israeli supreme court decisions: supporting Israel’s methodical process of ethnic cleansing, bit by bit — as the old Zionist saying goes, “duman here, and dunam there” — this time 9.5% of the West Bank territory. Next time what?
Haaretz’ coverage of WikiLeaks documents concerning Israel is very interesting and well worth reading HERE.
Paul Jay interviews Lia Tarachansky, The Real News Middle East correspondent. Tarachansky covers the political economy of the occupation, while also focusing on international law and its applicability to the conflict. Having grown up in an Israeli settlement in the heart of the occupied West Bank, Tarachansky speaks about how denial of narrative fuels a conflict where the two peoples, the Israelis and Palestinians, become further segregated, physically, socially, and psychologically.
Juliano was angry. His rage was the kind that only a Jew like him, who was born on the left and craved equality until the end, can allow himself to express as a way of life. Palestinians must conquer the anger, mellow it; they must tame it, repress it, sublimate it. That’s the only way to stay both alive and sane (without getting arrested, wounded or killed ) under the conditions of physical and non-physical violence dictated by Israel.
On March 30, 2011, join the international campaign to Stop the Jewish National Fund. A key pillar of the colonization of Palestine – from the founding of the State of Israel to the present – has been the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael (KKL), commonly known in English as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF enjoys charity status in over 50 countries. This is despite its role in the on-going displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their land, the theft of their property, the funding of historic and present-day colonies, and the destruction of the natural environment.
Despite living in the Negev Desert for hundreds of years, long before modern-day Israel was even formed, Bedouin who want to live on their ancestral land are being accused by Israel of ‘trespassing’… The Israeli government says the Bedouin do not qualify as indigenous people, and it’s just enforcing laws it inherited from the British and the Ottomans. Video journalist Amos Roberts travels with Nuri to the edge of the disputed land where he was born and which he’s not even allowed to set foot on. Nearby, Amos witnesses a village being bulldozed by Israeli authorities, then rebuilt by defiant locals – for the seventh time.
The one-two punch of settler “price tag” attacks carried out under the watch of the army and with the encouragement of state-funded religious nationalist rabbis is common all over the West Bank. Most Jewish Israelis view the army with reverence, and are reluctant to criticize its conduct under any circumstance. And though settler violence is considered a matter of controversy in Israeli society, a new poll shows that a staggering number of Israelis support the pogroms meted out by fanatical settlers against defenseless Palestinians.
A dramatic change is taking place in the form of Israeli control in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), whereby, in addition to soldiers and security officials, one begins to notice the growing presence of private security personnel. A number of Israeli security companies operate in the oPt, taking over some of the tasks that were traditionally executed by the army… The variety of operations of private security companies illustrates, perhaps most lucidly, that the Israeli occupation today is sustained not only by state military forces, but also by a multitude of commercial and economic forces, whose activities in the oPt are interwoven into the establishment of control itself.
Like most Arab residents of East Jerusalem who chose not to apply for Israeli citizenship, Fahmi had Israeli residency, but not citizenship. Residency is automatically revoked in the event of an absence of many years or the acquisition of citizenship from another country.
IOA Editor: This seemingly small matter, one case among thousands, reflects the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict:” It is part of an ongoing, systematic effort on Israel’s part to replace the Palestinian Arab population with a Jewish population: a long term process of Ethnic Cleansing. To that end, a complex web of laws covering citizenship and immigration, land ownership and use, town development and residency, economic benefits, and much more has been set up. New laws are added as deemed necessary, such as the law authorizing ‘admission committees’ approval for residency in Israeli towns, which is designed to exclude Palestinians and others who do not conform to a vague lifestyle standard.
During the five day curfew in the village of Awarta, south of Nablus, the Israeli military raided homes and detained around 300 people, the youngest 14 years old. Some of the men were taken to the local boy school were they had to leave their finger prints and DNA and some were taken to the military base at Huwwra checkpoint. According to mayor, Qays Awwad, 55 men are still in Israeli custody. Some of the detainees reported that they had been abused by the soldiers while they were detained and handcuffed. It has been reported that a 75 year old woman was handcuffed and had to sit on the ground while the soldiers went through her home, and that an 80-year-old woman was beaten by soldiers.
Abdallah Abu Rahmah was given a hero’s welcome in the West Bank village of Bil’in after being released from Ofer Prison on Monday. He was greeted by over a hundred and fifty townsfolk who escorted him home waving flags and letting off fireworks in his honor.
Julian Schnabel’s Miral – Trailer. Stars Freida Pinto, Willam Dafoe, Hiam Abbass and Vanessa Redgrave. To the displeasure of Israeli officials, the full film was shown today at the UN headquarters in New York.
Ministerial committee on settlements with participation of Netanyahu and Barak approve further settlement building as response to the fatal stabbing in West Bank settlement in which family of five were slain.
Not for the first time, Seattle, WA-based Richard Silverstein plays a key role in revealing news stories about Israeli government activities — whether anti-democratic acts or outright crimes, as is the case now. Silverstein’s role in exposing such Israeli actions has been very important in that it exposed Israeli acts against Palestinians and others who stand in the way of “The Only Democracy in the Middle East.” The latest story involves the kidnapping in the Ukraine of a Palestinian man responsible for running the Gaza power plant, suspected to have been carried out by the Israeli Mossad, and his jailing at a secret location in Israel by the Shabak (Shin Bet). In addition to the kidnapping, Israel has also placed a gag-order on the case.
[T]he abhorrent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), coupled with its denial of the rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.
Leila Farsakh discusses the implications of the protest movements in the Arab world on Palestinian politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict in a video interview with The Journal of Palestine Studies.
[T]he ideology behind these tours … builds on the Zionist selectivity we were taught in our schools, claiming a Jewish right over the land and erasing that of the Palestinians who have lived there for centuries. It prepares us for army service and it underlines the legal designation of Palestinians as ‘foreigners’ making them outsiders…
Israeli security service agents have obscured their identities in the past when confronting Palestinians, but this is a new phenomenon for Israeli citizens.
IOA Editor: No mask could possibly conceal Israeli Occupation crimes.
The author is reminded that the Palestinians are under occupation when almost all Egyptians refuse to meet with her because she writes for an Israeli newspaper.
According to data by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, settlers began building over 114 houses during the 10-month settlement freeze, and began construction of over 427 houses since October 2010.
(1) The Israeli occupation and its policy of building settlements and displacing the local population are unequivocally illegal and unjustified. (2) The Israeli occupation has been a vicious one, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. (3) The Israeli occupation has been the most long-standing occupation in the world. (4) Our government, the US government, has made possible this sordid record of occupation and abuse.
Seven Deadly Myths examines the concept of knowing and not knowing at the same time. Seeing and not comprehending what you see. It starts in the West Bank colony of Ariel where director Lia Tarachansky grew up. As she returns to the settlement, she discovers as though for the first time that it is surrounded by Palestinian villages, that the dispossessed are right next door, behind electrical fences, under watch towers, locked behind walls. But the Palestinians were not made invisible by accident.
IOA Editor: Highly recommended! And, this trailer will be removed this coming weekend – very few days left to watch it.
Six years have passed since residents of Bil’in, together with their Israeli and international supporters, started regularly demonstrating against the Wall and the confiscation of more than half their land by it… The Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements declared this Friday a celebration of six years of struggle against the wall and the Occupation.
Israeli Civil rights attorney Lea Tsemel: “The [activists] were focused and continue to be focused on legal, democratic and non-violent protest against settlement trends in East Jerusalem . . . the phrasing of the report suggests the Shin Bet view these activists as similar to terrorists . . . as individuals seeking to harm the security forces.”
Although the Ministry of Defense [and] the Jerusalem municipality have claimed that the base will be within the green line, the document proves otherwise… Most of the area in which the base is to be built, however, appears to be on land that belonged to Jordan during the interwar [1948-1967] period. According to armistice agreements, it was a demilitarized zone and a small part of it was no man’s land between the two countries’ borders.
An updated map of Israeli colonization of the West Bank was released by Peace Now. It deserves careful study. Also note the graph on the left which shows clearly that colonization peaked during the so-called “Oslo Peace Process,” and again during the Camp David Peace charade hosted by US president Bill Clinton. This provides fresh evidence, if it were needed, that as far as Israel is concerned the negotiations were an exercise in deception and fraud.
IOA Advisory Board member Bashir Abu-Manneh speaks about current events in Egypt.
The stability in the region, something which Westerners and Israelis have come to yearn, merely means perpetuating the status quo. That situation might be good for Israel and the West, but it is very bad for the millions of people who have had to pay the price. Maintaining Mideast stability means perpetuating the intolerable situation by which some 2.5 million Palestinians exist without any rights under the heel of Israeli rule; and another few million Palestinian refugees from the war of 1948 are living in camps…
The Jerusalem Municipal Committee for Planning and Building is expected to approve today the construction of two buildings that will include 13 apartments for Jewish residents in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Backing the plan are settler organizations who currently occupy three homes in the neighborhood. Following the plan’s approval, it will be necessary to evict a number of Palestinian families living on the site in order for construction to commence.
Spurred by the events in Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and its ruling Fatah party also promised to hold local elections, followed by general elections, very soon… The PA was supposed to hold local elections last July, but Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s government decided unexpectedly to postpone them, and effectively to cancel them.
