Israel’s War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands

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Jonathan Cook: Egypt and Israel heading for crisis

5 May 2011

More worrying still to Israeli officials are reported plans by Egyptian authorities to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza, closed for the past four years as part of a Western-backed blockade of the enclave designed to weaken Hamas, the ruling Islamist group there. Egypt is working out details to permanently open the border, an Egyptian foreign ministry official told the Reuters news agency on Sunday. The blockade would effectively come to an end as a result.

Gaza: Israel’s war and the Goldstone Report (video)

4 May 2011

On May 2, 2011, the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University held a program on “Gaza: Israel’s War and the Goldstone Report.” The speakers included Norman Finkelstein, Peter Weiss, and Rashid Khalidi. The program was moderated by Bashir Abu-Manneh.

Human rights groups petition Israel’s High Court to overthrow ‘Nakba Law’

4 May 2011

Adalah lawyer Saswanzaher Zaher: “This is an ideological law that has been directed against the national identity of Israel’s Arab citizens, and against their collective memory. It detracts from the legitimacy of their standing as citizens entitle to equal rights in the State of Israel.”

Israel’s Islamic Movement reunites after rift over role in Knesset

4 May 2011

The northern and southern branches of the Islamic movement pledge to begin working together, after months of attempts to unify. Announcement of the movement’s reunification came on the same day that rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation deal in Cairo.

Amira Hass: Palestinian reconciliation may lead to Israel’s Palestinian separation

3 May 2011

Ever since January 1991, long before Hamas rose to power, long before the suicide bombings, even before the Oslo accords, Israel restricted the Palestinians’ rights to travel between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. That was when the “caging” of Gaza started, and this cage has gradually become more and more closed over time.

Bassem Tamimi: “Our destiny is to resist”

2 May 2011

Our problem is not just with the settlement of Halamish. Our problem is the whole occupation. The settlement is merely a face of the occupation. In Bilin and Nilin they set specific goals like moving the separation fence to the green line. That is a problem. Our only goal is to end the occupation.

Lia Tarachansky: Jerusalem reacts to Hamas-Fatah ‘unity’ (video)

2 May 2011

On April 28th, formerly rivaling Palestinian parties announced their intention to begin reconciliation and hold an election within one year. Hamas is in power in the Gaza strip and Fateh is the leading party in the Palestinian Authority, ruling the West Bank. Since 2006 the parties have fought each other, leading to hundreds of casualties and many failed attempts to reach reconciliation.

Jonathan Cook: Will Goldstone’s retraction provoke another Cast Lead?

2 May 2011

Goldstone’s timing may have been significant. He offered his reassessment a few days after the UN Human Rights Council, which appointed his fact-finding mission, recommended that the General Assembly refer the Goldstone Report to the Security Council. In doing so, the council initiated a mechanism designed to move the report to the ICC as a prelude to a possible war crimes tribunal.

Gaza: Israel’s war and the Goldstone Report

2 May 2011

A panel discussion dedicated to examining the reality and consequences of Israel’s war and siege of Gaza. The panelists are Norman Finkelstein, Rashid Khalidi, and Peter Weiss. Columbia University, New York – 2 May 2011.

IOA Editor: An outstanding and memorable event with each of the participants excelling. This was another successful, informative event organized by Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies.

Video recording of the event can be found HERE

Adam Shatz: A major step

1 May 2011

But Obama may have done Abbas a favour: by revealing in the starkest terms the unconditional nature of US support for Israel – and how slender the rewards are for being America’s man in Ramallah – he has forced Abbas to do something that, for once, may win him some Palestinian goodwill. And he may just be able to sell the agreement – in other words, the inclusion of a party that has not renounced violence or recognised Israel – to the EU, which has become increasingly exasperated with Obama’s timidity on Palestine.

Gilbert Achcar, Tom Segev: The Arabs and the Holocaust

1 May 2011

Gilbert Achcar and Tom Segev discuss The Arabs and the Holocaust

Catrina Stewart: The ghost town between Palestine’s past and its future

30 April 2011

Ghada Karmi: “On setting up its state in 1948, Israel set about demolishing every vestige of Palestinian life and history in the land… The battle to preserve Lifta must be won – it remains a physical memory of injustice and survival.”

Michael Sfard: The legal tsunami is on its way

30 April 2011

The significance of a Palestinian state joining the UN is that, for the first time, it will be the Palestinians who will decide what the international legal framework is that is binding in their territory.

Noam Chomsky: Israel Social TV interview

29 April 2011

Noam Chomsky in a telephone interview held on 1 March 2011 with Gadi Algazi of Israel Social TV. The interview covers the democracy uprising in the Middle East, US and the Occupation, democracy in Israel, Chomsky’s vision for Israel and Palestine, Iran and Israel’s nuclear policy, and Israel’s mainstream media.

Lands conference awards Safed rabbi who said Jews shouldn’t rent to non-Jews

28 April 2011

Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz awarded Eliyahu with the prize for “his actions, effort and devotion to the Jewish nature of the Land of Israel.”

IOA Editor: The “devotion to the Jewish nature of the Land of Israel” is the same racist devotion to keep away the Palestinian people, dispossessed from the very same land, including Israeli citizens, even as short-term renters (e.g., Palestinian students in Safed). Ethnocentric Israel, a rapidly diminishing democracy-for-Jews only, now officially awards members of its ruling tribe often described by fellow Israeli-Jews as ‘racist’ and ‘extremist’ for their “devotion” to racist discriminatory laws and practices. Ethnic cleansing — “dunam here and dunam there,” bit by bit, one student and one family at a time — whether in Safed, or in Silwan, or elsewhere.

Lia Tarachansky: Consequences of Gaza activist’s killing (video)

28 April 2011

On April 15, 2011, Italian journalist and activist Vittorio Arrigoni was kidnapped and killed in the Gaza strip. According to a video released by his kidnappers, they belonged to a Salafi group, which Hamas identified as including a former Hamas policeman. While the mainstream media portrayed the killing as an act of an extremist group identifying with Al Qaeda, many are saying the group, as other Salafi groups operating in Gaza represents a growing force from inside Hamas itself.

Richard Silverstein: Israel prevents return of Gazan to Gaza

28 April 2011

The fact that the man has brought a case to the Supreme Court demanding that he be allowed to return to Gaza is a clear repudiation of the stupidity of Shabak’s claim that he is in danger if he returns.

Gideon Levy: Arab world is deposing rulers, Israel is blowing leaves

28 April 2011

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!

Akiva Eldar: Israel’s West Bank policies render the two-state solution DOA

27 April 2011

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.

Israel’s High Court: Knesset must explain why Arab MK Zuabi stripped of rights

26 April 2011

In the wake of her participation in last year’s Gaza flotilla, Zuabi was stripped of three key privileges as an MK; Zuabi in turn petitioned the High Court to get her privileges reinstated. The court gave the Knesset 30 days to submit an explanation.

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Richard Falk: Goldstone breathes new life into Gaza report

26 April 2011

Goldstone miscalculated; he has given the report a second life. It may still languish in the UN system, thanks to the geopolitical leverage being exerted by the United States to ensure that Israeli impunity is safeguarded once more. But this new controversy surrounding the report has provided civil society with renewed energy to push harder on the legitimacy agenda which is animating the growing Palestinian solidarity movement.

Gary Younge: For Israelis and Palestinians, the status quo is neither sustainable nor desirable

25 April 2011

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.

Yossi Sarid: Israel does not have a monopoly on suffering

25 April 2011

And no one is a human being without recognizing that the other is also one, and that it is important to get to know him, both his shortcomings and hopes. No one is born a murderer and no one is destined to be murdered, and no nation has a monopoly on suffering and mourning. The warning sign before a holocaust, genocide, politicide, ethnocide or ethnic cleansing is the same everywhere and at all times. True, learned research distinguishes between each, but the victims don’t care about the minute distinctions.

Lamis Andoni: To Juliano and Vittorio with love

25 April 2011

Solidarity activists have traditionally been embraced, virtually adopted even, by their host communities. That they should be killed by those they were trying to defend generated shockwaves that reached deep into the heart of Palestinian communities across the world.

Oded Pilavsky: How I arrived to Matzpen

23 April 2011

Matzpen co-founder Oded (“Odik”) Pilavsky died last week in Tel Aviv at the age of 79. Three years ago he wrote about how and why he had arrived to the left margin of the Israeli political spectrum. Originally published on the Matzpen website, an edited version of the article was published yesterday in the Haaretz weekend magazine.

Suad Amiry: Closing speech at TEDx, Ramallah – 2011

23 April 2011

Suad Amiry’s inspiring, and hilarious, closing speech at the TEDx, Ramallah meeting on 16 April 2011. A Must-Watch video!

Richard Silverstein: Israel, extraordinary rendition and the strange case of Dirar Abu Sisi

22 April 2011

We are left to speculate regarding the reasons for Abu Sisi’s detention. The number of possibilities includes … that he had helped refine a new fuel system that made the plant far less dependent on Israeli-supplied diesel fuel. This may not have sat well with the Israeli authorities, who wish to control the system’s operations should they want to limit or cut them off.

Noam Chomsky: Is the world too big to fail?

22 April 2011

The US and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. To understand why, it is only necessary to look at the studies of Arab opinion conducted by U.S. polling agencies. [Most] Arabs regard the US and Israel as the major threats they face… Opposition to US policy is so strong that a majority believes that security would be improved if Iran had nuclear weapons… If public opinion were to influence policy, the US not only would not control the region, but would be expelled from it, along with its allies, undermining fundamental principles of global dominance.

Amira Hass: Itamar murders don’t justify stripping Palestinians’ rights

20 April 2011

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.”

Israel’s Masada unit attack Palestinian prisoners

20 April 2011

Israeli prison authority terrorized Palestinian prisoners in a ‘commando’ raid at the Ketziot prison which was designed to “boost the morale” of prison guards. One Palestinian prisoner was killed and several were injured. This was a routine prison raid, carried out against sleeping prisoners in the middle of the night. The video had been suppressed by the Israeli government from the time it was made in 2007, but was shown on Israel’s Channel 2 TV last week.

Jonathan Cook: on Nazareth, Israeli citizenship laws, and the Arabic language

20 April 2011

In this four-part video interview, British journalist Jonathan Cook talks about Nazareth and how it fits in within Israel’s ethnocracy; about Israel’s separate citizenship laws, one for Jews and one for non-Jews; and about where the Arabic language fits within Israel’s inherently discriminatory political system.

Cook’s position in the Arab heartland of Israel puts a different perspective on his reporting: namely that the post-1967 conflict over the occupied territories is best understood as a reflection and continuation of the larger conflict begun in 1948.

Lia Tarachansky: Chasing ghosts – questioning the death of Vittorio Arrigoni

19 April 2011

Vittorio Arrigoni, killed Friday, April 15 is the first international activist killed by Palestinian kidnappers in living memory of the conflict. Mystery surrounding his kidnapping and death leaves significant questions about the those allegedly responsible, the investigation, and the future of the region.

Moshé Machover: Comrade Oded (Odik) Pilavsky

19 April 2011

In memoriam: Moshé Machover remembers his close friend, Matzpen co-founder Oded Pilavsky.

Adam Keller: Oded Pilavsky – 1932-2011

19 April 2011

Oded Pilavsky: I finally started to comprehend what was happening there. A collectivist bunch imbued with socialist ideals, equipped with the best of agricultural machinery purchased on credit from the Jewish Agency, was reaping- robbing the fruit of the labor of poor Arabs who had been expelled from their land and their country…

Goldstone report: Statement issued by members of UN mission on Gaza war

14 April 2011

Many of those calling for the nullification of our report imply that the final report by the follow-up committee … somehow contradicts the fact-finding mission’s report or invalidates it. In the light of the observations of this committee such claims are completely misplaced, and a clear distortion of their findings.

Ali Abunimah: Recognising Palestine

14 April 2011

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.