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

IOA content is now updated mostly on Facebook.
More on the current status of the IOA HERE.

Palestinian boy freed from IDF jail without paying bail

7 March 2010

Amira Hass: The boy has been held since his first remand hearing, on March 2, when his father was unable to pay the NIS 2,000 the court required for him to be released on bail. He was released on Sunday without paying bail.

More on child-arrest: IDF arrests two 13-14 old Palestinian boys accused of picking protected flowers, which are said to have been edible greens (Hebrew).

Rela Mazali: At the Waldorf, Helmet in Hand

7 March 2010

Israeli generals live a life of luxury and extravagance, mostly shaded from public scrutiny, while their soldiers enforce a brutal and criminal occupation upon the Palestinian people. Now they appropriately choose the Waldorf Astoria in New York to solicit more American money. New Profile, an Israeli feminist movement for the civil-zation of Israeli society, asks US citizens to just say NO.

Gideon Levy: There has never been an Israeli peace camp

7 March 2010

The Israeli peace camp didn’t die. It was never born in the first place. While it’s true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and brave political groups have been working against the occupation – all worthy of recognition – a large, influential peace camp has never existed here.

Thousands protest Jewish presence in East Jerusalem

6 March 2010

About 5,000 left-wing activists and Palestinians gathered Saturday to protest the eviction of four Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Protesters carried Palestinian flags and chanted “Stop the destruction of homes” and “There is no sanctity in an occupied city.”

Hundreds protest police brutality at Jaffa rally

6 March 2010

MK Dov Khenin (Hadash): “We have come here today to say clearly that human rights do not end at the borders of Jaffa. We demand that residents of Jaffa receive equal rights, be treated decently by the authorities, especially the police.”

UPDATE: Ajami co-director ahead of the Oscars: I don’t represent Israel

Ajami co-director Scandar Copti on Sunday said that he does not represent Israel, hours before his film competes for the best foreign film Oscar at the Academy Awards, Army Radio reported. “I am not Israel’s national team and do not represent her,” Copti reportedly said… “The film technically represents Israel, but I don’t represent Israel. I cannot represent a country that does not represent me,” he said… (Haaretz – 7 March 2010)

Islamic conference slams Israel’s Al-Aqsa action

6 March 2010

[Secretary-general of the pan-Islamic body] called on the international community and the Quartet on Middle East peace — the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations — to “pay heed to the gravity of the Israeli violations and the threat they pose to the region now and in the future.”

UN official: Israel ‘nourishing despair’ in Gaza

5 March 2010

Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are essentially dependent on outside food aid, either from UNWRA or the World Food Program. Not because there isn’t food in the shops – there is – but they can’t afford it, or they can’t afford enough of it because any livelihoods that there were, any jobs that there were outside the government have effectively disappeared. Most private businesses have been destroyed, essentially by the blockade – bulldozed – and the rest finished off by Cast Lead.

Video Interview: Jeff Halper – The Global Pacification Industry

5 March 2010

Interview with Jeff Halper, Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and author of Obstacles to Peace: A Re-framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and An Israeli In Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel.

Israel’s Supreme Court slams police over Sheikh Jarrah protests

4 March 2010

[C]riticism was issued by the justices during a court hearing on a petition filed by residents of Sheikh Jarrah, who demanded to be allowed to protest on this coming Saturday night, a demonstration the police hasn’t authorized. The justices sided with the residents and stressed that the police should not seize the residents’ right to protest. “The police’s behavior regarding these protests takes us 30 years backwards,” the justices said.

Amira Hass: How will the next Palestinian uprising look?

3 March 2010

The truth is that the suicide attacks on civilians gave Israel a golden opportunity to implement plans, which had always existed, to confiscate more and more Palestinian lands, using the excuse of “security.” The use of weapons did not stop the colonialist expansion of the Jewish settlements. On the contrary. And the use of weapons only accelerated a process Israel began in 1991: disconnecting the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.

Salman Masalha: Israel’s apartheid doesn’t stop at the West Bank

3 March 2010

The alienation between Arabs and Jews can be seen everywhere. It has not arisen solely in the context of the national conflict, but is rather a result of an establishment policy which has expropriated Arabs’ lands to build communities “for Jews only” and has pushed the Arab inhabitants into localities under an “ethno-Zionist siege” on all sides.

IDF recording license plates of Israeli anti-fence protesters

2 March 2010

“Perhaps they are listening in on our phone calls, looking into our e-mails, or they have a snitch,” [one demonstrator] told Haaretz. “We do not know and do not bother ourselves about these things. We are not an underground organization and our activities are open, but the army has recently been investing a great deal of intelligence effort in preventing us from demonstrating.”

39 army raids, 28 arrests: Just another day in the West Bank

1 March 2010

Palestinian Agriculture Minister Ismail Daiq: “The year 2009 was the quietest for Israelis from the security point of view and the most violent for the Palestinians from the point of view of attacks by settlers in the West Bank.”

Universities worldwide mark ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’

1 March 2010

A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organizers have declared as “Israeli Apartheid Week” – and all three speakers are Israeli.

IOA Editor: More on Apartheid Week 2010 at: http://apartheidweek.org/

Akiva Eldar: No country would accept Netanyahu’s conditions for peace

1 March 2010

The only difference between “the rock of our existence” that launched the Western Wall tunnel violence in 1996 and the 2010 model is that this time Netanyahu is wearing a mask, trying to pass himself off as peace activist Uri Avnery, with the generous help of Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Israeli Apartheid Week 2010

28 February 2010

For all events, world wide, check the Israeli Apartheid Week 2010 website: http://apartheidweek.org/

Judith Butler: As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up

28 February 2010

But now I feel that it has become more possible, more urgent to reconsider the politics of the BDS. It is not that the principles of the BDS have changed: they have not. But there are now ways to think about implementing the BDS that keep in mind the central focus: any event, practice, or institution that seeks to normalize the occupation, or presupposes that “ordinary” cultural life can continue without an explicit opposition to the occupation is itself complicit with the occupation.

John Pilger: Listen to the heroes of Israel

28 February 2010

John Pilger reminds us of the struggle by an extraordinary few in Israel against the repression and lawlessness of the occupation of Palestine. They are the inspiration to break the loud silence in the Jewish diaspora.

EU court strikes blow against Israeli settlers

25 February 2010

The EU court in Luxembourg has ruled that Israel cannot pass off products made by its settlers on occupied Palestinian land as its own in order to get customs perks… It is unlikely to have a big financial impact… But the judgment has political weight in the context of long-standing EU complaints that Israeli support for settlers is damaging the Middle East peace process.

Nadia Hijab: Scattered in death as in life

25 February 2010

[T]he battle over Jerusalem’s Mamilla Cemetery, a Muslim cemetery known in Arabic as Maman Allah, where the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center intends to build a Museum of Tolerance, … encapsulates many aspects of Israel’s approach to Palestinian rights since the conflict began.

Jerusalem families come out against museum built on ancestors’ graves

25 February 2010

Members of prominent Palestinian families from Jerusalem came out last week in protest against plans by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a Museum of Tolerance on top of part of the ancient Mamilla Cemetery where their ancestors are buried.

IOA Editor: For more on this Israeli desecration of Muslim cemetery, read:
1. The Center for Constitutional Rights’ Mamila Cemetery Fact Sheet
2. Nadia Hijab: Scattered in death as in life
3. Mamilla Cemetery Chutzpah and the Museum of Tolerance by Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance.

Jonathan Cook: Ethan Bronner and Conflicts of Interest

25 February 2010

“The degree to which Bronner’s personal life… is integrated into Israeli society, makes him an excellent candidate to cover Israeli political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life. The problem is that Bronner is also expected to be his paper’s lead voice on Palestinian political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life, all in a society he has almost no connection to, deep knowledge of or even the ability to directly communicate with.”

Gideon Levy: Dispersing white phosphorous clouds over Gaza

25 February 2010

Ask any tea grower in Sri Lanka or banana farmer in Cameroon and they’ll tell you that Israel is seen as a global weapons provider, a political and economic power, an occupying and oppressing state.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Palestinians clash in Sheikh Jarrah

24 February 2010

Clashes erupted Wednesday between Palestinian residents and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. A Palestinian woman and child were hurt in the incident and taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

Vanunu: Take me off list of Nobel peace prize nominees

24 February 2010

“The reason he gave was that Shimon Peres had received the Nobel Peace Prize, and Peres he alleged was the father of the Israeli atomic bomb and he did not want to be associated with Peres in any way.”

Henry Siegman: For Israel, defiance comes at the cost of legitimacy

24 February 2010

The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel’s military, is not democracy.

Joel Beinin: Confronting Settlement Expansion in East Jerusalem

23 February 2010

The neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a 20-minute walk up the hill from the Damascus Gate to the Old City of Jerusalem, has become the focal point of the struggle over the expanding project of Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Israel grants visas to witnesses in suit over Rachel Corrie death

23 February 2010

Under pressure from the United States, Israel is to grant visas to four activists from the International Solidarity Movement so they can testify in suit brought against the government by the family of Rachel Corrie, an activist killed by an IDF bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in March 2003.

Adalah-NY: Dancing, Singing New Yorkers protest, calling for boycott of Israel Ballet

23 February 2010

Forty-five human rights activists called upon fellow New Yorkers to boycott the Israel Ballet at its performance Sunday at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts. Accompanied by the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, protesters performed ballet, sang, chanted, and handed out mock programs to bring attention to the Israel Ballet’s role in the Israeli state’s use of the arts to whitewash its crimes against the Palestinian people.

Jonathan Cook: Israel’s new ‘attack on freedom of speech’

22 February 2010

[T]he cabinet backed a bill last week that, if passed, will jail senior officials from the country’s peace-related organisations should they fail to meet tough new registration conditions… “We are seeing the evaporation of the last freedoms of speech and organisation in Israel,” said Amal Jamal, head of politics at Tel Aviv University… The Israeli political system, he added, was being transformed into a “totalitarian democracy”.

Haaretz: A duty to protest

22 February 2010

Bil’in has become a symbol of a civic struggle devoid of terrorism. Such persistent, ongoing protest action is remarkable. It has even prompted the Supreme Court to rule that the route of the fence should be moved, and that some 170 acres of land be returned to the villagers. Astonishingly, this ruling has yet to be implemented by the state, which is thus displaying brazen contempt of court.

No Tutu is Big Enough to Cover War up Crimes

21 February 2010

Human rights activists from Vermont, New York and Israel interrupted a performance of the Israel Ballet at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, VT calling attention to the dance company’s complicity in Israeli war crimes.

IOA Editor: See also Ynetnews story and correction of facts by activists:
israeli-occupation.org/2010-02-20/us-protestors-halt-israeli-ballet-performance/

International Women’s Peace Service is seeking Palestine volunteers

21 February 2010

The International Women’s Peace Service is currently seeking applications from women who would like to join our on-the-ground team in Palestine as long term volunteers (short term volunteers are welcome).

Brazen hardliners and ardent critics: the Israel I have seen

21 February 2010

As he prepares to leave Jerusalem after four years as the Guardian’s correspondent, Rory McCarthy reflects on a new, harsher climate of thought that is apparent in the wake of the Dubai assassination. But this attitude is not universal: dissent thrives in the most unlikely places.

Meir Dagan: the mastermind behind Mossad’s secret war

21 February 2010

The Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Assassination: The mission was not regarded as unduly complicated or risky, and Netanyahu gave his authorisation, in effect signing Mabhouh’s death warrant…

One well-informed Israeli source said: “The operative teams were very much aware of the CCTV in Dubai, but they have been astonished at the ability of the Dubai police to reconstruct and assemble all the images into one account.”

Israeli scientists irate after top education official questions evolution

21 February 2010

Israel’s great march backward: “Today I am pleased that more and more scientists engaged in pure science, rather than being employed in the name of an ideology, are reaching the conclusion that the world must have a master. Nothing is given to chance,” he said. “These are my opinions and I won’t deny them just because I was appointed to an Education Ministry position.”