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.

Childhood in ruins

17 December 2009

Last December, Israel began a 23-day bombardment of Gaza, killing around 1,400 people. One year on, a generation of children is growing up amid the wreckage of that attack, traumatised – and radicalised – by the experience.

Akiva Eldar: Netanyahu is making us miss Olmert

17 December 2009

Netanyahu has in essentially confirmed that he knew in advance that a limited settlement freeze wouldn’t bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. He could have bet that Abbas wouldn’t accept less than what the road map gave the Palestinians more than six years ago: a total freeze that includes natural growth and the immediate dismantling of all outposts established since March 2001.

UN envoy: Settlement freeze falls short of Israel’s commitments

17 December 2009

Robert Serry, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process said Thursday that recent activities by both Israel and the Palestinians are not contributing to settling their conflict and confidence remains low as 2009 draws to a close. Serry told the UN Security Council that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to temporarily freeze construction in West Bank settlements… falls considerably short of Israel’s commitments under the road map to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth.”

New EU foreign policy chief lambastes ‘Israeli occupation’

17 December 2009

Catherine Ashton… leveled scathing criticism at the “Israeli occupation,” in her first speech as the European Union’s first high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. The British stateswoman, who has also served as the Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission, said that in the EU’s view, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory, together with the West Bank.”

Olmert’s peace plan

17 December 2009

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert proposed giving the Palestinians land from communities bordering the Gaza Strip and from the Judean Desert nature reserve in exchange for settlement blocs in the West Bank.

Israeli women’s group tells Livni to turn herself in

17 December 2009

The Women’s Coalition for Peace sent a letter on Wednesday to Israel’s former Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, calling on her to cooperate with international investigations into her role in the assault on Gaza last winter, after a British court issued an warrant for her arrest on Monday.

Mustafa Barghouthi: When Will It Be Our Time?

16 December 2009

When young Israeli police officers force me to sit on the cold ground and soldiers beat me during a peaceful protest, I smolder. No human being should be compelled to sit on the ground while exercising rights taken for granted throughout the West.

Israel summons UK envoy to protest Livni arrest warrant

15 December 2009

The Foreign Ministry on Tuesday summoned the British envoy to Israel to rebuke him over the arrest warrant issued for Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni for alleged war crimes in Gaza. … [Naor Gilon, deputy director at the Foreign Ministry in charge of Western Europe] called on Phillips to urge his government to change the law that allows for arrest warrants to be issued against senior Israeli officials over alleged war crimes perpetrated in Gaza during the winter conflict between Israel and Hamas.

MK Naffaa to be indicted for contact with foreign agent in Syria

15 December 2009

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz decides to put Balad Knesset member on trial for alleged contact with foreign agent during 2007 trip to Syria when he met with PFLP number two and tried to meet with Khaled Mashaal.

Avi Shlaim’s “Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace”

11 December 2009

Avi Shlaim: “My own view is that the Balfour Declaration was one of the worst mistakes in British foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes. “It involved a monumental injustice to the Palestine Arabs and sowed the seeds of a never-ending conflict in the Middle East.”

UNWRA chief: Peace talks must deal with Palestinian refugees

11 December 2009

“Palestine refugees are unique in the contemporary refugee experience, as they have no state to return to, nor are they allowed to return to their homes… [I]n Gaza an occupied people is under extreme trade and economic sanction as a matter of political choice. And in the West Bank the closure regime – part of the military occupation – is leading to the continuing rise in poverty rates.

Watch The People Speak: inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History

11 December 2009

On Sunday, December 13, at 8 PM Eastern and Pacific/7 PM Central, THE PEOPLE SPEAK – the long awaited documentary film inspired by Howard Zinn’s books A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, co-edited by Anthony Arnove — will air on the History Channel. We hope you will tune in. More details are at www.history.com/peoplespeak

21 Israeli left-wing activists arrested in violent East Jerusalem clashes

11 December 2009

The demonstrators were protesting the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes. The protesters on Friday marched from the city center to Sheikh Jarrah, where they tried to enter a home that is partly occupied by Jews before being stopped by police.

Albuquerque Billboard Calls for End to Military Aid to Israel

11 December 2009

New billboard says: We Should Spend Our Money at Home Instead. Similar billboards were erected in April, but were unilaterally removed by [ad] company after being pressured by persons who didn’t want Israel held accountable for its war crimes.

Obama gains popularity in poll of Israelis

11 December 2009

WASHINGTON – President Obama is not as unpopular in Israel as has been previously reported, according to a new poll released yesterday by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

US not opposed to Israel pumping more funds into settlements

11 December 2009

Senior U.S. administration officials told Haaretz earlier Thursday that the prime minister’s bureau had provided satisfactory explanations as long as the benefits plan was in keeping with the freeze and that money would not be transferred for new housing in the settlements.

IOA Editor: This further demonstrates how meaningless both the so-called ‘freeze’ and the newly-minted Nobel Laureate’s “two-states, living side by side” peace plan are: He’ll surely manage the intellectual gymnastics necessary to defend the ‘settlement freeze’ concept while approving a status of preferred economic development zones to the very same settlements – just as he proclaimed the virtues of a “just war” while receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. The good-old American tradition of snake-oil salesmanship. Anything (we want) goes.

UK government urges businesses: Label products from settlements

10 December 2009

The recommendation is not binding, but this step marks an escalation in the country’s attitude toward Israel’s settlements… The government recommendation goes further to say that labeling a product from a settlement as having been manufactured in Israel would be considered a criminal offense as it is misleading to the consumer public.

Israel seizes Bil’in anti-wall protest leader

10 December 2009

[Attorney Gaby Lasky]: “The Bil’in demonstrators are being systemically targeted while it is the State [of Israel] that is in contempt of a High Court of Justice ruling; a ruling which affirmed that the protesters have justice on their side and instructed 2 years ago that the route of the Wall in the area be changed, which has not been implemented to date.”

Syria warns Israel it risks closing door to talks

10 December 2009

Syria warned Israel on Thursday it risked closing the door to renewed peace talks, a day after the Israeli parliament agreed to consider a bill that would make it far more difficult to return the occupied Golan… “Israel is defying the whole world with its rejection of peace and it is proving that its government’s stated wish to make peace is nothing but a political manoeuvre.”

Israeli Defense officials: Palestinians trying to coerce Israel into accepting statehood

10 December 2009

“The Palestinians want to continue to build their state from below and at the same time to work with the United States and the European Union to force Israel into an arrangement from above.”

IOA Editor: This would be funny, it it weren’t so profoundly sad and grotesquely warped: The gang of war criminals running this nuclear empire that controls the daily lives of an entire occupied people, whom they bomb, starve, repress and violate at will, complain about being coerced by their subjects.

Israelis shot mental patient ‘under controversial military directive’

10 December 2009

Jonathan Cook: The Israeli media reported that [the man] had bled to death after he was shot under the “Hannibal procedure”, designed to prevent Israelis from being taken captive alive by enemy forces… “The Hannibal procedure is definitely the right procedure. We cannot afford now some soulmate next to Gilad Shalit.”

Gideon Levy: Let’s face the facts, Israel is a semi-theocracy

10 December 2009

Between Stockholm and Tehran, Israel of 2009 is much closer to Tehran… It begins, of course, with the fact of our presence here. Among other things, it is based on theological reasoning. Abraham the Patriarch was here, so we are, too. He bought the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, so we, too, are in Palestinian Hebron. People who are entirely secular also cite religious and biblical explanations for the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.

IOA Editor: Levy is making the rarely-made connection between religion and the Occupation – specifically, the religious beliefs of secular-like Israelis who, just the same, justify their presence and (illegal) actions by the Word of God. This crucial point is what makes this article important outside Israel.

Ellen Cantarow: Living by the Gate From Hell

10 December 2009

Much is heard of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the story of the determined, long-term nonviolent resistance of many Palestinian villagers to the loss of their lands, striking as it may be, is seldom told. Here’s my report from just one village on the West Bank.

High Court: Gaza student cannot complete studies in West Bank

9 December 2009

Berlanty Azzam , 22, has been in the West Bank since 2005 and has only two months of studies left in order to complete her Bachelor’s degree in business administration. In late October, however, the Israeli authorities expelled her back to Gaza claiming that that she was illegally staying in the West Bank.

Rightist MK to Netanyahu: Jews are not popsicles to be frozen

9 December 2009

Over 10,000 right-wing protesters gathered on Wednesday in Paris Square in Jerusalem near the Prime Minister’s residence to demonstrate against the temporary settlement freeze. “When Netanyahu speaks of a settlement freeze he means a disengagement,” National Union MK Aryeh Eldad told the protesters.

IOA Editor: MK Eldad is among Israel’s most extreme right-wing politicians. It would be fair to surmise that he believes ALL Jews have all the rights over Israel/Palestine, and Palestinian Arabs have no rights at all. It is also safe to assume that he’d be entirely in favor of the transfer of all Palestinians out of their homeland – this is an assumption only because such speech is both politically-unwise and illegal in Israel.

Egypt building iron wall on Gaza border to stop tunnel smuggling

9 December 2009

Egypt has begun the construction of a massive iron wall along its border with the Gaza Strip, in a bid to shut down smuggling tunnels into the territory. The wall will be nine to 10 kilometers long, and will go 20 to 30 meters into the ground, Egyptian sources said. It will be impossible to cut or melt.

Amira Hass: How Israel manipulates its citizens

9 December 2009

The [settlement construction] freeze orders will not change what exists now: an elite state for Jews and a sub-space for Palestinians – truncated, cut up, asphyxiated. The distinction in the mind nowadays between the state of Israel and the settlers is artificial.

Netanyahu decided: a fence to be erected the length of the Israel-Egypt border

9 December 2009

Netanyahu has said in closed meetings that the only place where it is possible to walk a few dozen meters on foot and to move from the third world to the first world, is in southern Israel. In other places in the world, oceans separate these two worlds.

IOA Editor: A wall here and a fence there… pretty soon we’ll be incarcerated in our very own ghetto. And who will we be blaming then?

Bedouins in Israel denied elections

8 December 2009

Jonathan Cook: About 35,000 Bedouin residents of Israel’s southern Negev have been denied the right to hold their first local council election after the Israeli parliament passed a law at the last minute to cancel this month’s ballot. The new law gives the government the power to postpone elections to the regional council, known as Abu Basma, until the interior ministry deems the local Bedouin ready to run their own affairs. Legal and human rights groups say the move is an unprecedented violation of Israel’s constitutional principles.

Karen AbuZayd: Peace must begin with the plight of Palestine’s refugees

8 December 2009

Make no mistake, not a single conflict of contemporary times has been resolved, no durable peace achieved, unless and until the voices of the victims of those conflicts were heard, their losses acknowledged and redress found to injustices they experience.

Akiva Eldar: Israel may have frozen settlements, but does it want peace?

8 December 2009

The point of contention hinges on a completely different issue: the peace process. Abbas insists that the talks on the permanent status agreement be based on the parameters of the 2003 Road Map, which received affirmation in a UN Security Council Resolution. The map is reminiscent, among other things, of the Arab peace initiative which focused on normalization in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967.

Assaf Kfoury: The Fourth Estate in the Service of Power: Media Coverage of the Middle East

7 December 2009

You open the newspaper on any day and you can be sure to find at least one front-page article related to the Middle East. It will be something ugly or depressing, something implicating the United States directly or indirectly — Israel and Palestine, the Iraq war… And you wonder how much of the story is true, how much is distorted, and how much is omitted outright. It is not just for lack of space.

Conversation with Jonathan Cook

7 December 2009

Jonathan Cook gave a talk to a visiting delegation from Belgium in Bethlehem on 5 December 2009. Much of the talk, presented in five parts, is included here. It covers a wide range of topics, including Israel’s development of the homeland security industry, its economic dependence on US aid, its use of Gaza as a laboratory for experimentation in warfare, its need to promote a global clash of civilisations, and the increasing promotion of Jewish religious fundamentalism.

For additional Jonathan Cook interviews: www.jkcook.net/Interviews

International Participation in Dec 31 Gaza Freedom March Tops 1,000 As Registration Closes

7 December 2009

Over 1,000 delegates from 42 countries have signed up to participate in the December 31 Gaza Freedom March that will mark the one-year anniversary of the Israeli invasion and call for an end to the siege that has brought 1.5 million people to the edge of disaster.

Israel accused of interrogating medical patients from Gaza

7 December 2009

Israeli security agents held a Palestinian patient for three weeks without charge, interrogated him repeatedly and offered access to hospital care if he agreed to become an informant, the Guardian has learned.

Billboards calling for end to military aid back up in Albuquerque

6 December 2009

The Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition working to “end to the ten year commitment of $30 billion in U.S. taxpayer-funded military aid pledged to Israel in 2007 by the Bush administration,” reports they have a new set of billboards with a new company and slightly altered message. Seventy-five percent of US military aid to Israel is, by law, given to US arms manufacturers.