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

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Israel’s Gadfly: Robert Hirschfield interviews Gideon Levy

4 September 2009

Q: Some Israelis criticize you for writing the same kinds of stories about abuses over and over again.

A: That’s right. They don’t ask why the abuses continue to happen, they ask why I continue to write about them.

Norway divests from Israel defense firm over ties to West Bank fence

3 September 2009

The Norwegian government has decided to pull all of its investments from Israeli arms firm Elbit as a result of it involvement in the construction of the West Bank separation fence, the Norwegian Finance Minister announced on Thursday… Norway’s pension fund is invested in 41 different Israeli companies… A research project by the Coalition of Women for Peace called “Who profits from the occupation?” found that almost two thirds of those firms are involved in West Bank construction and development.

Rachel Giora: A modest proposal

3 September 2009

Ben Gurion University students’ democracy lesson following the Neve Gordon Los Angeles Times article and reactions: “we are taught history, but we are forbidden to learn from it. In gender studies, we are taught to identify violent discourse, but we are expected to go on speaking the routine and familiar militaristic language. We are taught to be social workers, but not to identify with exploited cleaning workers. Learning is allowed, but not drawing practical conclusions – especially not in a newspaper, in English, with a large circulation.”

New campaign targets Jews ‘abducted’ by intermarriage

3 September 2009

An organization that works to strengthen ties between Israel and Diaspora Jews Wednesday launched a scare-tactic campaign that urges Israelis to combat assimilation in North America by working to prevent the “loss” of their own Jewish acquaintances there.

Barak: IDF troops must be ready to die for Israel

2 September 2009

Defense Minister Ehud Barak reiterated on Wednesday his belief that Israel Defense Forces soldiers must be willing to risk their lives in service of their country and that the government would not pay any price for the return of Gilad Shalit, who has been languishing in Hamas captivity for over three years.

IOA Editor: Running a military occupation is a serious, demanding business, requiring everybody’s participation and willingness to make the Ultimate Sacrifice. Dispossessing another nation of its land and natural resources, destroying its infrastructure, erasing its history and eliminating its future as a nation – all require a long term commitment to Jewish nationalism, far bigger and more important than an individual life.

Some 7,700 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli jails, among them people not tried before any court, many political activists, and children who – if they were only Jewish – could not be held in an Israeli jail. Surely Israel could ‘spare’ 450 prisoners without ‘diluting’ the overall impact of holding such a large population of prisoners. But it seems that the principle of Being-Right-Always has to come first.

Amira Hass: The violence outside the statistics

2 September 2009

From the most senior military judge down to the lowest private at a checkpoint, hundreds of thousands of perfectly normal Israelis who are not violent at home are partners in the mission of administering, demarcating, restricting and taming the other society while cumulatively damaging its rights, welfare and well-being. This is the norm that is not taken into account here in the statistics on violence and the violent.

[Huge] Education gap divides Jerusalem into East and West

1 September 2009

Last year, NIS 577 was spent on each primary school student in the predominantly-Arab eastern section of the city, compared with NIS 2,372 for a student in the mainly-Jewish western part. In preschools, spending per student in West Jerusalem was 2.7 times that of East Jerusalem, and in special education 2.5 times.

IDF cuts down West Bank raids for fear US diplomats will see

1 September 2009

The Israel Defense Forces has canceled a number of planned arrest operations in the West Bank fearing soldiers will be seen by American diplomats touring the territories.

IDF soldier suspected of killing Palestinian still hasn’t been charged

31 August 2009

A Military Police investigation into a soldier’s killing of a Palestinian near Hebron in January has been going on for seven and a half months, and there is still no end in sight. Yet the sector commander has been giving briefings for the past few months based on his own inquiry into the incident, which he describes as “a serious failure in moral and professional terms.”

End of Freedom

31 August 2009

[A] firm demand… to put an immediate end to the policy of arrests and draconian interrogations currently conducted against the Arab-Palestinian community in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; to free ALL political prisoners; to halt the current wave of legislation aimed at curbing and restricting the civil rights of Israel’s residents and citizens; to stop the violent, racist policy now implemented against refugees and migrant workers; and to condemn crimes of hate and violence against ethnic, religious or gender minorities.

Akiva Eldar: Freeze in Jerusalem too

31 August 2009

If there is any truth in the reports that came out of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to Europe – that the United States agreed Israel can go on building in East Jerusalem – the headlines should have read “Obama has pulled out of the Middle East peace process.”

Gideon Levy: Return Gilad Shalit, but not at any price

30 August 2009

About 7,700 Palestinians are imprisoned in Israel, including about 450 without the benefit of a trial. Most of them are not murderers, although they are all automatically labeled as such here. The demonstrators at Megiddo would do well to realize this. Some of the prisoners are political detainees in the full sense of the word, from members of the Palestinian parliament imprisoned without trial, which is a scandal in and of itself, to those behind bars because of their “affiliation.” Innocent people are among them as well as political activists and nonviolent protesters.

IOA Editor: In this Israeli-centric commentary, Levy calls attention to the status of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Tutu to Ma’an: World must engage Hamas

28 August 2009

“You don’t make peace with friends,” he told Ma’an in Ramallah. “You negotiate with those who are regarded as pariahs.”

Photo: Desmond Tutu, center, placed a stone on a grave on Thursday in Bilin, site of weekly protests against the Israeli Wall. With him, from left: Gro Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Ela Bhatt and Abdullah Abu Rahma.

Also: The New York Times coverage of The Elders’ Bilin visit

4% of Israeli Jews: Obama pro-Israel

28 August 2009

he number of Israelis who see US President Barack Obama’s policies as pro-Israel has fallen to four percent, according to a Smith Research poll taken this week on behalf of The Jerusalem Post.

Tutu to Haaretz: Arabs paying the price of the Holocaust

28 August 2009

“The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns,” Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa told Haaretz Thursday… Tutu also commented on the call by Ben-Gurion University professor Neve Gordon to apply selective sanctions on Israel. “I always say to people that sanctions were important in the South African case for several reasons… it actually did hit the pocket of the South African government…”

Daoud Kuttab: Fayyad’s brilliant two-year plan for Palestinian statehood

27 August 2009

Palestinians have finally started to act in a different way. Instead of cursing the occupation, the new strategy is aimed at building up the desired Palestinian state. The idea is to force the Israelis to the negotiating table rather than beg them to come. The way to do that is to work for a state as if there were negotiations. This idea has been brilliantly developed by the Palestinian prime minister.

Gideon Levy: The last refuge – the Legitimacy of a Boycott

27 August 2009

So let us admit the truth: The occupier deserves to be boycotted. As long as the Israelis pay no price for the occupation, the occupation will not end, and therefore the only way open to the opponents of the occupation is to take concrete means that will make the Israelis understand that the injustice they are perpetrating comes with a price tag.

Anti-settler lawyer urges clemency for ‘Robin Hood’ of the ‘Wild West Bank’

27 August 2009

“Where there is no law and no one to turn to, Ezra is seen as a law breaker, while the state itself breaks the law and fails to uphold its basic obligations. Ezra is the savior of these people. He blocks with his body settlers who stop the farmers from working on their land. You could call him Robin Hood of the Wild West,” she said.

Anat Matar: Israeli academics must pay the price to end occupation

27 August 2009

[Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University] believes, and so do I, that only when the Israeli society’s well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation, will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it… The vast majority retains its freedom to be indifferent, up to the moment that someone begs the international community for rescue. Then the voices rise from right and left, the indifference disappears, and violence replaces it: Boycott Israeli universities? This strikes at the holy of holies, academic freedom!

Gideon Levy: Pulp journalism

27 August 2009

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman should have sent a big bouquet to Donald Bostrom, the Swedish photographer and journalist who wrote the article claiming that the Israel Defense Forces harvested organs from dead Palestinians… It has been a long time since such a propaganda asset has fallen into the hands of the friends of the occupation. It has been a long time since such damage has been caused to people seriously attempting to document its horrors.

Jonathan Cook: Palestinians in Israel fight to reclaim Beersheva’s Great Mosque

25 August 2009

“There is so much paranoia from the government, the municipality and the courts about Muslims using this mosque again,” said Nuri al-Uqbi, a 67-year-old Bedouin activist in Beersheva. “It was built with money raised from the local Bedouin and we should have the right to pray in it.”

Netanyahu assails group which alleged IDF wrongdoing in Gaza

25 August 2009

“They are breaking their silence about the only democracy in the Middle East that has an independent legal system and an investigative press that does not cease dealing with these issues,” Netanyahu told reporters…

IOA Editor: Again, the “Only-Democracy-in-the-Middle-East” cannot deal substantively with challenges to its violent Occupation and Gaza war crimes, such as those coming from the UN, HRW, and other international human-rights organizations. Instead, it tries to silence critical organizations and choke their international NGO funding.

BOYCOTT! Stands with Dr. Neve Gordon for BDS and Against Oppression

24 August 2009

The Palestinian civil society Call for global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, launched in July 2005 by over 170 Palestinian political parties, unions and organizations offers an opportunity to join the collective effort for justice for the Palestinian people, based on the successful South African model. It is noteworthy that the Palestinian call for boycott is aimed at institutions rather than an inclusive and personal boycott of Israelis as individuals.

Akiva Eldar: Don’t blame Bogie Ya’alon alone

24 August 2009

Rather than demand an apology, the Israeli peace camp needs to send Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon a large bouquet of flowers… His statements are straight-from-the-source, first-hand proof of the decisive role the senior military echelon has played in thwarting the peace process.

IOA Editor: True, and very important to recognize. However, what Eldar calls the lack of courage to deal with settlers and fear of “presenting a map which demarcates the state’s permanent borders,” reflect, first and foremost, a lack of commitment to such demarcation.

Historically, right-wing (“Revisionist”) Zionism has viewed Israel’s eastern borders as located somewhere between the Jordan River (“less extreme”) and deep inside Jordan (“more extreme”). So-called “moderate” Labor Zionism, on the other hand, has viewed Israel’s borders with infinite flexibility: initially influenced by the availability of contiguous land and by low Palestinian population density, and ultimately driven by opportunities. For example, the Jordan Valley was first to be included in the future Greater Israel by Labor policy makers, and subsequently settled by Labor-led governments. Future settlements, increasingly deeper in the heartland of the West-Bank, were built as opportunities (often domestic politics) presented themselves – following the old pre-State adage “dunam here and dunam there” (dunam is unit of area approximately equal to 1/4 acre).

Yitzhak Laor: The soft underbelly and the victim

24 August 2009

The name of this Israeli ethos is “who are you to tell us?” We are destroying Arab East Jerusalem? Who are you to tell us that it is wrong? We killed masses of Palestinians in Gaza? Who are you to tell us anything? We have maintained a brutal dictatorship in the territories for 42 years – longer than any other military occupation of the post-World War II era? Who are you to tell us? We’re allowed. We’re your victims. The past belongs to us. We will do as we please with it.

Why Israeli Jew Uri Davis joined Fatah to save Palestine

23 August 2009

Uri Davis is used to denunciations. A “traitor”, “scum”, “mentally unstable”: those are just some of the condemnations that have been posted in the Israeli blogosphere in recent days. As the first person of Jewish origin to be elected to the Revolutionary Council of the Palestinian Fatah movement, an organisation once dominated by Yasser Arafat, Davis has tapped a deep reserve of Israeli resentment. Some have even called for him to be deported.

Plans would make E. Jerusalem settlement largest yet

23 August 2009

A plan for the building of a new settlement, Ma’aleh David, in the middle of an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem was filed for approval by the relevant municipal committee at the Jerusalem Municipality. The plan calls for the construction of 104 housing units on the land where the former headquarters of the Judea and Samaria police was housed in the neighborhood of Ras al-Amud.

L.A. Jews mull boycott of Israel university over ‘apartheid’ op-ed

22 August 2009

Members of the Los Angeles Jewish community have threatened to withhold donations to an Israeli university in protest of an op-ed published by a prominent Israeli academic in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, in which he called to boycott Israel economically, culturally and politically. Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, a veteran peace activist, branded Israel as an apartheid state and said that a boycott was “the only way to save it from itself.”

IOA Editor: Haaretz leaves out the “unless” part of the threat to withhold donations: the firing of Prof. Neve Gordon from his BG University position. Is the “Only Democracy in the Middle East” about to start yet another round of harassment against a professor who dares to stare the Emperor in the eye?

See Neve Gordon: Boycott Israel on the IOA website.

Haaretz editorial: Verbal rioting

21 August 2009

The blatant attack that Ya’alon has been waging ever since he slammed the door by leaving the Israel Defense Forces has shown acute anti-democratic symptoms. Ya’alon has lashed out at the High Court of Justice in particular and the justice system in general, while expressing scandalous support for illegal settlements, making irresponsible accusations against his colleagues and superiors and stating views that are considered illegitimate even in the right wing.

IOA Editor: We continue focusing on Ya’alon because he is a central figure of Israel’s government and, as described by Haaretz, in many ways he is the government.

Israel Harel: Chivalrous defenders of human rights

21 August 2009

[Joe] Stork wrote to Haaretz that rather than deal with the content of the report, Yemini chose to “shoot the messenger… The quotes he attributes to me are more than 30 years old. Most of them I do not recognize, and they are contrary to the views I have been expounding for decades now.” Stork wrote. “I have dedicated much of my adult life to the protection of human rights for all and to fighting the idea that civilians can be attacked for political reasons.”

IOA Editor: Israel Harel is a right-wing Israeli commentator, as is Ben Dror Yemini. Joe Stork is the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division. This attack on HRW and its dedicated staff reflects the opinions of many Israelis who reject any outside criticism of IDF behavior and Israeli actions in the occupied territories.

See IOA coverage of the HRW report.

Settlers taped attacking Palestinians evade arrest

21 August 2009

B’Tselem told Haaretz it intends to appeal against the decision to close the case. “The footage of the attack shocked the Israeli public, but nobody was ever brought to trial. This decision joins other cases in a disturbing trend of a lack of law enforcement, signaling to violent settlers that they can do anything they want,” the organization’s comment read.

There ought to be a law

21 August 2009

Currently the fight against [Arab-Jewish] intermarriage is spearheaded by the Yad L’Achim organization . Not long ago its chairman, Rabbi Shalom Dov Lipschitz, wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, warning of “a fundamental failure in the Jewish education and values in the secular education system in Israel.”

IOA Editor: This is traditional racism at its very best: such attitudes – the separation of couples on racial grounds – are well known in European and North American history, and elsewhere. This news story is important because in the “advanced” countries that Israel would like to associate with and be treated as an ally of, such behavior would be rejected, and is generally outlawed. One would think that such blatantly racist practices are not in Israel’s self-interest, yet it involves organizations which benefit from government support, possibly involving high level government officials.

Ya’alon backtracks after calling Peace Now, elites ‘a virus’

21 August 2009

Peace Now secretary general Yariv Oppenheimer said yesterday that Ya’alon’s clarifications were “lip service only.”

IOA Editor: Indeed. Unlike some other Israeli leaders, General Ya’alon is highly educated, analytical, and measured. He is the opposite of a “hot-headed Israeli” who lets his tongue run ahead of himself. His violent language reflects cold and calculated thinking. He also must know that past comments from fellow members of the Israeli extreme-right were followed by violence, including the assassination of PM Rabin. If there was a mistake here, it was in considering that his comments, made in a closed meeting, would be leaked. That he may regret. Or not.

Poll: Only 12% of Israelis believe Obama supports Israel

20 August 2009

The poll also found that 64 per cent of Palestinians still feel Obama’s policy is more supportive of Israel, while 40 per cent of Israelis think it is more support of the Palestinians.

Neve Gordon: Boycott Israel

20 August 2009

I am convinced that outside pressure is the only answer. Over the last three decades, Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have dramatically increased their numbers. The myth of the united Jerusalem has led to the creation of an apartheid city where Palestinians aren’t citizens and lack basic services. The Israeli peace camp has gradually dwindled so that today it is almost nonexistent, and Israeli politics are moving more and more to the extreme right.

Ya’alon: I’m not afraid of the Americans

19 August 2009

Ya’alon told the crowd: “I am not afraid of the Americans” adding, “there are moments where we must say ‘we’ve had it up to here’”.

Ya’alon also referred to the Israeli anti-settlement organization Peace Now and the so-called Israeli “elites” as “viruses… causing grave damage to the state of Israel.”