Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
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).
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.”
[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.”
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.”
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.
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.
The Israeli parliament passed on first reading… a bill that would grant tax breaks to residents of the Golan Heights, a move likely to anger Syria from which Israel seized the territory. The bill, which needs to be approved at three further readings before becoming law, was supported by 67 of the 120 members of parliament.
IOA Editor: As most Israelis must know by now, Syria’s president Assad is ready to make peace with Israel based on the return of the Golan Heights to Syria. Now the Knesset has shown him that it is not threatened by his peace overtures, and that it would much rather have a piece of Syria than peace with Syria.
UPDATE: Syrian official: Golan benefits proves Israel doesn’t want peace
It is a matter of regional planning policy that expropriates vacant lands and restricts Palestinian development, and of the denial of the indigenous people’s natural rights: the right of inheritance and cultivation, the right to freedom of movement, the right to work, the right to family life, and the right to housing and education by choice. This… sums up the history of the occupation from 1967 to today. It is the government’s guiding policy in East Jerusalem and lies at the foundation of the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Jerusalem’s mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian neighbourhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.
Late last night Occupation forces raided the Stop the Wall offices in Ramallah. Some 10 military jeeps, hummers and an armoured bus surrounded the building as soldiers searched rooms, turning the office upside down and confiscating computer hard disks, laptops, and video cameras along with paper documents, CDs, and video cassettes.
Every year since March 2002, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization have reiterated their support for the Arab peace initiative. Hopefully they will do so again next month at the Arab League summit in Tripoli. The initiative offers Israel normalization with all Arab League members in return for a withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967.
Jonathan Cook: [Israel's] finance ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for “infrastructure programmes”. [The] co-author of the report said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements… In one especially cynical use of the funds, the report notes, the money was spent on portable stoves for soldiers involved in Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza last year.
In a rare speech to an Israeli audience, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Tuesday that Israel must show the Palestinians that it is beginning to roll back the occupation, and that the way to do that is primarily by stopping both settlement construction and IDF incursions into Palestinian areas.
IOA Editor: So, “it’s the Occupation, stupid,” eh? Some of us have been saying it for over four decades.
Also The Washington Post: Palestinian premier gives a key address…
But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders… and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results.
Social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, along with a slew of blogs, are playing an increasing role in the growing participation of young Israelis in protest rallies in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Israel, via the Interior Ministry, continues to spit in the face of friendly countries, and those countries continue to admire the falling raindrops. The ministry’s most recent gob of spit was the cancellation of the work visas that citizens of those countries who are employed by international NGOs have been getting for years.
Two months after the government decision on November 26 to freeze construction in Jewish settlements for 10 months, you’d have to be blind, an idiot, or a member of the Yesha Council of settlements to use the term “freeze” to describe the real estate situation in Judea and Samaria.
The attempt to change the geography and demography of Jerusalem has been a relentless Israeli project since the occupation of the city in 1967 and its subsequent de jure annexation. While this “legal” annexation has been rejected by the international community as a violation of international law, action has been limited to verbal protests and condemnation.
“The prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’” applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew,” write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.”
Amira Hass: Under the cover of the incessant noise from the roads in the Hebron district, an anonymous Arab is perpetrating a serious crime: With a small hammer, he is digging a cistern so he can collect rainwater on his rocky land.
[I]n 1948, the Israelis wanted to create a state without Palestinians, and they almost succeeded in driving them out. In 1967, their victory reunited the refugees with those who had remained in Israel. We were scattered, they brought us back together. The Israelis are sowing their own failure by their success. The colonization of Jerusalem and the West Bank, which makes impossible a two-state solution, will force Israel to live with a sizable Arab population and to reconsider its democratic system.
IOA Editor: Sari Nusseibeh has long advocated the Two-State solution. After decades of relentless Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank, he now sees it as a near-impossibility.
The discovery was made hours after Israel Defense Forces soldiers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Israeli settlers were seen entering the cemetery… Israelis are forbidden from entering Awarta, although the IDF occasionally organizes group trips for which it provides security.
MK Ahmad Tibi: “Barak continues to permit the infestation of settlements and surrender to Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu. Barak’s decision will only spur the academic boycott of Israel in the world. The Labor Party proves once again that that it is a barrier to reconciliation between the two nations.”
Sheikh Tamimi further warned that houses in the surround neighborhood are at risk resulting from the Israeli Antiquities Authority working a night and removing dozens of bags with stones from the excavation site south of the mosque.
More on the Jerusalem excavations: Chief Jerusalem digger admits excavation endangers Arab homes
Persistent blockades, destruction of [olive] trees, closure of factories and other repressive and punitive measures by Israel in the occupied territories have massacred the Palestinian economy, widened unemployment and poverty, and killed hopes of the young generation of any recovery under Israel.
“The Palestinians don’t have a real organization fighting for their rights and they can’t expect others to fight for them… No revolution in history was ever led by a government or a bureaucracy. We’ve became an agency of Israel and of the United States. You can’t lead a revolution and fly to America. Our leaders are too fluid in their views. A revolution requires toughness, not flexibility. In music, you can be flexible, but not when you’re leading a revolution.”
Leftist activists have held weekly demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah for the past three months, in protest of the eviction of Palestinians from their homes and their replacement with Jewish families.
The increasing isolation of Gaza — and the ratcheting up of pressure — is designed to send a message to Gaza: that Hamas has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from resisting Israel’s occupation, and that ordinary Gazans should turn their back on the Islamic movement.
Anyone who carefully reads the debates about the military government in Arab-populated areas in the 1950s and ’60s will see that… security arguments are linked to preventing Arab farmers from entering the land in question… Whatever the nature of the solution, from the Israeli point of view it always entails the removal of Arabs from areas where Jews live.
UPDATE: Jared Malsin, chief editor, English Desk, at Ma’an News Agency, and a US citizen, was detained upon arriving at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. He was deported week later, as was his girl-friend, according to The Guardian: Israel deports US journalist.
IOA Editor: Israel, for “security reasons,” cannot accept Palestinian reporting. The US, for reasons it doesn’t care to explain, “does not recognize Ma’an as a news organization.” It seems that both the “world’s leading democracy” and the “only democracy in the Middle East” cannot independent reporting. Israel, following Soviet/Chilean/Iranian (pick your favorite dictatorship) tradition, decided to ban the journalist. And his girl-friend.
UPDATE: Guardian reports Israel deports US journalist.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Tuesday that Israel would never cede control of united Jerusalem nor retreat to the 1967 borders, according to a statement.
A selection of video clips: 2009 – Occupation news, history, and more.
Like many of the names that Israel assigned to the new streets in the eastern part of [Jerusalem], the militaristic names that the rapid-transit stops are supposed to bear reflect the situation accurately: occupation.
IOA Editor: As Segev points out, the renaming of streets and transit stops reflects the Occupation. But he leaves a great deal out: The Renaming of Palestine is an important last part of a process, specifically designed to erase the past, thus enabling the re-Making of History as the victor would like future generations to know it. The current story is only the latest example. After 1948, nearly 500 Palestinian villages were removed: not only were they physically obliterated by the then-young State of Israel, but their names were either erased (from all maps and road signs) or “Hebraized” – turned into Hebrew. This is an important, and sinister, element in the historical process generally known as Ethnic Cleansing. For Israel it means This land is ours, and ours alone.
This highway has told the whole story. They pave a road, expropriate Palestinian land and the High Court of Justice approves the expropriation, in its words, “provided that it is done for the sake of the local population.” Afterwards they prevent the “local population” from using the road, and finally they build a wall with drawings of creeks and meadows so we don’t see and don’t know that we are driving on an apartheid road, that we are traveling on the axis of evil.
These days, it’s tough to find a used car with a bumper sticker that reads “Peace is better than a Greater Israel.” Nowadays, everyone seems to favor the latest formula: two states for two peoples.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
