The Israeli occupation is the longest military occupation of modern times. The subjects of the occupation in its two forms – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – live under a brutal regime that few other occupations allowed themselves, without any law… The prolonged occupation, a disaster for us and for the Palestinians – [is made possible] because Israel enjoys the support of the West.
permanent occupation
Esther Zandberg: “Although it is termed a preservation effort, it is in effect, paradoxically, an erasure of all memory of the original village.”
Eitan Bronstein: “The message is that we are finishing what we started in 1948.”
The artificial division between Areas A, B and C was supposed to be erased from the map, and dropped from the discourse, in 1999. Instead, Israel has sanctified and perpetuated it. The largest share – 60 percent – is designated Area C, meaning it is under full Israeli security and civil control. It is self-evident why Israel perpetuates the Area C classification. After all, it gives Israel a free hand to continue emptying that part of the West Bank of Palestinians and encourage more Jews to violate international law and settle there.
According to the [Israeli] court decision, the custodian of abandoned property in the West Bank area allocated the land on which the farm stands to the World Zionist Organization, which granted a permit for use of the land to Sussia, a cooperative agricultural association [a group of Jewish settlers].
The kit called ‘How do you say Nakba in Hebrew?’ did not receive Israel’s Education Ministry’s approval and most of the teachers using it conceal their source.
The right wing considers recognition of the reality created in 1949 to be the chief enemy of Zionism. The dynamic of a conquering nationalism can never recognize that any situation created at any given time is final.
IOA Editor: Written from an Israeli-centered perspective, Sternhell focuses on the extreme “right” Zionism (Netanyahu, Yaalon, et al), correctly pointing out its dangerous and unstoppable nature. Unfortunately, he lets “mainstream” Zionism (not the subject of this article) go scot-free. In fact, much of what he says about “right wing” Zionism applies equally to “mainstream” Zionism. Perhaps the grass is greener when one conjures up the dream-images of what Zionism-Lite could/should have been. However, for the Palestinians, the harsh reality of dispossession and ethnic-cleansing of the past 100+ years was managed and carried out mostly by “mainstream” Zionism: some 77 years (about 40 years pre-statehood, followed by 37 of the past 63 years of Israeli statehood, including the 1967 war and subsequent occupation and settlement). Therefore, this article is important for the understanding of Zionism, both “right” and “mainstream,” not for the implied, and very limited, differences between them.
Muna and Muhammed are 12-year-old twins living in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. Settlers have taken over the front of their home, but the family continue to live in the rest of the house.
Israel exploits the natural resources in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea more than in the rest of the West Bank and prevents Palestinians from using most of the area’s land and water resources.
Last Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of Israeli youth marched along the Green Line to celebrate Jerusalem Day, an annual commemoration of the Israeli occupation of the city in the 1967 war. The organization of the march was done under a Zionist banner. Three days later, thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv in support of the Two State Solution. While many organizations participated, the overall slogan was “Netanyahu says no, Israel says yes to a Palestinian state”.
RELATED Jerusalem Day 2011 by Just Jerusalem
Why did the Arabs of Haifa flee in 1948? Didn’t Haifa’s Jewish mayor ask them to stay? Maybe because Haganah (the primary pre-state Jewish military organization in Palestine) mortar rounds shot at the midst of the civilian crowds in the market, spoke another language. Here is a story that Israeli historians do not like to tell. (HEBREW)
In the 1940s, with the understanding that a war is on its way, the Haganah (the primary pre-state Jewish military organization in Palestine) collected detailed intelligence on hundreds of Palestinian villages. Only a few dozen files survived in the archives, and in them images that teach a great deal about the way in which the Palestinian population at the time was viewed by the Jewish population. (HEBREW)
A handful of Israelis marked Jordanian Independence Day on Tuesday by trying to present the Jordanian Embassy in Ramat Gan with a petition to make the country the official homeland of the Palestinian people.
IOA Editor: Arye Eldad is one of Israel’s most overtly-racist MPs. Following the footsteps of his father, Israel Eldad, leader of the Stern Gang — the organization responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre. As this short news story makes clear, ethnic cleansing is deeply rooted in the Eldad family.
An interview with Alternate Focus: an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, covering several of the most central issues.
This latest of Obama’s statements may be the closest the president has come to legitimising illegal Israeli settlements… Obama’s idea of Palestinian self-determination is for Palestinians to accept whatever Israel decides.
The Palestinians and the international community, including the United States, have long objected to the E-1 plan on the grounds that it would cut the West Bank in two and sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the area.
In retrospect, the [Nakba] village files… sometimes constituted the last testimonies of the Arab villages, just before they were emptied of their inhabitants. They are the last remaining vestiges of the villages before they were destroyed or settled by Jewish immigrants who streamed into the country in its first years; villages which were erased from the Israeli map because of their Arab identity.
IOA Editor: Newly revealed documents on the Nakba, directly from the files of its perpetrators. This Israel-centric exposure of Israeli war crimes might, over time, help change Israelis’ view of history, or so one hopes.
As the state which claims to be the heir of the Holocaust martyrs, Israel crowns itself as the winner in the global, historical competition of victimhood. Yet it manufactures methods of oppression and dispossession of the individual and the collective, methods which turn the Nakba into a continuing, 63-year process.
It is necessary to know that there were 418 villages here that were wiped off the face of the earth, and it should be remembered that there were more than 600,000 natives of this land who fled or were expelled not to return to their homes, and that to this day most of them … and their offspring live in terrible conditions, carrying keys to their lost homes… We must know that under nearly every patch of Jewish National Fund forest rest the ruins that Israel was keen to erase, to ensure that they not serve as evidence of a different heritage. We can know that under our flourishing Canada Park hide the ruins of three villages which Israel razed after the Six Day War, putting its residents on a bus and expelling them.
The “peace negotiations” were a deceptive farce whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU. Far from enabling a negotiated and fair end to the conflict, the pursuit of the Oslo process deepened Israeli segregationist policies and justified the tightening of the security control imposed on the Palestinian population, as well as its geographical fragmentation. Far from preserving the land on which to build a state, it has tolerated the intensification of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory.
The sweeping denial of residency status from tens of thousands of Palestinians and deporting them from their homeland in this way cannot be anything but an illegitimate demographic policy and a grave violation of international law. It’s a policy whose sole purpose is to thin out the Palestinian population in the territories.
