[I]nside the occupied Palestinian territories [there] is a shadow state where the only real law is the law of the gun, where land is being taken away from its rightful owners every day, and where the very few who stand up to protest, without violence, like Ezra Nawi, are sent to prison. Bad times generally bring out the worst in most of us.
settlements
An important assessment of the realities of the West Bank settlement program, and why the Israeli Occupation is here to stay – unless Israel is forced otherwise.
Nearly six of every 10 Israelis think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resist U.S. demands to completely freeze construction in Jewish West Bank settlements, according to a new poll released Friday. The poll by the Maagar Mohot Polling Institute comes just ahead of Netanyahu’s major policy speech on Sunday that is expected to address a […]
Officials in Jerusalem told Israel Radio on Saturday that there is no alternative but to ultimately agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state… [T]he quicker Israel adopts the road map for peace as the preferred diplomatic initiative, the more likely it will ward off American pressure to concede to a Palestinian state within the framework of an alternative plan that is less agreeable to Israel.
An important report on how settleres, settlement organizations, and the Israeli government, working in close cooperation, methodically rob Palestinian farmers of their lands and transfer them to Jewish settlers. Incidentally, similar methods were used by the Israeli government in the early 1950s to transfer lands of Palestinian citizens of Israel to Jewish hands.
“I want to make it clear that the current Israeli government will not accept in any way the freezing of legal settlement activity in Judea and Samaria [West Bank],” Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz told Army Radio.
As Akiva Eldar reports,figures for 2006-07 reveal that the housing shortage in settlements stems largely from “migration” from Israel proper to communities beyond the Green Line, as well as the addition of new immigrants from abroad.
[T]he area known as E1, linking the settlement to East Jerusalem… is the only area that [candidate] Netanyahu explicitly committed to developing… His political rival… Ehud Barak also publicly expressed support for building there… All of these developments share a single common denominator – by taking “a dunam here and a dunam there,” they are tightening Israel’s grip on the land… These steps seriously diminish the already narrow possibility of reaching a final-status agreement with the Palestinians. Over the past decade Palestinian officials have hinted that they could come to terms with Ma’aleh Adumim, but that willingness is unlikely to extend to the giant “bubble” developing around the settlement.
IOA Editor: Both Likud and Labor candidates – now government partners – share the vision, plans, and actions designed to sever the West Bank in order to make a future independent Palestinian state impossible. And, “US protest,” and “Obama’s determined veto,” recently mentioned frequently in connection with Israeli settlement expansion are, so far, entirely theoretical: indeed, mere speculations.
“We, Israeli organizations, comprised of Jewish and Palestinian women and men and dedicated to building a just peace and to promoting human rights and equal civil rights in Israel/Palestine, call upon the Norwegian people to join us in our efforts and to stop investing in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory…” [Signed by 20 Israeli/Palestinian organizations]
For the last ten days or so, settlers from Bat ‘Ayin in the so-called Etzion Bloc have been paying violent daily visits to their Palestinian neighbors in Um Safa… They’ve already killed four innocents, and another eleven or twelve have been wounded by gunfire… the soldiers have apparently been making common cause with these settlers, opening fire readily at the villagers.
A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll finds that three-quarters of Americans think that Israel should not build settlements in the Palestinian territories. This is up 23 points from when this question was last asked in 2002.
A right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu is widely seen as spelling the end of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Given the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Netanyahu has promised to accelerate, no other outcome seems conceivable.
Despite the state’s formal commitment not to expand West Bank settlements, a government agency has been promoting plans over the past two years to construct thousands of housing units east of the Green Line, Haaretz has learned.
Just four years ago, the defense establishment decided to carry out a seemingly elementary task: establish a comprehensive database on the settlements…
