Thank you for this opinion piece. Would you like to comment on the application of your genocide rubric to the experiences of Jewish Israelis vis-a-vis Hamas and Islamic Jihad?
On October 24 of this year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which, according to its website, “…was founded in 1913 ‘to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all’,” printed an overview of what it called ‘Anti-Israel Activity on Campus After Operation Protective Edge: A Preview of the 2014-2015 Academic Year’. This article provides information about student groups that were appalled at Israeli cruelty during that country’s so-called ‘Operation Protective Edge’, the ridiculous name of the most recent invasion and carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip. It discusses the increase in student activity opposing Israeli policies, and projects that it will probably only continue to grow.
It is certainly true that opposition to Israel’s decades-long, brutal occupation of Palestine is growing.But the ADL made some statements in the article that belie belief. A look at one sentence suffices: “Student groups that constitute today’s anti-Israel movement hurl a multitude of hateful accusations against Israel, falsely claiming that Israel is guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes in an effort to demonize Israel.”
(...)
‘Hurl a multitude of hateful accusations against Israel’. It would not be difficult to diffuse these ‘hateful’ accusations. If Israel is indeed innocent of these charges, all it would need to have done would be to have cooperated with any of the international investigations of the last few years, or that are currently ongoing, into its practices. If Israel has nothing to hide, why not show the facts to the world? On the other hand, if the facts are already there for all the world to see, why not try calling them ‘hateful accusations’ and see if that accomplishes anything?
“Falsely claiming that Israel is guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes”. Are these false claims? A quick Internet search shows this definition for apartheid: ‘any system or practice that separates people according to race, caste, etc.’. Palestinians in the West Bank cannot drive on the same roads that Israeli’s use. They are hindered in their daily activities by countless checkpoints that Israelis establish and man arbitrarily. A Palestinian arrested in the West Bank may spend months incarcerated without charge, and without access to legal representation. An Israeli arrested in the West Bank is either charged or released within hours, and has access to legal representation immediately. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank need to ask permission from Israel to farm their own lands, and to harvest their own crops. No such restrictions or requirements are placed on Israelis.
Is Israel guilty of ethnic cleansing? Going to the same Internet source, this is how ‘ethnic cleansing’ is defined: “The elimination of an unwanted ethnic group or groups from a society, as by genocide or forced migration.” Israel was established in 1948 only after the forced removal (‘migration’) of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes. In the decades since that time, Palestinian homes have been, and continue to be, routinely demolished to make room for illegal Israeli settlements, in which only Israelis can live.
Now let us look at the charge of genocide. Returning again to the same dictionary site, genocide is defined thusly: “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political or cultural group.” When three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes in 1947 and 1948, at least 10,000 of them were killed. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were completely destroyed, leaving no trace of mosques, museums, schools, cemeteries or other signs of Palestinian culture. Since then, countless mosques, schools and other vital structures of Palestinian culture have been obliterated by Israel, in order to make room for more, Israeli-only, illegal settlements. Ironically, in June of 2011, Israel bulldozed the ancient Muslim cemetery, Ma’man Allah, in order to build a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on the site.
During Israel’s recent horrific bombing of the Gaza Strip, many more ancient mosques were destroyed, further decimating Palestinian culture.
These student groups accuse Israel of ‘a number of other war crimes’, says the ADL article. According to International Law, an occupying force (Israel) cannot move permanent settlers into the occupied territory. Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu has stated flatly that he has no intention of giving up the West Bank, where over 500,000 settlers live illegally. It is also in violation of international law to remove residents from their property, something Israel does routinely, and has done for decades, causing the displacement of hundreds of
It’s not just the thousands of people—Palestinians—that the state of Israel has killed over the years in its regular assaults, dwarfing the handful killed by Hamas’s rockets. Israel has, for decades, been carrying out what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes as an “incremental genocide,” one that has since 1948 seen Palestinians steadily removed from their land, their homes destroyed, and their families forced into fenced-in refugee camps, for no reason other than that Palestinians were born to the wrong mothers.
“It's been going on for a long time, the killings, the incredibly awful conditions of life, the expulsions that have gone on [since 1947], when 700 or more villages in Palestine were destroyed, and in the expulsions that continued from that time until today,” said Michael Ratner, president of the left-of-ACLU Center for Constitutional Rights, in an interview with the Real News. “It's correct and important to label it for what it is.” And that label, he said, is “genocide.”
Bay Area activists launched a massive campaign to block Israeli shipping vessels in August. (Daniel Arauz / Flickr)
On 28 October, San Francisco Bay Area activists organizing to block the unloading of Israeli shipping vessels declared their most significant victory yet: Israel’s Zim Integrated Shipping Services appears to have cancelled all future shipments to the Oakland Port.
This past summer, at the peak of Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza, the Bay Area’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) mobilized the community in response to the military assault. Deciding to focus on a tangible, highly-visible and big-money target, the group set its sights on Israel’s Zim lines, determined to block the company every time it tried to dock a ship at the busy Port of Oakland.
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Fifteen Palestinian prisoners being held in solitary confinement reached their third month there, prisoners said on Saturday.
The fifteen prisoners are being held in solitary confinement after they were moved from the Jalbou and Shatta prisons on June 12 as punishment for "attempts to dig tunnels," prisoners told the a lawyer from the Palestinian Prisoner's Society.
Since then, the prisoners have been kept in solitary confinement at the Gilboa, HaSharon, Ayalon, and Nafha prisons.
Prisoners at Nafha prison, meanwhile, said that raids into prisoners' cells at the facility have been increasing.
Prisoners at Nafha said that "repression units" raided a room overnight, using weapons to assault prisoners and handcuff them with plastic cuffs.
Around 5,500 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli prisons, including hundreds without charge or trial.
The segregation of buses is just one small part of an Israeli system which, at its core, designates different sets of rights and privileges based on religion and ethnicity. This latest move is yet another indication of escalating Israeli discrimination and aggression that is isolating Israel from global and increasingly US support. Recent announcements of aggressive settlement construction, the closure of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound, and the heavy-handed police operation known as Guardian of the Wall ongoing in East Jerusalem have heightened tensions between the U.S. and Israel. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki responded said these actions "are not conducive to peace..."
The bus segregation proposal would require Palestinian workers living in the West Bank to return home through the same checkpoint they entered, effectively banning them from using the buses used by Israeli settlers.
JVP has long spoken out against segregation policies in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and participated in a solidarity with Palestinian Freedom Riders campaign in 2011. JVP strongly condemns this recent announcement as yet another iteration of an ongoing pattern of discrimination and disenfranchisement.
Published Saturday 01/11/2014 (updated) 02/11/2014 11:05
(MaanImages)
JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday attempted to detain two Palestinian children, a two-year-old and a nine-year old, on suspicion of throwing rocks.
Israeli soldiers were conducting a raid on the home of the Jaber family in the Silwan neighborhood in order to search for an individual suspected of throwing rocks at them from the roof, the family told Ma'an.
When the soldiers ascended to the roof to detain the alleged culprit, however, they found a two-year-old named Mimati Asaad Jaber who was playing with his mother. While they were playing, apparently, a rock had fallen into the street below.
The boy's grandfather, who was in the house during the raid, said that the boy was only playing and that he did not know there were soldiers in the street below the building when he tossed the stone.
Upon seeing the two-year-old with his mother, however, the Israeli soldiers shifted their attention to a nine-year-old member of the family nearby.
Members of the Jaber family told Ma'an that once Israeli soldiers found out the nine-year-old boy's name -- Izz al-Din al-Qassam, also the name of a famous Palestinian national hero and used by Hamas as the name for its military brigades -- they began questioning him.
The Israeli soldiers attempted to detain the nine-year-old boy based on the fact that he had "colored rocks" in his pockets, presumably to throw at soldiers, but when they searched the child they found that the "rocks" were in fact candy.
A new draft law being considered by Israeli lawmakers would lead to charges of up to 20 years, even if it could not be proven that rock-throwers intended to cause damage.
A 2011 report by Israeli rights group B'tselem, meanwhile, noted that around 100 percent of all Palestinian children accused of rock-throwing are convicted, largely because minors are kept in prison for the duration of any trial so the pressure to plea bargain is high.
Military Court Watch estimated that at the beginning of October more than 180 Palestinian children and youths were being held in Israeli prisons, down from 250 in June.
According to a 2013 report by the UN's Children's Fund, Israel is the only country in the world where children are systematically tried in military courts and subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment."
Over the past decade, Israeli forces have arrested, interrogated, and prosecuted around 7,000 children between 12 and 17, mostly boys, at a rate of "an average of two children each day," UNICEF said.
In the wake of the 50-day Israeli assault that devastated the Gaza Strip, reconstruction must not be the only priority, according to the nonprofit organization Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights. All perpetrators of war crimes must be held to account, and Euro-Mid has taken the initial step by completing the first comprehensive investigation into Israeli actions during “Operation Protective Edge.”
“If we want young Palestinians to turn away from violent resistance in the future, they must believe that international law will be respected and enforced,” said Ihsan Adel, legal officer for Euro-Mid, a nongovernmental human rights watchdog focusing on the Middle East-North Africa region. “Our investigation documented both indiscriminate attacks on civilians by Israeli forces and their use of captured Palestinians as human shields. When the UN Human Rights Council arrives in the coming days to conducts its own investigation, our reports will already have laid the groundwork. Now it is up to the international community to demonstrate to the youth of today that the rule of law applies to everyone.”
The initial fieldwork for the Euro-Mid investigation began on July 10, the second day of the massive Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout the course of the conflict, 24 Gaza-based researchers, many with legal backgrounds, visited every hot spot that erupted, interviewing more than 432 individuals involved in or eyewitnesses to144 instances in which more than two Palestinians were killed at one time.
The Euro-Mid investigation is summarized in two reports: “Indiscriminate Attacks and Deliberate Killing: Israel Takes Revenge on Gaza by Killing Civilians,” and “Israeli Matrix of Control: Use of Palestinians as Human Shields.”
Indiscriminate Attacks
Between 8 July and 26 August, Israeli forces conducted an estimated 60,664 raids into the Gaza Strip. This report documents that in many cases, the attacks were indiscriminate. Not only did Israeli forces fail to take sufficient measures to protect noncombatants, including children and the disabled, but in a number of instances they deliberately targeted locations with concentrations of civilians. Reports from physicians on the ground strongly suggest that Israel deployed “unconventional weapons” (nail bombs and DIME – “dense inert metal explosive” – munitions), which are designed to cause maximum damage and thus are not considered permissible in densely populated areas – either legally or morally.
Likewise, the investigation showed that the so-called “warnings” issued by the government of Israel, typically in the form of telephone calls or “roof knocks,” were insufficient to offer protection.
Use of Palestinians as Human Shields
Euro-Mid documented use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Israeli military forces in at least six cases in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. These civilians were held against their will for hours or days to protect Israeli soldiers from fire, and in the meantime were subjected to inhumane and abusive treatment such as beating, humiliation and exposure to the hot sun while naked for long periods of time.
In contrast, the Euro-Mid team did not find any evidence of Palestinians who were forced to stay in their homes or to use their bodies for the protection of Palestinian resistance factions, as charged by the Israeli government.
Call to action
The indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants, deployment of unconventional weapons and the use of Palestinians as human shields are violations of international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights calls on the Fact Finding Committee on the Gaza Conflict recently established by the UN Human Rights Council, soon to arrive in Gaza, to make every effort to focus international attention and pressure on all parties found to be guilty of these crimes. Likewise, the UN Security Council and General Assembly must back these efforts with their own positions of authority and visibility
“The reconstruction of Gaza is needed for Palestinians to be able to live,” said Ramy Abdu, PhD, Euro-Mid chairman. “However, without accountability for crimes and protection of human rights, it will be a life without dignity or hope.”
A video produced by the Euro-Mid Observer, presents documented cases of Palestinian civilians used as human shields by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.
Thank you for a news piece based entirely on hearsay, and also for a report by an organization devoted to upholding human rights in the Middle East (a region replete with human rights violations), which boasts a lineup publications which exclusively to criticize Israeli policies. Because every other Middle Eastern regime is, of course, faultless.
Methods range between severe beatings, putting prisoners under cold water followed by hot water, cuffing or restraining them with their arms behind them and then tying them to a door or window for long periods of time, often lasting hours
Hundreds of torture methods used against Palestinian prisoners during interrogations conducted in Israeli prisoners have been observed by human rights organisations and prisoners' rights associations.
A report by the United Nations lists around 200 methods of torture. The Israeli rights group B'Tselem listed around 105 torture methods. Regardless of the number, all these reports indicate a grave level of violations perpetrated against Palestinians following their arrest.
Fouad Khuffash, director of the Ahrar Centre for Prisoners' Studies and Human Rights, suggests that torture can be divided into two categories; physical and psychological. Some believe that psychological torture is less harmful than physical torture, but the mental scars left by both can leave prisoners traumatised long after their release.
Khuffash adds: "Torture in Israeli prisons is systematic and starts from the moment a prisoner is arrested, not from the moment they begin interrogation. This is a premeditated and staged scenario that changes according to the case of the detainee and the nature of their file. Investigators alternate and play various roles assigned in advance to each investigator."
Fahd Abu Al-Hajj, director of the Abu Jihad Centre for Prisoner Affairs at the University of Jerusalem, noted that there are 73 methods of interrogation considered to be the "most popular" in Israeli jails. These methods demonstrate the barbarism of the occupation and its lack of respect for basic standards of human rights, he stated.
He added: "Nothing evidences this more than the repeated death of prisoners under interrogation, the most recent of which was the death of the prisoner Raed Al-Jabari."
Al-Hajj believes that the use of torture is systematic, adopted by the Israeli intelligence services and that no prisoner detained in any Israeli prison is spared.
He also explained that these methods range between severe beatings, putting prisoners under cold water followed by hot water, cuffing or restraining them with their arms behind them and then tying them to a door or window for long periods of time, often lasting hours. Prisoners are also made to sit on chairs and beaten with sticks until they lose consciousness. These beatings may target sensitive areas of their bodies which have the potential to leave long-term negative effects, sometimes leading to chronic diseases.
Forms of torture
Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem acknowledged in its report that 105 torture methods are used against Palestinian detainees which are considered serious violations of human rights. A UN human rights committee described the torture in Israeli prisons as "crossing the line", noting that Israel's brutal methods of torture included breaking backs, pulling fingers apart and twisting testicles.
Israeli intelligence bases their torture of detainees on the so-called secret guidelines that were approved in 1987, after the outbreak of the first Intifada. These guidelines allow them to apply "moderate" physical and psychological pressure on prisoners. This gives a legal cover to the torture practiced by Israeli intelligence agents.
In the last 10 years, interrogators have decreased their use of torture, moving away from physical torture and instead used harsh psychological methods that can leave enduring scars, while continuing to use direct physical torture of varying degrees.
Mohammed Kilani, who has experienced many interrogations, noted that his solitary confinement which exceeded two months during which he was forced to remain chained to a chair, was the harshest method of torture he has suffered.
He also added that throughout the entire prison system across the globe, there exists no torture method that has not been thought of or used by the Israeli authorities at some point.
According to statistics, around 72 prisoners were killed as a result of torture in Israeli prisons since 1967, out of a total number of over 200 prisoners who died behind bars.
The first prisoner to die as a result of being tortured was Yousef Al-Jabali who died on January 4 1968 in a Nablus prison. Many prisoners have since followed him, such as Qassem Abu Akar, Ibrahim Al-Rai, Abdul Samad Harizat, Attia Za'anin, Mustafa Akkawi, and others, including the most recent, Raed Al-Jabari.
tammuz, if you spent less time posting something every 3 minutes trying to convince/inform (?) people on an architecture forum (I'm actually really not sure what your goal is), maybe you could actually do something tangible. seems like a strange outlet.
The heroes, or rather the villains, of this story are therefore the Israelis who worked out the fine details of the system to begin with, those who upheld it in all those years and those who perfected its operation on the ground: namely its power to abuse, humiliate and destroy. They were and are servants of the bureaucracy of evil. They come quite innocent into the system but only the very few among them do not succumb to its raison d’être and modus operandi. As wardens of this largest prison of earth, they are constant abusers, dehumanizes and destroyers of Palestinian rights and lives. The moment the last of them would be discharged from this service, we will know the mega prison of Palestine was abolished forever.
Seen from this perspective, the so called peace process begun in the 1970s and culminating in the 1993 Oslo accord, is a false paradigm which became a powerful discourse, in as similar way that the discourse of Orientalism became a potent and hegemonic prism through which Middle-Eastern realities were viewed in the past of present. As Edward Said has put it in the opening pages of his seminal work – the discourse in this instance is a presentation, or rather mis-presen-tation that has behind it institutions, political and economic power, academics and media and anoiled PR mechanism.24
The discourse of peace based on two-state solution was powerful enough to induce quite a few Palestinians to adopt it. Its basic assumptions seen from this historical perspective are not only wrong, but frame together the reality in a way that enabled Israel as a state to deepen its occupation and oppression of Palestine while the world at large was led to believe that a genuine effort was made to solve the problem.
The peace process was based on the assumption that everything visible was divisible: land, sources, blame and history. This business-like approach offered at best 20% of Palestine to the Palestinians (and even that was never on the table); punished them with a lesser offer when they refused the first offer; never consulted them of the future solution and all in all was based on a wish to reconcile between Israeli real intention of having as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible on the one hand, and the wish of the Western world to be assured that a virtual and simulated process was going on which absolved the international community from addressing Israel’s impunity
.It is time to adopt a new dictionary that views Israel as a settler colonialist state and the Pales-tinians as leading an anti-colonialist struggle. Decolonization is more relevant that peace process for the torn land of Palestine and Israel. Only a more accurate framing can help bring reconciliation for the benefit of Jews and Arabs alike.
Palestinians face jail terms of up to 20 years for throwing stones - whilst an Israeli soldier was sentenced to 45 DAYS for killing a woman and her daughter in Gaza who were waving a white flag.
4th November 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Khirbet Al-Tawil, Occupied Palestine
Early on Monday morning, while the inhabitants of the village of Khirbet Al-Tawil, near Aqraba (Nablus), were sleeping, eight military vehicles, and 30-40 Israeli soldiers entered the village.
Within two hours the military had demolished three houses, and several water pipes and roads.
The Israeli military- taken early Monday morning by a local resident
The water pipes destroyed were new and scheduled to be turned on Monday. The Aqraba community had funded these water pipes as part of the municipal water system.
Of their destruction, Sami Dariyah, stated: “They are trying to prevent people from living in this area. This is their clear policy.”
Due to the continuing demolishment of houses, electricity lines, water lines and other living necessities, the farmers have fled to the city of Aqraba and departed their lands in Khirbet Al-Tawil. Sami Direyah grew up near Khirbet Al-Tawil and remembers the many houses and shops that used to be there.
Khirbet Al-Tawil is part of Area C (under full Israeli military civil and security control), which means the army can choose which buildings and activities are ‘allowed’. Sami wonders how their existing community, their farms and their 100-year-old houses, can suddenly become illegal.
Even though the three demolished houses were nearly 100 years old, dating back to the British occupation, they were all still active homes for families like the Mahers. The residents of the houses were not given any warning of the military’s planned visit. Sofian Maher, a former resident of one of these homes, spoke to ISM and explained that this is not the first time the military has paid a visit to Khirbet Al-Tawil. In May of this year the village’s Mosque was demolished, together with four houses, four cottages, and two barns. Less than one month ago the power line was cut by the military, leaving the village without electricity.
Sofian Maher explained to ISM that his family tried to rebuild their house after it was demolished in May. While rebuilding, Sofian’s family lived in a donated tent, which the army soon tore down. The family then moved into old stone huts that were built, long ago, to house animals while shepherding. Periodically the military returned and destroyed the newly rebuilt portions of their house.
Sofian Maher and local resident near their destroyed home near Khirbet Al-Tawil
The family is now trying to rebuild their home for the fourth time.
To further make the area uninhabitable, the military has destroyed large sections of the road leading to the remaining farms
Submitted by Rania Khalek on Sun, 11/02/2014 - 12:15
“The message the Israelis are sending is that Jerusalem Palestinians are unwanted here and they are doing everything to reassert their control and squash any form of dissent and resistance to Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem,” Twitter user @BDS4Justice, or Zalameh, told The Electronic Intifada from his home in the eastern occupied Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat on 29 October.
A few hours after our conversation, Israel intensified its crackdown in eastern occupied Jerusalem following an assassination attempt on prominent rightwing extremist Yehuda Glick, a Temple Mount agitator who seeks to replace the al-Aqsa mosque with a Jewish Third Temple, a goal Zalameh says is “mainstream” in the Israeli government.
“[Temple Mount settlers] have enjoyed official support by the Israeli army and they enter Aqsa on a daily basis in large numbers as an act of provocation,” explained Zalameh, adding that the media have largely ignored months of peaceful Palestinian protests against Israeli restrictions and encroachment on al-Aqsa.
Meanwhile, he says the racism in Jerusalem from Israelis continues to escalate. But unlike during the summertime, when mobs of Jewish extremists were hunting and attacking Palestinians in the street, it is the Israeli “security” apparatus that is now doing the harassing on behalf of the Israeli government.
In Zalameh’s own neighborhood, Shuafat — which been under siege by Israeli police since Jewish settlers kidnapped and burned alive his neighbor, sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair, in early June — the police repression is suffocating.
For the last four months Israeli forces have “punish[ed] the population for reacting to [Abu Khudair’s] gruesome murder,” waging “the largest arrest campaign since the second intifada,” said Zalameh, who has been forced to endure an Israeli army post stationed right outside his home.
“Several of my neighbors were taken in the middle of the night, were interrogated, placed in administrative detention, accused falsely of things they didn’t do,” Zalameh said.
More recently, Israel has used fatal Jerusalem car crash at the Jerusalem light rail last week as a pretext to ramp up its campaign of harassment, flooding Palestinian neighborhoods in the occupied city with tear gas, drones, low-flying helicopters and more police. “[Y]ou cannot drive for more than two minutes without seeing an Israeli patrol,” said Zalameh, describing a police state.
This comes on top of the ongoing daily harassment, house demolitions, ethnic cleansing and settlement expansion — official Israeli policies that seek to gradually weaken the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem “to the point that whatever [Israelis] do to al-Aqsa and the Old City will be met with little resistance,” said Zalameh.
Nevertheless Jerusalem Palestinians, particularly the youth, are pushing back with what little they have and in a way that Palestinians in the West Bank cannot due to the repressive Palestinian Authority, which Zalameh described as “a buffer to any form of resistance to Israel.”
“This is really a struggle for survival,” Zalameh proclaimed, adding that while Palestinians have a moral duty to resist, “it’s also a moral duty for those in solidarity with Palestinians abroad to intensify their efforts for boycott, divestment and sanctions to support the struggle here in Jerusalem.”
Listen to the interview using the media player above, or read the transcript below (which has been edited for clarity).
"Israeli occupation forces blocked Palestinian worshipers from having their usual terror attack planning meeting al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jeruslem on Friday."
Orhan, I just want to be clear that the views of subgenius do not reflect the views of most Israelis-- including Israelis who are virulently opposed to Hamas.
Amnesty International has accused the Israeli military of war crimes in Gaza during a war earlier this year against Hamas.
In a new report, Amnesty described eight cases in which residential Palestinian homes were attacked without warning, which resulted in the deaths of 104 people including 62 children
(...)
On July 8, the Israeli military launched “Operation Protective Edge” in response to rocket fire from Hamas. The fighting lasted seven weeks and more than 2,200 people were killed, almost all Gaza civilians.
“Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International. “Even if a fighter had been present in one of these residential homes, it would not absolve Israel of its obligation to take every feasible precaution to protect the lives of civilians caught up in the fighting.”
The report contains numerous accounts from survivors describing frantically digging through the rubble and dust of their destroyed homes in search of the bodies of children and loved ones.
At least 18,000 homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable
Miko Peled on, the planning of the racist colonial Israel by European colonialists , its creation beginning with the massacres committed against Palestinians from the 1940s and their ensuing ethnic cleansing at the hand of Israel, the subsequent formation of the Gaza Strip and the complicity of the US and other allies in perpetuating the oppression and murder of Palestine's native people.
Yolande Knell: "On security camera footage you can see a speeding white van"
A Palestinian driver has rammed a van into several pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing a policeman, hours after clashes at the city's holiest site.
Some 13 people were hurt in the attack on Wednesday. The driver was shot dead.
Hamas militants said they carried out the attack. Israel's prime minister said it was a result of "incitement" by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
A similar car attack by a Palestinian took place in the same area two weeks ago which left a woman and a baby dead.
In a separate development on Wednesday, a Palestinian motorist drove into a group of soldiers in the southern West Bank, injuring three of them before fleeing the scene.
Israeli soldiers later found the car abandoned, according to witnesses at a nearby Palestinian refugee camp.
The driver turned himself in to security forces on Thursday morning, the Israeli army reported.
Meanwhile Jordan has recalled its ambassador to Israel over what it called the "unprecedented Israeli escalation" at holy and sensitive sites in Jerusalem.
As tensions have risen in the city, access to the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif compound has been intermittently restricted, with police at times barring male Muslim worshippers under the age of 50 from entering the site as a security measure.
The compound is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, and to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif. It contains the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.
Jordan also cited continued building of settlements by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, and is to lodge a formal complaint to the UN Security Council in protest, reports say.
The settlements are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
'Prolonged battle'
The man killed in Wednesday's van attack was police Chief Inspector Jidaan Asad, 38, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
Several people were wounded in the incident, which has been described by police as a "hit-and-run terror attack"
After the attack, right-wing Israelis demonstrated at the site where it took place
Earlier on Wednesday, stone-throwing Palestinians took to the streets of mainly Arab East Jerusalem
The driver of the van - named as Ibrahim al-Akari - was from Shuafat refugee camp in the east of the city, police said.
His Facebook page states that he is a member of Hamas, and the Twitter account for the group's armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, described him as a member and a martyr.
Hamas, the militant Islamist group dominant in Gaza, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party, agreed to form a unity government earlier this year - a move denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hamas rejects Israel's right to exist and advocates what it calls "armed resistance" against the Jewish state.
Mr Netanyahu said Wednesday's attack in Jerusalem was the result of incitement emanating from Mr Abbas and "his Hamas partners".
"We are in a prolonged battle in Jerusalem. I have no doubt we will win," Mr Netanyahu said.
"We are deploying all the necessary forces to restore calm and security to all parts of the city."
Hamas praised the attack as a "glorious operation", describing Mr Akari as a "hero" whose actions were a "natural response" to Israel's actions in east Jerusalem.
Two weeks ago a Palestinian from the Abu Tor area drove his car into a tram station, killing a baby and an Ecuadorean woman.
Holy site clashes
Earlier on Wednesday, dozens of masked protesters threw stones and launched fireworks at police near the non-Muslim visitors' entrance to the site, Israeli police said.
The driver was shot dead by police
Hamas declared responsibility for the attack
Tensions have been high in recent weeks
Police said they had managed to disperse the crowd.
The fate of Jerusalem is one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, while Israel regards the whole of Jerusalem as its "eternal and indivisible capital".
Israel occupied East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in 1980 in a move not recognised internationally.
6th November 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil Team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine
On October 30th, a 14-year-old boy was violently arrested by Israeli forces in al-Khalil (Hebron).
Due to a teachers strike in solidarity with underpaid public workers, school in Hebron finished at 10:00 in the morning. Several young boys threw stones towards the military, armed at Salaymeh checkpoint, and the soldiers then fired three canisters of tear gas.
The children threw more stones, and the soldiers fired approximately ten more tear gas grenades in several rounds. This continued until 11:00 when an army vehicle drove up from a side street at a high speed. Three soldiers jumped outside one of the school buildings, before running into a school yard and arrested the 14-year-old boy.
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Seven Palestinians were struck by rubber-coated steel bullets on Thursday afternoon during clashes between Israeli soldiers and students from Birzeit University which took place near Israel's Ofer detention center west of Ramallah.
Sources at Birzeit University told Ma'an that the Student Union suspended classes in the morning and organized a large rally in the center of campus opposing Israeli attempts to divide the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem into Jewish and Muslim sections.
Following the rally, students left campus in buses and headed to Ofer detention center near the town of Beitunia.
Shortly after the rally began, Israeli forces opened fire on the students with tear gas canisters, and the students began hurling stones at the soldiers in response.
The students then ran away and took positions on hilltops around the detention center, before Israeli soldiers started to fire live ammunition and rubber-coated bullets at them, injuring seven.
An Israeli military spokeswoman, however, denied that soldiers had opened fire on the students, insisting that they had merely used unspecified "riot dispersal means."
"There was a riot of about 150 rioters who hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails and burning tires," she said, adding that the incident had lasted several hours.
Tensions have been high across the West Bank and Jerusalem in recent weeks, amid an uptick in Israeli violence against Palestinian citizens spurred on by a series of hit-and-run attacks involving Palestinian drivers.
They have also been stoked by Israeli authorities' decision to hold a vote on splitting the Al-Aqsa compound - Islam's third-holiest site -- despite the existence of a Jewish prayer area at the Western Wall immediately next door.
The tensions follow months of Israeli pressure on the region, including through a massive arrest campaign and a major military offensive that left more than 2,100 dead and provoked outrage across Palestine.
5th November 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Huwwara, Occupied Palestine
On Friday the 31st of October, approximately 300 Israeli soldiers invaded the village of Huwwara, near Nablus. They fired tear gas canisters and stun grenades, seemingly in attempt to clear the streets of people, and declared the village to be a closed military zone. They closed down the mosques, forced the shop owners to close their shops and placed a curfew on the village.
Mutda Tofeq Odeh and Fadi Gasher Dmede, students from the village, were arrested and held for two days. Residents state that the Israeli forces raided several homes in the village and caused damage to various Palestinian homes and properties. The curfew was finally removed on Monday afternoon.
According to Ma’an news, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a settler bus near the village, with no injuries reported, it is not known if that incident preceded this period of collective punishment.
Two days after the curfew ended, ISM activists visited the village and witnessed a large military presence, who were regularly stopping and searching Palestinian cars.
Roughly 3000 people live in Huwwara village. There are five illegal settlements in the area around, and inhabitants often suffer from settler violence, mostly caused by settlers from the illegal settlement of Yzhar, located just above the village.
Recently settlers from Yzhar set fire to an olive field, belonging to a farmer from Huwwara.
A Palestinian resident of Huwwara stated to ISM that the situation in Huwwara is tense, and inhabitants are frightened that the situation will deteriorate again this weekend.
I grew up in Israel and served as an IDF officer. It took me years to realize that we had been brought up on lies, myths and propaganda and that Palestinians are no different from native Americans, blacks in S. Africa and other indigenous populations who were abused and dispossessed by European colonialism. Demolishing the Zionist myths and propaganda is the first step towards de-constructing the exclusionary colonial state and achieving historic justice and lasting peace. I can be reached at ahadhaadam at yahoo dot com.
In its most recent assault on the defenseless population of Gaza, Israel is claiming to be “defending itself”, a preposterous claim parroted by the ever-so-subservient White House and Congress. To anyone with even a shred of knowledge of the facts, it seems outlandish that anyone would believe this absurd Orwellian language that turns oppressor and occupier into victim and victim into aggressor. So let’s review briefly Gaza’s history and put things in perspective:
Who are the Gazans and who are the real bad guys? Most Israelis are not aware that most Gazan Palestinians are refugees from what is now Israel, created during the 1947-1949 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces. The Zionists – fresh colonial immigrants from Europe to Palestine under British colonial rule – aimed to create a “Jewish state” on a land populated by an overwhelming majority of non-Jews (Muslim and Christian Palestinians). They achieved this through violent expulsion in what is known as the Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe). Gaza is the small strip of land into which a large number of refugees from historic Palestine were herded. Thus most Gazans have land and property deeds which have been confiscated from them by the newly established Zionist state and were prevented from returning to their homes for the only reason of not being Jewish.
To this flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, Israel added by shooting thousands of unarmed refugees who attempted to return to their homes (the Palestinians were then as they are now – a defenseless, mostly rural society without an army or a state). It later razed to the ground hundreds of Palestinian villages and wiped them off the map with the intent purpose of erasing the history and the people of Palestine.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine created a surreal situation where the newly established Zionist state claims to be “defending itself” from the people it just dispossessed – a situation that continues to this day (imagine someone one day showing up at your door step, then forcing you out of your house where you and your family have been living for countless generations, and then when you try to reclaim it, convinces himself and others that he is a victim of your “irrational aggression”). And indeed, hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in houses that were confiscated from their legal owners who are now destitute stateless refugees languishing in refugee camps only a few miles away, while the refugees are being vilified for trying to reclaim what’s legally theirs.
Adding insult to injury, in 1967 Israel conquered the Gaza strip and then overnight the refugees came under the rule of the same state that had dispossessed them 19 years earlier. A happy reunion of the people and their land? Not so much. Then began a chapter known as Israel’s permanent “occupation” – a brutal regime of military repression and colonization in which Palestinians have no basic human rights, are allowed to work only as day laborers on their former land in menial jobs, and are subject to permanent military occupation where 6000 Jewish settlers planted by force in their midst by the Israeli colonial state are allocated 30% of the land of tiny Gaza and 70% of its scarce water resources. Israel creates a system of Apartheid, in effect to this day: one civilian law for Jewish settlers and another harsh military law and courts for Palestinians who sometimes live only a few hundred yards away.
In 2005, after having tortured (I know, I heard the screams of tortured Palestinians in the interrogation rooms of Israel’s notorious security services) and killed thousands of Gazans and leaving scorched earth behind, Israel decided that the cost of maintaining 8000 Jewish settlers in a handful of colonies was too high and decided to “disengage”, removing the settlers and soldiers from within Gaza but at the same time turning it into a giant ghetto, surrounded by walls and remote controlled machine gun turrets, a 300 yard death zone within the fence and a “warden” who even monitors the calorie intake for the 1.5 million inmates. “We put them on a diet” joked one of Israel’s top political advisors.
Once again, a permanent siege on a civilian population with scarce resources with an average income of $1/day, that prevents imports and exports. The entire world watches on and stays indifferent as humans locked in a giant ghetto resort to digging tunnels in order to smuggle food and basic necessities.
The bottom line: Israel expects Gazans to accept their fate and live peacefully behind walls and barbed wire, without an economy, future or slight hope for returning to their original land and homes, while the warden liquidates people as he pleases and shoots anybody who approaches the fence and continues his colonization drive in the West Bank.
As the horrors of the Jewish State start leaking into the world’s consciousness, Israel has embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to blame Hamas for Gaza’s misery, with the Western press generally going along for the ride, as it usually does when it comes to Israel.
But of course, such propaganda that takes advantage of the ignorance of the general public easily crumbles by pointing out two stark facts: the colonization, torture, apartheid and military oppression lasted for 4 decades before Hamas came to power and in fact long before Hamas existed. In addition, the Zionist propagandists ignore the fact that in the West Bank the “moderate” Abbas is in charge, where he vehemently fights terror, jails Hamas activists and obeys every order he receives from Israel’s military echelon. Did Abbas get a state? No. Did Israel stop its apartheid, military occupation or colonization of the West Bank? No. In fact it has been accelerating them. This just proves that Israel, the colonial apartheid state keeps doing what it’s been doing, i.e. ethnic cleansing, colonization, oppression and apartheid, regardless of who represents the Palestinians or what they do. Israel is the embodiment of the Zionist ideology which aimed to create a “lebensraum” for Jews in Palestine on the expense of the Palestinians, something which has been done continuously since Israel’s establishment and has not stopped for one day ever since.
A Palestinian refugee holding the keys to his house, confiscated by Israel. Israel has defied the Geneva Convention and UN Resolution 194 by preventing him from returning to his home. The reason: he is considered a “demographic threat” to the Jewish State, a state that was established in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians by colonial immigrants from Europe.
In 2006, I began to meet Palestinians. And as you say, that’s very important. One day I was walking up Broadway, and a Palestinian shouted, my goal in life is to end Zionism. I was shocked by that statement, but now I would say, one of my goals in life is to end Zionism. Then a couple of years ago, I heard Hannah Mermelstein outside the Israeli consulate in New York saying, When someone asked if Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, she said No. I was shocked then and now I’m at the point where I think, it shouldn’t be a Jewish state, I don’t know about right to exist. But everyone of us has changed our consciousness. And shocking moments bring awareness. So, you have had that process too. Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state?
No. Absolutely not.
Why not?
It’s a racist state. Not a democracy. If it’s a Jewish state, meaning that the Jews are the privileged people, and then you have either the Palestinian citizens who don’t have the same rights, and you have the Palestinians under occupation, they have no rights whatsoever. Of course not! Are you going to have in America a Protestant state for instance; they’re a majority no? Or the demographics are changing here too? It’s an oxymoron. Do you know Shulamit Aloni? No but she died. Yes. She was Zionist until her last day, and her son Udi, he wanted to know, mom why are you Zionist after all this? Because she was outspoken and she was the one who said, It cannot be a Jewish and democratic state, cannot be. Shulamit Aloni said that. Udi said, So mom how come you are saying you’re a Zionist. She said, Oh, go away! She couldn’t deal with it. All her life she was Zionist. I don’t know what she thought inside herself. You see you live here, so you didn’t experience the pain that I’ve experienced. I had like an earthquake in myself. In what way? Everything. All the songs that I love that I heard on Independence Day. All the literature. All the myth with the newcomers. It was so romantic. All of a sudden, everything, it’s gone. You were how old when this happened? 64. What does that say about your maturity. Not to be judgmental. But it took you that long– what kept you from awareness so long? You see, in Israel, all of us– the Jews– are brought together with little differences, left mainstream right, and not knowing, absolutely not knowing Arabs at all. They don’t exist. They exist only in theory. We would drive on main roads and highways, and you see the Arabic villages, they look different and they have the mosques. And you don’t go there. It’s not yours. And speaking for myself, I always, always worked in a very diligent way. I was very dedicated. It was not a job; for me, teaching and running a school, it was part of my life, and I had kids. So I had those ideas—Meretz– but I didn’t really pay attention because the Arabs were not in my life, I didn’t know what was going on. And only when I saw with my own eyes what the reality was—then I was shocked! - See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/israel-thiers-story#sthash.8xrG4ntt.dpuf
Look at how low-life those Zionist supporters can be.
Instead of actually fending off, rationally and coherently, all these accounts being presented against Israel as the primary and superiorly responsible entity for the Palestinian's oppression, banishment, exodus, displacement and ethnic cleansing - a process that continues to date- they wish to malign those who attack this racist colonial entity by presenting cases of others joining in the dispossession of the Palestinians and thus suggesting a hypocrisy on the side of those who attack Israel for what it is.
Such low-life tactics. Firstly, they do not, in not single iota, suffice as tactics defending Israel...they act as an obfuscation to equate the immorality of Israel with that of others. Hah. Well, at least its an advancement from the attempt to present Israel and its army as the most moral on the region. Now, that stupid argument is: Israel is just as bad as others...therefore, please attack everyone equally or leave ISrael alone.
Low life tactics of course and lies. Yes, regimes (and inner factions) of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Syrian, etc, even Palestinians!! will be found to have contributed to Palestinian's dispossession either in direct collaboration with Israel or indirect...(and of course, the Egyptian ghettoization of Gaza is complicit with Israel's superior responsibility in rendering it a pent-up shooting arena/ ghetto for its army). Does this in any way, in any way at all mitigate the superior rottenness that is ISrael?
No. These regimes have been complicit and have contributed to the dispossession of Palestine...but they did not colonize the Palestinians, they did not throw them out, they did not render them refugees in their own lands and abroad, they do not massacre them ever other year, they did not steal ..what...80 percent...90 percent of their land..and subject the remaining to occupation, whether militarily or by proxy.
Yes, many are guilty of having committed crimes - including a wide swathe of western gcountries as well as arab ones. And indeed, as in the case of many Lebanese (just to show how "hypocritical" I am) , racist ones- against Palestinians.. but the entity that is responsible for their very exposure to those crime, the entity that drove them out of their own homeland, and kills them in their own homeland, that steals, plunders, lies and cheats to misrepresent ISrael: whether as a clean democratic state or as a state just as bad as its neighbours...both, of course, are lies.
No, Israel is a colonial cancer in the region. One cannot take the trees for the forest or the symptoms for the disease.
KAFR KANNA (Ma'an) -- A young Palestinian citizen of Israel died on Saturday morning after being shot in the chest by Israeli police during an arrest raid in a village north of Nazareth.
According to locals in the Galilee-region town of Kafr Kana in northern Israel, Khair al-Din Rouf Hamdan, 22, was shot dead after police attempted to arrest his cousin.
Israeli police claimed in a statement that the Hamdan had been wielding a knife at the time of the incident and had attempted to stab an officer before being shot dead.
Following his death, locals in the village announced a general strike in protest against the killing.
Video emerged following the killing that appeared to show Hamdan hitting a police car with a small object.
The video footage -- which could not be independently verified -- subsequently shows a police officer exiting the car and shooting Hamdan at close range, before dragging him into the car.
Although the majority of Palestinians were expelled from their homes inside Israel during the 1948 conflict that led to the creation of the State of Israel, some Palestinians managed to remain in their villages and their descendants today make up around 20 percent of Israel's population.
Palestinians in Israel complain of routine discrimination, particularly in housing, land access and employment, and anger has risen in recent months over Israel's assault on Gaza that left nearly 2,200 dead.
More than 700 Palestinians in Israel were arrested in protests across the country against the attack over summer.
"Pro-Israel people: you have plenty of other avenues to spread your viewpoint. Actually, you have pretty much all the avenues, considering the slightest criticism of Israel in America is met with vehement, frequently unhinged denunciation. All you're succeeding in doing, ironically, is exhibiting the exact sort of shrill, unyielding zealotry you claim to be the exclusive province of your opponents."
While claiming to oppose Israel's settlements in East Jerusalem, both the US and Europe have contributed to the colonisation
News coverage of the Middle East is frequently predictable. Each time a plan to expand settlements in occupied Jerusalem is announced, the media reports about heightened "tensions" between Israel and the West. It would all be quite tedious, if it were not for the occasional twist - like when an unnamed official calls Benjamin Netanyahu a "chickenshit."
Recent history indicates that the "tensions" tend to be superficial. In 2010, Hillary Clinton - then secretary of state - described Israel's latest plans for Jewish-only colonies as an "insult to the United States."
The Obama administration recovered from the insult with remarkable speed. Soon, it was showering unprecedented levels of aid on Israel. In 2009 - the year Barack Obama took office - Israel received $2.5 billion in US "foreign military assistance. " This year, it has been allocated $3.1 billion.
Such aid has contributed directly to the dispossession of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Between 2000 and 2009, Washington authorities approved the delivery of "riot control" weapons worth $20.5 million to the Israeli military. Residents of Silwan, a neighbourhood nudging Jerusalem's old city, have amassed a collection of tear gas canisters marked "made in the USA." Israeli forces routinely fire that vile gas when Palestinians protest at how their homes are being stolen by settlers.
Some American firms and individuals have invested in those Israeli settlements that left Hillary Clinton so discomfited. The Israeli subsidiary of RE/MAX, a US real estate giant, sells and rents out property in at least five East Jerusalem settlements. As the buildings are exclusively reserved for Jews, RE/MAX can be considered a profiteer of apartheid.
Irving Moskowitz, a casino and bingo tycoon in California, has owned the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem since 1985. Dating from the 1930s, it was the residence of Haj Amin Husseini, Jerusalem's grand mufti. Over the past few years, Moskowitz has allowed Israel to demolish part of the complex to make way for Jewish-only apartments. By doing so, he has enabled the erasure of Palestinian heritage.
Moskowitz is also a generous donor to Ateret Cohanim, a group that buys up Palestinian property so that it can be handed over to settlers.
The settlements which Moskowitz supports are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into the territory it occupies. If Moskowitz was openly bankrolling the mafia or other criminal organisations, he would more than likely be prosecuted.
Yet he and his wife Cherna are contributors to the Israel Allies Foundation, a lobbying outfit with branches within both the US Congress and the European Parliament. Israel Allies was founded by the right-wing politician, Benny Elon; then a government minister, Elon joined a 2003 mob attack against Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Federica Mogherini, the EU's new foreign policy chief, seems to be weighing her words carefully; her response to the latest expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem was timid. She went no further than to describe the announcement as "yet another highly detrimental step which undermines the prospects for a two-state solution."
If EU representatives were really dismayed about ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem, they would cease cooperating with Israeli institutions that are active there.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem took part in more than ten projects financed as part of the EU's science programme between 2007 and 2013.
Active, too, in the Erasmus student exchange scheme, the Hebrew University has been known to host promotional events at which EU diplomats express their desire to deepen the Union's relationship with Israel. To express its gratitude for that friendship, the university gave an honorary doctorate to José Manuel Barroso in the final months of his stint as European Commission president.
Although the EU made a general commitment in 2013 to stop subsidising colleges or firms based in East Jerusalem or the wider West Bank, it has decided to make an exception for the Hebrew University. The Union's reasoning for doing so was spurious.
The Hebrew University has a campus on Mount Scopus. Although geography tells us that is part of East Jerusalem, the EU has decided that it belongs to Israel because of an armistice agreement from 1949.
That distinction is morally dubious. Zionists began a process of destruction and displacement against Palestinians in the 1940s. The Nakba (catastrophe), as that process is known, continues today with the uprooting of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the suffocation of the wider West Bank and the periodic bombardment of Gaza.
The rationale for continuing to allocate grants to the Hebrew University ignores, too, how its campus has been encroaching into the neighbouring Palestinian village of Issawiyeh.
Israel's national police headquarters, meanwhile, are located in occupied East Jerusalem. That hasn't stopped Europol, the EU's police agency, from liasing with Israel in operations against drugs. During September, Israel took part in Europol's annual gathering for senior police officers in The Hague.
Young Palestinians have lately destroyed part of the light rail system serving Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. That tramway is a symbol of Western duplicity. No amount of rhetoric from Brussels can conceal the fact that European firms have built this tramway. One of these companies, Veolia has rightly been the target of an international campaign that has caused it to lose numerous municipal contracts around the world.
Yet EU officials have conferred an unmerited respectability on Veolia by attending business conferences that it has sponsored in Tel Aviv. The Paris government has celebrated how Veolia has been France's number one investor in Israel.
If the West is really insulted by Israel's colonisation of East Jerusalem, then it has ample scope for action. The US could halt arms exports to Israel. And the EU could revoke the trade privileges it has accorded to Israel - after all, those privileges were always supposed to be conditional on respect for human rights.
For strategic and political reasons, neither Europe nor America wants to punish Israel. So long as they refuse to do so, their professions of concern about East Jerusalem will ring hollow.
- David Cronin is a journalist and activist living in Brussels. He is the author of Europe's Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation (Pluto, 2011). His most recent book is Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War (Pluto, 2013).
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: An aerial view shows the Jewish settlement of Har Homa on the outskirts of Arab east Jerusalem (AFP)
Note: This video shows disturbing footage of Israeli police shooting and killing a Palestinian youth.
At least thirty Palestinian citizens of Israel were arrested in the Galilee village of Kufr Kana on Sunday as protests spread over the cold-blooded police killing of a youth on Friday.
The video above shows Israeli police shooting 22-year-old Kheir Hamdan in Kufr Kana in circumstances that totally contradict their initial account.
“It is clear from the video footage that the shooting of Hamdan was a murder, as Hamdan did not pose an immediate threat to the lives of the police officers when they shot him,” the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel said in a statement.
An image of Kheir Hamdan widely circulated on social media.
“Hamdan approached the officers’ van and banged on the windows with an object. The officers then opened the door of the van, got out and shot him from close range as he tried to run away from the scene, without giving any prior warning such as firing a shot into the air,” Adalah added.
“After the murder occurred, the police rushed to publish a false statement about the details of the incident, but later it became clear that cameras had documented the incident, showing that the police narrative was false and fabricated,” Adalah said.
Israeli police had previously told media that Hamdan was shot “when he tried to stab an officer during an attempt to arrest him for allegedly throwing a stun grenade in the town.”
“The officers’ actions clearly violate the open fire regulations of the police,” Adalah added. “The video also raises suspicion that the police shot Hamdan again after he was injured and had fallen to the ground.”
The group notes that “the police dragged Hamdan’s body in a humiliating manner while he was bleeding and threw him into the police van, as if they were carrying a meaningless object, instead of calling on rescue teams to save him.”
Adalah called for the officers involved in the shooting to be suspended immediately and for a criminal investigation to be opened under the supervision of Israel’s attorney general.
Adalah expressed pessimism that the existing system could result in accountability. “The experience of Arab citizens proves that the Israeli Police Investigation Unit (Mahash) will not seriously investigate an incident of an Arab citizen’s murder at the hands of the police, and will not take those responsible for the murder to trial,” attorney Hussein Abu Hussein said in the statement.
Result of incitement
Adalah noted that the shooting came after direct incitement to violence against Arab citizens of Israel by a senior minister:
Adalah sees a direct connection between the murder of Kheir Hamdan and the statements made earlier this week by Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich. The Minister stated that anyone who attacks Israeli Jewish citizens should be killed immediately. In any democratic society that respects the life of its citizens, any government minister that makes statements such as those by Yitzhak Aharonovich should be immediately dismissed.
Impunity
There are more than 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who unlike Palestinians living under Israeli siege and occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are supposedly afforded civil rights and protections.
However, Palestinian citizens of Israel live under dozens of laws and de facto practices that leave them at best with second-class citizenship.
The Israeli state recognized this in the Or Commission report produced after the October 2000 police killings of thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel. But as Patrick O. Strickland reported last month, Israeli police brutality against Palestinian citizens remains unchecked fourteen years after that massacre.
Kheir Hamdan’s killing is only the latest by Israeli forces to be caught on video. In May, CNN and security camera video showed the cold-blooded killings by Israeli snipers of two teens, Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, in the occupied West Bank village of Beitunia.
In December 2012, a camera caught the killing of seventeen-year-old Muhammad al-Salaymeh in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In that case, as in the killing of Hamdan, the video directly contradicted Israeli claims that the youth posed an immediate threat to the person who shot him.
Protests and repression
This video shows hundreds of people marching in Hamdan’s funeral in Kufr Kana as many more line the streets:
Strikes and protests against Hamdan’s killings have continued in Palestinian cities towns across the Galilee and the north of present-day Israel, including in Haifa, Umm al-Fahm, Sakhnin and Tamra
Published Saturday 08/11/2014 (updated) 10/11/2014 15:36
A Palestinian activist fixes a flag near an encampment set up to protest against Israel's intention to confiscate land on Jan. 20, 2013 in Beit Iksa. (AFP/Ahmad Gharabli)
JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Locals said on Saturday that Israeli authorities delivered orders to the village of Beit Iksa north of Jerusalem indicating the confiscation of 12,852 dunums (3,176 acres) of Palestinian land.
Locals told Ma'an that soldiers deployed at the military checkpoint at the entrance to the village delivered confiscation orders signed by the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Nitzan Alon, that gave them until Dec. 31, 2017 to remain on their land.
Villagers said that soldiers informed them that an official from the Israeli military liaison would arrive on Monday to specify which lands that would be confiscated, adding that the lands confiscated would be used for "military purposes."
Israeli officials, however, denied the reports late Sunday.
A spokeswoman of COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry unit in charge of civil administration in the Palestinian territories, told Ma'an that there were only Israeli military orders to renew a confiscation order for 163 dunams (41 acres) of land in Beit Iksa north of Jerusalem.
"Around 163 dunams were temporarily confiscated in 2004 for military purposes," the spokeswoman said.
"The new orders mean that the area will be used for military purposes until 2017," she added.
Although located immediately next to Jerusalem, the village's lands have been progressively confiscated and the village is surrounded on all sides by the Israeli separation wall. Villagers can no longer travel to Jerusalem without permits, and Palestinians not resident in Beit Iksa cannot enter the single Israeli checkpoint that allows access to the village.
Ninety-three percent of the village is under full Israeli military control, and a majority of the total land of the village falls in areas outside of the separation wall, meaning they have been de facto confiscated, including about 1,500 dunums (371 acres) where Jewish-only settlements have been built.
The head of the Beit Iksa village council Saada al-Khatib told Ma'an that according to the order and the maps that soldiers had shown them Saturday, the lands that would be confiscated are between parcels 7 and 8 and include Haraeq al-Arab, Thahr Biddu, Numus, and Khatab areas around the village.
Beit Iksa (AFP/file)
Al-Khatib added that the Israeli authorities claim that the confiscation order has been under way since 2012, and that the new order issued on Saturday only emphasizes the old order.
The order would prevent dozens of farmers from reaching their lands, he said, calling upon Palestinian ministries and national institutions to support the village of Beit Iksa and its neighbors.
He added that the order came after the Israeli municipality announced the approval of 244 housing units to be built in the Ramot settlement, which was previously built on lands confiscated from the settlement.
Al-Khatib warned that the land confiscation orders being issued to many villages were an attempt to carry out the "Judaization" of Beit Iksa after sealing the village shut and surrounding it with a checkpoint and the separation wall, turning it into an 2,500-dunum prison.
Israeli security forces detain a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship during clashes in the town of Kfar Kana, in northern Occupied Palestine on November 9, 2014, a day after security forces shot dead a 22-year-old Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. AFP / Jack Guez
Published Monday, November 10, 2014
Updated at 6:20 pm (GMT +2): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday publicly challenged Palestinians with Israeli citizenship protesting against a deadly police shooting to go and live under Palestinian rule in the West Bank and Gaza.
"To all those who are demonstrating and shouting their denunciation of Israel and support of a Palestinian state, I can say one simple thing: you are invited to move there - to the Palestinian Authority or to Gaza," Netanyahu said.
"I can promise you the State of Israel will not put any obstacles in your way," he told a meeting with Likud legislators.
Protests have erupted in northern Occupied Palestine since Israeli forces on Saturday shot dead a young Palestinian with Israeli citizenship during an attempted arrest.
Israeli police said Monday that 24 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, including 10 minors, appeared in court on charges of rioting after getting arrested the day before.
They are suspected of “stone-throwing” and other "public order offenses" during demonstrations which have rocked the northern town of Kfar Kana, near Nazareth, since the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old resident early Saturday.
Kheir Hamdan was shot dead after Israeli police claimed he intervened in the arrest of one of his relatives and “threatened” Israeli officers with a knife.
Police say the officers fired warning shots before aiming directly at him when their lives were threatened. However, CCTV footage of the shooting show Hamdan was shot dead in cold blood.
His death set off two days of widespread rioting across Palestinian towns and villages in the Israeli-occupied northern territories, as locals in Hamdan’s village announced a general strike in protest.
Youths hurled stones at an Israeli car overnight near Taibe, police said. Taibe is part of a concentration of Palestinian towns and villages northeast of Tel Aviv, known as the Triangle, which lies close to the border with the occupied West Bank.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who account for about 20 percent of the population in Occupied Palestine, are the descendents of Palestinian who remained on their land when the Zionist state was established in 1948. The majority of Palestinians were killed, expelled from their homes, or detained in work camps.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship complain of routine discrimination, particularly in housing, land access and employment, and anger has risen in recent months over Israel's assault on Gaza that left nearly 2,200 Palestinians, mostly civilians dead. More than 700 Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories were arrested in protests across the country against the attack over summer.
Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, said the comments showed the right-wing Likud party leader had "gone off the rails.”
Tibi accused Netanyahu, who has publicly pledged to explore the possibility of revoking the citizenship of those who "call for Israel's destruction,” of pandering to far-right potential challengers in Likud.
The party is to hold a leadership vote in January amid mounting speculation of a national election, due only in 2017, within months.
"These kinds of things have never been said by any prime minister - not by (Menachem) Begin, nor by (Yitzhak) Shamir," Tibi told Reuters, referring to the late Zionist leaders and pre-state underground chiefs.
The rioting in northern Occupied Palestine comes against a backdrop of soaring Israeli-Palestinian tensions in annexed East Jerusalem where there have been near-daily clashes over Israeli al-Aqsa violations as well as illegal settlement activities.
Israeli forces spokesman Micky Rosenfeld wrote on Twitter on Friday that 200 Palestinians have been arrested over the past two weeks in East Jerusalem.
Around 7,000 Palestinians, including hundreds without charge, are currently being held in Israeli prisons, more than 2,000 of whom were arrested by Israeli forces over this summer amid heavy tensions in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the Zionist state – a move never recognized by the international community.
Archinect, please boycott Israel (its about time!)
Thank you for this opinion piece. Would you like to comment on the application of your genocide rubric to the experiences of Jewish Israelis vis-a-vis Hamas and Islamic Jihad?
From A Sea Change in the Middle East?
Palestine, Israel and the ADL
October 29, 2014
by ROBERT FANTINA
On October 24 of this year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which, according to its website, “…was founded in 1913 ‘to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all’,” printed an overview of what it called ‘Anti-Israel Activity on Campus After Operation Protective Edge: A Preview of the 2014-2015 Academic Year’. This article provides information about student groups that were appalled at Israeli cruelty during that country’s so-called ‘Operation Protective Edge’, the ridiculous name of the most recent invasion and carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip. It discusses the increase in student activity opposing Israeli policies, and projects that it will probably only continue to grow.
It is certainly true that opposition to Israel’s decades-long, brutal occupation of Palestine is growing.But the ADL made some statements in the article that belie belief. A look at one sentence suffices: “Student groups that constitute today’s anti-Israel movement hurl a multitude of hateful accusations against Israel, falsely claiming that Israel is guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes in an effort to demonize Israel.”
(...)
‘Hurl a multitude of hateful accusations against Israel’. It would not be difficult to diffuse these ‘hateful’ accusations. If Israel is indeed innocent of these charges, all it would need to have done would be to have cooperated with any of the international investigations of the last few years, or that are currently ongoing, into its practices. If Israel has nothing to hide, why not show the facts to the world? On the other hand, if the facts are already there for all the world to see, why not try calling them ‘hateful accusations’ and see if that accomplishes anything?
“Falsely claiming that Israel is guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes”. Are these false claims? A quick Internet search shows this definition for apartheid: ‘any system or practice that separates people according to race, caste, etc.’. Palestinians in the West Bank cannot drive on the same roads that Israeli’s use. They are hindered in their daily activities by countless checkpoints that Israelis establish and man arbitrarily. A Palestinian arrested in the West Bank may spend months incarcerated without charge, and without access to legal representation. An Israeli arrested in the West Bank is either charged or released within hours, and has access to legal representation immediately. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank need to ask permission from Israel to farm their own lands, and to harvest their own crops. No such restrictions or requirements are placed on Israelis.
Is Israel guilty of ethnic cleansing? Going to the same Internet source, this is how ‘ethnic cleansing’ is defined: “The elimination of an unwanted ethnic group or groups from a society, as by genocide or forced migration.” Israel was established in 1948 only after the forced removal (‘migration’) of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes. In the decades since that time, Palestinian homes have been, and continue to be, routinely demolished to make room for illegal Israeli settlements, in which only Israelis can live.
Now let us look at the charge of genocide. Returning again to the same dictionary site, genocide is defined thusly: “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political or cultural group.” When three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes in 1947 and 1948, at least 10,000 of them were killed. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were completely destroyed, leaving no trace of mosques, museums, schools, cemeteries or other signs of Palestinian culture. Since then, countless mosques, schools and other vital structures of Palestinian culture have been obliterated by Israel, in order to make room for more, Israeli-only, illegal settlements. Ironically, in June of 2011, Israel bulldozed the ancient Muslim cemetery, Ma’man Allah, in order to build a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on the site.
During Israel’s recent horrific bombing of the Gaza Strip, many more ancient mosques were destroyed, further decimating Palestinian culture.
These student groups accuse Israel of ‘a number of other war crimes’, says the ADL article. According to International Law, an occupying force (Israel) cannot move permanent settlers into the occupied territory. Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu has stated flatly that he has no intention of giving up the West Bank, where over 500,000 settlers live illegally. It is also in violation of international law to remove residents from their property, something Israel does routinely, and has done for decades, causing the displacement of hundreds of
Israel's War on Palestine: It's Bad, but Is It 'Genocide'?
August 13, 2014
By Charles Davis
It’s not just the thousands of people—Palestinians—that the state of Israel has killed over the years in its regular assaults, dwarfing the handful killed by Hamas’s rockets. Israel has, for decades, been carrying out what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes as an “incremental genocide,” one that has since 1948 seen Palestinians steadily removed from their land, their homes destroyed, and their families forced into fenced-in refugee camps, for no reason other than that Palestinians were born to the wrong mothers.
Map via Wikimedia
“It's been going on for a long time, the killings, the incredibly awful conditions of life, the expulsions that have gone on [since 1947], when 700 or more villages in Palestine were destroyed, and in the expulsions that continued from that time until today,” said Michael Ratner, president of the left-of-ACLU Center for Constitutional Rights, in an interview with the Real News. “It's correct and important to label it for what it is.” And that label, he said, is “genocide.”
Bay Area activists declare victory after Israeli carrier cancels all ships
Submitted by Charlotte Silver on Fri, 10/31/2014 - 19:05
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Bay Area activists launched a massive campaign to block Israeli shipping vessels in August. (Daniel Arauz / Flickr)
On 28 October, San Francisco Bay Area activists organizing to block the unloading of Israeli shipping vessels declared their most significant victory yet: Israel’s Zim Integrated Shipping Services appears to have cancelled all future shipments to the Oakland Port.
This past summer, at the peak of Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza, the Bay Area’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) mobilized the community in response to the military assault. Deciding to focus on a tangible, highly-visible and big-money target, the group set its sights on Israel’s Zim lines, determined to block the company every time it tried to dock a ship at the busy Port of Oakland.
15 Palestinian prisoners held in solitary confinement for 3 months
Published yesterday 16:45
(MaanImages/file)
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Fifteen Palestinian prisoners being held in solitary confinement reached their third month there, prisoners said on Saturday.
The fifteen prisoners are being held in solitary confinement after they were moved from the Jalbou and Shatta prisons on June 12 as punishment for "attempts to dig tunnels," prisoners told the a lawyer from the Palestinian Prisoner's Society.
Since then, the prisoners have been kept in solitary confinement at the Gilboa, HaSharon, Ayalon, and Nafha prisons.
Prisoners at Nafha prison, meanwhile, said that raids into prisoners' cells at the facility have been increasing.
Prisoners at Nafha said that "repression units" raided a room overnight, using weapons to assault prisoners and handcuff them with plastic cuffs.
Around 5,500 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli prisons, including hundreds without charge or trial.
Unemployed Jewish-American lesbians protesting against Israel? In Oakland?!
Shocking!
is that a phone number on that girl's arm?
From Segregated ‘apartheid buses’, yet another step further from peace
(...)
The segregation of buses is just one small part of an Israeli system which, at its core, designates different sets of rights and privileges based on religion and ethnicity. This latest move is yet another indication of escalating Israeli discrimination and aggression that is isolating Israel from global and increasingly US support. Recent announcements of aggressive settlement construction, the closure of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound, and the heavy-handed police operation known as Guardian of the Wall ongoing in East Jerusalem have heightened tensions between the U.S. and Israel. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki responded said these actions "are not conducive to peace..."
The bus segregation proposal would require Palestinian workers living in the West Bank to return home through the same checkpoint they entered, effectively banning them from using the buses used by Israeli settlers.
JVP has long spoken out against segregation policies in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and participated in a solidarity with Palestinian Freedom Riders campaign in 2011. JVP strongly condemns this recent announcement as yet another iteration of an ongoing pattern of discrimination and disenfranchisement.
Link to segregated buses in Israel?
I've stated repeatedly that I disagree with settlements; many Israelis are against them too.
It's dishonest to frame the settlements as an Israel-wide issue; it's a right-winger, Likud issue.
Israeli soldiers attempt to detain 2-year-old for rock-throwing
Published Saturday 01/11/2014 (updated) 02/11/2014 11:05
(MaanImages)
JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday attempted to detain two Palestinian children, a two-year-old and a nine-year old, on suspicion of throwing rocks.
Israeli soldiers were conducting a raid on the home of the Jaber family in the Silwan neighborhood in order to search for an individual suspected of throwing rocks at them from the roof, the family told Ma'an.
When the soldiers ascended to the roof to detain the alleged culprit, however, they found a two-year-old named Mimati Asaad Jaber who was playing with his mother. While they were playing, apparently, a rock had fallen into the street below.
The boy's grandfather, who was in the house during the raid, said that the boy was only playing and that he did not know there were soldiers in the street below the building when he tossed the stone.
Upon seeing the two-year-old with his mother, however, the Israeli soldiers shifted their attention to a nine-year-old member of the family nearby.
Members of the Jaber family told Ma'an that once Israeli soldiers found out the nine-year-old boy's name -- Izz al-Din al-Qassam, also the name of a famous Palestinian national hero and used by Hamas as the name for its military brigades -- they began questioning him.
The Israeli soldiers attempted to detain the nine-year-old boy based on the fact that he had "colored rocks" in his pockets, presumably to throw at soldiers, but when they searched the child they found that the "rocks" were in fact candy.
A new draft law being considered by Israeli lawmakers would lead to charges of up to 20 years, even if it could not be proven that rock-throwers intended to cause damage.
A 2011 report by Israeli rights group B'tselem, meanwhile, noted that around 100 percent of all Palestinian children accused of rock-throwing are convicted, largely because minors are kept in prison for the duration of any trial so the pressure to plea bargain is high.
Military Court Watch estimated that at the beginning of October more than 180 Palestinian children and youths were being held in Israeli prisons, down from 250 in June.
According to a 2013 report by the UN's Children's Fund, Israel is the only country in the world where children are systematically tried in military courts and subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment."
Over the past decade, Israeli forces have arrested, interrogated, and prosecuted around 7,000 children between 12 and 17, mostly boys, at a rate of "an average of two children each day," UNICEF said.
First comprehensive investigation of latest Israeli assault documents war crimes.
In the wake of the 50-day Israeli assault that devastated the Gaza Strip, reconstruction must not be the only priority, according to the nonprofit organization Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights. All perpetrators of war crimes must be held to account, and Euro-Mid has taken the initial step by completing the first comprehensive investigation into Israeli actions during “Operation Protective Edge.”
“If we want young Palestinians to turn away from violent resistance in the future, they must believe that international law will be respected and enforced,” said Ihsan Adel, legal officer for Euro-Mid, a nongovernmental human rights watchdog focusing on the Middle East-North Africa region. “Our investigation documented both indiscriminate attacks on civilians by Israeli forces and their use of captured Palestinians as human shields. When the UN Human Rights Council arrives in the coming days to conducts its own investigation, our reports will already have laid the groundwork. Now it is up to the international community to demonstrate to the youth of today that the rule of law applies to everyone.”
The initial fieldwork for the Euro-Mid investigation began on July 10, the second day of the massive Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout the course of the conflict, 24 Gaza-based researchers, many with legal backgrounds, visited every hot spot that erupted, interviewing more than 432 individuals involved in or eyewitnesses to144 instances in which more than two Palestinians were killed at one time.
The Euro-Mid investigation is summarized in two reports: “Indiscriminate Attacks and Deliberate Killing: Israel Takes Revenge on Gaza by Killing Civilians,” and “Israeli Matrix of Control: Use of Palestinians as Human Shields.”
Indiscriminate Attacks
Between 8 July and 26 August, Israeli forces conducted an estimated 60,664 raids into the Gaza Strip. This report documents that in many cases, the attacks were indiscriminate. Not only did Israeli forces fail to take sufficient measures to protect noncombatants, including children and the disabled, but in a number of instances they deliberately targeted locations with concentrations of civilians. Reports from physicians on the ground strongly suggest that Israel deployed “unconventional weapons” (nail bombs and DIME – “dense inert metal explosive” – munitions), which are designed to cause maximum damage and thus are not considered permissible in densely populated areas – either legally or morally.
Likewise, the investigation showed that the so-called “warnings” issued by the government of Israel, typically in the form of telephone calls or “roof knocks,” were insufficient to offer protection.
Use of Palestinians as Human Shields
Euro-Mid documented use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Israeli military forces in at least six cases in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. These civilians were held against their will for hours or days to protect Israeli soldiers from fire, and in the meantime were subjected to inhumane and abusive treatment such as beating, humiliation and exposure to the hot sun while naked for long periods of time.
In contrast, the Euro-Mid team did not find any evidence of Palestinians who were forced to stay in their homes or to use their bodies for the protection of Palestinian resistance factions, as charged by the Israeli government.
Call to action
The indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants, deployment of unconventional weapons and the use of Palestinians as human shields are violations of international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights calls on the Fact Finding Committee on the Gaza Conflict recently established by the UN Human Rights Council, soon to arrive in Gaza, to make every effort to focus international attention and pressure on all parties found to be guilty of these crimes. Likewise, the UN Security Council and General Assembly must back these efforts with their own positions of authority and visibility
“The reconstruction of Gaza is needed for Palestinians to be able to live,” said Ramy Abdu, PhD, Euro-Mid chairman. “However, without accountability for crimes and protection of human rights, it will be a life without dignity or hope.”
To See the report "Indiscriminate Attacks and Deliberate Killing": HereTo See the report "Indiscriminate Attacks and Deliberate Killing": Here
To See the report "Israeli Matrix of Control": HereTo See the report "Israeli Matrix of Control": Here
Video Israeli Matrix of Control
Published on Oct 30, 2014
A video produced by the Euro-Mid Observer, presents documented cases of Palestinian civilians used as human shields by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.
Thank you for a news piece based entirely on hearsay, and also for a report by an organization devoted to upholding human rights in the Middle East (a region replete with human rights violations), which boasts a lineup publications which exclusively to criticize Israeli policies. Because every other Middle Eastern regime is, of course, faultless.
Fair and balanced.
Torture in Israeli prisons: 200 methods used against Palestinian prisoners
Wednesday, 29 October 2014 16:55
Methods range between severe beatings, putting prisoners under cold water followed by hot water, cuffing or restraining them with their arms behind them and then tying them to a door or window for long periods of time, often lasting hours
Hundreds of torture methods used against Palestinian prisoners during interrogations conducted in Israeli prisoners have been observed by human rights organisations and prisoners' rights associations.
A report by the United Nations lists around 200 methods of torture. The Israeli rights group B'Tselem listed around 105 torture methods. Regardless of the number, all these reports indicate a grave level of violations perpetrated against Palestinians following their arrest.
Fouad Khuffash, director of the Ahrar Centre for Prisoners' Studies and Human Rights, suggests that torture can be divided into two categories; physical and psychological. Some believe that psychological torture is less harmful than physical torture, but the mental scars left by both can leave prisoners traumatised long after their release.
Khuffash adds: "Torture in Israeli prisons is systematic and starts from the moment a prisoner is arrested, not from the moment they begin interrogation. This is a premeditated and staged scenario that changes according to the case of the detainee and the nature of their file. Investigators alternate and play various roles assigned in advance to each investigator."
Fahd Abu Al-Hajj, director of the Abu Jihad Centre for Prisoner Affairs at the University of Jerusalem, noted that there are 73 methods of interrogation considered to be the "most popular" in Israeli jails. These methods demonstrate the barbarism of the occupation and its lack of respect for basic standards of human rights, he stated.
He added: "Nothing evidences this more than the repeated death of prisoners under interrogation, the most recent of which was the death of the prisoner Raed Al-Jabari."
Al-Hajj believes that the use of torture is systematic, adopted by the Israeli intelligence services and that no prisoner detained in any Israeli prison is spared.
He also explained that these methods range between severe beatings, putting prisoners under cold water followed by hot water, cuffing or restraining them with their arms behind them and then tying them to a door or window for long periods of time, often lasting hours. Prisoners are also made to sit on chairs and beaten with sticks until they lose consciousness. These beatings may target sensitive areas of their bodies which have the potential to leave long-term negative effects, sometimes leading to chronic diseases.
Forms of torture
Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem acknowledged in its report that 105 torture methods are used against Palestinian detainees which are considered serious violations of human rights. A UN human rights committee described the torture in Israeli prisons as "crossing the line", noting that Israel's brutal methods of torture included breaking backs, pulling fingers apart and twisting testicles.
Israeli intelligence bases their torture of detainees on the so-called secret guidelines that were approved in 1987, after the outbreak of the first Intifada. These guidelines allow them to apply "moderate" physical and psychological pressure on prisoners. This gives a legal cover to the torture practiced by Israeli intelligence agents.
In the last 10 years, interrogators have decreased their use of torture, moving away from physical torture and instead used harsh psychological methods that can leave enduring scars, while continuing to use direct physical torture of varying degrees.
Mohammed Kilani, who has experienced many interrogations, noted that his solitary confinement which exceeded two months during which he was forced to remain chained to a chair, was the harshest method of torture he has suffered.
He also added that throughout the entire prison system across the globe, there exists no torture method that has not been thought of or used by the Israeli authorities at some point.
According to statistics, around 72 prisoners were killed as a result of torture in Israeli prisons since 1967, out of a total number of over 200 prisoners who died behind bars.
The first prisoner to die as a result of being tortured was Yousef Al-Jabali who died on January 4 1968 in a Nablus prison. Many prisoners have since followed him, such as Qassem Abu Akar, Ibrahim Al-Rai, Abdul Samad Harizat, Attia Za'anin, Mustafa Akkawi, and others, including the most recent, Raed Al-Jabari.
How does that video prove that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields? Because children are throwing rocks at them?
tammuz, if you spent less time posting something every 3 minutes trying to convince/inform (?) people on an architecture forum (I'm actually really not sure what your goal is), maybe you could actually do something tangible. seems like a strange outlet.
square, eponymously evident (the goal, that is).
..........................................................................................
From
Settler Colonial Studies Revisiting 1967: the false paradigm of peace, partition and parity
The false paradigm of peace
The heroes, or rather the villains, of this story are therefore the Israelis who worked out the fine details of the system to begin with, those who upheld it in all those years and those who perfected its operation on the ground: namely its power to abuse, humiliate and destroy. They were and are servants of the bureaucracy of evil. They come quite innocent into the system but only the very few among them do not succumb to its raison d’être and modus operandi. As wardens of this largest prison of earth, they are constant abusers, dehumanizes and destroyers of Palestinian rights and lives. The moment the last of them would be discharged from this service, we will know the mega prison of Palestine was abolished forever.
Seen from this perspective, the so called peace process begun in the 1970s and culminating in the 1993 Oslo accord, is a false paradigm which became a powerful discourse, in as similar way that the discourse of Orientalism became a potent and hegemonic prism through which Middle-Eastern realities were viewed in the past of present. As Edward Said has put it in the opening pages of his seminal work – the discourse in this instance is a presentation, or rather mis-presen-tation that has behind it institutions, political and economic power, academics and media and anoiled PR mechanism.24
The discourse of peace based on two-state solution was powerful enough to induce quite a few Palestinians to adopt it. Its basic assumptions seen from this historical perspective are not only wrong, but frame together the reality in a way that enabled Israel as a state to deepen its occupation and oppression of Palestine while the world at large was led to believe that a genuine effort was made to solve the problem.
The peace process was based on the assumption that everything visible was divisible: land, sources, blame and history. This business-like approach offered at best 20% of Palestine to the Palestinians (and even that was never on the table); punished them with a lesser offer when they refused the first offer; never consulted them of the future solution and all in all was based on a wish to reconcile between Israeli real intention of having as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible on the one hand, and the wish of the Western world to be assured that a virtual and simulated process was going on which absolved the international community from addressing Israel’s impunity
.It is time to adopt a new dictionary that views Israel as a settler colonialist state and the Pales-tinians as leading an anti-colonialist struggle. Decolonization is more relevant that peace process for the torn land of Palestine and Israel. Only a more accurate framing can help bring reconciliation for the benefit of Jews and Arabs alike.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK (Facebook entry):
8 hrs · Edited ·
Palestinians face jail terms of up to 20 years for throwing stones - whilst an Israeli soldier was sentenced to 45 DAYS for killing a woman and her daughter in Gaza who were waving a white flag.
Because banning discourse on Israel will make Palestine free.
Tammuz, there's a post on the front page that discusses Preston Scott Cohen's Tel Aviv Art Museum. Seize upon this opportunity for activism.
Israeli forces demolish three houses, and several water pipes and roads in village near Nablus
in Nablus, Reports November 4, 2014
4th November 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Khirbet Al-Tawil, Occupied Palestine
Early on Monday morning, while the inhabitants of the village of Khirbet Al-Tawil, near Aqraba (Nablus), were sleeping, eight military vehicles, and 30-40 Israeli soldiers entered the village.
Within two hours the military had demolished three houses, and several water pipes and roads.
The Israeli military- taken early Monday morning by a local resident
The water pipes destroyed were new and scheduled to be turned on Monday. The Aqraba community had funded these water pipes as part of the municipal water system.
Of their destruction, Sami Dariyah, stated: “They are trying to prevent people from living in this area. This is their clear policy.”
Due to the continuing demolishment of houses, electricity lines, water lines and other living necessities, the farmers have fled to the city of Aqraba and departed their lands in Khirbet Al-Tawil. Sami Direyah grew up near Khirbet Al-Tawil and remembers the many houses and shops that used to be there.
Khirbet Al-Tawil is part of Area C (under full Israeli military civil and security control), which means the army can choose which buildings and activities are ‘allowed’. Sami wonders how their existing community, their farms and their 100-year-old houses, can suddenly become illegal.
Even though the three demolished houses were nearly 100 years old, dating back to the British occupation, they were all still active homes for families like the Mahers. The residents of the houses were not given any warning of the military’s planned visit. Sofian Maher, a former resident of one of these homes, spoke to ISM and explained that this is not the first time the military has paid a visit to Khirbet Al-Tawil. In May of this year the village’s Mosque was demolished, together with four houses, four cottages, and two barns. Less than one month ago the power line was cut by the military, leaving the village without electricity.
Sofian Maher explained to ISM that his family tried to rebuild their house after it was demolished in May. While rebuilding, Sofian’s family lived in a donated tent, which the army soon tore down. The family then moved into old stone huts that were built, long ago, to house animals while shepherding. Periodically the military returned and destroyed the newly rebuilt portions of their house.
Sofian Maher and local resident near their destroyed home near Khirbet Al-Tawil
The family is now trying to rebuild their home for the fourth time.
To further make the area uninhabitable, the military has destroyed large sections of the road leading to the remaining farms
Palestinians “struggling for survival” in Jerusalem
Submitted by Rania Khalek on Sun, 11/02/2014 - 12:15
“The message the Israelis are sending is that Jerusalem Palestinians are unwanted here and they are doing everything to reassert their control and squash any form of dissent and resistance to Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem,” Twitter user @BDS4Justice, or Zalameh, told The Electronic Intifada from his home in the eastern occupied Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat on 29 October.
A few hours after our conversation, Israel intensified its crackdown in eastern occupied Jerusalem following an assassination attempt on prominent rightwing extremist Yehuda Glick, a Temple Mount agitator who seeks to replace the al-Aqsa mosque with a Jewish Third Temple, a goal Zalameh says is “mainstream” in the Israeli government.
“[Temple Mount settlers] have enjoyed official support by the Israeli army and they enter Aqsa on a daily basis in large numbers as an act of provocation,” explained Zalameh, adding that the media have largely ignored months of peaceful Palestinian protests against Israeli restrictions and encroachment on al-Aqsa.
Meanwhile, he says the racism in Jerusalem from Israelis continues to escalate. But unlike during the summertime, when mobs of Jewish extremists were hunting and attacking Palestinians in the street, it is the Israeli “security” apparatus that is now doing the harassing on behalf of the Israeli government.
In Zalameh’s own neighborhood, Shuafat — which been under siege by Israeli police since Jewish settlers kidnapped and burned alive his neighbor, sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair, in early June — the police repression is suffocating.
For the last four months Israeli forces have “punish[ed] the population for reacting to [Abu Khudair’s] gruesome murder,” waging “the largest arrest campaign since the second intifada,” said Zalameh, who has been forced to endure an Israeli army post stationed right outside his home.
“Several of my neighbors were taken in the middle of the night, were interrogated, placed in administrative detention, accused falsely of things they didn’t do,” Zalameh said.
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Israeli occupation forces blocked Palestinian worshipers from accessing al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jeruslem on Friday.
(Muammar Awad / APA images)
More recently, Israel has used fatal Jerusalem car crash at the Jerusalem light rail last week as a pretext to ramp up its campaign of harassment, flooding Palestinian neighborhoods in the occupied city with tear gas, drones, low-flying helicopters and more police. “[Y]ou cannot drive for more than two minutes without seeing an Israeli patrol,” said Zalameh, describing a police state.
This comes on top of the ongoing daily harassment, house demolitions, ethnic cleansing and settlement expansion — official Israeli policies that seek to gradually weaken the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem “to the point that whatever [Israelis] do to al-Aqsa and the Old City will be met with little resistance,” said Zalameh.
Nevertheless Jerusalem Palestinians, particularly the youth, are pushing back with what little they have and in a way that Palestinians in the West Bank cannot due to the repressive Palestinian Authority, which Zalameh described as “a buffer to any form of resistance to Israel.”
“This is really a struggle for survival,” Zalameh proclaimed, adding that while Palestinians have a moral duty to resist, “it’s also a moral duty for those in solidarity with Palestinians abroad to intensify their efforts for boycott, divestment and sanctions to support the struggle here in Jerusalem.”
Listen to the interview using the media player above, or read the transcript below (which has been edited for clarity).
@tammuz said -
"Israeli occupation forces blocked Palestinian worshipers from having their usual terror attack planning meeting al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jeruslem on Friday."
-there, i fixed it for ya!
Israel accused of war crimes during campaign in Gaza -
Amnesty International says Israel displayed ‘callous indifference’ in attacks on family homes during military campaign in Gaza
NYT Guardian Haaretz
@Orhan
"Israel accused of war crimes during campaign in Gaza -
Amnesty International says Israel displayed ‘callous indifference’ in attacks on family homes during military campaign in Gaza"
Odd since Palestine won't even allow an Amnesty International office to be opened in their own country.
besides your quote has a typo -
"Amnesty International says Israel displayed excellent judgment in attacks on Palestinian neanderthals during military campaign in Gaza"
There, fixed it for ya!
ihhihihi!
too funny for words.
"Amnesty International says Israel displayed excellent judgment in attacks on Palestinian neanderthals during military campaign in Gaza" - subgenius.
here is your neanderthal in picture you fucking subhuman sub-exterminator wanna be...
subgenius, what value do you see in completely dehumanizing Palestinians?
Do you think that you're making Israel supporters look good?
thank you alternative.
Orhan, I just want to be clear that the views of subgenius do not reflect the views of most Israelis-- including Israelis who are virulently opposed to Hamas.
From Amnesty International Accuses Israel of War Crimes in Gaza
(...)
Amnesty International has accused the Israeli military of war crimes in Gaza during a war earlier this year against Hamas.
In a new report, Amnesty described eight cases in which residential Palestinian homes were attacked without warning, which resulted in the deaths of 104 people including 62 children
(...)
On July 8, the Israeli military launched “Operation Protective Edge” in response to rocket fire from Hamas. The fighting lasted seven weeks and more than 2,200 people were killed, almost all Gaza civilians.
“Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International. “Even if a fighter had been present in one of these residential homes, it would not absolve Israel of its obligation to take every feasible precaution to protect the lives of civilians caught up in the fighting.”
The report contains numerous accounts from survivors describing frantically digging through the rubble and dust of their destroyed homes in search of the bodies of children and loved ones.
At least 18,000 homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable
.
Miko Peled on, the planning of the racist colonial Israel by European colonialists , its creation beginning with the massacres committed against Palestinians from the 1940s and their ensuing ethnic cleansing at the hand of Israel, the subsequent formation of the Gaza Strip and the complicity of the US and other allies in perpetuating the oppression and murder of Palestine's native people.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29911702
Jerusalem: Palestinian van attack kills policeman
Yolande Knell: "On security camera footage you can see a speeding white van"
A Palestinian driver has rammed a van into several pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing a policeman, hours after clashes at the city's holiest site.
Some 13 people were hurt in the attack on Wednesday. The driver was shot dead.
Hamas militants said they carried out the attack. Israel's prime minister said it was a result of "incitement" by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
A similar car attack by a Palestinian took place in the same area two weeks ago which left a woman and a baby dead.
In a separate development on Wednesday, a Palestinian motorist drove into a group of soldiers in the southern West Bank, injuring three of them before fleeing the scene.
Israeli soldiers later found the car abandoned, according to witnesses at a nearby Palestinian refugee camp.
The driver turned himself in to security forces on Thursday morning, the Israeli army reported.
Meanwhile Jordan has recalled its ambassador to Israel over what it called the "unprecedented Israeli escalation" at holy and sensitive sites in Jerusalem.
As tensions have risen in the city, access to the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif compound has been intermittently restricted, with police at times barring male Muslim worshippers under the age of 50 from entering the site as a security measure.
The compound is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, and to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif. It contains the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.
Jordan also cited continued building of settlements by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, and is to lodge a formal complaint to the UN Security Council in protest, reports say.
The settlements are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
'Prolonged battle'
The man killed in Wednesday's van attack was police Chief Inspector Jidaan Asad, 38, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
The driver of the van - named as Ibrahim al-Akari - was from Shuafat refugee camp in the east of the city, police said.
His Facebook page states that he is a member of Hamas, and the Twitter account for the group's armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, described him as a member and a martyr.
Hamas, the militant Islamist group dominant in Gaza, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party, agreed to form a unity government earlier this year - a move denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hamas rejects Israel's right to exist and advocates what it calls "armed resistance" against the Jewish state.
Mr Netanyahu said Wednesday's attack in Jerusalem was the result of incitement emanating from Mr Abbas and "his Hamas partners".
"We are in a prolonged battle in Jerusalem. I have no doubt we will win," Mr Netanyahu said.
"We are deploying all the necessary forces to restore calm and security to all parts of the city."
Hamas praised the attack as a "glorious operation", describing Mr Akari as a "hero" whose actions were a "natural response" to Israel's actions in east Jerusalem.
Two weeks ago a Palestinian from the Abu Tor area drove his car into a tram station, killing a baby and an Ecuadorean woman.
Holy site clashes
Earlier on Wednesday, dozens of masked protesters threw stones and launched fireworks at police near the non-Muslim visitors' entrance to the site, Israeli police said.
Police said they had managed to disperse the crowd.
The fate of Jerusalem is one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, while Israel regards the whole of Jerusalem as its "eternal and indivisible capital".
Israel occupied East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in 1980 in a move not recognised internationally.
VIDEO: 14-year-old violently arrested in Hebron
in Features, Hebron, Reports, Video November 6, 2014
6th November 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil Team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine
On October 30th, a 14-year-old boy was violently arrested by Israeli forces in al-Khalil (Hebron).
Due to a teachers strike in solidarity with underpaid public workers, school in Hebron finished at 10:00 in the morning. Several young boys threw stones towards the military, armed at Salaymeh checkpoint, and the soldiers then fired three canisters of tear gas.
The children threw more stones, and the soldiers fired approximately ten more tear gas grenades in several rounds. This continued until 11:00 when an army vehicle drove up from a side street at a high speed. Three soldiers jumped outside one of the school buildings, before running into a school yard and arrested the 14-year-old boy.
7 Birzeit students injured in clashes with Israeli forces near Ofer
Published yesterday 15:57
(MaanImages/file)
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Seven Palestinians were struck by rubber-coated steel bullets on Thursday afternoon during clashes between Israeli soldiers and students from Birzeit University which took place near Israel's Ofer detention center west of Ramallah.
Sources at Birzeit University told Ma'an that the Student Union suspended classes in the morning and organized a large rally in the center of campus opposing Israeli attempts to divide the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem into Jewish and Muslim sections.
Following the rally, students left campus in buses and headed to Ofer detention center near the town of Beitunia.
Shortly after the rally began, Israeli forces opened fire on the students with tear gas canisters, and the students began hurling stones at the soldiers in response.
The students then ran away and took positions on hilltops around the detention center, before Israeli soldiers started to fire live ammunition and rubber-coated bullets at them, injuring seven.
An Israeli military spokeswoman, however, denied that soldiers had opened fire on the students, insisting that they had merely used unspecified "riot dispersal means."
"There was a riot of about 150 rioters who hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails and burning tires," she said, adding that the incident had lasted several hours.
Tensions have been high across the West Bank and Jerusalem in recent weeks, amid an uptick in Israeli violence against Palestinian citizens spurred on by a series of hit-and-run attacks involving Palestinian drivers.
They have also been stoked by Israeli authorities' decision to hold a vote on splitting the Al-Aqsa compound - Islam's third-holiest site -- despite the existence of a Jewish prayer area at the Western Wall immediately next door.
The tensions follow months of Israeli pressure on the region, including through a massive arrest campaign and a major military offensive that left more than 2,100 dead and provoked outrage across Palestine.
Military places curfew on Huwwara village, arrests two young men, and raids Palestinian homes
in Nablus, Reports November 5, 2014
5th November 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Huwwara, Occupied Palestine
On Friday the 31st of October, approximately 300 Israeli soldiers invaded the village of Huwwara, near Nablus. They fired tear gas canisters and stun grenades, seemingly in attempt to clear the streets of people, and declared the village to be a closed military zone. They closed down the mosques, forced the shop owners to close their shops and placed a curfew on the village.
Mutda Tofeq Odeh and Fadi Gasher Dmede, students from the village, were arrested and held for two days. Residents state that the Israeli forces raided several homes in the village and caused damage to various Palestinian homes and properties. The curfew was finally removed on Monday afternoon.
According to Ma’an news, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a settler bus near the village, with no injuries reported, it is not known if that incident preceded this period of collective punishment.
Two days after the curfew ended, ISM activists visited the village and witnessed a large military presence, who were regularly stopping and searching Palestinian cars.
Roughly 3000 people live in Huwwara village. There are five illegal settlements in the area around, and inhabitants often suffer from settler violence, mostly caused by settlers from the illegal settlement of Yzhar, located just above the village.
Recently settlers from Yzhar set fire to an olive field, belonging to a farmer from Huwwara.
A Palestinian resident of Huwwara stated to ISM that the situation in Huwwara is tense, and inhabitants are frightened that the situation will deteriorate again this weekend.
PS. The below of course predates the latest spree of massacres committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere.
Dancing With Palestinians
I grew up in Israel and served as an IDF officer. It took me years to realize that we had been brought up on lies, myths and propaganda and that Palestinians are no different from native Americans, blacks in S. Africa and other indigenous populations who were abused and dispossessed by European colonialism. Demolishing the Zionist myths and propaganda is the first step towards de-constructing the exclusionary colonial state and achieving historic justice and lasting peace. I can be reached at ahadhaadam at yahoo dot com.
A Brief History of Gaza
November 19, 2012
In its most recent assault on the defenseless population of Gaza, Israel is claiming to be “defending itself”, a preposterous claim parroted by the ever-so-subservient White House and Congress. To anyone with even a shred of knowledge of the facts, it seems outlandish that anyone would believe this absurd Orwellian language that turns oppressor and occupier into victim and victim into aggressor. So let’s review briefly Gaza’s history and put things in perspective:
Who are the Gazans and who are the real bad guys? Most Israelis are not aware that most Gazan Palestinians are refugees from what is now Israel, created during the 1947-1949 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces. The Zionists – fresh colonial immigrants from Europe to Palestine under British colonial rule – aimed to create a “Jewish state” on a land populated by an overwhelming majority of non-Jews (Muslim and Christian Palestinians). They achieved this through violent expulsion in what is known as the Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe). Gaza is the small strip of land into which a large number of refugees from historic Palestine were herded. Thus most Gazans have land and property deeds which have been confiscated from them by the newly established Zionist state and were prevented from returning to their homes for the only reason of not being Jewish.
To this flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, Israel added by shooting thousands of unarmed refugees who attempted to return to their homes (the Palestinians were then as they are now – a defenseless, mostly rural society without an army or a state). It later razed to the ground hundreds of Palestinian villages and wiped them off the map with the intent purpose of erasing the history and the people of Palestine.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine created a surreal situation where the newly established Zionist state claims to be “defending itself” from the people it just dispossessed – a situation that continues to this day (imagine someone one day showing up at your door step, then forcing you out of your house where you and your family have been living for countless generations, and then when you try to reclaim it, convinces himself and others that he is a victim of your “irrational aggression”). And indeed, hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in houses that were confiscated from their legal owners who are now destitute stateless refugees languishing in refugee camps only a few miles away, while the refugees are being vilified for trying to reclaim what’s legally theirs.
Adding insult to injury, in 1967 Israel conquered the Gaza strip and then overnight the refugees came under the rule of the same state that had dispossessed them 19 years earlier. A happy reunion of the people and their land? Not so much. Then began a chapter known as Israel’s permanent “occupation” – a brutal regime of military repression and colonization in which Palestinians have no basic human rights, are allowed to work only as day laborers on their former land in menial jobs, and are subject to permanent military occupation where 6000 Jewish settlers planted by force in their midst by the Israeli colonial state are allocated 30% of the land of tiny Gaza and 70% of its scarce water resources. Israel creates a system of Apartheid, in effect to this day: one civilian law for Jewish settlers and another harsh military law and courts for Palestinians who sometimes live only a few hundred yards away.
In 2005, after having tortured (I know, I heard the screams of tortured Palestinians in the interrogation rooms of Israel’s notorious security services) and killed thousands of Gazans and leaving scorched earth behind, Israel decided that the cost of maintaining 8000 Jewish settlers in a handful of colonies was too high and decided to “disengage”, removing the settlers and soldiers from within Gaza but at the same time turning it into a giant ghetto, surrounded by walls and remote controlled machine gun turrets, a 300 yard death zone within the fence and a “warden” who even monitors the calorie intake for the 1.5 million inmates. “We put them on a diet” joked one of Israel’s top political advisors.
Once again, a permanent siege on a civilian population with scarce resources with an average income of $1/day, that prevents imports and exports. The entire world watches on and stays indifferent as humans locked in a giant ghetto resort to digging tunnels in order to smuggle food and basic necessities.
The bottom line: Israel expects Gazans to accept their fate and live peacefully behind walls and barbed wire, without an economy, future or slight hope for returning to their original land and homes, while the warden liquidates people as he pleases and shoots anybody who approaches the fence and continues his colonization drive in the West Bank.
As the horrors of the Jewish State start leaking into the world’s consciousness, Israel has embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to blame Hamas for Gaza’s misery, with the Western press generally going along for the ride, as it usually does when it comes to Israel.
But of course, such propaganda that takes advantage of the ignorance of the general public easily crumbles by pointing out two stark facts: the colonization, torture, apartheid and military oppression lasted for 4 decades before Hamas came to power and in fact long before Hamas existed. In addition, the Zionist propagandists ignore the fact that in the West Bank the “moderate” Abbas is in charge, where he vehemently fights terror, jails Hamas activists and obeys every order he receives from Israel’s military echelon. Did Abbas get a state? No. Did Israel stop its apartheid, military occupation or colonization of the West Bank? No. In fact it has been accelerating them. This just proves that Israel, the colonial apartheid state keeps doing what it’s been doing, i.e. ethnic cleansing, colonization, oppression and apartheid, regardless of who represents the Palestinians or what they do. Israel is the embodiment of the Zionist ideology which aimed to create a “lebensraum” for Jews in Palestine on the expense of the Palestinians, something which has been done continuously since Israel’s establishment and has not stopped for one day ever since.
A Palestinian refugee holding the keys to his house, confiscated by Israel. Israel has defied the Geneva Convention and UN Resolution 194 by preventing him from returning to his home. The reason: he is considered a “demographic threat” to the Jewish State, a state that was established in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians by colonial immigrants from Europe.
From In and out of love with Israel: Tzvia Thier’s story
In 2006, I began to meet Palestinians. And as you say, that’s very important. One day I was walking up Broadway, and a Palestinian shouted, my goal in life is to end Zionism. I was shocked by that statement, but now I would say, one of my goals in life is to end Zionism. Then a couple of years ago, I heard Hannah Mermelstein outside the Israeli consulate in New York saying, When someone asked if Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, she said No. I was shocked then and now I’m at the point where I think, it shouldn’t be a Jewish state, I don’t know about right to exist. But everyone of us has changed our consciousness. And shocking moments bring awareness. So, you have had that process too. Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state?
No. Absolutely not.
Why not?
It’s a racist state. Not a democracy. If it’s a Jewish state, meaning that the Jews are the privileged people, and then you have either the Palestinian citizens who don’t have the same rights, and you have the Palestinians under occupation, they have no rights whatsoever. Of course not! Are you going to have in America a Protestant state for instance; they’re a majority no? Or the demographics are changing here too? It’s an oxymoron. Do you know Shulamit Aloni? No but she died. Yes. She was Zionist until her last day, and her son Udi, he wanted to know, mom why are you Zionist after all this? Because she was outspoken and she was the one who said, It cannot be a Jewish and democratic state, cannot be. Shulamit Aloni said that. Udi said, So mom how come you are saying you’re a Zionist. She said, Oh, go away! She couldn’t deal with it. All her life she was Zionist. I don’t know what she thought inside herself. You see you live here, so you didn’t experience the pain that I’ve experienced. I had like an earthquake in myself. In what way? Everything. All the songs that I love that I heard on Independence Day. All the literature. All the myth with the newcomers. It was so romantic. All of a sudden, everything, it’s gone. You were how old when this happened? 64. What does that say about your maturity. Not to be judgmental. But it took you that long– what kept you from awareness so long? You see, in Israel, all of us– the Jews– are brought together with little differences, left mainstream right, and not knowing, absolutely not knowing Arabs at all. They don’t exist. They exist only in theory. We would drive on main roads and highways, and you see the Arabic villages, they look different and they have the mosques. And you don’t go there. It’s not yours. And speaking for myself, I always, always worked in a very diligent way. I was very dedicated. It was not a job; for me, teaching and running a school, it was part of my life, and I had kids. So I had those ideas—Meretz– but I didn’t really pay attention because the Arabs were not in my life, I didn’t know what was going on. And only when I saw with my own eyes what the reality was—then I was shocked! - See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/israel-thiers-story#sthash.8xrG4ntt.dpuf
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/11/06/now-the-world-fiddles-as-gaza-cries/
Look at how low-life those Zionist supporters can be.
Instead of actually fending off, rationally and coherently, all these accounts being presented against Israel as the primary and superiorly responsible entity for the Palestinian's oppression, banishment, exodus, displacement and ethnic cleansing - a process that continues to date- they wish to malign those who attack this racist colonial entity by presenting cases of others joining in the dispossession of the Palestinians and thus suggesting a hypocrisy on the side of those who attack Israel for what it is.
Such low-life tactics. Firstly, they do not, in not single iota, suffice as tactics defending Israel...they act as an obfuscation to equate the immorality of Israel with that of others. Hah. Well, at least its an advancement from the attempt to present Israel and its army as the most moral on the region. Now, that stupid argument is: Israel is just as bad as others...therefore, please attack everyone equally or leave ISrael alone.
Low life tactics of course and lies. Yes, regimes (and inner factions) of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Syrian, etc, even Palestinians!! will be found to have contributed to Palestinian's dispossession either in direct collaboration with Israel or indirect...(and of course, the Egyptian ghettoization of Gaza is complicit with Israel's superior responsibility in rendering it a pent-up shooting arena/ ghetto for its army). Does this in any way, in any way at all mitigate the superior rottenness that is ISrael?
No. These regimes have been complicit and have contributed to the dispossession of Palestine...but they did not colonize the Palestinians, they did not throw them out, they did not render them refugees in their own lands and abroad, they do not massacre them ever other year, they did not steal ..what...80 percent...90 percent of their land..and subject the remaining to occupation, whether militarily or by proxy.
Yes, many are guilty of having committed crimes - including a wide swathe of western gcountries as well as arab ones. And indeed, as in the case of many Lebanese (just to show how "hypocritical" I am) , racist ones- against Palestinians.. but the entity that is responsible for their very exposure to those crime, the entity that drove them out of their own homeland, and kills them in their own homeland, that steals, plunders, lies and cheats to misrepresent ISrael: whether as a clean democratic state or as a state just as bad as its neighbours...both, of course, are lies.
No, Israel is a colonial cancer in the region. One cannot take the trees for the forest or the symptoms for the disease.
Israeli forces shoot dead Palestinian youth in Galilee
Published yesterday (updated) 09/11/2014 11:06
Khair al-Din Rouf Hamdan, 22.
KAFR KANNA (Ma'an) -- A young Palestinian citizen of Israel died on Saturday morning after being shot in the chest by Israeli police during an arrest raid in a village north of Nazareth.
According to locals in the Galilee-region town of Kafr Kana in northern Israel, Khair al-Din Rouf Hamdan, 22, was shot dead after police attempted to arrest his cousin.
Israeli police claimed in a statement that the Hamdan had been wielding a knife at the time of the incident and had attempted to stab an officer before being shot dead.
Following his death, locals in the village announced a general strike in protest against the killing.
Video emerged following the killing that appeared to show Hamdan hitting a police car with a small object.
The video footage -- which could not be independently verified -- subsequently shows a police officer exiting the car and shooting Hamdan at close range, before dragging him into the car.
Although the majority of Palestinians were expelled from their homes inside Israel during the 1948 conflict that led to the creation of the State of Israel, some Palestinians managed to remain in their villages and their descendants today make up around 20 percent of Israel's population.
Palestinians in Israel complain of routine discrimination, particularly in housing, land access and employment, and anger has risen in recent months over Israel's assault on Gaza that left nearly 2,200 dead.
More than 700 Palestinians in Israel were arrested in protests across the country against the attack over summer.
What's in a hummus?
Oakland restaurant Conflict Kitchen, which recently has been the focus of controversy over its serving of Palestinian food with what other groups have called anti-Israel messages on its food wrappers, has closed until further notice after receiving a letter containing death threats, according to a post on its Facebook page.
Conflict Kitchen Forced to Temporarily Close Due to Death Threats
"Pro-Israel people: you have plenty of other avenues to spread your viewpoint. Actually, you have pretty much all the avenues, considering the slightest criticism of Israel in America is met with vehement, frequently unhinged denunciation. All you're succeeding in doing, ironically, is exhibiting the exact sort of shrill, unyielding zealotry you claim to be the exclusive province of your opponents."
hmm
How the West connives in the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem
#Occupation
David Cronin
Friday 7 November 2014 16:20 GMT
While claiming to oppose Israel's settlements in East Jerusalem, both the US and Europe have contributed to the colonisation
News coverage of the Middle East is frequently predictable. Each time a plan to expand settlements in occupied Jerusalem is announced, the media reports about heightened "tensions" between Israel and the West. It would all be quite tedious, if it were not for the occasional twist - like when an unnamed official calls Benjamin Netanyahu a "chickenshit."
Recent history indicates that the "tensions" tend to be superficial. In 2010, Hillary Clinton - then secretary of state - described Israel's latest plans for Jewish-only colonies as an "insult to the United States."
The Obama administration recovered from the insult with remarkable speed. Soon, it was showering unprecedented levels of aid on Israel. In 2009 - the year Barack Obama took office - Israel received $2.5 billion in US "foreign military assistance. " This year, it has been allocated $3.1 billion.
Such aid has contributed directly to the dispossession of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Between 2000 and 2009, Washington authorities approved the delivery of "riot control" weapons worth $20.5 million to the Israeli military. Residents of Silwan, a neighbourhood nudging Jerusalem's old city, have amassed a collection of tear gas canisters marked "made in the USA." Israeli forces routinely fire that vile gas when Palestinians protest at how their homes are being stolen by settlers.
Some American firms and individuals have invested in those Israeli settlements that left Hillary Clinton so discomfited. The Israeli subsidiary of RE/MAX, a US real estate giant, sells and rents out property in at least five East Jerusalem settlements. As the buildings are exclusively reserved for Jews, RE/MAX can be considered a profiteer of apartheid.
Irving Moskowitz, a casino and bingo tycoon in California, has owned the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem since 1985. Dating from the 1930s, it was the residence of Haj Amin Husseini, Jerusalem's grand mufti. Over the past few years, Moskowitz has allowed Israel to demolish part of the complex to make way for Jewish-only apartments. By doing so, he has enabled the erasure of Palestinian heritage.
Moskowitz is also a generous donor to Ateret Cohanim, a group that buys up Palestinian property so that it can be handed over to settlers.
The settlements which Moskowitz supports are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into the territory it occupies. If Moskowitz was openly bankrolling the mafia or other criminal organisations, he would more than likely be prosecuted.
Yet he and his wife Cherna are contributors to the Israel Allies Foundation, a lobbying outfit with branches within both the US Congress and the European Parliament. Israel Allies was founded by the right-wing politician, Benny Elon; then a government minister, Elon joined a 2003 mob attack against Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Federica Mogherini, the EU's new foreign policy chief, seems to be weighing her words carefully; her response to the latest expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem was timid. She went no further than to describe the announcement as "yet another highly detrimental step which undermines the prospects for a two-state solution."
If EU representatives were really dismayed about ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem, they would cease cooperating with Israeli institutions that are active there.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem took part in more than ten projects financed as part of the EU's science programme between 2007 and 2013.
Active, too, in the Erasmus student exchange scheme, the Hebrew University has been known to host promotional events at which EU diplomats express their desire to deepen the Union's relationship with Israel. To express its gratitude for that friendship, the university gave an honorary doctorate to José Manuel Barroso in the final months of his stint as European Commission president.
Although the EU made a general commitment in 2013 to stop subsidising colleges or firms based in East Jerusalem or the wider West Bank, it has decided to make an exception for the Hebrew University. The Union's reasoning for doing so was spurious.
The Hebrew University has a campus on Mount Scopus. Although geography tells us that is part of East Jerusalem, the EU has decided that it belongs to Israel because of an armistice agreement from 1949.
That distinction is morally dubious. Zionists began a process of destruction and displacement against Palestinians in the 1940s. The Nakba (catastrophe), as that process is known, continues today with the uprooting of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the suffocation of the wider West Bank and the periodic bombardment of Gaza.
The rationale for continuing to allocate grants to the Hebrew University ignores, too, how its campus has been encroaching into the neighbouring Palestinian village of Issawiyeh.
Israel's national police headquarters, meanwhile, are located in occupied East Jerusalem. That hasn't stopped Europol, the EU's police agency, from liasing with Israel in operations against drugs. During September, Israel took part in Europol's annual gathering for senior police officers in The Hague.
Young Palestinians have lately destroyed part of the light rail system serving Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. That tramway is a symbol of Western duplicity. No amount of rhetoric from Brussels can conceal the fact that European firms have built this tramway. One of these companies, Veolia has rightly been the target of an international campaign that has caused it to lose numerous municipal contracts around the world.
Yet EU officials have conferred an unmerited respectability on Veolia by attending business conferences that it has sponsored in Tel Aviv. The Paris government has celebrated how Veolia has been France's number one investor in Israel.
If the West is really insulted by Israel's colonisation of East Jerusalem, then it has ample scope for action. The US could halt arms exports to Israel. And the EU could revoke the trade privileges it has accorded to Israel - after all, those privileges were always supposed to be conditional on respect for human rights.
For strategic and political reasons, neither Europe nor America wants to punish Israel. So long as they refuse to do so, their professions of concern about East Jerusalem will ring hollow.
- David Cronin is a journalist and activist living in Brussels. He is the author of Europe's Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation (Pluto, 2011). His most recent book is Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War (Pluto, 2013).
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: An aerial view shows the Jewish settlement of Har Homa on the outskirts of Arab east Jerusalem (AFP)
7 Comments
(Ismael Mohamad / United Press International)
Video captures execution of Palestinian citizen by Israeli police
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Sun, 11/09/2014 - 22:52
فيديو : كاميرات المراقبة توثق لحظة قتل الشاب خير حمدان من كفركنا على يد أحد عناصر الشرطة فجر اليوم
Note: This video shows disturbing footage of Israeli police shooting and killing a Palestinian youth.
At least thirty Palestinian citizens of Israel were arrested in the Galilee village of Kufr Kana on Sunday as protests spread over the cold-blooded police killing of a youth on Friday.
The video above shows Israeli police shooting 22-year-old Kheir Hamdan in Kufr Kana in circumstances that totally contradict their initial account.
“It is clear from the video footage that the shooting of Hamdan was a murder, as Hamdan did not pose an immediate threat to the lives of the police officers when they shot him,” the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel said in a statement.
hamdan.jpg
An image of Kheir Hamdan widely circulated on social media.
“Hamdan approached the officers’ van and banged on the windows with an object. The officers then opened the door of the van, got out and shot him from close range as he tried to run away from the scene, without giving any prior warning such as firing a shot into the air,” Adalah added.
“After the murder occurred, the police rushed to publish a false statement about the details of the incident, but later it became clear that cameras had documented the incident, showing that the police narrative was false and fabricated,” Adalah said.
Israeli police had previously told media that Hamdan was shot “when he tried to stab an officer during an attempt to arrest him for allegedly throwing a stun grenade in the town.”
“The officers’ actions clearly violate the open fire regulations of the police,” Adalah added. “The video also raises suspicion that the police shot Hamdan again after he was injured and had fallen to the ground.”
The group notes that “the police dragged Hamdan’s body in a humiliating manner while he was bleeding and threw him into the police van, as if they were carrying a meaningless object, instead of calling on rescue teams to save him.”
Adalah called for the officers involved in the shooting to be suspended immediately and for a criminal investigation to be opened under the supervision of Israel’s attorney general.
Adalah expressed pessimism that the existing system could result in accountability. “The experience of Arab citizens proves that the Israeli Police Investigation Unit (Mahash) will not seriously investigate an incident of an Arab citizen’s murder at the hands of the police, and will not take those responsible for the murder to trial,” attorney Hussein Abu Hussein said in the statement.
Result of incitement
Adalah noted that the shooting came after direct incitement to violence against Arab citizens of Israel by a senior minister:
Adalah sees a direct connection between the murder of Kheir Hamdan and the statements made earlier this week by Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich. The Minister stated that anyone who attacks Israeli Jewish citizens should be killed immediately. In any democratic society that respects the life of its citizens, any government minister that makes statements such as those by Yitzhak Aharonovich should be immediately dismissed.
Impunity
There are more than 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who unlike Palestinians living under Israeli siege and occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are supposedly afforded civil rights and protections.
However, Palestinian citizens of Israel live under dozens of laws and de facto practices that leave them at best with second-class citizenship.
The Israeli state recognized this in the Or Commission report produced after the October 2000 police killings of thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel. But as Patrick O. Strickland reported last month, Israeli police brutality against Palestinian citizens remains unchecked fourteen years after that massacre.
Kheir Hamdan’s killing is only the latest by Israeli forces to be caught on video. In May, CNN and security camera video showed the cold-blooded killings by Israeli snipers of two teens, Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, in the occupied West Bank village of Beitunia.
In December 2012, a camera caught the killing of seventeen-year-old Muhammad al-Salaymeh in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In that case, as in the killing of Hamdan, the video directly contradicted Israeli claims that the youth posed an immediate threat to the person who shot him.
Protests and repression
This video shows hundreds of people marching in Hamdan’s funeral in Kufr Kana as many more line the streets:
فلسطينيو48 يشيعون جنازة المرحوم خير حمدان من كفركنا
On Saturday, thousands of people marched through the town in a protest:
عشرة الالاف متظاهر في مظاهرة كفركنا الاستنكارية على قتل خير الدين حمدان
As this video posted on Saturday shows, Israeli police stationed large numbers of forces at the entrances to Kufr Kana:
قوات الشرطة الاسرائيلية والوحدات الخاصة ووحدات الخيل تغلق مدخل كفركنا | www.ehna.tv
Strikes and protests against Hamdan’s killings have continued in Palestinian cities towns across the Galilee and the north of present-day Israel, including in Haifa, Umm al-Fahm, Sakhnin and Tamra
Locals say Israel to confiscate Palestinian land near Jerusalem
Published Saturday 08/11/2014 (updated) 10/11/2014 15:36
A Palestinian activist fixes a flag near an encampment set up to protest
against Israel's intention to confiscate land on Jan. 20, 2013 in Beit Iksa.
(AFP/Ahmad Gharabli)
JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Locals said on Saturday that Israeli authorities delivered orders to the village of Beit Iksa north of Jerusalem indicating the confiscation of 12,852 dunums (3,176 acres) of Palestinian land.
Locals told Ma'an that soldiers deployed at the military checkpoint at the entrance to the village delivered confiscation orders signed by the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Nitzan Alon, that gave them until Dec. 31, 2017 to remain on their land.
Villagers said that soldiers informed them that an official from the Israeli military liaison would arrive on Monday to specify which lands that would be confiscated, adding that the lands confiscated would be used for "military purposes."
Israeli officials, however, denied the reports late Sunday.
A spokeswoman of COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry unit in charge of civil administration in the Palestinian territories, told Ma'an that there were only Israeli military orders to renew a confiscation order for 163 dunams (41 acres) of land in Beit Iksa north of Jerusalem.
"Around 163 dunams were temporarily confiscated in 2004 for military purposes," the spokeswoman said.
"The new orders mean that the area will be used for military purposes until 2017," she added.
Although located immediately next to Jerusalem, the village's lands have been progressively confiscated and the village is surrounded on all sides by the Israeli separation wall. Villagers can no longer travel to Jerusalem without permits, and Palestinians not resident in Beit Iksa cannot enter the single Israeli checkpoint that allows access to the village.
Ninety-three percent of the village is under full Israeli military control, and a majority of the total land of the village falls in areas outside of the separation wall, meaning they have been de facto confiscated, including about 1,500 dunums (371 acres) where Jewish-only settlements have been built.
The head of the Beit Iksa village council Saada al-Khatib told Ma'an that according to the order and the maps that soldiers had shown them Saturday, the lands that would be confiscated are between parcels 7 and 8 and include Haraeq al-Arab, Thahr Biddu, Numus, and Khatab areas around the village.
Beit Iksa (AFP/file)
Al-Khatib added that the Israeli authorities claim that the confiscation order has been under way since 2012, and that the new order issued on Saturday only emphasizes the old order.
The order would prevent dozens of farmers from reaching their lands, he said, calling upon Palestinian ministries and national institutions to support the village of Beit Iksa and its neighbors.
He added that the order came after the Israeli municipality announced the approval of 244 housing units to be built in the Ramot settlement, which was previously built on lands confiscated from the settlement.
Al-Khatib warned that the land confiscation orders being issued to many villages were an attempt to carry out the "Judaization" of Beit Iksa after sealing the village shut and surrounding it with a checkpoint and the separation wall, turning it into an 2,500-dunum prison.
Netanyahu tells Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to leave
Israeli security forces detain a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship during clashes in the town of Kfar Kana, in northern Occupied Palestine on November 9, 2014, a day after security forces shot dead a 22-year-old Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. AFP / Jack Guez
Published Monday, November 10, 2014
Updated at 6:20 pm (GMT +2): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday publicly challenged Palestinians with Israeli citizenship protesting against a deadly police shooting to go and live under Palestinian rule in the West Bank and Gaza.
"To all those who are demonstrating and shouting their denunciation of Israel and support of a Palestinian state, I can say one simple thing: you are invited to move there - to the Palestinian Authority or to Gaza," Netanyahu said.
"I can promise you the State of Israel will not put any obstacles in your way," he told a meeting with Likud legislators.
Protests have erupted in northern Occupied Palestine since Israeli forces on Saturday shot dead a young Palestinian with Israeli citizenship during an attempted arrest.
Israeli police said Monday that 24 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, including 10 minors, appeared in court on charges of rioting after getting arrested the day before.
They are suspected of “stone-throwing” and other "public order offenses" during demonstrations which have rocked the northern town of Kfar Kana, near Nazareth, since the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old resident early Saturday.
Kheir Hamdan was shot dead after Israeli police claimed he intervened in the arrest of one of his relatives and “threatened” Israeli officers with a knife.
Police say the officers fired warning shots before aiming directly at him when their lives were threatened. However, CCTV footage of the shooting show Hamdan was shot dead in cold blood.
His death set off two days of widespread rioting across Palestinian towns and villages in the Israeli-occupied northern territories, as locals in Hamdan’s village announced a general strike in protest.
Youths hurled stones at an Israeli car overnight near Taibe, police said. Taibe is part of a concentration of Palestinian towns and villages northeast of Tel Aviv, known as the Triangle, which lies close to the border with the occupied West Bank.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who account for about 20 percent of the population in Occupied Palestine, are the descendents of Palestinian who remained on their land when the Zionist state was established in 1948. The majority of Palestinians were killed, expelled from their homes, or detained in work camps.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship complain of routine discrimination, particularly in housing, land access and employment, and anger has risen in recent months over Israel's assault on Gaza that left nearly 2,200 Palestinians, mostly civilians dead. More than 700 Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories were arrested in protests across the country against the attack over summer.
Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, said the comments showed the right-wing Likud party leader had "gone off the rails.”
Tibi accused Netanyahu, who has publicly pledged to explore the possibility of revoking the citizenship of those who "call for Israel's destruction,” of pandering to far-right potential challengers in Likud.
The party is to hold a leadership vote in January amid mounting speculation of a national election, due only in 2017, within months.
"These kinds of things have never been said by any prime minister - not by (Menachem) Begin, nor by (Yitzhak) Shamir," Tibi told Reuters, referring to the late Zionist leaders and pre-state underground chiefs.
The rioting in northern Occupied Palestine comes against a backdrop of soaring Israeli-Palestinian tensions in annexed East Jerusalem where there have been near-daily clashes over Israeli al-Aqsa violations as well as illegal settlement activities.
Israeli forces spokesman Micky Rosenfeld wrote on Twitter on Friday that 200 Palestinians have been arrested over the past two weeks in East Jerusalem.
Around 7,000 Palestinians, including hundreds without charge, are currently being held in Israeli prisons, more than 2,000 of whom were arrested by Israeli forces over this summer amid heavy tensions in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the Zionist state – a move never recognized by the international community.
(Ma'an, Reuters, Al-Akhbar)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndVvloHHKh8
Again, that link
Australian film on Israel's torturing of Palestinian children sparks controversy
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