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

March 2010

About 5,000 left-wing activists and Palestinians gathered Saturday to protest the eviction of four Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Protesters carried Palestinian flags and chanted “Stop the destruction of homes” and “There is no sanctity in an occupied city.”

MK Dov Khenin (Hadash): “We have come here today to say clearly that human rights do not end at the borders of Jaffa. We demand that residents of Jaffa receive equal rights, be treated decently by the authorities, especially the police.”

UPDATE: Ajami co-director ahead of the Oscars: I don’t represent Israel

Ajami co-director Scandar Copti on Sunday said that he does not represent Israel, hours before his film competes for the best foreign film Oscar at the Academy Awards, Army Radio reported. “I am not Israel’s national team and do not represent her,” Copti reportedly said… “The film technically represents Israel, but I don’t represent Israel. I cannot represent a country that does not represent me,” he said… (Haaretz – 7 March 2010)

[Secretary-general of the pan-Islamic body] called on the international community and the Quartet on Middle East peace — the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations — to “pay heed to the gravity of the Israeli violations and the threat they pose to the region now and in the future.”

Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are essentially dependent on outside food aid, either from UNWRA or the World Food Program. Not because there isn’t food in the shops – there is – but they can’t afford it, or they can’t afford enough of it because any livelihoods that there were, any jobs that there were outside the government have effectively disappeared. Most private businesses have been destroyed, essentially by the blockade – bulldozed – and the rest finished off by Cast Lead.

Interview with Jeff Halper, Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and author of Obstacles to Peace: A Re-framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and An Israeli In Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel.

[C]riticism was issued by the justices during a court hearing on a petition filed by residents of Sheikh Jarrah, who demanded to be allowed to protest on this coming Saturday night, a demonstration the police hasn’t authorized. The justices sided with the residents and stressed that the police should not seize the residents’ right to protest. “The police’s behavior regarding these protests takes us 30 years backwards,” the justices said.

The truth is that the suicide attacks on civilians gave Israel a golden opportunity to implement plans, which had always existed, to confiscate more and more Palestinian lands, using the excuse of “security.” The use of weapons did not stop the colonialist expansion of the Jewish settlements. On the contrary. And the use of weapons only accelerated a process Israel began in 1991: disconnecting the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.

The alienation between Arabs and Jews can be seen everywhere. It has not arisen solely in the context of the national conflict, but is rather a result of an establishment policy which has expropriated Arabs’ lands to build communities “for Jews only” and has pushed the Arab inhabitants into localities under an “ethno-Zionist siege” on all sides.

“Perhaps they are listening in on our phone calls, looking into our e-mails, or they have a snitch,” [one demonstrator] told Haaretz. “We do not know and do not bother ourselves about these things. We are not an underground organization and our activities are open, but the army has recently been investing a great deal of intelligence effort in preventing us from demonstrating.”

Palestinian Agriculture Minister Ismail Daiq: “The year 2009 was the quietest for Israelis from the security point of view and the most violent for the Palestinians from the point of view of attacks by settlers in the West Bank.”

A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organizers have declared as “Israeli Apartheid Week” – and all three speakers are Israeli.

IOA Editor: More on Apartheid Week 2010 at: http://apartheidweek.org/

The only difference between “the rock of our existence” that launched the Western Wall tunnel violence in 1996 and the 2010 model is that this time Netanyahu is wearing a mask, trying to pass himself off as peace activist Uri Avnery, with the generous help of Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

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