The Middle East policies of US President Barack Obama may well prove the most detrimental in history so far, surpassing even the right-wing policies of President George W. Bush. Even those who warned against the overt optimism which accompanied Obama’s arrival to the White House must now be stunned to see how low the US president will go to appease Israel — all under the dangerous logic of needing to keep the peace process moving forward.
2010
Many analysts and observers fear that life in the west Bank is taking on an increasingly authoritarian hue. “I feel real concern that we are reaching the level of a police state,” says Shawan Jabarin, the director of al-Haq, a Ramallah-based human rights group.
In any other country, the current American bribe to Israel, and the latter’s reluctance to accept it, in return for even a temporary end to the theft of somebody else’s property would be regarded as preposterous. Three billion dollars’ worth of fighter bombers in return for a temporary freeze in West Bank colonisation for a mere 90 days? Not including East Jerusalem … [T]here is only one word for Barack Obama’s offer: appeasement.
I was eager to return to Palestine, to see what Edward Said called “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.”
By handing light sentences to IDF soldiers who knowingly risked the life of a non-combatant Palestinian child, an Israel Defense Forces court has conveyed a message that the lives of Arabs have less value than the lives of Jews, Deputy Knesset Speaker Ahmed Tibi said Sunday.
According to Dror Etkes, who has been researching construction in the settlements for several years, at least 25 springs are undergoing development for tourism. “Access to these springs has been blocked to the Palestinians, and there are dozens of other springs that the settlers have marked as targets for takeover,” he says.
Noam Chomsky on the illusion of US democracy, liberal-conservative politics, the economy, unions and much more in a Paul Jay (the Real News Network) interview.
Amira Hass has been a correspondent in the Occupied Territories for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz since the early 1990s. Hass describes her work as “writing about the Israeli occupation and Apartheid regime and about Israelis through the experiences of Palestinians.” She also covers internal Palestinian issues. She is the author of the widely acclaimed Drinking the Sea at Gaza and two books of collected articles.
A press that excels in many ways has shirked its task in covering the occupation; it’s the occupation’s greatest collaborator. It helps Israelis feel that there is no occupation. Without the dehumanization campaign in the press, Israelis would feel less self-satisfied, and perhaps more moral doubts would be raised about what we are doing.
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine staged a very impressive mock Israeli checkpoint for Right to Education Week – watch video.
Ali Abunimah, speaking at the University of New Mexico, asks the Jewish Federation of New Mexico to apologize for publishing a Dry Bones cartoon which compared BDS supporters with Hitler.
As it becomes increasingly difficult to justify Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people, Israel’s apologists — whether based in Israel or at pseudo-academic centers such as the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism — resort to another line of defense: namely, they accuse Israel’s critics of being anti-Semitic. Not the sort of classic anti-Semitism found for example in Hamas’s Charter, but instead the anti-Semitism of an anti-Israel double standard.
Appendix to Anti-Semitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict – assessing the claim of double standards, by Stephen R. Shalom, Israeli Occupation Archive – IOA (19 Nov 2010).
Despite lavish incentives offered by the U.S. to bring about a 90-day settlement freeze Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has intensified illegal settlement construction in the occupied territories, further casting doubt on the future of peace talks and on the Obama Administration’s ability to secure Israeli cooperation. Listen in on an earlier IMEU briefing with historian Rashid Khalidi and author John Mearsheimer.
Irene Gendzier, professor of Political Science at Boston University (and IOA Advisory Board member), will present her research on the foundations of US foreign policy in the Middle East in 1945 – 1949. The findings point to very early recognition on the part of US foreign policy planners of the future role the newly created State of Israel could have in protecting US interest in the region.
The talk by Irene Gendzier is THIS Monday, 22 November 2010- Columbia University, 207 Knox Hall, at 12:30pm
Following is a list of the artists who were scheduled to perform in Israel and asked not to cross the picket lines of this struggle, but instead chose to follow the footsteps of Elton John who entertained apartheid South-Africa, and gave their stamp of approval to a reality in which a Palestinian under Israeli occupation is barred from coming to their show in Tel-Aviv.
Al-Shabaka Policy Advisors discuss strategies for Palestinians and their supporters if peace talks “succeed.” Over the past few weeks, Al-Shabaka Policy Advisors Bashir Abu Manneh, Ali Abunimah, Naseer Aruri, Diana Buttu, Mary Nazzal-Batayneh, Mouin Rabbani and Samah Sabawi commented on Nadia Hijab’s policy brief, What if Peace Talks “Succeed?” Their comments are published here.
Among the strategies used in the struggle for human rights, the Palestinians urgently need to identify the most effective ways to stay on the land of Palestine… Israel is still relentlessly carving up the West Bank and depopulating the Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem, as it is [in] the Negev and other areas where Palestinians are the majority inside Israel. Without Palestinians on the land of Palestine, as Israel knows only too well, the Palestinian cause will be impossible to sustain.
Followed by comments by Al-Shabaka Policy Advisors Bashir Abu Manneh, Ali Abunimah, Naseer Aruri, Diana Buttu, Mary Nazzal-Batayneh, Mouin Rabbani and Samah Sabawi: Strategies if Talks “Succeed”?
As … Netanyahu knows very well, it is not “settlements” per se that are illegal. It is the transfer of an occupier’s population into the occupied territories that violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory. Such transfers are illegal irrespective of where they take place—whether in settlements in the West Bank countryside or in apartment buildings in East Jerusalem.
“In underlining them we are purposefully directing attention to individuals rather than the static structures through which they operate,” the website states while calling on visitors to spread the info “widely”.
UPDATED: ‘War criminals’ site exposing personal details of IDF soldiers taken down.
In addition to the concession in the Jordan Valley and the [$3.00B] offer of combat jets that would effectively double the annual aid from the US, the deal is said to include a promise by Washington to veto for the next year any UN resolutions Israel opposes and to refrain, after borders have been agreed, from demanding any future limits on settlement growth.
Tel Aviv, November 15 2010, an anti-apartheid flashmob during the performance of “Porgy and Bess,” performed by South Africa’s Cape Town Opera.
According to a June 2010 fact sheet on the USAID Internet site, last year American taxpayers funded the paving of 63 kilometers of asphalt roads in the West Bank.
Israel signed a contract for 20 F-35s – a fifth-generation stealth fighter jet made by Lockheed Martin – in early October in a deal valued at $2.75 billion. Under the offer made to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during his meeting last week with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Israel would receive a second, free squadron of the advanced fighter jet if it agrees to impose a three-month freeze on settlement construction.
IOA Editor: $2.75B worth of long-distance killing machines, free of the usual “charge,” in return for a short 3-month pretense of a stop of colonization: An even greater US taxpayer subsidy of Israel, Lockheed Martin, and other US and Israeli military corporations. Not a terribly impressive deal, for a guy who graduated from Harvard Law School.
Unlike the Peace Now Settlements Task Force, which has played an important role in documenting and exposing illegal Israeli West Bank settlements, the Tel Aviv leadership of Peace Now is reported to be collaborating with Israel’s propaganda ministry under Lieberman’s leadership.
Lieberman reads the political map clearly and understands that the Zionist parties will not be able to stop the process of suppressing democracy for ethnicity… Netanyahu, it seems, won’t be taking a strong position and then it will only take the foreseeable economic crisis for Lieberman to come out as the leader of a fascist Israel.
The Hebron Fund has scheduled the “Hebron Aid Flotilla,” a pleasure cruise to raise funds for illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Hebron, Palestine.
PROTEST: Tuesday, November 16th, 5:30 – 7:00 pm. Meet 5:30, Chelsea Piers – 23rd Street & West Side Highway.
“No one can prevent me from going to a university and standing together with my constituency,” Zuabi wrote in a letter to Yoav Lavee, the dean of students. “My participation in the event is part of my parliamentary activities, just as my participation in the freedom flotilla constituted a humanitarian, ethical, civic and political obligation of the first order and was part of my parliamentary activities.”
UPDATED
An extraordinary meeting, the first such meeting of the Lieberman era, took place some days ago at the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, when Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon met behind closed doors with a delegation of senior officials of the Peace Now movement.
IOA Editor: The Peace Now Settlements Task Force has played an important role in documenting and exposing illegal Israeli West Bank settlements. As delineated by the author, this is quite apart from the Tel Aviv leadership of Peace Now, which is reported to be collaborating with Israel’s propaganda ministry under Lieberman’s leadership.
That the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, not only is it possible, but there is near-universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognised (pre-June 1967) borders – with “minor and mutual modifications”, to adopt official US terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.
Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the government is pressing ahead with land expropriations, demolitions and settlement building, making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever more improbable. More than a third of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant violation of international law.
A diverse group of Arizona State University students joined together to protest IDF Sargent Nadav Weinberg’s lecture on the “Ethics of the IDF.” We organized a silent protest to give a voice to the Palestinian civilians who have been silenced by IDF policy.
“A number of Knesset members and ministers from Yisrael Beitenu and Likud and other right-wing figures are calling for cutting off funding to artists that this week called for a boycott of the cultural center in Ariel… Threats of this type … do not scare us… As Israeli citizens, the refusal of these theater actors to perform in Ariel, which is not within the borders of Israeli sovereignty, is a democratic right.”
“The smokescreen called a medical school obscures an evil scheme: to establish a refugee camp for psychotic, sadistic and debased Arabs, whose deceptiveness is, and always has been, aimed at tempting [Jewish women] and cruelly abusing them. On orders of the great rabbis of Safed, may they be blessed with a long life, we declare our protest and vehement resistance, and reiterate that it is forbidden under the law of the Torah to offer these people apartments for sale, rent, work or any form of entry. Our city will not succumb to wanton behavior – go back to your own locales and do not defile our camp.”
When I envision Israel ending settlement expansion and living in equality with the Palestinians – while Netanyahu’s government confiscates more Palestinian land and builds more settlements every single day – I wonder who is misguided?
Young men have reportedly been roaming in and around Independence Park seeking Arabs to attack, trying to identify them by their accent.
IOA Editor: As is so often the case, propaganda is Israel’s “solution” to most problems: Any rumors about the victimization of Palestinians in Israel will be quashed.
