The Palestinian people are under occupation. It doesn’t surprise me that the media has not raised the issue of the thousands of prisoners who are in prison. They have never given us any sense of value or consideration. It was Shalit who was the one who was oppressed. He was the one paying the price. The whole world was talking about Shalit. But no people can ever be victorious as long as the value of an individual is not respected. Up until now, we are worthless to the international community. Because it is westerners who have ‘value.’
2011
Ross has played a crucial role in crafting Middle East policies that have prolonged and exacerbated the more than six-decade conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. His efforts contributed significantly to the growth in the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories from well under 200,000 in the 1980s to nearly 600,000 today. It is in no small measure due to him that the two-state solution is all but dead.
Palestinian activists will attempt to peacefully board segregated Israeli public transportation in the occupied West Bank to travel to East Jerusalem in action reminiscent of the Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Rides to the US South. UPDATED
Professor Norman Finkelstein stormed UK campuses in November, lecturing to packed auditoriums in London, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham on How to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Israeli forces overnight Sunday raided the homes of seven prisoners freed as part of the Oct. 18 prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel.
Since February, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to demolish all outposts built on private Palestinian land, right-wing activists have been applying heavy pressure on him to reverse that decision. Publication of the report on Derekh Ha’avot would cause more headaches for the authorities and bring the petitioners back to the High Court.
One day not long from now we will wake up to a different kind of country, the country that’s now in the making. It won’t look like the country we know, which already has its share of flaws, distortions and ills. And when we become aware of this, it will be too late. At that point, the old Israel will be described in glowing terms, a model of democracy and justice, compared to the new version that is taking shape as we close our eyes to it, day after day, new law after law.
Noam Chomsky has been awarded this year’s Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s only international peace prize. In his City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, “Revolutionary Pacifism: Choices and Prospects,” Chomsky covers activist A.J. Muste’s concept of “revolutionary pacifism,” the principle of universality, and the long history of violent US behavior around the world, including the Middle East.
US Likudniks, who had remained relatively restrained on [book talks] until now, could not stand it any longer. They launched a massive attack against me in the form of a smear article … written by two Campus Watch vigilantes and first published on FrontPageMag… From there, the article was reproduced by countless websites and blogs belonging to the same ideological swarm, and distributed by them to their extensive email lists.
Palestinian Authority Minister of Prisoners Issa Qaraqe said the situation of Palestinian prisoners was worse than before the Oct. 18 prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. The deal also included an end to solitary confinement and punitive measures, he said. Director of the parliamentary prisoners’ committee Khalida Jarar said Israel has detained 110 Palestinians since the deal was made.
Haneen Zoabi talks about conditions of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the racism that is inherent to Israel as a Jewish State during the 3rd International Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town, November 2011.
The Tribunal finds that Israel subjects the Palestinian people to an institutionalised regime of domination amounting to apartheid as defined under international law. This discriminatory regime manifests in varying intensity and forms against different categories of Palestinians depending on their location. The Palestinians living under colonial military rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are subject to a particularly aggravated form of apartheid.
UPDATED
Download the full findings of the Russell Tribunal session HERE
Assailants spray paint Mamilla Cemetery headstones with the slogans ‘Death to Arabs’ and the name of a settlement outpost slated for demolition. This is only the last in a series of violent activities against Palestinians and Israeli anti-Occupation activists.
IOA Editor: Mamilla Cemetery, a historic Jerusalem and Muslim landmark, has now been relegated by a junior Haaretz journalist to a site “next to the [yet-to-be-built] Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance.” The cemetery, containing centuries of Palestinian history, has been desecrated for decades by Israeli governments intent on eradicating Palestinian history. The museum, representing a distorted view of Jewish history, and imported from the US, is intended to physically replace yet another bit of Palestinian history — in Jerusalem, the very heart of Israeli-Palestinian contention. The Mamilla Cemetery case is crucially important: it is a very real, yet also a very symbolic, representation of Israeli ethnic cleansing in action.
Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London; his latest work is The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Achcar discusses what he calls the “Nazification” of the Arabs, what implications this narrative has had on the past and present political situation in the Middle East, and some of the context from which anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial has taken root in a segment of Arab society.
The US and Israel have both been intent on forestalling the appearance of the Palestinian Authority before the UN, in case it succeeded in winning support for its unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence. This is a reversal of history: in 1948, the US regarded the prospect of an Israeli declaration of independence as a threat to its interests in the region, and the State Department, Defence Department and CIA were worried about such an outcome.
Haneen Zoabi: “Israel will not stop being racist unless it pays the price of its racism and unless it loses the support of the international world. Israel keeps being racist because it enjoys also the support of the international community.”
A study commissioned by Israel’s Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barakat to address housing shortages in the city, obtained by Hebrew daily Maariv, shows designs for 60,718 housing units in the city, with the majority — 52,363 homes — planned for East Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem office of Israeli group Peace Now was evacuated after receiving a bomb threat on Sunday evening, the organization said. Unknown assailants warned the building would explode in ten minutes in a “price tag” attack over the office intercom, the group said in a statement.
It appears that Anonymous carried out a major cyber-attack against Israeli government websites. Haaretz reports that IDF, Mossad, Shin-Bet, and several other government websites are currently inaccessible. Watch video for an accurate and sophisticated political statement.
The US is “absolutely” concerned that Israel is preparing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and this concern is increasing… as is US “watchfulness” of Iran and Israel over the past few weeks by US Central and European Commands, which watch Iranian and Israeli developments.
IOA Editor: Whether information or disinformation, none of this has stopped the US from tightening its close military relations with Israel even further. The US, as the ‘senior partner’ in the US-Israel relations, could stop any Israeli action if it seriously wanted it.
UPDATED Top Israeli firm: World more likely to accept nuclear Iran than pay high cost of war
US Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro says security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper, more intense than ever before.
US cooperation with Israel [includes] various security concerns, from Israel’s undertakings of tasks the US might not be willing to do, to sharing intelligence and missile defense cooperation, to the Israeli expertise in cyber security that has already benefitted U.S. banking, communications, transportation and utilities.
IOA Editor: The full report on which the article is based, entitled Israel: A Strategic Asset for the US, can be downloaded on the article page. Highly recommended by Moshé Machover as “an antidote to the widespread thesis that the Israeli/Zionist tail is wagging the US dog. The US imperialists are not innocents coerced or manipulated by the evil Zionists. In fact, they are senior and junior partners, respectively.”
US cooperation with Israel [includes] various security concerns, from Israel’s undertakings of tasks the US might not be willing to do, to sharing intelligence and missile defense cooperation, to the Israeli expertise in cyber security that has already benefitted U.S. banking, communications, transportation and utilities.
Watch video…
In the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Israel’s prolonged occupation has led to astonishing detention statistics. Since 1967, over 700,000 Palestinians have been detained: this figure amounts to around 20 percent of the existing Palestinian population in the OPT, which consists of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Among the most egregious aspects of Israeli detention policy is its treatment of child prisoners.
A report by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Public Committee Against Torture (PCAT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), claims that medical staff are also failing to report suspicion of torture and ill-treatment, returning detainees to their interrogators and passing medical information to interrogators.
Like thwarted spoiled bullies, both Israel and the US reacted with theatrical pique and fury. The US, never applying sanctions against Israel’s decades- long war crimes in Gaza and the OPT’s by suspending its steadfast cornucopia of billions in aid and arms, immediately withdrew its $80 million contribution to UNESCO as a collective punishment.
Moshe Dayan: Fundamentally, a Palestinian state is an antithesis of the State of Israel… The basic and naked truth is that there is no fundamental difference between the relation of the Arabs of Nablus to Nablus and that of the Arabs of Jaffa to Jaffa… And if today we set out on this road and say that the Palestinians are entitled to their own state because they are natives of the same country and have the same rights, then it will not end with the West Bank. The West Bank together with the Gaza Strip do not amount to a state… The establishment of such a Palestinian state would lay a cornerstone to something else… Either the State of Israel — or a Palestinian state.
A gang of thugs, the forum of eight senior [Israeli] ministers, decided on the steps to punish the man who dared to act contrary to the desires of the familia. They’re building another 2,000 housing units in the settlements, which are for the first time being characterized as punishment. And they’re stealing the Palestinians’ tax money and canceling some of their leaders’ VIP passes.
The responsibility of the solidarity movement … is not to get caught up in wonkish or wishful “one-versus-two-state” disputations, but to do everything we can to advance the bottom-up struggle where we are. This is all the more important because, while gains can be won now to get the occupation’s foot a little bit off the Palestinians’ neck, no lasting solution seems possible in isolation from a broader democratic revolutionary transformation of the region.
Indeed, the Oslo Accords created false symmetry between the occupier/colonizer and the occupied/colonized. This symmetry denied the Palestinians an important asset in negotiations for their independence: recognition in principle of Israeli and international responsibility for having wronged the Palestinians and robbed them of their homeland and rights.
Americans for Peace Now files amicus brief with US Supreme Court to oppose listing Israel as home country of Jerusalem-born Americans; US has never recognized any sovereignty over Jerusalem, be it Israel, Palestinian or Jordanian.
Noam Chomsky delivers a rare lecture on the US and Israel-Palestine (video).
The academic Orientalists experts who sold the defense establishment the Shi’ites, and Hamas thereafter, “in order to stop the PLO,” failed in their understanding of the simplest matter: Occupation gives birth to opposition; opposition gives birth to death; death leads to more conflict, etc.
