Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
Head of the Kfir infantry brigade, was censured by IDF Central Command chief Gadi Shamni; was subject to criminal investigation against him, before the case was closed for lack of evidence; and is now to be promoted.
IOA Editor: Advocacy of violence towards Palestinians by a top IDF occupation officer is rewarded with a promotion, naturally.
Saturday saw the largest demonstration in Israel’s history in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured onto the streets to demonstrate against the high housing prices and rising costs of commodities. Meanwhile Israel’s Palestinian citizens who make up 20% of the population join the movement that began on July 14th and became known as J14.
This time, too, Israel will accuse the Arabs of unilateral steps, ignore the United Nations, expand settlements in the West Bank, and build more neighborhoods for Jews in East Jerusalem.
It’s no accident that the outlines of extreme capitalism, a policy based on the continual splintering of society due to competition among people, is inherent within the occupation. Anyone who travels around the West Bank and the Jordan Valley can witness capitalism’s geographic manifestations. Cantonization, the proliferation of checkpoints and the bureaucratic control of traffic are all components of separation designed to make survival difficult and perpetuate control by the central authority.
Moshé Machover: “He had precisely what we lacked then – a consistent and comprehensive grasp of the Zionist settlement process and especially its impact on Arab society in Palestine. We acquired from him a deeper, more complete conceptualization of Israel as the realization of Zionist settlement. He also grasped the Arab Revolution as one indivisible process.”
State Department announcement comes in light of Hamas demands to audit the books of US charities, New York Times reports, which would violate U.S. policy against direct contacts with Hamas.
As the movement grows, some will continue to think and demand “justice” within the borders of one nation, at the expense of the other nation that lives in this land. Others will understand that this will never be a country of justice and welfare if it is not a state of all its citizens.
UN coordinator for the ME peace process: “If confirmed, this provocative action undermines ongoing efforts by the international community to bring the parties back to negotiations.”
For in this stretch of land, despite the many fences and walls and barriers of all sorts that scar its landscape, the borders are not clear and they are not permanent – not only the physical borders between one power and another and between one authority and another, but also the mental and moral borders between what is permissible and what is forbidden, between good and evil, between stupidity and wickedness, between the humiliated and those who humiliate.
Yasmin Dahr and Eilat Maoz put Israel’s July 14 Movement in its proper historical, social, and political context – something the protest movement’s loosely structured leadership has, so far, insisted on avoiding. Important analysis. (HEBREW)
Israeli official: “UAVs are a critical part of the battlefield today, as can be seen by the dramatic increase in the amount of flight hours of drones in the IAF – and they can also contribute to watching over gas fields.”
Israel Harel does not deal with the simple fact that the land on which his son and his friends are living is private land, registered properly in the name of Palestinians, who have submitted to the High Court the deeds that prove their family’s ownership of the land. The petitioners’ documents are unequivocal, and the State of Israel is not denying their ownership.
The [Washington] spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan: “People don’t really know what their children are reading in textbooks. One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians.”
On July 14th, eight Israeli students set up tents in the heart of Tel Aviv. Within days they were joined by hundreds of tents, and tent cities sprung up throughout the country. This movement, which became known as “July 14th” saw dozens of direct actions such as blockading the entrance to the Israeli parliament and massive protests with tens of thousands on the streets of Tel Aviv and nine other cities.
The activists, who belong to the extreme right, claim solution to housing crisis is construction in the West Bank; plan to set up dozens of more tents in coming days.
Forty-two cabinet ministers and MKs, all members of the [right wing pro-settlement] Eretz Yisrael Lobby, signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, calling on him to solve the housing crisis that has swept up the country by building in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
IOA Editor: Turning problems into opportunities…
Unprecedented ruling states that Migron must be razed by April 2012; Israeli government had admitted outpost was built on lands belonging to Palestinians, but has thus far failed to dismantle it.
I hope that the activists in the Arab countries, especially in Egypt, will realise their vital and deep influence on the Israelis’ motivation to protest.
The great majority of the Israelis demanding affordable housing, even if they may understand the connection, are reluctant to articulate that their economic distress is exacerbated by the cost of the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Israel’s military budget for fear that this stance would discredit them politically. Consequently, it may take a long time before a significant number of Israelis are convinced or compelled to abandon their colonial settlement project and share the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with Palestinians on the basis of equality.
A Palestinian financial crisis? Problems with donor countries? Economist Raja Khalidi offers some different explanations for the PA’s fiscal problems.
Anyone who asserts that there is no construction in Israel should peruse OECD data on building beyond the Green Line. 9% of GDP beyond the Green Line comes from construction, compared with 4.7% of GDP within the Green Line. The difference is even greater for residential construction: within the Green Line, residential construction accounts for just over a fifth of investment; beyond the Green Line, it accounts for almost 45%.
Because I believe in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, equal rights for Palestinians and Jews, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes and lands in 1948, I support boycotting — and calling on others to boycott — all Israeli companies that help perpetuate these injustices.
The time has come to stick their hand in the fire and fight for all the issues they have steered clear of so far – the security budget, the settlements, the occupation, the breaches of democracy and the rule of capital, without which no real rectification can be made, not even in the cost of rent.
Israeli authorities are suing residents of a makeshift Bedouin village for the cost of repeatedly evicting them and razing “illegal structures” where they live, an official said on Wednesday… An Israeli non-governmental group, Bedouin-Jewish Justice, reported in March that the homes there had been destroyed and rebuilt 21 times since July 2010.
IOA Editor: Dispossession neoliberal-style where the victim is charged for his oppressor’s operating expenses.
For Israel’s housing protest to succeed, it must be defined as political – and it must be translated into political acts. The issues it raises must be placed at the center of Israel’s democratic life. The argument over who gets what must find expression within political parties and elections.
IOA Editor: This domestic Israeli (Jewish and largely middle-class) housing campaign is rapidly spreading and may well threaten the stability of Netanyahu’s government.
However, so far, demonstration activists and their leaders have dealt with the housing crisis outside of any political context. They didn’t discuss the dramatic discrepancy between Israel’s domestic and West Bank housing development policies, let alone make the connection between Israeli governments’ (past and present) high priory for settlement construction and low priority for domestic development – both designed to increase the size of the settlement population. Similarly, they didn’t include Israeli Palestinians — whose community has suffered a far greater housing shortage for decades — in their national campaign.
This ‘missing’ context is a true reflection of the extent of this Israeli-Jewish struggle. It is also likely to constrain the significance of any ‘success’ resulting from this campaign.
Six governments preferred to encourage Israelis to go and live on settlements rather than in the periphery of the country. This had a critical effect on the level of supply in various regions, and therefore on the prices of real estate.
Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz confirmed Monday that the state subsidizes bus tickets within West Bank settlements, causing them to be cheaper than tickets for rides within the Green Line.
IOA Editor: Transportation options and costs are an integral part of household location decisions. Therefore, public transportation subsidies to Jewish residents of illegal West Bank settlements, which reduce the cost of living in the West Bank compared to pre-1967 Israel, constitute yet another incentive for Israelis to become settlers.
What will the Palestinians do at the UN in September? The question appears to haunt Washington and Tel Aviv as they prepare to block Palestinian attempts to obtain UN recognition, as though the very idea of such action represents a form of political impudence that merits the harshest international rejection. Sober accounts by Palestinians of what they may expect from a trip to the UN have done little to allay the dark cloud of suspicion that is fostered in mainstream accounts.
Inclusion of Jordan Valley, northern Dead Sea and area surrounding Ariel in ‘settlement blocs’ whose takeover the IDF Civil Administration is advancing, would prevent establishment of Palestinian state with territorial contiguity… Until now it was not known that the administration, which is a military agency, was charged with distinguishing between the blocs Israel is demanding to annex as part of a final-status agreement and the rest of the settlements.
A video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem shows an IDF officer pointing a loaded gun at an unarmed Palestinian in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar, near Hebron, last month.
On 11 July 2011, the Knesset plenum passed the Anti-Boycott Law, which enables the filing of civil lawsuits against those who call for a boycott of the State of Israel or any of its territories (e.g. Israeli settlements). Following the final approval of this law, ACRI has prepared a Q&A document, to explain the legal implications of this law.
The Other Israel and Occupation Magazine’s joint summary of current events and activities.
We could get in trouble for this. Not in New York City, where this editorial is being written, because legitimate comment is protected under the First Amendment. But our editorials, along with many other stories and columns in the Forward, also appear every Sunday in the English edition of the Haaretz newspaper in Israel. And now, with a new anti-boycott law approved by the Knesset and due to take effect in less than 90 days, the boundaries of free speech and legitimate expression have grown unpredictably and suffocatingly tight.
Ms Zoabi, a vociferous critic of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, was a passenger on the Mavi Marmara, attracting fury in Israel. She was branded a traitor by colleagues and stripped of some parliamentary privileges… The Knesset’s ethics committee voted to bar Ms Zoabi from parliamentary debates until the current session ends next month, declaring that her actions had “harmed national security and were inconsistent with the legitimate conduct of a lawmaker”.
On July 11th the Israeli parliament passed the controversial anti-boycott law. The law was written in response to the mounting global movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and profits from its settlements and industry in the occupied West Bank. The Boycott movement began as a mass Palestinian civil society call, and has been supported from the beginning by some Israelis. The new law bans publicly calling for a boycott, classifying it a civil wrong.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
