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

Activism

A group of pro-Israel activists, backed by StandWithUs, a national US pro-Israel US organization, is planning to take legal action to force the Olympia Food Co-op to rescind its historic decision to boycott Israeli products.

UPDATED   Ali Abunimah: Lawsuit filed against Olympia Food Co-op, seeks to force end to Israel boycott

Palestinian residents of Sahknin, an Arab Galilee town, petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice five years ago over rejection by Rakefet’s admissions committee.

IOA Editor: The admission-committees system enables hundreds of Israeli Jewish towns and villages to reject individuals seeking to reside in them based on “incompatibility” – a sufficiently general term used to reject Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Israel Lands Administration’s reversal of a long standing policy of systematic discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, in this instance only, is merely a tactical move designed to deal with this potentially precedent-setting legal case: All discriminatory laws and practices remain unchanged, continuing a long history of ethnic cleansing efforts on the part of all Israeli governments, “Right” and “Left” alike.

Israel’s “March of the Million” brought out more people than any other protest in Israel’s history. Meanwhile the government has decided to keep quiet, only appointing a committee to look into the demands of the J14 movement. While many on the street have different ideas about how to move ahead, most have little faith in the committee.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators interrupt Israeli orchestra’s London performance. BBC Radio forced to suspend broadcast. UK minister tweets: Demonstrators turned entire audience pro-Israel.

IOA Editor: Indeed, the minister might be right. Unlike the disruption of speeches by Israeli officials, where irritating the audience may well be part of the objective, interrupting a concert is likely to generate total resentment by audience members who paid (often dearly) for tickets and whose attendance may have more to do with music and less to do with support of Israel. On the other hand, direct action outside the box office or music hall offers at least a chance of causing a few people to reconsider their attendance. Not that every action need result in immediate sympathy, but turning the audiences against one’s cause is hardly an effective BDS tactic.

The mainstream of the Jewish public decided on its own, and without much internal reflection, that social justice could exist alongside a system of ethnic exclusivism. Thus, while the July 14 movement proceeded through cities across Israel bellowing out cries for dignity and rights, Palestinians remained safely tucked away behind an elaborate matrix of control — the Iron Wall. Ten years of separation had not only rendered the Palestinians invisible in a physical sense. It had erased them from the Israeli conscience.

IOA Editor: A very important article that puts Israel’s July 14 protest movement in an historical context: the Zionist settlement in, and occupation of, Palestine — before and after 1967. So far, there is no evidence that the massive wave of Israeli Jews calling for “social justice” has any intentions of improving the lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel. And it is absolutely clear that ending the Occupation is not on its agenda either.

While certainly factors besides the mounting pressure on Agrexco from the BDS movement were at work here, the movement has made an impact on the Israeli economy.

Last week an unofficial group of protesters released an 11 page document to the media with a list of demands. While the document listed the end of privatization policies as well as housing, education, health care, and taxation reforms, it did not include previously discussed points about the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel that make up a fifth of the population.

Jackson explicitly lectured Palestinians for not using nonviolence, ignoring a long tradition of nonviolent resistance by occupied and disenfranchised Palestinians. In so doing he also implicitly placed blame on Palestinians for their miserable lot, apparently forgetting that it is they, not the Israelis, who are subjugated.

What’s needed very badly … is for Israelis to realize that the occupation is hurting the Palestinians terribly, that it’s driving them to try to kill us, that we are compelling them to engage in terrorism, that the blood of Israeli victims is ultimately on our hands, and that it’s up to us to stop provoking our own people’s murder by ending the occupation. And so long as we who oppose the occupation keep pretending that the Palestinians don’t have the right to resist it, we tacitly encourage Israelis to go on blindly killing and dying in defense of an unholy cause.

IOA Editor: Larry Derfner was fired from The Jerusalem Post after posting this article on his personal blog – despite subsequently removing it and apologizing. Without Derfner, a liberal-Zionist with a strong anti-Occupation record, the Post remains the same house of venom it has long been, even more so now.

Peaceful protesters, especially on college campuses, usually never face criminal charges. This has led some to believe that District Attorney Tony Rackaukas is singling the students out because of their faith and the politics involved.

If Google intends to operate Street View in occupied territory, it may face strong resistance from activists. Already activists are planning to organize demonstrations along the routes of the Google Street View vehicles, which must be published in advance according to Google’s agreement with the Ministry of Justice.

Roubini says that the current global economic system – capitalism – will remain in a crisis – a crisis economist Karl Marx predicted more than a century ago – until major systemic reforms are implemented. He says that social unrest and demonstrations are all being driven by the same thing, capitalism’s most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It stems from globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and a destructive redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital.

Following last week’s terror attack in which eight Israelis died on the Southern border with Egypt, the Israeli air force escalated its bombardment of Gaza. On Saturday, despite predictions that the cycle of violence would dissolve the rising social protest movement in Israel, thousands poured onto the streets and chanted “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.”

We are profiting from the occupation even as we groan under regressive taxation. Whether our families came from Katrielevka or Baghdad, we are profiting from the structural discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and from the very fact that they have become a minority in their own land.

A critical review of Omar Barghouti’s BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions and the treatment of BDS as, at once, an effective strategy, a moral obligation, and a movement — and a discussion of the resulting contradictions and ramifications thereof.

So this is how the occupation develops into war, which the commentators, in their righteousness, call a war “that neither side wants.” Really? Do Military Intelligence and Shin Bet not know that Hamas will fire rockets if the air force kills people in the Gaza Strip? Of course they know.

Even if the word “occupation” is not uttered, even if no one speaks of a Palestinian state, the smothering trap that successive Israeli governments have put us in for the past 40 years no longer allows us to breathe. There is a sense of hopelessness and pointlessness stemming from the knowledge that everything is the same, and only the citizens’ situation declines from day to day. There’s nothing to look forward to, no prospect for something else in sight.

Someone in the wild Sinai peninsula took a decision and sent a big, well equipped squad to infiltrate across the border into the Israeli Negev, attack buses and cars and engage in running battles with soldiers and shoot and kill and kill indiscriminately. And presto, in one minute the agenda changed and the public mood changed into a state of emergency and war at the gate and in all communications media there was no more talk of social protests, nothing but terrorism and army and security issues.

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.

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.”

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.

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)

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.