Like the physical assault on the boat, the Israeli media assault was also reckless, clumsy, malicious, and dangerous… I am a firm believer that actions speak louder than words, and in this spirit I thought it might help to take a closer look at IHH, and judge this group based on their actions, rather than empty words.
July 2010
Board member: “I am trying to be realistic – the Olympia Food Co-Op boycott is not going to change the Israeli policy, but I believe that these small drops will eventually have an effect. I would like to see more co-ops joining the boycott and more voices involved.”
Almost immediately, Shapira related, she began talking about his activity in Global BDS Movement: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for Palestine, which supports measures against Israel… The agent reminded Shapira the Knesset was expected shortly to outlaw calls for sanctions against Israel.
[Netanyahu's] has so far avoided engaging meaningfully in the limited talks the White House is promoting with the Palestinians while the pace of settlement building in the WB has been barely affected by the 10-month freeze, due to end in September. In the meantime, planning officials have repeatedly approved large new housing projects in E. Jerusalem and the WB that have undercut the negotiations and will make the establishment of a Palestinian state – viable or otherwise – far less likely.
UPDATE Watch Video – Netanyahu: “At that moment I actually stopped the Oslo accord”
Pending court approval, government could assume control over properties of people who moved to enemy states during the War of Independence, as well as structures that belong to people now residing in the [occupied] territories.
IOA Editor: Not “legal” and not “abandoned.” The term “abandoned property” was created by the Israeli legal system after Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s Arab population in 1948, specifically to acquire Palestinian owned properties. In many cases, then and now, the “abandoned” properties belong to a population that was forcibly evicted, or kept out, of the very property that was subsequently deemed “abandoned.”
Brigadier Ilan Malka is not alone. More than 550 [IDF] officers and men of IDF who participated in the “Cast Lead” operation have been interrogated by the investigative military police of the IDF in the last 18 months.
There are about 35,000 Palestinians who live in the West Bank but are registered as Gazans. Due to Israel’s successful 20-year-old policy of isolating the population of the Strip, they are in permanent danger of deportation.
Jonathan Cook: The “one video Benjamin Netanyahu … must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles… Its contents threaten to gravely embarrass not only Mr. Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama.”
Gideon Levy: “Outrageous”
IOA Editor: Here it is, with English subtitles, the ‘smoking gun’ with which Netanyahu killed the “peace process.” And continues to do so.
“I came to save lives, but also because it’s important to me to show that Israel is not the Flotilla Country that it is painted out to be,” said the Israeli doctor… “International aid organizations here are very pro-Palestinian and not too friendly to Israelis,” said an American training specialist.
Forget the Bar-Ilan University speech, forget the virtual achievements in his last visit to the US; this is the real Netanyahu. No more claims that the Palestinians are to blame for the failure of the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu exposed the naked truth…: he destroyed the Oslo accords with his own hands and deeds, and he’s even proud of it. After years in which we were told that the Palestinians are to blame, the truth has emerged from the horse’s mouth.
Israeli border police destroyed several Palestinian fields in Al Beqa’a Valley just east of Hebron on 6 July 2010, directly affecting the livelihood of more than one hundred Palestinians.
An expanded security aid package should allow Israel to reach tough decisions in its peace talks with the Palestinians, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Andrew J. Shapiro said Friday, adding that Washington planned to provide Israel with its most extensive security aid package in history.
IOA Editor: If you believe this, we have a local bridge to sell you. An important update from an Administration that, when it comes to the ME, is no better than its predecessors, and possibly even worse. Wearing his horse-blinds tightly, Mr. Obama is telling us he didn’t mean a word he said in Cairo last year (“A New Beginning“).
I am hastening to call for this boycott because I want to earn a footnote in Jewish history: He tried, Canute-like, to stand against the wave of fascism that engulfed the Zionist project.
The Israeli government is facing legal action for contempt over its refusal to implement a Supreme Court ruling that it end a policy of awarding preferential budgets to Jewish communities, including settlements, rather than much poorer Palestinian Arab towns and villages inside Israel.
Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live? It’s hard to say.
Some things are amazingly simple. In Sheikh Jarrah you can see pure theft in all its starkness. The Bible says “Thou shalt not steal,” and it – God, that is – was referring to Sheikh Jarrah. Any one can see it. The shocking thing, of course, is that the whole apparatus of the modern state – the municipality, its committees and master plans and grey bureaucrats, the mayor, the government, the Prime Minister, the cabinet, the courts, the police, the secret services – all these have colluded in actively perpetrating the theft.
Vague promises to extend the partial freeze on settlement building and to alleviate some of the daily hardships encountered by Palestinians are no more than the blackmail tactics Israel has always employed against those under its control.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
IOA Editor: This is a very important series. Among other things, it confirms Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part II: Israel Inflates National Security Concerns in Order to Invalidate Labor and Class Disputes
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part III: Israeli Elite Profited through Privatization of Public Assets – Workers Are Asked to Sacrifice
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part IV: Rational and Irrational Zionism – The Moderates and the Right
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part V: One State or Two, There Should Be Economic Justice – The Only State Now is Israel, It Has Obligations
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part VI: Israel’s Elite and the Far Right – Israel Sells Itself As ‘Frontline’ Against Islam
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
A seven-part series on the political economy of the Israeli Occupation. Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an Israeli economist and expert in the political economy of the Occupation whose forthcoming book is The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Part VII: The Boycott Israel Movement – The Reasons for Boycotting Israel
IOA Editor: This is a very important series, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, that Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay.
According to the investigation … the goods could have been used to manufacture nuclear weapons and missile programs… It is worth mentioning that in the 1980s … Israeli companies and individuals have been involved in all sorts of technological espionage, steeling US secrets, technology and equipment.
Under the new law [if enacted], any group could sue damages of up to NIS 30,000 from anyone who launched a boycott against them, or incited a boycott, without having to prove that damage was indeed caused. An additional sum could then be demanded once damages were proven.
A few weeks ago, human rights activist, Ezra Nawi, was released from jail after serving a month’s sentence following his attempt to prevent a bulldozer from destroying Palestinian homes in the South Hebron Hills… Today, his pickup truck is falling apart, and he desperately needs to replace it. Ezra cannot afford to buy a car, so a group of friends has decided to collect donations so that Ezra can buy a newer car, which will, in turn, enable him to continue his important work in the West Bank.
Throughout his life, Ameer has struggled for the rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel … as well as those of the Palestinian people overall. He has the ability to lead and to convene diverse viewpoints, bringing them together across sect and ideology. His ability to network locally, at the Arab level, and internationally, coupled with his clear strategic vision – this is what Israel is trying to silence.
It has become impossible to supervise the defense budget … It is utterly opaque. The system does everything to deflect true supervision… [T]he army is completely opaque to us. There is no civilian supervision over the IDF.
IOA Editor: This is an important story, confirming Amira Hass’s assertions, made regularly, about the power of the Israeli defense industry — from the professional classes of the IDF to the private sector arms manufacturers, dealer/exporters, “consultants,” and the rest — and the inherent financial and personal interest it has in continuing the Occupation. The Occupation is an essential part of the “business environment” of Israel’s largest and most influential economic sector. Civilian financial oversight of the IDF is only one aspect of a much bigger picture. See also:
Amira Hass: Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay
Jonathan Cook: Remote-Controlled Killing
The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation
Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people — Palestinians in Gaza — who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick. The [Israeli] female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza.
Haneen Zoabi: “It’s not surprising that a country that strips the fundamental rights of its Arab citizens would revoke the privileges of a Knesset member who loyally represents her electorate… You are punishing me out of vengeance… When you threaten the Arab MKs and the Arabs’ protectors, you threaten democracy and co-existence between Jews and Arabs.”
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said one of the homes … was inhabited, although the family was not home at the time. The demolition is the first this year of an inhabited home, according to group … and four of the six people who lived there are children. In the Issawaieh village… one house was being built by a single mother of five, who fainted on the scene of the demolition and was taken to a local hospital.
Yousef Jabareen: “It’s a feeling of frustration and of not belonging … That the … state is excluding you and you are not counted as an equal… In some areas you could identify some characteristics of apartheid that should raise a lot of concern about the future.”
Young Israeli Jew: “It’s a kind of psychological warfare. The idea is to get [Palestinians] to leave.”
Israel’s diplomatic and defense establishments will hold several meetings this week on how to contend with what some officials described as a “barrage” of international investigations into Israel’s conduct. Officials say particularly concerned over UN probe of country’s court system in the wake of the Goldstone report on the Gaza war.
Amira Hass: The court agreed with the state’s position that … easing the blockade “did not say anything about extending the present policy about travel,” a policy that allows Gazans to leave “only in humanitarian cases, with the emphasis on urgent medical cases.”
Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin travels to Jenin and Ramallah as a guest of the Palestinian Authority security service.
