As a Libyan backed aid ship sails for the Gaza Strip, another group of international activists has been defying the blockade, but this time on the land. Foreigners acting as human shields have been helping farmers in Gaza harvest their crops.
July 2010
Hundreds of Israeli college professors have signed a petition accusing the education minister of endangering academic freedoms after he threatened to “punish” any lecturer or institution that supports a boycott of Israel.
Neve Gordon: “I am worried about what is happening to the space for debate in Israel. I find that there is a proto-fascist mindset developing. One of the slogans you hear a lot now is no citizenship without loyalty. It is an inversion of the republican idea that the state should be loyal to the citizen.”
Hollywood actors Meg Ryan and Dustin Hoffman backed out of attending this year’s annual Jerusalem Film Festival, which is set to kick off this coming Thursday, following the international outcry over Israel’s attack on the Gaza aid flotilla.
The report, prepared by the Office of the Co-ordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, found that thousands of Palestinians have limited access to East Jerusalem hospitals because of the barrier. Ambulances are routinely delayed at checkpoints, and Palestinian vehicles are not allowed to pass through barrier checkpoints, forcing sick or elderly patients to walk.
Tom Segev dismantles Morris’s assessment of the 1948 War and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian from their homeland. Pointing to Morris’s lack of concern for Palestinian victims, Segev counters Morris’s false claims on the actual war crimes carried out by the Israelis, for example, in Deir Yassin – acts which the the State of Israel and its Supreme Court still keep secret.
Haaretz: “An increasing number of complaints of abuse during the interrogation of Palestinians from the Hebron area can apparently be traced to a computer program that grades police performance. An investigative report on the digitization of evil.”
IOA Editor: This important report shows how the Israeli Occupation authorities combine sophisticated performance management techniques, taken from the American corporate world, with traditional interrogation/torture techniques – resulting in sheer horror for their Palestinians subjects.
Norman Finkelstein discusses the Obama – Netanyahu meeting with Laura Flanders of GRITtv, calling the “peace process” a “colonization process” and detailing Israel’s settlement enterprise.
Commentators of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often complain that there has not yet been a legitimate Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. to emerge from within Palestinian civil society. The reality is that there are many Palestinians engaged in popular unarmed resistance to the Israeli occupation, preferring organized demonstrations in the West Bank to suicide bombs in Tel Aviv.
The secrecy surrounding the attack on the nuclear plant in eastern Syria in September 2007 was justified only for the period immediately after the operation, according to the CIA head at the time, Gen. Michael Hayden. That secrecy had been meant to save President Bashar Assad from embarrassment that could have provoked him to retaliate.
A question for Obama and Netanyahu: Where to? … Where are they headed? What will improve in another year? What will be more promising in another two years? The Syrian president is knocking at the door begging for peace with Israel, and the two leaders are ignoring him. Will he still be knocking in two years? The Arab League’s initiative is still valid; terror has almost ceased. What will the situation be after they have finished compromising over the freeze in construction of balconies and ritual baths?
“Israeli academia will suffer great damage if politicians dictate to it what is right and wrong to say, think, research and teach, and force it to adopt that kind of criteria for admitting, promoting or rejecting researchers and professors. Your statement about intending to use your authority to act against professors who support an academic boycott of Israel are causing just such damage.”
At the end of this month, my brother Bassam Aramin, the persistent Combatant for Peace, was meant to … go with his family to Bradford University in the UK, to complete his masters in Conflict Resolution. … Unfortunately, there is still £20,000 needed, despite considerable efforts.
A Palestinian music video.
Meeting at the White House, President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized the “unbreakable” bond between Israel and the United States. Despite ongoing Israeli settlement expansion, roadblocks, closures and the attack on the Gaza-bound aid flotilla, Obama said he thinks Israel “has shown restraint.” Democracy Now! speaks to veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass.
“What’s really disturbing about Operation Cast Lead is not the ordinary soldiers. The true problematic situation is the general policy, that they tell soldiers ‘Go in and shoot, you’re at war – whatever moves should be taken down.’”
Commentary on Gilbert Achcar’s work and a review of his recently published book: The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.”
This week we will join with other groups using the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign to pressure the Israeli government to respect human rights & international law, and to raise money for an important documentary film about Operation Cast Lead, the assault on Gaza.
Were it not for Mohammed Abu Tir’s red beard, this would perhaps be only a marginal news item: Israel is working to expel four Palestinian residents of Jerusalem affiliated with Hamas from the city of their birth.
Unhappy settlers: “The fact that B’Tselem decided to publish it on the day of Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama to try to make it go badly reveals the organization’s face as a systemic harmer of Israeli interests,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
B’Tselem’s Report:
By Hook and By Crook: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank
The defense establishment is demanding that the state delay approval for the construction of gas reception terminals on a strip of Israel’s coastline.
Video of IDF soldiers, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, patrolling as a Muslim call to prayer is heard. Then the music changes and they break into a Macarena-like dance.
As opposed to the conventional thinking, the tens of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons are human beings; as opposed to the conventional thinking, they also have families whose worlds have been destroyed. Most of them are not murderers, some are political prisoners in every way; others are various kinds of “bargaining chips” or throwers of stones and Molotov cocktails and carriers of kitchen knives.
A number of prominent Israeli jurists, intellectuals, writers and leftist public figures co-sign letter that charges Jerusalem police with ‘illegal and inequitable’ conduct towards Sheikh Jarrah protesters.
Stuart Henochowicz: “I certainly don’t think Emily is a self-hating Jew … I think she is an ethical Jew of the highest order. I think she is what Jewish people should be about. I don’t think Emily should be a poster person for anyone … Emily is her own person … The Palestinians have been living in a cage for 43 years, so my heart goes out to them. … This is what Emily saw.”
IOA Editor: Emily surely isn’t a (self) hating person. The term “self-hating Jew” is a trick as old as the Occupation itself. Some of us continue to be subjected to it — for decades now — simply because we challenge the legitimacy of the Occupation. The same people using such name-calling also try twisting our criticism of the Occupation, calling us “delegitimizers.”
More on Emily and her artwork:
Images: Art – Emily Henochowicz
Talks aimed at reaching an intelligence-sharing agreement between the European Union and Israel have skirted around the location of Israel’s national police headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem… “The negotiations so far have not touched upon the issue of the location of the main office of the Israeli police in East Jerusalem,” a Europol spokesman [stated].
[B]anking sanctions impact quickly upon financial elites who have the clout to pressure governments to concede political change. Trade sanctions, by contrast, impact hardest on the poor or lower-paid workers, who have virtually no political influence. SWIFT will, however, only take action against Israeli banks if ordered to do so by a Belgian court, and then only in very exceptional circumstances. Such very exceptional circumstances are now well-documented by the UN-commissioned Goldstone report.
Israel’s botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely to get worse over time, which will cause major problems for Americans who have a deep attachment to the Jewish state.
Published by OR Books – 31 March 2010
Buy the book HERE
Ken Livingstone, the host of Epilogue book review program, calls Jonathan Cook’s book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations” “shocking” and “devastating.”
Five activists who caused £180,000 damage to an arms factory were acquitted after they argued they were seeking to prevent Israeli war crimes… The five admitted they had broken in and sabotaged the factory, but argued they were legally justified in doing so.
