Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat: “I think it’s the time for the US administration to officially hold the Israeli government responsible for the collapse of the peace process.”
January 2011
Two years ago, Israeli shells fell on Dr Abuelaish’s family home in Gaza, killing three of his young daughters and their cousin. The horror was caught live on Israeli TV when the doctor phoned his broadcaster friend. Amazingly, the loss did not embitter Izzeldin Abuelaish. Instead he decided his girls’ deaths must not be in vain – and slowly he has turned his family tragedy into a force for peace.
Video of the Tel Aviv demonstration against rising fascism in Israel held of 15 Jan 2011.
Israeli Occupation soldier: “You don’t want to get into a confrontation with a Jewish settlement. They are the people that are closest to you, they are like your operations branch officer, that’s how it works.”
MK Michael Ben Ari (National Union): “Movements on the extreme left have proven that they are some of the people who would like to see the State of Israel destroyed. They are betraying the state and therefore there is no escape from taking steps against them. We will reveal that they are funded by enemy states and we will treat them like Hezbollah.”
IOA Editor: The original statement, in Hebrew, makes the point far clearer: “נעמיד אותם בשורה אחת עם החיזבאללה” or, “we will put them on the same line with Hezbollah,” with the strong connotation of standing them against the wall and shooting them.
The Media Review Network and the Palestine Solidarity Alliance are seeking to secure an arrest warrant in South Africa for Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni, who is due to visit that country next week, Channel 10 reported citing South African media outlets.
When people comment on [Israel] venomously around the world, we object almost instinctively and say, no, that is too much already. It is only anti-Semitic hate propaganda. But with a hand on the heart — are we not becoming, from year to year, more and more like our monstrous caricature, which is drawn by our worst enemies? For really, where are we going? Think for yourselves, as unpleasant as this may be: Are we becoming more or less racist? More or less democratic? More or less decent?
IOA Editor: It is good that Mr. Dankner has finally awakened from his self-inflicted vacuous state of mind, as former editor of Maariv, one of Israel’s two most popular rags. Unfortunately, the extent of his appreciation of Israel’s decline is remarkably limited. Indeed, very little and very late. Yet, the fact that a figure who spent decades at the heart of Israel’s propaganda machine expresses regret and disappointment in the state of Jewish State is somewhat reassuring, despite the repulsive feelings one is overwhelmed by when reading his statement.
Hilik Bar, secretary general of the Labor Party: “Judea and Samaria is the land of our fathers and the Bible, and the Labor Party and its members are not disconnected from what this region represents, historically and religiously. We should all stay true to the legacy of the nation’s Fathers and Mothers, and pass it on from generation to generation. Labor belongs to the center and not to the far left […] we feel closer to the settlements’ people here than to the far left.”
IOA Editor: As Sheizaf correctly points out, Labor has not evacuated even a single settlement, and the colonization of the West Bank started on the party’s watch in the 1970s. It was subsequently expanded greatly under Rabin and prospered under Barak, throughout the Oslo “peace talks.” Indeed, Israel’s Labor movement was responsible for the colonization of Palestine from pre-statehood and, since 1967, it has steadfastly rejected opportunities to end the conflict with the Palestinians based on Land-for-Peace, that is, ending the Occupation in return for peace. Historically, there’s little doubt that Labor had played a far larger role in dispossessing the Palestinians than than the various Likud-led governments.
MKs from the party heading the opposition recently voted in favor of two bills that should have been easy “nays”: giving mortgage help to would-be settlers and probing leftist organizations.
IOA Editor: Another, rather mundane, instance where so-called “Labor,” “Centrist” Israeli parties participate, alongside the “Extreme Right,” in the daily conduct of Israel’s colonization program: the century-long dispossession and repression of the Palestinian people, now with a new McCarthyist twist pointing to its own Jewish citizens. History doesn’t repeat itself, it simply continues.
The Foreign Press Association in Israel is threatening to boycott briefings held by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if security procedures are not changed immediately.
IOA Editor: Israel’s Shin-Bet security service has gone berserk – along with most of the country’s parliament, “Defense” (Occupation) Department, the national Police Department, and so many other public agencies and social sectors.
The corporations, no matter how badly the wars are going, make huge profits from the conflicts. They have no interest in turning off their money-making machine. Let Iraqis die. Let Afghans die. Let Pakistanis die. Let our own die. And the mandarins in Congress and the White House, along with their court jesters on the television news shows, cynically “feel our pain” and sell us out for bundles of corporate cash.
Israel’s demolition of the Shepherd’s Hotel property in the Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, in preparation for the establishment of a new Jewish settlement is part of the larger Israeli settlement enterprise aimed at maximizing territorial contiguity for illegal settlements, while incorporating the bare minimum Palestinian population within Jerusalem’s boundaries. It is designed to fragment the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem and separate them from the Old City and the remainder of the occupied Palestinian territory; and to preempt any negotiated solution on Jerusalem.
Back in the days of the Shoah [Holocaust], one of the slogans of the Jew haters was: “Jews to the Ovens.” Now, it causes me anguish to say, we have Israeli Orthodox rabbis saying the same about the Palestinians.
British film director Ken Loach brought a message of warning to the Palestinians on his first visit to the occupied territories: if you are divided you will fail.
From an unbiased viewpoint, even if it were true that present-day Jews are descended from an ancient people forcibly exiled from Palestine, it would clearly not justify Zionist colonization and the ‘repossession’ of the country after two millennia from its long-standing inhabitants. This is the epitome of hutzpah coming from Zionists, who deny the right of return to the Palestinians they evicted and exiled 62 years ago.
Documents of the Second International session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine that took place in London on November 20, 21 and 22 2010 on “Corporate Complicity in Israel’s Violations of International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law”.
On January 11, 2011 Israeli activist Yonatan Pollack began a 3 month jail sentence for riding his bike in a protest against the criminal siege of Gaza. While the war criminals responsible for the siege go free and siege protesters like Pollak are jailed. The protesters say: Prosecute the real criminals! End the siege of Gaza! Free Yonatan Pollack!
US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan – an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed – that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand. As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel.
The army’s seizure of land “for military and security purposes” quickly turned into large-scale appropriation for the exclusive benefit of Israel’s super-citizens, at the expense of the subpar species.
The persecution of “Jewish Left extremists” creates a different dynamic than the persecution of Arab citizens. Political persecution is now extending to all layers of Jewish society, permeating into areas that not even the General Security Service, and the powers to be, have ever considered.
“It cannot be expected from the State of Israel to forbid Jews from purchasing private property in Jerusalem. There is no democratic country in the world that would impose such a ban on Jews and it cannot be expected that Israel will be the one to do so.”
In the wake of the recent attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, warned that Christians face a campaign of “religious cleansing in the Middle East”. But, given Western governments’ colonial history and double standards on human rights, Arab Christians would be better served by an end to destructive Western intervention in the region than by sympathetic statements.
Instead of working toward revealing the truth behind the recent death of an anti-fence demonstrator the IDF is behaving like the propaganda ministry of an authoritarian regime.
Israel is gearing up for another major offensive into Gaza, yet the world community still remains bafflingly silent.
“Although it was not my usual custom, I made a point of kissing my children every night,” one young father from Gaza City told me. “I never knew which of us would still be alive the next day, and I wanted to say goodbye properly.”
It’s high time a legal ban on the Israeli left be instituted. Why do we continue beating around the bush? Why do we need such a taxing, exhaustive legislative process in enacting law after law? What’s the use of all these various proposals and amendments? In lieu of all the aforementioned, let’s just do one very simple thing: declare the left an illegal entity in the State of Israel. From then on, whoever thinks left, acts left, demonstrates left or tolerates left will belong in jail.
Once you are labeled and stereotyped – especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite – you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, and even beyond explanation.
Breaking the Silence director: “This is an extremely absurd and stupid policy, because whoever wants to block Internet access to people at an airport will ultimately have to consider preventing them from traveling abroad.”
Panel of inquiry will primarily look into these groups’ funding sources, particularly to examine whether foreign state or terror-linked organizations are involved.
Rashid Khalidi: “Palestinian statehood is 62 years overdue. It should have happened at the time of the partition plan, a Jewish state, an Arab state. That’s what the U.N. mandated. It’s 44 years since the West Bank and the Gaza and Jerusalem were occupied, and we’re still waiting for a peace process that is going absolutely Nowhere, in fact, has made things much worse.”
As 2010 came to a close in the West Bank under the regular, weekly cloud of teargas experienced among the villages bordering Israel’s 1967 Green Line, 2011 started with the death of Palestinian woman from the village of Bi’lin and the arrest of 19 Israeli activists in the Tel Aviv area.
While intensively engaged in illegal settlement expansion, the government of Israel is also seeking to deal with two problems: a global campaign of what it perceives as “delegitimation” – that is, objections to its crimes and withdrawal of participation in them – and a parallel campaign of legitimation of Palestine.
“We have no problem will the people of Israel. We have a problem with the army and the occupation… We know that our land will be returned to us even if someone is killed every day. We say this to Netanyahu: The demonstrations here will not end until we get our land back. We believe in a popular struggle, a non-violent struggle. We don’t want a violent struggle.”
An anonymous group of students has created a document to express their frustration born of Hamas’s violent crackdowns on ‘western decadence’, the destruction wreaked by Israel’s attacks and the political games played by Fatah and the UN.
Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, was evacuated to the Ramallah hospital yesterday after inhaling massive amounts of tear-gas during the weekly protest in Bil’in, and died of poisoning this morning. Abu Rahmah was the sister of Bassem Abu Rahmah who was also killed during a peaceful protest in Bil’in on April 17th, 2010.
A resident of the West Bank village of Bil’in died on Saturday morning in a Ramallah hospital after she was exposed to tear gas that was shot by IDF soldiers to disperse the crowd of demonstrators against the separation wall in the village on Friday.
