Ban Ki-moon: “The two state vision where Israel and Palestinians can live… side by side in peace and security — that is a still a valid vision and I fully support it… And I support also the statehood of Palestinians; an independent, sovereign state of Palestine. It has been long overdue…”
September 2011
Hamas needs a blockade to regulate from within so that the subjects of “independent Gaza” will be exposed as little as possible to different realities and will not question its policies. Hamas needs the blockade and needs Gaza to be cut off from the rest of Palestinian society to ensure the continuation of its regime.
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
The protest is supported by 90% of Israelis. It is led mainly by students and white-collar workers who are described by the media, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘middle class’. In fact, the demands raised by them indicate that they feel they are being proletarianised, and display solidarity with the poor. The prevailing spirit is that of egalitarianism, self-activity and grassroots direct democracy.
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.
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo…
WikiLeaks documents now reveal that one of the options secretly discussed was to relocate the residents of Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon to the West Bank, possibly to the newly constructed Rawabi urban complex.
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.
Human rights groups and international media have been reporting for years that the IDF uses unmanned drones armed with missiles in order to attack targets in Gaza. This is the first instance of it being published in WikiLeaks, quoting the words of the IDF Advocate-General.
Haneen Zoabi: “Just as Israelis are beginning to seriously consider a new social order, they must also consider a new diplomatic order in which Israel will pay a heavy price for its policy of oppression, occupation, and belligerence.”
The Palestinians are walking into a trap of their own making. With the so-called “peace process” going nowhere, and with the number of Israeli settlements on the rise, the UN vote is an act of desperation, not strength, on the part of the Palestinian leadership.
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.
Sygmunt Bauman: “Israel does not see the missiles falling on communities along the border as a bad thing. On the contrary, they would be worried and even alarmed were it not for this fire.”
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.
“Under normal trade and transit conditions … Israel would no longer enjoy overwhelming dominance as the leading OPT trading partner,” the UNCTAD report says.
Whenever a conflict between democracy and Jewish values arises, the new definition of Israel would allow courts and legislators to favour the latter. The proposed bill will also make halacha, Jewish religious law, “a source of inspiration to the legislature and the courts”. And, in the spirit of favouring the Jewish character of the state over a state for all its citizens, the legislation would also downgrade Arabic from an official language to one with “special status”.
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.
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