Michael Sfard: “While talks are happening Israel gets away with anything. Land grabs, the expansion of settlements, even [Operation] Cast Lead was waged while there were peace talks.”
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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.
The significance of a Palestinian state joining the UN is that, for the first time, it will be the Palestinians who will decide what the international legal framework is that is binding in their territory.
Michael Sfard: “I am embarrassed to say that the investigation team did not even go to Ni’ilin, the scene of the shooting… If a Jewish man had been shot and wounded, there is no doubt that the entire village would be under curfew and Israel would do everything possible to investigate.”
An Israel reserves soldier, who has refused to partake in army duty to protest Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, has gone on hunger strike in military prison, in what he said was a show of solidarity with Palestinian administrative detainees.
Marian Houk: Ethnic Cleansing continues – Israeli lawyers tell UN Palestinian Jerusalemites targeted
Michael Sfard: “It’s the first report of its kind which, looking from a bird’s-eye view, sees not just demolitions, not just loss of residency, and not just discrimination between Jewish and Palestinian [inhabitants] – but also displacement based on ethnic origins.”
Since February, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to demolish all outposts built on private Palestinian land, right-wing activists have been applying heavy pressure on him to reverse that decision. Publication of the report on Derekh Ha’avot would cause more headaches for the authorities and bring the petitioners back to the High Court.
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.”
High Court rejects petition to put 2 Border Guard officers on trial for death of Abir Aramin, but slams police, prosecution for ‘incomplete’ investigation.
IOA Editor: This is the latest chapter in the struggle of a Palestinian family whose daughter, Abir Aramin, who was murdered by Israeli Occupation forces, as they try to put their personal tragedy in the context of the broader struggle for justice and for Palestinian national liberation.
Despite a long career on the radical left, Spiro said that this is his first arrest. The cause is peculiar: an article he wrote ten months ago. In the article, Spiro wrote that when settlers carry weapons, they ought to be considered as militiamen and therefore legitimate targets. He claimed that Israelis ought not to dictate to Palestinians their methods of struggle against the occupation, but strongly emphasized that he supports a non-violent struggle.
Despite living in the Negev Desert for hundreds of years, long before modern-day Israel was even formed, Bedouin who want to live on their ancestral land are being accused by Israel of ‘trespassing’… The Israeli government says the Bedouin do not qualify as indigenous people, and it’s just enforcing laws it inherited from the British and the Ottomans. Video journalist Amos Roberts travels with Nuri to the edge of the disputed land where he was born and which he’s not even allowed to set foot on. Nearby, Amos witnesses a village being bulldozed by Israeli authorities, then rebuilt by defiant locals – for the seventh time.
Michael Sfard: “Either way, even if wounding of my client was the result of negligence and not criminal intent -even then the State of Israel has a moral, ethical and legal obligation to pay for her treatment.”
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
Amnesty International has accused the Israeli authorities of subjecting jailed nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by holding him in solitary confinement.
The latest gimmick of the Israeli occupation under the guise of “security considerations” has emerged. The test subject: Nasser Laham, a Palestinian journalist from Bethlehem who is close with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and who advocates peace with Israel.
IOA Editor: Yossi Melman is the Haaretz specialist on Israel’s intelligence services. In recent months, his writing has been turning increasingly more critical of the Occupation authorities.
“I guess most Israelis would view me as a traitor… They would ask what right does someone who wasn’t born in Israel and who didn’t serve in the army have to criticize the state? But I came here out of great love, and I don’t intend to keep quiet just because I came from afar. I believe that there is no choice, that Israelis and Palestinians will live together. When I try to build connections between the two sides, I’m working for Israel’s good. The Bil’in people are very special… But they are not a rare species. There are many Palestinians like them.”
Job interviews for the position of imam at mosques in Israel are conducted not by senior clerics but by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, a labour tribunal has revealed. Sheikh Ahmed Abu Ajwa, 36, is fighting the Shin Bet’s refusal to approve his appointment as an imam in a case that has lifted the lid on Israel’s secret surveillance of the country’s Islamic leaders.
“Suddenly, the ICC has turned into a potential threat,” warned Reisner, who was one of the architects of Israel’s policy not to have the military police investigate IDF soldiers suspected of involvement in the deaths of Palestinian civilians, a policy that has been in force since the beginning of the intifada in 2000. “If that happens, it will be a turning point in Israel’s position in the world.”
Akiva Eldar: Netanyahu is not trying to enlarge his government because a new war is threatening Israel’s citizens. Rather, he is scared the peace process will threaten the wholeness of his government.
Construction of the facility began in 2007, on private Palestinian land from the nearby village of Ein Yabrud, in contravention of the government’s approved master plan for the area. [...] “the state is trying to legitimize the land theft … by seizing land retroactively, for the sake of a settlement that was not long ago classified as ‘the largest illegal outpost in the West Bank.
[T]he head of the Civil Administration, Yoav Mordechai, came and proposed to the residents that they move eastward… they were also explicitly told they would not be given building permits… In his letter to Mordechai, [human-rights attorney Michael] Sfard says the proposal to uproot the village is an expression of “the Civil Administration’s ‘transfer’ policy, whose aim is to ‘cleanse’ the seam area of its Palestinian inhabitants … Even if you believe that there is a big difference between forced transfer and so-called ‘voluntary transfer,’ the difference is really minimal.”
The Israeli army has targeted [Mohammed Khatib]. He was arrested, severely beaten and threatened with death during a series of midnight raids on the village this summer. He was freed on condition that he report to an Israeli police station each Friday at the hour of the weekly protest… Relative calm prevails in the Palestinian territories, but Khatib says it cannot last long under the diplomatic impasse… He believes Israel is trying to crush nonviolent activists because it would rather take on an armed insurgency.
IOA Editor: Israel’s favorite Palestinian Occupation-resister is one ‘throwing a bomb’ – and the more violent, the better. It is much more difficult to defend shooting non-violent Bilin demonstrators, though, Israel manages to get away with murdering demonstrators just fine.
“It’s quite simple and smart but evil,” said Michael Sfard, a lawyer with the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. “They attack Palestinian property, people, and blockade roads every time the Israeli security forces do something they don’t like” — such as demolish outposts.
On Wednesday we – members of the Combatants for Peace movement, women of Machsom Watch, members of the Forum of Bereaved Families for Peace and writer David Grossman – attended a hearing at the [Israeli] High Court of Justice on the matter of the closing, due to lack of evidence, of the investigatory file on the killing of ten-year-old Abir Aramin about three years ago.
IOA Editor: Reported by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli peace activist and professor at Hebrew University, among the founders of the Bereaved Families for Peace. After the death of Elhanan’s 13 year-old daughter in a 1997 suicide bombing attack she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli Occupation.
[Bil'in] residents say the IDF conducts nighttime raids up to four times a week, sometimes using percussion grenades and tear gas and sometimes also entering homes, which has led to Israeli activists staying overnight in village homes.
U.S. President Barack Obama says that Israel has to end its settlement activity. Does he have the power to force Defense Minister Ehud Barak to evacuate 24 outposts, in keeping with the promise made by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon to Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush? Does the president have any chance of forcing the Israel Police to implement the decision to evacuate the settlers of Hebron who squatted in that city’s abandoned market? Can the leader of the free world really order the Civil Administration to dismantle the new house in the outpost of Elmatan, under the noses of Israel Defense Forces soldiers, or to return to Ahmed Abdel Khader the land that settlers from Kedumim stole from him?
An important report on how settleres, settlement organizations, and the Israeli government, working in close cooperation, methodically rob Palestinian farmers of their lands and transfer them to Jewish settlers. Incidentally, similar methods were used by the Israeli government in the early 1950s to transfer lands of Palestinian citizens of Israel to Jewish hands.
Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din is taking the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the Israeli civil administration and a number of Israeli mining companies to court [for] illegally stripping Palestinian West Bank quarries of raw construction material for the benefit of the Israeli construction industry and the building of illegal Israeli settlements.
The authorities consider him a traitor, even though he did not betray secrets to enemy countries, a terrorist organization or foreign security organizations. He exposed Israel’s nuclear secrets to the British Sunday Times… The justifications are weak and exaggerated. The claim is that Vanunu holds more secret information about Israel’s nuclear program. The entire world assumes Israel has nuclear weapons, so what further damage can he cause to the security of the state? Based on this logic, he may never leave Israel.
BEITAR ILIT, West Bank – Boulders the size of compact cars are carved out here at a vast quarry near Bethlehem and pushed noisily through grinders, producing gravel and sand that go into apartment buildings in this rapidly growing Israeli settlement and all across Israel itself.
A Swedish activist, Soren Johanssen who was reportedly standing near Henochowicz, was quoted as saying: “They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession. One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face.” Another protester, Jonathan Pollak, was quoted as saying that Border Policemen had intentionally aimed at the demonstrators.
IOA Editor: The extent of the demand made by the US embassy remains to be seen, especially since Israel Foreign Ministry says “We have not received an official request from the Americans on this matter.”
