“There is no doubt that the occupation is the biggest festering sore in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Futile negotiations over the last two decades have led to its intensification rather than mitigation. The only way forward is an ongoing campaign to put an end to it, without having anything to do with the diplomatic process or with the one-state, two-states, debate.”
Is Israel an apartheid state? The notion of apartheid may be applicable in different ways to different components of the system. While Israel clearly is different from South African historical apartheid, in crucial respects it has affinities with apartheid in its generic sense.
Part II of a two-part essay. Read Part I HERE
“In the long term, the more Israel appears to reject peace and to be the one that opposes a two-state solution, the more it will be perceived as a regional bully that possesses nuclear weapons. So the world will be a lot less forgiving on the nuclear issue. The situation of ambiguity, in which you don’t have real legitimacy, is not a good place to be.”
Over the past two yeas, many of us have felt that the democratic camp in Israel has been under a well-planned, coordinated attack … organizations from the old-style religious right … got together and planned, under the baton of one of the most talented and innovative strategic consultants in Israel, the move that would bring them back to the front of the stage as the hegemonic ideology of Israel.
Government officials warned Israeli teachers last week not to cooperate with Zochrot, a civic group that seeks to educate Israelis about how the Palestinians view the loss of their homeland and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
Israeli anti-Occupation activist: “We want to overturn this immoral law that gives rights to Jews to move freely around while keeping Palestinians imprisoned in their towns and villages,” referring to regulations that bar most Palestinians in the occupied territories from entering Israel, and Israelis from assisting them.
Israel’s demand that Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state sounds reasonable — unless you understand 1948.
“There is no doubt that the occupation is the biggest festering sore in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Futile negotiations over the last two decades have led to its intensification rather than mitigation. The only way forward is an ongoing campaign to put an end to it, without having anything to do with the diplomatic process or with the one-state, two-states, debate.”
Is Israel an apartheid state? The notion of apartheid may be applicable in different ways to different components of the system. While Israel clearly is different from South African historical apartheid, in crucial respects it has affinities with apartheid in its generic sense. (Part I of a two-part essay.)
What is at stake in the conflict over Israel and Palestine are land and sovereignty — the traditional core issues of colonial and anti-colonial rivalry — not theology… Until the US withholds the subsidies that Israel uses to pay for the confiscation and settlement of Palestinian land, there will be no resolution to the conflict in Palestine-Israel.
Bottom line: it’s a witches’ brew that is being stirred up, and it is one that will no doubt produce violence. But the witches are not all on the right. Just as many liberals are stirring the pot to please some of their donors.
The Palestinians in Israel will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinians, the authentic owners of the land here, are an inseparable part of the Arab nation. They were here before Israel, they are not transients and they are certainly not guests in their native land.
UN special rapporteur, Richard Falk: “[The Occupation] is presently a de facto annexation. The creation of a single state would give the arrangement a more legalistic cover. It would seek to resolve the issue of occupied territory without the bother of international negotiations… The effect is to fragment the Palestinian people in such defining ways as to make it almost impossible to envision the emergence of a viable Palestinian sovereign state… The longer it continues, the more difficult it is to overcome, and the more serious are the abridgements of fundamental Palestinian rights.”
Ethnic cleansing is the common theme of [the 1948 and 1967 Golan Height] Israeli conquests. A deeper probe of the archives will almost certainly reveal in greater detail how and why these “cleansing” campaigns were carried out – which is precisely why Mr Netanyahu and others want the archives to remain locked.
Yousef Jabareen, Dirasat’s director, said [Tel Aviv] university’s decision represented an increasingly hardline attitude from its officials. “What is so worrying is that a supposedly liberal academic institution — not the right-wing government — is promoting discrimination,” he said.
“I wish these pictures reached leftists abroad,” my friend said … as she watched Hamas police use rifle butts and clubs to beat her friends – activists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although my friend has never been a fan of the Fatah government in the West Bank, she is outraged by the romanticization of Hamas rule by foreign activists.
Sixty-two years after the founding of the state … it is time to acknowledge that the Jewish state is not interested in also being the state of its Arab citizens. The predicament of the Arab minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Green Line, especially the Muslim Arab minority, is an indication of the attitude of the Jewish democratic state toward those who do not belong to the lords of the land.
The fact that [Israeli Arabs] have yet to choose to boycott the state and its institutions and to stop participating in the game of democracy, which is corrupt to begin with, as far as they are concerned – a game from which they are almost completely excluded – is nothing short of amazing.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel, counts more than 35 Israeli laws explicitly privileging Jews over non-Jews. Other Israeli laws appear neutral, but are applied in discriminatory fashion. For example, laws facilitating government land seizures make no reference to Palestinians, but nonetheless have been used almost exclusively to expropriate their properties for Jewish settlements.
Despite Israel’s siege of Gaza, and the escalating displacement in the Negev and East Jerusalem, Palestinians have some reason to celebrate. In Washington [state] a food co-op has passed a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli products, confirming that the boycott movement – five years old last month – has finally crossed the Atlantic.
Yesterday, the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site.
In the early hours of 10 August, Israeli forces destroyed — for the third time — the Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the northern Negev desert. Israel had first destroyed the village on 27 July as the Electronic Intifada reported, and each time the villagers have attempted to rebuild.
Two of the US closest allies in the ME, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are on the brink of signing large arms deals with the US in a move designed to ratchet up the pressure on Iran, according to defence analysts. [T]he joint strengthening of the Saudi Arabian and Israeli militaries was seen as a key regional interest for the US.
I would like to remind [Israelis] that it is they who hide in darkness. It is we who stand in the light. It is they who deceive. It is we who openly proclaim our compassion and demand justice for those who suffer in Gaza. We are not afraid to name our names. We are not afraid to name our beliefs. And we know something you perhaps sense with a kind of dread. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government.
The violence of the occupier is the norm that no one questions, so much so that it becomes invisible. Only the response to that norm is presented and perceived as criminal, and the occupying nation wallows pleasurably in its eternal victimhood to justify its violent actions.
Henning Mankell, aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla: “We have been attacked while in international waters. That means the Israelis have behaved like pirates … The moment they start to steer this ship towards Israel, we have also been kidnapped. The whole action is illegal.”
A police officer known as “Major George” who is accused of torturing Arab prisoners in his previous role as chief interrogator in a secret military jail has been appointed to oversee relations with Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, it has emerged.
Defining Israel as a Jewish state condemns us to living in a racist state… Were we to not expel the migrant workers’ children but continue to raze Bedouin villages we would not solve a thing. We will continue to move from one injustice to another until we recognize the racist nature of the state.
Israel quickly reined back expectations yesterday over its agreement to co-operate with a UN investigation into the Israeli army’s lethal raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla two months ago.
Israeli security forces destroyed a Bedouin village this week for the second time in a matter of days, leaving 300 inhabitants homeless again after they and dozens of Jewish and Arab volunteers had begun rebuilding the 45 homes.
[South Lebanon] was under Israeli occupation for 18 years… It was an occupation no less brutal than the one in the territories, but whitewashed well… So now, as well, we can do what we like… For months now the drums of war have been beating here again. Rat-a-tat, danger, Scuds from Syria, war in the north. No one asks why and wherefore.
Boycott is the primary tool of those engaged in nonviolent resistance to systematic injustice. Boycott targets unjust policies. It is not about ‘the right to exist’; Everyone has the right to ‘exist’… Israel inside the green line is the agency of occupation and [it] conducts, plans, prepares and executes aspects of the occupation from inside the green line.
Zinn, who died in January at the age of 87, did not advocate violence or support the overthrow of the government, something he told FBI interrogators on several occasions. He was rather an example of how genuine intellectual thought is always subversive. It always challenges prevailing assumptions as well as political and economic structures. It is based on a fierce moral autonomy and personal courage and it is uniformly branded by the power elite as “political.” Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.
Chris Hedges’ Truth Commission on Conscience in War speech: Americans “are as capable of perpetuating evil as those who oppose us, and this existential crisis is one that turns those who have the courage to stand up and speak … into outcasts, pariahs, prophets.”
A rabbi from one of the most violent settlements in the West Bank was questioned on suspicion of incitement last week as Israeli police stepped up their investigation into a book in which he sanctions the killing of non-Jews, including children and babies.
But no one could say what killed 21 members of the Samouni family in a few minutes on January 5, 2009, in their neighborhood of Zeitoun. Some said it was shells fired by tanks in the main street. Some said it was something from the air, certainly not a plane that they would have heard. An Israel Defense Forces bulldozer destroyed the entire building later, with all its bodies, and it was difficult to identify the projectile. But what difference does that make? It was the Israeli soldiers who told them to gather in one house – women, children, elderly and middle aged people – and it was the soldiers who fired what they fired at them.
Many countries violate human rights in one way or another – but few have the consistent backing a Permanent Member in the UN Security Council. Most proposed resolutions condemning acts by the government of Israel get aborted by the US veto.
