It is not our right or responsibility to lecture the Palestinian leadership on what they should do. That is up to the Palestinians to decide. But it is very definitely our responsibility to focus attention on what we should be doing. Of prime importance is to educate and organize the American public and to develop popular forces that can overcome the dominant propaganda images that sustain the US policies that have been undermining Palestinian rights.
IOA Editor: And much more from Noam Chomsky on the US and Israeli dynamics of the Occupation, and on approaches available to the anti-Occupation movement, including detailed comments on BDS.
Adalah lawyer Abir Baker: “The Shin Bet is facing an internal crisis over this arrest and the settlers are trying to exploit that with their campaign. Many members of the Shin Bet are settlers themselves and think of these extremists as their colleagues, not as the enemy. The line between the Shin Bet and these extremist organisations is very blurred.”
Jonathan Cook writes about the rich tapestry of discriminatory laws and practices designed to marginalise, weaken and exclude Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens.
Security forces in the West Bank continue to arrest people identified with Hamas… The same security authorities that have won praise from the occupier for the quiet they’ve achieved while the occupier acts: confiscating land, demolishing homes, expelling people, arresting children, preventing free movement and killing.
[A]utomation makes killing cheaper… the demand for remote-controlled machines is stoked by the large savings in defence costs. A drone operator can be trained in a day; a pilot may need years of expertise to fulfil the same mission.
A decision by Israel’s Supreme Court to double a 15-month jail term for a policeman who shot dead an unarmed Palestinian driver suspected of stealing a car has provoked denunciations from police commanders and government officials.
The basic conflict can be understood in very conventional terms of people enduring and trying to resist an occupation. I don’t think it requires much more profundity in order to understand why Palestinians are opposed to their current condition, and I think Israel is behaving like most occupying powers behave — specifically, it is very hard to evict them.
Ethnic cleansing can be carried out dramatically (as in this country in 1948 and in Kosovo in 1998) or in a quiet and systematic way, by dozens of sophisticated methods, as is happening now in East Jerusalem. But there cannot be the slightest doubt that this is the final stage of the one-state vision of the rightists. The first stage will be an effort to fill the entire country with settlements, and to demolish any chance of implementing the two-state solution, which is the only realistic basis for peace.
“This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion … in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies…” Why is all this so important? … There is now a ratcheting up of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
They are trying to establish borders on our political identity and say that we cannot have relations with the broader Arab world. They want to redefine the margins of democracy to exclude any political program that calls for full equality. We are calling for equality without Zionism… The fact is, to demand full civic and national equality is actually to demand the end of Zionism. So we don’t hate Zionism. Zionism hates democracy.
Several of the most dramatic instances of war crimes, which previously stirred Israel’s defenders into fits, are now publicly admitted by the IDF in the recent update to its official response. [Including: The use of] white phosphorous in urban areas … the murder of two unarmed Palestinians carrying white flags … the Al-Fakhura Street incident … the use of innocent Palestinians as human shields … the Al-Samouni family massacre … firing on Al Maqadmah and other mosques during prayer time.
The Israeli Parliament approved the first of three readings of a new law which, if passed, will make it illegal to declare a boycott on Israel or Israeli companies, participate in a boycott, or provide aid in the form of information to anyone who is part of the BDS campaign. The bill also penalizes the PA for its decision in May 2010 to ban the use by Palestinians of settlement products. The law even affects international citizens who will be banned from entry into Israel for 10 years and will be effective retroactively.
“The reason why Israel can’t allow Iran to have nuclear weapons is because if Iran developed its own nuclear arsenal, it would totally change the balance of power in the Middle East.” (Video)
Anyone from the US should recognize the Jerusalem District Court’s ruling for what it is: an anti- miscegenation measure on par with the now-defunct US laws against “race mixing” that were once used to uphold white supremacy… Only they like to call it “national purity,” since Jewish privilege in Israel depends on maintaining the Jewish character of the state. In fact, race-mixing is perceived as such a threat that more than half of all Israeli Jews agree that Jewish-Arab intermarriage is a form of treason.
We should not romanticise these Likud converts. They are not speaking of the “state of all its citizens” demanded by Israel’s tiny group of Jewish non-Zionists. Most would require that Palestinians accept life in a state dominated by Jews.
IOA Editor: Indeed, we shouldn’t. In the words of an important Beitar song – penned by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Israeli Right’s spiritual leader – “two banks has the Jordan [River], this one is ours and so is the other.”
Recently, proposals to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank, including the right to vote for the knesset, have emerged from a surprising direction: Right-wing stalwarts such as knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin, and former defence minister Moshe Arens, both from the Likud party of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister.
Palestinian freedom and equal rights are unlikely to be secured by a United States committed to false notions of Israeli security. Since his Cairo speech, President Barack Obama has failed to pursue new policies. In the Middle East, he is regarded as full of fine but empty words. Empty because securing Palestinian freedom and equal rights requires standing up to Israel.
This movement is taking upon itself what governments have failed to do: to hold Israel accountable for its crimes. The dockworkers’ refusal to deal with Israeli ships is part of this vibrant movement and comes in response to the appeal in 2005 from Palestinian civil society. Other initiatives include campaigns for the boycott of Israeli products, divestment from companies aiding Israeli war crimes, and cultural isolation, so as to not entertain Israeli apartheid.
Like the physical assault on the boat, the Israeli media assault was also reckless, clumsy, malicious, and dangerous… I am a firm believer that actions speak louder than words, and in this spirit I thought it might help to take a closer look at IHH, and judge this group based on their actions, rather than empty words.
[Netanyahu's] has so far avoided engaging meaningfully in the limited talks the White House is promoting with the Palestinians while the pace of settlement building in the WB has been barely affected by the 10-month freeze, due to end in September. In the meantime, planning officials have repeatedly approved large new housing projects in E. Jerusalem and the WB that have undercut the negotiations and will make the establishment of a Palestinian state – viable or otherwise – far less likely.
UPDATE Watch Video – Netanyahu: “At that moment I actually stopped the Oslo accord”
There are about 35,000 Palestinians who live in the West Bank but are registered as Gazans. Due to Israel’s successful 20-year-old policy of isolating the population of the Strip, they are in permanent danger of deportation.
Forget the Bar-Ilan University speech, forget the virtual achievements in his last visit to the US; this is the real Netanyahu. No more claims that the Palestinians are to blame for the failure of the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu exposed the naked truth…: he destroyed the Oslo accords with his own hands and deeds, and he’s even proud of it. After years in which we were told that the Palestinians are to blame, the truth has emerged from the horse’s mouth.
I am hastening to call for this boycott because I want to earn a footnote in Jewish history: He tried, Canute-like, to stand against the wave of fascism that engulfed the Zionist project.
The Israeli government is facing legal action for contempt over its refusal to implement a Supreme Court ruling that it end a policy of awarding preferential budgets to Jewish communities, including settlements, rather than much poorer Palestinian Arab towns and villages inside Israel.
Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live? It’s hard to say.
Some things are amazingly simple. In Sheikh Jarrah you can see pure theft in all its starkness. The Bible says “Thou shalt not steal,” and it – God, that is – was referring to Sheikh Jarrah. Any one can see it. The shocking thing, of course, is that the whole apparatus of the modern state – the municipality, its committees and master plans and grey bureaucrats, the mayor, the government, the Prime Minister, the cabinet, the courts, the police, the secret services – all these have colluded in actively perpetrating the theft.
Vague promises to extend the partial freeze on settlement building and to alleviate some of the daily hardships encountered by Palestinians are no more than the blackmail tactics Israel has always employed against those under its control.
Throughout his life, Ameer has struggled for the rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel … as well as those of the Palestinian people overall. He has the ability to lead and to convene diverse viewpoints, bringing them together across sect and ideology. His ability to network locally, at the Arab level, and internationally, coupled with his clear strategic vision – this is what Israel is trying to silence.
Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people — Palestinians in Gaza — who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick. The [Israeli] female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza.
Yousef Jabareen: “It’s a feeling of frustration and of not belonging … That the … state is excluding you and you are not counted as an equal… In some areas you could identify some characteristics of apartheid that should raise a lot of concern about the future.”
Young Israeli Jew: “It’s a kind of psychological warfare. The idea is to get [Palestinians] to leave.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
