Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
The ACLU of Washington filed a federal lawsuit against King County over the decision to cancel a bus ad that alleges Israeli war crimes. The lawsuit claims that King County violated the First Amendment rights of the group that sought to place the ad on the sides of [Seattle] Metro Transit buses.
RELATED Seattle Mideast awareness campaign: Gaza vigil and metro bus ad campaign
Video of the Tel Aviv demonstration against rising fascism in Israel held of 15 Jan 2011.
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.
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.
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!
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.
“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.
Shin Bet: “[W]e know what you are doing and … it will have repercussions. At the moment, what you are doing is on the borderline of the law and it is quite possible that information on you will show your actions are illegal. We know about all your files.”
The Israeli army’s “looting” of books belonging to Palestinian intellectuals is the subject of a documentary being made by Dutch-Israeli film maker Benny Brunner. He claims as many as 30,000 Arabic books and manuscripts, some of them rare and valuable, ended up in Israel’s National Library after the 1948 war.
Please come join us in a walking vigil to remember the ongoing siege and attacks on Gaza.
IOA Editor: Also, read about the group’s upcoming Seattle Metro bus ad campaign, and the predictable reactions to it.
We are outraged to learn that US Rep. Howard Berman, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is trying to push through Congress today a resolution “condemning unilateral declarations of a Palestinian state.”
The book’s stark – and inevitably highly political – conclusion is contrary to the view that “Israel is withdrawing from the Palestinian Territories slowly and with the appropriate caution and security”. The IDF soldiers quoted “describe an indefatigable attempt to tighten Israel’s hold on the territories, as well as on the Palestinian population”.
A pro-Palestinian pressure group claimed success last week after Edinburgh Council rejected an attempt by a controversial firm to take over a range of public services in the city. The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) had argued that Veolia should be excluded from Council contracts because of the company’s involvement in Israel’s Occupation of Palestine.
Noam Chomsky will be giving a talk at Cardiff University on 11 March next year. Just 48 hours after it was announced on Facebook philosopher Noam Chomksy would be giving a talk at Cardiff University next year, 2,000 people had signed up to attend the event. After one week, the list of those interested was more than 4,000.
[The State of] Minnesota’s investment in two Israel bonds supports Israel’s apartheid system in both Israel and the Palestinian Territories and enables widespread abuse of human rights. Israel Bonds finance infrastructure projects including settlement building on the Palestinian West Bank and in East Jerusalem; these settlements displace Palestinians from their own lands.
Columbia University student Maya Yechieli Wind organizes campus display depicting IDF soldiers abusing Palestinian students at checkpoints. Israeli students form counter-protest. ‘Many think this is what really goes on,’ one of them says.
IOA Editor: Perhaps it is precisely because this is what actually goes on… Flag-wrapping not withstanding, even this ‘pro-Israeli’ coverage of anti-Occupation activism at Columbia University fails to materially challenge the protesters’ message.
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine staged a very impressive mock Israeli checkpoint for Right to Education Week – watch video.
Ali Abunimah, speaking at the University of New Mexico, asks the Jewish Federation of New Mexico to apologize for publishing a Dry Bones cartoon which compared BDS supporters with Hitler.
Following is a list of the artists who were scheduled to perform in Israel and asked not to cross the picket lines of this struggle, but instead chose to follow the footsteps of Elton John who entertained apartheid South-Africa, and gave their stamp of approval to a reality in which a Palestinian under Israeli occupation is barred from coming to their show in Tel-Aviv.
Tel Aviv, November 15 2010, an anti-apartheid flashmob during the performance of “Porgy and Bess,” performed by South Africa’s Cape Town Opera.
The Hebron Fund has scheduled the “Hebron Aid Flotilla,” a pleasure cruise to raise funds for illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Hebron, Palestine.
PROTEST: Tuesday, November 16th, 5:30 – 7:00 pm. Meet 5:30, Chelsea Piers – 23rd Street & West Side Highway.
A diverse group of Arizona State University students joined together to protest IDF Sargent Nadav Weinberg’s lecture on the “Ethics of the IDF.” We organized a silent protest to give a voice to the Palestinian civilians who have been silenced by IDF policy.
Matan Cohen, Israeli who disrupted PM’s speech: We were raised on human rights. Youngster who heckled Netanyahu during GA address in New Orleans says US Jews distancing themselves from community due to “expectation of blind loyalty to Israel.”
IOA Editor: “Raised on human rights” is well intentioned, and an understandable comment when facing the likes of Netanyahu and Lieberman, but it is misleading. Although plenty of individual Israeli (Jewish) families raised their children “on human rights,” Labor Zionism was racist from the very start but, unlike today, mostly below the surface: instituting land laws designed to deprive Arab citizens of most natural and national resources; putting activists under administrative detention without trial, and much more.
Now things are far more out in the open: raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night and putting them away — via trials without the standard rules of evidence that would be required in the West (e.g., most recently, Ameer Makhoul); the ability to legally exclude any Arab citizen from living in much of Israel that is, in effect, designated as Jewish-only; and an “informal,” but well organized and sanctioned by “Higher Authority,” terror campaign against renting to Palestinians when they venture into Jewish towns (even when those had been mostly-Arab towns before 1948), lest their sort mix with our precious daughters (see Jonathan Cook’s Rabbis’ edict bars renting to Arabs). Today’s conditions are far more blatant, and outright scary, but they evolved over a long period of time, starting from the political foundation put in place by Labor Zionism.
Prof. Gilbert Achcar is in the US on a speaking tour for his latest book, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Tour schedule includes stops in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
New York event: A discussion with Gilbert Achcar and Amira Hass, moderated by Rashid Khalidi, at the International Affairs building, Columbia University – Tuesday, 9 Nov, 6:00 – 8:00pm.
Africa Israel, the flagship company of Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, announced this week that it is no longer involved in Israeli settlement projects and that it has no plans for future settlement activities. Africa Israel subsequently denied that this was a political decision.
We are writing to you as a group of fellow filmmakers and academics, Palestinians, Israelis and others, to thank you for your principled and courageous step of withdrawing from the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School workshop and “implicitly” joining the cultural boycott of Israel… Your action is striking evidence of growing cultural resistance abroad to Israel’s intransigence. We hope it will encourage others. Only by such concerted action will the situation change in the Middle East.
Silent protest during a University of Michigan visit by two IDF soldiers on 20 October 2010.
On October 26th, Brooklyn For Peace, CODEPINK NYC, Adalah-NY, Jews Say No!, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other local groups will bring the Stolen Beauty Ahava boycott campaign to Brooklyn for a third time. Local activists, some dressed in spa attire, and others wearing monster masks to convey the message that Occupation is an Ugly business, will gather on Montague Street to tell Ricky’s NYC: No More Ahava Cosmetics.
British director Mike Leigh has canceled his scheduled visit to Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet approved a controversial amendment to the Citizenship Law last week requiring non-Jews to pledge allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.”
ADL’s Foxman: “These groups are not promoting peace, they are spreading propaganda to assault Israel’s legitimacy. We want to Americans to know who these groups are and what it is they really stand for, which is to delegitimize the Jewish state.”
IOA Editor: From one of Israel’s propaganda chiefs, himself. We’d be honored to join the list.
Celebrate the Freedom Theatre Jenin on October 16th, in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle
(Columbus Avenue at W 60th St., NYC) at 2pm! A symposium with Prof. Alain Badiou, Prof. Slavoj Zizek, and Filmmaker Udi Aloni, on the possibility of reading Antigone in the Jenin Refugee Camp, as well as for subsequent film screenings of Forgiveness and Arna’s Children.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
