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.”
Human Rights
Israel Bar Association: “Keeping human beings in such unreasonable conditions for extended periods of time, dangerous though they may be, deals a critical blow to the most basic human rights.”
The absence of an effective Palestinian political body that could mobilize and represent refugees as a collective national group, combined with repressive state policies, catapulted UNRWA to center stage. Taking on a unique and visible role, it assumed many of the functions of a welfare government.
“We don’t need to help Arabs set down roots in Israel,” Rabbi Shlomo Aviner of the Beit El settlement, said. Aviner explained that he supported the move for two reasons: one, a Jew looking for an apartment should get preference over a gentile; and two, to keep the growing Arab population from settling too deeply. “Racism originated in the Torah,” said Rabbi Yosef Scheinen, who heads the Ashdod Yeshiva. “The land of Israel is designated for the people of Israel. This is what the Holy One Blessed Be He intended and that is what the [sage] Rashi interpreted.”
Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey.
Many analysts and observers fear that life in the west Bank is taking on an increasingly authoritarian hue. “I feel real concern that we are reaching the level of a police state,” says Shawan Jabarin, the director of al-Haq, a Ramallah-based human rights group.
Kaplan and Feiler had planned to use their trip in Israel to lodge an official complaint with the Israel Police against the Israel Defense Forces. Their complaint accused the IDF of kidnapping, armed robbery, violence and obstruction of freedom.
A new joint report exposes routine ill-treatment of Palestinians in interrogations: The treatment of detainees … is consistent with an interrogation doctrine that seeks to break the spirit of the detainee by inducing anxiety and shock, completely removing him from his normal life, and subjecting him to extreme deprivation of sensory stimuli, movement, and human contact. Added to these is the induced enfeebling of the detainee by means of sleep deprivation, food reduction, exposure to cold and heat, and causing pain, mainly through forced stiff postures. This doctrine appeared in the CIA interrogation manuals of the 1960s and 1980s, used … as guides to interrogators operating in Latin American dictatorships.
“If a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is to be found it has to be here in Jerusalem as well,” said delegation leader and former Irish president Mary Robinson.
Amnesty International: “Ameer Makhoul is a key human rights defender, well-known for his civil society activism on behalf of the Palestinian citizens of Israel” and “his arrest and continued detention smacks of pure harassment, designed to hinder his human rights work.”
Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel: “It is insupportable that, in a democratic country, authorities can arrest people in complete secrecy and disappear them from public view without the public even knowing such an arrest took place.”
The dire situation in Gaza cannot be resolved by providing humanitarian aid. The closure imposed on the Gaza Strip is about to enter its fourth year, choking off any real possibility of economic development. Gazans continue to suffer from unemployment, poverty and warfare, while the quality of Gaza’s health care system has reached an all-time low. The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.
[Emily] Henochowicz became critical of Israel in the spring, after accompanying a friend to a demonstration in East Jerusalem against the eviction of Palestinian families. Very quickly, she began participating regularly in protests against Israeli policies, especially the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. … The dangers caught up with her on May 31. During a demonstration at the West Bank checkpoint at Qalandia, Henochowicz was struck in the face by a tear gas canister fired by Israeli security forces. She lost her left eye, and her jaw and cheekbone were fractured.
“In recent days,” Yishai wrote, “Israel’s citizens have witnessed how an Israeli member of parliament, Hanin Zuabi, headed a group of terrorists who aimed to hurt Israel Defense Forces soldiers, under the protection of her parliamentary immunity.”
RT (Rusian TV in English) interviews MK Haneen Zoabi.
“It is disgusting that the Foreign Office is exaggerating the impact on the peace process to get a few people who are suspects of very serious international crimes off the hook,” said Daniel Machover, partner at the law firm Hickman & Rose.
A United Nations humanitarian relief agency is accusing Israel of deliberately disrupting the international community’s aid efforts for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. According to a special report released by the UN’s OCHA, Israel is not permitting construction of buildings for needy Palestinians and is encumbering on the freedom of movement of aid groups and their staffs.
In annual report, international human rights group says Israeli blockade ‘hit hardest on the most vulnerable – children, the elderly, the homeless and the sick'; claims Israel ‘forcibly evicts Palestinians, demolishes their homes and expropriates their land.’
“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.”
For the past 43 years, Israel has been occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands conquered in 1967. Since then, and especially in the past 20 years, a campaign of ethnic cleansing has been vigorously underway, one which at times borders on genocide… Israel is methodically replacing the Palestinian population of Palestine with a Jewish population. This is not new. Looking back in time, one sees a pattern and direct connection between this and the 1948 period called the Nakba.
