Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
Netanyahu has said in closed meetings that the only place where it is possible to walk a few dozen meters on foot and to move from the third world to the first world, is in southern Israel. In other places in the world, oceans separate these two worlds.
IOA Editor: A wall here and a fence there… pretty soon we’ll be incarcerated in our very own ghetto. And who will we be blaming then?
Jonathan Cook: About 35,000 Bedouin residents of Israel’s southern Negev have been denied the right to hold their first local council election after the Israeli parliament passed a law at the last minute to cancel this month’s ballot. The new law gives the government the power to postpone elections to the regional council, known as Abu Basma, until the interior ministry deems the local Bedouin ready to run their own affairs. Legal and human rights groups say the move is an unprecedented violation of Israel’s constitutional principles.
Jonathan Cook: A recent report from Israel’s National Insurance Institute showed that half of all Arab families in Israel are classified as poor compared with just 14 per cent of Jewish families.
The young trainee was spotted by a female passer-by as he planted a fake bomb under a vehicle in the capital.
IOA Editor: Israeli agents have a long history of bomb-planting throughout the Arab World, from Egypt in the 1950s to Syria and Lebanon in recent years.
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz appears to have been unaware of some important facts when he said at a recent conference on discrimination that Arab society in Israel is partially responsible for the low levels of employment for Arab women.
Currently around 130 Palestinian citizens of Israel are incarcerated as security prisoners. Hamas… is concentrating on the 22 who have been in jail for more than 15 years, much longer than the average for offenders sentenced to life… None are Hamas members. Some are serving life sentences, although they were not convicted of murder or manslaughter. In most cases, a minimum term before eligibility for parole has not been set, in others it has been set at 40 or 45 years.
IOA Editor: Another example of Israeli takeover of land and property owned by Palestinian individuals or institutions by “legal” or illegal means – based on the winner’s ability to write the law. This convoluted case – based on special Israeli laws written to legalize, and thus legitimize, the takeover of “abandoned properties” left by Palestinians after the Nakba – shows how Israel’s war against Palestine continues, 61 years after 1948.
A current case, different circumstances, different legal basis, but the very same theme: HERE.
US embassy: “To stir up controversy at the same time that we are trying to get people back to the [negotiating] table, is not productive… It is only natural that Senator Mitchell would be paying attention to that – and the US government as well.”
IOA Editor: The spirit of Kahane is alive and well (as they used to say, “Kahane Chai” – “כהנא חי”)… Thriving from the hills of the West Bank all the way into Israel’s Knesset. This would serve only as the latest excuse for the US failure to get “people back to the table,” with the primary reason being the woefully one-sided, twisted US foreign policy – one that accepts Occupation of one nation by another as a normal state of affairs.
[U]nlike the Hamas government, our government does not pay the salaries of rabbis who advocate the killing of babies. Is that so? Not really. For example, government ministries regularly transfer support and funding to a yeshiva whose rabbi determined that it is permissible to kill gentile babies “because their presence assists murder, and there is reason to harm children if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us … it is permissible to harm the children of a leader in order to stop him from acting evilly…”
[Jaffa,] a part of [Tel Aviv] where half of the population is Arab, and which has some 400 streets, only five are named after Arabs.
“[W]e must strengthen the community and character of every town that sees Zionist values and the heritage of Israel as the heart of its existence and way of life and seeks to bring in people who view these values as dear to their hearts. We don’t see this as racism, just as we don’t see Zionism as a racist movement.
The judge accepted the defense attorney’s claim that the youth must be “protected against justice” and said that sentencing the Nazareth citizen to prison would be contradictory to the principles of justice of the country.
A Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Council member resigned Sunday in protest of what he called “efforts to erase any memory of Arab names and identity from the city.” The municipality also failed to mark the new street name in Arabic, despite most residents of the neighborhood being Arabs. “It’s not enough that they ignore our requests, but how can they ignore the fact that a third of Jaffa’s population are Arabs?” Masharawi said Friday. “I’m afraid this is intentional, and motivated by a desire to Judaize Jaffa, to draw more Jews to the city.”
During the discussion, Tibi added that the proposed law reminded him of the “thought police” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Israeli democracy is being administered by four elites: the political elite (which includes influential journalists), the financial elite (which excels in extraordinary cowardice when it comes to opposing the powers that be), the military elite (whose power is greater than anyone would like to admit), and the academic elite (whose role is to legitimize the other three elites).
Israel’s Education Ministry has recalled all copies of a history textbook because of a passage alleging “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians during the 1948 war, a newspaper reported on Monday. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said the secondary school textbook was removed from shelves because it sought to present both Israeli and Arab perspectives on the departure of some 750,000 Palestinians during the fighting that erupted after the creation of the Jewish state.
IOA Editor: “Deny, deny, deny…” see No Atonement
Israeli authorities are planning to demolish 150 Palestinian houses, home to about 1,000 people in East Jerusalem, according to a new report from the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights… [This figure does] not include another 125 houses and apartments whose owners were given demolition orders.
“The police commissioner has apparently forgotten that Umm al-Fahm and Ramle are parts of the State of Israel,” Al-Sana said. “The residents of these Arab communities are not demanding independence and are not undermining Israeli sovereignty – and are fighting for their equal civil rights and social justice.”
The [Israeli] police have recently started operating an undercover unit among Israeli citizens. Some two months ago, Police Commissioner David Cohen said the force had “no intelligence infrastructure to deal with the Arab community.”
US and Israeli forces were already poised for their joint Juniper Cobra strategic missile defense exercise, which takes place every two years, to begin Oct. 12, when at noon, Oct. 11, an Israeli military spokesman suddenly announced its postponement by one week.
“I don’t understand why we incarcerate them in Israel in the first place,” the professor told [Israeli] Army Radio Saturday. She added that “all prisoners should be returned to Palestine regardless of a deal for Gilad Shalit’s release.”
A video tape made during a guided tour of the archaeological excavations at Silwan (the City of David) near Jerusalem’s Old City walls reveals how Elad, the association that runs the dig, works together with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Jerusalem municipality to dig under the homes of Arab residents.
ALSO: Court rejects Silwan residents’ petition against City of David archeological work
IOA Editor: As is often the case, Israel is acting as if the Palestinians do not exist. Or, treating them as ‘debris.’
Participation of foreign diplomats represented a turning point in the way that the world treated relations between Israel’s Arab population and the state… About a month ago, The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee decided to declare a general strike in all Israeli Arab communities on Thursday, October 1st.
IOA Editor: The participation of foreign diplomats in events related to the General Strike would be a remarkable change, and would add to Israel’s feeling of growing global pressure. Let us hope that this will actually happen.
“The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one”
Hadash Chairman Mohammad Barakeh said the statistics were the result of long term government policies: “We are living in two states here. This is the result of actions by generations of Israeli governments. The data speaks for itself… It’s a policy meant to place the Arab citizens under siege and it translates into poverty”
A new report from Adalah shows how the courts and police attempted to stamp out opposition to Operation Cast Lead. “This is a time of war, and every incident harms the people’s morale.”
The Education Ministry will be reexamining a new Hebrew-language history textbook… [that] gives expression to the Palestinian perspective on the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), which is the Palestinians’ term for what happened to them in the War of Independence.
Although Lieberman declared he would reactivate Israeli foreign policy in certain African states, past experience has shown that the Defense Ministry and arms manufacturers’ lobby have hijacked Israeli foreign policy in recent decades and subordinated it to their needs, Israeli sources said. No deals were signed on this trip. But Foreign Ministry officials estimate Africa’s business potential at some $1 billion, in addition to the $3 billion of merchandise and services Israel currently exports to the continent.
Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.
A day after mounting a scare-tactic campaign to prevent the assimilation of Diaspora Jews, the Prime Minister’s Office and Jewish Agency received some 200 calls, most of them reporting names of Jews living abroad. However, many callers also blasted the campaign – which describes assimilation as a “strategic national threat.”
IOA Editor: What’s next? An IDF rescue mission to forcibly airlift strayed Jews to Jewish re-education camps in the Negev?
“There is so much paranoia from the government, the municipality and the courts about Muslims using this mosque again,” said Nuri al-Uqbi, a 67-year-old Bedouin activist in Beersheva. “It was built with money raised from the local Bedouin and we should have the right to pray in it.”
The name of this Israeli ethos is “who are you to tell us?” We are destroying Arab East Jerusalem? Who are you to tell us that it is wrong? We killed masses of Palestinians in Gaza? Who are you to tell us anything? We have maintained a brutal dictatorship in the territories for 42 years – longer than any other military occupation of the post-World War II era? Who are you to tell us? We’re allowed. We’re your victims. The past belongs to us. We will do as we please with it.
Members of the Los Angeles Jewish community have threatened to withhold donations to an Israeli university in protest of an op-ed published by a prominent Israeli academic in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, in which he called to boycott Israel economically, culturally and politically. Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, a veteran peace activist, branded Israel as an apartheid state and said that a boycott was “the only way to save it from itself.”
IOA Editor: Haaretz leaves out the “unless” part of the threat to withhold donations: the firing of Prof. Neve Gordon from his BG University position. Is the “Only Democracy in the Middle East” about to start yet another round of harassment against a professor who dares to stare the Emperor in the eye?
See Neve Gordon: Boycott Israel on the IOA website.
The blatant attack that Ya’alon has been waging ever since he slammed the door by leaving the Israel Defense Forces has shown acute anti-democratic symptoms. Ya’alon has lashed out at the High Court of Justice in particular and the justice system in general, while expressing scandalous support for illegal settlements, making irresponsible accusations against his colleagues and superiors and stating views that are considered illegitimate even in the right wing.
IOA Editor: We continue focusing on Ya’alon because he is a central figure of Israel’s government and, as described by Haaretz, in many ways he is the government.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
