It was a single word scrawled on a wall at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that unlocked something deep inside … two years after she had completed compulsory military service in the IDF. The word was “occupation”. “I really felt like someone was speaking the unspoken… It was really shocking to me. There was graffiti saying, ‘end the occupation’. And I felt like, OK, now I can talk about what I saw.”
Israel-Palestine
Since September 2009, Defence for Children International has given the UN details of more than 100 cases in which the military authorities allegedly abused minors who were held in detention.
“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.)
Tel Aviv University was partially built on the lands of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwanis… Zochrot, an organization that encourages the Israeli state and its institutions to recognize the moral debt for the injustices caused to the Palestinian people during the establishment of the state of Israel, has started a campaign requesting that Tel Aviv University acknowledge the history of Sheikh Muwanis.
PLEASE HELP this effort by sending a letter to Tel Aviv University President Itamar Rabinowich.
American support for Israel is waning, a poll presented to senior Israeli officials in Jerusalem last week revealed. [And it is even lower in western Europe.]
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.
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.
Harvard University has insisted that the sale of shares in Israeli companies is not driven by pro-Palestinian boycott and divestment campaign.
ALSO
Globes (Updated): Harvard denies divestment from Israel
Foreign Policy: Harvard not divesting from Israel
IOA Editor: Harvard’s sale of all its Israeli holdings will remain a bit of a mystery, at least for a while. The manner in which it was done – an entire country-portfolio, sold at once – during the second quarter of 2010 which, coincidentally or not, was also when the Berkeley BDS struggle culminated, suggests it may be more than just a matter of investment management.
If the Harvard Corporation wanted to avoid becoming embroiled in a BDS struggle connected to the Israeli Occupation – say, the next time Israel commits war crimes on sea or land – its best strategy would be to make a ‘business decision’ to pull out of Israel, quietly and without fanfare: not to make a principled, morally-based and publicly explained University policy decision, one that would be controversial and may cause some of Harvard’s donors to put their money elsewhere. And this is exactly what it did. Only time will tell.
Breaking the Silence: Facebook photos depicting Israel Defense Forces soldiers pictured alongside handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees represent the norm, not the exception, in IDF conduct … refuting an official army statement claiming the opposite.
In another blow to Israeli shares, the Harvard Management Company notified the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday that it had sold all its holdings in Israeli companies during the second quarter of 2010. No reason for the sale was mentioned. The Harvard Management Company manages Harvard University’s endowment.
IOA Editor:The Harvard Management Company — a subsidiary of Harvard University charged with managing the university’s endowment, pension assets, working capital, and non-cash gifts — is best known for managing the university’s $26 billion endowment, the largest endowment in US higher education. Historically, the HMC has been the leading university investment management company, receiving a great deal of attention from all other university funds.
This is probably the first reported university endowment divestment from all Israeli holdings. Coming from Harvard, it sets a very important precedent: it is likely to be reviewed, scrutinized, and possibly followed, by other universities. Because Harvard, or HMC, has yet to make a public statement on the decision, one can only assume that it took place as a preventive measure, to avoid becoming the “next Berkeley.”
Yishai Menuchin, director of the Public Committee Against Torture: “The horrible pictures demonstrate a norm of treating Palestinians like objects instead of human beings – treatment that disregards their feelings as humans and their right to privacy.”
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.
For 62 years, the Palestinian people have been misunderstood and oppressed, and in a small way, we hope to change that. It is in the spirit of justice that we found the inspiration to compile The Veritas Handbook.
FREE DOWNLOAD OF THE VERITAS HANDBOOK
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.
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.
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.
Israeli defense companies have scored one of the biggest deals in the industry’s history: They will be making about $4 billion worth of parts for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter [manufactured by] Lockheed Martin… The discussions about Israel’s involvement were led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
IOA Editor: There’s no business like War Business, to misappropriate Irving Berlin.
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.
What happened to the 130,000 Syrian citizens who lived in the Golan Heights in June 1967? According to the official Israeli version, the vast majority fled into the depth of Syria by the end of the war. According to military documents and eyewitness reports, tens of thousands were expelled in a transfer that reminds that of the residents of Lod [Lydda] and Ramle [al-Ramla] in 1948.
Israeli eyewitness: “[W]e saw a big group of Syrian civilians, a few hundred people, gathered in front of tables with soldiers sitting behind them. We stopped and asked a soldier what they were doing. He answered they were doing pre-expulsion registration. I’m not a softhearted person, but I immediately had the feeling that something here wasn’t right. I still remember what a bad impression this sight left on me. But it was, de facto, like it was [with the Arab populations] in Lod, Ramle and other places in the War of Independence.”
*UPDATED* IOA Editor: As in 1948, the “Israeli narrative” tries to sweep Israel’s ethnic cleansing crimes under the rug. As in 1948, official Israel lied about the fate of the local population during and after the war and so did Israeli historians, as this story reveals.
In recent years, interest in the pre-state Revisionist underground movements has grown among West Bank settlement youth. These young people want to give the nationalist Lehi and Etzel (Irgun Zvai Leumi) movements a more prominent role in Zionist history and aggrandize figures who sacrificed themselves for the Land of Israel.
IOA Editor: There is a natural continuity between Israel’s pre-state right-wing terrorist organizations and today’s settlers, who are sometime the very same individuals, their children, or followers. The “Lehi” (“Stern-Gang”) and “Etzel” (“Irgun”) mentioned here are best known for their 1948 war crime of the Deir Yassin massacre, which played a key role in the ethnic-cleansing of Palestine that followed.
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.
Michael Sfard: “Either way, even if wounding of my client was the result of negligence and not criminal intent -even then the State of Israel has a moral, ethical and legal obligation to pay for her treatment.”
Around 300 Bedouins living in Israel’s Negev desert have been made homeless after police raided their village and razed their homes. Israeli activists said 1,500 police arrived in Al-Arakib village at dawn. They destroyed 30 to 40 makeshift homes and uprooted hundreds of olive trees belonging to the villagers.
IAF officer: “There are very high mountains in central Romania with a flat area around them and this unfamiliar terrain … provided the crews with a unique environment for training that cannot be carried out in Israel” … As Israeli-Turkish relations began deteriorating … so far as joint air force exercises go, Romania is now Israel’s closed European ally.
IOA Editor: Of all probable future Israeli targets, high altitude training can only serve to emulate conditions in Iran.
Haneen Zoabi: “It took us 40 years for us to admit that we were even Palestinians. Another 15 years passed before we realised that the peace process started under Oslo had been a disaster. The Zionist project was to domesticate its Arab citizens as the hewers and drawers of water. But the carrot-and-stick approach failed, and now we see Israel is prepared to throw away its liberal side to control us. We were passive once and now we are becoming active about our national identity.”
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 Shin Bet’s tendency to call in citizens to discuss their political activity has ACRI concerned. The Attorney General’s office says the service wants to keep innocent people from being exploited.
Israel’s Knesset should reject proposed legislation that would weaken the country’s vibrant civil society, Human Rights Watch said today. Recent proposed bills would penalize human rights groups for critical reporting and advocacy, including publicizing information on war crimes, expressing support for boycotts, or helping refugees and asylum seekers.
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.
An Arab resident of Jerusalem who had consensual sex with a woman who believed him to be Jewish, was convicted yesterday of rape by deception and sentenced to 18 months in prison by the Jerusalem District Court… “The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls,” wrote the judge.
IOA Editor: We’ve yet to read about a similar sentencing of a man who falsely claimed to be wealthy, or a movie-director or, for that matter, single – all pretences that happen daily. For centuries, people have lied in the pursuit of sex, and this comment is not an attempt to justify it. But it is clear that only this one particular lie – for an Arab to dare pretend being a Jew(!), something which the accused denied doing – will land a Palestinian in jail for 18 months, “to protect the public interest.” In Israel, that is. Ethnic separation is very important to most Israelis (see Israel bids to stop interracial dating), and this court seems eager to comply. This is Apartheid-style racism that is deep-seated in Israel – including among the ‘educated classes,’ such as lawyers and judges.
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.
