Labour, the dominant party for the first three decades of Israel’s existence, would only get seven MPs in the 120-strong parliament if elections were held today, according to a public opinion poll published on Friday.
Israel-Palestine
“Israel has begun to use the same methods internally as it does outside its own territory,” said Reporters Without Borders, adding that journalists had been arrested and imprisoned and that military censorship also posed a threat.
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
Sixty-four percent of Israelis support the creation of a Palestinian state, a new poll carried out by researchers at Tel Aviv university shows. The poll… shows that 33% of Israelis oppose the “two-state solution.” The survey also showed that 60% of the Israelis believe that continued settlement expansion reducing the chances of a two-state solution or would lead to a bi-national state while 33% have the opposite view.
Richard Goldstone responds to Israel: “In Gaza, I was surprised and shocked by the destruction and misery there. I had not expected it. I did not anticipate that the IDF would have targeted civilians and civilian objects. I did not anticipate seeing the vast destruction of the economic infrastructure of Gaza including its agricultural lands, industrial factories, water supply and sanitation works. These are not military targets.”
[I]t is not certain UNRWA will manage to overcome Hamas’ objection to instituting Holocaust studies in Gaza… but the attempt should be encouraged, because it is impossible to understand Israel without understanding the place of the Holocaust in the Israelis’ universe, and one who does not understand his enemy will not be able to make peace with him either.
Economics professor and [Israeli] government minister Avishay Braverman confirms that per-capita income in the West Bank in 2009 is still far below the figures for the nine months that preceded the last intifada, in 2000. The prospects for sustained growth that will last several years and demonstrate true economic stability there, he says, are thus very poor.
IDF Chief of General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told his French counterpart Jean-Louis Georgelin that Israel is not planning to bomb Iran, but may send elite troops to conduct activities on the ground there.
IOA Editor: Information, misinformation, or disinformation?
Fayyad is a former World Bank economist who has been praised internationally and by Israel for reforming Palestinian finances and improving security in the occupied West Bank. He said he remains committed to a plan announced in August to build all the institutions of a viable state within two years.
“We cannot ignore the truth – the occupation is a violent, racist, inhumane, illegal, undemocratic, immoral and an extreme condition that presents a mortal danger to both peoples,” the letter read. “We, who were educated on the values of liberty, justice, honesty and peace, cannot accept it.”
Abe Hayeem, an architect and founding member of Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine writes about Tel Aviv and its deeply-rooted colonial history.
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.”
“We hereby announce our refusal to take part in the military apparatus,” read the letter which was signed by 88 youths. “We do not see a military solution as the proper solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
IOA Editor: This is the largest number of Israelis collectively refusing the draft – even though the majority of them found ways to evade military service without formally refusing and being subjected to multiple, consecutive jail terms.
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.
According to Dr. Muweiyah Hassenein, head of the ministry’s ambulance and emergency department, “we have found cases among newborn babies involving heart defects and brain abnormalities.”
IOA Editor: This report can be found in surprisingly few current media sources (Ma’an in Sept, Haaretz and Xinhua).
“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.”
In looking for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, we should once and for all stop looking to governments and officials (elected or otherwise), in the US, Israel, or among the Palestinians themselves. As the Obama administration has already demonstrated, the US government, in the present political conjuncture, will never put peace and justice in Palestine ahead of internal domestic pressures and politics; the Israeli government will not for one moment back down from its continually expanding colonization plan in the West Bank and East Jerusalem until it is compelled by outside pressure to do otherwise; and the Palestinian government — well, there is no such thing.
We strongly urge the leadership to reconsider its decision, and to begin to forge an independent path of diplomacy based on respect for international law that can lead to genuine justice and durable peace.
In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies.
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.’
When the world said in near unison, “War crimes,” Kasher said, “We are the most moral army in the world, no one is better than us.” If this is how a philosopher of ethics speaks, who needs propagandists?
[O]nly 1.7% of the planned produce exports from Gaza have actually left the Strip. The report also notes that the “monthly average exports in the period before the crisis was 1,380 truckloads per month (70 truckloads per day), composed of furniture, garments, cash crops, vegetables, processed food, metal products, handicrafts, and other cargo types.”
According to the Saban Center poll, 55% of Israeli-Arabs surf the Internet on a near daily basis, 14% go online a few times a week, and only 24% do not use the Internet at all.
On Iran: Asked if they would support American military action, 56% of American Jews said they would, while just 36% opposed it…
On the Occupation: While 51% oppose the American freeze demand (though a substantial 41% agree with it), fully 60% said Israel should dismantle all (8%) or some (52%) of the West Bank settlements in the context of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians.
The wounds of Gaza have not yet healed, the debris has not yet been cleared and the housing there has not yet been rehabilitated. Israel has also not been rehabilitated. It still insists that everything went as it should have. But cracks are now appearing. There is something cynical and depressing about the fact that it is happening only after Israeli leaders started to fear for their personal fates. Now it may be hoped that Goldstone, the United Nations and the world will not give in.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel: The slow response of the Shin Bet security service… was the main reason that more than one third… missed their medical appointments.
According to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the U212s… have a range of 4,500 kilometres (2,810 miles) and can launch cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads. Israeli media have written that the Dolphin submarine could be key in any attack on arch-foe Iran’s controversial nuclear sites.
IOA Editor: For technical specifications, see Israeli Dolphins Rule The Waves
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 military researcher] also warned of the possibility that in a future conflict, the United States might not help Israel as it had in the past… Sandman recommended that the IDF ask the US to establish additional warehouses with emergency stockpiles of weaponry in Israel, even “if Israel has to pay for their maintenance.” The US already has several warehouses with weaponry in Israel.
Israelis, Palestinians work together: The Occupier and the Occupied.
A clear majority of Palestinians – 55% – favor a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, separate from Israel, according to the survey. Just 11% favored either of the other alternatives under discussion, a bi-national state of Palestinians and Israelis or a confederation with neighboring Jordan and Egypt.
