Yaakov Amidror, newly appointed head of National Security Council, worked with many Ofer-controlled companies; the Ofer brothers are uspected of illegal trade with Iran through subsidiaries registered abroad.
IOA Editor: While Israeli leaders continue to raise the Iranian Threat as a diversion from Israel’s enhanced colonial efforts, prominent Israeli security officials have been exposed in the upper management tier of a leading Israeli conglomerate suspected of illegally trading with Iran. Hypocrisy knows no bounds, and the same goes for propaganda.
Is there a democratic country in the world where there are unrecognized villages? In Israel there are. Is there a country in the world where there are laws that allow for admissions committees to prevent citizens from living in certain communities? In Israel there are. Is there a country with a true democracy where a bill like the Nakba Law can be passed or where citizenship can be revoked, including citizenship of tens of thousands of Palestinians from East Jerusalem? Is there a democratic state that rules over another people as Israel does over the Palestinians?
Why did the Arabs of Haifa flee in 1948? Didn’t Haifa’s Jewish mayor ask them to stay? Maybe because Haganah (the primary pre-state Jewish military organization in Palestine) mortar rounds shot at the midst of the civilian crowds in the market, spoke another language. Here is a story that Israeli historians do not like to tell. (HEBREW)
“We are rapidly turning into South Africa. The economic hardship due to sanctions will be felt by every family in Israel,” said Idan Ofer at a gathering of some 80 businessmen. (HEBREW)
IOA Editor: A clear indication of how Israel’s ruling elite is deeply concerned about the potential economic impacts of BDS on Israel’s economy and on all Israelis. The meeting, which was organized in great secrecy, included Israeli billionaires and other leading business figures and its purpose was to support a diplomatic initiative designed to avert the impending deterioration of Israel’s global status.
In the 1940s, with the understanding that a war is on its way, the Haganah (the primary pre-state Jewish military organization in Palestine) collected detailed intelligence on hundreds of Palestinian villages. Only a few dozen files survived in the archives, and in them images that teach a great deal about the way in which the Palestinian population at the time was viewed by the Jewish population. (HEBREW)
An interview with Alternate Focus: an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, covering several of the most central issues.
Does history matter? Over the course of the past few months the Obama administration has abandoned its putative efforts to engage Israel and the Palestinians in peace talks after their collapse in the face of Israel’s continued settlement building on the West Bank. At the popular level and in the mainstream media, the response was one of familiar frustration with the allegedly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict… In practice, the core issues have remained the same for over 60 years, with the role of the United States and U.S. interests, including defense industries — major components in perpetuating the conflict — expanding over the course of that period.
In retrospect, the [Nakba] village files… sometimes constituted the last testimonies of the Arab villages, just before they were emptied of their inhabitants. They are the last remaining vestiges of the villages before they were destroyed or settled by Jewish immigrants who streamed into the country in its first years; villages which were erased from the Israeli map because of their Arab identity.
IOA Editor: Newly revealed documents on the Nakba, directly from the files of its perpetrators. This Israel-centric exposure of Israeli war crimes might, over time, help change Israelis’ view of history, or so one hopes.
As the state which claims to be the heir of the Holocaust martyrs, Israel crowns itself as the winner in the global, historical competition of victimhood. Yet it manufactures methods of oppression and dispossession of the individual and the collective, methods which turn the Nakba into a continuing, 63-year process.
On the 63rd commemoration of the Nakba Palestinians coordinate a wave of historic demonstrations. Protests at the Lebanese, Syrian, West Bank, and Gazan borders and inside Egypt took place. Many died as a result of live fire, and hundreds were injured both from Israeli forces and others such as the Egyptian and Lebanese armies.
MK Hanin Zuabi (Balad ) canceled a scheduled lecture at the University of Haifa Sunday after the university announced it was banning on-campus political activity and called in security forces. The lecture, which would have coincided with Nakba Day, was arranged and approved by the university a month ago. Zuabi, who was invited by the Balad student association, had planned to discuss anti-Arab discrimination and other issues.
IDF soldier describes the distress of a young woman who tearfully pleaded to be allowed to pass through a Jenin checkpoint in order to sit an important exam. He gradually came to understand, he says, that the Israeli army’s intention was “to enforce tyranny on people who you know are regular civilians” and to “make it clear who’s in control here”.
It is necessary to know that there were 418 villages here that were wiped off the face of the earth, and it should be remembered that there were more than 600,000 natives of this land who fled or were expelled not to return to their homes, and that to this day most of them … and their offspring live in terrible conditions, carrying keys to their lost homes… We must know that under nearly every patch of Jewish National Fund forest rest the ruins that Israel was keen to erase, to ensure that they not serve as evidence of a different heritage. We can know that under our flourishing Canada Park hide the ruins of three villages which Israel razed after the Six Day War, putting its residents on a bus and expelling them.
Israeli Defense Ministry director general: Five countries interested in Iron Dome, Israel’s anti-missile system.
IOA Editor: There’s no business like arms business… The Occupation has been very good to Israel’s arms industry, serving as a live shooting range, practice killing fields for the high tech systems Israel is marketing to countries around the world. As Amira Hass wrote in 2009, Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay. For more on the economic benefits of the Occupation, see the Shir Hever interview series The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation.
Morderchai Vanunu demands to apply a recently passed law and revoke his Israeli citizenship. “I have no interest in Israeli citienship, I don’t want to go on living here.”
Adalah lawyer Saswanzaher Zaher: “This is an ideological law that has been directed against the national identity of Israel’s Arab citizens, and against their collective memory. It detracts from the legitimacy of their standing as citizens entitle to equal rights in the State of Israel.”
The northern and southern branches of the Islamic movement pledge to begin working together, after months of attempts to unify. Announcement of the movement’s reunification came on the same day that rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation deal in Cairo.
On April 28th, formerly rivaling Palestinian parties announced their intention to begin reconciliation and hold an election within one year. Hamas is in power in the Gaza strip and Fateh is the leading party in the Palestinian Authority, ruling the West Bank. Since 2006 the parties have fought each other, leading to hundreds of casualties and many failed attempts to reach reconciliation.
Gilbert Achcar and Tom Segev discuss The Arabs and the Holocaust
Ghada Karmi: “On setting up its state in 1948, Israel set about demolishing every vestige of Palestinian life and history in the land… The battle to preserve Lifta must be won – it remains a physical memory of injustice and survival.”
Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz awarded Eliyahu with the prize for “his actions, effort and devotion to the Jewish nature of the Land of Israel.”
IOA Editor: The “devotion to the Jewish nature of the Land of Israel” is the same racist devotion to keep away the Palestinian people, dispossessed from the very same land, including Israeli citizens, even as short-term renters (e.g., Palestinian students in Safed). Ethnocentric Israel, a rapidly diminishing democracy-for-Jews only, now officially awards members of its ruling tribe often described by fellow Israeli-Jews as ‘racist’ and ‘extremist’ for their “devotion” to racist discriminatory laws and practices. Ethnic cleansing — “dunam here and dunam there,” bit by bit, one student and one family at a time — whether in Safed, or in Silwan, or elsewhere.
In the wake of her participation in last year’s Gaza flotilla, Zuabi was stripped of three key privileges as an MK; Zuabi in turn petitioned the High Court to get her privileges reinstated. The court gave the Knesset 30 days to submit an explanation.
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And no one is a human being without recognizing that the other is also one, and that it is important to get to know him, both his shortcomings and hopes. No one is born a murderer and no one is destined to be murdered, and no nation has a monopoly on suffering and mourning. The warning sign before a holocaust, genocide, politicide, ethnocide or ethnic cleansing is the same everywhere and at all times. True, learned research distinguishes between each, but the victims don’t care about the minute distinctions.
Israeli prison authority terrorized Palestinian prisoners in a ‘commando’ raid at the Ketziot prison which was designed to “boost the morale” of prison guards. One Palestinian prisoner was killed and several were injured. This was a routine prison raid, carried out against sleeping prisoners in the middle of the night. The video had been suppressed by the Israeli government from the time it was made in 2007, but was shown on Israel’s Channel 2 TV last week.
In this four-part video interview, British journalist Jonathan Cook talks about Nazareth and how it fits in within Israel’s ethnocracy; about Israel’s separate citizenship laws, one for Jews and one for non-Jews; and about where the Arabic language fits within Israel’s inherently discriminatory political system.
Cook’s position in the Arab heartland of Israel puts a different perspective on his reporting: namely that the post-1967 conflict over the occupied territories is best understood as a reflection and continuation of the larger conflict begun in 1948.
Oded Pilavsky: I finally started to comprehend what was happening there. A collectivist bunch imbued with socialist ideals, equipped with the best of agricultural machinery purchased on credit from the Jewish Agency, was reaping- robbing the fruit of the labor of poor Arabs who had been expelled from their land and their country…
Hamoked director Dalia Kerstein: “There is clearly a policy to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem and Israel to reduce what is called here the ‘Palestinian demographic threat.’ It’s really a case of ethnic cleansing.”
A recent ruling demonstrates the bureaucratic machinery the state has created to restrict the Palestinians’ ability to enter, live and work on land west of the separation fence.
IOA Editor: This is an important news story which points to the ultimate effect of Israeli supreme court decisions: supporting Israel’s methodical process of ethnic cleansing, bit by bit — as the old Zionist saying goes, “duman here, and dunam there” — this time 9.5% of the West Bank territory. Next time what?
Haaretz’ coverage of WikiLeaks documents concerning Israel is very interesting and well worth reading HERE.
The world knows that this is a battle between the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian David, and its heart is with the underdog. The world heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak of a two-state solution and was filled with hope. But after two years of total deadlock, hollow talk, illusions, Israel’s unreasonable setting of conditions and the construction of more and more settlements, the world has condemned Israel. No hasbara can change that.
Safed Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu: “It is necessary to see this struggle as action completing the Law of Return and the declaration of a Jewish state, as a continuation of the redemption of lands by the founders of the state and as action completing the government’s decision on Judaizing the Galilee.”
Anyone who honored the first Goldstone has to ask him: What exactly do you know today that you didn’t know then? Do you know today that criticizing Israel leads to a pressure-and-slander campaign that you can’t withstand, you ‘self-hating Jew’?
Most important, Israel has failed to investigate adequately the policy-level decisions that apparently lie behind the large-scale indiscriminate and unlawful attacks in Gaza. Those decisions are obviously the most sensitive because they involve senior officials, not just troops on the ground.
Israeli leaders have barely hidden their jubilation at an opinion article … by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone reconsidering the findings of his UN-appointed inquiry into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008… Israel would certainly like observers to interpret Goldstone’s latest comments as an exoneration. In reality, however, he offered far less consolation to Israel than its supporters claim.
[Goldstone] writes that if he knew then what he knows now, the report would’ve been different. Note, he didn’t say the report would’ve vindicated Israel’s conduct. That’s the message the Hasbara apparatus is crowing from every treetop and it’s simply untrue.
