Haaretz: “An increasing number of complaints of abuse during the interrogation of Palestinians from the Hebron area can apparently be traced to a computer program that grades police performance. An investigative report on the digitization of evil.”
IOA Editor: This important report shows how the Israeli Occupation authorities combine sophisticated performance management techniques, taken from the American corporate world, with traditional interrogation/torture techniques – resulting in sheer horror for their Palestinians subjects.
Commentators of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often complain that there has not yet been a legitimate Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. to emerge from within Palestinian civil society. The reality is that there are many Palestinians engaged in popular unarmed resistance to the Israeli occupation, preferring organized demonstrations in the West Bank to suicide bombs in Tel Aviv.
A question for Obama and Netanyahu: Where to? … Where are they headed? What will improve in another year? What will be more promising in another two years? The Syrian president is knocking at the door begging for peace with Israel, and the two leaders are ignoring him. Will he still be knocking in two years? The Arab League’s initiative is still valid; terror has almost ceased. What will the situation be after they have finished compromising over the freeze in construction of balconies and ritual baths?
Were it not for Mohammed Abu Tir’s red beard, this would perhaps be only a marginal news item: Israel is working to expel four Palestinian residents of Jerusalem affiliated with Hamas from the city of their birth.
Unhappy settlers: “The fact that B’Tselem decided to publish it on the day of Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama to try to make it go badly reveals the organization’s face as a systemic harmer of Israeli interests,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
B’Tselem’s Report:
By Hook and By Crook: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank
Video of IDF soldiers, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, patrolling as a Muslim call to prayer is heard. Then the music changes and they break into a Macarena-like dance.
As opposed to the conventional thinking, the tens of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons are human beings; as opposed to the conventional thinking, they also have families whose worlds have been destroyed. Most of them are not murderers, some are political prisoners in every way; others are various kinds of “bargaining chips” or throwers of stones and Molotov cocktails and carriers of kitchen knives.
Stuart Henochowicz: “I certainly don’t think Emily is a self-hating Jew … I think she is an ethical Jew of the highest order. I think she is what Jewish people should be about. I don’t think Emily should be a poster person for anyone … Emily is her own person … The Palestinians have been living in a cage for 43 years, so my heart goes out to them. … This is what Emily saw.”
IOA Editor: Emily surely isn’t a (self) hating person. The term “self-hating Jew” is a trick as old as the Occupation itself. Some of us continue to be subjected to it — for decades now — simply because we challenge the legitimacy of the Occupation. The same people using such name-calling also try twisting our criticism of the Occupation, calling us “delegitimizers.”
More on Emily and her artwork:
Images: Art – Emily Henochowicz
Talks aimed at reaching an intelligence-sharing agreement between the European Union and Israel have skirted around the location of Israel’s national police headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem… “The negotiations so far have not touched upon the issue of the location of the main office of the Israeli police in East Jerusalem,” a Europol spokesman [stated].
[B]anking sanctions impact quickly upon financial elites who have the clout to pressure governments to concede political change. Trade sanctions, by contrast, impact hardest on the poor or lower-paid workers, who have virtually no political influence. SWIFT will, however, only take action against Israeli banks if ordered to do so by a Belgian court, and then only in very exceptional circumstances. Such very exceptional circumstances are now well-documented by the UN-commissioned Goldstone report.
Israel Police arrested Hamas official Mohammed Abu Tir on Wednesday for failing to comply with orders to leave his East Jerusalem home… In early June, Jerusalem police confiscated Abu Tir’s Israeli identity card, along with those of three other Hamas legislators – Mohammed Totach, Khaled Abu Arafa, and Ahmed Atoun – giving them until July to leave Jerusalem.
Jewish “settlements and the demolition of homes are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible,” [EU foreign affairs chief Catherine] Ashton warned in a statement.
The continuing struggles against the occupation, on the ground in the territories, take their usual grim course, but inside Israel hardly a day passes without some new and sickening jolt. The country is in the grip of violent nationalist paranoia spiked with inventive forms of wickedness and active hatred for Palestinians, of an intensity I’ve never seen before.
6,800 Detainees are currently imprisoned by Israel, including 300 children, 34 women, 213 detainees in administrative detention, and 11 elected legislators. Nearly 1,500 detainees are ill and need urgent medical attention, dozens of them requiring surgeries and constant hospitalization… Gilad Shalit is the only Israeli held by the Palestinians.
ALSO: Boy receives second administrative detention order
Hassan Jabareen (Adalah): “Under international law, an occupying power cannot demand loyalty from the the people it occupies. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are ‘protected persons’ in law and cannot be expelled.”
Successive Israeli cabinets have worked to enforce on the ground in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories a situation that they could present as irreversible. Have they now reached the point where the biblical book of Daniel’s prophecy is once again relevant?
The Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee is set to approve an unprecedented master plan that calls for the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, a move largely based on construction on privately owned Arab property.
Seven oxygen machines donated to the Palestinian Authority by a Norwegian development agency were seized by Israeli officials en route to hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza, the Ramallah-based health ministry said.
Each of us, each of you, can draw the line through BDS and act as a caring, responsible citizen of the world. To end Israel’s 43-year-old occupation. To end the unacceptable, criminal siege of Gaza. To end racist laws and policies inside Israel, openly targeting the Palestinian citizens of Israel. To end more than sixty years of ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Uzi Arad: “The creation of a Palestinian state remains the choice of many … But in the process, have you failed to notice that the more we lend legitimacy to a Palestinian state, the more it comes at the expense of our own?”
IOA Editor: So much for Netanyahu’s commitment to a Palestinian state, and Obama’s.
Israeli police … are sent to the streets of East Jerusalem as enforcers of government and municipal policy. It is that same policy of intentional discrimination that has brought 65% of the 303,429 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem below the poverty line (double the number of poor Jews in the city) and 74% of Palestinian children below that line. The police serve the government that since 1967 has expropriated 24,000 dunams (8,000 acres) of land from Palestinians and over the years has built more than 50,000 housing units on it – for Jews only. Police accompany the bulldozers that demolish homes built, for lack of choice, without permits.
Citizens of Israel can leave the country for any length of time, and their citizenship and all their rights are theirs in perpetuity. But when it comes to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, Israel applies draconian regulations whose covert intent is to bring about the expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible from their home city.
Those who demand that I prepare students for [military] recruitment should know that my duty is also to tell them that they would enter a territory which was occupied 43 years ago, in which human rights are being shamefully violated on a daily basis by means of our military superiority. In [the] future, these children will have to account for themselves, and they will ask if their school has revealed to them the terrible secret called occupation. Yes, occupation. An occupation, not a liberation, not a return to an ancestral land.
The latest gimmick of the Israeli occupation under the guise of “security considerations” has emerged. The test subject: Nasser Laham, a Palestinian journalist from Bethlehem who is close with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and who advocates peace with Israel.
IOA Editor: Yossi Melman is the Haaretz specialist on Israel’s intelligence services. In recent months, his writing has been turning increasingly more critical of the Occupation authorities.
Amira Hass: A motorist from East Jerusalem who ran over and wounded several Border Police officers Friday was shot twice in the face from close range while still lying on the ground, eyewitnesses said. Neighborhood witnesses said the fatal shots were fired once the officers no longer had reason to fear that their lives were in danger, and could have easily arrested the suspect.
IOA Editor: Shoot first, and don’t nobody ask any questions later.
BDS initiative is a moral strategy which has demonstrated its potential for success. Most recently, German Deutsche Bank became the latest of several European institutions to divest from Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems; two main Italian supermarket chains announced a boycott of produce from illegal Israeli settlements; performers Elvis Costello and Gil Scott-Heron cancelled appearances in Israel.
Rashid Khalidi: “Our efforts to insure that the competent UN authorities fully address this issue will continue, and we intend to keep the campaign on the international agenda until Israel and the Simon Wiesenthal Center desist from this project that has desecrated an important Muslim and Palestinian cultural heritage site.”
[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.
Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime… For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years. Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead.
IOA Editor: UPDATED to correct an omission from Noam Chomsky’s statement on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
Jerusalem police confiscated the Israeli identity cards of four Hamas legislators overnight on Thursday and gave them until July to leave the country.
IOA Editor: This Haaretz headline is, of course, misleading. The Palestinian leaders were given a month before they’d be forced out of East Jerusalem. In all likelihood, their presence in Jerusalem predates Israel by centuries.
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.
How can we rely on those Palestinians? For 43 years, they have been building the settlers’ homes with the sweat of their brows, paving roads for them and building their fences, and then suddenly, out of the blue, a boycott? Is that the way for partners to behave? Is that how they pay us back after we educated them for so many years to be our hewers of wood and drawers of water?
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington in a much-feted effort to restore damaged ties with the United States, new tensions in East Jerusalem threaten to rekindle a diplomatic row over Jewish building beyond the Green Line in the city. On Saturday lawyers served eviction notices to two Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, a focus of clashes between Arab residents and settlers.
Although photojournalist Imad Bornat from Bil’in was acquitted over a year ago on charges of assaulting an officer, police still regard his case as “open” and continue to bar him from entering Israel.
Nawi’s conviction points to a relatively recent development regarding the restriction of resistance, to extremely passive modes of protest. And, in some cases, even these kinds of protests are prohibited, as in Sheikh Jarrah where activists are repeatedly arrested simply for demonstrating against the seizure of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian village of Sheikh Sa’ad has been essentially disconnected from the outside world by the Israeli defense establishment. This is one of those stories that make me, as an Israeli, feel truly shameful.
