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Thousands rally against Netanyahu’s visit to The Hague

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Former Dutch Prime Minister Dries Van Agt
Press TV – September 7, 2016

Thousands of people have staged a demonstration in The Hague in protest at an official visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Netherlands, saying he should be brought to justice for his crimes.

On Tuesday, the protesters carried Netanyahu’s mugshots and signs that read “Bring Bibi Netanyahu to International Criminal Court” as the Israeli leader arrived in the Netherlands and met with senior Dutch officials.

Chants such as “Free free Palestine, boycott boycott Israel” could also be heard during the demonstration.

“I’m standing here because Netanyahu is visiting the Netherlands. I’m standing in The Hague and we think that rather than him being received by the parliament, he should be put on trial in the Peace Palace of the UN tribunal,” a protester said in English.

Some of the protesters also criticized local authorities for attempting to cancel the anti-Netanyahu gathering.

“This demonstration is not only against Netanyahu, but it’s also for our right to demonstrate, at the places where we want, where it’s happening, because the Zionists, they always get the permission to stand in front of the parliament,” another demonstrator commented.

The rally was originally planned to be staged outside the Dutch parliament building in The Hague downtown, but authorities later did not allow the protesters to proceed.

The demonstration came a day after former Dutch prime minister Dries Van Agt reacted angrily to Netanyahu’s two-day visit to the Netherlands, calling on government officials to “send him right away to the International Criminal Court.”

Speaking in an interview with the NPO1 public broadcaster on Monday, Van Agt described the 66-year-old Chairman of Israel’s right-wing Likud political party as a “war criminal,” arguing that the Tel Aviv regime has been committing a crime under the ICC’s Rome Statute.

“The occupation and expansion… building of settlements, of occupied territory, this is according to the Rome Statute, which is… the setup… the statute on which the international criminal court is based, in so many words, a war crime,” he said.

“So why should we receive someone who continues with such things, we could have sent him right away to the International Criminal Court, that would have been better,” the 85-year-old politician and activist, known for his vocal support of the Palestinian cause, the ex-PM pointed out.

The Rome Statute, which went into effect in July 2002, outlines the four grave international crimes, namely crimes of aggression, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. The statute forms one of the foundations of The Hague-based International Criminal Court.

Israel signed the treaty in December 2000, but “unsigned” it two years later by means of the US lobby.

One of the primary reasons behind the decision was a clause in the document, which allowed the prosecution of the Israeli regime over war crimes for “transfer of parts of the civilian population of an occupying power into occupied territory.”

September 7, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Without Israeli occupation, Palestinian economy would double – UN report

RT | September 7, 2016

In a damning report, the UN development body (UNCTAD) described the ways Israeli occupation of Gaza and West Bank has been preventing the Palestinian economy from recovery and getting twice as big as it is now.

The document detailing the “staggering economic cost” of Israeli occupation was released on Tuesday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

“The Palestinian economy would be at least twice as large without Israeli occupation,” the findings reveal.

Among the key reasons for the high unemployment and staggering poverty the agency cites “confiscation of Palestinian land, water and other natural resources.” It adds that “restrictions on the movement of people and goods; destruction of assets and the productive base;” also played a major role here.

According to the latest estimations by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics nearly 27 percent of people of the autonomy are currently without job. Meanwhile UNCTAD has revealed that over 66 percent of the Palestinians were food-insecure last year.

“The continuous process of de-agriculturalization and de-industrialization” has contributed to a severe degradation of Palestinian economy, according to the UN report. The paper states that in Gaza “producers are denied access to half of the cultivable area and 85 per cent of fishery resources.”

The West Bank area is facing a similar problem, according to the UN. In the so-called area C, which constitutes over 60 percent of West Bank “more than 66 per cent of its grazing land, is not accessible to Palestinian producers”.

The figures published in the report say that the Israeli occupation of the Area C “costs the Palestinian economy the equivalent of 35 per cent of GDP ($4.4 billion in 2015).”

The Israeli military campaign in 2014 whose proclaimed goal, was to prevent rocket attacks on its territories from the Palestinian areas delivered another blow to the financial recovery of the Palestinians.

The following tightening of the Gaza blockade, in place since 2007, made the things even worse, the report states. It resulted in additional civilian items being banned after labeled “dual-use”, meaning they can be also implemented for causing harm.

The crisis resulted in additional severe shortages of medical equipment as well as serious reduction in water supplies in the occupied territories, the UN finds. The problem also contributed to the rising infant mortality of almost 20 out of 1,000 live births. The trend is labeled “unprecedented” and found only in countries “affected by HIV epidemics”

In addition UNCTAD points out that the expanding settlement policies by the Israeli authorities are contributing to the Palestinian plight.

“There are now 142 settlements in the West Bank, bringing the number of Israeli settlers to over one fifth of the Palestinian population. This expansion undermines the prospects for a two-State solution,” UNCTAD claims.

The so-called two-state solution, proposed by the UN would see an establishment of an independent state of Palestine alongside Israel, west of the Jordan River. The potential boundaries however remain one of the key stumbling blocks here.

In the latest development, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s press service has issued a statement saying he is considering Russia’s offer to host Israeli-Palestinian talks in Moscow

“[Netanyahu] presented Israel’s position whereby he is always ready to meet [Abbas] without preconditions and is therefore considering the Russian president’s proposal and the timing for a possible meeting,” the statement said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already accepted the offer to meet with Netanyahu, although the date for the talks has not been yet set.

September 6, 2016 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Jonathan Kay and the Israel First Movement

The Kevin Barrett – Noam Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Eleventh part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” – Read the tenth part here

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By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 12, 2016

Jonathan Kay began his literary career in 1998 as a founding member of the editorial board of Canada’s National Post. Kay worked under Conrad Black and his Israeli-American partner, Richard Perle. Perle was an executive member of the advisory board of Black’s Hollinger International, which oversaw one of the world’s largest English-language newspaper chains based in North America, Great Britain and Israel. A main objective of Hollinger Inc.’s Canadian flagship, the National Post, was to push the country’s political culture far enough rightward that the Christian Zionist politician, Stephen Harper, could take the reigns of the federal government. Canadian Prime Minister between 2006 and 2015, Harper swept into power riding the wave of political fervor originating in the 9/11 psychological operation.

Richard Perle is sometimes referred to as the Prince of Darkness. He is a frequent and unabashed proponent of “total war.” Perle was a PNAC member and lead author of the “Clean Break” document that in 1996 encouraged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to move away from negotiations with the Palestinians toward a more militant posture in the Middle East and globally. Quite likely Perle had a significant role in planning the 9/11 event.

After the Bush administration was delivered its new Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001, Perle renewed his call for “total war.” In advancing this agenda, Perle helped lead the charge resulting in the US and UK-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Along with David Frum, another Canadian neocon spin doctor deeply implicated in the lies and crimes of 9/11, Perle co-authored the propaganda text, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. One of the book’s key recommendations was for the United States to invade the Islamic Republic of Iran. Going back to his role in the formulation of the “Clean Break” document, Perle had long advocated the invasion of Iran as well as Iraq and Syria in his capacity as an influential adviser within Israel’s Netanyahu government.

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In looking back in 2014 at his sixteen years at the National Post, Kay emphasized that his work on 9/11 infused his literary career with a “sense of purpose.” For a lot of “conservative pundits… this was our Spanish Civil War. The fate of Western Civilization was at stake.” Kay continues, “I became obsessed with 9/11. I read the Koran, hoping to gain insights into Osama Bin Laden’s mindset, travelled to conferences in Israel, joined a Washington, D.C.-based think tank devoted to protecting democratic countries from terrorism. [Foundation for the Defense of Democracies] I helped a former Mossad agent [Michael Ross] write his memoir, and then wrote a book about 9/11 conspiracy theories.” [1]

If Jonathan Kay’s journalistic crusade is conceived as his equivalent to fighting in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939, his position on 9/11 puts him on the side of the Falangists, on the side of Francisco Franco’s right-wing nationalist forces. As clearly displayed in the ultra-Zionist content of Among The Truthers and The Volunteer as well as his frequent columns in the National Post, Kay is an extreme nationalist whose highest priority is to advance the imperial reach of the Jewish state centered in the expansionary polity of Israel. Kay seems surprisingly candid in identifying himself as a partisan journalist spinning propaganda for the Israel First faction that now prevails inside the governing elites that rule Canada, the United States and all the NATO countries.

The Underground Asylum Imagined by Jonathan Kay

The difference between Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Kay in dealing with Kevin Barrett’s 9/11 work helps illuminate the complex dynamics of a many-faceted cover up campaign. Kay’s Among The Truthers, for instance, is based largely on detailed ad hominem attacks on those that do not accept the official narratives he seeks to advance and defend. Chomsky on the other hand avoids any reference to scholarship of those that have critically evaluated the evidence of what did or did not happen on 9/11. This treatment of his intellectual opponents as unworthy even of named recognition is made very clear in his failure to identify Dr. Barrett and his qualifications even as the MIT professor accused the former University of Wisconsin Lecturer of academic wrongdoing.

In Among The Truthers, Kay’s sponsors assigned him the task of developing the primary commemorative text created with an eye to maintaining Zionist control over the MSM discourse that would mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The task given Kay in the prelude to the commemorate events in 2011 was to extend the meme of “9/11 conspiracy theories” into new extremes of deceit and obfuscation through fear mongering, defamation, misrepresentation and guilt-by-association.

The text’s title well encapsulates the core features of the smear campaign that is so central to the strategy of preventing the public from realizing how severely and systematically we have been lied to. Kay’s fervid literary invention of a “Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers” was meant to invoke connotations of darkness, dementia and concealment. Among the engineered mental pictures conjured up by the literary reference to a “Conspiracist Underground” are concocted media memes of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network supposedly coordinating international havoc from elaborate networks of Eurasian terrorist caves.

Chomsky and Kay and the other 9/11 obfuscators consistently avoid dealing with the evidence. There is never any discussion, for instance, of the US government’s position that a catastrophic failure of intelligence flows, together with a complete breakdown of a whole series of emergency measure procedures, was the main cause of the 9/11 debacle. This narrative line is called into question by the fact that not one of the officials supposedly responsible for this alleged failure of intelligence and national defense was so much as reprimanded let alone fired. If the official narrative was true, why is it that the supposed incompetents actually received promotions?

There is never any effort to address huge anomalies like the fact, for instance, that the black boxes from the weaponized jet planes could not be found and yet passports of the alleged hijackers were miraculously located amidst the debris. There is never any real reckoning on the side of the obfuscators with the ongoing and blatantly illegal destruction of the forensic evidence of the 9/11 crimes.

This process starts under Michael Chertoff in his capacity as the person responsible for the US Justice Department’s criminal investigation of 9/11. Under Chertoff’s guidance this federal “investigation” quickly assumed the character of a federally orchestrated cover up. The destruction of evidence begins with the unseemly haste in the autumn of 2001 to dispose of the steel remnants of the three pulverized WTC towers. The twisted steel girders were quickly removed and sold off to scrap metal customers in China without prior forensic testing for signs of controlled demolitions. The quick destruction of evidence included the removal and destruction of human remains.

The saga of federal destruction of the evidence of the 9/11 crime, including the illegal destruction of the taped evidence of CIA torture in secret black site dungeons, extends to the proceedings currently underway in the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. There, the military trial being pressed against the supposed “mastermind of 9/11” broke down in May of 2016 because a military judge improperly allowed the destruction of state evidence.

Kay’s excuse for not dealing with the evidence in Among The Truthers is to cite the supposed advice of a supposed New York editor who supposedly cautioned him, “debunking books don’t sell… Conspiracy theorists won’t believe you. And normal people don’t need to be told what you’re telling them. So you have no audience.” The implication here is that somehow “normal people” need not be burdened with knowledge of the evidentiary substance of what really happened. (p.320)

Kay effectively destroys his journalistic credibility with this startling declaration that he ignored the 9/11 evidence due to the marketing advice of his New York editor. From this very compromised position of surrender to the vagaries of media salesmanship, Kay launches into his pop psychology fakery profiling the inhabitants of his imagined underground realm. Those “conspiracists” that the author chooses to highlight are simply wrong because Jonathan Kay declares them to be wrong. No proof required. All those that have developed interpretations that do not conform with the Israeliocentric worldview of Jonathan Kay and his publishers in the Rupert Murdoch media empire are simply swept aside as members of “cults and cult-like movements.” (p.315)

The inhabitants of Kay’s invented realm are pronounced by their Inquisitor to be heretics and worse. Kay declares them to be common victims of an “incurable disease” against which young people require “inoculation” through the introduction of special curricula and programs in schools. In taking on the personae of a public health official charged to protect our youth from the spread of infectious conspiracy theories, is Kay, the self-proclaimed poseur, implicitly prescribing the quarantining of those with whom he disagrees?

You will read “9/11 Crimes and Israel” in the next part.

Endnotes

[1] Jonathan Kay, “My Life at the National Post and Why I’ll Miss It,” National Post, 21 November, 2014

Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

September 6, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

UK Jewish lobby calls on Labour to expel Livingstone

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Former London mayor Ken Livingstone
Press TV – September 6, 2016

Britain’s Labour Party has come under pressure from a powerful Jewish lobby to expel former London mayor and MP Ken Livingstone, who says Adolf Hitler supported Zionism.

The British Jews organization made the call on Monday, shortly after Livingstone’s interview with the BBC, where he doubled down on his remarks about Hitler’s support for Zionism.

“During the 1930s, Hitler collaborated with the Zionists and supported them because he believed that a solution to his problem — the Jews — was that they should all move to Palestine,” the veteran MP told BBC radio.

Livingstone told the radio show that expelling him would be “very difficult” as he has the evidence needed to back the statement.

The comments revived a controversy from April, where he made the same remarks on the same radio show and was subsequently suspended by party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

“After I did the interview with you and I got suspended, I couldn’t walk down the street for people stopping me and saying ‘we know what you said is true – don’t give in to them,'” Livingstone said. “It’s going to be very difficult for them to expel me from the Labour Party when I’ve got this whole sheaf of documents and papers which shows that what I said was true.”

In its Monday statement, the British Jews blasted Livingstone for attempting to “rewrite history.”

“Every day that Labour does not expel him is a stain on the party,” the lobby’s Board of Deputies Vice President Marie van der Zyl said.

The Israeli regime was illegally established in 1948, when it occupied Palestinian land along with expanses of other Arab territories during full-fledged military operations. The occupied lands also include Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms and Syria’s Golan Heights.

In 1967, it occupied the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem al-Quds, and the Gaza Strip. It later annexed the West Bank and East al-Quds in a move never recognized by the international community.

“The creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong, because there had been a Palestinian community there for 2,000 years,” Livingstone told Arabic TV station al-Ghad al-Arabi in May.

The Labour Party has suspended as many as 50 members over allegations of “anti-Semitism” and racism over the past months.

September 6, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian forces stop vehicle of undercover Israeli forces, get arrested at gunpoint

Ma’an – September 6, 2016

TULKAREM – Undercover Israeli special forces reportedly arrested four Palestinian customs forces before dawn on Tuesday morning near the Nur Shams refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank district of Tulkarem.

The Palestinian customs forces were reportedly conducting a surveillance operation surrounding “smuggled goods” in the Tulkarem area, when they spotted a Mercedes commercial vehicle driving in the nearby village of Anabta.

When the Palestinian officers attempted to stop the vehicle, it reportedly evaded them and fled in the direction of the Nur Shams refugee camp, at which time the Palestinian forces began to chase down the vehicle.

Palestinian sources told Ma’an that the customs officers managed to stop the vehicle, but when they attempted to search it, they discovered that the vehicle was being driven by undercover Israeli special forces.

The Israeli forces then reportedly pulled their guns on the four Palestinian officers, and detained them for “obstructing a secret mission” they were conducting in the nearby village of Bizzariya.

The detained Palestinian officers were released by 8 a.m. Tuesday, after the Palestinian Authority reportedly intervened on their behalf.

September 6, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

Israel detained 30 Palestinian teens in August, majority report being tortured

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Ma’an – September 5, 2016

RAMALLAH – Israeli forces imprisoned 30 teenage Palestinians over the month of August and collected 65,000 shekels ($17,270) from their families as fines, the Palestinian Committee of Prisoners’ Affairs said Monday, with the majority of the detainees saying they were beaten and tortured during their detention, interrogation, and transport from one detention center to another.

A statement released Monday quoted the committee’s lawyer Luay Akka as saying that among the detainees were minors as young as 13 years old.

Akka added that 17 of the detainees were taken from their homes during military raids, five were detained from off the street, four at military checkpoints, and four arrived voluntarily to detention centers after they received summons from Israeli authorities.

Three of the 30 detainees were held without being charged or standing trial in administrative detention, and the rest were sentenced after court hearings to periods ranging from one month to 45 months.

Mousa Khanafsa, a 14-year-old boy from Abu Dis in the Jerusalem district of the occupied West Bank told Akka that he was violently beaten when he was detained from a street near his house.

A group of undercover Israeli officers, he said, chased him in the street and when they caught him they “assaulted him with the butts of their rifles, stomped on him with military boots, and was left bleeding from his nose.”

It was the latest report to emerge recently from the committee and other rights groups, amid years of well-documented abuse and mistreatment of Palestinian children by Israeli forces.

Akka reported last month on the cases of two Palestinian minors who were tortured, abused, and medically neglected in Israeli custody, one of which after being shot at point-blank range when Israeli forces detained them for rock throwing in the occupied West Bank district of Ramallah.

Locals in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of al-Tur reported Saturday that Israeli police detained and assaulted 16-year-old Jamal al-Zaatari. During his detention, Jamal was pepper sprayed and beaten, resulting in injuries to his face, back, and feet, in addition to several bruises.

A report released recently by BADIL, a Palestinian NGO, warned of an increasing trend of Israeli forces shooting and injuring Palestinian youth — particularly in the knees and legs — during the near-nightly detention raids carried across the occupied West Bank.

Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) has also extensively documented the abuse of Palestinians children in East Jerusalem by Israeli forces and the harsh interrogation practices used to force their confessions.

Despite “on paper” having more rights than Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank who are subject to a draconian military detention system, in practice, Jerusalem minors “do not enjoy their enshrined rights” under the Israeli civilian court system, according to DCIP.

Out of 65 cases documented by DCIP in 2015, “more than a third of Jerusalem youth were arrested at night (38.5 percent), the vast majority (87.7 percent) were restrained during arrest, and only a slim minority of children (10.8 percent) had a parent or lawyer present during interrogation.”

Interrogations of Palestinian children can last up to 90 days according to prisoners’ rights group Addameer, during which in addition to being beaten and threatened, cases of sexual assault, and placement in solitary confinement to elicit confessions are also often reported, while confession documents they are forced to sign are in Hebrew — a language most Palestinian children do not speak.

According to the Palestinian Committee of Prisoners’ Affairs, as of mid August, Israeli forces detained 560 children from occupied East Jerusalem alone since the beginning of 2016, and 110 minors were still being held in Israeli prisons, including four girls and 10 boys in juvenile detention centers.

According to Addameer, of the 7,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli custody, 250 were minors as of July.

September 5, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Zeina

DCI-Palestine | September 16, 2013

My name is Zeina. I’m 12 years old. I live in Ras al-Amud in Jerusalem. I was 15 days old when my dad was sent to prison, and he’s serving a 20-year sentence.

– Produced by DCI-Palestine
– Directed by Sevan Karakashian
– Edited by Sameer Qumsiyeh

Subscribe to our mailing list: http://www.dci-palestine.org/subscribe

September 4, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

51 Israeli Violations against Journalists in August

IMEMC News & Agencies – September 2, 2016

journalist-alrayIsraeli occupation forces reportedly committed 51 violations against Palestinian journalists during August of 2016, the government media office stated.

According to Al Ray Palestinian Media Agency, a report published by the office revealed that Israeli forces detained eight journalists, holding four in custody, and served a summons notice to one journalist.

Israeli authorities recently renewed the administrative detention of four journalists and the actual prison sentence of two journalists. It also documented five cases of abuses committed against detained journalists.

Additionally, it documented seven cases of injury, regarding four female journalists, involving gas grenades and fire.

Israeli forces also banned five journalists from covering events and travelling, one of them from Gaza.

The report also documented the closing of one local radio in the occupied West Bank, the raiding of two media institutions and the storming of nine houses where Palestinian journalists resided. It also reportedly seized media staff equipment.

September 3, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian Photojournalist injured in Kafr Qaddum protest, forces raid East Jerusalem neighborhoods

Ma’an – September 2, 2016

QALQILIYA – A Palestinian photojournalist was injured by Israeli forces Firday afternoon, as dozens others suffered from tear gas inhalation during the weekly protest in the norther occupied West bank village of Kafr Qaddum.

Popular resistance coordinator in Kafr Qaddum Murad Shtewei told Ma’an that Israeli forces “assaulted” participants in the protest minutes after it began.

The soldiers injured photojournalist Nidal Shtayyah after hitting him with a tear gas canister in the back of his head. He was taken to Rafidia hospital for treatment.

Shtewei added that Israeli forces fired a barrage of tear gas, which landed mostly in surrounding homes, causing a family of five to suffer from tear gas inhalation, in addition to others participating in the protest, who were treated on the scene.

Residents of Kafr Qaddum began staging weekly protests in 2011 against land confiscations, as well as the closure of the village’s southern road by Israeli forces. The road, which has been closed 13 years, is the main route to the nearby city of Nablus, the nearest economic center.

Following similar clashes that broke out last month, Shtewei told Ma’an that more than 330 protests have been held over that period, during which time 84 protesters have been injured by live fire, including 12 children.

Some 120 others have been detained at protests and were subsequently held in Israeli custody for periods ranging between four and 24 months, Shtewei said, adding that they have paid fines totaling some 25,000 shekels (approximately $6,488).

Over the course of five years, an elderly protester was killed after suffering from excessive tear gas inhalation, one youth lost his eyesight, and another his ability to speak, he added.

Meanwhile, along with armed Israeli forces, Israeli Jerusalem municipality crews reportedly raided the occupied East Jerusalem villages of al-Isawyia and Silwan, where they delivered demolition orders and summons to local residents.

According to the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, Israeli forces accompanied municipality crews who raided the al-Bustan neighborhood in Silwan, where they hung demolition orders and warnings telling residents to “follow-up with the municipality on several buildings in the area.”

The forces reportedly took pictures of neighborhoos buildings and entrances of the neighborhood, and wrote tickets for parked cars.

Muhammad Abu al-Homos,a member of the al-Isawiya monitoring committee, said Israeli forces raided the village, searched a house, and patrolled the street ‘provocatively’. He added that the forces detained a teenager who was present in the area.

An Israeli army spokesperson said they were looking into reports of all three incidents in Kafr Qaddum, al-Isawiya and Silwan.

September 2, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel to deploy machine gun-equipped autonomous vehicles along Gaza border

MEMO | September 2, 2016

Israel is set to use fully autonomous unmanned vehicles along the border with the Gaza Strip, according to a  report published by FoxNews.com.

While currently unarmed, the Israeli military plans to add machine guns to the so-called Border Protector Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) by “the beginning of next year”.

An unnamed Israeli military official told the website: “This is the future – the border is a very dangerous place… Sending unmanned vehicles to do these patrols means that troops’ lives are not at risk.”

According to the report, the Israeli army has worked with defence giant Elbit Systems to convert Ford pick-up trucks into UGVs by adding “specialised remote driving technology”, along with “four driving cameras and a 360-degree observation camera.”

UGV testing reportedly began in July 2015 and the trucks “became operational in February [2016].”

While each vehicle is currently “driven by an operator in a remote control room using a steering wheel, joystick and pedals”, an army official told FoxNews.com that “in the future, we will have the capability of fully autonomous driving.” The machine gun “will be operated from a control room.”

September 2, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ben Gurion’s Plan for Regional Conquest and Israeli Empire

By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | September 1, 2016

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Ben Gurion’s 1948 vision of Israeli empire

Odeh Bisharat, one of Haaretz’s few Israeli-Palestinian columnists (Sayeh Kashua is another), published an incisive article on what he calls “the end of the road” for Zionism.  But the first paragraph, which comprised a quotation from David Ben Gurion (the full archival passage in Hebrew is here), really opened my eyes.  At the first meeting of the Haganah military command after statehood was declared on May 15, 1948, he told the assembled leadership his strategic goals for the coming war.  This grandiose vision dispels a long-standing claim by proponents of the Israel-as-victim view, who argue that Israel’s enemies have commenced all the wars against it and that the “Jewish state” has only acted in self-defense:

“We must immediately destroy Ramle and Lod. … We must organize Eliyahu’s brigade to direct it against Jenin in preparation for [conquering] the Jordan Valley. … Maklef needs to receive reinforcements and his role is the conquest of southern Lebanon, through bombing-support against Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. … Yigal Allon must strike Syria from the east and from the north. … We must establish a Christian state whose southern border will be the Litani [River]. We will forge an alliance with it. When we break the strength of the [Jordanian] Legion and bomb Amman we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria falls. And if Egypt still dares to fight, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.

… That is how we will end the war – and make a reckoning on our forefathers behalf with Egypt, Assyria and Aramea.”

Pro-Israel advocates will chalk this up to the braggadocio of a national leader preparing the troops for battle.  He offers them a vision full of victories and maximalist territorial gain.  It cheers them for the difficult battle ahead.  Defenders may argue that Ben Gurion had to have been realistic enough to know that the new state had little chance of achieving such objectives.

But in my reading of Ben Gurion, there are two separate personalities: one of the pragmatist who accepts half a loaf instead of the whole; the other the ambitious politico-military strategist harboring imperial visions of Israel’s future (including the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian inhabitants of the new state).  But even the pragmatist is only pragmatic in the moment.  Ben Gurion makes clear that his pragmatism is only temporary until Israel is in a position to realize its maximalist goals.

The irony here is that it is Israeli advocates who continually claim that conspiring Palestinian militants only accept Israel on an interim basis until they are powerful enough to eradicate it.  Therefore, Israel may never trust such enemies and never make peace with them; because a knife in the back is the only future Israel can expect from them.  We can see that it is Israel that the Arab states had reason to distrust.

Another bitter irony is the claim by Israel and anti-Iran forces in the U.S. and elsewhere, that Iran has a nefarious plan to spread Shia hegemony throughout the Middle East to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf region.  In truth, Ben Gurion shows that Iran is a piker by comparison.  He envisioned a Greater Israel not just from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean), but a Davidic imperium spreading its influence from Syria to Egypt.  Even those Arab states Israel permitted to remain would be little more than vassals of this new regional Goliath.

Just think how Ben Gurion’s successors implemented most of the strategic vision he proclaimed that day: a Christian state in southern Lebanon; the fall of Syria; Israeli bombardment of Arab capitals in Beirut, Damascus and elsewhere.  The only elements of his plan that were unrealized (conquest of Jordan and the pacification of Egypt) weren’t necessary because both states sued for peace.

Today’s radical settlers, with their considerably ‘pared-down’ vision of a pure, racialist Judean state, rid of Palestinians, from the Jordan to the sea are inheritors of Ben Gurion’s legacy.

Bisharat quotes another telling statement from a pre-State Zionist leader who could be describing current Israeli strategy of sabotaging peace negotiations with the Palestinians.  This was written in 1937:

“It turns out that we have put out our hand for peace, but took it back right away, when the other side expressed its interest in accepting it. This dangerous game did not help to raise our honor in their eyes as honest people, and the accusation that they blame us for, that we are conducting two-faced politics: On one hand we pretend as if we are asking for an agreement, and on the other hand we only want to gain time – is not baseless.”

This clearly explains Netanyahu’s Bar Ilan speech of 2009 in which he pretends to embrace a two-state solution (under severe pressure from the Bush administration to do so).  The few times since when the Israeli leader has trotted out his affirmation of a two-state solution were times when he was under great duress and had to throw a sop to foreign interlocutors like the Obama administration.  Clearly, Bibi’s heart is not in it, nor does he believe it.

September 2, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

California Lawmakers OK Bill Penalizing Companies Boycotting Israel

teleSUR – September 1, 2016

Both houses of California’s legislature have now approved a bill to ban state government agencies from awarding contracts to companies that choose to join the international boycott against Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine.

The bill, AB 2844, if passed, would be a serious attack on the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid and its treatment of Palestinians.

Companies who choose to boycott Israel, would be accused of being in violation of the state’s civil rights law and would not be permitted to accept a California government contract of $US100,000 or more.

The bill, which has eight different amendments, was eventually passed 60 to 0 in the assembly, and will now go to Governor Jerry Brown for has to decide whether to veto or sign the bill into law by the end of September.

BDS and civil rights advocates have urged Brown to veto the bill, while supporters of the bill have made much of the trade ties between the U.S. and Israel, as well as Israel’s positive treatment of LGBTQ persons as a reason for supporting AB 2844 – ignoring Israel’s long history of oppressing and collectively punishing Palestinians.

“AB 2844 is both an attack on the constitutional rights of Californians and a waste of taxpayer money, estimated to cost upwards of $140 million annually, according to the California Department of Finance, which opposes it,” read a statement from the Coalition to Stop AB 2844, which includes over 100 civil society organizations.

“Government should not be in the business of punishing supporters of BDS, whether corporations, universities, organizations or individuals, by denying them contracts,” said Nasser Barghouti from the U.S. Campaign to End The Israeli Occupation.

A number of other states, including New York and New Jersey, have passed similar laws to outlaw the boycott of Israel.

September 1, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | Leave a comment