AL-KHALIL (HEBRON): Mekerot Water Company disrupts flow of water to Palestinian crops again
CPTnet | 1 August 2011
The Mekerot Water Company continues to disrupt the flow of water to Palestinian farms in the Beqa’a Valley. CPTers received a call on 20 July to document further damage to crops when the water company ripped out plastic irrigation pipes, saying that the Palestinians were stealing water. Seleh Jaber, a sixty-seven-year-old farmer, told CPTers that Mekerot also cut strings that support beans and cut pipes in violation of the Geneva conventions. (1)
Mekerot has destroyed cisterns and wells on the Jaber property, filling them with rocks, and has issued orders for the demolition of all wells in the valley. Jaber said that the interruption of water to crops damages the Palestinian economy. He also said that since farmers in the Beqa’a have many children, the denial of water damages families. Hassan Jaber, a family member whose new house is under construction after the Israeli military demolished his previous home, told CPTers Mekerot personnel beat young men with sticks and clubs when they are in the fields and Mekerot arrives to destroy irrigation equipment. Selah Jaber estimates that over eighty men, women, and children were affected by Mekerot’s pipe cutting venture on 20 July 2011. Shaddad Attili, the head of the Palestinian Water Authority, writing in the Jerusalem Post, June 2011, has listed numerous examples of Israel’s stranglehold on the water supply, such as denying permits for water exploration and destroying cisterns. The Palestinians thus face severe water shortages, despite the fact that the three principle underground aquifers of Palestine are found largely in the West Bank:
- The Yarkon-Tanninim Aquifer supplies Israel with about 340 million cubic meters of water annually, which are used by the Jerusalem-Tel-Aviv area. Palestinians use about 20 million cubic meters a year from this aquifer.
- The Nablus-Gilboa Aquifer supplies Israel with about 115 million cubic meters a year, largely for agricultural irrigation in the kibbutzim (communes) and moshavim (cooperative settlements) in Galilee.
- The Eastern Aquifer supplies about 40 million cubic meters annually to the Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley, and about 60 million cubic meters to the Palestinians.
Israeli planners insist that the Yarkon-Taninim Aquifer is vital to Israeli water needs, and therefore would like to retain control of settlement blocks over that area, adjacent to the so called “center” of Israel, the Gush Dan area. Israel’s water supply always came from these aquifers, both during British mandate times and when Jordan ruled the area.
Seleh Jaber told CPTers, “The people of Beqa’a live in constant fear that their crops and way of life will be destroyed.” They are constantly seeking ways, in and out of the legal system, to plant and harvest beans, melons, tomatoes, and peppers as their families have done in Beqa’a for over 400 years.
Footnotes
(1) J. L. El Hindi, The West Bank Aquifer and Conventions Regarding Laws of Belligerent Occupation, Michigan Journal of International Law, Vol. 11, No. 4, Summer 1990.
Israeli Army Attacks Dutch Music Orchestra with Tear Gas
PNN – 29.07.11
Nablus – The Dutch street orchestra ‘Fanfare van de Eerste Liefdesnacht’ (the First Night of Love Brass Band) from Amsterdam was attacked with tear gas today by the Israeli army during their performance in the Palestinian village Kufr Qadum near Nablus, northern West Bank.
The bands tour of Palestine is designed to be interactive, working with children from a refugee camp in the east of Bethlehem and having them play along with the band and dancing in the streets together.
The musicians were confronted with tens of soldiers who shot tear gas cannisters from behind their military jeeps during the musical performance. They then found themselves surrounded with snipers. Several members of the band were injured and suffered from tear gas inhalation.
Kufr Qadum is a village near Nablus that has suffered in recent years from radical jewish settlers who have attacked the villagers, cut down olive trees and set fire to fields. The roads that lead to the village are often blocked by Israeli military checkpoints.
The Dutch music orchestra has travelled around the West Bank for a duration of two weeks to perform in towns, villages and refugee camps. The band consists of 25 musicians with different musical instruments. They were invited by the town council of Kufr Qadum to perform in the village.
See the Dutch band performing ‘Unadikum’ at Yabous Festival in East Jerusalem:
New moves to curb criticism of Israel in US and Canada
By Kristin Szremski | The Electronic Intifada | 29 July 2011
New legislation in the US threatens to conflate campus criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
A number of new initiatives to curtail freedom of speech by conflating opposition to Israeli crimes with anti-Semitism are underway in the United States and Canada.
The Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA) issued a report in early July recommending the adoption of strict new standards defining anti-Semitism and the types of speech and campus activities that would violate them. Its report urged the Canadian government to adopt the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s definition of anti-Semitism (“Report on the Inquiry Panel,” 7 July 2011 [PDF]). That definition suggests that any questioning of whether Israel has the right to exist as a state that privileges Jews over people of other religions or ethnic backgrounds amounts to anti-Semitism.
Though the Canadian group is not linked to the Ottawa government, it has 22 parliamentarians as members. Activities it deems as anti-Semitic and, therefore, calls to be banned, include events such as the Israeli Apartheid Week that was founded in Toronto and now takes place on college campuses internationally every March.
The Canadian report is just the latest attempt at stifling public discourse about Israel. Free speech and the unimpeded exchange of ideas are also under attack on America’s college campuses. Pro-Israel supporters have targeted federal funding for academic institutions, including support for research and academic conferences, under the pretext that criticism of Israel is “hate speech.”
Federal authorities from the Office of Civil Rights with the US Department of Education are investigating charges of anti-Semitism against the University of California Santa Cruz, as well as at other institutions within the California university system, according to published reports. These are the first investigations taking place since Title VI of the Civil Rights Act was re-interpreted in October 2010, allowing Jewish students, as members of a religious group, to claim discrimination under a provision that previously applied only to racial and ethnic bigotry.
A “dear colleague” letter issued by the Office of Civil Rights in October 2010 said that discrimination against a student who is a member of a religious group violates Title VI when the discrimination is based on the group’s “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics … or when it is based upon the student’s actual or perceived citizenship or residency in a country whose residents share a dominant religion or a distinct religious identity,” David Thomas, a US Department of Education spokesman, explained by email.
Bowing to the Zionist lobby
Major pro-Israel organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America and the Anti-Defamation League have lobbied for this re-interpretation for years. Title VI now can be applied to Jewish students who claim universities create hostile campus environments if they allow pro-Palestinian events or even class lectures critical of Israeli policies.
In other words, since Israel bills itself as a Jewish state, of which all Jews everywhere are automatic citizens, Jewish students can file complaints of anti-Semitism and discrimination based upon their perceived ethnicity and citizenship or residency in a country that has a “dominant religion.”
Dr. Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian-American professor of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who founded the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) there in 2001, takes issue with the amended understanding of Title VI. While he agrees that Jewish students, as well as Muslim students, should be protected from discrimination based on their religious identity under Title VI, he believes the reinterpretation is actually being used to silence debate about Israel.
“Attempts to silence opposition to the illegal Israeli occupation and policies is un-American and amounts to political and academic censorship,” Bazian said via email. (Bazian is also the chairman of American Muslims for Palestine, the organization with which this writer is employed).
The Title VI reinterpretation and the subsequent case against Santa Cruz is part of a growing trend of stifling of protected political speech on college campuses. Several lecturers and professors have been censured and even denied tenure because they openly criticized Israeli policies or advocated for Palestinian rights.
Perhaps the most widely publicized cases are those of former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein and North Carolina State University professor Terri Ginsberg, both of whom were not given tenure because of their open criticism of Israeli policies in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Ginsberg initiated legal action against North Carolina State and her case is currently on appeal.
Freedom of information denied
The new interpretation has rejuvenated a 29-page complaint brought against the University of California Santa Cruz in June 2009 by lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, the contents of which have been kept secret by the Department of Education and university officials.
On 13 April, American Muslims for Palestine filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the complaint with the San Francisco Office of Civil Rights. Federal authorities declined the request on 22 April, saying that supplying the complaint would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” and that it could “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings,” both of which are listed as exemptions under the federal FOIA statute.
What is so troubling in the University of California Santa Cruz investigation is that the amended interpretation is being applied retroactively to Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint, which she filed more than one year before the October 2010 “dear colleague” letter. No one contacted from the university or the Department of Education would discuss how an institution can be held liable for something that was not considered to be a violation at the time it occurred.
“[The Office of Civil Rights] received the UC-Santa Cruz complaint … on 25 June 2009,” Thomas wrote in an email to American Muslims for Palestine. “On 7 March 2011, OCR formally notified the university and the complainant that OCR was opening for investigation the allegations that a hostile environment existed for Jewish students at the university in 2009 in violation of Title VI and that the university had notice of the hostile environment but did not have a process to adequately respond to hostile environment complaints.”
Thomas failed to respond to American Muslims for Palestine’s direct question about how the new interpretation could be applied retroactively, though it was posed three times in three separate emails on 13 and 15 April.
Jim Burns, a University of California Santa Cruz spokesman, also would not address that issue and instead referred it back to the Department of Education’s civil rights office. He did tell American Muslims for Palestine in an email, however, that the Office of Civil Rights is reviewing a complaint that “speech on campus that is critical of Israel creates a hostile environment for Jewish students.”
“We believe that [the Office of Civil Rights’] investigation will ultimately conclude that [the University of California Santa Cruz] diligently enforces laws, policies and practices that protect our students’ civil rights. But we also believe that our review of the matter with OCR will provide us with an opportunity to examine our relevant policies and practices to ensure that is the case,” he added.
If federal investigators find a university to be in violation of Title VI and the institution does not remedy the situation satisfactorily it could lose federal funding. This is a worst-case scenario to be sure, but it is one that seemingly threatens the open exchange of ideas on college campuses.
“While some of the recent allegations … might well raise a claim under Title VI, many others simply seek to silence anti-Israel discourse and speakers. This approach is not only unwarranted under Title VI, it is dangerous,” Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Presidents (AAUP), and Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, wrote recently in an open letter on AAUP’s website.
“The purpose of a university is to have students wrestle with ideas with which they may disagree, or even better, may make them uncomfortable. To censor ideas is to diminish education, and to treat students as fragile recipients of ‘knowledge,’ rather than young critical thinkers,” they added.
American Muslims for Palestine’s Hatem Bazian said the implications of the re-interpretation go far beyond free speech in the classroom and at extra-curricular events. Funding for scholarly research and academic conferences that bring up “legitimate criticism of Israel” may be at stake, he said.
“The new interpretation will directly, first and foremost, impact those who administer Title VI funding, and they for sure will be more hesitant and will engage in self-censorship in funding research or activities that are critical of Israel,” Bazian said.
Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League was one of 12 national organizations that urged the Department of Education to amend its Title VI interpretation. It may have just been a co-signer in that battle but the ADL has taken the lead in many high-profile cases to stifle free speech and public debate in its hundred-year history.
In March, the ADL, along with the American Jewish Committee and the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council, protested an academic conference at the UC Hastings College of the Law in March entitled “Litigating Palestine: Can Courts Secure Palestinian Rights?” Their protest was so effective the university board voted to remove its name and endorsement for the event and it prevented university Chancellor Frank Wu from making opening remarks.
Challenging Israel on campus
Writing about the incident in the San Francisco Chronicle, Cecilie Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, stated that “Perhaps for the first time in US history, there is an aggressive challenge to a one-sided narrative that covers up or justifies ongoing Israeli repression of Palestinians” (“Pressure on law conference threatens free speech,” 21 April 2011).
Surasky added, “The center of that challenge is on campuses, which is why those who have traditionally adopted knee-jerk defenses of Israeli policies are attempting to stigmatize or shut down alternative viewpoints.”
The same threats of losing federal funding because of an “anti-Semitic and hostile environment” are being leveled at Rutgers University in New Jersey, thanks in large part to a 15-page letter written to the university by Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein, and copied to the state’s governor, its US senators and representatives and other officials.
These recent moves, according to Surasky, “suggest that legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is being conflated with anti-Semitism. If this is allowed to happen, then serious debate on Israel’s illegal actions in the Palestinian territories will be shut down.”
Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint against University of California Santa Cruz could very well be a test case under the new interpretation of Title VI. The reinterpretation, when viewed against the backdrop of professors being censured or denied tenure because of their political views, could have an adverse affect on the free exchange of ideas on college campuses at a time when debate and concrete examinations of US foreign policy in the Middle East is needed more than ever.
Kristin Szremski is an independent journalist and currently the director of media and communications for the American Muslims for Palestine.
Settlers Attack International With An Iron Bar
By Katie Child | International Middle East Media Center | July 29, 2011
Three settlers from the illegal West Bank settlement of Havat Maon harassed three Palestinian shepherds and attacked two internationals observers near Mesheha hill. The masked settlers threw stones at the internationals as well as hitting one of them with an iron bar on the head.
The Palestinian shepherds were tending to their flocks when the settlers came to harass them and attack the internationals at 9:15AM Wednesday July 27, 2011.
The shepherds left the area before being attacked by the settlers but the Internationals were attacked.
One of the internationals was a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team. The settler ruined this international’s camera. After being attacked by the settler, the international was sent to the hospital to receive eight stitches.
The four unidentified settlers chased both of the internationals back to At-Tuwani.
The international organizations, Operation Dove and the Christian Peacemaker Team, have maintained a presence at At-Tawani and the south Hebron hills since 2004.
Operation Dove and the Christian Peacemakers team has captured six occasions where settlers from Havot Maon have attacked Palestinian’s or internationals by Mesheha hill since June 22, 2011, according to Maan News Agency.
All settlements and outposts in the West Bank are illegal under Israeli and international law.
Israel is an Apartheid State
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan | Palestine Chronicle | July 27, 2011
Western leaders and media label any Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation as terrorism, but it refuses to give Israel the same label when its military commits daily crimes against the Palestinians. Israel destroyed Gaza and committed massacres, starves the Palestinian population and bulldozes their houses in Jerusalem and the West Bank. It does not approve residency permits for Palestinians returning to their homes in the occupied lands and expels thousands of Palestinian families from Jerusalem.
The Arab population of Israel today stands at a little over one million, but the state has refused to allow them to create a single new Arab community to accommodate the natural population growth. The result is chronic overcrowding while the land lost to these Arab towns and villages has simply been passed to Jewish settlers for their benefit. Israel denies the right of the Arab-Israeli to marry Palestinians from outside Israel and Palestinians unlike Jews are not allowed to have dual citizenship.
Jewish settlements continue to grow rapidly in the Palestinian occupied lands while it is extremely hard for Palestinians to obtain permits to build homes on their own lands. The “Peace Now” organization found that 94% of Palestinian permit applications for building in East Jerusalem and in the 60% of the West Bank that is referred to in Oslo agreements as “Area C”, have been refused since 2000, when such data has been available. Palestinian houses built without permits are considered illegal and routinely demolished while the state provides water, electricity and military protection to Jewish outposts that are built without permits in the West Bank.
When a Palestinian in Jerusalem or in the West Bank could no longer live in his parents’ home and decides to build a home on his family land that Israel has not yet confiscated, the planning authority refuses him a building permit. At the same time endless housing developments are springing up all over the illegally occupied territories for Jewish families only.
Where is the next generation of the Palestinians in the occupied lands including Jerusalem to live? What is the future envisaged for the next Palestinian generation by Israel? The denial of permits for Palestinians on such a large scale is part of Israel’s plan to force a ‘silent transfer’ of the Palestinian population from the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Israel promotes a profoundly racist view of the Palestinians and enforces a system of land apartheid. It is the only member of the United Nations that is an apartheid state, but anyone who criticizes what it is doing to the Palestinians is called an anti-Semite or Jew-hater. A disproportionate part of the Western media coverage of anti-Semitism is concentrated on tarring critics of Israel’s action against the Palestinians with any unpleasant label.
It is sad to see the West led by the US following the hypocrisy as their main guiding principle on the question of the Palestinians. It leads me to ask a question that is on the minds of the frustrated victims of Israel’s human rights violations: “why do the US leaders hate the Palestinians so much?” The West defends and even supports Israel’s inhumane, cruel and unusual actions against the Palestinians.
Richard Falk, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories has come under fire by US officials for posting what has been described as an “overtly anti-Semitic” cartoon on his blog. US Ambassador to the UN, Eileen Chamberlain Donadoe said on July 8th, “Mr. Falk’s continued comments and postings to his personal blog are deeply offensive, and I condemn them in the strongest terms.” She suggested that Falk should resign his post in the UN saying: “his continued status as a UN mandate holder is a blight on the UN system.” The US criticized Falk several times before for his stance on Israel and Palestine.
When former President Jimmy Carter dared to title his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the US media was up in arms against Carter even before the first copy of the book was on the shelf.
Jews and the Western media have demanded exclusive rights to certain comparisons, such as nothing can be compared with the Jews suffering in Europe. Anyone who challenges that exclusive right, by suggesting that the Israeli Jews depopulated four hundred Palestinian villages and towns in 1947-48 and they are trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the 1967 occupied lands, is dismissed as anti-Semitic.
Germany had accepted its responsibility and atoned for the Holocaust, whereas Israel is still pretending that the 1947-48 Nakba never took place. The Nakba marks the period when 750,000 Palestinians were terrorized or expelled from their homes, many beyond the state, and tens of massacres were committed by the Jewish military and militias. Plenty of evidence has emerged including official documents concerning a military operation known as “Plan Dalet”, to suggest that it was always the intention of the Jewish leaders to rid Israel of its Palestinian inhabitants. Germany had been paying large sums of compensation to individual Holocaust survivors and to the state of Israel, but Israel has yet to apologize for the mass expulsion of the Palestinian population. No one with authority dares call Israel an apartheid or outlaw state despite the obvious.
Israel cooperated in the past with the most notoriously brutal regimes, including Argentina’s military dictatorship, Pinochet’s Chile, and Apartheid South Africa. Its intimate alliance with Apartheid South Africa was the most extensive. The Israeli-South African relation was a marriage of interests and ideologies. Nancy Murray, the director of “The Middle East Justice Network”, wrote that the history of Israeli-South African cooperation is evidence of the two countries shared racist roots and “moral and political congruence” between their systems of government.
In the end, Apartheid South Africa collapsed and Apartheid Israel survived. According to the Israeli citizen and human rights advocate, Uri Davis “following the dismantlement of the legal structures of apartheid in South Africa, Israel remains the only member of the UN that is apartheid state.” In Israel, the parliament, the judicial system and the law enforcement bodies impose racist and xenophobic policies against the Palestinian population in Israel proper and the occupied lands.
Israel forced many facts on the ground including transforming Palestine into a “Jewish state” owned by Jews and Israel privileges Jews both inside the country and outside it in the Diaspora while denying the Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. The “Law of Return” openly states that it offers special privileges to the Jews only, and many other laws state simply that the benefits apply only to anyone who qualifies under “the Law of Return”- that is Jews.
Some of South Africa’s own anti-apartheid leaders have said that the system of racial discrimination Israel is implementing is even worse than what they suffered. Israel acts worse than latter-day South Africa by building Jews-only settlements and access roads; erecting the apartheid wall and countless military checkpoints on confiscated lands in the West Bank and Jerusalem to ensure compliance with the apartheid rules. And in Israel proper, 93% of the land is designated in law as state land for settlement, cultivation and development for Jews only, and less than 7% is private land that is theoretically accessible to the non-Jewish indigenous people.
John Dugart, the chairman of a UN commission on human rights, concluded that “Israel is a serious violator of human rights and is in serious violation of international law.” And in a report released in 2007, Dugart wrote that “It is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of Israel’s laws and practices violate the 1966 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination.”
The tragedy for the Palestinian people is that Israel and its supporters have succeeded in convincing the vast majority of the West population to accept the myth of Apartheid-Israel as “the only liberal democracy in the Middle East” as an article of faith and dismiss the Palestinians’ history and culture as irrelevant or nonexistent.
Hasan Afif El-Hasan is a political analyst. His latest book, Is The Two-State Solution Already Dead? (Algora Publishing, New York)
Iraq against US presence beyond 2011
Press TV – July 27, 2011
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari says Baghdad has decided not to allow US military troops to stay in the country following the 2011 deadline.
“The decision is final but the cooperation with the US government will remain as it is and we are going to increase it in coming days,” he said in a press conference in Baghdad on Wednesday.
The Iraqi minister added that the US government has not applied any request to extend its troops’ presence in Iraq, a Press TV correspondent reported.
Zebari also noted that the extension of presence of US troops in the country is not easy because the Iraqi parliament, the prime minister and the president should approve it.
Many observers believe that Washington has no intention to leave Iraq as American troops have built several bases in the country.
“The US administration has started to seek other places for its troops but they will find no other place safer than Iraq. Therefore they are putting pressure on the government to keep their forces in the country,” political analyst Abdul Zahra al-Majid told Press TV.
Baghdad and Washington signed an agreement on withdrawal of all US forces by December 31, 2011.
The last US combat brigade left the country in August 2010, seven years after the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Though combat operations have officially ended, about 50,000 US troops will remain in the country until the end of 2011 to “advise Iraqi forces and protect US interests.”
Undercover Forces Captured On Film Kidnapping A Palestinian Child in Jerusalem
By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | July 27, 2011
The Al Aqsa Foundation in Jerusalem published a video showing members of the undercover forces of the Israeli military attacking Palestinian children as they played in Ras Al Amoud Palestinian neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, and forcing one of them into their vehicle before driving away. The child was later taken to a graveyard where he was beaten by the soldiers.
The foundation said that the undercover forces kidnapped the child, Islam Jaber, 13, and detained him in Ras Al Amoud illegal settlement, in East Jerusalem, before taking him into a graveyard where they beat him repeatedly while he was cuffed and blindfolded inflicting concussions and bruises to different parts of his body.
The soldiers drove their vehicle against the children as they played football on a minor road in Ras Al Amoud, before jumping out of their car and violently grabbing Jaber.
Jaber said that the undercover forces violently attacked and beat him before trying to force him to sign some papers accusing him of unidentified violations, but he refused their demand and refused to give them any information when they asked him about his friends’ names and other info about them. … Full article
Israel’s War On Theater
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | July 27, 2011
Freedom Theater, Jenin
Not content to wage war on armed militants (of whom there are very few these days in the West Bank), earlier today the famed special forces of the Israeli army staged a daring raid on Jenin’s Freedom Theater. In a bold tactical stroke, they woke up a night watchman at 3:30AM by throwing hunks of concrete at the theater entrance. They then strip searched him and made him afraid for his life. Those bold national heroes then arrested a Theater board member and abused the theater general manager, a British citizen. When he called the Israeli civil administration, which has sometimes been known to intercede in the most egregious situations, they hung up on him.
I can’t figure out what’s so dangerous about the Theater’s work. Perhaps the performances of Orwell’s Animal Farm in France? Or The Magic Flute? Is there a message of subversion and a call for insurrection I missed in them? Or perhaps they didn’t like the message of support for the Gaza flotilla on its website?
Given that the founder of Freedom Theater, Juliano Mer-Khamis was assassinated outside the venue a few months ago, this comes as a brutish insult from the Israeli authorities. First the Occupation criminalizes resistance through violence. Then resistance through non-violence. Then they criminalize art and expression.
Everyday Israelis believe that somehow these acts of oppression are located far from them. What they don’t understand is that this rot infects from the outside and works its way in. There will come a time, and not very long, when they’ll criminalize artistic expression inside Israel and Israeli Jewish theater managers will be arrested for expressing themselves. That is, if Israeli cultural institutions haven’t become so co-opted that they no longer offer an alternative to the prevailing nationalist consensus.
Israeli Supreme Court convenes without issuing verdict on Jerusalem politicians
Palestine Information Center – 26/07/2011
RAMALLAH — The latest hearing on the banishment of three Jerusalem politicians has ended in the Israeli Supreme Court without a ruling being made.
The court has yet to set a date for the ruling, but one is expected to be issued in a few months due to legal complications enveloping the case, sources from the defense have told the PIC.
The Israeli Public Prosecutor will follow through in defending the interior ministry’s revocation of the men’s right to residency in Jerusalem under an Israeli allegiance law, the source, Att. Fadi al-Qawasimi, said.
Qawasimi added the body defending the former PA minister and two Palestinian legislators held that the law does not allow for revoking residency over participation in Israel-sanctioned elections held in 2006.
They said it only applies to those who have left the city and resided elsewhere for more than three years.
The defense also presented international treaties undersigned by Israel that disallow any country to strip one of its nationals the right of residency. It also produced agreements that Israel signed with the PA implying the right to hold local, legislative, and presidential elections in Jerusalem, as the city was chartered as an occupied Palestinian territory.
Qawasimi added that the court asked the defense not to base its case on international and PA-Israeli agreements, but rather to focus on the case according to Israeli law.
After 2006 elections gave Hamas political dominance in Palestine, the Israeli interior minister issued orders banishing from Jerusalem Khalid Abu Arafeh, the PA’s former Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, as well as Mohammed Abu Teir, Mohammed Totah, and Ahmed Attoun, all members of the Palestinian legislative council.
Israel plows farms paving way for apartheid wall extension in Bethlehem village
Palestine Information Center – 26/07/2011
BETHLEHEM — Israeli bulldozers began plowing through ”vast” Palestinian farmlands and uprooting olive trees to pave the way for an extension of the apartheid wall in Al-Walaja village in western Bethlehem province early Tuesday morning.
Tensions envelop the village as Israeli soldiers have suppressed locals, reporters, and dozens of outside supporters who emerged to help stop the operation, locals said.
Protests managed to foil the operation for a few hours until heavy back-up arrived at the scene.
Locals said over sixty olive and pine trees were torn down in the excavations.
Palestinian sources reported spotting Israeli forces closing off one area of the village after attacking reporters covering the incident and activists from Spain who arrived to support the locals.
Elsewhere, an Israeli planning committee has notified locals in the Malih area of northern Jordan Valley that it would tear down dozens of local structures, including shacks and nomadic tents.
The structures were built allegedly without permits on what the Israeli army has declared a military zone.
The committee officials handed out a total of 35 notices, a local has told our correspondent.
”The occupation (Israel) aims at evacuating the Jordan Valley of its indigenous population for the sake of expanding settlements in the area,” said local activist Mohammed Daraghema.
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Villains of Judea
Samuel Zemurray
The ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … continue
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