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LA Fire Captain faces investigation, calls to be fired, over online video criticizing forced vaccines

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 25, 2021

Captain Christian Granucci of the Los Angeles Fire Department is under investigation for posting an online video criticizing LA’s vaccine mandate for city employees. The fire captain described the mandate as tyranny.

In a statement, the LAFD said that it “was made aware of the video posted on social media,” after Twitter users called for him to be fired.

The statement added that while the department respects “the individual’s right to his opinion, he is not authorized to speak on behalf of the Department.

“Therefore, the matter has been submitted to our Professional Standards Division for investigations, which may lead to disciplinary action.”

The statement was referring to a video posted by Captain Christian Granucci. The captain started the video by saying: “I’m a 31-year veteran with this agency and I’m more than likely going to catch total grief from my administration from this, but I am done being silent on this matter and so are many of our members. This is regarding the vaccine mandate by the city of Los Angeles for all city employees.”

Granucci referenced a recent incident where a captain at the Hawaii fire department resigned because he refused to forcibly take the vaccine.

“Well, now it’s here in Los Angeles and the mandate has come down from the mayor and the city council that we, all city employees including first responders, shall take the vaccine,” he said. “If we do not take the vaccine, we have to be subjected to testing twice a week and if we refuse that, termination.”

He also criticized the LAFD Union for not speaking up against the vaccine mandate on behalf of its members. The fire captain accused the union of being in “lockstep with total tyranny.”

Granucci explained: “This is not about politics. This is not about left or right. This is not about red versus blue. This is not about Republican versus Democrat. This isn’t even about vaccinated versus unvaccinated. This is tyranny. This is about freedom of choice.”

Predicting that there would be booster shots and even more vaccines, Granucci asked: “When will this end?”

“I’ll tell you where it’s going to stop,” he began answering his question. “It’s going to stop right here, right now. I am putting my administration and my union on blast. You had the opportunity to get in front of this and you didn’t.”

The fire captain claimed that hundreds of first responders had a lawyer on retainer, who he described as “a shark.”

“We will seek legal counsel and we will take the fight to you, the city of Los Angeles,” he said.

“We all see what’s happening here,” he said, concluding the video. “I can’t sit idly by anymore. If things have moved that fast in the last 18 months, where the hell will we be in the next 18 months?”

August 26, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Silenced and smeared – the hounding of Dr Sam

By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | August 25, 2021

As I reported in TCW Defending Freedom here, Dr Sam White, a former partner in a Hampshire GPs’ practice, was suspended by NHS England after tweeting a resignation video in February explaining his concerns around Covid vaccination and what he felt about the government and NHS’s over-zealous response to the pandemic.

Now the independent Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) has ruled that there were no grounds for suspending Dr White – but he must still be gagged.

For the next 18 months, Dr White ‘must not use social media to put forward or share any views about the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated aspects’.

Dr White’s lawyers will appeal under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which states that everyone has the right to freedom of expression, although the law may be subject to conditions or restrictions necessary in a democratic society. Surely doctors should never be silenced in a democratic society? Dr White said: ‘If I lose my ability to speak freely so will other doctors.

‘I have been forced to agree that I will erase the video and any other Covid criticism from my Twitter and Instagram accounts.

‘In the wake of the Jane Barton issue [Jane Barton was dubbed “Dr Opiate” after 650 patients in her care died after she prescribed powerful painkillers] the Royal College of General Practitioners commented that doctors should feel able to report promptly systemic failings and that is what I did. So to be punished for that is confusing to say the least.’

The RCGP guide for whistleblowers states: ‘When a professional working in the NHS is aware that care is threatened, sub-standard or dangerous for whatever reason, they have a duty to make these concerns known and for those in charge to assess and, if necessary, act.’

Last Tuesday (August 17) the MPTS, which is independent from medical personnel regulators the General Medical Council (GMC) who are investigating Dr White over alleged fitness to practise issues, said they had received 18 complaints connected with his social media output but did not name any complainants.

They are also relying on the evidence of the manager at his former practice who had not complained about him to bosses while he worked with her, only since she was contacted by NHS England. She is alleged to have stated that the practice had ‘significant concerns’ about Dr White, and that he had expressed ‘strange ideas’ and used inappropriate language whilst at work. Dr White strenuously denies the allegations.

Francis Hoar QC, who defended Dr White, told the tribunal: ‘The NHS and GMC had relied on hearsay with no signed statements being available, no validation of the identity of the complainants, no investigation as to whether his [Dr White’s] remarks were supported by science or clinical practice and no investigation by the NHS of the complaints he has made.’

In fact, Dr White, 41, talked through his concerns about the Covid response to a local GP during his annual appraisal and spoke again to a responsible officer acting on behalf of the GMC and NHS England during his five-year revalidation (relicensing) procedure, but received no meaningful response. He says he turned to social media as a last resort.

His main bones of contention were that the vaccination programme had been rolled out in breach of legal requirements in relation to free and informed consent. As we have reported, informed consent is not being taken seriously at vaccine hubs with people receiving details about potential serious adverse events only after receiving the jab. Dr White also voiced concerns about face masks. He felt elderly patients should not have to wear them and that he should not have to wear one in an NHS setting unless consulting with patients, which he did willingly.

Without investigating any of Dr White’s concerns, which included worries about inaccurate PCR tests that are being abandoned in America by the Centers for Disease Control in December; or vaccination harms, with reports to the Medical Healthcare products Regulatory Agency of 1,596 fatalities post vaccination up to August 11, the tribunal concluded that they had serious concerns about his conduct.

They said: ‘Dr White posted misinformation on social media platforms’, but did not go into detail.

A popular method of silencing doctors wanting to challenge the narrative is to question their mental health. In April, Swiss cardiologist Thomas Binder, 58, based in Baden, an open critic of coronavirus measures and treatment, was taken away from his practice by a SWAT team and locked in a psychiatric ward. He managed to fire off a tweet, minutes before his arrest and before his Twitter account was suspended for criticising the Swiss government, which said: ‘In front of my practice there is a SWAT team from Aargau. They are here to arrest me. Help!’

Dr White’s mental health has been questioned too by a senior NHS England clinical adviser. After a phone conversation with him she urged NHS England in June to ‘consider an emergency suspension given the suspicion that he was suffering from paranoid beliefs and mental ill health’. She concluded this without meeting Dr White and without any kind of formal mental health assessment. Dr White taped the conversation, and the tape reveals that at no time does she ask any direct question about his mental health, so it is hard to know how she came to that conclusion.

The tribunal ruled that Dr White should inform the GMC of any new job he takes so that his behaviour can be monitored, but the ruling will not prevent him from practising as an integrative doctor, a locum or as a GP in any NHS practice.

Dr White maintains: ‘Everything I have said or written is substantiated by peer-reviewed papers or by expert witness testimony, all of which has been discussed by professionals with the lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich at his International Corona Committee. [Weekly interviews with respected doctors, scientists, academics, journalists, concerned with the global pandemic response.]

‘I knew that there were problems with the way medicine had become protocol driven and not patient focused but had no idea of the scale.’

Dr White is crowdfunding to pay for his legal expenses.

August 26, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, NHS, UK | Leave a comment

The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID Debates

By Glenn Greenwald | August 25, 2021

In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.

The quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph. Any of those policies would immediately prevent huge numbers of human beings from dying. Each year, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “1.35 million people are killed on roadways around the world,” while “crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 1–54.” Even with seat belts and airbags, a tragic number of life-years are lost given how many young people die or are left permanently and severely disabled by car accidents. Studies over the course of decades have demonstrated that even small reductions in speed limits save many lives, while radical reductions — supported by almost nobody — would eliminate most if not all deaths from car crashes.

Given how many deaths and serious injuries would be prevented, why is nobody clamoring for a ban on cars, or at least severe restrictions on who can drive (essential purposes only) or how fast (25 mph)? Is it because most people are just sociopaths who do not care about the huge number of lives lost by the driving policies they support, and are perfectly happy to watch people die or be permanently maimed as long as their convenience is not impeded? Is it because they do not assign value to the lives of other people, and therefore knowingly support policies — allowing anyone above 15 years old to drive, at high speeds — that will kill many children along with adults?

That may explain the motivation scheme for a few people, but in general, the reason is much simpler and less sinister. It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days). So foundational is the use of this cost-benefit analysis that it is embraced and touted by everyone from right-wing economists to the left-wing European environmental policy group CIVITAS, which defines it this way:

Social Cost Benefit Analysis [is] a decision support tool that measures and weighs various impacts of a project or policy. It compares project costs (capital and operating expenses) with a broad range of (social) impacts, e.g. travel time savings, travel costs, impacts on other modes, climate, safety, and the environment.

This framework, above all else, precludes an absolutist approach to rational policy-making. We never opt for a society-altering policy on the ground that “any lives saved make it imperative to embrace” precisely because such a primitive mindset ignores all the countervailing costs which this life-saving policy would generate (including, oftentimes, loss of life as well: banning planes, for instance, would save lives by preventing deaths from airplane crashes, but would also create its own new deaths by causing more people to drive cars).

While arguments are common about how this framework should be applied and which specific policies are ideal, the use of cost-benefit analysis as the primary formula we use is uncontroversial — at least it was until the COVID pandemic began. It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies. Thus, this mentality insists, we must keep schools closed to avoid the contracting by children of COVID regardless of the horrific costs which eighteen months or two years of school closures impose on all children.

It is impossible to overstate the costs imposed on children of all ages from the sustained, enduring and severe disruptions to their lives justified in the name of COVID. Entire books could be written, and almost certainly will be, on the multiple levels of damage children are sustaining, some of which — particularly the longer-term ones — are unknowable (long-term harms from virtually every aspect of COVID policies — including COVID itself, the vaccines, and isolation measures, are, by definition, unknown). But what we know for certain is that the harms to children from anti-COVID measures are severe and multi-pronged. One of the best mainstream news accounts documenting those costs was a January, 2021 BBC article headlined “Covid: The devastating toll of the pandemic on children.”

The “devastating toll” referenced by the article is not the death count from COVID for children, which, even in the world of the Delta variant, remains vanishingly small. The latest CDC data reveals that the grand total of children under 18 who have died in the U.S. from COVID since the start of the pandemic sixteen months ago is 361 — in a country of 330 million people, including 74.2 million people under 18. Instead, the “devastating toll” refers to multi-layered harm to children from the various lockdowns, isolation measures, stay-at-home orders, school closures, economic suffering and various other harms that have come from policies enacted to prevent the spread of the virus:

From increasing rates of mental health problems to concerns about rising levels of abuse and neglect and the potential harm being done to the development of babies, the pandemic is threatening to have a devastating legacy on the nation’s young. . . .

The closure of schools is, of course, damaging to children’s education. But schools are not just a place for learning. They are places where kids socialize, develop emotionally and, for some, a refuge from troubled family life.

Prof Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, perhaps put it most clearly when he told MPs on the Education Select Committee earlier this month: “When we close schools we close their lives.”

The richer you are, the less likely you are to be affected by these harms from COVID restrictions. Wealth allows people to leave their homes, hire private tutors, temporarily live in the countryside or mountains, or enjoy outdoor space at home. It is the poor and the economically deprived who bear the worst of these deprivations, which — along with not having children at all — may be one reason they are assigned little to no weight in mainstream discourse.

“The stress the pandemic has put on families, with rising levels of unemployment and financial insecurity combined with the stay-at-home orders, has put strain on home life up and down the land,” the BBC notes. But even for adults and those who are middle-class and above, severe and sustained isolation from community and life is bound to produce serious mental health harms, as two mental health experts I interviewed all the way back in April, 2020, warned.

None of this is to say that these are easy calculations. How COVID deaths or hospitalizations are weighed against the grave harms from anti-COVID restrictions is a complex question, one that almost certainly yields different answers in different countries and cultures. It may even yield a different policy answer in the same country as the virus and the social conditions which COVID produces evolve. One can debate how the contagiousness of COVID compares to the huge number of people who lose their lives or ability to lead healthy lives every year (so often, this argument is met with the more or less accurate but irrelevant distinction that COVID is contagious while car accidents are not: how does that bear on one’s willingness to endorse road policies (such as allowing driving cars at high speeds) that will inevitably kill large numbers of people or one’s refusal to consider the countervailing costs of anti-COVID measures?).

Put another way, this is not an argument in favor of or against any particular policy undertaken in the name of fighting COVID. What it is, instead, is an attempt to highlight the pervasive and deeply misguided refusal to assign any costs to the harms caused by anti-COVID policies themselves.

Perhaps this irrational mindset is explainable by the fact that COVID hospitalizations and deaths are more dramatic than the more insidious, lurking harms from sustained life disruptions. Perhaps the rapidly declining rates of child-rearing in the West make it more difficult to observe or care about the damage all of this is doing to the developmental abilities and mental health of children. Perhaps other factors — from a psychological desire for parental protection in the form of authoritarian power or a warped sense of “safetyism” — is rendering any cost-benefit analysis morally unacceptable. None of those speculative theories, however, accounts for the virtually unanimous refusal to consider a ban on cars or a 25 mph nationwide speed limit; that willingness to sacrifice huge numbers of lives by opposing life-saving automobile policies seems driven by the inconvenience such policies would impose on particular groups of people.

Whatever is true about motives, what is unacceptable — sociopathic, really — is the insistence on assigning severe costs to just one side of the ledger (harms from COVID itself) while categorically refusing to recognize let alone value the costs on the other side of the ledger (from severe, enduring anti-COVID disruptions to and restrictions on life). Given the reflexive rage that is produced when one tries to make this argument — what immediately emerges are accusations that one is indifferent to COVID deaths — I wanted to walk through the evidence and rationale demonstrating why this approach is reckless, immoral and irrational. That is the argument I examine in both this article and in a 30-minute video I produced for Rumble.

August 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Northern Ireland Doctor, Anne McCloskey, suspended over online video showing concern over vaccinating kids

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 25, 2021

A Northern Ireland doctor has been suspended over a YouTube video (now only available on Odysee after being deleted by YouTube) where she expressed concerns about young people taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

A Health and Social Care Board (HSCB) investigation is being carried out as a result of concern raised over Dr. McCloskey’s comments in the video.

Her comments on the COVID-19 vaccinations appeared in a video posted online after treating patients at an after-hours clinic.

During the investigation period, McCloskey, a former Aontú councillor, will not be permitted to participate in health service activities.

Several assertions were made by Dr. McCloskey in the nine-minute video uploaded on Sunday, among them that she had come across a girl that had a blood clot in her upper arm and alleged she spoke to a boy who couldn’t get out of bed two weeks after getting vaccinated.

Allegedly, GPs and members of the public have complained about the video, according to the BBC.

“There is no evidence to support Dr. McCloskey’s comments,” the BBC stated.

According to the Derry GP, “I dealt with very many sick, distressed, worried, traumatized people, almost all of them, with the exception of small children, have been double jabbed.”

McCloskey said that some vaccinated young people she treated at the weekend became ill because they were “damaged” by vaccination.

She said that many young people had been “coerced, bribed, or bullied” into getting them.

She stated, “… This whole hype has largely been a figment of the media, and the government and their lying scientific advisors and their deceptions.”

According to the Health and Social Care Board (HSCB), Dr. McCloskey was suspended “as a precautionary measure,” while an investigation was being conducted.

“Suspension is not an automatic occurrence when undertaking an investigation” a spokesman stated, “but may be necessary where there are concerns regarding patient safety and in the public interest.”

Dr. McCloskey, on the other hand, told BBC News NI she stands by her views.

As per the HSCB, Dr. McCloskey works for Western Urgent Care, which provides GP out-of-hours services in the western area, on a sessional basis, however, the Western Urgent Care (WUC) is also conducting its own “investigations and internal processes in regard to the matter,” the statement reads.

August 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

In the Name of ‘Public Safety’ Australia Descends Into a Nightmarish Orwellian Police State

By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 25, 2021

The land Down Under appears to be reverting back to its original status as a penal colony as government officials, looking more like prison wardens than any servants of the people, clamp down on demonstrators weary of more Covid lockdowns.

A heavy police presence in the major Australian cities on the weekend didn’t stop thousands of protesters from taking to the streets in what many saw as a last-ditch effort to protect their severely threatened liberties and freedoms.

The protests came after New South Wales announced its second extended lockdown, which puts Sydney’s 5 million residents under strict curfew conditions until mid-September. The wait will seem all the more excruciating, however, as rumors are flying that the shelter in place orders may be extended all the way until January.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city behind Sydney, citizens face similar restrictions, which mean that – aside from going shopping within a designated radius from their homes, exercising for an hour a day outdoors, and going to work so long as they are engaged in “essential employment” – have essentially become prisoners inside of their own homes.

At this point in Australia’s history, the only thing that remains certain is the uncertainty, which makes the lockdowns all the more unbearable.

Images from Australia’s two major cities on Saturday showed powder keg conditions as demonstrators squared off against police, who responded with batons, pepper spray and mass arrests (It will interesting to see if Big Media describes the police actions against the lockdown protesters in the same compassionate way it described the actions taken against Australia’s very own Black Lives Matter protests around the same time last year. As the Guardian sympathetically reported: “At least 20,000 attended the Sydney [BLM] march which passed off peacefully, except for ugly scenes when police officers used pepper spray on protesters who had flowed into Central station after the rally finished.” It will be advisable not to hold your breath). In live footage obtained by Facebook user ‘Real Rukshan,’ large groups of police are seen confronting individual citizens, seemingly guilty of nothing else aside from just being there.

In one scene (at the 2:10 marker), an elderly man who appears to be leaving a Starbuck’s coffee shop is surrounded by no less than five police officers, who proceed to handcuff the man and, presumably, take him to prison. In another scene (at the 0:30 mark), two men are seen standing in front of the Bank of Melbourne confronted by six officers. In front of them on the street are four mounted officers astride anxious horses. The feeling conjured up in these incidences is the same: authoritarian police-state overkill.

Given the massive police presence amid the steady deterioration of basic human rights a person might get the impression that Australia is really dealing with an existential crisis. While that may be true with regards to obesity, drug abuse and homelessness, it seems to be a real exaggeration when it comes to Covid-19. After all, while evidence of the above mentioned scourges is visible everywhere in the country, the only place the coronavirus seems to exist in Australia is on the nightly news channels (which, by the way, have done a very poor job of keeping their audiences up to date on latest developments. Sources in New Zealand, for example, have informed that the media there has largely ignored the story of anti-lockdown protests happening just across the Tasman Sea).

For example, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, in an effort to portray the pandemic as enemy number one, expressed from the boob tube her “deepest, deepest sympathies” to the families of three people who died overnight from/with the coronavirus. Who were these fatalities? The public was not informed of their identities, but Berejiklian described them as “a man in his 80s, and a man in his 90s, and a female in her 90s.”

It’s just a hunch, but could the comorbidity in each of those “tragic” cases have been that silent killer popularly known as ripe old age? Yes, every life is precious and worth saving, but is Australian officialdom secretly shooting for absolute immortality among the population and not just prevention? That would certainly be the height of irony if true considering that the effort is killing just about everyone. In fact, it seems that the real pandemic attacking the Australian people is government-sponsored fear.

Meanwhile, Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews added insult to injury when he commanded from his bully pulpit that citizens, now deprived of their favorite drinking holes to while away the jobless hours, were forbidden from removing their masks to drink alcohol in the great outdoors. As to whether the consumption of a non-alcoholic beverage outdoors would also fall within the tight confines of the mask regime, dear leader did not say. However, the answer seems pretty clear since the state is actually using police helicopters to shoo away sunbathers from the nation’s many famous beaches.

All of this insanity has befallen the people Down Under after the continent has witnessed the barest uptick of Covid cases. In the state of New South Wales, for example, where Sydney is located, there were just 825 acquired infections reported on Saturday, an increase from the 644 the day prior. In the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, the situation appears even less worrying, with just 61 cases reported as of Saturday. These low infection rates, taken together with a high level of public skepticism with regards to the safety of the Covid vaccines, translates into just 29 percent of the population opting to be jabbed to date.

So as the petty tyrants Down Under seem more concerned with getting every single Australian citizen the Big Pharma jab – together with the lifetime of booster shots and lockdowns that will certainly follow – the populace is more concerned about how to save their collective health, sanity and jobs. That’s no easy task when the police give a hard time even to people who are found to be walking their dogs without a face mask on. These days even man’s best friend seems to have it better than the people struggling to survive Down Under.

August 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Australia, Human rights | Leave a comment

S. Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to ‘take every action available’ to stop Biden from ‘illegally’ mandating vaccines

RT | August 24, 2021

South Dakota governor and anti-lockdown advocate Kristi Noem has promised to do all it takes to “protect” residents from a hypothetical federal vaccine mandate after the Pfizer-BioNTech shot received full approval from regulators.

Noem has vowed to take the Joe Biden administration to court if it tries to impose a blanket vaccination requirement on Americans, claiming that such an order would be illegal.

“If Joe Biden illegally mandates vaccines, I will take every action available under the law to protect South Dakotans from the federal government,” Noem sounded off on Twitter.

The tweet came hours after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted its full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, one of three that have been used as part of the mass vaccination drive in the US. The others remain approved on an emergency basis only.

President Biden cited the long-awaited green light from the FDA to urge private businesses, nonprofits and other organizations to “step up the vaccine requirements” and demand that employees and visitors show proof of vaccination. “Require it,” Biden said, doubling down on his previous rhetoric that total immunization was necessary to put an end to Covid-19 in the US.

Although Biden had already mandated all federal workers to either get a Covid-19 jab or face regular testing, and recently extended a similar requirement to staff at certain nursing homes, he has not floated a broader federal vaccine mandate – something that is considered to be out of his reach.

In late July, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky caused a stir when she appeared to suggest the administration was “looking into” such a mandate, only to walk back her comments later the same day and “clarify” that she was speaking about mandates by private companies and some government agencies.

Noem’s pre-emptive vow to defy mandatory vaccinations has earned her both praise and criticism online. Opponents of the administration’s vaccine policy lauded her for “fighting for freedom,” some even saying they were contemplating a move from California to South Dakota. Vaccination advocates, however, blasted the governor for letting constituents “die” for her “political ambitions,” and urged her to encourage immunizations instead.

Biden has waged a war of words with Republican governors, such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott in Texas, who have been at odds with the Democratic administration’s Covid-19 policy, banning businesses and schools from requiring masks.

Biden argued that requiring masks is “doing the right thing,” saying it was in the governor’s “power” to “save lives.”

“I say to these governors: Please help, but if you aren’t going to help at least get out of the way,” he said on August 3.

Republicans argue that masks and vaccines should be left up to personal choice, noting that nobody is prohibited from wearing face coverings or scheduling vaccinations.

There has been a steady increase in new cases in South Dakota over the past several weeks, but no deaths were reported since last weekend. And despite the recent surge, South Dakota still remains below the US national average in cases.

About 70% of the state’s adult population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including 61% that have been fully inoculated. Overall, some 48% of the state’s total population has been vaccinated fully.

August 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | Human rights, Kristi Noem, South Dakota, United States | Leave a comment

Israeli forces shoot, kill 15-year-old Palestinian boy in Nablus

Imad Khaled Saleh Hashash, 15, was shot dead by Israeli forces during a raid on Balata refugee camp near Nablus on August 24, 2021. (Photo courtesy of the Hashash family)

Defense For Children International | August 24, 2021

Ramallah – Israeli forces shot and killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy today in the northern occupied West Bank.

Imad Khaled Saleh Hashash, 15, was shot and killed by Israeli forces around 4 a.m. this morning as he stood on the roof of his home watching as Israeli forces conducted a raid in the Balata refugee camp located southeast of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, according to information collected by Defense for Children International – Palestine. Imad sustained a gunshot wound to the head and was taken to Rafidia hospital in Nablus where he was pronounced dead.

“Israeli forces continue to kill Palestinian children with impunity,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP. “Systemic impunity means Israeli forces can kill Palestinian children in their homes without fear of any consequences.”

Israeli forces raided Balata refugee camp to conduct search and arrest operations around 3 a.m., an eyewitness told DCIP. After being awakened by gunshots, Imad and his brother went to the roof of their home to observe the raid, according to information gathered by DCIP. Imad had taken out his cell phone and was attempting to photograph or film the raid, when he was shot in the head.

Imad’s brothers were initially unable to evacuate him from the home due to tear gas fired by Israeli forces, according to information gathered by DCIP. Imad was transported to Rafidia hospital in Nablus in a neighbor’s taxi, where he was pronounced dead.

Israeli forces shot and killed 15-year-old Imad Khaled Saleh Hashash during an early morning raid on Balata refugee camp near Nablus on August 24, 2021. (Photo courtesy of the Hashash family)

Israeli forces shot and killed 15-year-old Imad Khaled Saleh Hashash during a raid on Balata refugee camp near Nablus on August 24, 2021. (Photo courtesy of the Hashash family)

Imad is the 12th Palestinian child shot and killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of 2021. Israeli forces shot Mohammad Mo’ayyad Bahjat Abu Sara on July 28, while he was a passenger in his father’s car. Israeli forces fired 13 bullets at the vehicle as it retreated from the area in which they were deployed.

Israeli forces shot Mohammad Munir Mohammad Tamimi, 17, in the back on July 24. Mohammad underwent surgery at Salfit governmental hospital but succumbed to his wounds later that evening.

In June, Israeli forces killed two Palestinian teens from the occupied West Bank village of Beita located southeast of Nablus. Israeli forces shot and killed 15-year-old Ahmad Bani-Shamsa in the head with live ammunition around 5:30 p.m. on June 16 in Beita, DCIP reported. Ahmad did not present any threat to Israeli forces at the time he was shot. On June 11, Israeli forces shot and killed 16-year-old Mohammad Hamayel in the chest with live ammunition around 4:30 p.m. during a protest, DCIP reported.

Under international law, intentional lethal force is only justified in circumstances where a direct threat to life or of serious injury is present. However, investigations and evidence collected by DCIP regularly suggest that Israeli forces use lethal force against Palestinian children in circumstances that may amount to extrajudicial or wilful killings.

August 24, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Comments in response to FDA’s license of Pfizer vax today for 16 years and up

By Meryl Nass, MD | August 23, 2021

The vaccine-induced protection provided by Covid vaccines starts fading within months. In late July, Israel’s Minister of Health said vaccine protection had dropped to 39%. It is not preventing severe illness in Israel and the UK either, though the US CDC changed its collecting methods for breakthrough cases on May 1 to disguise this fact.

While the US government has said it will begin booster doses of mRNA vaccines the week of September 20, there is actually NO evidence that Covid-19 boosters will provide increased protection against infection, or that they are effective against the delta variant or other new variants.

For other vaccines, such as mumps and pertussis, there is no evidence that booster doses after the initial course add measurable protection.

Boosters do raise antibody levels, briefly, which increases the risk of autoimmune adverse effects, immune overactivity and the dire possibility of antibody-enhanced disease (AED), a.k.a. vaccine-enhanced disease (VED), in which those who are vaccinated have a much more severe illness when exposed to Covid than do the unvaccinated.

Since the UK’s top vaccine expert Sir Andrew Pollard told Parliament 2 weeks ago that herd immunity cannot be obtained—in fact it is a “myth”– because the vaccine is not halting transmission, and since the CDC director confirmed this, there is no logical reason to mandate vaccinations for anyone, since the vaccines are not protecting the community.

Mandating vaccinations for the young and healthy, who are at minimal risk from Covid, but at increased risk from Covid vaccinations, is a travesty. The risk of myocarditis after vaccination in a male teenager is 50 times higher than the risk to a 65 year old, according to CDC data. The teenager has many years ahead of him, while the long-term side effects from Covid vaccines have yet to be identified.

Reported deaths following Covid vaccinations are at least 10 times higher than for any vaccine ever approved in the US. Yet FDA and CDC have never explained the causes of these deaths, and they pretend they do not exist.

This fact alone should have been sufficient to stop FDA granting a license to the Pfizer vaccine.

Here is the convoluted license-plus-authorization letter from FDA. This could be a bait and switch–see the next post.

August 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment

Robert Dingwall: We Need to Hold Advocates of Mask Mandates to Account

By Toby Young | The Daily Sceptic | August 23, 2021

Robert Dingwall, a Professor at Nottingham Trent University and a leading sociologist, has written an excellent piece for Social Science Space criticising the imposition of mask mandates, given the paucity of evidence that masks interrupt transmission and the lack of any robust evaluation of the harms masks cause.

First, Professor Dingwall looks at the two main sources of evidence purporting to show that masks are effective.

One is studies at various scales of the impact of mask mandates on reported infection rates. These may compare cities, states, provinces or entire nations using time series data to look for inflections of rates that may be attributable to the mandates. A great deal of mathematical ingenuity has been expended in trying to control for the numerous confounders from biases in reporting, differences in diagnosis, leads and lags in public behaviour in response to the mandates, seasonal fluctuations, mobility – the list is almost endless. By the time these manipulations are complete, though, it is very difficult to conclude that there is any clear and obvious effect. Infection rates do not seem to vary much between comparable communities regardless of the NPIs that have been introduced. I have yet to see a study that identifies a clear and unequivocal benefit from a mask mandate in the form of an obvious inflection point attributable to the intervention. For all the reasons cited, this would be hard to find so perhaps we should not treat its absence as conclusive proof of a lack of benefit so much as something that is consistent with the RCT evidence that any benefit is likely to be minimal.

The other main source of evidence is laboratory studies of the properties of masks using techniques from physics and engineering. Some studies treat masks as a straightforward air filtration experiment. These are well-controlled and reproducible, but bear little resemblance to real-world conditions. The more sophisticated studies use mannikins to create a jet of air carrying inert particles into a controlled space, mimicking human exhalation. Masks can then be used to interrupt the air flow. The resulting measurements are the basis for computational models that provide more general descriptions of the spread of particles, which may be used to create video simulations. These studies are often elegant but suffer familiar problems in generalising to real-world environments. Within reason, the experimenter can manipulate the average velocity of the jet, the size of particles and the permeability of the mask in ways that aim to mimic breathing at different rates, coughing or sneezing. To get reliable measurements, including video or photographic evidence of the dispersion of the particles, the simulated exhalations must enter still air. Air, however, is never still in the real world. In any space there are thermal currents that are moving air around and dispersing exhalations in ways that are not captured, and probably cannot be captured, by the experimenter in a physically meaningful way. The efficacy of masks is also sensitive to the choice of particle size. If the experimenter favours droplets, larger particles, masks capture these quite well – but they also fall quickly to the ground and are unlikely to be inhaled by anyone at a normal social distance. If the experimenter favours aerosols, smaller particles, these are likely to pass through or around cloth masks, whose pore size is typically significantly larger than the aerosol particles. In which case the masks may filter a small proportion of the particles but probably let most through or around the edges. Where higher quality masks have been mandated, the community evidence runs into the same problems as before.

Having concluded that neither body of evidence is remotely persuasive, he then turns to the potential harms that masks do.

The precautionary principle also requires a proper evaluation of the potential harms. Few such studies have actually been done but relevant issues can readily be identified. Four are clearly important. First, they discriminate against a large group of people with communicative disabilities of speech and hearing, with neurodisabilities, such as autism or Aspergers, or with mental health issues, such as prior trauma from confinement as an abused child or as a survivor of sexual assault. Second, they discriminate against people who have medical consequences such as acute skin infections, eye infections or respiratory infections as a result of mask use. In the pre-pandemic world, such people could find workplaces where these issues were avoided but they cannot escape the mandates. Third, there is the impact on child development, particularly in relation to language and social interaction. The American Academy of Pediatrics claimed that there was no evidence for this, but there is a substantial body of research from psychology, education and linguistics establishing the importance of observing faces, particularly for small children. Fourth, and perhaps hardest to measure, there is the impact on community levels of fear and anxiety. This, indeed, has been the ultimate fall-back for committed advocates of masks – they may not have an impact on the transmission of the virus but they remind everyone that there is a pandemic going on and that they should be cautious every time they set foot outside their home – the safety of the home is assumed, of course. The consequence, of course, is that we are nudged towards regarding our fellow human beings as no more than potential vectors of infection. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent. The trust on which everyday life depends in modern societies is fatally compromised.

He concludes that mask mandates should never have been introduced, given the paucity of the evidence and the lack of research into potential harms.

If we do not think it is acceptable to have our lives ordered in ways that discriminate against large sections of the population, that impair the development of children, that damage the mental health of the nation and that make each of us fearful of the other, then it is time to hold the advocates of masking to account for the quality of evidence. It is simply too fragile to justify coercive measures, whether by the state or by private actors. Why has there been so little investment in RCTs? Why are mask advocates now arguing that RCTs would be unethical because the benefits are obvious, when they patently are not? It is more unethical to perpetuate a practice without evidence than to challenge one’s preconceptions. This is truly how science progresses and debate should be conducted.

Worth reading in full.

August 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Ten reasons why the jab must never be mandatory

By Abir Ballan | TCW Defending Freedom | August 21, 2021

COVID-19 presents a high risk of severe illness and death to a few and a negligible risk to the majority of the population. This epidemiological reality lends itself to a focused vaccine approach: offering a safe and efficacious vaccine to high-risk individuals (mostly people above 50 who already have health problems) when the benefit of the intervention clearly outweighs the risk.

Mandatory vaccination has no place in a free society. Public health policy should never be coercive and should always be participatory. Decisions must be made by those who have ‘skin in the game’ and not by bureaucrats or a conflicted elite who will never have to live with the consequences of their actions. The role of public health agencies is to provide the public with accurate information, and allow individuals and communities to make their own decisions.

Seven ethical principles of public health should be at the heart of any public health intervention: non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, health maximisation, efficiency, justice and proportionality. Human rights, scientific facts and common sense should also be applied.

Ten reasons why Covid-19 vaccination should never be mandatory:

1. Non-maleficence – the Hippocratic duty of ‘first, do no harm’. There is mounting evidence of serious adverse events, particularly myocarditis in the young, following Covid-19 vaccination. Adverse events reporting systems act as a signalling system so immediate action can be taken to prevent greater harm. There are currently strong enough signal s to warrant an investigation. Vaccines arealso contra-indicated for individuals with certain health conditions. Vaccination of pregnant/breastfeeding women must be approached with great care – pregnant women were excluded from the vaccine trials; Covid risk is low in healthy women of child-bearing age, while vaccine risks to the foetus/infant cannot be determined yet.

2. Beneficence – the duty to produce benefit for the individual. Health interventions should be based on individual needs.Vaccination is indicated only when the intervention clearly represents a greater benefit than risk for the individual. This criterion is not met for children and young people, individuals below 60 with no existing health problems, and individuals with past SARS-CoV-2 infection (including asymptomatic infection).

3. Respect for autonomy – allowing individuals to pursue their wellbeing as they perceive it. Every person has a high value and cannot merely be treated as a means to the end of others’ good. This entails seeking the individual’s i nformed consent before any medical intervention: informing them of the risks and the benefits of the intervention and getting their voluntary consent without any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion. Currently, individuals cannot be provided with full information on vaccine side effects as no long-term data exists yet. The results of the vaccine trials should be replicated by independent scientists prior to vaccine rollout to the high risk group. Public transparency of all efficacy and safety data is necessary.

4. Health maximisation – maximising the health of all members of the general public requires a holistic and multi-layered approach: educating the public about a healthy lifestyle to improve their chronic illness, the importance of Vitamin D in fighting respiratory infections, the importance of home-based early treatment, the availability of life saving treatment protocols, safe and effective drugs (such as ivermectin), as well as vaccines for the high-risk group. Vaccinating individuals who incur greater risk from the vaccine than benefit increases total harm.

5. Efficiency – the duty to produce as many benefits to as many people given limited resources. Vaccinating individuals who do not benefit from the intervention diverts valuable resources away from the vulnerable as well as from far more devastating global health issues like TB, HIV, diabetes, cancer and cardiac diseases.

6. Justice – all humans have equal worth and no one should be discriminated against based on their health choices. Unfair practices such as denial of services, requirements for employment, restrictions on travel, higher insurance premium for the unvaccinated create a two-tiered society. It breaks social solidarity and cohesion.

7. Proportionality –the reasonable balance between benefits and costs of an intervention in terms of individual welfare versus collective benefit. Vaccines are designed to confer protection to the vaccinated. It is unethical for a person to incur any vaccine risk or lose personal freedoms for the sake of somebody else.

8. Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can result from both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The virus can also be transmitted among animals. Even if everyone is vaccinated, transmission will continue and variants will keep on evolving. A Zero Covid strategy is unrealistic and unachievable.

9. Herd immunity can be reached through a combination of natural infection and vaccination. Natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is broad and long-lasting – more so than vaccine-induced immunity, especially in combating variant s. Recovery from infection prevents serious illness if reinfected. It is not necessary to vaccinate the entire planet for the ‘greater good’ of society.

10. Non-derogable rights, as stated in Article 58 of the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1958), apply under all circumstances, even under threat of ‘national security’:

‘No state party shall, even in time of emergency threatening the life of the nation, derogate from the Covenant’s guarantees of the right to life; freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and from medical or scientific experimentation without free consent . . . and freedom of thought, conscience and religion. These rights are not derogable under any conditions even for the asserted purpose of preserving the life of the nation.’

We face two scenarios. Either the vaccines work, delivering protection to the vaccinated and eliminating the claim that everyone needs to be vaccinated. Or the vaccines don’t work, and therefore no one should get vaccinated. On both counts, vaccine passports are a pointless ‘public health’ tool that will undermine trust in the medical profession and vaccination programmes. They seem to serve economic, financial, political and ideological agendas. Most fundamentally, they are unethical. They swing the gate wide open for totalitarian rule through a digital social credit system.

Vaccine passports represent the epitome of the greater evil of society. This is the inch we must not yield.

August 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment

Palestinian organizer and former prisoner Ghassan Zawahreh seized by Israeli occupation forces

Ghassan Zawahreh

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | August 20, 2021

Ghassan Zawahreh, Palestinian former prisoner and longtime struggler for justice, was seized from his home in Dheisheh refugee camp by Israeli occupation forces in the pre-dawn hours of 19 August 2021. Zawahreh has been repeatedly detained since 2002, when he was only 14 years old. He was last released from Israeli occupation prisons on 4 March 2021 after 28 months jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention. Almost every time he is released, he may spend only a few months with his family and community before being ripped away once again for arbitrary imprisonment with no charge or trial.

During his last detention, Zawahreh highlighted the injustice of administrative detention, announcing his boycott of the military courts: “Administrative detention is a heinous crime for the ages. What is even more criminal is the occupation’s attempts to mislead through mock courts and charades where the executioner and the ruler, dressed up in military suits, represent the Occupation and its crimes.”

He has spent nearly 16 years in total in Israeli prisons; his brother Moataz Zawahreh was murdered by Israeli occupation forces as he participated in a popular protest in Bethlehem in 2015. Moataz had actually returned home to Palestine from where he was studying in France to support Ghassan, who was engaged in a long-term hunger strike against his imprisonment without charge or trial. He won his release in December 2015, only to be seized again by occupation forces seven months later.

Ghassan Zawahreh mourns his brother after his release in 2015

He was in his last year of studies in social work at the Open University of Jerusalem when he was arrested in 2008, and has been prevented from completing his studies through multiple arrests.

He is well-known in the camp as a community activist and volunteer in popular programs that provide social services to people in the camp. He worked as a taxi driver in order to support his family, on the Bethlehem-Ramallah road.

Administrative detention was first used in Palestine by the British colonial mandate and then adopted by the Zionist regime; it is now used routinely to target Palestinians, especially community leaders, activists, and influential people in their towns, camps and villages.

There are currently approximately 550 Palestinians jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention, out of 4,750 Palestinian political prisoners. These orders are issued by the military and approved by military courts on the basis of “secret evidence”, denied to both Palestinian detainees and their attorneys. Issued for up to six months at a time, they are indefinitely renewable, and Palestinians — including minor children — can spend years jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention. There are currently nine Palestinians on hunger strike to end administrative detention without charge or trial.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network demands the immediate release of Ghassan Zawahreh, dedicated struggler for Palestine and leading political prisoner repeatedly attacked by Israeli occupation forces, and all of his fellow Palestinian political prisoners. We are committed to organize, struggle and work to achieve the liberation of Palestinian prisoners, and the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.

August 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

The Grand Zionist Robbery of Palestinian Property

By Dr. Zuhair Sabbagh | August 23, 2021

The following research article will deal with the issue of Palestinian property and its relationship with the Zionist settler bourgeoisie. Furthermore, it will tackle both the Palestinian property that was captured by the Zionist military armies in the period 1948-1949 and the Palestinian property that was legally owned by the Palestinians who were allowed to stay and who became Israeli citizens.

Moreover, this research article will tackle the issue of Palestinian property inside the colonized West Bank, including the area of East Jerusalem.

It is necessary, at this stage, to begin my analysis by providing a brief legal introduction to the issue of property, specifically, when it falls under belligerent military occupation.

International Law and Private and Public Property

In cases of belligerent occupations, the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, are applicable international law tools. In the occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, the Zionist authorities have violated numerous articles of these conventions. I will not deal with all these violations, nor will I deal with all the occupied territories, but will confine my research to the articles that are relevant to Palestinian private and public property inside Israel as well as inside the colonized West Bank.

Both the Fourth Geneva and Hague Conventions prohibit the belligerent occupiers from violating the rights to private property of Protected Persons. “Article 46 of the Hague Convention of 1907 provides that an occupying power must respect private property, which cannot be confiscated.”1 While,

Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits any destruction of real or private property whether belonging to private individual(s), the state or another organization, except when rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.2

Israel and Palestinian Property in 1948

After the conclusion of the grand campaign of ethnic cleansing in Palestine3, the Zionist authorities began to debate the policies they should adopt regarding the massive property that was left by the Palestinian refugees.

During the war that began on November 30, 1947 and ended on July 30, 1949, the State of Israel was a poor state in its first steps and had a great deal of war booty: about 77% of the land of Israel was the assets of the Palestinian refugees …4

Two months after the establishment of the State of Israel,

[t]he Provisional State Council, which was the legislative authority of the State of Israel from the end of the British Mandate until the establishment of the Knesset, established emergency regulations regarding the assets of the absentees … and appointed, on 21/07/1948, D. Shafir to be the custodian of the absentee property. Thus, the Palestinians’ connection to their land was erased, with the definition of “absentees” legitimizing the takeover of the assets. …5

In a report written in 1949, the newly appointed “Custodian of Absentee Property” described the situation on the ground as follows:

The frightened escape of the Arab residents and the abandoning of vast property in hundreds of thousands of apartments, shops, warehouses and workshops, the abandoning of grains in the fields, and fruit in gardens, orchards and vineyards, all during the war… put the victorious army in the face of severe material temptation…6

As it will become clearer later, the appointment of the “Custodian of Absentee Property” was not meant to take care of refugee property until the resolution of their problem, then the return of their property to their legitimate owners. But in actuality, it meant the plunder of the refugee property and its transfer to the Zionist state and private ownership. This Zionist conduct was a despicable thievery of the property that rightfully belonged to the Palestinian Arab refugees, the legitimate owners.

In 1950, the Absentee Property Law was enacted, according to which all assets owned by Palestinian refugees were transferred to the state of Israel through the custodian of absentee property. His powers were expanded by regulations that were in place until the law was enacted. In doing so, this institution was given great power. In addition, in close proximity to the Absentee Property Law, the Development Authority (Asset Transfer) Law was enacted in 1950, in order to sell the assets to a third party, i.e., laundering the absentee’s assets and erasing the Palestinians’ affiliation with the land. 7

Consequently,

At the time of the application of the Development Authority Law, the custodian sold most of the absentee property to Development Authority, and the Development Authority sold the land to the public and government institutions. As part of the mechanism for transferring agricultural assets – over 2.5 million dunams of absentee property including Waqf assets – were sold by the custodian to the Development Authority, which in turn sold it to the JNF, which transferred most of these resources to the (Jewish) farmers. 8

The Massive Plunder of the Lands of Palestinian Arab Citizens

The Zionist settler bourgeoisie did not only plunder the property of the Palestinian refugees, but decided to plunder also the property of the Palestinians whom they decided to let them stay and who were granted Israeli citizenship. The Zionist laws that were enacted for the “absentees” did not apply for the citizens, so, the Zionist authorities enacted suitable laws for this grand robbery.

In a matter of few years, the lands of the Palestinian citizens were plundered with the help of Zionist colonial laws. This massive robbery, which was a typical settler colonial conduct, was justified under the false “security” pretense.

Subsequently, in 1953, the State of Israel enacted the Land Acquisition Law, which led to massive expropriations by the Development Authority and the dispossession of 1.2 million dunams of municipal and agricultural land of the “present absentees” (absentee property law of 1950 did not apply to them) …9

In actuality, the concise land area that was expropriated by the Zionist authorities from the Palestinian Arab citizens totaled 1,234,785 dunams. This official number was released, in 1955, by Zionist Minister of Finance, Levi Eshkol, in response to a query by Israeli Communist Party member of Knesset Shmuel Mikonis.10

At the government meeting regarding the sale of land to the JNF, Minister Pinchas Rosen noted that the Development Authority must be rushed and established, because formally only it is entitled to sell these lands. Finance Minister Kaplan demanded that the seller be not the custodian of absentee property, but the Development Authority.11 The reason for this is the desire to make it difficult to locate the original owners of the land and to protect its new owners from future claims by the refugees to reclaim the land.

Moreover, Uzi Lovia added that,

Money laundering was the initial goal of the establishment, while reducing the value of compensation for future Palestinian claims was the secondary goal, as reflected in a secret memo to the Minister of Finance by the Jerusalem District Supervisor, which emphasizes the need to eliminate absentee property – with an emphasis on the problematic value of the assets and/or by free market prices. “In addition to the economic problem of saying prices, the possibility of lowering the prices of real estate assets across the country in general should be checked by flooding the market with absentee property at a reduced price,” he said. 12

Consequently, Uzi Lovia further explained that,

This policy applies more strongly to the development authority’s assets transferred to the JNF. In a memorandum by Finance Minister Kaplan in honor of the Director of the State Assets Department, regarding the consideration for the land transferred to the JNF as part of the million dunams (JNF purchased over 2 million dunams and received the territories in two installments), he writes that “the announcement by the Existing Fund that the prices that will be declared on them in the estate’s offices and which will be recorded in the bank of sale will be two-thirds of the prices set by the Committee – correct.”13 Is the Minister of Finance’s declaration and the action that followed legal?

It should be pointed out that the material compensation that the Zionist regime was ready to pay, for the legitimate Palestinian land owners, was decided upon in a way to be “of no real value”.

The Land Acquisition Law of 1952 was rife with covert intentions. Weitz writes: “It is not the owners who are guilty that the state did not pay for their land at the time of their seizure … The landowners, those who wish to remain citizens of Israel – will be severely deprived, the money they will receive for their assets will lack real value … From what was previously mentioned, it is understandable that the monetary value of the absentee assets is low, because the calculation of the value of compensation for the expropriation of the assets is determined from January 1, 1950. The range of years has improved the value of the assets, yet the absentees did not receive the proper value … Moreover, at the time of the application of the law, the Israeli Lira lost 80% of its value and the value of the land in 1953 was 15 times its value in 1950. 14

That was Zionist double robbery, of both land and in the price of compensations. All Zionist thievery was carried out under suitable settler colonial laws.

Consequently, and as a result of the massive expropriation of their lands,

… Israeli Arabs, who make up 21% of the population, control less than 3% of the country’s land. 97% of the land was taken out of their hands. Ben-Gurion was not satisfied with transferring ownership of the registered land, he wanted to change the registration in the consciousness as well: He declared in 1949 “We must also remove the Arabic names for political reasons. Just as we do not recognize the political ownership of Arabs in Israel, we do not recognize their spiritual ownership and their names.” 15

In addition to the plunder of the lands of the Palestinian private owners, the Zionist authorities categorized the Palestinian custodians of the “Muslim Waqf” as “absentees” also, therefore their property could be massively expropriated and sold to the Zionist ministries and municipalities. According to Israeli writer Uzi Lovia,

… the Representatives of The Muslims in Jaffa and the other cities involved received 1% of the total endowment assets scattered throughout the country, and were sold and/or transferred by the guardian to the Development Authority, for which it sold them to a third party – the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Religions and Municipalities…16

After the end of the major wave of Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1949, most of the Palestinian Arabs who remained inside Palestine were land owners who made their living from agriculture.

Consequently, the massive expropriations of their lands in the early 1950s led to structural changes in their economy and produced major changes in the class pyramid of the Palestinian society. It converted these farmers into unskilled workers who sought work inside Israeli cities.

Zionist Plunder of Palestinian West Bank Land

According to International Law and specifically to the Hague Convention of 1907, and to article 46 of this Convention, “Private property … must be respected and … cannot be confiscated.”17

In a research work carried out, in 2002, by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, the Zionist settler bourgeoisie adopted five types of methods to plunder Palestinian-owned land.18

1. Seizure for Military Needs;
2. Employment of the Ottoman Law Code of 1858;
3. Absentee Property;
4. Expropriation for Public Needs;
5. Acquisition of Land on the Free Market.

According to an estimation mentioned by Israeli researcher Joseph Algazy,

… from 1967 to 1984 the Israeli government requisitioned an estimated 5,500,000 dunams, or roughly half the total area of the West Bank, setting aside much of the land for military training and camping areas. 19

Apparently, the process of Zionist plunder of Palestinian land inside the colonized West Bank was carried out in various illegal ways. However, one of these ways was done according to a “fake legality” that is based on trickery. One example is to apply the old Ottoman “Land Registration Law of 1858” but only after creating conducive circumstances.

This Ottoman land law classified land under five categories. One of these categories is called the “mahlul” which stipulates that private land will revert to the state if left uncultivated by the owner for three consecutive years or left vacant.20

An example on the application of this law is what happened to the land of Ahmad Qaddoura, a Palestinian from the village of Laqef, the colonized West Bank. To begin with, almost half of his land was expropriated a decade ago for Israeli military facilities, including a watchtower.21 Later on, the rest of the land was expropriated through the misuse of this Ottoman law.

It should be mentioned that this land was cultivated with wheat prior to 1967.22 However, “… it was not possible” for the Qaddoura family members “to enter their land due to its closeness to the adjacent Karnei Shomron settlement.”23 One day the father of the family tried to plow his land, but was attacked by settlers and his plow was confiscated.24

Consequently, the Qaddoura family was forced, by the Zionist settler colonialists of the Karnei Shomron settlement, to abandon their land and not cultivate it for three consecutive years. Then, the Zionist colonial authorities applied the “Land Registration Law of 1858” that stipulates that land will revert to the state if left uncultivated for three years or left vacant.25 So, in 1986 a Zionist court issued a ruling that converted Qaddoura’s land into a state land, because the Qaddoura family “left their land uncultivated for three years”.26 Later on, the Zionist colonial authorities granted this land to the colonial settlers of Karnei Shomron who wanted to establish a factory on it.

Apparently, Zionist colonial courts do not feel legally obligated to take into consideration the circumstances that forced the Qaddoura family to abandon their land and leave it uncultivated for three years. Zionist colonial courts act according to the colonial tricks of “fake legality”. This colonial plunder by the Zionist State will appear, in Israeli eyes, “legal” because it has been carried out in accordance with the law. Collusion between the Zionist colonial courts and the settler colonialists of Karnei Shomron comes afterwards to an established colonial fact on the ground. The last stage of this colonial trickery is carried out discreetly by the Zionist colonial industrial bourgeoisie which invests in establishing a factory on robbed private Palestinian land. The Zionist army acts as enforcer of and protector of settler colonial schemes. In the end, all these colonial tools carry out their colonial roles in a complicit manner.

The Liquidation of Muslim Waqf Property

To begin with, the Islamic Waqf property is an “… Islamic property held in sacred trust for religious purposes…”27 for schools, public kitchens, mosques and libraries.28 According to International Law that is applicable inside occupied territories, specifically, articles 46 and 56 of the Hague Convention of 1907, it is forbidden to demolish and expropriate private property.29

Already in 1948, Israeli Zionist colonialists have never recognized the Palestinian rights bequeathed by Islamic Trust endowment. They regarded Waqf property as public property, or absentee property that can be expropriated by the Zionist state.

American author, Michael Dumper, calculated West Bank Waqf properties as exceeding 600,000 dunams…30 By the year 2013, Israeli settler colonialists were estimated to have expropriated more than 104,996 dunams of Waqf property mostly around Jerrico. 31

The Demolishment of the Moroccan Quarter

It should be pointed out that the Hague Convention of 1907 is applicable to the Palestinian occupied territories. According to Art. 46 of this Convention, “Private property … must be respected and … cannot be confiscated.”32

Moreover, According to Art. 56 of the Hague Convention of 190733,

The property of municipalities, that of institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, even when State property, shall be treated as private property.

All seizure of, destruction or willful damage done to institutions of this character, historic monuments, works of art and science, is forbidden, and should be made the subject of legal proceedings.

Prior to the Zionist occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, “Harat al-Magharibah” (the Moroccan Quarter) was one of the famous historical neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. It dates back to the end of the Crusaders wars.34

The entire Moroccan Quarter was endowed as Muslim waqf for the Maghribi community in recognition for the contribution of the Maghribis who fought with Salah Edin against the Crusaders.35

In the last day of the 1967 war, the Zionist authorities represented by Teddy Kollek, the “liberal” mayor of West Jerusalem, took two decisions, first to demolish the entire Moroccan Quarter and second to evacuate by force the Palestinian inhabitants of the “Jewish” Quarter.

On Saturday night, June 10, 1967, Israeli authorities informed more than 100 families living in the Moroccan Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City that they had three hours to evacuate their homes, where some had lived for generations.36

In total, the Zionist authorities demolished 135 houses, two mosques,37 schools, Muslim institutions and Sufi orders.38

Around 650 persons who resided in these houses, became refugees in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Jordan, while some of them returned to Morocco.39

Later on, Teddy Kollek turned to the “Jewish” Quarter and decided to

… remove forcibly all the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, many of whom had fled there from parts of the city taken over by the Israelis… Never mind that the vast majority of buildings in the Jewish Quarter were Arab-owned at the time of the 1948 war. …40

That was another crime of despicable theft of Palestinian owned property, coupled with the crime of ethnic cleansing. Both incidents reveal how Zionist settler colonialists have no respect for Palestinian human beings and that they are ready to displace them and rob their property without remorse or human compassion.

It should be pointed out that Zionist insolence dare to claim that Palestinians are not attached to their city nor to their houses and that they are ready to receive money and vacate. According to Zionist logic, the attachment of settler colonialist thieves to the property they robbed, is stronger than the attachment of the indigenous people to their lands, villages and cities. Teddy Kollek claimed, in his biography that, “Jerusalem meant less to the Arabs”41 While former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir claimed that “Jerusalem has a “political, national significance for Jews, as opposed to a religious, almost imaginative significance for Muslims and Christians.”42

Since the beginning of Zionist occupation of the West Bank, expropriation and annexation of Palestinian owned property was an ongoing process. Expropriation was carried out under various pretexts and for different purposes, but Palestinian land kept being robbed and plundered then annexed to Zionist settlements.

In his public speech against annexation, Israeli Advocate Michael Spharad stated the following:

Annexation is an elaborate and new mechanism that will enable the expropriation and dispossession and displacement of Palestinians at a scale and pace that we did not know. When East Jerusalem was annexed, thousands of properties were declared absentee property and thousands of dunams were expropriated for so-called “public purposes.” And who is the public who is in his best interests these properties were expropriated? Of course, settlers. This happened in East Jerusalem, and this will definitely happen in the territories annexed in the West Bank if there will be annexation.43

According to the writer Ali Kadri,

By 1983, the expropriation was calculated to extend over 52% of the territory, most of its prime agricultural land and, just before the 1993 Oslo Accords, these confiscations had encompassed over three quarters of the West Bank.44

Waqf Muslim property in the colonized West Bank was plundered by the Zionist colonial authorities. When Palestinian Muslims protested this plunder and demanded their return, the Zionist colonial authorities were ready to return a very small portion of the Waqf land.

This outright thievery by the Zionist authorities was affirmed by the Israeli researcher Uzi Tovia who reported the following fact.

Needless to say, representatives of Muslims in Jaffa and the other mixed cities received 1% of the total endowment assets scattered throughout the country, and were sold and/or transferred by the guardian to the Development Authority, which on its part sold them to a third party – the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Municipalities…45

Moreover, Uzi Tovia points out that the enactment of a number of land laws in Israel, is a reflection of the continued process of plunder and theft. These laws have led to the deteriorating share of the Palestinian citizens in the total lands under the control of the state of Israel.

As noted, the State of Israel enacted land laws that legitimized the nationalization and laundering of the absentee’s assets. Today, the of Nationality Law, the Kaminitz Law and the application of sovereignty in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley constitute the continuation of the theft and plunder. If the long-awaited peace reaches our country, then the State of Israel will tell the Palestinian refugees, the original landowners, that the possibility of returning the land to the absentee is legally impossible due to the large transfer of ownership of the land. Today, Israeli Arabs, who make up 21% of the population, control less than 3% of the country’s land. 97% of the land was taken out of their hands. Ben-Gurion was not satisfied with transferring ownership of the land registration, he wanted to change the registration in the consciousness as well: “We must also remove the Arabic names for political reasons. Just as we do not recognize the political ownership of Arabs in Israel, we do not recognize their spiritual ownership and their names,” he declared in 1949. 46

The Failed Policy of Demographic Containment

It should be emphasized that the present demographic situation of Palestinian cities, towns and villages is that of overcrowding, suffocation, lack of open spaces, and lack of plots of land for construction. This deplorable situation has been brought about by Zionist colonial policy of plunder of Palestinian owned land. The racist undertone of this policy could be clearly seen when we compare Palestinian residential localities with Jewish residential localities.

The Zionist regime realized that the policy of demographic containment of Palestinian citizens has failed. Palestinian citizens succeeded in infiltrating the all-Jewish cities of Nof Hagalil and Karmiel that were established specifically to contain Palestinian demographic expansion. Moreover, Palestinian citizens began to find solutions to their housing problems also inside neighbouring Jewish cities such as Haifa, Acre, and Afula. The failure of the Zionist racist policy of demographic containment was the direct result of the colonial policies of the massive land expropriations that took place in the fifties and sixties. By depriving the Palestinian Arab villages of their lands, the Zionist state has led to the creation of demographic overcrowding inside every Palestinian city and village. Available lands for housing and development have disappeared and land prices skyrocketed. Lack of available housing solutions drove lots of Palestinian citizens to migrate to the all-Jewish cities that have plenty of residential solutions.

Comparison Among Some Settler-Colonial Projects

When a comparison is conducted among the five settler colonial projects in the USA, Canada, French Algeria, South Africa and Israel – it would show a set of common similarities and another set of common differences.

Common Similarities

All settler colonial projects are based on the ideology of settler colonialism which produce the assumed racial superiority of the colonial settlers and the assumed racial inferiority of the indigenous population. Ultimately, this racial dichotomy leads to the dehumanization of the indigenous population. Its conduct towards the indigenous population cannot but reflect this ideology.

All settler colonialist projects begin their initial step by the destruction of the indigenous economy and the dissolution of indigenous societies. Then they begin the establishment of settler colonies on the plundered land of the indigenous population.

In their conduct, all settler colonial projects are motivated by the practice of segregation, walls, towers, fencing, closed zones, closed racist villages and racist ghettoes inside mixed cities.

Throughout its socio-political development, racist conduct becomes inherent in: law, courts, ministries, government agencies, official media, universities, the educational system, police treatment of indigenous population, land allocation, budget allocation, commerce, transportation and political narrative of its leaders.

These settler colonial regimes pursue an aggressive colonialist policy towards the indigenous population that gives no respect for their old traditions, religious beliefs and shrines.

The pursued colonialist policy does not recognize the previous regulations and laws that guided indigenous population prior to the advance of the aggressive settler colonial project.

Moreover, the pursued colonialist policy does not recognize the title of indigenous ownership for lands, whether private, public, or state. All indigenous lands are bound to be plundered by means of expropriation.

When faced with indigenous resistance, the leaders of the settler colonial project, the settlers, and the military agencies, resort to vicious violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Common Differences

When it comes to the differences, there are a number of differences that stem from: stages of the socio-economic development of the colonial metropolis, the degree of resistance paused by the indigenous population to the settler colonial project, and the end result of the settler indigenous conflict.

We could notice different degrees of “success” in three settler colonial projects such as in the United States of America, Canada and Australia. The settler colonial project “succeeded” in annihilating the Indigenous Population, through the use of ethnic cleansing, massive massacres and general genocide. According to Australian expert researcher on settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, the primary motive that stood behind annihilation was the following.

… Whatever settlers may say— and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.47

Concluding Remarks

Apparently, Zionist legal-minded political leaders, lawyers, and jurists deeply thought about the proper cover and moral justification for the plundering of the property of Palestinian Arab refugees and citizens. All their efforts could not produce a suitable solution except the provision of a thin veneer of fake legality. But how can you justify outright thievery with laws? Only a racist frame of mind of some colonialists thought that such a fallacy could be convincing.

After seventy-three years of Zionist settler colonialism, one can conclude that the Zionist settler bourgeoisie did not even once plan to achieve genuine peace with its Arab neighbors or with the Palestinian Arab people. The Zionist settler bourgeoisie opted in 1948 for the plunder of refugee property and this option totally negated the establishment of a genuine peace.

All Zionist talk about their desire for peace and about the extended hand for peace of Zionist leaders are nothing but Zionist propaganda. The Zionists have never thought of achieving genuine peace because their hand was extended only to grab Palestinian Arab lands. They thought that being militarily powerful is a state that could last forever and they regarded the support provided by Western imperialism to be guaranteed forever. They also thought that the rising Arab resistance to Zionist settler colonialism can be forever contained and managed.

Finally, the Zionist regime cannot but be a settler colonialist regime. Its conduct regarding the indigenous population and indigenous land remains colonial and aggressive. This regime cannot change by itself, it becomes callous and more inhuman. It will deteriorate and become more vicious, more violent and more racist.

Zuhair Sabbagh is a Palestinian Arab author specialized in Palestinian, Israeli and Third World issues. He lives in Nazareth, Israel. He worked for 21 years as an academic at the Bir Zeit University, at the department of social and behavioral studies. He is a graduate of the University of Manchester and holds a Ph.D. in Political Sociology. He is author of a number of books and research articles.

1 Natalie Sedacca, “Sanctioning land expropriation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory – Israel’s new ‘Land Regularization Law’’, https://lphr.org.uk, 3-3-2017

2 Ibid.

3 Actually, Zionist ethnic cleansing did not start in 1948, but preceded that in many years. In 1907, a Zionist by the name of Yitshaq Epstein reported that Zionist settlers ethnically cleansed the Palestinian Arab residents of two villages, Al-Ja’uny and Al-Mtilli. Then Zionist settlers settled inside the evacuated Palestinian Arab houses. Moreover, Zionist ethnic cleansing did not stop in 1949, but still continues to this very day inside Israel’s June 4th., 1967 borders and also inside the colonized West Bank (ZS).

4 Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the concept of laundering absentee property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

5 Proposal for absentee property ordinance on behalf of Justice Minister Felix Rosenblit to members of the government, dated 04/09/1948. As quoted by: Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

6 Report on operations until 31/03/1949 on behalf of the Custodian of Absentee Property, Ministry of Finance. As quoted by Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the concept of laundering absentee property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

7 Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 As reported by “Kol Ha’am”, Voice of the People (in Hebrew), 3-2-1955. As was quoted by Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

11 A cabinet meeting regarding the sale of land to the JNF by the Development Authority, dated 05/10/1950. As quoted by: Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

12 Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

13 Memorandum by Minister of Finance Kaplan regarding the consideration for land that goes to the JNF as part of the million Dunams, dated 22/01/1952. As quoted by: Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

14 Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 The Hague Regulations of 1907, “CONVENTION RESPECTING THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF WAR ON LAND”, https://constitution.com. Retrieved on: 13-8-2021

18 Wikipedia, “Land expropriation in the West Bank”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 27-6-2021

19 Algazy, Joseph (Spring-Summer 1985). “Israeli Settlement Policy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Arab Studies Quarterly, 7(2-3): 62-73 JSTOR 41857769, p.66. As quoted by: Wikipedia, “Land expropriation in the West Bank”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 18-8-2021

20 LeVine, Mark (2005). Overthrowing geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 184. As quoted by Wikipedia, “Ottoman Land Code of 1858”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 3-7-2021

21 Al-Bazz, Ahmad, “Settlers are seizing ‘empty’ land. The Palestinian owners are fighting back”, https://www.972mag.com, 7-1-2020

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 LeVine, Mark (2005). Overthrowing geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 184. As quoted by Wikipedia, “Ottoman Land Code of 1858”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 3-7-2021

26 Al-Bazz, Ahmad, “Settlers are seizing ‘empty’ land. The Palestinian owners are fighting back”, https://www.972mag.com, 7-1-2020

27 Wikipedia, “Land expropriation in the West Bank”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 27-6-2021

28 Halil Deligöz (2014). “The legacy of vakıf institutions and the management of social policy in Turkey”. Administrative Culture. Retrieved 15 September 2015. As quoted by Wikipedia, “Waqf”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 27-6-2021

29 The Hague Regulations of 1907, “CONVENTION RESPECTING THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF WAR ON LAND”, https://constitution.com. Retrieved on: 13-8-2021

30 Ehrenreich, Ben (2016). The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-783-78312-0, p. 292. As quoted by Wikipedia, “Land expropriation in the West Bank”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 27-6-2021

31 Ibid.

32 The Hague Regulations of 1907, “CONVENTION RESPECTING THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF WAR ON LAND”, https://constitution.com. Retrieved on: 13-8-2021

33 Ibid.

34 Hatem, Bazian, “Israel’s Grand Theft of Muslim Endowments in Jerusalem”, http://www.hatembazian.com, 3-2-2016

35 Ibid.

36 Joost R Hiltermann “Teddy Kollek and the Native Question,” Middle East Report 182 (May/June 1993).

37 The demolishment of the Moroccan Quarter, a copy reserved on Y-Pack Machine, 4-2-2012. As quoted by Wikipedia, “The Moroccan Quarter”, (in Arabic), https://ar.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 1-7-2021

38 Hatem , Bazian, “Israel’s Grand Theft of Muslim Endowments in Jerusalem”, http://www.hatembazian.com, 3-2-2016

39 The Jerusalem City Website, “54 years on the demolishment of the Moroccan Quarter, the Occupation continues to Judaize the place in order to conceal its history”, (in Arabic), https://www.alquds-city.com. Retrieved on: 10-6-2021

40 Ibid.

41 Kollek, Teddy, with Kollek, Amos, For Jerusalem: A Life (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 2. As quoted by Joost R Hiltermann “Teddy Kollek and the Native Question,” Middle East Report 182 (May/June 1993).

42 Jerusalem Post, May 24, 1990. As quoted by Joost R Hiltermann “Teddy Kollek and the Native Question,” Middle East Report 182 (May/June 1993)

43 Spharad, Michael, “Annexation is conquest and dispossession”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 8-6-2020

44 Kadri, Ali (Autumn 1998). “A Survey of Commuting Labor from the West Bank to Israel”. Middle East Journal. 52 (4): 517–530. JSTOR 4329251., pp. 517–518. As quoted by Wikipedia, “Land expropriation in the West Bank”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 27-6-2021

45 Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

46 Lovia, Uzi, “Behind the Concept of Laundering Absentee Property”, (in Hebrew), https://www.haokets.org, 14-8-2020

47 Wolfe, Patrick, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research, https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20. Retrieved on: 18-8-2021

August 22, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Jerusalem, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

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