Gazans shiver in ruined homes, tents after brutal storm
Al-Akhbar | January 8, 2015
Gazans who survived a brutal summer war are now struggling with the worst storm of the winter, as freezing rain and gale-force winds battered the besieged Gaza Strip on Thursday.
At least ten Palestinians were injured in the Gaza Strip after a winter storm, dubbed “Huda,” hit the embattled coastal enclave, Gaza’s civil defense department said.
More than 96,000 homes were destroyed or damaged during the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed more than 2,300 Palestinians during 50 days in July and August.
Gazans are now living by candlelight and wood fire because of electricity shortages, and rely on sandbags to stop their ruined homes from flooding. Some Gazans have sought shelter in the Sheikh Shaaban cemetery outside Gaza City, living in makeshift hut and tents.
Wael al-Sheikh, 37, lost his home last summer during an Israeli airstrike and now lives with his two sons in a tent pitched among the ruins. But with no access to electricity, it is impossible to fend off the cold.
Fearing that the winds of 80 kilometers per hour would simply blow their makeshift home away, they have sought refuge with relatives.
Imad Mutlaq’s home was also largely destroyed in the war, leaving the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls.
“We have no electricity or heating,” he said, describing the first night of the storm as “difficult.”
Thirty-year-old Mohammed Ziyad, a father of two young sets of twins, is trying to put on a brave face.
During a previous storm, the ground floor of the building where they live flooded, but this time he said the family was well prepared.
“We have stocked up on milk and nappies in case we find ourselves stuck indoors,” he said.
With or without a proper roof over their heads, everyone is facing the same problem: the chronic electricity shortages which has plagued the tiny, impoverished strip that is home to 1.8 million people.
Gaza’s sole power station, which was damaged during the war, is struggling with a severe lack of fuel and is only able to supply the enclave with six hours of power per day.
Raed al-Dahshan, head of Gaza’s civil defense, said his staff were facing “a difficult situation which was compounded by a lack of infrastructure” to help those suffering from the storm.
Gaza is also prone to severe flooding, exacerbated by a chronic lack of fuel that limits how much water can be pumped out of flood-stricken areas. The fuel shortages are a result of the eight-year-old Israeli blockade, which limits the import of other kinds of machinery related to pumping and sewage management that could help Gazans combat the floods. The most recent war has exacerbated the crisis.
In early November, flooding from days of torrential rains forced hundreds of Gaza City residents to flee their homes, as a massive week long storm flooded the city’s streets and homes with water and sewage.
Dispute over reconstruction funds
The Hamas resistance movement on Tuesday accused the Palestinian Authority(PA) of interfering with money earmarked for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.
In a statement, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said some ministers of the Palestinian national consensus government “admitted that the money allocated for Gaza reconstruction was being added to the PA budget.”
This confession, he said, “proves that the real reason behind the delay in reconstruction of Gaza is that the PA has been messing with the reconstruction money and exploiting the suffering of Gaza’s people.”
For 51 days this summer, Israel pounded the Gaza Strip – by air, land and sea – with the stated aim of ending rocket fire from the coastal enclave.
More than 2,310 Gazans, 70 percent of them civilians, were killed and 10,626 injured during unrelenting Israeli attacks on the besieged strip.
According to the UN, the Israeli military killed at least 495 Palestinian children in Gaza during “Operation Protective Edge.” The al-Mezan Center for Human Rights puts the number at 518, while the Palestinian Center for Human Rights puts it at 519. All three figures exceed the total number of Israelis, both civilians and soldiers, killed by Palestinians in the last decade.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that 3,106 Palestinian children were injured in the war. The UN estimates that 1,000 children will suffer a permanent disability as a result of their injury.
Moreover, the UN said as many as 1,500 children have been orphaned by Israeli attacks that killed their parents, while 6,000 children will have a parent with a lifelong disability.
In addition, 145 Palestinian families had three or more members killed in a single Israeli attack, for a total of 735 lives lost.
The assault ended with an Egypt-brokered ceasefire agreement that called for reopening Gaza’s border crossings with Israel, which, if implemented, would effectively end the latter’s years-long blockade of the embattled territory.
However, Israel had repeatedly blocked the entry of building material, prompting the UN in September to broker another deal. The reconstruction of Gaza has yet to begin.
The Palestinian Authority has estimated that the rebuilding Gaza will cost $7.8 billion.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon said during a visit to the Gaza Strip in October that the devastation he had seen was “beyond description” and “far worse” than that caused in the previous Israel-Gaza conflict of winter 2008-2009.
According to the UN, over 106,000 of Gaza’s 1.8 million residents have been displaced to UN shelters and host families.
(AFP, Anadolu, Al-Akhbar)
Egypt to raze Rafah city
MEMO | January 8, 2015
Egyptian authorities have decided to raze the city of Rafah, in Sinai, in order to establish a buffer zone with the besieged Gaza Strip, North Sinai governor Abdel-Fattah Harhoor said in a press conference yesterday.
1,220 homes are to be demolished in Rafah in the coming days.
2,044 families will be affected.
“The establishment of a buffer zone requires the complete removal of the city and, in fact, it will be completely destroyed,” Harhoor said.
He said that a new Rafah will be established, and until that happens, “each family whose home will be demolished will receive $210 as a down payment to rent a house”.
Cairo claims its buffer zone is intended to fight terrorism in Sinai and prevent cross border attacks on Israel.
Report: Israeli Occupation Forces killed six Palestinians last month
Palestine Information Center – January 8, 2015
GAZA – Israeli occupation forces (IOF) killed six Palestinians and kidnapped hundreds in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip last December, according to a report released by the Hamas Movement on Wednesday.
According to the report, the IOF shot dead one Palestinian last month in Gaza while another died of wounds he had sustained during the last war.
Four Palestinians were killed by IOF gunfire in the West Bank.
The IOF also detained 327 Palestinians, including 58 children and four women, mostly from the West Bank.
During the reporting month, the IOF demolished 40 Palestinian homes, 10 commercial stores, 31 structures as well as one restaurant and one forge, and issued demolition orders against other homes.
The Israeli occupation authority, in turn, approved plans for the construction of 316 housing units in Jerusalem and annexed 321 dunums of Palestinian land last month.
The report also touched on some of the violations committed by the Palestinian Authority’s security forces during the month, stating that they detained 235 cadres and supporters of the Palestinian resistance, mostly from Hamas, summoned 151 others for interrogation, and extended the detention of 32 others.
Israel’s attorney general to charge Zoabi with incitement
MEMO | January 7, 2015
The legal advisor to the Israeli government declared yesterday his decision to file an indictment against the Member of the Knesset for the National Democratic Alliance Hanin Zoabi on charges of inciting violence and insulting a civil servant.
The public prosecutor had previously called on the government’s legal adviser, Yehuda Weinstein, to submit an indictment against Zoabi, following an altercation between Zoabi and a police officer during the trial of one of the detainees of the Nazareth demonstration following the death of Mohammed Abu Khdeir.
Zoabi will request a hearing session for her statements within 30 days, in accordance with the law, and the Attorney General will then decide if he will file an indictment against her.
The director of the Adala Center for Human Rights and Zoabi’s lawyer, attorney Hassan Jabarin said: “We will request a hearing soon, aiming at convincing the attorney general not to file an indictment against Zoabi. In my opinion, there are no legal grounds for the indictment or its trial, as the investigations with Zoabi focused on an argument between her and a police officer in a Nazareth court because of the way he dealt with minors who protested against the killing of Abu Khdeir.”
“Zoabi said, during the investigation, that her words came as a reaction to what she witnessed and amid a storm of emotions after seeing the police’s brutality in dealing with minors,” he explained.
Israeli group files war crimes complaints against Palestinian leaders at ICC
MEMO | January 6, 2015
An Israel based rights organisation yesterday filed war crimes complaints against three Palestinian leaders before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper revealed.
The Shurat HaDin Law Centre filed the complaints against Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub, Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, and intelligence chief Majid Faraj.
Similar complaints were made earlier against President Mahmoud Abbas and the head of Hamas’ political bureau,Khaled Meshaal over their alleged role “in committing war crimes and harm to human rights”.
According to the paper, the Israeli organisation accuses the Palestinian officials of committing “acts of terror, torture and harm to human rights”.
UN: 1,200 Palestinian children injured by Israeli forces in the West Bank in 2014
MEMO | January 4, 2015
Israeli forces injured a total of 1,190 Palestinian children in the West Bank during 2014, according to a UN agency report.
The figure, contained within a weekly briefing covering the period 23-29 December, accounts for 20 percent of all Palestinian injuries.
UN OCHA noted that 280 of the injuries were recorded in July in the Jerusalem governorate, in the context of confrontations with Israeli occupation forces after the murder of Mohammad Abu Khdeir, and in light of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.
More than in 1 in 5 of the child injuries were caused by Israeli forces’ use of live ammunition, with the rest from rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas inhalation, and assault.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Israel had detained 1,266 Palestinian children in 2014, an average of seven children every two days.
Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism
By Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Dahir-Nashif | Jadaliyya | November 17, 2014
They not only invaded our home, took over our space, and evicted us—they even arrested me and took me to the Maskubya—the police station. I was put in room number four, alone, for a long time. Then, a big and tall man, a police officer, entered the interrogation room. I was alone, and started shivering from fear as he closed the door, started moving things around in the room and examining me from head to toe. I was terrorized, and my heart was beating so fast. His eyes penetrated my body, as he was opening the drawers looking for something. Then, he left the room and came back five minutes later holding a box. He pulled out a pair of blue plastic gloves, and put one on each of his hands, while looking at me and saying “…Come here…” I must tell you that I was terrorized when they invaded the house and evicted us. I was extremely anxious when they arrested my son. But my fears of ‘you know what’… You know… being abused… being raped by his blue big hands and more…were the most terrifying moments of my life.[1]
These were the words of Sama, a thirty-six-year-old Palestinian woman who lost the intimate familial and physical space of her home, only to experience further terror with the threat of sexual abuse. Sama’s narrative is not uncommon, as colonized women living under severe deprivation and dispossession are subject to daily attacks against their sexuality and bodily rights. Sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. This is readily apparent in the history of settler colonial contexts, where the machinery of violence explicitly targets native women’s sexuality and bodily safety as biologized “internal enemies” since they are the producers of the next generation.
Settler colonialism, as a “structure, not an event” operates through a “logic of elimination” that seeks to erase indigenous presence on a specific territory (settler colonialism’s “irreducible element”). Settler colonialism “destroys in order to replace.” The invasion of indigenous land seeks to permanently erase the indigenous presence on the land, in order to replace it with the new settler society and polity. Scholars have argued that settler colonialism’s logic of elimination may culminate in indigenous genocide. In its European formations, both settler colonialism and genocide have “employed the organizing grammar of race.” Since its inception, the Jewish state has been embedded in a racialized colonial logic. This logic constructs the Palestinian as a dangerous other in opposition to the white/Jewish subject and polis. As numerous authors have noted, this racial configuration is articulated through early Zionist thinkers’ Orientalist ideology that framed the Jewish people as bearers of European civilization in the face of a culturally backward region and people. Such a “modernizing” project or “civilizing” mission relied on a Zionist imaginary of exclusively Jewish labor cultivating an empty, uncultivated land, and “making the desert bloom.” Early Zionist leadership attempted to actualize the foundational Zionist myth of a “land without people for a people without land” through systematic ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians in 1948. The Zionist entity continues to evict native Palestinians today. The massacres in Gaza of July- August 2014, and the repressive “iron fist” policies targeting Palestinian Jerusalemites at the time we write this article, are contemporary modes of settler colonial eviction of the Palestinian native.
The targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies and sexuality, we contend, is structural to the Israeli settler colonial project’s racialized logic of elimination. Rape and other forms of sexual violence against Palestinian women have always been an element of the settler colonial state’s attempts to destroy and eliminate indigenous Palestinians from their land. In addition to rape and other forms of sexual violence, the racialized logic of sexual violence energizes the very imaginary and project of conquering and cultivating Palestinian land, in transforming it into the Jewish polis. Hence, our discussion of sexual violence is embedded not only in the sexualized practices and politics of the Zionist state, but also in the nature of Israeli settler colonial violence itself.
As Palestinian feminists, we assert that the Zionist movement’s imaginary of conquering and settling the Palestinian body is inseparable from the project of conquering and settling Palestinian land, and erasing indigenous presence. Here, we build on native scholar Andrea Smith’s assertion that the logic of colonial sexual violence “establishes the ideology that Native bodies are inherently violable—and by extension, that Native lands are also inherently violable.” It is the logic of settler colonial sexual violence that we center in our analysis of the continuous Nakba that targets our people. We trace the logic of sexual violence, in its historical and present context, as machinery, hidden and apparent, of colonial patriarchy against indigenous communities in Palestine. The logic of sexual violence attempts to fragment Palestinian family and communal life, as it severs the connection to the Palestinian homeland. The Zionist project is inherently based on the destruction of Palestinian native bodies and land, which cannot be separated from the colonial logic of elimination. Sexual violence is not simply a byproduct of colonialism, rather “colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.”
Sexual Violence and Palestinian Genocide Since the Nakba
Understanding the intensified attacks on Palestinian women’s bodies in times of heightened attacks by the settler colonial regime requires a feminist analysis. Such an analysis takes the Nakba as its analytical point of departure. Israel was built on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland, on its land, pain, and displacement. It was built on the destruction of our communal social ties, the violation and invasion of our homes and bodies.
Rape and killing of Palestinian women was a central aspect of Israeli troops’ systematic massacres and evictions during the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948. During the Deir Yassin massacre, for instance:
All the inhabitants were ordered into the village square. Here, they were lined up against a wall and shot. One eyewitness said her sister, who was nine months pregnant, was shot in the back of the neck. Her assailants then cut open her stomach with a butcher’s knife and extracted the unborn baby. When an Arab woman tried to take the baby, she was shot… Women were raped before the eyes of their children before being murdered and dumped down the well.
David Ben Gurion, like other Zionist leaders, openly discussed the rape and sexual torture of Palestinian women in his diary entries during 1948. At the same time that he advocated the killing of Palestinian women and children, constructing them as a threat to the Jewish settler polity, he awarded a prize to every Jewish mother on her tenth child. Ben Gurion ensured that the Jewish Agency, not the state, administered such pronatal incentives in order to guarantee the exclusion of Arabs.[2] The fetishization of fertility has made Palestinians, especially women, targets of nationalist rhetoric that deeply politicizes their reproduction. For Zionists, Palestinian women have always been, and continue to be, as we have seen in the latest attacks on Gaza, targets of the Zionist killing machine.
Feminist scholars have also suggested that the Zionist state mobilizes violence against Palestinian women’s bodies and sexuality to strengthen indigenous patriarchal structures and aid in the eviction of Palestinians from their land. Militarized sexual abuse has been rampant under Israeli occupation. The Israeli state and military forces have exploited the threat of sexual violence against Palestinian women, and patriarchal perceptions of sexuality and “honor” to “recruit Palestinians as collaborators” during periods of uprisings and deter attempts at organized resistance. This practice has been so historically prevalent that it gained its own term in the Arabic language as isqat siyassy, meaning the sexual abuse of Palestinians for political reasons. The state’s security apparatus continues to use Palestinians’ sexual identities and Orientalist conceptions of “Arab culture” to recruit collaborators and fragment Palestinian society. Recent revelations by Israel’s secret military intelligence Unit 8200 have revisited this fact. The literal and figurative “rape” of Palestinian women’s bodies, framed as inherently violable by the Zionist entity, is inherently structured by the same logic of sexual violence that energizes the settler colonial project’s violation and continued confiscation of Palestinian natives’ land.
Unmasking the Logic of Sexual Violence
The silence on the Zionist machinery’s use of sexual violence against Palestinian women[3] and their communities has been further revealed since the inception of the state’s most recent military operations. The logic of sexualized violence that structures the Israeli settler colonial project has become more visible during the last period of military invasion. Slogans such as “Death to Arabs” and “Arabs out” have become more usable and tolerable in the Israeli public sphere, exposing the necropolitical drive against Palestinian natives at the core of the so-called Jewish democracy.
On 1 July, just after discovery of the bodies of three Jewish settler youth who had gone missing in the occupied West Bank, Israeli professor Mordechai Kedar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies remarked on public radio: “the only deterrent for … those who kidnapped the [Israeli] children and killed them, the only way to deter them is their knowledge that either their sister or their mother will be raped if they are caught … this is the culture of the Middle East.” His comments suggested that raping Palestinian women was the only deterrent to Palestinian resistance and “terrorism.”
We as Palestinian feminists were not surprised to hear Kedar advocating rape as an antidote to anti-colonial resistance. Making such comments on public radio, in the open, where it would be heard by a wide Israeli Jewish public, women as well as men, including Israeli Jewish feminists, reflects the settler’s mentality and socialization towards Palestinians. Discussing the rape of Palestinian women as a military strategy by a so-called scholar from one of the prominent universities in Israel reveals the mode in which colonizers portray colonized women. The presentation of a sexualized Orientalist discourse positions Palestinians as culturally “backward,” non-human Others.
Lest the sexualized discourses Kedar mobilized appear an aberration, it is important to note that he was not the only performer in this latest theater of sexualized violence. Israeli soldiers on their way to killing Palestinians in Gaza read slogans of support prepared by their fellow Jewish-Israeli civilians stating: “Go pound their mothers, and come back to your mother.” Israeli Jews gathered on hillsides to watch and cheer as the military dropped bombs on Gaza. One young Jewish woman’s Facebook post summed up the sexualized pleasure they received in spectatorship of our collective lynching: “What an orgasm to see the Israeli Defense Forces bomb buildings in Gaza with children and families at the same time. Boom boom.” Even their Prime Minister Netanyahu received a post, which circulated widely among the Israeli public via social media, showing a veiled woman labeled “Gaza,” naked from the waist down, holding a message: “Bibi, finish inside this time! Signed, citizens in favor of a ground assault.” This is in addition to Knesset member Ayelet Shaked’s public declaration that Palestinian mothers should be killed.
The rape of the land as the rape of women’s bodies has thus come to the fore in Israel’s most recent eliminatory attacks against the Palestinian people. As the massacres of the Palestinian people in Gaza continued, the sexualized nature of Israeli invasion and racial terror against Palestinian natives came to the forefront of nationalist politics and discussion among the public sphere within 1948 Palestine as well. Palestinian women took to the streets with their communities throughout historic Palestine to demonstrate against the continuous massacres in Gaza. Public demonstrations took a sexualized turn, as crowds’ calls for “death to Arabs” quickly turned to chanting “Haneen Zoabi is a whore!” naming a female Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament who stood up for her people’s right to life. Israeli police attacked Palestinian women’s bodies, along with their male counterparts, and dragged them out of protests in Haifa and Nazareth, where they were arrested or beaten by racist crowds. Leading religious and military figures on the state’s payroll issued religious edicts which stated that during times of war it is permissible to bomb Palestinian civilians in order to “exterminate the enemy.” The city council of Or Yehuda, a settlement in Israel’s coastal region, hung a banner supporting Israeli soldiers that suggested the rape of Palestinian women: “Israeli soldiers, the residents of Or Yehuda are with you! Pound their mother and come back home safely to your mother.” [4]
We argue that the logic of sexual violence exhibited during attacks on indigenous Palestinians throughout historic Palestine, both historically and during the Israeli state’s most recent attacks, pervades both the Israeli settler state and settler society. Indeed, the state and settler society are inseparable entities, connected through a visceral psychological and political imaginary that exceeds the commonly framed state/civil society divide. As Lorenzo Veracini notes, settlers “carry their sovereignty with them.” Both the state apparatuses (including public elected officials, academic and military institutions) and settler society (including Israeli publics—situated along the continuum of Zionist ideology) embody the machinery of settler colonial violence. It is no surprise then, that both the official state apparatuses and unofficial settler spheres have exhibited grave attacks on Palestinian women’s sexuality, bodies, and lives in the context of the latest invasions of our people in Gaza, in the daily attacks today in Jerusalem, and throughout historic Palestine.
Israeli officials’ repressive policies and incitement against the Palestinian people work to empower and embolden Israeli settler society to embody the power of the state and viciously attack Palestinians. This is clearly exhibited in the attacks on Palestinian women’s bodies inside Al Aqsa mosque these last weeks in Jerusalem, by both settler publics empowered by the state’s military protection, and members of the state security forces. A recent example of the daily scene of sexual violence is Israeli border police’s violent beating and arrest of Aida, a Palestinian woman from the old city of Jerusalem. When she tried to enter Al-Aqsa mosque, border police attacked and brutally beat Aida. They tore off her hijab and pulled her by her hair, as they continued to beat her through the streets of the old city, and dragged her into the police car. She was then taken to the police station, where she was violently interrogated, further beaten and accused of attacking a police officer. Security forces’ brutalization and violation of Aida’s body, and attempts to mark her as an inherently criminal other, are a form of gendered and sexual violence. The legalization of such forms of violence marks the Israeli legal system itself as deeply embedded in the settler colonial project’s machinery of elimination.
Palestinian women’s brutalization and violation by the settler colonial state also takes on more mundane forms. When Samera was arrested for participating in a demonstration in occupied East Jerusalem, her release by authorities was conditional upon her completing what they termed “community service.” Samera’s “community service” required her to scrub the bathrooms of a facility for Israeli border police and soldiers. As she explained to us:
I could not afford to pay the huge fine, and needed to be released [from prison] to go back to my kids. I had no other choice but to scrub their bathrooms…. Just by being there, in men’s bathrooms, in the Israeli men’s toilets felt like rape. I did it to avoid payment, but I can’t avoid feeling that I allowed them to keep me there, in their bathrooms, in a constant state of terror, fearing being sexually abused, then trashed like we trash toilet paper in toilets.
Samera’s words and analysis further illustrate the gendered and sexualized aspects of the complex machinery of settler colonial violence. Yet as Samera concluded: “Sometimes I feel I was their slave, but some other times I tell myself no, this is resistance, this is sumud, this is power… I did what was needed to come back to my children, without being touched or violated sexually…. yes hard, complex… our situation is complex.” Even in the face of such violent inscription of settler colonial violence, Palestinian women’s daily acts of resistance and survival demonstrate their power and sumud, or steadfastness.
In sum, sexual and gender violence are not merely a tool of patriarchal control, the byproduct of war or intensified conflict. Colonial relationships are themselves gendered and sexualized. We contend that sexual violence, a logic embedded in the Israeli settler colonial project, follows two contradictory principles that operate simultaneously: invasion/violation/occupation and supremacy/purification/demarcation. That is, the Zionist settler colonial project’s invasion, violation, and occupation of indigenous Palestinians’ bodies, lives, and land is intimately intertwined with its demarcation of racialized geographical and physical boundaries between Jewish citizenry and Palestinian natives as well as attempts to “purify” the Jewish national body of the Palestinian body, which is framed as a biopolitical contaminant. It is thus that the logic of sexual violence, embedded in the Zionist regime, energizes historical and continuous attacks on Palestinian bodies and lives.
Thus our struggle for indigenous sovereignty within anti-colonial activism as feminists is necessarily situated in the protection of Palestinian women’s bodily safety and sexuality, family, and communal right to life. It is a struggle against the hypermasculine Zionist military and settler apparatuses that frame Palestinian women as inherently threatening racialized Others whose bodies must be violated and destroyed as the internal enemy and “reproducers of Palestinians.” This logic is inseparable from the settler colonial logic of elimination.
As Palestinian feminists concerned about the safety of women’s bodies and lives, the continuity of our people and our future generations, we call on local and international feminists to join our struggle, challenge the settler colonial culture of impunity and raise their voices against the ongoing Israeli state crimes.
Endnotes
[1] This quote was taken from a group discussion with Palestinian women in Jerusalem, 2014.
[2] In the 1950s Ben Gurion, as the first prime minister of Israel, turned the issue of women’s fertility into national priority, arguing that “increasing the Jewish birthrate is a vital need for the existence of Israel” and that “a Jewish woman who does not bring at least four children into the world is defrauding the Jewish mission.” See Sharoni, S. (1995). Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: the Politics of Women’s Resistance. Syracuse University Press. Also see Davis, U. & Lehn, W. (1983). “And the Fund Still Lives: The Role of the Jewish International Fund in the Determination of Israel’s Land Policies”, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 7 (4), p.3, at pp.4-6(1978).
[3] While centering our analysis on Palestinian women, we also note the Zionist state’s use of sexual violence as a tactic to curb the “demographic threat” over some Jewish women’s bodies, including black women (from the Ethiopian community) and women from impoverished backgrounds. While attempting to curb the birth rates of black and/or poor Jewish women, a practice we analyze as connected to the racialized project of curbing Palestinian reproduction and life, Israel has simultaneously sought to increase European Jewish birth through modernized practices such as buying ovum for human reproductive cloning from poor, Eastern European women. Besides, the Israeli state suggested that the law for preventing human reproductive cloning (1999) had expired and many of Israel’s physicians, politicians and social researchers are embracing this practice as yet another strategy for maintaining a Jewish demographic advantage on the land of Palestine.
[4] In addition to the posts and declarations against Palestinian mothers, Jewish girls and women encouraged men serving in the Israeli Occupation Forces by sending them semi-nude or pornographic pictures as an expression of love and support (see http://www.pitria.com/israeli-girls-support-zahal).
Happy New Year Palestine: But Don’t Expect any Change in the Status Quo
By William Hanna | Dissident Voice | January 2, 2015
A stinging defeat for Abbas, but no great victory for Israel … Netanyahu persuaded Nigeria to abstain as UN Security Council rejected Palestinian statehood, but could only muster US and Australian opposition, and the French let Israel down.
Had the UN Security Council voted for Palestinian statehood it would still have made no difference because the resolution would have been vetoed by Israel’s superpower lapdog — that principled and supreme upholder of democracy and international law — the United States of America. But even before this latest amoral rejection, the Palestinian people had already been forewarned that the New Year of 2015 would herald no change in their misfortunes.
They would continue to be faceless, voiceless, and unrecognised by a Zionist blackmailed, bribed, bullied, and sadly spineless international community; continue to be stateless prisoner refugees on their own land and in adjoining Arab states; continue to be subject to air, sea, and land blockades that prevent free trade — the import of essential foods, medical supplies, and rebuilding materials — and freedom of their own movement; continue to exist under the constant threat of another barbaric military assault in keeping with Zionism’s rationale that Palestinian existence denies and challenges Israel’s insatiable territorial claims which can only be satisfied by annihilating the Palestinian people; continue to be subject to arbitrary arrest, beatings, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without charges or due process — for up to ten or more years in some cases without knowledge of when or if they will ever be released — under Israel’s Administrative Detention Orders; continue seeing their children being systematically detained by the military and police who subject them to violent physical and verbal abuse, humiliation, painful restraints, hooding of the head and face in a sack, threats with death, physical violence, and sexual assault against themselves or members of their family, and denial of access to food, water, and toilet facilities; continue to be subject to attacks against themselves and their property — including the burning of their olive groves which are the only means of livelihood for many — by deranged savages from illegal Israeli settlements; continue to have their property demolished, their resources including water stolen, and their land expropriated by “God’s chosen people” from the “only democracy in the Middle east”; and finally, they would continue to be aghast at how the world could stand idly by and do nothing while Israel barbarically violated every article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which incidentally both warmongering criminal states of the U.S. and Israel had ratified.
So despite recent encouraging recognitions of a “Palestinian state” by some European parliaments, forewarnings that the status quo for the Palestinian people would remain unchanged came from various sources including the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron. Cameron, who during a visit to Israel in march 2014 had taken obsequious Knesset-grovelling to new heights by confirming that very determined and insidious “friends of Israel” lobby groups corrupt and exert influence over the Western leaders irrespective of what the the people themselves may want as was the case in the lead-up to the Iraq War:
I will always stand up for the right of Israel to defend its citizens, a right enshrined in international law, in natural justice and fundamental morality [which is not applicable to the Palestinian people because their lobby is nowhere near as powerful as yours], and in decades of common endeavour between Israel and her [bought and paid for political] allies. When I was in opposition, I spoke out when – because of the law on universal jurisdiction – senior Israelis could not safely come to my country without fear of ideologically motivated court cases and legal stunts; when I became Prime Minister, I legislated to change it. My country is open to you and you are welcome [as are your shiny shekels] to visit any time.
Despite Israel’s flagrant crimes against humanity during last summer’s Operation Protective Edge and following Israel’s Jewish nation-state bill which affirmed “the personal rights of all [Israel’s] citizens according to law,” but reserved communal rights for Jews only — which meant that while individual Arabs would be equal in the eyes of the law, their communal rights would not be recognised — the following exchange took place in parliament between an unabashed Cameron and the high-principled Jewish Sir Gerald Kaufman:
Sir Gerald Kaufman: “Will the Prime Minister condemn the new Israeli Government Bill that removes what are defined as national rights from all Israeli citizens who are not Jews, makes Hebrew the only national language and has been denounced by the Israeli Attorney-General as causing a ‘deterioration of the democratic characteristic of the state’? Will he make it clear that the statutory, repressive removal of citizenship rights on the basis of religion will turn Israel into an apartheid state?”
Prime Minister David Cameron: “One of the reasons I am such a strong supporter of Israel is that it is a country that has given rights and democracy to its people, and it is very important that that continues. When we look across the region and at the indexes of freedom, we see that Israel is one of the few countries that tick the boxes for freedom, and it is very important that it continues to do so.”
Furthermore, as a consequence of last year’s increased public sympathy for the Palestinian people, Israel has ramped-up its propaganda through Zionism’s reliable army of selfish, self-serving, sleazy, sewer-scavenging, slime ball supporters — time to abandon political correctness and unjustified respect — whose leading light is Tony Blair the war criminal “Middle East Peace Envoy.” Such lowlife paid for recruits contaminate not only politics, but also the mainstream media that plants the seeds of support for Israel by expurgating the news we hear, read, and watch. While speaking at a conference in Jerusalem last month, Danny Cohen the director of the Israeli-biased BBC Television said: “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew in the UK as in the last 12 months,” and that rising anti-Semitism has made him question the long-term future for Jews in the UK.
It would be an insult to morons to refer to Mr. Cohen as such, but it has obviously escaped his Zionist mentality that what he refers to as anti-Semitism in Britain, may in fact be the British people’s exasperation with continually seeing images of Israel’s barbarity against a defenceless people who only want to be left alone to enjoy their inalienable human rights in an unoccupied Palestinian state. How can Mr. Cohen and others of his heartless ilk be made to understand that the general public’s revulsion and condemnation resulting from seeing [WARNING: images very graphic!] images of Palestinian children burnt to a crisp with limbs blown off, is not in any way anti-Semitic but simply empathy for fellow human beings whose savage persecution has been ongoing for more than 60 years.
Unmitigated Zionist arrogance — with its inherent Ariel Sharon belief that “Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial” — presumes to tell the rest of us “unchosen” goyim what we can and cannot do; presumes to condemn the European parliaments that finally took a moral stand and voted to recognise a Palestinian state; presumes —after the Palestinians signed up to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) — to issue the threat that Israel would take “steps in response and defend Israel’s soldiers”; presumes that it has a right to special trade agreements and dispensations whose conditions it routinely violates; presumes that it can take what it wants without giving anything in return; and presumes in accordance with its self nomination as “God’s chosen people” that it has a supremacist entitlement to treat all non-Jews as contemptible individuals to be used and exploited.
Further proof of an unchanged Palestinian status quo in 2015 came after the first step was taken to join the ICC with the U.S. state department — an Israeli mouthpiece — releasing a statement condemning what it called “an escalatory step” on the part of the Palestinians and that negotiations between the two sides were the only “realistic path towards peace … today’s action is entirely counter-productive and does nothing to further the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a sovereign and independent state.”
It is hard to comprehend how after decades of “peace talks” anyone can still believe that peace is achievable through negotiations. The Israeli position of insisting that only through negotiations can an agreement be reached is a ploy that always includes the deliberate Israeli intent to sabotage such negotiations so as to prolong the status quo and thereby enable Israel to continue with its illegal settlement building and gradual expropriation of more Palestinian land by means of ethnic cleansing. Israel does not want peace. Peace would mean an end to Israel’s gratuitous persecution of the Palestinian people and the larcenous plunder of Palestinian land and resources.
Even before the UN Security Council vote Israel considered the resolution to be a diplomatic declaration of war with Intelligence and Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz calling for drastic measures if the Palestinians indeed do make the move. “A vote at the UN is expected on the aggressive, hostile and one-sided resolution regarding a Palestinian state. We must not let it pass quietly,” Steinitz declared. “In my opinion, if such a resolution is accepted by the UNSC we will have to seriously consider the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority … in my opinion, if such a resolution is accepted by the UNSC we will have to seriously consider the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority.”
It is time for decent people everywhere to face two inescapable realities: the first is to recognise and accept what Israel is — a Zionist Apartheid warmongering state bent on driving out the indigenous Palestinian people so as to grab their land irrespective of cost or consequences, and the second is that Western political leaders cannot be relied upon on to unconditionally insist on justice for the Palestinian people including Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders thereby allowing for a Palestinian state.
So what can decent people do? They can resort to the only peaceful and proven alternative which successfully ended Apartheid in South Africa and simply involved an all out boycott. The current global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS Movement) has to be supported and expanded to such an extent that Israelis will have no option other than to accept that even as a God chosen people they still have the responsibility of respecting international law and the rest of humanity.
William Hanna is a freelance writer with a recently published book the Hiramic Brotherhood of the Third Temple. He can be reached at: w194hanna@gmail.com.
BDS National Committee condemns Gaza orphans trip to Israel
MEMO | January 2, 2015
The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee condemned a planned trip organised for 37 Palestinian orphans, who lost their parents during the recent Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, to Israel.
In a statement, the committee said the “suspicious trip” included visits to several Israeli settlements around Gaza and described it as nothing but a failed public relations stunt aimed at covering up Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. The trip was cancelled after Hamas stopped the orphans from leaving the Strip.
The visit was organised by Yoel Marshak of the Kibbutz Movement, a versed Zionist organisation which has long been involved in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and uprooting them from their land, the statement said.
The committee condemned Candle for Peace and Brotherhood, a Palestinian organisation believed to have ties to the right-wing Likud Party.
The statement concluded by calling to stop all normalisation of formal and informal ties with Israel and to support the Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, the Negev and Galilee as well as inside Israel.
Palestinians Need Less Negotiations, Not More
By Matt Peppe | Just the Facts | January 1, 2015
When the U.N. Security Council resolution to end the Israeli military occupation of the occupied territories and establish a Palestinian state by 2017 was defeated, not a single human with a pulse was surprised. The resolution received eight votes in favor, with the United States and Australia against and five countries abstaining. Even though the measure was one vote shy of adoption, the United States decided to exercise its veto power anyway just to make its rejectionist stance abundantly clear. But the bill would not have lead to a fair settlement anyway. If it led to a settlement at all it would have been an unjust one for Palestinians. A just settlement would mean assuming the goals of the resolution as a starting point, not as an end point.
Explaining why she put a kibosh on the resolution, United States Ambassador Samantha Power said the bill was “imbalanced” and addressed “only one side.” It did address only one side – Israel’s. It was imbalanced because it sought legal rights already due to Palestinians since 1967 as its objective while ignoring other Palestinian rights like the right of return and equal rights inside the 1948 borders. And it rewarded Israel for 47 years of atrocious criminality – ethnic cleansing, land and water theft, destruction of thousands of homes and olive trees – without any consequences.
The insistence on maintaining the status quo was explained by Power saying that “we firmly believe the status quo between Israelis and Palestinians is unsustainable.”
Power also made multiple references to negotiations between the parties. “The United States every day searches for new ways to take constructive steps to support the parties in making progress toward achieving a negotiated settlement,” she said. By this, she apparently meant that the United States searches for ways to force Palestinians to negotiate how many of their rights they are willing to forfeit, while Israel demands that it doesn’t have to give up anything.
The only acceptable outcome for Israel is maintaining control of all of Mandate Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Sea, by de facto annexation. The United States knows this and has enabled them to do so, by giving them $3 billion per year in aid and vetoing 43 resolutions meant to hold them accountable since 1972, among other things.
If Power was not being dishonest and deceitful, the only other explanation for her statement is that she is clinically insane. The definition of insanity is “a mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality.” The idea that Israel has ever for one second been interested in a negotiated settlement since its foundation in 1948 is more of a fantasy than Game of Thrones. And to think the U.S. has done anything other than aid and abet Israel’s conquest of Palestine through ideological, financial and diplomatic support would require an unfathomable level of historical amnesia.
If Israel was interested in an actual settlement they would have to admit that they cannot bargain with what does not belong to them – namely any land beyond the Green Line. Palestinians don’t need another resolution to clarify that Israel needs to remove its military occupation from the lands that were conquered in the 1967 war. This has already been the law for 47 years.
UN Security Council Resolution 242 declared that “the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East … should include” the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and “termination for all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area.”
This was reiterated six years later with the demands in Resolution 338 to implement 242 “in all of its parts” and that “negotiations shall start between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace.”
By proposing a new resolution that would achieve at best what is already guaranteed by Resolutions 242 and 338, Palestinians would be forced to surrender the rest of their rights – namely the right of return of the 1948 refugees and their descendents displaced during the Nakba, and the end to discrimination of Palestinians within Israel who are second-class citizens in the Jewish State.
Israel could not practically dismantle all the illegal settlements they have built in the West Bank and move 500,000 settlers back inside the Green Line, much less absorb possibly millions of refugees, many who still hold the keys to their ancestral homes inside Israel. There is no possibility of a two state solution. It is as much as a fantasy as Ambassdor Power’s claim that the U.S. doesn’t believe in the status quo.
Once this two-state scam is exposed for what it is, the only possibility left is a binational state where Palestinians enjoy equal rights with Jews. It is the reason that Ali Abunimah, writing in the Electronic Intifada, said last month he hoped for the U.S. to veto the U.N.’s “terrible resolution.”
“It insists that the entire question of Palestine be reduced to the question of the 1967 occupation and that merely ending this occupation would effectively end all Palestinian claims,” Abunimah writes.
When the question of the occupation has already been resolved in existing law in favor of the Palestinians, why would they want to give away willingly the rest of what was stolen from them? Since Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, Palestinian leadership has demonstrated their willingness to surrender the rights of the people they represent to placate Israel and the United States and be left with scraps.
With incredible foresight Edward Said called the Oslo Accords, with “so many unilateral concessions to Israel,” the “Palestinian Versailles.” Then, as now, Israel was not willing to give an inch toward recognition of Palestinian self-determination. Pretending that Palestinians can lure Israel into accepting a settlement if they just concede a little bit more is even more absurd now than it was 21 years ago in Oslo.
A news census shows that Palestinians will outnumber Jews in Greater Israel by 2016. Palestinians in the occupied territories and within the ’48 borders are expected to equal Jews with a population of 6.42 million before surpassing them. By the end of the decade, the census bureau estimates Palestinians will reach 7.4 million to 6.87 million Jews. This does not even include the estimated 5 million Palestinians living in the diaspora and prohibited by Israel’s Prevention of Infiltration Law from returning.
So by virtue of merely existing Palestinians will put an end to Israel’s hollow claims of being a democracy. Of course this is no small feat. Palestinians have been struggling for seven decades to maintain their existence in spite of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and slow-motion genocide. How else to honor this heroic resistance than to prove definitively that Israel’s claims to being a democracy and Jewish state have never been anything more than a myth?
By demanding their rights outside of negotiations with Israel, as they did when they signed the Rome Statute this week, Palestinians are able to apply pressure unilaterally. With world opinion turning in favor of the Palestinian plight, it has become clear that isolation of Israel and forcing them to be accountable for their crimes is the only way for Palestinians to attain their rights.
Joseph Massad writes that “Palestinians must insist that those in solidarity with them adopt BDS [Boycott, Divest, and Sanction] as a strategy and not as a goal, in order to bring about an end to Israel’s racism and colonialism in all its forms inside and outside the 1948 boundaries.
It is worth remembering that the only reason Israel exists at all is precisely because the colonial powers who created it acted against all concepts of democracy and human rights. If the newly formed World Court would have heard the case of Palestinians in 1948, when they owned nearly 90% of the land and consisted of about 66% of the population, they never would have permitted granting the country to a minority to rule over it.
No amount of negotiations will be able to force Israel to give up its racism and colonialism willingly – just as no negotiations were able to force the South African apartheid regime to do so. The only way for Palestinians to achieving peace will be in spite of Israel and the United States, who will continue as they have for decades to do everything they can to prevent Palestinian self-determination. Palestinians must expose Israel and the U.S.’s hypocrisy on democracy and human rights, not let them hide from it.
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The Balfour Declaration – A Century of Jewish Power
By Gilad Atzmon | May 17, 2017
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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