Israel crushes water pipelines with bulldozers in occupied West Bank
MEMO | December 15, 2022
The Israeli occupation army destroyed the main water pipelines in the village of Al-Auja, in the north-east of Jericho, reported Wafa news agency.
The destruction is seen as being part of the apartheid state’s efforts to control all water sources in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Local residents said that occupation soldiers forced their way into the village and welded-shut the sole pipeline which supplies water to more than 1,200 people and used a bulldozer to crush it beneath the land.
In recent years, Ein Al-Auja villagers have suffered from Israeli demolition and persecution campaigns and repeated attacks and violations by illegal settlers and soldiers.
The supervisor of the Al-Baidar Organisation for Defending the Rights of the Bedouins, Hasan Mleihat, said the community is one of the largest in the West Bank and is a target of frequent assaults and violations by the Israeli soldiers and settlers.
He also noted that such assaults are intended to displace the community and seize their water and land to make room for colonial settlement construction.
Israel violates international law by destroying and pillaging water resources in occupied Palestine. It then uses stolen water to increase the supply to illegal Israeli settlements, which have a much higher demand and consumption rate. The state discriminates blatantly by not boosting or even protecting water supplies to Palestinian communities.
Mleihat noted that Israel’s restrictions force Palestinians to buy water directly from the occupation state, even as it prevents them from constructing their own wells or engaging in other projects to enhance access to fresh water.
Like hundreds of other Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, Al-Auja village is located in ‘Area C’ according to the Oslo Accords, putting it under full Israeli military and administrative control.
How to Trash a Movie in Support of a Lie
The cover-up of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians during the Nakba continues
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • DECEMBER 13, 2022
Israel’s new government is planning to give de facto operational control of the national police and heavily armed border police to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of a party of right wing, racist extremists. It can perhaps be regarded as the prelude to the last phase in the uprooting and displacement of the Palestinian people. Those who resist will be killed and not a single Israeli soldier or policeman will be punished for carrying out what the Benjamin Netanyahu government will frame as a war against terrorists blessed by Yahweh in support of his “Chosen” people.
The Zionist view of what should be done to the indigenous inhabitants of a place once called Palestine has been unflinching since the founding of the state of Israel. The Zionist historic boast that a Jewish homeland would be built on “A land without a people for a people without a land” ignored the fact that Palestine already had plenty of inhabitants and a well-established economy where Jews were a distinct minority, less than 20% of the population in the 1930s.
The solution to correct the numbers was to compel the natives to leave by one means or another. Israel’s founding father David Ben Gurion early on endorsed a policy of removal by force if necessary the Christians and Muslims. The fighting that followed in 1948 after the United Nations’ partition of the country into two separate states left the mostly unarmed Palestinians helpless before the well-armed Jewish militias, which quickly expanded their zone of control well into the area that was granted on paper to the Palestinians. It is estimated that 15,000 Palestinians were killed outright by the Zionist forces while 800,000 more were driven from their homes, to which nearly all were denied any right to return. Four hundred Palestinian occupied villages were “ethnically cleansed” and in some cases physically destroyed.
The de facto seizure of the remainder of historic Palestine outside the borders of the Jewish state after the June 1967 Six Day war gave Israel direct control of all key strategic areas as well as land in Syria and Lebanon. Since that time, successive Israeli governments have pursued an ethnic cleansing policy both in Israel itself and on the West Bank consisting of gradually forcing the remaining Palestinians to leave to be replaced by all-Jewish towns and settlements. The Palestinians know that the final push is indeed coming and have begun to resist, though having few weapons they are helpless against the heavily armed Israel Defense Force (IDF), which has killed 195 Palestinians, mostly teenagers, in the past eleven months.
A recent killing captured on surveillance video shows an Israeli border policeman shooting a young man dead after an encounter on the main street of a West Bank town. Far-right Otzma Yehudit Party leader and incoming National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, praised the policeman who did the shooting as a “hero,” citing his “Precise action, you really fulfilled the honor of all of us and did what was assigned to you.”
The Palestinians refer to their dispossession and killing at the hands of the Jewish soldiers in 1948 as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” which has sometimes been popularized as the Arab version of the so-called holocaust. I have recently watched a controversial film called Farha, made in Jordan by a woman filmmaker of Syrian descent, which views the Nakba through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old village girl. She, the eponymous Farha that gives the film its title, was preparing to go off to advance her education, presumably in Jerusalem, when Israeli soldiers attacked her village. The Israelis used loudspeakers to announce that all residents must leave immediately. Anyone seeking to remain would be killed. In a panic, the girl’s father, the village chief, locked her into a storage shed for safety as he tried to figure out what to do, but he then disappears from the tale and it might be presumed that both he and the rest of the family were killed.
Farha has only a crack in the door to witness what is going on outside. In a particularly dreadful sequence, a Palestinian man and his family who are trying to escape but are apparently confused regarding what way to go are detained by an Israeli officer and his men. After some perfunctory questioning, the father, mother and two children are lined up against a wall and shot dead. A newborn baby was left lying on the ground, alive, crying for its mother. The officer tells one of his men to kill it, but adds “Don’t waste a bullet on it.” The soldier prepares to stomp on the baby’s head to carry out the order, but cannot bring himself to do it and walks away. The baby continues to wail until later that day it stops, presumably dead from exposure or other factors.
Eventually Farha escapes from her prison and the movie concludes with her walking away in tears to an uncertain future. The film is very powerful, with excellent acting, cinematography and direction and it is based on a true story as handed down by Director Darin J. Sallam’s mother’s best friend, but I ended up wishing that it were stronger in its depiction of the savagery exercised by the Israelis, perhaps recreating an actual major massacre of Palestinian civilians, like occurred at Deir Yassin, where 107 Arabs, including many women and children, were shot dead by Israeli militiamen from the Irgun and Lehi groups. Other massacres took place in hundreds of villages across Galilee as well as in cities like Haifa or Akka, all far worse than what is revealed by the film. For those who are interested, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine describes, in detail, the brutality of what Israeli forces unleashed on the largely unarmed Palestinian people during the Nakba.
But even though the film deliberately avoided cliched scenes of mass violence, it has proven very powerful with supporters and critics lined up along the completely predictable political lines. The Israelis have in particular come down hard on the film and they and their many friends in the United States, have reacted in their usual tribal fashion, attacking Netflix, which is streaming Farha on its network including in the United States and Europe. The Israel firsters are advocating striking back against Netflix for its temerity by canceling the service and attacking the decision to air the film at all. Ironically though not surprisingly, Netflix has hitherto been a leader in obtaining and streaming Israeli films and even television series.
In Israel, the government has declared war on the film, also a characteristic of that nation’s circle-the- wagons paranoid response to anything that might even suggest that Jews are just as capable of evil as anyone else. Last month ultra-nationalist Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman moved to block scheduled screenings of the film in Jaffa, saying that “Israel is a place to present Israeli and international works, but is certainly not the place to slander IDF soldiers and the security forces who are acting day and night to defend and protect all the citizens and residents living here.”
Lieberman, a Russian Jew known for his ethnocentric and essentially racist views, apparently does not believe that soldiers and security forces should actually protect Palestinians and afford them at least some measure of free speech, which is only allowed to Jews. Israel’s ironically titled Culture Minister the oddly named Chili Tropper also attacked the film for its so-called “false plots against IDF soldiers” denouncing how their actions were presented as similar to “behavior of the Nazis in the Holocaust.”
Former IDF soldier and current right wing apologist, Yoseph Haddad also tweeted, “I saw the movie ‘Farha’ and I can tell you that it is much worse than you think. The IDF soldiers are presented there as inhuman with unimaginable evil, all they care about is murdering and slaughtering without mercy (which is the exact opposite of the truth). This is a blood libel that will certainly increase antisemitism and incitement against Israel. If you haven’t canceled your Netflix subscription yet – do it now.”
In an Instagram post, Israeli model Nataly Dadon also demanded that Israelis and their supporters internationally should drop their Netflix subscriptions in an Instagram post, claiming that Farha’s “sole purpose is apparently to increase anti-Semitism against the Jewish people.” Mondoweiss also reports how “author and photographer Laura Ben-David tweeted a photo of her cancellation message with the streaming app and wrote, ‘Buh-bye Netflix! Supporting the false and anti-Israel film Farha is unacceptable.’”
So Israel, which is passionate about its rejection of the non-violent pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) economic pressure movement, is united in its desire to punish Netflix’s bottom line. And the old reliable anti-Semitism tag is being liberally attached to how the argument is being framed. Former Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed Shihab-Eldin suggested to the Middle East Eye that “The pacing of [all the negative posts] reveals it was coordinated. With each passing hour, dozens and dozens of vapid and vile reviews would appear, making wild accusations trashing the film. It was clear people had not seen the film, and only wanted to damage its reputation.”
Finally, it would not be about Israel and Jews if there were not space in The New York Times to twist and spin the story. A review of the film by one Beatrice Loayza, a Peruvian-American film critic based in Brooklyn, describes the movie oddly as a “brutal coming-of-age-story.” At one point, Farha discovers an old handgun wrapped up within a sack of lentils. She eventually uses it to shoot the lock and escape the storage room. But this is how the Times reviewer describes the sequence: “She finds a gun buried inside a sack of grains — was the threat present all along? One day, a scene of great barbarity plays out before her tiny window.” Aha! So those crafty Arabs actually were potentially using the old handgun among the lentils trick to threaten the friendly Israel soldiers who just happened to drop by to shoot to death a Palestinian family, which is dismissed as a “scene of great barbarity” without any suggestion of what that might have been. In truth, the garbage being peddled by the Times as a review of a story of an atrocity committed by Jews is actually achieved without having to include any context or feature any Jews at all. “Remarkable” is all I have to say in conclusion.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Social media’s history of suppressing Palestine content
By Kathryn Shihadah | Israel-Palestine News | December 12, 2022
For years, social media have been making it difficult for Palestinian and their allies’ voices to be heard – even as Israel’s stranglehold on Palestinians has grown stronger, and as increasing amounts of US tax money have been sent to Israel and to various countries for Israel’s direct benefit.
Social media users, especially Palestinian human rights advocates, have reported puzzling occurrences on the major platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – especially during times of Israeli crackdowns.
Users who shared information on the situation in the Palestinian territories described posts being deleted as “hate speech or symbols,” or “violence,” inexplicably losing followers and views of their content, or having entire accounts abruptly frozen or deleted.
One rights group documented over 700 instances of social media networks restricting or removing Palestinian content in May 2021 alone, during a time of especially heavy Israeli state violence.
Another group reported that nearly half of the Palestinian-themed content that disappeared off of Instagram during this time period
occurred without the company providing the user a prior warning or notice. In an additional 20 percent of the cases, Instagram notified the user but did not provide a specific justification for restricting the content.
When users appealed the censorship, often their content or account would be restored, with a message that it never should have been deleted to begin with. But by the time this resolution came, the opportunity to inform and influence readers was past.
For example, in May 2021, during a time of escalating Israeli violence, Twitter restricted the account of Palestinian-American journalist Mariam Barghouti, who had been posting photos and videos of the violence in Jerusalem. It later restored Barghouti’s account and apologized for the suspension, saying it was done “by mistake.”
A long report on social media actions regarding Israel-Palestine in the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out: “Some of those who have been covering such issues for years don’t think these kinds of things are a mistake; rather, they believe social networks are deliberately censoring Palestinian content.”
Barghouti explained the significance of Twitter to the Palestinian rights movement:
It’s our only avenue for speaking with the world from under a military occupation that controls all our entry and exit points. We’re left to share through soundbites of 280 characters. If even that is taken away, we’re looking at the slaughter of Palestinians in silence.
Social media suppression is particularly critical since mainstream media tend not to cover Israel and Palestine with the kind of accuracy and context that would enable Americans to understand the issue.
In essence, social media have been preventing the victims of Israeli violence from sharing their experiences or building support for their plight.
Excuses
Although owned by two different companies, the three platforms, Twitter and Facebook/Instagram, have offered duplicate “explanations” for what has happened, including glitches that just happened to affect posts and hashtags about Israel, and “widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic.”
While these [glitches] have been fixed, they should never have happened in the first place. We’re so sorry to everyone who felt they couldn’t bring attention to important events, or who felt this was a deliberate suppression of their voice. This was never our intention – nor do we ever want to silence a particular community or point of view.
TRT World reported another case in which Twitter restricted information on Palestine:
Pro-Palestinian activist Hebh Jamal’s Twitter was targeted with complaints over a post detailing an emotional conversation between her husband and his little cousin in Gaza. The young cousin admitted to wanting to brush his hair before sleeping for fear that the Israeli fire may kill him in his sleep. He said he wanted to look good in case he died. Hebh’s post was flagged for deletion, and restricted by Twitter.
Since the German government has implemented legal measures to make social media companies accountable to users, Twitter later confessed to Hebh that the complaints against her post were baseless. Under German law, Twitter has to inform the user if their post or account is being investigated. This only applies because Hebh and her family reside in Germany. For most Palestinians hailing from Gaza City, there’s a different set of rules, and a radically different set of rights.
TRT reports: “Hebh now faces a video review for every post she makes. She’s also been reported on TikTok as well, with her account deleted before.”
Journalist Bayan Ishtaiwi explained: “For Palestinians sealed-off in open-air prisons like Gaza, social media is all they have. Whoever uses words like occupation or martyr, is penalized for three days at least, which happened to me, or face a ban on live videos for a month.”
Whistleblowing
A group of Instagram employees confirmed the human rights activists’ suspicions when they protested the platform’s blocking of pro-Palestinian content during Israel’s violence in May 2021 – even after the issue had already been reported.
Can we investigate the reasons why posts and stories pertaining to Palestine lately have had limited reach and engagement, especially when more people than ever from around the world are watching the situation unfold?
Other employees added comments, including,
I’d really like to understand what exactly is breaking down here and why. What is being done to fix it given that this is an issue that was brought up a week ago?
Soon after, nearly 200 Facebook employees signed on to an open letter demanding that Facebook address the allegations of censorship.
Israel calls the shots
Foreign Policy reports:
“Since 2015, the Israeli Justice Ministry has operated a Cyber Unit that has issued tens of thousands of content removal requests to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, mostly alleging violent incitement or support for terrorism.
Technically, these requests are voluntary. They are not legally binding and are therefore not tracked in the transparency reports that technology companies use to disclose formal government censorship orders.
Nonetheless, social media companies have complied with the Cyber Unit’s requests roughly 90 percent of the time.”
Israel’s infamous Cyber Unit patrols social media, searching for “incriminating” content, passing along thousands of requests to social media administrators to remove what the unit finds unacceptable.
In 2016, the Israeli government and Facebook agreed to collaborate on ways to combat what Israel considers “incitement to violence” on the platform.
Then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked noted that at the time, Facebook’s compliance with Israel’s requests to take down content was up to 95%, but expressed hopes that the plan would result in even more censorship.
Neither Israel nor the platforms have been transparent about this practice.
In 2020, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs issued a report on allegedly “phony” online profiles that put out content critical of Israel.
Within a day, Twitter “suspended dozens of Palestinian and pro-Palestine accounts,” claiming the information they circulated violated its terms of service.
It may be noteworthy that both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk have had private audiences with top Israeli leaders.
Israelis abound in Silicon Valley, with about 60,000-100,000 in the Bay Area, and Israel partisans are also ever-present. A recent photo of Musk shared on Twitter was of him with his friend Ari Emanuel, son of a former Irgun terrorist and brother of Rahm Emanuel, who once volunteered with the IDF.
One Palestinian activist summed up the situation:
Rather than being some kind of enabler of democracy, social media has come to be the epitome of political silencing and repression as tech giants have collaborated with various oppressive governments, including the Israeli government, to censor and delete content that exposes their true oppressive character.
Facebook, Instagram report card
Facebook’s Oversight Board recommended that Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) undergo an evaluation of its treatment of Palestinian content in May 2021. Meta hired the consulting company Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) for the work.
Jewish Currents summarized BSR’s final report in an article entitled “Human Rights Due Diligence of Meta’s Impacts in Israel and Palestine”:
The report underscored heavy-handed content moderation by Facebook and Instagram, which Palestinian social media users claim censors critics of Israeli repression.
These restrictions have undermined Palestinian users’ effort to use social media to document Israeli human rights abuses.
BSR contrasted Meta’s over-enforcement of Palestinian social media posts with its under-enforcement of Hebrew-language posts, which the report attributes to Meta installing an algorithmic “hostile speech classifier” for Arabic, but not for Hebrew.
The report concludes that Arabic language content is over-regulated because Hamas, the ruling, elected party in Gaza, is on Facebook’s blacklist, so it was standard to remove posts that appeared to “praise, support, or represent” that group or others on the list.
Other reasons for the interference lie in the fact that the Palestinian content was not reviewed by Palestinian dialect speakers of Arabic, nor was the algorithm developed with the proper “linguistic and cultural competence.”
Internet policy experts summed up the situation at Facebook and the other platforms:
Social media companies have] shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.
“Unintentional”? Really?
BSR’s report speculated that the impact of Facebook’s actions – Palestinian users’ loss of rights to expression – was unintentional. Rights groups disagreed.
Dozens of groups signed a public statement in response to BSR’s report, insisting that they had been
calling Meta’s attention to the disproportionately negative impact of its content moderation on Palestinians for years, [so] even if the bias started out as unintentional, after knowing about the issues for years and not taking appropriate action, the unintentional became intentional.
Looking ahead
The BSR report ends with 21 recommendations to Meta, some of which Meta has committed to, either fully or in part.
Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for a digital rights group, had mixed feelings:
The report validates the lived experiences of Palestinians… They cannot tell us anymore that this is a system glitch. Now they know the root causes…
But regarding Israel’s interference in content restriction, he added,
We’ve wanted more clarity on this because Meta refuses to provide answers. Users deserve transparency on whether their piece of content has been removed as a result of the Israeli government’s request.
Bottom line
Social media have for years – and for various reasons – repressed content about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
In some particularly egregious situations, like Israel’s aggression in May 2021, the companies have offered excuses and apologies. But impartial analysis has proven these excuses false and the apologies hollow.
Not only are social media platforms inherently skewed to over-regulate Palestinian voices, but they are influenced by a powerful foreign government (and no doubt, its US lobby) to an extent we can only imagine.
And Palestinians continue dying.
A report in Foreign Policy by Emerson T. Brooking and Eliza Campbell described the situation with rare eloquence:
The 4.8 million residents of the occupied Palestinian territories live in two simultaneous and vastly different realities. In the physical world, Palestinians are captives, crammed into Gaza or West Bank enclaves and blockaded by Israeli military checkpoints…
But on the internet, the checkpoints disappear. Palestinians can converse with family from whom they are separated by barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. They can share their stories with observers and sympathizers around the world.
In doing so, Palestinians can call themselves citizens of a sovereign State of Palestine: one recognized by 138 countries and admitted in 2012 as a non-member observer state to the United Nations. This second, digital Palestine represents a fulfilment of the internet’s optimistic and largely forgotten promise to give voice to the voiceless and illuminate the darkest corners of the world.
It is also under threat of being extinguished. This is due to a confluence of three forces. The first is the expansive police and surveillance apparatus of the State of Israel, which is used to track, intimidate, and imprison Palestinians in the occupied territories for their online speech.
The second is a network of formal and informal institutions used by the Israeli government to target pro-Palestinian expression across the globe.
The third—and most surprising—force is that of American social media companies, which have shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.
Together, these forces demonstrate how it is possible for an ostensibly democratic government to suppress a popular online movement with the acquiescence of ostensibly liberal Silicon Valley executives. The playbook being pioneered against Palestinians will not stay in the Middle East forever. In time, it may be deployed against activist communities around the world.
Israeli sniper kills 16-year old Palestinian girl in West Bank raid
Jana Zakarneh, 16, was killed by Israeli forces in Jenin. (Photo: via WAFA)
MEMO | December 12, 2022
The Palestinian Health Ministry said a girl child was killed by an Israeli sniper last night in Jenin City, north of the Occupied West Bank, The Palestinian Information Centre reports.
According to local sources, 16-year-old Jana Zakarnah was found dead on the roof of her home after an Israeli sniper targeted her and fatally injured her in the head.
The incident happened after Israeli soldiers from a special unit stormed the eastern neighbourhood of Jenin City on Sunday night.
Fierce armed clashes reportedly took place in the area between the soldiers and resistance fighters.
The Health Ministry said that one citizen was moderately injured during the protests, while the Red Crescent said that its ambulance crews provided assistance to three citizens after they suffered bullet injuries in their lower extremities.
In a statement, Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas affirmed that a group of its fighters and others exchanged fire with undercover soldiers from the Duvdevan unit in Al-Bayader area in Jenin City and targeted them with explosive devices.
Meanwhile, local sources reported that the Israeli Occupation Forces kidnapped three young men, including two brothers, from Jenin City during the same raid.
The Hebrew media claimed that one of the detainees was intending to carry out operations against Israeli targets.
Xi Jinping ends landmark KSA visit by calling on Arab states to embrace multipolar world
The Cradle | December 10, 2022
Chinese President Xi Jinping left Saudi Arabia early on 10 December following a three-day visit that saw him attend three different summits with leaders from across West Asia and Africa.
On Friday night, Xi headed the first China-Arab States Summit, which saw a large majority of Arab League heads of state attend in a bid to strengthen bilateral ties with the Asian giant.
“As strategic partners, China and Arab states should … foster a closer China-Arab community with a shared future, so as to deliver greater benefits to their peoples and advance the cause of human progress,” the Chinese president said during his keynote speech.
Xi also called on Arab states to remain “independent and defend their common interests,” adding that China “supports Arab states in independently exploring development paths suited to their national conditions and holding their future firmly in their own hands.”
“China is ready to deepen strategic mutual trust with Arab states, and firmly support each other in safeguarding sovereignty, territorial integrity and national dignity,” Xi said, noting that the two sides should “jointly uphold the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, practice true multilateralism, and defend the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries.”
The Chinese leader also urged leaders from West Asia and Africa to embrace “synergy between their development strategies, and promote high-quality [cooperation in the Belt and Road Initiative].”
Launched nine years ago, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is considered the crown jewel of Xi’s long-term foreign policy agenda. The stated aim of the mega-infrastructure project is to bring capital and infrastructure to Global South countries while dramatically strengthening connectivity for commerce, finance, and culture.
The BRI also aims to secure markets for Chinese companies, stable supplies of inputs for Chinese factories, and productive outlets for China’s large foreign exchange holdings. Close to 150 nations across the globe have signed on to participate in the BRI.
For the first half of 2022, Saudi Arabia was the biggest recipient of China’s finance and investment spending in the BRI.
Ahead of the China-Arab Summit on Friday, the Chinese president met with leaders from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). During this summit, he urged the oil and gas giants to conduct energy sales in the Chinese yuan, potentially divorcing the US dollar from bilateral transactions.
He also vowed to import more oil and natural gas from Gulf Arab states while not interfering in their affairs, a departure from Washington’s long-standing policy of interference and domination.
Xi later took the opportunity to express China’s support for the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and voiced frustration over the “historical injustice” suffered by Palestinians.
“It is not possible to continue the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinians,” the Chinese president said on Friday.
He went on to call on the international community to grant Palestine “full membership in the United Nations” and said Beijing “supports the two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
Beijing’s emergence as a major superpower since the turn of the century has proven to be critically important for Arab states, prompting them to diversify their strategic objectives and balance themselves away from a decades-long Western dependency.
Washington rejects ICC probe into Israel’s murder of Al Jazeera reporter
The Cradle | December 7, 2022
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price on 6 December said the White House opposes Al Jazeera taking the murder of Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Aqla to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“We oppose it,” Price told reporters when pressed about the ICC probe. He went on to add Washington maintains its “longstanding objections to the ICC’s investigation into the Palestinian situation and the position the ICC should focus on its core mission, and that core mission of serving as a court of last resort and punishing and deterring atrocity crimes.”
Abu Aqla was shot dead by Israeli troops on 11 May as she was covering a raid in the Jenin refugee camp. At the time of her death, she was wearing full body armor with clearly visible press markings.
Washington has long opposed Palestinian-led efforts to take up Israeli human rights abuses with international bodies, including the UN and the ICC.
The ICC has reportedly reviewed the evidence presented by the Qatari news network, and will make a decision on whether or not it will launch an investigation. The uncertainty comes naturally, as Israel has attempted to shut down any form of an objective inquiry into the incident since it took place.
Independent investigations by the UN, human rights groups, and western media outlets have all concluded Abu Aqla was deliberately shot by an Israeli soldier in an area where no Palestinian gunmen were present.
Last month, the White House disavowed an FBI investigation into the killing in order to appease Israel.
Israel, which rights groups accuse of imposing a system of apartheid on Palestinians, receives $3.8 billion in US security assistance annually.
Price’s reaction to the ICC probe echoes that of Israeli officials, who on Tuesday called for the expulsion of Al Jazeera journalists from the occupied territories.
“Al Jazeera is an anti-Semitic and false propaganda network working against Israel in the world,” Jewish supremacist official Itamar Ben Gvir said in a tweet, before calling for the journalists’ expulsion.
Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman also called for withdrawing the license of Al Jazeera reporters, saying: “I expect the [Israeli] government press office to revoke the journalists’ credentials of Al Jazeera reporters who are in Israel.”
Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, for his part, has said he will not allow any interrogation of army soldiers in connection with Abu Aqla’s death.
In a statement on Tuesday, Al Jazeera said its lawsuit with the ICC includes “new witness evidence and video footage that clearly show that Abu Aqla and her colleagues were directly fired at by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).”
“The evidence presented to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) confirms, without any doubt, that there was no firing in the area where Shireen was, other than the IOF shooting directly at her,” the statement added.
“My family still doesn’t know who fired that deadly bullet and who was in the chain of command that killed my aunt,” Abu Aqla’s niece, Lina Abu Aqla, said at a press conference in The Hague.
“The evidence is overwhelmingly clear, we expect the ICC to take action,” she said, adding that they had asked for a meeting with prosecutor Karim Khan.
Israel is not an ICC member and disputes the court’s jurisdiction. The US is also not a member.
European firms ‘invest’ $171 billion in Israel’s illegal settlements: Report
The Cradle | December 6, 2022
According to a report published on 5 December by the advocacy group Don’t Buy into Occupation, investments by European firms in Israel’s illegal settlements increased by more than $30 billion since last year.
Almost 24 Palestinian, regional, and European organizations have joined forces to form the group, which aims to investigate and disclose any connections between European financial institutions and companies involved in illegal Israeli settlements.
In their second report, “Exposing the financial flows into illegal Israeli settlements,” the group discovered that between January 2019 and August 2022, 725 European financial institutions, including banks, asset managers, insurance companies, and pension funds, had financial ties to 50 firms that are directly associated with Israeli settlements. International law prohibits all squatters and settlements in Israel.
Loans and underwriting totaled $171.4 billion over the three years covered by the report. The figure represents a $30 billion increase over last year when European firms invested $141 billion in illegal settlements. European investors are also said to hold $115.5 billion in shares and bonds of companies benefiting from the settlements as of August 2022.
According to the advocacy organization, businesses directly or indirectly associated with Israeli settlements run a significant danger of being complicit in serious violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as well as contributing to other human rights violations.
Meanwhile, on 8 November, the ‘Elad’ settlement association in occupied East Jerusalem received roughly $7.9 million to support illegal settlements in the Palestinian town of Silwan.
The Elad group pursues the declared objective of “Judaizing” East Jerusalem, including Silwan, as a part of its mission to expand a Jewish presence across the occupied city and to uproot the indigenous Palestinian population under the guise of archeological and touristic endeavors.
Israel has illegally expanded its territory since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and built settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem for over 700,000 settlers, in clear violation of international law.
Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem is not recognized by most countries and is considered one of the biggest obstacles to peace, as Palestinians consider East Jerusalem the capital of their future state.
Ukraine war doubled Jewish migration to Israel
MEMO | December 2, 2022
An official Israeli report has revealed that the number of Jewish immigrants to Israel has doubled over 2022 following the Russian-Ukrainian war.
“The number of immigrants to Israel in 2022 has reached some 70,000, which is double the number of immigrants the country hosted last year,” the report read, according to Safa.
The study pointed out that the “majority of the Jewish immigrants were fleeing the escalating war in Ukraine,” adding that the immigrants were also “exploiting the Israeli government’s efforts to bring home all Jews in warring countries.”
“Fifty-four per cent of the immigrants this year arrived from Russia, 21 per cent arrived from Ukraine, five per cent from the United States, and four others from France,” the report read.
It pointed out that 22,000 of the Jewish immigrants were “recruited by the Israeli army over the last decade, 15,000 of whom had no families.”
Over the last decade, the Israeli army received a total of 6,440 doctors and 22,400 engineers, most of whom came from the former Soviet Union, according to official data.
Israel revokes Jerusalem Residency Rights Of Imprisoned Palestinian-French Lawyer
IMEMC | DECEMBER 1, 2022
On Wednesday, the Israeli Prison Authority informed imprisoned Palestinian-French lawyer, held under Administrative Detention without charges or trial, that it revoked his Jerusalem ID card and stripped him of all residency rights in occupied Jerusalem, and will be deporting him to France upon his release.
The Israeli occupation imposed a three-month Administrative Detention order against the imprisoned lawyer, Salah Hammouri, 37, and renewed the order in June 2022, then renewed it again in September 2022.
Hammouri, a lawyer and a field researcher with the Ad-Dameer Prisoner Support And Human Rights Association, spent more than eight years in Israeli prisons, starting when he was abducted in 2001 and was sentenced to five months in prison.
In 2004 he spent four months under arbitrary Administrative Detention orders without charges, then was abducted again in the year 2005 and was imprisoned for seven years, and then in the year 2017, he was abducted yet another time and spent 13 months under Administrative Detention orders, and upon his release, he received an order barring him from entering the rest of the West Bank for two years.
On June 6, 2022, Salah received another three-month Administrative Detention order just hours before his scheduled release after being imprisoned for three months under a similar order.
The decision to revoke his residency was made in October of last year, 2021, after accusing him of “breeching loyalty to the state” for his human rights and legal work in defending Palestinian political prisoners.
Salah was born to a Palestinian father from Jerusalem where he grew up and lived, and his mother is a French national.
Several years earlier, Israel deported his French wife to her country after detaining her at the airport in Tel Aviv for three days when she returned to Jerusalem. Salah and his wife have two children.
Palestinians born in occupied Jerusalem are only granted “residency” status and not citizenship of Israel despite Israel’s constant claims of “unified Jerusalem as its capital.” Children born to Jewish parent/s in any part of the world are entitled to become citizens of Israel.
Israel calls on world leaders to oppose ICJ opinion on occupation
The Cradle | November 29, 2022
On 29 November, acting Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid sent a letter to more than 50 world leaders, demanding them to oppose a Palestinian bid at the United Nations regarding an advisory position of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
“This resolution is the result of a concerted effort to single out Israel, discredit our legitimate security concerns, and delegitimize our very existence,” Lapid said in the letter.
Among the recipients were the heads of government of the United Kingdom, France, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Latvia, Georgia, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Vietnam.
With a majority of 98 votes in favor and 17 against, a committee of the UN General Assembly approved a resolution on 11 November requesting the ICJ to “urgently” issue a stance on the effects of Israel’s illegal occupation and colonization of Palestinian territories, The New Arab reported.
In the coming weeks, the resolution has to be voted on for a second time by the plenary of the General Assembly.
The acting Prime Minister stated that this resolution resulted from a “biased campaign” by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva and its Commission of Inquiry, which have repeatedly denounced human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
According to Lapid, the “status of the disputed territory must be subject to direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”
However, Israel has illegally expanded its territory since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and built settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem for over 700,000 settlers, clearly violating international law.
On 13 November, Israeli authorities announced their plans to construct 9,000 new illegal settlement units over the ruins of Palestine’s Jerusalem International Airport.
The settlement plan was initially submitted for discussion last year by the Israeli-run Jerusalem Municipality but then halted due to pressure from EU member states and several rights groups; however, the plan has been revived and is under review by the municipality.
On 8 November, the ‘Elad’ settlement association in occupied East Jerusalem received roughly $7.9 million to support illegal settlements in the Palestinian town of Silwan.
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From the Archives
Sanctions, War and the Policy of Dual Containment
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH | March 17, 2008
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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