South African students are giving Israel a lesson in honesty, integrity and morality
By Yvonne Ridley | MEMO | October 31, 2017
Some observers get very touchy at the mention of a pro-Israel lobby sweeping the corridors of power to influence opinion formers, politicians and media in order for them to look favourably upon the Zionist state. Quite why they get so defensive is beyond me when it is quite clear that millions upon millions of Euros, dollars, pounds and shekels are thrown openly in an organised campaign to convince the world that Israel really is a benign little country; indeed, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Such propaganda — “hasbara” — ignores the fact that Israel has launched three vicious wars in the past decade against its Palestinian neighbours in the besieged Gaza Strip; continues to operate a racist regime which discriminates against its own Arab citizens — one-fifth of the population; and makes the lives of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as miserable and difficult as possible.
However, as I discovered during a recent visit to South Africa, it’s not just the elected great and the good who are being targeted for free junkets to Israel. It seems that the pro-Israel lobby groups are aiming to seduce the rising stars of the future in a get-them-young strategy. Students in Johannesburg told me how they have been approached and offered free trips to Israel, and the problem has become so great that those belonging to the SA Students Congress (SASCO) and the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA) have now signed pledges publicly rejecting the propaganda junkets.
In particular, those who are running in the current Witwatersrand University SRC student government elections have signed the pledges. It is no coincidence that they were targeted because during the last student elections the SASCO/PYA won all of the seats in Wits’ SRC student government.
“They are obviously trying to work out who will be the stars of the future in politics and media, and they are being courted by these lobbyists with offers of free trips to Israel,” one pro-Palestine student told me. “When we discovered what was happening someone from last year’s elections felt obliged to resign from his position.” The resignation letter was accepted earlier this month.
This particular method of targeting students resonates particularly with the young people who know their country’s history as the very same method used during the 1980s in an attempt to smash the comprehensive international boycott of the Apartheid regime. The South African government and its lobby groups brought gullible students from campuses in Europe and America to South Africa on so-called “fact-finding”, “see for yourself” visits.
The anti-apartheid movement at the time saw these freebies for what they were; brainwashing propaganda trips. For Israel to launch similar enterprises has angered those old enough to remember their use by the White-only, Apartheid government in South Africa, as well as the students. The Zionist state’s bribes are seen as a bid to break Israel’s increasing isolation in the international community.
One seasoned campaigner believes that the pro-Israel lobby is becoming more determined to smash the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) programme. “The focus on Wits University is aimed at circumventing the national policies of student organisations that have endorsed the BDS boycott of Israel by attempting to take student leaders on these apartheid-era propaganda junket trips,” said veteran campaigner Naazim Adam.
Clearly, though, the student bribes are not working. While it is only recently that bribes have been seen as necessary but unpleasant in business circles, South Africa’s students are now giving the Israelis a lesson in honesty, integrity and morality, as well as displaying solidarity with the Palestinians. Such a lesson, as Israel is finding out from these dynamic young people, is something that shekels can’t buy.
Israel MK: Palestinians’ ‘liability’ is that ‘they weren’t born Jews’
MEMO | October 30, 2017
An Israeli parliamentarian has expressed his support for formal apartheid, backing the annexation of the entire West Bank but without its Palestinian inhabitants being granted the right to vote.
MK Miki Zohar, who is chair of the Knesset’s Special Committee for Distributive Justice and Social Equality, expressed his views in an interview with Haaretz newspaper.
“When we say to the Palestinians, ‘We are giving you a state, let’s make peace’ – it’s deceiving them,” Zohar told the paper.
“No one is going to give them a state, not the left either. I am saying: Let’s cut this problem off before it begins and stop with the lies. We’ll tell them: ‘Guys, no state, live here with us, prosper, earn a living, educate your children’.”
Asked whether he meant that Palestinians in an annexed West Bank would not vote in the Knesset elections, Zohar replied in the affirmative.
“We must always maintain control over the mechanisms of the state, as the Jewish people that received this country by right and not by an act of charity.”
Over the years it is very possible the Arabs could become the majority here, and I cannot take this risk.
According to Zohar, such views are “not extreme” but “realistic”.
He continued: “In my opinion, he [the Palestinian] doesn’t have the right to national identity, because he does not own the land of this country.”
“I want him as a resident by virtue of my own sense of fairness – because he was born here and lives here, I will not tell him to leave. I’m sorry to say this, but they have one conspicuous liability: They weren’t born Jews.”
With respect to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Zohar said: “They will have to choose if they are loyal to the state”, based on three conditions: “national service; recognition of the Israeli flag, which would fly above every public institution; and recognizing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
“And this would not be the decision of an individual, but of a public authority. If they can’t meet these criteria, they would no longer be able to vote for the Knesset.”
Israelis attack Britons on Balfour apology mission
Press TV – October 30, 2017
Israeli forces and settlers have attacked British activists who walked from the UK to Jerusalem al-Quds in solidarity with the Palestinian nation on the centennial anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
The 60 British activists arrived in Palestine after they walked for more than 135 days from the UK to apologize for the 1917 declaration by Arthur James Balfour that paved the way for the creation of Israel.
The delegation was welcomed by Palestinian officials and activists on Sunday, but Israeli forces and settlers attacked the group in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron), banning them from continuing the tour.
The deputy governor of al-Khalil, Nidal al-Ja’bari, was attacked during the confrontation while Mahdi Mor’eb, the al-Khalil governor’s adviser, was detained for several hours “at the request of the settlers,” the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported.
The British activists’ condemnation of Balfour Declaration comes while the UK government is refusing to apologize for its role in establishing the Israeli regime.
Britain’s insistence on celebrating the document has drawn criticism from Palestine, which has repeatedly called on the UK government to apologize for its role in the establishment of Israel.
Nabil Shaath, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said during an interview with Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen network on Thursday that Palestine was planning to take legal action against the UK for triggering a chain reaction that led to the displacement of millions of Palestinians.
Abbas had earlier threatened the UK with a lawsuit in case it refused to call off celebratory events linked with the Balfour declaration.
There is consensus that Israel has been in violation of a key caveat of the declaration, which states that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.”
Will Netanyahu unmask Israel?
By Jonathon Cook | Middle East Eye | October 27, 2017
NAZARETH – As Israeli legislators returned to parliament this week, ending the long summer recess, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced a packed agenda of reforms designed to push Israel further to the right.
Legislative proposals include weakening the supreme court’s powers of judicial review, cracking down on left-wing civil-society organisations, expanding Jerusalem’s boundaries to include more Jewish settlements and allowing the government to forcibly deport mainly African asylum seekers.
But none is likely to prove as controversial – or gain as much attention – as a measure concerning Israel’s status as a Jewish state.
This long-gestating bill is intended to join 11 existing Basic Laws – Israel’s equivalent of a constitution. Netanyahu appears to be basing his wider legislative assault on the success of the proposed Basic Law: Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Its purpose is to give a constitutional-like standing to Israel’s definition as a state that belongs not to its citizens – as is the case in a liberal democracy – but to all Jews around the world, including those with no connection to Israel.
Additionally, the bill is expected to downgrade the status of Arabic, the mother tongue of a fifth of Israel’s population. It will also require the Israeli courts to give due weight in their rulings to Jewish religious law and Jewish heritage.
Who opposes the law
Basic Laws are much harder to reverse than ordinary legislation. Various versions of the Jewish nation-state bill have been under consideration since a first draft was introduced in 2011 by Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police.
But after eight years as prime minister, Netanyahu appears impatient for progress. He insisted in May that the legislation must pass as soon as possible. A special committee has been hastily drafting a final version during the past few weeks.
Opposition to the bill comes from three quarters in parliament, each with very different concerns.
The first is the Joint List, a coalition of parties representing Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens – one in five of the population – who are the chief targets of the proposed legislation. However, their voice carries no weight in either the parliament or the government.
The second group are the small hardline religious parties in the coalition government, who have always had an ambivalent, if not hostile, attitude toward Israel as a state. They believe that Jews can be sovereign only when the Messiah reveals himself. In practice, however, if the legislation is carefully phrased, then these parties may not put up much resistance.
Most troublesome for Netanyahu is likely to be the antipathy from the centre-left parties on the opposition benches, especially the former Labour party, now rebranded as Zionist Union. Most of its legislators reject the proposed Basic Law, but not necessarily because they disagree with its provisions.
The age-old deception revealed?
The Zionist Union’s attitudes towards the Jewish nation-state bill are complex. They are rooted in the party’s role in founding Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
Mohammed Zeidan is director of the Nazareth-based Human Rights Association, an advocacy group for Israel’s Palestinian citizens. He said that Labour’s leaders, especially the nation’s father, David Ben Gurion, carefully crafted Israel’s image in a way that would hoodwink most outside observers into believing it was a Western-style liberal democracy.
“The goal of the state’s founders was to conceal the structural discrimination,” he told Middle East Eye. “The mistake was to believe that a Jewish state can be a democratic one, and that it can uphold universal values and rights.”
In the centre-left’s view, Netanyahu’s Basic Law risks pulling the veil off that immensely successful deception.
In fact, tellingly, the chief objections from the centre-left to Netanyahu’s Basic Law are not that the measure is immoral or undemocratic in denying Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinians equal status with Jewish citizens but rather that it is “unnecessary,” “superfluous” or “gratuitous”.
In 2014, when a draft of the legislation was brought before the parliament, the then-leader of Zionist Union, Isaac Herzog, observed: “Only a prime minister lacking in self-confidence, without a vision and a plan, needs laws that deal with the obvious, that will not improve any Israeli citizens’ lives.”
Similarly, Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper has called the legislation “completely redundant”. Abraham Foxman, as head of the New York-based Israel lobby group the Anti-Defamation League, labelled it “well-meaning but unnecessary”.
In other words, the ideological successors to Israel’s founding generation reject the Basic Law not because it will fundamentally alter Israel’s character but because it risks dragging its ugliest secret – well-concealed for nearly seven decades – into the bright light of day.
They fear that the Israeli far right will show Israel’s hand by clearly codifying its status as a state belonging to, and privileging, Jews around the world rather than to its own citizenry, which includes a large proportion of Palestinians.
One law for Jews, another for Arabs
It is important to understand how Israel’s founders deliberately obfuscated the apartheid-like legal and administrative structures they created to appreciate why so much is at stake for today’s centre-left.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence, published at the state’s creation in May 1948, was effectively a sophisticated exercise in public relations. It famously promised to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”.
Thousands of Arabs were driven from their land during the Nakba of 1948 (creative commons)
But, Zeidan said, for many decades Israel has avoided enshrining the principle of equality in any of the Basic Laws. Instead, it has embedded inequality at a foundational level – in Israel’s citizenship legislation.
What is most noticeable is that Israel has two citizenship laws. These confer different rights, based on whether a citizen is Jewish or not. In the United States during the mid-1950s, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision amid the civil rights struggle that “separate is inherently unequal” – and so it has proved in Israel too.
Israel’s Law of Return of 1950 opened the door to all Jews around the world, allowing mass Jewish immigration. Any Jew who landed in Israel could instantly receive citizenship, as many hundreds of thousands of Jews did during the next seven decades.
But Israel wanted exactly the opposite outcome for Palestinians. The result? It created a separate law, the Citizenship Law of 1952, for non-Jews. Its primary purpose was to strip the right to return home from the 750,000 Palestinians expelled by Israel four years earlier, during the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe”.
Longer term, however, the Citizenship Law was designed to guarantee a large perpetual Jewish majority by blocking access to citizenship for non-Jews.
Today, there is only one path by which a non-Jew can gain citizenship in Israel – by marriage to an Israeli citizen. This exception is allowed because only a few dozen non-Jews qualify each year, thereby posing no threat to Israel’s Jewishness.
Under legal challenge, Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law in 2003 to ensure that the vast majority of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and Arabs from many neighbouring states, cannot qualify for Israeli residency or citizenship under the marriage provision.
National rights trump citizenship
The Law of Return and the Citizenship Law are two of nearly 70 Israeli laws – the number is growing – that explicitly discriminate based on whether a citizen is Jewish or Palestinian. A legal group, Adalah, representing Israel’s Palestinian citizens, has compiled a database of such measures.
But Netanyahu’s Basic Law threatens to expose the deeper significance of this bifurcated citizenship structure.
Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinian citizens, observed Zeidan, are discriminated against in a way that goes beyond that practiced against minorities in democratic states: that is, by the arbitrary, informal or unregulated decisions of officials and state bodies. In such democracies, officials are usually breaking the law when they discriminate against minority groups.
But in Israel, Zeidan pointed out, “officials are often breaking the law if they do not discriminate. It is their job to discriminate.”
This state-sanctioned racism is achieved by establishing “nationalities” separate from citizenship. The primary nationalities in Israel are “Jew” and “Arab”. The state has refused to recognise an “Israeli nationality,” a position supported by the Israeli supreme court, precisely to sanction a hierarchy of rights.
Individual rights are enjoyed by all citizens by virtue of their citizenship, whether they are Jews or Palestinians. In this regard, Israel looks like a liberal democracy. But Israel also recognises “national rights,” and reserves them almost exclusively for the Jewish population.
National rights are treated as superior to individual citizenship rights. So if there is a conflict between the two, the Jewish national right will invariably be given priority by officials and the courts.
How this hierarchy of rights works in practice is neatly illustrated by Israel’s citizenship structure. The Law of Return establishes a national right for all Jews to gain instant citizenship – as well as the many other rights that derive from citizenship.
The Citizenship Law, on the other hand, creates only an individual citizenship right for non-Jews. Israel’s Palestinian minority can pass their citizenship “downwards” to offspring but cannot extend it “outwards,” as a Jew can, to members of their extended family – in this case, the millions of Palestinians who were made refugees by Israel in 1948 and their descendants.
This privileging of Jewish national rights is equally clear in the way Israel treats its most precious material resources: land and water.
The commercial exploitation of these key resources is treated effectively as a national right, reserved for Jews only. In practice, noted Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, access to these resources is restricted to Jews through hundreds of rural communities across Israel, including the best-known – the kibbutz.
These rural communities are the places where Israel has made available vast swaths of land and offers subsidised water. As a result, almost all commercial agriculture and much industry is located in these communities.
But these resources can be exploited only by the Jewish population because each community is governed by an Admissions Committee, which blocks entry to Israel’s Palestinian citizens on the grounds that they are “socially unsuitable“.
“The committees govern entry to 550 communities in Israel, ensuring that the resources they control are available only to their Jewish populations,” Zaher told MEE. “These committees are one link in a chain of racist policies, segregation and exclusion by the state towards Palestinian citizens.”
The primary purpose of these rural communities is to enforce Israel’s “nationalisation” of 93 percent of its territory. This land is “nationalised” not for Israeli citizens – as no Israeli nationality is recognised – but for a global Jewish nation.
Meanwhile, the fifth of the population who are Palestinian are confined to less than three percent of Israeli territory, after most of their lands were confiscated by the state and are now held in trust for Jews around the world.
No new Palestinian community has been built since Israel’s creation 70 years ago, while dozens of Palestinian villages have been “unrecognised” by a 1965 Planning and Building Law. The 120,000 inhabitants of these villages, criminalised by this planning law, cannot build a home legally and are denied public services.
The real danger of Basic Law
Observers say that Netanyahu’s Basic Law risks exploding a seven-decade-old myth about Israel: that it is a liberal democracy where Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians alike enjoy equal rights.
The combination of the Law of Return, which entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship, and Israel’s land laws, which reserve ultimate ownership to Jews as a global nation, has emptied citizenship of its accepted meaning.
Instead, according to Israel’s existing legal structure, the state belongs to Jews collectively around the world rather than to the country’s citizenry. The Jewish state is “owned” by world Jewry, even if many individual Jews have failed to actualise their citizenship by coming to live in Israel.
As Israeli scholars have noted, Israel should be classified not as a liberal democracy but as a fundamentally non-democratic state called an ethnocracy.
Ariel Sharon, a famous general and later a prime minister, once described world Jewry as the “landlords” of Israel. That leaves Palestinian citizens, one in five of the population, as little more than resident aliens or temporary guest workers, on licence so long as they do not threaten the state’s Jewishness.
Israel’s modern centre-left, Ben Gurion’s heirs, rightly fear that Netanyahu and the far-right are about to air Israel’s very dirtiest secret in public. Their Basic Law will reduce a complex and opaque system of laws and practices to one simple and easily intelligible Basic Law that may evoke comparisons with apartheid-era South Africa.
Or as Zaher observed, if Netanyahu’s Basic Law is passed, it will “send a clear and dangerous political message to Palestinian citizens of Israel that you are not wanted, that you are not equal citizens, that, in fact, the state is not yours”.
Today’s far right cares much less about world opinion than Israel’s founders did. In their zealotry, they wish to eradicate the last hold-outs among the liberal Jewish establishment – such as the supreme court, civil society and parts of the media – so that they can advance their more aggressive brand of Zionism, launch a new wave of anti-democratic legislation and intensify the settlement project.
The real danger of Netanyahu’s Basic Law is not that it will change what Israel is, warned Zeidan. “What it does instead is provide a much more solid platform for what the far right in Israel intends to come next.”
UN expert mulls sanctions on Israel over Palestine occupation
RT | October 27, 2017
A UN human rights expert has accused Israel of violating a number of international laws and resolutions while suggesting legal action, including travel bans, against the Middle Eastern state. Tel Aviv countered by saying the UNHRC “has lost all touch with reality.”
“Israel’s role as occupier in the Palestinian Territory – the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza – has crossed a red line into illegality,” said Canadian law professor Michael Lynk, who is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Presenting his latest report to the UN General Assembly in New York, the expert described Israel’s actions in the region as “the longest-lasting military occupation in the modern world.” He then suggested the UN proceed with relevant international legal processes to force Israel change its policy, which so far “shows no signs of ending.”
In order to do so, the UN should seek to proclaim the occupation of Palestine illegal. As a first step, he suggests that the UN request the International Court of Justice to offer its assessment of the situation.
As things stand, Israel is regarded “as the lawful occupant of the Palestinian territories,” he pointed out, saying that this position does not correspond with reality.
Israel’s actions are “in defiance of 40 plus resolutions of the [UN] Security Council, 100 plus resolutions of the General Assembly, and rulings of the International Court of Justice,” Lynk underlined. He added that the current “focus” on the Israeli-Palestinian issue “is not anti-Israel, it’s an anti-occupation.”
Once Israel’s actions are officially pronounced illegal, the international community could put pressure on Tel Aviv through suspending certain forms of cooperation.
“Only when the Israelis need visas to travel abroad and don’t receive them, only when the EU trade with Israel is limited and only when cooperation in academic, military and economic fields with Israel comes to an end – only then will we see a real change,” Lynk explained at a news conference Thursday.
Israel’s envoy to the UN, Danny Danon, strongly condemned the special rapporteur’s claims, saying the UN body Lynk represents “has lost its legitimacy.”
“[UNHRC] focuses obsessively on attacking Israel instead of working on resolving the real human rights problems plaguing the world,” Danon said in a statement as quoted by the Israeli media. “The Council has lost all touch with reality,” he added.
However, according to the UN special rapporteur, calls to end the occupation of Palestine also emanate from within Israel. The UN official in particular cited the publisher of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Amos Schocken, who said international pressure “is precisely the force” that can help change things in the crisis.
The UN has recently included some of the biggest Israeli and international firms operating in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights on a blacklist of those violating “international law and UN resolutions.”
Some 130 Israeli companies as well as dozens of international firms and corporations have already received warnings from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein, on impending inclusion on the list, according to the Israeli outlet, Ynet News.
Earlier in October, Israel approved construction of over 30 new settlements in the UNESCO-protected city of Hebron, which is the largest Palestinian community in the West Bank.
Read more:
My Name is Rachel Corrie
23-year-old Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death by Israeli bulldozers in Gaza in 2003 [NawalAlhawsawi/Twitter]
By Nasim Ahmed | MEMO | October 26, 2017
Fourteen years have passed since 23-year-old Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by Israeli bulldozers in Gaza. The American activists, along with other members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), were taking part in nonviolent direct action to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition when the activist from Washington was killed.
Since her untimely death on the Rafah border crossing in 2003, Corrie’s free-spirited attitude to life has been the inspiration for international solidarity movements, non-violent resistance as well as plays and books celebrating her humanity and bravery.
My Name is Rachel Corrie, being showed at the Young Vic in London, is based on the emails and diary entries of the pro-Palestinian activist, which first premiered at London’s Royal Court in 2005. The play was originally put together by the late Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, now the editor of the Guardian.
Unsurprisingly the plays reproduction has come under strong criticism from Pro-Israeli groups. Fury at the revival of the play has stirred all kinds of controversy such that supporters of Israel in the UK are piling pressure on the Young Vic for staging the play. The Vic’s artistic director David Lan, who is Jewish, felt compelled to come to the theatre’s defence saying: “Gaza is a wound to the planet from which so many people are suffering.”
Pro-Israeli organisations have even threatened to leverage the £1.7 million pubic grant given to the Young Vic to ensure that it takes a more “balanced” position when it comes to Israel. Lan however has insisted that artistic expressions are useful to promote dialogue saying: “We welcome and hope to encourage as wide a discussion of this terrible situation as possible and anything that keeps Gaza at the front of our consciousness is to be valued.”
Aside from the nuisance of having Pro-Israeli activists shoving propaganda leaflets smearing the memory of Corrie towards you at the entrance of the theatre, the hour and half long immersion into Corrie’s mind is a memorable experience.
The play brilliantly darts through the diaries of Corrie from her early teens through to the period of her untimely death. Directed by an award winning director, Josh Roche, and wonderfully performed by British actor Erin Doherty, viewers are exposed to a visceral representation of the brutality of Israeli occupation seen through the eyes of an activist searching for her place in life.
Doherty’s astonishingly skilful performance of Corrie brings to life defining moments in the campaigner’s personal journey as she grapples with her own sense of privilege in contrasted with the indignity and poverty she saw in Gaza. If nothing else, the play powerfully captures the inner tensions of Corrie who felt a deep sense of responsibility over her own country’s unquestioned support for Israel.
The play is emotionally rousing given the very nature of diary entries, which are intended by its author to be an honest representation of ones thoughts and feelings unpolluted by polemics. Corrie appeared deeply troubled by the constant dehumanisation of Muslims and Palestinians; her conversations with her father, which are including in the the play, shed light on America’s own troubling assumptions about the world in the post 9/11 world.
The added punch to the play and the performance of Doherty is made all the more incredible by the setting; a background made up from the barest material, empty colourless plywood panels on the floor and the wall. The centrepiece is a tall wooden stand that appears to stand as a representation of Israel’s Separation Wall. It required an exceptional actor playing an exceptional person to make the experience so emotionally jarring.
Rachel Corrie’s legacy will continue to inspire thousands in campaigns against political oppression and this play, like its predecessor, has certainly reached the level of being “the irrepressible political voice” of the young campaigner from Olympia.
UN blacklists 130 Israeli firms & 60 multinationals for working in occupied Palestinian territories
RT | October 26, 2017
The United Nations (UN) has included some of the biggest Israeli and international firms operating in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in a blacklist for those violating “international law and UN resolutions.”
According to Israeli Ynet News which has gained access to part of the list, 130 Israeli companies and 60 international corporations received warning letters from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein about their impending inclusion on the blacklist.
The list, which reportedly will be published in late December includes Israel Aerospace Industries, telecom giants, international tech firms, banks, and even cafes.
Israel Aerospace Industries, Hewlett-Packard, the Israeli branches of Motorola and HP, the Dead Sea cosmetics firm Ahava, the Cellcom and Partner telecommunications companies are among those listed. Israel’s two largest banks, Hapoalim and Leumi, are also said to be on the list.
Israeli Channel 2 News has reported that among the American firms that received letters were Coca-Cola, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and Caterpillar.
The US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley condemned the blacklist as “the latest in this long line of shameful actions” taken by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). In June Haley warned the US could withdraw from the 47-member body.
“It may cause large investment firms or pension funds carrying stocks of various Israeli companies to divest in them because they, in turn, operate in the settlements,” an unnamed senior Israeli official told Ynet, adding “it may lead to a snowball effect that will greatly harm the Israeli economy eventually.”
The companies say the list’s creation was politically motivated and their inclusion may cause them financial harm and tarnish their brand. They are reportedly looking into filing lawsuits against the Commissioner and the UNHRC.
In September, the UN Commissioner warned over 150 companies that their activities in the “occupied Palestinian territories” may see them added to a blacklist of companies as “they operate in opposition to international law and in opposition of UN resolutions.”
The UN Human Rights Commission voted in March for the resolution being pushed by the Palestinian Authority and Arab nations, according to which the commission would formulate a database of Israeli and international firms directly or indirectly doing business in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights. The decision passed despite pressure and criticism from the US.
Anything Hamas requests will be given, says Iranian FM
Senior Hamas members prepare for PA delegations to arrive in Gaza on 2 October 2017 [Mohammed Asad/Middle East Monitor]
MEMO | October 25, 2017
The advisor to the Iranian foreign minister, Sheikh Hussein Al-Islam, has said the relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hamas is excellent and has become stronger and more solid.
“Anything Hamas requests from Iran will be given. This is our duty,” Sheikh Al-Islam said in an exclusive interview with Shehab News Agency.
“All of Iran’s doors are open to Hamas which represents the first line of defence for the Palestinian resistance,” he said.
Commenting on Israel’s demand that Hamas sever ties with Iran as a precondition to accept Palestinian reconciliation, Sheikh Al-Islam said that “Israel wants to destroy Hamas because it is a resistance movement, not because of its relationship with Iran”.
“Hamas’s relationship with Iran is not important, the important thing is that Hamas is a resistance movement, and therefore Israel wants to wipe it out,” he said, adding that the movement makes its own decisions and that Iran does not tell Hamas what to do or not do.
The Iranian official praised the Palestinian national reconciliation, stressing that the agreement serves the Palestinian people’s interests.
Recently a Hamas delegation led by deputy political chief Saleh Al-Arouri visited Iran and met with a number of Iranian officials.
Israel sets up iron gate at entrance of private Palestinian graveyard
Ma’an – October 25, 2017
BETHLEHEM – Israeli forces on Wednesday set up an iron gate at the entrance of private Palestinian graveyard in the southern occupied West Bank Bethlehem-area village of al-Walaja.
Locals told Ma’an that the plot of land where the gate was set up around belongs to Ahmad Barghouthi, and holds the graves of several of his family members.
Israeli forces reportedly told Barghouthi that the land is located inside the route for Israel’s separation wall, therefore cutting off his access to the graveyard.
An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an they were looking into reports.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces on Tuesday reportedly delivered a demolition notice to an under-construction two-story home in the village, according to official Palestinian Authority (PA)-owned Wafa news agency.
Residents of al-Walaja lost over three-quarters of their lands since the state of Israel was established in 1948, when most of the village’s residents became refugees.
During Israel’s military takeover of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, 50 percent of al-Walaja’s lands were annexed to the Jerusalem municipality.
Meanwhile, Israel’s separation wall encircles al-Walaja, the hometown of slain Palestinian activist Basel al-Araj, and swathes of land have been reappropriated by the Israeli government for the construction and expansion of the illegal Israeli settlements of Gilo, Har Gilo, and Givat Yael.
The Israeli government has also planned to confiscate hundreds of acres from al-Walaja for the establishment of a national park.
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From the Archives
Because no animal reservoir has been found for SARS-CoV-2, it cannot properly be termed a zoonosis.* Should we call it a labnosis? And what does that mean?
By Meryl Nass, MD | July 12, 2021
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
Why did they do it? … continue
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- How Hillel International uses antisemitism training and ‘campus climate’ concerns to attack Palestine solidarity
- Old Iraq war architects rise up against Trump’s Iran deal
- Unmasking Axios, its Israeli ties and agenda
- Israel Is Bleeding Support in the U.S. – and Pouring Tens of Millions Into Trying to Change That
- Israeli army included on UN blacklist for 3rd year over ‘grave violations’ against children
- Trita Parsi on the Iran deal, Israel, and how Iran has been a ‘cash cow’ for AIPAC
- No Tricks Zone
- German Wind Turbines Face Regulatory Shutdown Due To Excessive Noise
- New Study: Chile’s Relative Sea Level Was 3.2 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
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