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Israel forces open fire on Palestinian farmers in southern Gaza

Ma’an – May 8, 2016

GAZA – Israeli forces on Sunday morning opened fire on Palestinians farmers in the southern Gaza Strip, local sources said.

Locals told Ma’an Israeli forces deployed east of Khan Yunis opened fire on farmers, preventing them from reaching their lands. No injuries were reported.

An Israeli army spokesperson said they could not confirm the incident.

The incident comes after Israeli forces targeted the southern region of the small Palestinian territory with airstrikes for four consecutive days beginning Wednesday evening. Several were injured and a Palestinian woman was killed by Israeli shelling.

Israel said airstrikes were launched in response to Palestinian resistance groups targeting its troops with mortar rounds in an attempt to thwart Israeli military excavation activities in search of Hamas-made tunnels. However, Israel’s regular incursions inside Gaza’s border areas were perceived by many as the instigator of the hostilities.

The exchange was seen as an unusual escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip since a 2014 ceasefire was brokered after Israel’s devastating 50-day assault on the besieged coastal enclave that left some 2,200 dead and 11,000 injured.

Hamas, Gaza’s de facto ruler, had widely observed the 2014 ceasefire; Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yalon in March said Hamas “hasn’t fired a bullet” since the war, and following Thursday’s hostilities, Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted a senior Israeli army officer as saying that Hamas had even been instrumental in preventing terrorist attacks and rocket fire directed at Israel.

However in the almost two years since the ceasefire was declared, regular violations have been committed on the Israeli side.

Israeli bulldozers frequently enter Gaza territory, carrying out land-leveling and excavation operations while accompanied by military vehicles, with four such incursions recorded by the UN between April 26 and May 2.

On a near daily basis, the Israeli army fires “warning shots” on Palestinian fisherman, farmers, and shepherds entering the Israeli-enforced “buffer zone,” implemented after Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip a decade ago.

Due to the high frequency of the attacks, live fire often goes unreported.

While Israel typically cites security concerns when targeting Palestinian agricultural areas, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights has reported in the past that fishermen are often targeted when they pose no threat.

Approximately 35 percent of Palestinian agricultural land in Gaza is inaccessible without high personal risk, according to the center.

In 2015, Israeli naval forces opened fire on Palestinian fishermen at least 139 times, killing three, wounding dozens, and damaging at least 16 fishing boats, according to the UN Agency for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Israeli forces also regularly open fire on Palestinian protesters during Friday demonstrations held along Gaza’s border, with injuries sustained by live fire and rubber-coated steel bullets reported nearly every week. At least 25 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli forces in Gaza clashes since the beginning of October, according to UN documentation.

May 8, 2016 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Extremist settlers attack Palestinian human rights activists in Hebron

Ma’an – May 8, 2016

HEBRON – A group of extremist Israeli settlers on Saturday attacked two Palestinian human rights activists in the Tel Rumeida area in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron, video footage showed.

Human Rights Defenders spokesperson Badee Dweik told Ma’an that settlers attacked Emad Abu Shamsiya and Yasser Abu Markhiya, who work with the group’s Hebron office. The two were taking footage of extremist settlers carrying rods near Palestinian homes in Tel Rumeida in Hebron’s Old City.

Abu Shamsiya, who serves as coordinator of the group in Hebron, said the settlers “were preparing to attack and intimidate Palestinian residents, especially children,” and that he rushed toward the scene with Abu Markhiya after they heard children screaming.

Their video shows a group of three settlers, two boys and one adult, begin to pass by. The adult settler can be heard saying in Hebrew, “if you take footage of me I’m going to kill you.” The children approach Abu Shamsiya and Abu Markhiya and order them to put down the camera before the adult strikes Abu Shamsiya.

“They punched me and broke my camera,” Abu Shamsiya told Ma’an, highlighted that Israeli soldiers were watching when the settlers attacked him and his colleague without intervening.

Dweik told Ma’an that attacks by Israeli settlers and Israeli soldiers against activists attempting to document settler attacks on Palestinian residents have increased recently, especially after footage captured by Abu Shamsiya in March of an Israeli soldier shooting and killing Abd al-Fatah al-Sharif while he was lying motionless on the ground stoked widespread international criticism.

A day after release of the video, Israeli settlers gathered outside the home of Abu Shamsiya in Hebron to threaten him.

Tel Rumeida — where Shamsiya’s house is located and the site both Saturday’s incident and al-Sharif’s killing — has long been a flashpoint for tensions between Palestinians and Israeli settlers and military, and is location to an illegal Israeli settlement.

Mistreatment of Palestinians in the Hebron area has been common since the city was divided in the 1990s after a US-born Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, massacred 29 Palestinians inside the Ibrahimi Mosque.

The majority of the city was placed under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, while the Old City and surrounding areas were placed under Israeli military control in a sector known as H2.

The area is home to 30,000 Palestinians and around 800 Israeli settlers who live under the protection of Israeli forces. Hebron residents frequently report attacks and harassment by the settlers carried out in the presence of the forces.

May 8, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“It is the determined will of people that counts” …

Review of Dr Abu Sitta’s Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir

By Vacy Vlazna | Dissident Voice | May 5, 2016

I spent the rest of my life on a long, winding journey of return, a journey that has taken me to dozens of counties over decades of travel, and turned my black hair to silver. But like a boomerang, I knew the end destination, and that the only way to it was the road of return I had decided to take.

— Salman Abu Sitta

The spirit of Dr Abu Sitta’s Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir mirrors precisely the dynamic quintessence and will of its creator – in a word – sumoud – a compelling steadfastness to his homeland Palestine and to the right of return of every Palestinian.

It is the determined will of people that counts. It must of course be accompanied by vigorous planning and action. An iron will does not bend in the face of obstacles or challenges, failures or disappointments. These challenges only sharpen it.  Its  ultimate reward is to enforce justice, to return home.

Abu Sitta’s personal experiences, great intellect, moral substance and totality of purpose  confer authoritative soundness to his part in Palestine’s modern history. The Palestinian narrative is rare and future readings, such as Ilan Pappe’s definitive history outlining Israel’s systematic strategies and crimes of the Nakba, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, now, thanks to Abu Sitta, will be imbued with the flesh and breath of Palestinian truth and rights.

51hmBpJcw0L._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_Opening the door of the memoir, we step into and see, through the eyes of the 10 year old Salman, his birth place, the village of Ma’in in the Beersheba district as yet pristine and undefiled by the Zionist scourge and anguished loss. We witness the prosperity of the land abundant in maize, barley, date palms, figs, grapes, almonds, apricots, melons, cactus fruit and wheat harvested, gleaned, and threshed by families and poor itinerant workers. It is a generous land that feeds well its people and their livestock of camels, horses, cows, oxen, sheep, and goats.

We join in the robust vitality of Palestinian village life: the flirting, courting, marriage customs, the rituals, like the blessing of wells, defined by religion, superstitions and omens, children’s games and school lessons, and listen to the men gathered in the shigg sharing ‘anecdotes, news, future plans, hopes and fears’ and listen to the poetic recitation of family histories by storytellers ‘who are the real source of our history’.

Abu Sitta’s memoir is rich in this tradition. It chronicles his family’s illustrious lineage of the Tarabin, ‘the largest, wealthiest, strongest tribe in southern Palestine’ that extends into Egypt as far as Cairo. The Tarabin is the tribal tree from which  the Abu Sitta sheiks branched since the 16th century from Darshan I to Abu Sitta’s father, Hussein. The Abu Sitta bloodline of belonging to and defending their precious land begat landowners and warriors with a history of Arab resistance to invaders.

Resistance to foreign invaders is oxygen to Abu Sitta’s father Sheik Hussein, a self-educated man who was ‘chief judge at the tribal court in Beersheba’. He became a key player in the Palestinian national movement ensuring no land was sold to Jews and spurned collaboration with the British.

Cousin Abdullah was leader of the southern front of Palestinian 1936-39 revolt blowing up railways, cutting telephone wires and ambushing British convoys. In 1938, he, allied with  Abd al-Halim al-Joulani of al-Khalil, liberated Beersheba, ‘an area equal to half of Palestine’ from British control for a year. He also resisted the zionists from 1947-56.

Abu Sitta details the fateful impact of the arrival of European colonialism. Its imperial machinations to control Palestine, he clarifies, were predetermined by decades of covert British, German  and Zionist intelligence gathering culminating in the Sykes-Picot betrayal and the ‘legally void, morally wicked and politically mischievous’ Balfour Declaration that opened the  immigration floodgates of Jews bent on Palestine’s annihilation.

Abu Sitta documents the post WWII departure of the British that shamefully abandoned the meagrely armed Palestinians to the well armed terrorist Haganah, Irgun and Stern militias. With cousins, Abdullah, Hamed and brother Ibrahim at the front line of defense, Abu Sitta details the tragi-heroic resistance of villagers in the Beersheba district doomed to join the surviving hoards of terrified Palestinians fleeing massacres such as Burayr, Tantura, Deir Yassin, and death from 670 ethnically cleansed villages.

At 11 years of age, young Salman, like his contemporary Naji Al-Ali and hundreds of thousands of children, becomes Handala* incarnate destined to wander the paths most travelled to the wretched camps of the dispossessed. The Abu Sittas set up tents in Gaza alongside fellow ‘uprooted people, robbed of their land, but not of their identity and least of all family cohesion. Groups maintained their social structures, complete with the village mukhtars and sub-mukhtars’. Here, Sheikh Hussein, despite losing everything, was determined to maintain university costs for his four sons.

After 1948, the refugee template, with its trials and triumphs, of itinerant study, employment and residence was cast. Abu Sitta himself studied in Egypt, UK and Canada as well as set up business in Kuwait, Iraq, Yemen, Canada , and the UK.

Page upon page is packed with firsthand personal and historic facts, figures, key players, letters, and Palestinian endeavours ‘to fight the occupier’; the formation of the General Union of Palestinian Students, the Palestinian National Council and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Palestinian Lawyers Syndicate,  Hajj Amin al-Husseini, General  Ahmed Fouad Sadek, Gamal And al-Nasser, Kamel al-Sharif, Ismail Shammour, Jawaharlal Nehru, Che Guevara, Edward Said, Khalil al-Wazir and Arafat with his ‘calamitous concessions’ peaking with the infamous Oslo Accords.

In the 60s the Royal Geographical  Society library was the starting point of Abu Sitta’s journey of sleuthing maps and literature on Palestine before the Zionists savagely rent it to pieces ‘to wipe Palestine from memory.’ Then came the challenge, over decades, of meticulously making Palestine whole again.

Dr Abu Sitta is no dreamer. He is a pragmatic visionary whose unwavering yearning for home has morphed into the Palestinian Land Society, his literal pièce de résistance, that has created the phenomenal Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966 and meticulous plans for the inevitable return.

We plan for the reconstruction of destroyed Palestinian villages. Our plans are derived from a massive database…. We are creating a file for every village, its house plans before 1948, its features and characteristics, its economies and its status of education… Young architects are now working on the reconstruction of these destroyed villages to be built in the same locations with the same beautiful old features, but with modern amenities.

Fahrenheit 451 is the burning point of paper, and at the end of (Ray) Bradbury’s book of the same name, hope, for a society that was culturally reduced to ashes by the systematic burning of books, lies in a group of intellectual renegade exiles who are individually responsible for memorising and preserving one book each and become its living version.

Dr Abu Sitta’s life is an Opus Magnus preserving the integrity of the land of Palestine, past, present and future in preparation for the certain return of all its stranded children. The outstanding feature of the memoir is its invitation to ‘meet’ a distinguished  colossus of Palestinian sumoud.

* Handala is the eternal child; the eternal 10-year-old refugee child conceived in the Nakba fragmented childhood of the late Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. In Palestine, Handala is loved and cherished as a symbol of righteous steadfast resistance.

The book will be launched in London on May 20th.

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Aceh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 and then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

May 7, 2016 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

THE OXFORD UNION FAWNS TO APARTHEID AMBASSADORS

By Hugh Jaeger · May 5, 2016

On 26 April Israel’s new Ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev, spoke at the Oxford Union. Three days later I sent a 300-word letter to The Oxford Times about his speech, and a street protest against him that was held outside the building.

Any newspaper has the right to edit letters. In addition The Oxford Times sets a limit of 300 words. I write lots of letters to the paper. Usually they are on other subjects, and nearly always The Oxford Times publishes them in full.

On 5 May the paper published some of my letter about Ambassador Regev. Unusually it had been edited to less than half its length. The choice of which sentences to delete robbed the letter of all of its evidence and much of its force.

Below is the full letter as I sent it. In [brackets and italics] are the sentences that The Oxford Times deleted. Draw your own conclusions!

MARK REGEV’S APPEARANCE AT THE OXFORD UNION WAS NOT BALANCED

Thank you everyone from Oxford University Palestine Society and Oxford Palestine Solidarity Campaign who, at scant notice, protested outside the Oxford Union on 26 April.

The Union had invited Mark Regev, Israel’s new London ambassador, to speak. Regev was spokesman for Israel’s defence ministry during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. [He notoriously defended Israel’s massacres of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in 2008–09, 2012 and 2014.

In 2008–09 Regev claimed Israel’s use of white phosphorus in the Gaza massacres didn’t break international law. He defended Israel bombarding hospitals, schools, homes, mosques, churches and a UNWRA aid store. He claimed Hamas kept weapons in mosques and carried them in ambulances. After the 2008–09 massacres the UN Goldstone report found no evidence for Israel’s claims, but accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.]

The Oxford Union holds debates between high-calibre speakers. It could have invited Regev and a seconder to debate against equal opponents. A Palestinian advocate such as Hanan Ashrawi or liberal Israeli such as historian Professor Ilan Pappé of Exeter University would have been suitable. Or Channel 4 newscaster Jon Snow, who knows the Middle East and lives in Oxford.

Instead the Union let Regev address an audience and then answer questions. [Few students, however bright, can match Regev’s experience, guile and cold cunning.] The Union treated previous Israeli ambassadors the same: Daniel Taub in 2014 and Ron Prosor in 2010. Each got off lightly.

[Regev told his audience only anarchists or Marxists distinguish between criticism of Zionism and prejudice against Jews. He claimed to support a two-state settlement! In fact his government keeps seizing Palestinian land and pouring illegal settlers into East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Online the Union repeated Regev’s propaganda but no audience criticism. It betrayed the interests of Israelis, Palestinians and students.]

May 6, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

#IsraelSaudi: A Match Made in Hell

By Alli McCracken and Raed Jarrar | CounterPunch | May 6, 2016

For decades, Saudi Arabia has been a stalwart advocate of Palestinian statehood rights and a voracious critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Saudi Arabia’s commitment to Palestine has defined the geopolitical contours of the Middle East for decades. But now that the Iran nuclear deal has been struck and as the war in Syria ravages on, those political lines are being redrawn, bringing together unexpected bedfellows: Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Marketed as a “pathbreaking public dialogue between senior national security leaders from two old adversaries,” May 5, 2016 will feature a high-profile meeting in Washington DC between officials from Saudi Arabia and Israel. Prince Turki bin Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief and one-time ambassador to Washington, and retired Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Major General Yaakov Amidror, former national security advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will be speaking together at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel organization funded by AIPAC donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and located down the hall from AIPAC Headquarters.

Saudi Arabia has never engaged in diplomatic relations with Israel since the Nakba in 1948, and at one point even led efforts to boycott the state of Israel. And although this is not the first meeting of its kind (Saudi Arabia and Israel had a former official speak at a Council on Foreign Relations panel last year), it is definitely the highest profile meeting and it is taking place.

While having like-minded human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia and Israel mingle and meet publicly might come as no surprise to most of us, this event is still bad news: it signals a new era of normalization by the official sponsor of the Arab Peace Initiative.

The Arab Peace initiative, also known as the “Saudi Initiative”, is a 10-sentence proposal for an end to the Arab–Israeli conflict. It was endorsed by the Arab League in 2002 and re-endorsed in 2007, and it is supported by all Palestinian factions, including Hamas. The initiative calls for normalizing relations between the Arab world and Israel in exchange for a complete withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem). Until now, it has been the most viable blueprint for a two-state solution. The deal also addressed the issue of Palestinian refugees and called for a “just settlement” based on UN Resolution 194.

So, at this political moment when Netanyahu is not showing any willingness to withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territory and some of his ministers are calling for the official annexation of the West Bank, Saudi Arabia seems to be giving up on its historic commitments. By normalizing relations with Israel without demanding a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saudi Arabia is diminishing its leverage in negotiating a two-state solution.

In a way, this meeting marks the official demise of the Arab Peace Initiative, but more importantly, as the last standing mechanism for a regionally negotiated resolution, it is yet another indicator that a two-state solution is officially dead.

Alli McCracken is co-director of the peace group CODEPINK based in Washington DC. Raed Jarrar is an Arab-American political advocate based in Washington DC.

May 6, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Labour Party witch hunt: Will the real fomenters of anti-Semitism please stand up?

By Michael Lesher | American Herald Tribune | May 6, 2016

The so-called “anti-Semitism row” embroiling the United Kingdom’s Labour Party under its new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a fraud – a cynical fraud at that. Despite the best efforts of the notoriously tireless Israel lobby, not to mention an abundance of circling media sharks eager to seize upon the lobby’s every lurid accusation, not one actual anti-Semitic statement from a Labour politician has emerged to date.

Indeed, if the campaign has any effect at all, it will not be to eject anti-Semitism from British politics. On the contrary, it is likely to foment anti-Semitism where, up to now, little or none has existed.

It’s hard to exaggerate how ridiculous the witch hunt around Jeremy Corbyn has become. But you don’t have to take my word for that. If Anshel Pfeffer’s tortuous attempt this week to rationalize the charges of “anti-Semitism” is any indication of the merits of the smear campaign, not even its purveyors actually believe their own accusations.

Pfeffer – who published his piece in Israel’s liberal daily, Ha’aretz on May 1 – is a veteran reporter with a number of genuine stories to his credit. It stands to reason that if there were anything real behind the so-called anti-Semitism scandal, Pfeffer would find it. But not even Pfeffer can locate a single anti-Semitic slur to latch onto.

Instead, he’s reduced to redefining anti-Semitism – redefining it so broadly that it includes all criticism of Israel’s government. Pfeffer’s argument is that condemning crimes committed by Israel’s leadership is, in effect, an accusation against all Israelis, and that, since most Israelis are Jews, this means an implicit attack on Jews everywhere. Pfeffer doesn’t spell out this approach too carefully, and no wonder – if it were true, it would mean that any statement critical of, say, Bashar al-Assad would make the speaker an Islamophobe. But without this bowdlerized definition of anti-Semitism (according to Pfeffer, a critic of Israel’s illegal occupation is simply “someone who only hates Jews living in Israel”), Pfeffer’s whole attack on the Labour left would collapse.

Not even neutering the meaning of anti-Semitism is enough for Pfeffer’s purposes. To demonize critics of Israel he has to coin the peculiar notion of “anti-Jewish theories” as well. That is, to mention the Zionist movement’s early efforts to cooperate with Hitler’s government – as former mayor of London Ken Livingstone did in an off-the-cuff way while defending his colleague Naz Shah – is more or less historically accurate; certainly it isn’t an expression of bigotry. But if Jews don’t like to hear about such facts, that makes the comment an “anti-Jewish theory,” and of course anyone who would espouse an anti-Jewish theory must be an anti-Semite. Pfeffer complains that Corbyn and his supporters “are incapable of comprehending” this logic. I wonder why.

Pfeffer has more to say, but not a word of it is factual – it’s a low-rent right-wing conspiracy theory about how all socialists secretly hate Jews because they’re, well, white. Pfeffer can’t for the life of him imagine any other reason why some politicians might object to mass murder, apartheid or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – he calls this a “Marxist class-warfare perspective” and the product of “revised history” – but he does get good and sore over the fact that Labour MP John Mann, who had the “decency” (Pfeffer’s word) to smear Livingstone on television as a “Hitler apologist,” actually got a mild reprimand for the slander. Frankly, people with moral priorities like those give me the creeps.

But again, nobody has to take my word for any of this. The facts – which people like Pfeffer studiously ignore – speak for themselves. There is no anti-Semitism scandal in the U.K. A poll conducted by the highly respected Pew Research Center just last year found that only 7% of respondents in that country held an “unfavorable view” of Jews, as compared with 19% – nearly three times as many – who expressed such views about Muslims. And as for Labour, the hysterical rush to suspend Shah and Livingstone on the flimsiest of charges (not to mention Shah’s groveling apologies for some innocuous statements made long before she even ran for office) hardly bespeaks an anti-Jewish bias.

What’s more, for all Pfeffer’s posturing, neither Zionism’s past nor Israel’s present is above critical scrutiny. The Zionist movement, though certainly not allied with Nazism, did agree with Hitler on one important point: namely, that Jews are a nation – not a religious group – and consequently do not really belong in any European country. That’s why much of established British Jewry spoke out sharply against the Balfour Declaration in 1917: they recognized it as a blow to the hopes of British Jews who wanted equal rights in their own country. For Zionists, as for Nazis, such hopes were dangerous.

That’s a matter of history, but Israel’s crimes – including the wanton killing of civilians in Gaza less than two years ago – are urgent contemporary realities. The witch hunt for Labour Party “anti-Semites” is really a crude attempt to silence the critics of those crimes. And let’s not delude ourselves: the targets of that campaign understand this perfectly well.

That’s the ultimate irony about the “anti-Semitism” canard. The witch hunt isn’t uncovering any anti-Semitism. But it may go a long way toward creating it. As the redoubtable scholar Norman Finkelstein recently said, the attacks on left-Labour politicians, supported at every step by Israeli hasbara, are “fanning the embers of hate and creating new discord between Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah… [S]he’s being crucified, her career wrecked, her life ruined, her future in tatters, branded an ‘anti-Semite’ and a closet Nazi, and inflicted with these rituals of self-abasement. It’s not hard to imagine what her Muslim constituents must think now about Jews.”

May 6, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Stoking More Conflict With Gaza

By Stephen Lendman | May 5, 2016

Three Israeli wars of aggression on illegally besieged Gaza since December 2008 perhaps aren’t enough for Israel’s killing machine.

Repeated inter-war ground, air and sea attacks occur regularly. Is Israel preparing the ground for another major assault – blaming Gazan victims like it always does for its high crimes against peace?

On Wednesday, Israeli tanks shelled two Hamas watchtowers provocatively. Senior Hamas official Musheer al-Masri called the attacks “dangerous developments and an obvious breach of the ceasefire in Gaza.”

“The Israeli occupation should avoid testing the Palestinian resistance. The enemy should realize that the toll would be in proportion to the Israeli crimes.”

“The Israeli escalation is a new development, and the Palestinian resistance is (deciding) how to react.”

Hamas’ armed wing al-Qassam Brigades responded with mortar fire on an Israeli bulldozer. An Interior Ministry source reported no casualties, just damage.

Islamic Jihad spokesman, Daud Shihab, said “Israel has not ceased its hostilities against the Palestinian people since the ceasefire was agreed on in 2014.”

“There are continued onslaughts and infiltrations in both Gaza and the West Bank and in other locations in Palestine.”

Gaza remains illegally blockaded since June 2007 – for political, not security reasons. According to an April UN report, about 75,000 Palestinians remain displaced from Israel’s summer 2014 naked aggression.

Affected families are forced to “liv(e) in store rooms, unfinished units, substandard apartments in relatives’ or neighbors’ buildings” or wherever else they can find shelter.

Some live in damaged homes, others in prefabricated shelters. War and displacement affected women and children hardest.

Over 30% of displaced females “liv(e) in shelter conditions… lacking safety, dignity and privacy, including tents, makeshift shelters, destroyed houses or the open air.”

Nearly all affected families lack resources and construction supplies to rebuild. Most funds pledged for reconstruction weren’t delivered.

Israel blocks or greatly restricts building supplies entering the Strip on the phony pretext of being useful to Hamas or other resistance groups.

The UN warned “(a)t the present rate, it will take years to address the massive reconstruction and repair needs, adding to the general frustration of the population following years of movement restrictions, rising unemployment and poverty.”

Gazans suffer hugely under open-air prison conditions. Israel attacks the Strip at its discretion.

Are things heading for another war? Does Israel want remaining parts of Gaza turned to rubble – thousands more of its residents slaughtered or injured?

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

May 5, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hitler the Ultra Zionist!

By Gilad Atzmon  | May 4, 2016

In a bizarre effort to paper over the historical truth regarding Hitler and the Haavara Agreement, Professor Rainer Schulze of Essex University wrote an article totally lacking intellectual integrity. Schulze’s piece in the Independent, ‘Hitler and Zionism: Why the Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were Zionists’, demonstrates that fear of Zionists and their extensive power extends beyond the Labour party. It is deeply entrenched within the British psyche and institutionally embedded in academia.

Schulze article leads him to the conclusion that: “any claim that Nazis and Zionists ever shared a common goal is not only cynical and disingenuous, but a distortion of clearly established historical fact.” The German/British professor’s failure to apply elementary academic analytical skills to the issue results in faulty scholarship.

Schulze accepts that the Havaara Agreement provided that “Jewish emigrants from Germany had to hand over their possessions before they departed, and the proceeds from the sale of such possessions were used by a company specifically set up for this purpose in Tel Aviv to purchase German goods for sale in Palestine.”

But Schulze continues, “The Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were ever Zionists. Instead, it is testament to the fact that Nazi policy towards the Jews was not clear-cut from the beginning, but evolved greatly over the years.” Schulze clearly doesn’t understand what Zionism was and who the Zionists were at the time of the Agreement.

Schulze defines Zionism as; “a movement based on the right of self-determination.” This definition of Zionism is profoundly anachronistic and it is wrong.

Zionism was primarily and fundamentally the belief that Jews should return to Zion. Zionism was a Jewish ‘homecoming project.’*

Zionists Jews were divided amongst themselves what the ‘homecoming’ might mean. Some believed that Zionism should aim to create a spiritual centre, others believed in Bi Nationalism. Many engaged in a pragmatic political struggle to erect a racially oriented Jews Only State.

Crucially, Hitler like Churchill** and many others, saw in Zionism an opportunity for Europe to rid itself of some problematic Jewish elements. Whether Schulze likes it or not, Zionism was a successful project because from its onset, it formed a symbiotic relationship between Zionist Jews and the Jew haters who wanted the Jews out of Europe. Zionism promised a national home for the Jews and at the same time offered to ‘take the Jews away.’

In 1933 Hitler was a Zionist. Like Zionists (both Jews and their detractors) he wanted the Jews out of Europe. Palestine was his preferred solution. At a later stage, probably around 1936, Hitler changed his mind about Zionism. He realised that the Zionist project was celebrated at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people. Professor Schulze can discuss this transition with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

One would expect an academic scholar specialising in Modern Jewish History to grasp that Zionism as well as the State of Israel are sustained by Jew hatred. If ‘anti Semitism’ disappears, Israel and Zionism become obsolete concepts. Understanding this, Israel and Zionism have consistently contributed to the rise of anti Semitism. When there is no anti Semitism to point at, Jewish institutions simply invent it, as they are presently doing in the Labour party.

Enough Schulze bashing for one day. To his credit, Professor Schulze is not entirely dishonest. Like other contemporary German historians, Schulze is very careful with his wording regarding the German oppressive mechanisms and practicality.

Towards the end of his Independent article, Schulze writes about the 1939 German Polish Campaign: “they (the Nazis) were looking for dumping grounds for Jews and other “undesirables.” These people were at best treated as ‘assets’ to exploit or, later, a stock of slave labour, and at worst simply expected to die of disease and starvation.”

Did Schulze miss something? He did. He forgot to mention the gas chambers. Was this unintentional? I don’t think so. I have noticed that more German mainstream historians are unwilling to commit to the gas chamber homicidal narrative. Let’s see how long it will be before Schulze is kicked out of Essex University for heresy of the one and only universal Western religion.

—-

*Home coming” from a Jewish perspective only. The author of this article doesn’t agree in any way that Palestine is home for the Jews.

**”Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and centre of national life.” (A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People, Winston S. Churchill 1920)

May 4, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

April 2016 Report: 567 Palestinians arrested by Israeli occupation, including 123 children

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Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Solidarity Network | May 3, 2016

In a report by Palestinian prisoners’ institutions, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and the Prisoners Affairs’ Commission, the organizations released the relevant statistics and overall report on Palestinian prisoners in April 2016. The following figures were compiled and released by these three organizations.

567 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli occupation forces during April 2016, bringing the number of those arrested since the beginning of the popular uprising in October 2015 to 5334 Palestinians. The highest number of arrests were in Jerusalem, where 213 were arrested including 60 minors; al-Khalil, where 120 were arrested; followed by 43 in Ramallah, 40 in Nablus, 38 in Bethlehem, 35 in Qalqilya, 23 in Jenin, 12 in Tulkarem, 9 in Tubas, five in Salfit and four in Jericho; in the Gaza Strip, 25 were arrested, including 20 fishers who were subjected to firing and attacks in the sea, two who passed Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing, and three near the “border” of Gaza.

Among the arrestees were 123 children and 24 women and girls (including 3 minor girls). 69 Palestinian women and girls are imprisoned in Israeli jails, including 15 minor girls; the total number of children in Israeli jails remains over 400. There are over 750 Palestinians held in administrative detention and 700 sick and ill prisoners. 133 administrative detention orders were issued in April, including 97 renewals of ongoing administrative detention orders.

Invasions and Inspection Policy in Prisons

The Israel Prison Service used special units in raid and search operations launched by the prison administration on a regular basis as a means of collective punishment by the Israel Prison Service from arrest until release. The prison administration fabricates pretexts to launch these attacks, in which prisoners are subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment.

These special units suddenly invade or launch inspections, so as to prevent prisoners from preparing themselves or taking precautionary measures, usually in the early morning hours and sometimes in the hours after midnight; sometimes these fall in the middle of the day, including during prayer times or during iftar in Ramadan. The aim of these raids is to harass and abuse detainees; these special units use provocative actions against prisoners, including dragging prisoners from the rooms, yelling in their faces, verbally abusing them, and confiscating personal documents and family photos, creating provocations which are then used to justify attacks on prisoners.

In the month of April, the incident of the storming of section 14 in Nafha prison went beyond a typical invasion/inspection process with beating of prisoners. This incident occurred after guards refused to allow Akram Siyam and Muharreb Da’is to use the bathroom, which led to an altercation between the guards and the prisoners, during which armed units broke into the section, beat prisoners, sprayed pepper spray and tear gas, removed prisoners from the section, then returned Da’is to the section and invaded again to take him back. Prisoners refused to hand him back and a large force returned with dogs, forced all the prisoners from the room, and attacked them with batons. This caused numerous injuries, including to the ill prisoner Yousry al-Masri, who has cancer and was beaten with a baton on his neck and in his liver area.

The prison administration closed all sections of the prison, and imposed sanctions on section 14, including removal of electrical appliances, denial of family visits, and isolation from other prisoners.

Isolation conditions

17 prisoners are isolated under the pretext of “threat to state security,” without evidence to indicate this threat. They are held in solitary confinement cells for 23 hours a day except for one hour of recreation when they are with guards only. Solitary confinement is harmful to mental and physical health. The prison service issues isolation orders which can be extended every six months on the decision of the military court, based on a secret file not revealed to prisoners or their lawyers.

Among the isolated prisoners are Noureddine Amer, 34, from Qalqilya, isolated since 21 September 2013, imprisoned since 2 February 2002, and serving a 55 year sentence. He is held in a 3.5 m x 1.5 m room, in Eshel prison, which contines a toilet and a metal door with a slot for introducing food, and has a closed window. He is allowed out for recreation alone for one hour per day.

He has been held in isolation in multiple prisons: Ramon, Ashkelon, Megiddo, Shatta, Gilboa and Ayalon. He is transfered by “Bosta”; transfers take many hours. Prisoners transfered by “Bosta” are prevented from looking through the window and their hands and feet are shackled. During these transfers, Amer is accompanied by special forces who often engage in provocations and subsequent attacks. In July 2015, he was beaten by five military guards; his nose was bleeding and he was in pain but was not given treatment. His belongings were scattered, and they told him to gather them again while he was handcuffed.

He suffers from several diseases worsened by the environment of isolation, including shortness of breath, high cholesterol, joint problems, severe headaches, and stomach ulcers. He sustained a fracture in his hand eight years ago in Gilboa prison and did not receive treatment, and continues to suffer today from the injury to his hand.

He has been denied all forms of communication with his family since his isolation. His mother is elderly, suffers from cancer and had a stroke; he has learned this news only through visits from his lawyers. Three of his brothers are also imprisoned; Nidal Amer is sentenced to life imprisonment, Abdul Salam Amer to 20 years, and Aysar Amer is held in administrative detention since February 2016.

Systematic policy of torture and abuse during the detention of children

Children are exposed to systematic torture, humiliation and cruel treatment from the first moment of arrest, characterized by methods of detention, whether through late-night home invasions, detention by special units or by undercover soldiers who seek to appear “like Arabs” on the street. In addition to degrading treatment of children during their arrest and transfer, they are shackled hand and foot and blindfolded while taken to detention or interrogation centers where they are directly exposed to ill-treatment. This comes either through beatings using hands and feet, cursing and yelling at them in order to provoke fear, or through solitary confinement and harsh conditions to psychologically pressure them,

Among the cases of minor prisoners is that of Mohammed Amarna, 17, from Ya’bad near Jenin, who was arrested on 2 March 2016 from his home. During a legal visit inside the prison, his lawyer confirmed that Amarna had been beaten, insulted and mistreated during transfer to a detention center where he was blindfolded and his hands cuffed behind his back. He was held for hours outside, slapped by a soldier in the face repeatedly as well as by an interrogator.

157 Palestinians detained in connection with activities on social media

The Israeli government formed in recent months the so-called “Cyber Unit” to step up its prosecutions of Palestinians on social media, especially Facebook.

From October 2015 to April 2016, there have been 157 cases of arrests based on expression and opinion posted on Facebook. A number of people have been indicted for “incitement,” while others have been ordered to administrative detention.

The majority of arrests have taken place in Jerusalem as part of the targeting of Palestinians in Jerusalem. Many of the statements express sympathy or solidarity with Palestinian martyrs killed by Israeli occupation forces, or include publishing the photos of martyrs or prisoners.

The suppression of freedom of speech, opinion and expression on social media is not limited to cases of arrest, but has also included terminating the employment of accused Palestinians from institutions in Jerusalem or 1948 occupied Palestine, or forcibly expelling them from their city of residence, especially Jerusalem.

Battle of the empty stomachs

During the month of April, Palestinian prisoners engaged in a number of individual and collective hunger strikes for multiple reason. Sami Janazrah, 43, from al-Khalil, has continued his hunger strike since 3 March, and Fuad Assi, 30, and Adib Mafarjah, 29, both from Ramallah, continue their hunger strikes since 3 April. All are striking against their administrative detention without charge or trial.

Shukri al-Khawaja, 48, from Ramallah, engaged in a strike for a number of days against his continued isolation; dozens of prisoners in several prisons launched solidarity strikes with him. Abdullah Mughrabi, 24, from Jerusalem, also struck for a number of days against isolation.

Mahmoud Suwayta, 40, from al-Khalil, went on hunger strike for over a week against the denial of visits from his son for over two years; Iyad Fawajrah of Bethlehem also engaged in a hunger strike for family visits.

Mansour Moqtada, 48, from Salfit, is engaged in a partial hunger strike as a result of complicated and difficult health conditions, demanding improved medical treatment. Muhannad al-Izzat of Bethelehm engaged in a 9-day hunger strike, also for medical treatment.

Two re-arrested former prisoners, Abdel-Rahim Sawayfeh and Mohammed Daoud, engaged in hunger strikes against their re-arrests.

In addition, thousands of prisoners collectively engaged in a protest, returning food in rejection of the attacks on prisoners in Nafha prison.

May 4, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel settlement construction should keep going: Trump

Press TV – May 4, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says Israel should continue construction of illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank.

Asked in an interview with the British paper Daily Mail whether there should be a pause in settlement construction in the occupied territories, Trump responded: “No, I don’t think there should be a pause.”

Trump said the settlement construction must “keep going” and “keep moving forward,” because Palestinians fired “thousands of missiles” at Israel.

There are “thousands of missiles being launched into Israel,” he said. “Who would put up with that? Who would stand for it?’

“Look: Missiles were launched into Israel, and Israel, I think, never was properly treated by our country. I mean, do you know what that is, how devastating that is?”

Over half a million Israelis live in more than 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank including East al-Quds (Jerusalem). All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.

Pointing to the stalled “peace” talks, which Palestinian negotiators say will not happen without a halt in new construction, Trump said, “With all of that being said, I would love to see if peace could be negotiated.”

“A lot of people say that’s not a deal that’s possible. But I mean lasting peace, not a peace that lasts for two weeks and they start launching missiles again. So we’ll see what happens.”

Asked about his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump called him “a very good guy” for whom he had made a campaign ad in 2013.

“I don’t know him that well, but I think I’d have a very good relationship with him,” the billionaire GOP front-runner said.

“I think that President [Barack] Obama has been extremely bad to Israel,” he said.

The Obama administration demanded in 2009 that Israel freeze new settlement construction in an effort to get the two sides to the negotiating table.

Trump’s remarks came ahead of Tuesday’s Indiana primary and his pitch for pro-Israeli voters.

Trump had said last year he would like to initially remain “neutral” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as president, a position that he believes would allow him a better opportunity to be seen as a peace broker.

He has repeatedly expressed his affection for Israel and support for Netanyahu and his policies.

In Indiana’s primary on Tuesday, Trump emerged as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee with 53.2 percent support, followed by Cruz with 36.7 percent and John Kasich with only 7.6 percent.

The victory in Indiana has almost secured the GOP nomination for the New York businessman.

May 4, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The True Anti-semites, Past and Present

By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | May 3, 2016

We are desperately in need of some sanity as the British political and media establishment seek to generate yet another “new anti-semitism” crisis, on this occasion to undermine a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party before the upcoming local elections.

Corbyn and his supporters want to revive Labour as a party of social justice, while Britain’s elites hope that – in a period of unpopular austerity – they can turn the Labour leadership’s support for the Palestinians into its Achilles’ heel. This is nothing more than a class war to pave the way for a return of the Blairites to lead Labour.

Israel and its supporters in the UK are only too willing to help fuel the hysteria, given their own fears that a Corbyn-led government would be bad news for an Israel committed to destroying any hope of justice for the Palestinians.

I have analysed earlier efforts to foment panic about a “new anti-semitism”, including during the early years of the second intifada, when Israel’s popularity plummeted. As now, Israel tried to deflect attention from its increasingly clear abuses of Palestinians – and its lack of interest in peace-making – by suggesting that the problem lay with critics rather than its policies. You can see my articles about this here, here and here.

Then, the chief targets of the “new anti-semitism” smear were supposedly leftist elements in the media who were concealing their true goal – vilification of Jews – behind criticism of Israel. The campaign, despite being patent nonsense, was successful enough that it cowed the few critical voices in the media – and terrorised senior editors at the BBC into supine compliance with Israel’s narrative.

That’s why we should take this current campaign seriously and worry that Corbyn, who is already on the back foot, is in real danger of conferring credibility on this whole confected narrative of an “anti-semitism problem” in Labour simply by giving it house room. The only suitable response is derision.

We should be particularly wary of the wolves in sheep’s clothing. The Guardian’s Jerusalem bureau chief Peter Beaumont, for example, was set the task of bolstering absurd claims against Ken Livingstone for being an anti-semite after he stated – admittedly clumsily – a historical truth that for a period of time Hitler and the Zionist movement shared enough common ground that they held negotiations about transferring Jews to Palestine.

Livingstone said the following on radio:

When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

There’s a lot of information about this out there – Lenni Brenner even wrote a book on the subject. Livingstone’s mistake was both to express himself slackly in the heat of the moment and to refer to a history that was supposed to have been disappeared down the memory hole. But what he is saying is, in essence, true.

He could have gone further, in fact. A century ago, many European anti-Semites, including most members of the British government that formulated the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to create a “national home” for Jews in Palestine, upheld the same logic as the Zionist movement. They saw the Jews as a race apart. They thought in terms of a “Jewish question”, one that needed solving. And for many, the solution was to export that “problem” far away, out of Europe.

This was not surprising because Zionism emerged both in reaction to Europe’s ugly ethnic nationalisms – where it was normal to speak of “races” – and mirrored these nationalisms’ failings. The Zionists wanted to claim for themselves the same traits as other European “races”: nationhood and territory. And the European anti-Semites were only too happy to oblige – especially if the primary victims were going to be brown people in the colonies, whether in Uganda or Palestine.

Fortunately, there is an antidote to Beaumont’s kind of stenographic journalism, apparently written up after an afternoon at Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, in the form of this interview with Norman Finkelstein. It is full of profound insights.

Finkelstein puts into perspective both Livingstone’s comments and the orginal “offending” Facebook post by Labour MP Naz Shah that triggered the latest hysteria. Finkelstein notes that the post (one dredged up from two years ago), which shows a map of the United States with Israel superimposed, and suggests resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict by relocating Israel to the US, was clearly intended to be humorous rather than anti-Semitic.

I would make a further point. It is also obvious that the true target of the post is the US, not Jews or even Israel – making the anti-Semitic claim even more ridiculous.

shah

The post’s implicit argument is that, if the US government and ordinary Americans are really so committed to the creation of a safe haven for Israeli Jews, then would it not be far wiser to locate them inside the US rather than supporting at great expense a garrison state in the Middle East that will always be at war with its neighbours? This is classic satire, and the fact that almost no one in the British media and political establishment can see this – or, in the case of Corbyn and his allies, afford to admit it – is the real cause for concern.

In addition, Finkelstein concludes with a very powerful argument that the “new anti-Semitism” canard is likely – and possibly intended – to fuel the very anti-Semitism that it claims to be exposing and challenging.

Here is what Finkelstein says:

Our Corbyn is Bernie Sanders. In all the primaries in the US, Bernie has been sweeping the Arab and Muslim vote. It’s been a wondrous moment: the first Jewish presidential candidate in American history has forged a principled alliance with Arabs and Muslims. Meanwhile, what are the Blairite-Israel lobby creeps up to in the UK? They’re fanning the embers of hate and creating new discord between Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah, a Muslim woman who has attained public office. They’re making her pass through these rituals of public self-degradation, as she is forced to apologise once, twice, three times over for a tongue-in-cheek cartoon reposted from my website. And it’s not yet over! Because now they say she’s on a ‘journey’. Of course, what they mean is, ‘she’s on a journey of self-revelation, and epiphany, to understanding the inner antisemite at the core of her being’. But do you know on what journey she’s really on? She’s on a journey to becoming an antisemite. Because of these people; because they fill any sane, normal person with revulsion.

Here is this Muslim woman MP who is trying to integrate Muslims into British political life, and to set by her own person an example both to British society at large and to the Muslim community writ small. She is, by all accounts from her constituents, a respected and honourable person. You can only imagine how proud her parents, her siblings, must be. How proud the Muslim community must be. We’re always told how Muslim women are oppressed, repressed and depressed, and now you have this Muslim woman who has attained office. But now she’s being crucified, her career wrecked, her life ruined, her future in tatters, branded an ‘antisemite’ and a closet Nazi, and inflicted with these rituals of self-abasement. It’s not hard to imagine what her Muslim constituents must think now about Jews. These power hungry creeps are creating new hate by their petty machinations.

May 4, 2016 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How The NY Times Whitewashes the Scandal of Israel’s Child Prisoners

By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | May 3, 2016

jj-israel-frees-youngest-palestinian-prisoner--001Dima al Wawi, 12, was released from an Israeli prison last week, and according to The New York Times, her experience there was not all that bad. She played shuffle ball and went to classes, and when she came home after more than two months, she remained her spunky self.

This is the tenor of a piece by Diaa Hadid that ran on page one recently under the headline, “As Attacks Surge, Boys and Girls Fill Israeli Jails.” The tone here is in stark contrast to other accounts. The Daily Mail, for instance, ran the story with this title: “Haunted face of a 12-year-old girl broken by jail.”

A YouTube video of Dima’s reunion with her family also reveals a stony-faced child with dull eyes, and her mother speaks of her dismay at seeing her like that: “It seems like she is living in another world, in shock, not aware of what is happening.” She adds, “It feels like our suffering has increased.”

But Hadid gives us nothing like this. Her piece opens with a description of a benign Israeli prison experience and ends with Dima talking back to her mother like a normal, spirited pre-teen. Only far into the story do readers learn that Dima was not allowed to have either her parents or a lawyer present when she was interrogated and that she was shackled when she appeared in court.

Also missing from Hadid’s article is a full account of Israel’s scandalous treatment of Palestinian children and its apartheid court system. She describes these euphemistically as “a debate over how Israel’s military justice system, which prosecutes Palestinians from the West Bank, differs from the courts that cover Israeli citizens… and especially how it handles very young offenders.”

In fact, this is more than a debate. It is an atrocity that monitoring organizations have been documenting and publicizing for years: Israel routinely abuses Palestinian children in custody, deprives them of access to their parents and lawyers and coerces them into confessions. (See list of sources below.)

In addition, Israel is the only country in the world that systematically tries children (but only Palestinian children) in military courts, and it has two distinct systems for Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank. The former are tried in civil court while Palestinians face military trials.

In the Times story, however, this scandalous state of affairs becomes little more than a bureaucratic matter, a problem that calls for bringing two separate justice systems “more in line with one another.”

Hadid writes that Israel is trying to correct this deficiency, and she lists some policy changes made since a 2013 UNICEF report outlined abuses, but she fails to clarify either the extent of these abuses or the consistent and widespread condemnations of Israeli practices.

It is not only UNICEF that has raised alarm over the scandal: Human Rights Watch, Defence for Children International, the Israeli monitoring group B’Tselem, Amnesty International, Military Court Watch, several members of the U.S. Congress, the UN Committee for the Rights of the Child, Breaking the Silence (a group of former Israeli soldiers) and the U.S. State Department have done the same over several years.

It should also be noted that Israel, even as it claims it is correcting the problems, recently denied a delegation from the UK the right to witness child detainees in court. Additionally, the DCI report, cited in Hadid’s article, states, “Despite repeated calls to end night arrests and ill treatment and torture of Palestinian children, Israel has persistently failed to implement practical changes to stop violence against child detainees.”

Missing from the Times story is a major abuse cited in the above quote: the arrest of young Palestinians during night raids. Israeli soldiers routinely invade Palestinian homes after midnight—terrorizing families and neighborhoods in the process—and haul away teenagers and children accused of throwing stones or other offenses.

After a drumbeat of criticism from rights groups, the military announced that it would try a pilot program to cut down on night raids by delivering summonses to suspects, demanding that they turn themselves to the authorities.

But as the online magazine 972 reported, little has changed. The program has affected only 5 percent of these arrests, the documents are often handwritten in Hebrew without translation and soldiers are delivering the summonses during night raids.

DCI noted in its report that Israel has an obvious interest in continuing the raids: “Arresting children from their homes in the middle of the night, ill-treating them during arrest and interrogation, and prosecuting them in military courts that lack basic fair trial guarantees, works to stifle dissent and control an occupied population.”

Hadid’s story makes no mention of the night raids nor of the possible Israeli strategic interest mentioned by DCI. We get glimpses of the hardships Dima’s family has faced, but overall the effect is to minimize the trauma Israel inflicts on Palestinian children.

As the Times tells it, the treatment of these young detainees is simply “different” from that of young Israelis who run afoul of the law. It’s a matter of making a few adjustments, not a matter of ingrained racism and a brutal occupation.

Online readers can get a more complete story by clicking on the links to the DCI and UNICEF reports, but in the Times itself only fragments of the truth are allowed into print. The result is to obscure the cruel reality of routine abuse in the cells and interrogation rooms of Israel’s crowded prisons.

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May 3, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment