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Israeli forces kill teenager on his 17th birthday in Hebron

International Solidarity Movement, West Bank | December 12, 2012

Palestinian youth Mohammad Ziad Awwad Salayme was shot dead on his 17th birthday in Hebron. Live ammunition was fired injuring another man and several journalists had to be hospitalised after being beaten on the street. Clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli Occupation forces erupted throughout the city and surrounding areas.

At around 7:30 pm on Wednesday 12 December 2012 a soldier of the Israeli army shot dead Mohammad Salayme, killing him with two bullets to the body and head in the Salayme neigbourhood of Hebron near to the Ibrahimi mosque. Mohammad had spent the day in school and was on his way to buy some cake for him and his family to celebrate his birthday, when suddenly his life was cut short. Another Palestinian man was shot with live ammunition and injured, he was taken to a hospital in the city. The Israeli military claimed Mohammad Salayme was carrying a fake gun, therefore shot him. Mohammad’s father who rushed to administer first aid to his son said he saw no fake gun on him. Sound bombs, tear gas and rubber bullets were fired at Palestinians who tried to help the dying teenager.

The Israeli military closed off all the streets around the area where Mohammed was killed to prevent any journalists from reaching the incident. A car carrying four journalists was hit with several rounds of live ammunition and the journalists were stopped and forced from their car. The journalists, two from Youth Against Settlements, one from Reuters and one from Palmedia were forced to strip to their underwear in the cold evening air. The soldiers took their cameras and physically beat up the journalists resulting in them needing hospital treatment. A filmmaker who works for the Israeli peace group Btselem who lives close to the shooting was surrounded by 12 soldiers, beaten up and arrested. Officers from the District Coordination Office For Military Affairs informed local activists the cameras would be returned to them tomorrow after being checked for evidence.

The Israeli military flooded the city with an enormous amount of soldiers who attempted to clear the streets in a very aggressive manner, throwing sound bombs into groups of remonstrating Palestinians, shooting tear gas and rubber coated steel bullets. This behaviour only antagonised the residents of Hebron turning the tense situation into outright confrontation as clashes erupted throughout the city. The areas of Salayme, Bab Al-Zawiya, Qtoun and Dar Al Binzaid all echoed to the sound of live ammunition, concussion grenades, tear gas and rubber coated steel bullets. Clashes were reported in the nearby city of Yatta and in Dura.

Tensions in Hebron are rising as the Israeli occupation forces are using increased levels of violence in the city ever since the recent Israeli assualt on Gaza. Hamdi Alfalah was killed on November 20th and many people have been injured. Hebron will see another funeral on Thursday 13th of December.

December 13, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinians aren’t getting “one cent,” says Israel

Al Akhbar | December 12, 2012

Israel says Palestinians will not get tax revenues before at least March, after having already confiscated the Palestinian Authority’s December funds. The decision comes as part of Palestine’s “punishment” for last month’s United Nations bid.

“The Palestinians can forget about getting even one cent in the coming four months, and in four months’ time we will decide how to proceed,” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in a peremptory speech on Tuesday night.

Under the current peace deal, Israel collects US$100 million each month in duties on the PA’s behalf in occupied West Bank. These funds are generally used to pay public sector salaries.

Israel has responded viciously to the PA’s UN upgrade to non-member statehood, accusing the PA of sidestepping stalled negotiations, through a UN bid.

“Israel is not prepared to accept unilateral steps by the Palestinian side, and anyone who thinks they will achieve concessions and gains this way is wrong,” he said.

Before confiscating funds in December, Israel announced settlement plans in the E1 sensitive area that would destroy all possibility for a two-state solution, inciting international condemnation.

While making it clear that these steps are a form of retribution, an Israeli iron-fist response meant to instil fear in those that make decisions without permission – “unilateral steps” – Israelis mentioned that Palestinians have debts to pay off with Israel Electric Corporation and the Israel Water Authority.

The European Union criticized Israel Monday, saying, “Contractual obligations … regarding full, timely, predictable and transparent transfer of tax and custom revenues have to be respected.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tuesday that Paris will host a donors’ conference early next year to raise funds for the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

(Al-Akhbar, Ma’an)

December 12, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Bulldozers arrive in Hajja

International Solidarity Movement | December 10, 2012

Occupied Palestine – On Sunday 9th December at 4pm the bulldozers rolled into the small sleepy town of Hajja near Kufr Qaddoum, in the northern part of the West Bank. They rolled past the Illegal Israeli Settlements, where many Palestinians from the surrounding villages work, with less workers’ rights than the Israeli Settlers who work in the same factory.

Beneath the factories lies open farmland. Olive trees run up the sides of the hill, this is the land they’ve come to take. A confrontation happens between the Palestinians who own the land and the Palestinians from 1948 that drive the bulldozers that are already ripping up the land. The bulldozer has destroyed everything in its path already, ripping up chunks of soil, trees and shrubs along the way.

During the dispute soldiers appear, they’ve been sent to ‘protect’ the bulldozer drivers. They assure the Palestinians who rightfully own the land that they have received permission. When challenged the story changes, the soldiers have arrived without proof and it seems without permission.

Hajja has ten Illegal Settlements surrounding it to date; already they have lost so much.

We arrive at midday, the day after the first encounter. Today the soldiers come with a map, they have it all planned and regrettably it’s inevitable that the process will continue.

We arrive to the area around 2pm, a 65 year old women is clenching her fists into the sky, wailing and begging, demanding answers for what is about to happen. The soldiers tell the village that the land will be used to build an electricity post, which will also include a road which will be used to access the point. The land is shared between hundreds of people and as a result of this potentially the village would lose access to this land.

Fatima Bora Dean Marsalha tells me ‘Every time they come they destroy our land, Two years ago the settlers came and tried to build here. We just want to be able to live and work on the land that belongs to us.’

The soldiers leave and go, leaving the villagers from Hajja on the land that belongs to them, the soldiers holding their livelihoods in the palm of their hands. The soldiers I’m told are going to find more proof that they can access the land to build the Electricity Line, in the process destroying the land and preventing the Palestinians from accessing it. I am told by a Palestinian that this is how the settlements begin, first they come with a small proposal then they move on caravans, and then houses.

As we begin to walk away a Wild boar pounds down the hill towards us, the Palestinian guys throw stones to scare it away. Released by settlers to intimidate, destroy and damage the land. Wild boar are not native to Palestine, as I leave I realise that there are many manipulative tactics to this occupational game of land steal.

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December 10, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli authorities ‘to demolish West Bank road’

Ma’an – 10/12/2012

SALFIT – Israeli authorities on Monday notified Palestinian farmers in a northern West Bank village that a road connecting them to their fields will be demolished, locals told Ma’an.

Residents of Qarawat Bani Hassan, near Salfit, said Israeli planning officers told them the al-Hurriya (Freedom) road will be demolished in two weeks.

Farmers were told to avoid agricultural work in the area.

The same street was dug up by Israeli bulldozers on March 24, 2011. The local municipality, with support from the Palestinian prime minister and donor organizations, later rehabilitated the road.

Palestinian Authority premier Salam Fayyad joined the road’s original inauguration two years ago.

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December 10, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Jewish settlers commit vehicular assaults with impunity at peaceful roadblock protests in the West Bank

International Solidarity Movement | December 3, 2012

West Bank – On two different occasions while Palestinians, accompanied by international activists, peacefully blocked roads leading to illegal settlements to demonstrate against the occupation and settlements, settlers purposefully injured activists in hit and run incidents.

On November 14 while a group of protesters blocked a road leading to an illegal settlement, a settler tried to drive through the crowd, then accelerated, deliberately hitting an international activist, as the activist was trying to get out of the way. The activist hit the front of the car, then bounced off the windshield and hit the ground. The settler then drove away, careless about what he had just done. An ambulance was called, and the activist was treated for injuries to his head and arm.

A similar incident occurred on November 19, as a roadblock protest was held on another settler road. As a settler car approached the crowd, he accelerated into Palestinian popular struggle coordinator Abdallah Abu Rahmah, hitting him with his car, before fleeing the scene. Abdallah was treated in hospital but was released later that day. Israeli army soldiers were present at the scene, but didn’t do anything to prevent the settlers from acting in violent ways, and allowed them to flee the scene.

The settlers seem to be above the law. They continually get away with violence, destruction of property, and constant harassment against the Palestinians, while the soldiers usually protect them, because they have Israeli citizenship. Incidents similar to these happen constantly all throughout the West Bank, while soldiers and authorities turn a blind eye.

December 3, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | Leave a comment

Why Israel Desires to be Hated by Palestinians

Gaza 2012: On the Use and Abuse of Hatred and Violence

By OREN BEN-DOR | CounterPunch | November 25, 2012

Yet another massacre is unfolding in Gaza, the largest prison in the world.  We are surrounded by familiar chatter: ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’; ‘Palestinians’ legitimate resistance to (the 1967) occupation’; ‘who started it this time?’ Most insidious, however, is the stale refrain, sung by a chorus which includes President Obama, that the violence is disastrous for the ‘peace process’ aimed at a ‘two-state solution’.

While it has been noted that one motivation for the Israeli government, in the run-up to elections in January, is to unite voters behind a ‘no choice’ rhetoric, there is a deeper motivation at stake here – to restrict the horizons of political debate, to control what should be regarded as a litmus test for ‘realistic’, ‘moderate’ and ‘reasonable’ voices.

War is useful because the passion it arouses prevents people from asking two basic questions that must be addressed if the core of silencing and violence that we are witnessing is to be grasped and, in turn, if progress is ever to be made towards justice and enduring peace. First, what kind of state is Israel?  Second, who are the Palestinians that this state is in conflict with?

Israel was established to be a Jewish state. Its institutions have always been shaped and constrained so as to ensure the continued existence of a Jewish majority and character.  Passing a test of Jewishness entitles someone to Israeli citizenship regardless of where in the world she lives.  Furthermore, her citizenship comes with a bundle of political, social and economic rights which are preferential to that of citizens who do not qualify as Jewish.  This inbuilt discriminatory premise highlights the apartheid nature of the state.  But apartheid is not an accidental feature of Israel. Its very creation involved immense injustice and suffering.  Shielding and rationalizing this inbuilt premise prevents the address of past injustices and ensures their continuity into the future.  It is a premise that, in matters of constitutional interpretation, takes precedence over, and thus involves the imposition of ‘reasonable’ limitations on, equality of citizenship.

The Palestinians, we are told, are a people who live in the West Bank and Gaza. The impression forced on us is that the conflict concerns a compromise to be made to correct the border between Israel and a Palestinian state.  We are led to believe that a partition into two-states would satisfy both genuine and realistic aspirations for justice and peace.  In this view, the violence in Gaza is just an unreasonable aberration from an otherwise noble peace process.

But Palestinians actually comprise three groups.  First, those whose families originate in the territories that were occupied by Israel in 1967 (Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem). Second, the descendants of the approximately 750,000 non-Jews who were ethnically cleansed in 1947-9 in order to ensure a Jewish majority in the new Jewish state.  This group is dispersed around the world, mostly in refugee camps in the territories occupied in 1967 and the neighbouring states. Israel has persistently denied them their internationally recognized legal right to return.  The majority in Gaza consists of refugees from villages which are now buried under Israeli towns and cities that were created explicitly for Jewish citizens, places which include Ashkelon and Tel Aviv that were hit by rockets in the current conflict.   The third group of Palestinians, which Israel insists on calling by the euphemism ‘Israeli Arabs’, are the non-Jews who managed to evade ethnic cleansing in 1947-49 and who now live as second-class citizens of Israel, the state which likes to claim that it is ‘Jewish and democratic’.

Until 1948, the territory of Palestine stretched from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. The violence that has afflicted the area ever since is the direct result of an event whose true nature our society seems determined to deny.  Violence keeps erupting because of the silencing and marginalization of a simple truth surrounding any partition policy: that the injustice that afflicts Palestine can not be partitioned.  It is because of the desire to preserve a Jewish state that first, the legal dualism that exists in the 1967 Occupied Territories as well as the horror at the ‘Separation Wall’ have become the dominant political discourses of apartheid, second, that the refugees are remained dispossessed and, thirdly, that both actual and potential non-Jew Arab citizens do, and would, suffer discrimination.   The two-state vision means that the inbuilt apartheid within Israel, and in turn the injustice to two groups of Palestinians, never becomes the central political problem.

The range of reactions to the current carnage shows just how successful violence has been in sustaining the legitimacy of Israel by entrenching the political focus merely on its actions rather than on its nature.  These reactions keep the discourse that calls for criticizing Israel rather than for replacing it with an egalitarian polity over the whole of historical Palestine.

Israel desires to be hated by Palestinians. By provoking violence Israel has not merely managed to divert the limelight from its apartheid nature.  It has also managed to convince  us that, as Joseph Massad of Columbia University once captured, it has the right  to occupy, to dispossess and to discriminate, namely the claim that the apartheid premise which founds it should be put up with and rationalized as reasonable. Would anybody allow such a right-claim to hold sway in apartheid South Africa?  How come the anti-apartheid and egalitarian calls for the non-recognition of Israel’s right to exist are being marginalized as extreme and unrealizable? What kind of existential fetters cause the world to exhibit such blindness and lack of compassion? Is there no unfolding tragedy that anticipates violence against Jews precisely because past violence against them in Europe is being allowed to serve as a rationalizing device of an apartheid state?

Israel has already created a de facto single state between the river and the sea, albeit one which suffers from several apartheid systems, one within Israel and another in the occupied territories. We must not let Israeli aggression prevent us from treating as moderate and realistic proposals to turn this single state into one where all would have equal rights.

Oren Ben-Dor grew up in the State of Israel.  He is a Professor of Law and Philosophy in the Law School, University of Southampton, UK. He can be reached at: okbendor@yahoo.com.

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November 28, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Analysis: World Bank policies persistently fail Palestinians

By Alaa Tartir and Jeremy Wildeman – Ma’an – 28/10/2012

The Middle East featured prominently on the agenda of the recent annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Tokyo. But how relevant are these agencies’ policy prescriptions in the context of conflict? In the case of the occupied Palestinian territories they are not only inappropriate but also harmful.

And yet both institutions have relentlessly dished up these prescriptions for the past two decades. To understand why they are so harmful, it is useful to deconstruct the policy recommendations in the World Bank’s latest growth report for the Palestinian territories.

The Bank’s growth report provides a breakdown of the current state of the Palestinian economy, which it describes as fragile and dependent on foreign aid. The report’s frank conclusions are largely unsurprising: aid-based growth is unsustainable, especially because aid levels are expected to decline over time.

The surprising part of the report lies not in the Bank’s negative prognosis of the Palestinian economy, but rather in its recommendations. It calls for the Palestinians to emulate the Asian tigers by “adopting an outward orientation and integrating into world supply chains.”

Just how a people that exercises no control over its own land, borders and natural resources can carry out such export-based growth is not explained. The report further recommends that the Palestinian Authority “should strive to build a business environment that is among the best in the world and not merely on par with its neighbors.”

This is utterly impossible under prolonged occupation, where Palestinian civil and property rights are ignored by an Israeli state that is simultaneously engaged in the mass-expropriation of Palestinian land. The business climate is so bad that one report suggested certain Palestinian businesspersons even prefer to invest in Israel.

The report also repeats a dangerous belief long propagated by the World Bank: that the Palestinian economy can benefit from deeper integration with the Israeli economy.

Actual experience indicates otherwise. The Palestinian economy has been de-developed since 1967, as US scholar Sara Roy’s work has shown, and Palestinian industry has been deliberately sabotaged in favor of Israeli industry, as economist Shir Hever documents.

Classic World Bank economic assumptions that recommend “free trade agreements between a future Palestinian state, Israel and neighboring countries” have never been embraced by Israel.

Palestinians cannot exploit “competitive advantages” because Israel deliberately prevents them. Instead, integration has been one-sided, allowing Israel to exploit a captive Palestinian market cut off from the outside world.

It is vital to understand the extent to which much of the World Bank’s policy advice is destined for failure because it exercises enormous influence on foreign aid to Palestinians, and its recommendations form the basis on which international donors design their aid programs.

In fact, it designed the aid regime adopted by the international community during the Oslo Peace Process of the early 1990s. Since that time, the Bank has prescribed policy recommendations for donors that do not take into account the human reality of Palestinians struggling to survive for decades under a violent military occupation and in colonial conditions.

Nor have the international community and those many prominent international bodies engaged in the ‘peace process,’ such as the World Bank, held Israel to account for its actions.

Indeed, the Bank sanitizes the language it uses when criticizing the occupation, employing euphemisms that downplay the effects of occupation while focusing on the Palestinians when giving reasons why Bank recommendations have failed.

As they met with the world’s delegations in Tokyo, did the World Bank and IMF question their policies and the need to actually reflect the facts on the ground?

Until and unless they do, they will waste valuable time and resources and distract Palestinians from what should be their primary goal: Ending the military occupation as a first step toward sovereignty, freedom, and self-determination.

Until Palestinian rights are secured, it is meaningless to develop aid programs that do not take into account the full impact of the occupation and the expropriation of Palestinian land.

The Bank’s growth report is useful only in revealing that the Palestinian economy is in a critical state of disrepair. Its inability to provide policy recommendations that properly account for the effects of occupation renders its advice irrelevant.

It is time to look for alternative models of aid, ones that do not simply seek new ways for the Palestinians to cope with life under occupation, but rather challenge the status quo while enabling Palestinians to survive, by, for example, promoting investment in smallholder agriculture.

This alone can lead to real economic growth and sustainable development.

Alaa Tartir is Program Director of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and author of The role of international aid in development: the case of Palestine 1994-2008 (Lambert 2011). Jeremy Wildeman, an Al-Shabaka Guest Author, co-founded the Nablus-based charity Project Hope. The full policy brief on World Bank policies by al-Shabaka is available here.

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October 29, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel detains leading MP near Nablus

Ma’an – 27/10/2012

Mahmoud al-Ramahi is secretary-general of the Palestinian parliament. (MaanImages/File)

NABLUS – Israeli forces detained the secretary-general of the Palestinian parliament Mahmoud al-Ramahi on Saturday afternoon as he passed through a northern West Bank checkpoint.

Al-Ramahi was driving south from Nablus when he was seized at the Huwwara checkpoint. His car was also confiscated.

The MP was last released from Israeli jail less than four months ago.

An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the detention and said he is “suspected of involvement in illegal activity,” without elaborating.

Months after al-Ramahi was appointed to the leadership the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, he was seized by Israeli forces in his hometown of al-Bireh, near Ramallah, as part of a sweep of arrests after Hamas won elections.

Al-Ramahi, a medical doctor, was elected on the Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform list.

He was jailed from August 2006 until March 2009. The MP was again arrested in November 2010, and held in administrative detention until July 4 this year.

Al-Ramahi has brokered talks between Hamas and Fatah, and Hamas officials said his last detention was an Israeli attempt to disrupt reconciliation talks.

According to latest statistics, 13 Palestinian MPs are being held in Israeli jails.

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October 27, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Picking olives in a cage

International Solidarity Movement, West Bank | October 25, 2012

I spent Tuesday inside a cage. Not my usual way to spend a sunny Tuesday – but for the Palestinian farmers I was with, this is routine.

This is because their land happens to be near the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel – in fact, it is in the Israeli imposed ‘buffer zone’ between the largest settlement in the West Bank and the surrounding Palestinian villages – of course, the buffer zone is created out of land outside of the settlement, effectively grabbing yet more land from the Palestinians.

Many olive trees are trapped in this ‘buffer zone’ between a fence on one side and Ariel on the other. So, during the Palestinian olive harvest, the villagers who own the land must ask for Israeli permission to access their own trees – as is typical across the West Bank. However, they have a second hurdle to cross, as their trees are behind this fence, the soldiers need to let them in and out every morning and evening.

The gate is meant to be opened at six every morning, during the 20 days that villagers have permission to pick olives inside the cage – some farmers have to set off from home before 5am to get there on time to be allowed in. Five soldiers deigned to grace us with their presence at around 6.15, zooming down their patrol road in a military jeep. They opened the first gate onto the road, then past the rolls and rolls of barbed wire separating this from the next gate, eventually coming down to permit access to the sixty Palestinians, who were waiting patiently outside, as the sun rose over the hill.

The soldiers took the ID card of every person who passed, impatiently gesturing at people to hurry up with their guns. When we had all crossed the patrol road and into the third gate into the cage-proper, the door slammed shut behind us. We were locked inside until 4pm, when the soldiers would come and release us.

This length of time has severe implications for the farmers picking inside the cage – if anyone is ill or gets injured over the course of the day, there is no guarantee that medical help would be able to reach them. Children can’t join their families picking olives after school. If families don’t pick their olives within the permission time, they will lose them. Multiple trips can’t be made during the day – any olives that need to be removed have to be taken in one go at the end of the day – and this can be a lot. More than anything, the loss of autonomy and control over your own life and livelihood is devastating.

The family that I was picking with didn’t actually own the land – they rented it from another family who live in a village very near to the land. However, because of the cage, it would take them around three hours to reach their trees. So although the majority of Palestinian families have a deep connection to their trees and their land, this family needed to sacrifice this for the practicality of allowing someone who lives closer to farm their land.

Actually picking the olives was trouble free. We saw one settler, jogging past on the other side of the fence – apparently there are sports fields there. At the end of the day, we walked the forty minutes back to the gate and waited for the soldiers to let us back out. This time, they called people one by one, handing them back their ID cards. This took rather a long time. At the end, there was one woman left – for several tense minutes, the soldiers couldn’t find her ID card and held her back. Her relief was tangible when it was found, and she was allowed to follow the rest of her family out of the cage. Palestinians need their ID cards for all aspects of their daily life, to have it go missing would be a big problem.

Israel aims to humiliate and control the Palestinian farmers – with great dignity, patience and steadfastness, the Palestinians gather their olives year after year, waiting until the moment when they will break free from the cages.

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October 26, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Bassem Tamimi injured and arrested with 3 others at Boycott Israel protest

International Solidarity Movement, West Bank | October 24, 2012

A demonstrator gets first aid help after being injured by a sound grenade at the protest

Four people, including Bassem Tamimi, the head of the Popular Committee of Nabi Saleh, were arrested by Israeli police today as Palestinians staged a peaceful direct action in an Israeli supermarket near the illegal settlement of Shaar Binyamin, north of Ramallah, calling for a boycott of Israeli goods. Two Palestinians were injured and removed in ambulances. Before he was arrested, Tamimi’s ribs were reportedly broken.

Two of those arrested were international human rights activists. One is an American and the other is from Poland. The American activist was dragged away by four Israeli officers.

Starting at around ten this morning, Palestinians and international activists gathered in the parking lot of Rami Levi supermarket, which is frequented by Israelis from the surrounding illegal settlements. The activists entered the market and walked up and down the aisles, holding Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) placards and waving Palestinian flags.

Demonstrators left the market voluntarily when the Israeli army arrived on the scene. As activists exited the building, about forty police, border police and soldiers were waiting in the parking lot. There, the Israeli authorities attacked the demonstrators and fired sound bombs at them.

Even though the demonstrators remained non-violent, soldiers punched, dragged and choked them. As one Palestinian man was pulled away from the soldiers by other demonstrators, to prevent his arrest, his walking stick was taken away as he lay on the ground – following this, he could not walk without assistance. A sound bomb was thrown just metres from the head of another Palestinian man who was already unconscious following attacks from the authorities.

Bassem Tamimi is the head of the popular committee of Nabi Saleh, a village that has suffered drastically from the creation and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank. Halamish settlement was created less than 1km away from Nabi Saleh, stealing a great deal of the villages’ land, as well as a spring that provided a vital water source for the village. Tamimi was released from prison in April of this year after spending 13 months in an Israeli prison for being accused of “taking part in illegal gatherings.” He was released on bail in April in order to take care of his elderly mother who had suffered a stroke.

The action today aimed to highlight the BDS campaign (www.bdsmovement.net ), which calls for a boycott of Israeli goods.

The status of the detained demonstrators is currently unknown, they remain held in the police station of the illegal settlement of Shaar Binyamin.

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October 24, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Galilee First!

By Sam Bahour | Palestine Chronicle | October 21, 2012

The horrendous reality of the Palestinian communities inside Israel—in places like Akka, Haifa, Nazareth, Yaffa, and the Negev—is not about being regulated to sit in the back of the bus; they could only wish for such blatant racism. Here, the racism is multilayered, ideological, well-camouflaged, state-sponsored, and non-stop. Anyone who thinks that resolving the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would bring peace to the region would be well-advised to peel away the veneer of democratic façade, one that covers an Israeli plan with only one goal in mind: completing the campaign of ethnically cleansing Palestinians that started with the creation of the State of Israel.

Last week, on a beautiful fall day, I sat in a friend’s living room in a village at the northern tip of Israel, adjacent to the Lebanese border, in the part of Israel called the Galilee. This is where the Palestinian citizens of Israel are concentrated. Five generations of Palestinians were sitting in the room. As expected in Palestinian society, within no time, politics was the focus of the discussion. But this political discussion had a different twist from what most of those following this conflict are accustomed. The issues had to do with the Palestinian citizens of Israel and how the Israeli government systematically and structurally discriminates against them.

Bilateral negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, better known as the infamous Oslo Peace Process, began with a slogan (and accompanying actions on the ground) of Gaza and Jericho First. The idea was that the Palestinian Authority, which the Oslo Accords created, would start by being set up in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank city of Jericho, a sort of pilot phase before subsequently deploying to all of the Palestinian areas defined in the Accords. The standing joke at the time was that what Israel, the military occupying power, really meant was Gaza and Jericho Only!

With 20 years of a never-ending “peace process,” Israeli misdirection diverted the world’s attention, including the Palestinian leadership’s, away from the discriminatory workings within Israel itself. As the parties quibbled over who violated the Oslo Agreement first and most, Israel never stopped strangling the Palestinian towns and villages inside it. More recently, even some of the mainstream, international research outfits, such as International Crisis Group (ICG), were forced to take note. Their March 2012 report titled, “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” stated:

“World attention remains fixed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but a distinct, albeit related, conflict smoulders within Israel itself. It might be no less perilous. Jewish-Arab domestic relations have deteriorated steadily for a decade. More and more, the Jewish majority views the Palestinian minority as subversive, disloyal and – due to its birth rates – a demographic threat. Palestinian citizens are politically marginalised, economically underprivileged, ever more unwilling to accept systemic inequality and ever more willing to confront the status quo.”

That’s researcher-talk for “A slow and calculated campaign of displacing an entire population in broad daylight—world, take note.”

As one travels northward in Israel, a stark reality cannot be ignored. Israel is empty. Most of the lands which comprise the State of Israel, as it is recognized worldwide, are empty of any population. The sad irony is that less than one hour’s drive north of where we were sitting, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, who, since 1948, have been prohibited by Israel from returning to their homes, dwell in squalid refugee camps, waiting for international law and UN resolutions calling for their return home to be respected. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, a Palestinian researcher with the Palestine Land Society, and a refugee himself, has extensively documented this phenomenon of empty lands in Israel, lands that Palestinian refugees call home. The undeniable fact is that allowing Palestinian refugees to return home would disrupt very little on the ground in Israel. It would, however, threaten the very basis of its existence as an exclusively Jewish state and create a demographic majority of Palestinians—a normal expectation, given that they were the majority in 1948 prior to being expelled.

Another startling realization, when traveling around the Palestinian farming villages in the Galilee, is that the hilltops are dotted with gated, Jewish Israeli communities and Israeli government-declared nature reserves, all creating a physical barrier to the natural growth of the indigenous Palestinian communities. Added to these physical obstructions to Palestinian development, Israeli law provides for another platform, a legal one, whereby hundreds of Israeli communities can keep out Palestinians on cultural grounds. Coming from the occupied territory of the West Bank, these physical obstacles and legal tools looked to me much like the illegal, Jewish-only settlements that surround every Palestinian city. The physical location of both types of these residential colonies is not random, but rather a sharp demographic weapon to interrupt and stunt the growth of the Palestinian communities.

While hearing the tribulations of Palestinian communities in Israel, I was reminded of another jarring fact: Israel detains and arrests Palestinians for their thoughts. One of the persons I was with, a 64-year-old man, was released a few years back after spending two years without charges in an Israeli prison. On my way home, I stopped in Haifa and, while speaking to a new business acquaintance there, he reminded me of another case: Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel and the director of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, who, like so many others, is imprisoned in Israeli jails after an unfair trial aimed at striking fear into an entire minority community in Israel. Also, just as in the areas under military occupation, Israel tends an army of collaborators within the Palestinian communities to do their bidding for them.

I wanted to engage more, but had to head back home to the West Bank.

Now that I’m a Palestinian ID holder, which means I have West Bank residency status issued by the Israeli occupation authorities, I can’t be in Israel as a tourist. My U.S. citizenship—my only one—is useless now that I am classified as a West Bank Palestinian in the Israeli government’s eyes. Israel is the only place on earth where I can’t be an American! Thus, my Israeli military-issued permit, which allows me to enter Israel, restricts my movement so that I have to be back by 10 in the evening to what I call my cage, also known as the metropolitan area of Ramallah.

What is now clear to me, and wasn’t when I first arrived here shortly after Oslo, is that the system of command and control, which oppresses over four million Palestinians under military occupation, is strikingly similar to the system which controls over one million Muslim and Christian Palestinians inside Israel.

The Israel goal is to erase Palestinian collective memory, limit Palestinian education, squeeze Palestinian living space, and strangle any serious notion of Palestinian economic enterprise. But Palestinians are not going anywhere. This was confirmed when I asked a law student from this Galilaean village where he plans to be in five years. Without hesitation, he said, “Here, in my village, and not for the next five years, but for the next 10 and 20 and 100 years.”

After hours of deep discussion in that quiet Palestinian village, tucked away in the velvet-like green hills of the Galilee, a Palestinian researcher, who was quiet for most of the time, spoke in a calm, definitive voice. He said that everything we were discussing, in terms of how much harm Israel is doing to Palestinians living in Israel and under military occupation, is true, but in the village, the numbers speak volumes. Over the past 64 years, since Israel’s creation, and despite all of its attempts to force the Palestinians off the land, the population has increased as per official Israeli statistics. As long as the Palestinians exist on this land, he asserted, their rights are bound to be realized.

All the way home, I could not get out of my mind a new political slogan that would reveal the extent of the Palestinian tragedy, The Galilee First. Instead of managing the conflict as if the only contentious issue is about those of us living under Israeli military occupation, the international community, and Palestinian leadership as well, should call for the world to witness the reality of Palestinians inside Israel. If Israel is bent on discriminating against one fifth of its own citizens, what should we expect of it in the occupied territories, areas that are not internationally recognized as Israel? Indeed, the next time I’m asked what I think the solution to this conflict is, my answer will be ready: Let’s start with full equal rights for Palestinians inside Israel. In other words, The Galilee First if Israel is serious about peace and truly desires historic reconciliation with the Palestinians.

– Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business development consultant from Youngstown, Ohio, living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He frequently provides independent commentary on Palestine and serves as a policy advisor of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and blogs at http://www.epalestine.com.

October 21, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Meet Zionist Miriam Levinger

| Feb 2, 2011

Imagine that into your beautiful vibrant city moves this woman, who, along with her highly-funded terrorist friends, tries to take it over through genocide. This is the reality in Hebron, Palestine.

Meet Miriam Levinger, U.S. citizen from the Bronx, New York… the mother of the Israeli colonial settlers in the ‘West Bank’

Filmed in Tel Rumeida, Hebron, Palestine

To see the second video in this series, click here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5C8dpnxzT4&feature=channel_video_title

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October 20, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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