Tag Archives: Palestine

Rep. Ilhan Omar Wanted To Discuss Palestine. Here’s What’s Happened There Since.

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In the case of alleged knife attacks, the “attackers” are almost always facing a large number of armed IDF, and are a good distance away. If the “attacker” DID brandish a knife they could be shot AT and not harmed, especially not killed dead.  The females are always petite and could just be pushed away or dodged. But..dead men tell no tales.

The part of ‘s comments we didn’t discuss was the part about a decades-long [since the suspicious Jewish holocaust in Europe] human rights crisis. As Congress fixated on her, a 15-year-old Palestinian died after being shot in the head by Israeli soldiers & scores of daily injustices continued.

RAMALLAH (Ma’an) 03/08/2019  — The Israeli authorities returned the body of killed Palestinian 15-year-old Samah Mubarak to her family, on Friday evening, outside of Israel’s Ofer detention center in Beituniya west of Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank

The video is edited such that it does not show what happened in the seconds prior to the altercation and shooting.

Attempted stabbing attack in JLM: A 16 year old attacker, a resident of the West Bank, arrived at the az-Za’ayyem checkpoint and attempted to stab the security personnel with a knife. Quick response by the forces managed to neutralize her pic.twitter.com/vUO6vYcm1w

— Israel Police (@israelpolice) January 30, 2019

Israel has long had “cemeteries for the enemy dead,” also referred to as “cemeteries of numbers,” where Palestinians who died during attacks on Israelis are held in nameless graves marked by numbers. Israel dramatically increased its policy of withholding bodies since the beginning of a wave of unrest across the occupied Palestinian territory in October 2015, although it has scaled back on the policy in recent months.

A joint statement released in 2016 by Addameer and the Israeli minority rights group Adalah condemned Israel’s practice of withholding bodies as “a severe violation of international humanitarian law as well as international human rights law, including violations of the right to dignity, freedom of religion, and the right to practice culture.”
Israeli forces had shot and killed Mubarak, on January 30th, at the al-Zaayim checkpoint, on a road that leads to the entrance of the illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, east of occupied Jerusalem.

Israel has held Mubarak’s body since the shooting, accusing her of wielding a knife in an attempt to carry out a stabbing attack against heavily armed Israeli soldiers deployed at the checkpoint. Mubarak is from the Qaddura refugee camp in central Ramallah.

Below photo:

Just two weeks ago an Israeli soldier cocked his gun & shot 21-year-old Palestinian Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif in the head when he had already been shot & was lying on the ground incapacitated. The Israeli occupying army alleges he stabbed an Israeli soldier but that can be dismissed with no further ado as propaganda to justify summary execution.

Photos like this–where unarmed Palestinians are surrounded by Gestapo-like military force ready to execute on the spot–show exactly what Palestinian Intifada is up against. Now we know exactly what kind of political pressure must be mobilized in defense of Intifada.

Palestinian at Beit Hanoun checkpoint (Abed Al Hashlamoun:EPA) Apr 4 2016

Occupied life goes on, business as usual: an Israeli shutdown of water supplies for 2,600 Palestinians, per Maan, and the nighttime clash on the Gaza border that killed Zaied. The military ― which receives more than $3 billion in U.S. aid per year ― then launched airstrikes into Gaza, one of the poorest areas in the world on pretext of launched weaponized balloons launch of armed balloons and a rocket into Israel.

Palestinian mourners carry the body of Samah Mubarak, aged 16, during her funeral in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on March 9, 2019, after the Israeli army handed over the corpse of the girl.

‘Witnesses are so important’

The shooting happened just outside the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) home in Tel Rumeida, where volunteers said they saw whole incident.

Moments after, one of the volunteers Tweeted: “I saw everything. I saw soldiers loading the guns. He had his arms up and was shaking, he was unarmed and they just shot him.”

Two activists who live at the home told MEE that the volunteers at ISM strongly believe that the stabbing attack was fabricated.

One of the volunteers, who asked to remain anonymous, said that while she didn’t see the shooting herself, as she was ducking on the ground next to the window with a few others, she trusted the eyewitness accounts of her friends and fellow volunteers who stood, watching the whole thing.

“We know what has been happening lately, and that there have been a lot of important details left out, so we know witnesses are so important,” she said, adding that in most cases in which witnesses were able to film or photograph an incident, they were able to discredit some if not all of the entire Israeli account.

Should members of the US Congress take edcational trip to Palestine Prison?

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The intense behind-the-scenes support of unpopular anti-BDS measures have put some Israel advocacy organizations under an uncomfortable spotlight. People vs Congress.

 Irmep Poll : When asked, 41.2% of American adults recently polled said members making visits to Israel should also visit “territories where Palestinians expelled during Israel’s creation. 

Question: Should members of the US Congress taking educational trips to Israel also visit the territories where Palestinians expelled during Israel’s creation? (Who would say no?)

Poll: 75% of Americans Oppose Outlawing Boycotts of Israel

Some Fighting Back Over Freedom of Speech

New legislation passed in the Senate seeks to legalize the right of individual state governments to force American companies to certify they won’t engage in economic boycotts of Israel as a condition for receiving government contracts.

The “Combating BDS Act of 2019” is embedded as Title IV within the ‘‘Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019’’ (S.1). If signed into law, S.1 would allow states to withhold government funding from entities unwilling to certify they will not boycott Israel. Most existing state anti-BDS measures require pledge forms that contractors must sign as a condition for winning or renewing contracts

But only 22.5% of American adults favor anti-boycott measures. A new representative IRmep poll conducted through Google Surveys finds that 74.9% of Americans oppose forcing government contractors to forswear boycotts.

Question: Should Congress force American businesses seeking government contracts to first sign a pledge that they won’t boycott Israel for its human rights record and military occupation?

Source: IRmep representative poll of 1,000 American adults through Google Surveyson February 5-9 with a root mean square of 5.1%.

Late in 2018, Senator Ben Cardin, a leading recipient of Israel lobby campaign contributions, attempted to include the Israel Anti-Boycott Act in must-pass spending legislation. The effort was stymied by the government shutdown.

In 2017 Cardin co-sponsored legislation seeking to amend a swath of U.S. lawsto outlaw boycotts of Israel. That earlier “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” legislation was also broadly unpopular. 69% of Americans opposed its harsh individual penalties which could have fined Americans up to $1 million or jailed them for up to 20 years. The earlier version also clumsily inserted Israel into laws authorizing US national and economic emergency response.

At least 25 states – many quietly lobbied by local Israel advocacy organizations – have now passed their own laws or started enforcing gubernatorial executive orders prohibiting the flow of state contracts to any business unwilling to sign pledges not to boycott Israel. They also ban compliant contractors from transferring state funding on to subcontractors unwilling to sign such pledges. But some are beginning to fight for their right to boycott as speech protected by the 1st Amendment.

Esther Koontz prevailed in a freedom of speech lawsuit against the state of Kansas which attempted to insert an anti-boycott pledge into her contract to train math teachers. Bahia Amawi sued the state of Texas after refusing to sign an anti-boycott waiver and then losing her contract as a speech pathologist. IT contractor and former Maryland state representative Saqib Ali in January sued over lost business opportunities state of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Attorney General Brian Frosh under Hogan’s anti-BDS executive order over.

Not all such 1st Amendment lawsuits have prevailed. In January, Arkansas Judge Brian Miller dismissed a case filed by the Arkansas Times challenging the state’s anti-BDS law after the newspaper refused to sign waivers as a condition to receive state-funded university ads.

Acknowledging his ruling diverged from federal precedents, the presiding judge found that boycotts are not, in fact, protected by the First Amendment. The Arkansas legislature – which like other state bodies and the Congress is under constant pressure of local and national Israel advocacy organizations – was poised during the lawsuit to undertake modifications to its law until something unchallengeable in court finally emerged.

However, their intense behind-the-scenes support of unpopular anti-BDS measures have put some Israel advocacy organizations under an uncomfortable spotlight. The office of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam released under state sunshine laws in 2018 hundreds of pages of records detailing the questionable activities of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board.

VIAB is an opaque taxpayer-funded state entity launched in 1996 that works independently of the commonwealth’s economic development board to secure lucrative opportunities for Israeli businesses. In 2016-2018 VIAB executed a complex reconstitution to hire a new anti-BDS director from Israel – by diluting the governor’s right to influence VIAB’s leadership appointments. A broad coalition of state human rights organizations – the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights – is now calling for a cutoff in all funding to VIAB and an audit of its activities.

In addition to anti-boycott measures S.1 also includes loan guarantees and Israeli access to prepositioned stockpiles of US weapons Israel can use in the event of regional conflict. S.1 augments Israeli access to US space technology, missile defense and anti-UAV support. The measure also expresses opposition to US withdrawals from Syria which the Israeli government strongly opposes.

Poll methodology and information about RMSE as a sampling error benchmark, raw data and demographic filters are available from Google.

When Satan chooses Your town

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Bonus video: MUST WATCH

 In the video:  In the spring of 2002, the Israeli military had the Palestinian town of Ramallah under siege.  The IDF had captured three of the four Palestinian television stations.  While in control of these media outlets, the Israeli military implemented a very disturbing plan: they began broadcasting pornographic movies to the Palestinian households.  For those who are familiar with the tactics frequently used by Israel against the Palestinian people, such a thing will come as no surprise. They also take over Palestinian sites routinely and replace it with pornography. Such is the nature of Israel, worshipped by Christian Zionists.

 ignore Palestine at your peril because the same evil source own us!

Remembering The Gaza Airport in Palestine. This is one of the MANY many examples of what Israel occupiers have done to the Palestinians. Just to glimpse the anatomy of  “Israel”.

“For Israel, shelling the concrete building of the airport means eliminating Palestinian existence”

Israelis accused of vandalising airport - Telegraph

Ironically it’s not been since the Jewish holocust Hollywood movies has the world seen such cruelty.

Israel bombed the airport because: “[The airport] was a way to bypass the Interim Agreement, that the Palestinians can take out people without our notice and without our security checks, and bring in weapons or things like that.”

Gaza Airport, like other airports in Palestine, functioned as an important stop in a network of prestigious airlines in the late 1930s. Palestine Airways was founded in July 1937 to be the second oldest in the region…

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton attended the opening ceremony for the new Gaza Airport on Dec. 14, 1998, and it was used for a short time by visiting dignitaries, including South Africa’s former President Nelson Mandela.

The airport was a step, Clinton went on, toward “a future in which it is easier and cheaper to bring materials, technology and expertise in and out of Gaza; a future in which tourists and traders can flock here, to this beautiful place on the Mediterranean; a future, in short, in which the Palestinian people are connected to the world.”

Palestinians stand next to the Flying Hospital, an aircraft carrying dozens of international surgeons at Gaza Airport in Gaza. The aircraft belonged to Operation Smile, an international humanitarian foundation established in 1982 to improve the lives of children worldwide.

Although this vision never became reality, Clinton’s visit is still regarded as a milestone by Palestinians.

“It was quite a day,” says Salman Abu Halib, then director-general of Gaza airport. “We will all remember it forever. The Palestinian people felt they’d secured one of the symbols of sovereignty, and this was being witnessed by the president of the United States.”

Abu Halib remembers crying with happiness. 

BUT Israel controlled routes and schedules, and prevented flights from landing at night by keeping the navigational equipment necessary to guide those planes. Passengers, luggage and aircrafts were subject to Israeli security checks for the new Gaza Airport. I can just imagine those security check delays as we now suffer the same plight…and Israel invented the damn TSA!

Arab Palestine before European Zionism

Above: Lydda Airport. The airport was open for regular traffic in 1936. Lydda, the town close to the airport was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs before 1948. Following the creation of the state of Israel, the airport was taken over by the Israeli authorities, and renamed Lod Airport. It is currently the site of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. The 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle, also known as the Lydda Death March, was the expulsion of 50,000–70,000 Palestinian Arabs when Israeli troops captured the towns in July that year.*

But Israel destroyed the runway in early 2001, a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, taking advantage of the distraction for 6 weeks.  Israel is reported to have carried out a series of nerve gas attacks on Palestinian civilian populations in both Gaza and the West Bank. The symptoms reported match those of tabun, a known anticholinesterase poison belonging to a family of organophosphate nerve poisons. There have been reports of chemical warfare practiced on the Palestinians since 1983.

Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza a few years later, in 2005, but maintains tight control of Gaza’s land, air and sea borders, while Egypt controls access from the south.

Israel says the restrictions are to stop weapons entering the Strip and to isolate Hamas, the Islamist movement which has controlled Gaza’s two million population since 2007.


Below: Gaza Airport…Israel bombs it back to the stone age.
The abandoned Yasser Arafat International Airport on the Gaza Strip – Strange Abandoned Places

Israhell Guilty As Hell

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Israel Broke Int’l Law, Committed War Crimes, Shooting 6,000 Gaza Protesters

They’re trying to narrow it down to individuals. That’s baloney. This is Israhell official policy.

GENEVA: A UN probe released Thursday said Israel have committed crimes against humanity in responding to last year’s unrest in Gaza, as snipers “intentionally” shot civilians including children, journalists and the disabled.

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory investigated possible violations during demonstrations in the Gaza strip between March 30 and Dec.31 last year.

Commission chairman Santiago Canton said Israeli soldiers committed multiple breaches of international humanitarian law while suppressing protesters who were calling for Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return to their former homes now inside Israel.

“Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity,” he said in a statement.

Commission member Sara Hossain told reporters in Geneva that Israeli snipers “intentionally shot children.”
“They have intentionally shot people with disabilities. They have intentionally shot journalists,” she added.

Below is video footage of this new weapon technology. Have you seen anything like this before?


A 14-year-old child inhaled an unknown neurotoxin that has left him in a coma.

Health workers were also hit by snipers who shot more than 6,000 “unarmed demonstrators” during weeks of protest, according to the inquiry set up in May by the UN Human Rights Council.

Netanyahu said the rights council, a frequent target of criticism by Israel, had hit “new records of hypocrisy and lies, out of obsessive hatred of Israel.”
Among the most contentious questions surrounding the protests was whether the demonstrators presented a threat to Israeli troops.

Everyone is against us, remember the holocaust!

Netanyahu said on Twitter that “it is Hamas which fires rockets at Israeli civilians, bombs and carries out terrorist activities during the violent demonstrations on the fence.”
But investigators pointed to evidence that Israeli troops targeted Palestinians “who were neither directly participating in hostilities, nor posing an imminent threat.”

The commission also dismissed claims the protests were aimed to conceal acts of terrorism, describing the demonstrations as “civilian in nature”.

“Despite some acts of significant violence, the commission found that the demonstrations did not constitute combat or military campaigns.”
The investigators did not have access to the Israeli military’s rules of engagement.

But, based on publicly available evidence, the commission said there is evidence that Israeli troops have been instructed that they can use lethal force against those who incite others to violence.

The so-called “main inciters” provision is at odds with international law and must be removed from Israel’s rules of engagement, Canton told reporters.

The commission said it conducted 325 interviews with victims, witnesses and other sources, reviewed more than 8,000 documents and looked at drone footage among other material.
Israel did not cooperate with the probe or provide access to Gaza.

Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim told AFP that the panel’s findings had proven that Israel “committed clear war crimes” against peaceful protesters and demanded justice.
Israel has however per usual accused Hamas of using the protests as cover for infiltrations and attacks.

Canton told reporters the commission considered Hamas’s culpability for the bloodshed, but stressed that since the demonstrations were generally peaceful in nature, Hamas was under no obligation to stop them.

“People have the right to demonstrate, they have the right to assembly,” he told reporters.

“So to put responsibility on (Hamas) for letting those demonstrations happen (is) against international humanitarian law,” he added.
The UN inquiry was in part tasked with identifying individuals who could be prosecuted for international crimes.

The commission declined to discuss specific suspects, but the report calls for the UN human rights office to manage the list of those with possible criminal responsibility and to share that information with relevant courts.

It also calls on states to “consider imposing individual sanctions, such as a travel ban or an assets freeze, on those identified as responsible by the commission.”

Christian and Muslim Palestinians in Jerusalem warn of Israel attempts to take their land

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Dear Christian Zionists, nothing good comes from evil!

January 7, 2019

Palestinian Christians living in occupied Jerusalem are fighting back against Israeli attempts to take away their land. Their struggle to remain in the historic city was raised by Christian Today in a report today where the non-denominational Christian news agency said that “Christians in Jerusalem are warning of another attempt by Israeli parliamentarians to take land they own”.

Israeli lawmakers have made repeated attempts to confiscate or nationalise church-owned lands. The latest threat against the Christian community was made before Christmas; it is thought to be the fifth occasion on which factions within the governing coalition sought to impose legislation which would allow the expropriation of Church lands.

Previous attempts to impose the so-called “Tenants’ Rights Bill”, said Christian Today,  received worldwide condemnation and even led to the temporary closure of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City – the historic site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

The Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, who is the most senior Orthodox Christian leader in the region, has been highly critical of attempts to confiscate land from his and other churches. He has toured the USA and EU countries to lobby against the Israeli bill, which members of the right-wing coalition are trying to push through within the Israeli Knesset.

Israel intensifying ‘settlement ring’ around Jerusalem’s Old City

Publishing a new map yesterday, Ir Amim described an “accelerated, intensifying chain of new facts on the ground in the most historically contested and politically sensitive part of Jerusalem: the Old City and adjacent ring of Palestinian neighbourhoods”.

Ir Amim pointed to “a mounting number of state-sponsored settlement campaigns inside Palestinian neighbourhoods”, as well as “settler-initiated evictions of Palestinians, takeovers of their homes, and the expansion of settler compounds”, as well as the use of “touristic settlement sites” as “key points along a ring of tightening Israeli control”.

According to the group, the Israeli authorities have struggled over the decades to advance plans for settlements due to “the population density in the built-up areas of the Old City”. Some 100,000 Palestinians live in the Old City and its immediate environs, compared to 6,000 Israelis.

Israel’s experiment on humans

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“Using the moral yardstick mentioned by [Moshe Sharett], I must ask: Are [we justified] in opening fire on the [Palestinian] Arabs who cross [the border] to reap the crops they planted in our territory; they, their women, and their children? Will this stand up to moral scrutiny . . .? We shoot at those hungry [Palestinian] Arabs who cross the line [to graze their flocks]—- will this stand up to moral review? Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned [term often used by Israelis to describe the ethnically cleansed] villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg. . . . [It may be that this] cannot pass review, but I know no other method of guarding the borders. then tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders.” (Righteous Victims, p. 275)

* “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

Because of its use during the assault on Gaza, G-NIUS was able to present its product as “combat-proven.” The unmanned Armored Personnel Carrier that was deployed in Gaza in the summer of 2014 marked the first time a remote-controlled, unmanned armored personnel carrier participated in combat.

Gaza: Israel’s experiment on humans in a situation of extreme stress and deprivation by Gideon Levy

It’s hard to imagine the day-to-day routine in this sweltering heat with only two-and-a-half hours of electricity a day.

One of the biggest experiments involving human subjects ever conducted anywhere is taking place right before our eyes, and the world is silent.

The project is at its peak and the world shows no interest. This experiment on human beings, unsanctioned by any of the international scientific institutions whose oversight is required by the Helsinki Declaration, seeks to examine human behaviour in situations of extreme stress and deprivation.

The experimental group does not comprise just a few, nor dozens or hundreds, nor thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. The experimental population includes no fewer than two million human beings.

Thus far they have stood the test amazingly well. While some turbulence is evident inside the pressure cooker within which they are confined, it has not yet exploded. The Gaza Strip is being watched to see when and in what form it will ultimately explode. This is apparently only a matter of time.

Snipers terrorize Palestinians in a children’s park in the west bank

As presented by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt: What happens to two million human beings when they are deprived of electricity nearly all the time, day and night? What happens to them in winter, and in spring, and especially now, in the terrible heat of a Middle Eastern summer?

This experiment, like all such experiments, is being conducted in a phased manner. The frog is to be cooked in water that will gradually be heated until it boils.

At first Gaza was deprived of electricity for about a third of each 24 hours, then for about half, and now the level has been ratcheted up such that the two million residents of Gaza have electricity for only about 2.5 hours in each 24. Let’s see what that does to them. Let’s watch how they respond. And how about when they are supplied with electricity for only a single hour per day? Or for one hour per week? This experiment is still in its early stages, and no one can foresee its end.

In the last decade, this battered strip of land has also turned into a cage, the largest cage on earth.

The location of this experiment is among the most cursed parcels of land on earth. Forty kilometres long, its width varying between 5.7km and 12.5km, with a total area of 365 square kilometres – the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places in the world. According to the CIA, in July 2016 there were some 1.7 million people there; the Palestinian Authority cites two million residents as of October 2016.

In any case, a million of them are considered refugees or the children or grandchildren of refugees, about half of whom are still living in refugee camps. Compared with other refugee camps elsewhere in the Arab world, the camps in Gaza are considered especially wretched, except perhaps for the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. The refugees in Gaza were expelled or fled from Israel in 1948 and comprise about a fifth of all Palestinian refugees in the world.

This population has rarely known any meaningful period of quiet, security or minimal economic welfare. Their situation today may be at its worst and most despairing, and a UN report has already concluded that in another two-and-a-half years or so, by 2020, the Gaza Strip will no longer be habitable, largely due to the escalating water problem. The new cuts in electricity are exacerbating the plight of these human beings as the experiment continues.

Gaza is surrounded: by Israel to the north and east and by Egypt to the south, and on its western boundary by the sea, where the Israeli military has absolute control. Since the advent of Hamas rule in Gaza, Israel in cooperation with Egypt has imposed a siege. The siege has been eased somewhat over the years, but remains a siege, especially with respect to the movement of people into and out of Gaza and the almost total prohibition on the export of goods.

But even that isn’t sufficient. Gaza’s torments are far from over. Now comes the reduced supply of electricity.

Palestinians walk on a street at the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City during a power outage on 11 June (AFP)

Palestinians walk on a street at the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City during a power outage on 11 June (AFP)

Gaza has a single electric power plant, which cannot produce as much electricity as is consumed. Launched in 2002 with a production capacity of about 140 megawatts, the plant is limited by the carrying capacity of its grid and in 2006 was producing only 90 megawatts, with 120 additional megawatts supplied by Israel, paid for in full, of course.

The plant was blown up by Israel after the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in the summer of 2006, when it was producing 43 percent of Gaza’s electricity consumption. After reconstruction, the plant reached a production capacity of about 80 megawatts. But even this is entirely dependent on Israel, which is the plant’s only supplier of diesel fuel and spare parts.

When the siege was first imposed, Israel began restricting the quantity of diesel fuel it supplied. Gaza needs between 280 and 400 megawatts of electricity, depending on the season. About a third of the total required, some 120 megawatts, was coming from Israel, and 60-70 megawatts was coming from the power plant. There was a chronic shortage of electricity in Gaza even before the most recent decrease. Gazans have been without electricity for some hours every day for years now.

The power struggle between Abbas and Hamas, which rules in Gaza, a struggle in which Israel cooperates in a contemptible manner with the PA, has created the present situation.

On 11 June of this year, Israel’s security cabinet decided to cut the supply of electricity provided by Israel to Gaza as per a request by the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. That set off the present crisis, the worst so far.

The power struggle between Abbas and Hamas, which rules in Gaza, a struggle in which Israel cooperates in a contemptible manner with the PA, has created the present situation. In this situation there are no good guys and bad guys, but only bad guys.

Catastrophic situation

About two weeks after the cabinet decision, Israel cut back on its supply again and eliminated another eight megawatts from the 120 megawatts it was providing. In consequence, the supply in some parts of Gaza, especially in the west and south, has been reduced to only about two-and-a-half hours of electricity in each 24 hours. Two-and-a-half hours of electricity per day.

Breaking the bones policy when Palestinians resist.

It’s hard to imagine the day-to-day routine in this sweltering heat with only two-and-a-half hours of electricity a day. It’s hard to picture how food can be kept fresh, frightening to think of all the ordinary human tasks being done without electricity, awful to consider all the hospital patients whose lives depend on electricity.

Not long ago, an article in Haaretz (4 June) by Mohammed Azaizeh, who works for the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha, described what was happening in the Al-Rantisi Hospital in Gaza.

In the paediatric ICU, children were hooked up to respirators for which the electricity was available only a few hours each day, their lives now dependent on a generator. Sometimes the generator breaks down. Hospital director Dr Muhammad Abu Sulwaya described the situation in his hospital as catastrophic. In the other Gaza hospitals the situation is, of course, similar.

Thus the residents of Gaza again fall victim to cynical political machinations that play out at their expense. The unbridled power struggles and ego games between Abbas and Hamas, between Egypt and Hamas, and between Israel and all the others have consequences that reach as far as the paediatric respirators for the children at Al-Rantisi.

Send them to Gaza, Israel’s penal colony
Gideon Levy

Read More »

No one can see where this will end, with the parties only further entrenching their positions and the world responding with apathy. The lack of electricity results in a lack of clean water and flooding of untreated sewage. Gaza is accustomed to all of that, but even the fantastic and unparalleled resilience of Gaza’s residents has its limits.

Israel bears primary responsibility for this situation, due to the siege it imposes, but Israel is certainly not the only culprit.

The PA and Egypt are full partners in this crime. Yes, crime. This is 2017 and preventing millions of human beings from receiving electricity means depriving them of oxygen and water. Israel’s responsibility cries out to the heavens because Gaza is still under partial Israeli occupation.

Although Israel withdrew its military and its settlers from the Gaza Strip, it retains sole responsibility for many other aspects of life in Gaza. This makes Israel responsible for providing electricity for Gaza’s residents. The PA also bears a heavy responsibility for the current situation, in which it is abusing its own people. Likewise Egypt, which likes to refer to itself loftily as the sister of Palestinians, even as its own role in the siege of Gaza is intolerable.

Gaza is dying, slowly. Elsewhere, its suffering matters to no one. No one in Washington, or Brussels, or Jerusalem, or Cairo nor even in Ramallah. Incredibly, there is evidently almost no one who cares that two million people are abandoned to the dark at night and to the sweltering heat of the summer days, with nowhere to run and no shred of hope. Nothing.

The fraud that is the Temple Mount movement

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Rothschild’s European destroyers take once peaceful Palestine

Belligerent occupation does not result in the transfer of sovereignty in favour of the military occupier,who merely acquires a temporary right of administration. The sources for the first temple are solely biblical, and no substantial archaeological remains have been verified. The Zionists have invented their history, their identity and the basis of a homeland. There is no history of these European Jews ever being in Palestine in the first place. No one knows where the Jewish temple used to be! Or ever was! It’s all part of the massive hoax called Israel.*

Article from 972mag

The Temple Mount movement is and always has been a movement not for religious equality, but for Jewish religious domination and contempt for Muslims and Islam. That’s what Feiglin’s about, that’s what Etzion is obviously all about, and anybody who thinks Miri Regev and Yariv Levin and these other nonstop Arab-bashers in the Knesset who want to let Jews pray freely on the Temple Mount are looking for peaceful coexistence, dream on.

For refusing to accept Zionism, they were harassed, incarcerated, and physically tortured by “Zionist police and agents.” As a result, they scattered internationally and established synagogues, educational institutions, publishing houses and organizations espousing their beliefs.

The best known of the Temple Mount NGOs, the Temple Mount Faithful, headed by Gershon Salomon, makes no bones about its intentions. On its website, the first of the group’s “Long Term Objectives” is: 

Liberating the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque were placed on this Jewish or biblical holy site as a specific sign of Islamic conquest and domination. The Temple Mount can never be consecrated to the Name of G‑d without removing these pagan shrines. It has been suggested that they be removed, transferred to, and rebuilt at Mecca.

Glick appears to be a somewhat different story. Despite many media reports, he is not an activist in the Temple Mount Faithful, or at any rate not mainly in the Temple Mount Faithful; he heads an organization called the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation, and formerly led the Temple Mount Institute. Both of these groups express the hope of rebuilding the Temple alongside the Muslim holy sites, not in their place. But here is a brief video Glick made for the Temple Institute in which he makes what sounds like a veiled threat of what will happen to the Dome of the Rock if Muslim religious leaders do not cooperate peacefully with this project:

The decision of what will happen to that building, which today represents the Muslim religion – if the Muslim religious leadership decides to choose a path of peace, that building can remain and be part of the house of prayer for all nations, and it can be used as a center of monotheistic religions. If, unfortunately, the Muslim leadership continues the path they are leading today – [Islamic Movement leader] Ra’ed Salah and other Muslim leaders today – it will bring to a very dangerous … [here Glick pauses, searching for words, then continues in a barely audible voice] to a great threat to the world and to the peace of the world.

I’m calling upon the leadership of the Muslim religion: join, cooperate with those who want peace. Join with those who believe that the Temple Mount belongs to all those who believe in God, and then the Dome of the Rock, built by Abdel Malek, will be part of the house of prayer of all nations, the holy temple.

There are now at least ten times as many Christian Zionists as Jewish Zionists. And their European cousins are no less active in the Zionist Hasbarafia, lobbying for Israel, attacking its critics and thwarting the peace process.

Glick did not deserve to be shot. From all reports, he is not a man of violence at all; he could be described as the friendly face of the Temple Mount movement. But he works alongside men of the most violent possible intent. He is the window-dressing of a movement with a psychotic, apocalyptic goal, one that goes back to the Six Day War conquest of the Mount when IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren, later to become Israel’s chief rabbi, implored Moshe Dayan to destroy the Dome of the Rock.

Should Muslims, accompanied by Muslim police, be allowed to conduct Muslim prayer in the Western Wall plaza?

With a police escort, right-wing Jews visit the Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City at the end of a ‘Jerusalem Day’ demonstration calling to rebuild the Jewish temple, May 21, 2009. (Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

With a police escort, right-wing Jews visit the Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City at the end of a ‘Jerusalem Day’ demonstration calling to rebuild the Jewish temple, May 21, 2009.

For that matter, should the police of a Muslim country be allowed to station themselves in the Western Wall plaza as the enforcer of law and order? Should the police of a Muslim country be allowed to decide which Jews can come pray at the Western Wall and which cannot?

That would be the mirror image of the current, Israeli-enforced status quo for Muslims on the Noble Sanctuary, which Jews worship as the Temple Mount. That status quo is not a violation of Jews’ civil rights, but a violation of Muslims’ religious rights and Palestinians’ national rights. That status quo is bad enough as it is; Glick, Feiglin, Etzion, Ariel, Regev and the movement they represent would make it out-and-out catastrophic.

The New York Times: Time to Break the Silence on Palestine

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For the first time, two sitting members, Representatives Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, publicly support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

“it seems the days when critiques of Zionism and the actions of the State of Israel can be written off as anti-Semitism are coming to an end.”

nytimes.com/2019/01/19

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the lectern at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. The United States had been in active combat in Vietnam for two years and tens of thousands of people had been killed, including some 10,000 American troops. The political establishment — from left to right — backed the war, and more than 400,000 American service members were in Vietnam, their lives on the line.

Many of King’s strongest allies urged him to remain silent about the war or at least to soft-pedal any criticism. They knew that if he told the whole truth about the unjust and disastrous war he would be falsely labeled a Communist, suffer retaliation and severe backlash, alienate supporters and threaten the fragile progress of the civil rights movement.

King rejected all the well-meaning advice and said, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” Quoting a statement by the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, he said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal” and added, “that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

It was a lonely, moral stance. And it cost him. But it set an example of what is required of us if we are to honor our deepest values in times of crisis, even when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.

I have not been alone. Until very recently, the entire Congress has remained mostly silent on the human rights nightmare that has unfolded in the occupied territories. Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel’s political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

The Minister of State for Media Affairs and spokesman for the Jordanian government Mohammad Al Momani said that the resolution affirms the illegitimacy of the actions and violations of the Israeli Occupation in the city of Jericho. Meanwhile, the Israeli government condemned the UNESCO’s decision and considered it to be “unwelcome.”

Many civil rights activists and organizations have remained silent as well, not because they lack concern or sympathy for the Palestinian people, but because they fear loss of funding from foundations, and false charges of anti-Semitism. They worry, as I once did, that their important social justice work will be compromised or discredited by smear campaigns.

Similarly, many students are fearful of expressing support for Palestinian rights because of the McCarthyite tactics of secret organizations like Canary Mission, which blacklists those who publicly dare to support boycotts against Israel, jeopardizing their employment prospects and future careers.

  • The Old City of Jerusalem and its walls is also listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site as well as Hebron which is illegally occupied by Israel

Reading King’s speech at Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues. King argued, when speaking of Vietnam, that even “when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,” we must not be mesmerized by uncertainty. “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.

We must not tolerate Israel’s refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the U.S. government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the U.S. government has pledged in military support to Israel.

And finally, we must, with as much courage and conviction as we can muster, speak out against the system of legal discrimination that exists inside Israel, a system complete with, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinians — such as the new nation-state law that says explicitly that only Jewish Israelis have the right of self-determination in Israel, ignoring the rights of the Arab minority that makes up 21 percent of the population.

On Wednesday 20 July 2016, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MoTA) and the municipalities of Bethlehem and Battir organized an official ceremony to celebrate the inscription of the two World Heritage properties in Palestine: “The Birthplace of Jesus: Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage Route, Bethlehem” and “Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines – Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir” on the prestigious World Heritage List.

Of course, there will be those who say that we can’t know for sure what King would do or think regarding Israel-Palestine today. That is true. The evidence regarding King’s views on Israel is complicated and contradictory.

Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee denounced Israel’s actions against Palestinians, King found himself conflicted. Like many black leaders of the time, he recognized European Jewry as a persecuted, oppressed and homeless people striving to build a nation of their own, and he wanted to show solidarity with the Jewish community, which had been a critically important ally in the civil rights movement.

Ultimately, King canceled a pilgrimage to Israel in 1967 after Israel captured the West Bank. During a phone call about the visit with his advisers, he said, “I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt.”

He continued to support Israel’s right to exist but also said on national television that it would be necessary for Israel to return parts of its conquered territory to achieve true peace and security and to avoid exacerbating the conflict. There was no way King could publicly reconcile his commitment to nonviolence and justice for all people, everywhere, with what had transpired after the 1967 war.

Today, we can only speculate about where King would stand. Yet I find myself in agreement with the historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who concluded that, if King had the opportunity to study the current situation in the same way he had studied Vietnam, “his unequivocal opposition to violence, colonialism, racism and militarism would have made him an incisive critic of Israel’s current policies.”

Indeed, King’s views may have evolved alongside many other spiritually grounded thinkers, like Rabbi Brian Walt, who has spoken publicly about the reasons that he abandoned his faith in what he viewed as political Zionism. To him, he recently explained to me, liberal Zionism meant that he believed in the creation of a Jewish state that would be a desperately needed safe haven and cultural center for Jewish people around the world, “a state that would reflect as well as honor the highest ideals of the Jewish tradition.” He said he grew up in South Africa in a family that shared those views and identified as a liberal Zionist, until his experiences in the occupied territories forever changed him.

Powerless Israel facing BDS - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Powerless Israel facing BDS – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

During more than 20 visits to the West Bank and Gaza, he saw horrific human rights abuses, including Palestinian homes being bulldozed while people cried — children’s toys strewn over one demolished site — and saw Palestinian lands being confiscated to make way for new illegal settlements subsidized by the Israeli government.

He was forced to reckon with the reality that these demolitions, settlements and acts of violent dispossession were not rogue moves, but fully supported and enabled by the Israeli military. For him, the turning point was witnessing legalized discrimination against Palestinians — including streets for Jews only — which, he said, was worse in some ways than what he had witnessed as a boy in South Africa.

Not so long ago, it was fairly rare to hear this perspective. That is no longer the case.

Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, aims to educate the American public about “the forced displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians that began with Israel’s establishment and that continues to this day.” Growing numbers of people of all faiths and backgrounds have spoken out with more boldness and courage. American organizations such as If Not Now support young American Jews as they struggle to break the deadly silence that still exists among too many people regarding the occupation, and hundreds of secular and faith-based groups have joined the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

In view of these developments, it seems the days when critiques of Zionism and the actions of the State of Israel can be written off as anti-Semitism are coming to an end. There seems to be increased understanding that criticism of the policies and practices of the Israeli government is not, in itself, anti-Semitic.

This is not to say that anti-Semitism is not real. Neo-Nazism is resurging in Germany within a growing anti-immigrant movement. Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose 57 percent in 2017, and many of us are still mourning what is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jewish people in American history. We must be mindful in this climate that, while criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic, it can slide there.

Fortunately, people like the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II are leading by example, pledging allegiance to the fight against anti-Semitism while also demonstrating unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people struggling to survive under Israeli occupation.

He declared in a riveting speech last year that we cannot talk about justice without addressing the displacement of native peoples, the systemic racism of colonialism and the injustice of government repression. In the same breath he said: “I want to say, as clearly as I know how, that the humanity and the dignity of any person or people cannot in any way diminish the humanity and dignity of another person or another people. To hold fast to the image of God in every person is to insist that the Palestinian child is as precious as the Jewish child.”

Guided by this kind of moral clarity, faith groups are taking action. In 2016, the pension board of the United Methodist Church excluded from its multibillion-dollar pension fund Israeli banks whose loans for settlement construction violate international law. Similarly, the United Church of Christ the year before passed a resolution calling for divestments and boycotts of companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

Even in Congress, change is on the horizon. For the first time, two sitting members, Representatives Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, publicly support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. In 2017, Representative Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota, introduced a resolution to ensure that no U.S. military aid went to support Israel’s juvenile military detention system. Israel regularly prosecutes Palestinian children detainees in the occupied territories in military court.

None of this is to say that the tide has turned entirely or that retaliation has ceased against those who express strong support for Palestinian rights. To the contrary, just as King received fierce, overwhelming criticism for his speech condemning the Vietnam War — 168 major newspapers, including The Times, denounced the address the following day — those who speak publicly in support of the liberation of the Palestinian people still risk condemnation and backlash.

Bahia Amawi, an American speech pathologist of Palestinian descent, was recently terminated for refusing to sign a contract that contains an anti-boycott pledge stating that she does not, and will not, participate in boycotting the State of Israel. In November, Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN for giving a speech in support of Palestinian rights that was grossly misinterpreted as expressing support for violence. Canary Mission continues to pose a serious threat to student activists.

And just over a week ago, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama, apparently under pressure mainly from segments of the Jewish community and others, rescinded an honor it bestowed upon the civil rights icon Angela Davis, who has been a vocal critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and supports B.D.S.

But that attack backfired. Within 48 hours, academics and activists had mobilized in response. The mayor of Birmingham, Randall Woodfin, as well as the Birmingham School Board and the City Council, expressed outrage at the institute’s decision. The council unanimously passed a resolution in Davis’ honor, and an alternative event is being organized to celebrate her decades-long commitment to liberation for all.

I cannot say for certain that King would applaud Birmingham for its zealous defense of Angela Davis’s solidarity with Palestinian people. But I do. In this new year, I aim to speak with greater courage and conviction about injustices beyond our borders, particularly those that are funded by our government, and stand in solidarity with struggles for democracy and freedom. My conscience leaves me no other choice.

The Said al-Mis’hal cultural center in Gaza was hit by an Israeli airstrike in August.CreditKhalil Hamra/Associated Press

Zio-GOP Rep. Seeks to Block Tlaib Palestine Congressional Delegation

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Because seeing is believing.

What Texas congressman Babin’s odd allegations hide is that he wants the Israeli narrative on Palestine to be the only narrative to which the Congress is exposed, and he wants to prevent the representatives from seeing the horror of the occupation with their own eyes.

juancole.com/2019/01

The newly elected Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 13th District, is seeking to take a delegation of congressional representatives to the Palestinian West Bank, which is militarily occupied by Israel and where some 600,000 Israeli squatters have usurped Palestinian land belonging to the nearly 3 million Palestinians living there (another nearly 2 million live in the Gaza Strip).

Tlaib represents not only part of Detroit but Dearborn Heights and among her constituents are many Arab-Americans who strongly support Palestine and resent Israel’s colonization project of stealing their land and resources and ultimately hoping to displace them and make them refugees anew.

AIPAC has extracted an inflation-adjusted $250 billion from US taxpayers for its foreign principals. Influencing the conduct of US policy “by techniques outside normal diplomatic channels” has never stopped.

Ordinarily, the wealthy and powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (which ought to have to register as a foreign agent but doesn’t because it is so wealthy and powerful) pays for a trip of these Federal representatives to Israel, where they are introduced to Israeli politicians and given the Israeli story about the Palestinians. This is like visiting Columbia, South Carolina in the 1950s and asking the white state legislators there why Black South Carolinians are so poor and have such bad education and health statistics.

As a result of such successful boondoggles and lobbying, the US is now giving $23,000 to each Israeli family over the next 10 years, $38 billion in total, at a time when Federal employees are not being paid at all and are losing their mortgages and people in Flint, Michigan, are still expected to drink lead-poisoned water.

Israel is a wealthy country with a per capita income of $40,000 a year in nominal terms, slightly better than that of France. The only reason that the American public is forking over that kind of cash to the Israelis is that the Israel lobbies have given significant campaign contributions to many in Congress and expect them to put massive aid to Israel into the US budget as a quid pro quo.

Brian Babin, a congressman from Texas’s 36th district, is seeking to block Tlaib’s trip and that of her colleagues by attempting to get the Democratic leadership on the Hill to pull the money for it. Stopping powerful women from traveling to crucial security zones, as Trump stopped Pelosi from going to Afghanistan, seems to be a new plank of the Republican Party platform.

Babin got nearly $6,000 for his 2016 campaign from pro-Israel “industries,” according to this database, though such things are hard to measure because wealthy individuals may also be giving and then pressuring him.

By the way, although $6,000 may not sound like much money, actually contributions on that scale are extremely influential sometimes in tight races. You wouldn’t want the lobbyists to give it to your opponent– that would be like losing $12,000 to pay for radio and tv and internet ads.

Babin has through his congressional career voted for positions similar to those of Trump 95% of the time. He may as well be Trump. He voted to remove sanctions from three Russian companies run by oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin. He supported Trump in calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.”

He opposes the US refugee program, which is part of our country’s treaty obligations, on the grounds that once admitted, refugees accept entitlements and become a public charge, and that if Muslim refugees are let in they will engage in terrorism and oppress women. of the 750,000 refugees admitted in the past 17 years, none has carried out a physical terrorist attack on US soil. As for oppressing women, he is the one who thinks they are “nasty.”

It is worth attending to Babin’s rhetoric. He complains that Tlaib’s planned trip will be “tax-payer funded.” But then so is Trump’s travel to what are essentially campaign rallies around the country. And that $38 billion Babin voted to give away to Israel is also taxpayer money, and it is hard to argue that he is working for the taxpayer.

Then Babin worries that for a congressional delegation to go to the Palestinian West Bank will harm relations between the United States as Israel. It is hard to see the logic here. US congressional delegations have routinely gone to the West Bank in the past and it hasn’t hurt US-Israeli relations at all, which are so warm that we are giving them $38 billion even after the visits to the West Bank.

Babin says that Israeli feelings will be hurt if congressional representatives visit Israel’s “adversary.”

The West Bank is under Israeli military occupation, so it is hard to see how visiting it is an affront to Israel. The junior partner in the Israeli occupation is the Palestine Liberation Organization, the constituent parties of which dominate the Palestine Authority. The Palestine Authority was created as part of the Oslo Peace accords and it recognized Israel in return for a pledge from Tel Aviv that Israel would withdraw from the Palestinian West Bank by 1998.

Israel pocketed the PLO recognition and declined to withdraw and then flooded hundreds of thousands of Israel squatters into Palestine, taking land, water and other resources away from the Palestinians with whom the Israeli government had concluded the Oslo Accords.

Nor is the Palestine Authority or just “Palestine” Israel’s “adversary.” It is a partner in a long-stalled peace process. Israeli authorities routinely cooperate on security with Palestine police and politicians.

Babin’s discourse imagines the Palestinian West Bank to be an independent country that is an “adversary” of Israel, instead of being an occupied territory of Israel itself, which gets security help from a PLO that was fooled into recognizing its occupier.

What Babin’s odd allegations hide is that he wants the Israeli narrative on Palestine to be the only narrative to which the Congress is exposed, and he wants to prevent the representatives from seeing the horror of the occupation with their own eyes. The 215,452 Palestinians in al-Khalil (Hebron) are terrorized by the some 800 Israeli squatters who have gradually usurped property in the city and who have attacked and menaced local Palestinians backed up by the full might of the Israeli army, which invades Palestinian homes at will.

Ironically, it is not clear that the Israeli authorities will let Tlaib into the West Bank. She practices Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) with regard to Israel, and the far right wing Likud government has been attempting to exclude people from entering Israel if they hold that position. Since Israel illegally occupies the West Bank, you can’t visit Palestine without going through Israel and the Israeli authorities. You might say that Netanyahu wouldn’t dare deport a sitting congresswoman. We’ll see.

Stateless Palestinians Seek Full State Membership at UN, Defying the Nazi Zionists

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The stateless have no standing in international institutions and fall through the cracks of international law. Israelis understand this, since the Fascists in the 1930s took citizenship away from European Jews. Zionists are Nazis.

Even if you don’t get it, at least say it and keep saying it!

A few correction for Juan Cole’s article here. “The Israeli hardliners” [I hate this expression. It’s every single regime, just say regime] “are in essence adopting” [no, it’s been the plan since the establishment of Israel] “precisely the same policy toward the Palestinians as the Fascists did toward the Jews and Gypsies and gays in the 1930s.” [Zionists are the Nazis]. “Though of course they have not taken the horrific genocidal steps taken by Hitler in the 1940s.” [definition of genocide: “Whoever, while participating in a conspiracy to destroy a national, racial or religious group, undertakes an attack against life, liberty or property of members of such groups is guilty of the crime of genocide. (“Genocide”, American Scholar, Volume 15, no. 2 (April 1946), p. 227–230) also, take account of all the massacres perpetrated by the Zionists it indeed adds up to genocide by massacres]

 

The some 12 million Palestinians in the world, the majority of them made refugees by the Israelis, lack a nation-state. A good half of them ,in addition to having no Palestinian state, do not even have citizenship in a host state. That is, the 5 million Palestinians under Israeli hegemony in the West Bank and Gaza are not citizens, and are completely stateless, as are Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and some European countries.

Same have fairly useless laissez-passer, but these flimsy documents are so feared by border agents in most countries, who fear their bearers will never depart once admitted, that they won’t recognize them. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon told me that they are essentially in prison, unable to leave Lebanon, unable to return home to Palestine, unable to own property or get most kinds of work.

The Palestine Authority created by the Oslo peace process in the 1990s has been gutted, and has no real control of the land, water, or territory of Palestine. It is more like the police forces in the Bantustans set up by white South Africans to avoid having to continue to recognize the citizenship of black South Africans.

I argue that it is because Palestinians are stateless that they can continually be screwed over by the Israelis, who are slowly but surely stealing their land and water and planting colonies in their cities such as Hebron, in preparation for eventually expelling them to Jordan and making many of them refugees all over again. Most but not all Israelis deny that this is their goal, but they are fooling themselves. It is the only possible outcome of their policies and therefore must be considered their goal.

The stateless have no standing in international institutions and fall through the cracks of international law. Israelis understand this, since the Fascists in the 1930s took citizenship away from European Jews. The Zionist or Jewish-Nationalist response was to create Israel to ensure that Jews did not remain stateless. It was their temporary statelessness under Hitler that facilitated the Holocaust, since stateless people have no tribunal in which to adjudicate their rights.

The Israeli hardliners are in essence adopting precisely the same policy toward the Palestinians as the Fascists did toward the Jews and Gypsies and gays in the 1930s, though of course they have not taken the horrific genocidal steps taken by Hitler in the 1940s. But the 1930s were no picnic for German minorities, and the danger to stateless Palestinians is that something horrible could yet be done to them with relative impunity for the Israeli leadership, for whom the United States will run interference no matter what.

All this is why it is a great good thing that the Palestinians are applying to be a full member of the United Nations, having submitted the paperwork Tuesday night.

The only thing that might at least slow the politicide of the hard right government of Israel against the Palestinians is for the latter to gain recognition as a state and have access to international tribunals that would inevitably halt Israeli colonization of Palestinian land.

Palestine a few years ago succeeded in moving from being a non-member observer entity to a non-member observer state, a status it shares with the Vatican. It only needed a majority in the UN General Assembly to make this change.

The new status allows Palestine to be a member of many UN committees, with Israel having failed to block this development, and it has even been allowed to join Interpol.

Palestine cannot become a full UN member without the agreement of the UN Security Council, on which the United States will wield its veto and ensure that the Palestinians remain stateless. In fact the US has done whatever it could to stop Palestine even from being a UN observer state and from joining UN committees. US diplomacy, aimed at crushing the Palestinians on behalf of Israel, has failed so far with the rest of the UN.

In fact, Palestine has just become the leader of the Group of 77, countries of the global South at the UN.

The Palestinians know that the US will block them, but they feel that they will gain some sympathy around the world for having made the attempt. (They could well get a majority on the UNSC, which would be a moral victory). Some countries are thinking seriously about upgrading their Palestinian diplomatic missions to full embassies, which would be a way of recognizing a Palestinian state.

That the Palestinian leadership is going ahead with the application, moreover, shows the depths of their despair over any peace process and the profundity of their disappointment in the Trump administration and the government of Binyamin Netanyahu. Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, half of which Palestinians claim for their capital, and Trump’s slashing of aid to Palestinians and their refugees, have left the Palestinian leadership feeling as though it has nothing left to lose from defying Trump and Netanyahu.

Just as Abolitionists engaged in many fruitless actions before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation achieved for them their goals, so Palestinians will try out many policies and legislative approaches in an attempt to forestall being massively expropriated and displaced. It may be that down the line they too will be released from their estate of semi-slavery.

5th Column Holocaust terrorists sought reconsideration of Angela Davis honor

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In America, fighters for Israel are not our freedom fighters!

Related image

 The 5th Column Jewish terrorist group get static

Earlier, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin expressed his “dismay” at the decision to cancel the award gala, which he said came “after protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies.”

City council member Steven Hoyt told media that the institute’s move was “absolutely embarrassing.”

An  Israeli Alabama holocaust terrorist civil rights organization withdrew a planned human rights award from political activist Angela Davis after a group that educates Alabamians about the Holocaust asked them to reconsider the honor.

The Birmingham Terrorist Holocaust Education Center wrote to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on Jan. 2 expressing “concern and disappointment” about the plan to honor Davis with an award named for minister and civil rights pioneer Fred L. Shuttlesworth. The letter urged the institute to “reconsider your decision.”

The Holocaust group cited “recent outspoken support” of a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, Al.com reported.

Israeli Mossad, by faking YET ANOTHER mass shooting in Strasbourg, tried to put an end to the “Gilet Jaune” (Yellow Jacket”) movement which is seeking to expose and end Zionist control of France and Europe. This “false flag attack then blame the fake Arab” gag is a long running trick used by Mossad and by the Israeli-controlled media whenever public discourse begins to run against them.

In a statement posted on its website over the weekend, the Birmingham Zionist Civil Rights Institute said, “Upon closer examination of Ms. Davis’ statements and public record, we concluded that she unfortunately does not meet all of the criteria on which the award is based.”

The Institute’s statement did not say what specific criteria Davis did not meet.

Davis, a Birmingham native, said Monday that the board wouldn’t tell her why it rescinded the award but she later learned her “long-term support of justice for Palestine was at issue.”

The civil rights institute also canceled a gala set for February.

The award’s withdrawal spawned widespread controversy and prompted three BCRI board members to resign Wednesday. The former board members — chair Mike Oatridge, first vice chair Walter Body and secretary Janice Kelsey — said they regret the circumstances surrounding the award’s selection process and “the dissension this has caused.”

“It is hoped this move will enable the City of Birmingham to create a board structure that will best enable the BCRI to continue its critical mission in the future,” the trio said in a statement.

The Holocaust education center’s letter was signed by board president Deborah Layman and the 11 other members of the board’s executive committee, as well as executive director Thomas Bryant. Layman said the committee voted unanimously to send the letter.

“Our intention was to go on record about our concerns in a private letter sent to BCRI leadership,” she said in an email to AL.com, responding to a query about the letter. “We had no further part in the decision made by BCRI to cancel the event, and we were surprised at their decision.”

Image result for holocaust in palestine

Davis said she is still coming to Birmingham next month as part of “an alternative event.”

A coalition of local activists and citizens said the “grassroots” event will be open to the public and will take place Feb. 16, at a site yet to be determined.

“It will be a conversation with Dr. Davis, not a ticketed event,” DeJuana Thompson, founder of Woke Vote, said at a news conference Wednesday. “It will center around her life’s work and the current work she’s doing to address injustice around the world.”

Layman said the Holocaust education organization is willing to meet Davis with when she comes to her hometown.

“(We) would be happy to have a conversation with Prof. Davis,” Layman said. “We believe that through open, respectful dialogue, mutual understandings may be reached.”

Holocaust refers to the mass murder of European Jews and other groups by the Nazi Germans before and during World War II, while the post WW2 Zionist holocaust in Palestine is hidden.

Image result for holocaust in palestine

“Absolutely embarrassing”

The BCRI’s decision is generating a growing backlash.

On Tuesday, the city council in Birmingham, Alabama, unanimously adopted a resolution “recognizing the life work of Angela Davis” – an implicit rebuke to the BCRI.

Davis, who suffered incarceration and political persecution for her support for Black liberation, grew up in Birmingham’s Dynamite Hill, a neighborhood that got its name from the frequency of bombings and violent attacks targeting its residents by white supremacists.

City council member Steven Hoyt, who proposed the council resolution, told media that the institute’s move was “absolutely embarrassing.”

“Everybody respects her but us. In academic communities as well as society and various groups,” Hoyt added. “I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed to even serve in a city that would do that.”

On Monday, Black activists called for leadership changes and protests at the BCRI, an institution ostensibly established to honor and advance the cause of civil rights.

On Wednesday, the BCRI’s chair, vice-chair and secretary resigned from the board.

“As members of this board, we regret the circumstances surrounding the selection process regarding the 2018 Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award and the dissension this has caused,” they said in a statement.

Earlier, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin expressed his “dismay” at the decision to cancel the award gala, which he said came “after protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies.”

Local media revealed that pressure had come from, among others, the Birmingham Jewish Federation, a staunchly pro-Israel communal group.

On Wednesday, the news publication AL.com confirmed that the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center wrote to the BCRI to express “concern and disappointment” over the honor to Davis, citing her support for BDS.

Davis is the second high-profile Black intellectual to be targeted by pro-Israel lobby pressure in recent weeks.

In November, Marc Lamont Hill was dismissed from his role as a CNN political commentator following an Israel lobby campaign of lies and smears misrepresenting a speech he made at the United Nations in support of Palestinian rights and BDS – the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to pressure Israel to respect international law and human rights.

Temple University also faced pressure from the Zionist Organization of America to dismiss Hill as a professor – a step it has not taken amid warnings that this would violate Hill’s First Amendment rights.

Last June, the University of Vienna banned a public lecture by Dhoruba Bin-Wahad after a smear campaign against the veteran Black American activist, author and former political prisoner, and against the Palestine solidarity groups co-sponsoring the event.

Punish and censor

The civil rights group Palestine Legal called the BCRI’s decision to rescind the honor to Angela Davis “the latest incident in a well-documented nationwide campaign to censor and punish critics of Israel.

“The pattern of censorship targeting Israel’s critics is already well documented,” Palestine Legal added.

“So are attempts by Israeli government officials to divide Black leaders and suppress those who draw connections between freedom struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians.”

Israel enraged by French human rights prize

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What House of Rothschild didn’t anticipate seventy years on.

14 December 2018

France has honored Al-Haq and B’Tselem with the prestigious Human Rights Prize of the French Republic.

This came despite heavy pressure from Israel on the French government to pull the award from the two groups which document Israeli war crimes and abuses against Palestinians.

French justice minister Nicole Belloubet did however give in to the pressure and refused to attend the award ceremony in Paris last Monday.

The French Israel lobby group CRIF wrote to Belloubet alleging that the two winners “call for the boycott of Israel,” and claimed that for the French justice ministry to give them the award “even in the absence of the minister, is insulting justice.”

In his acceptance speech, B’Tselem executive director Hagai El-Ad characterized the Israeli government’s response as “hysterical.”

El-Ad said that Israel’s attempt to pressure French officials “illustrates the reality within which we work: propaganda, lies, and threats by a government which believes that silencing and coverup will enable further human rights violations.”

Al-Haq director Shawan Jabarin told The Electronic Intifada that the award is a recognition his group’s work at a time when the organization is being targeted by Israeli smear campaigns.

The 10 December award ceremony coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 20th anniversary of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders.

Furious response

Israel reacted with fury to the announcement that France was giving the prestigious prize to the two groups.

“France gives its highest award to B’Tselem and Al-Haq, organizations that accuse Israel of apartheid, delegitimize us internationally, defend terror and support BDS,” Michael Oren, Israel’s deputy minister for diplomacy, claimed

BDS stands for boycott, divestment and sanctions – a nonviolent Palestinian-led campaign to hold Israel accountable for violating Palestinian rights, modeled on the successful international solidarity movement that helped end apartheid in South Africa.

Israel’s embassy in France tweeted it was “shocked” at the award and alleged that Al-Haq is linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a political party and resistance organization Israel deems a “terrorist” group.

Israeli culture minister Miri Regev said that B’Tselem and its members should feel “ashamed,” describing the prize as a “badge of shame.”

Israeli deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely called the award “deplorable” and asked the French government to reconsider.

Hotovely claimed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also expressed his opposition in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Mark Regev

Closing space

Al-Haq director Shawan Jabarin spoke to The Electronic Intifada in The Hague, a few days before traveling to Paris for the award ceremony.

He said that the award came at a moment when Israel is “trying to close the space” for human rights work.

The French recognition means even more to Al-Haq, he said, because it “comes on the same day as the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Jabarin said that the award was “for the victims in Palestine” and was “recognition of their rights.”

But he cautioned that victims need much more than symbolic recognition.

“France needs to act according to its obligations,” he said, referring to international treaties it has signed on human rights.

Time for action

Seven decades since the Nakba – the expulsion of the Palestinians – and after 51 years of military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jabarin said, “nothing has changed, the situation is deteriorating, the occupation is deepening, the suffering is deepening.”

Jabarin’s message to the French government is that “if they really want to have peace in Palestine and elsewhere, they have to act.”

To change the reality, Jabarin said there must be sanctions on Israel, including the banning of trade in settlement products and an arms embargo.

Europeans should not “let the criminals travel to their countries,” Jabarin added.

“Without the criminals paying the price of their crimes, there’s no way to rethink or to change their actions and policies.”

ICC leaning toward Israeli narrative?

Jabarin also expressed disappointment in the International Criminal Court, which since 2015 has been carrying out a “preliminary examination” of alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“This is a long time,” Jabarin said.

A preliminary examination is the first step in the court’s process to determine whether to open a formal investigation, which can then lead to charges and trials.

But while a preliminary examination is carried out whenever a referral is made, it is open-ended and can continue for years, at the discretion of the chief prosecutor.

Although Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor, warned Israeli leaders last April that they could face trial for the killings of unarmed Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Great March of Return, the court has not launched a formal investigation.

The “victims, the people who are suffering, they can’t wait anymore,” Jabarin said. “This institution has to act according to its mandate and not to deal with things from a political point of view.”

Jabarin called the court’s latest annual progress report disappointing.

The report affirms that “the prosecutor intends to complete the preliminary examination as early as possible,” but provides no firm deadline.

Jabarin described the report as “messy’ in its use of legal terminology and concepts. He is worried that the prosecutor has slipped in “the direction of the Israeli narrative.”

But he sees “good signs here and there.”

He hopes the prosecutor will move swiftly to open a formal investigation and “go after the criminals and later on issue arrest warrants.”

“I trust the professionalism and independence of the prosecutor,” Jabarin said. “My message to her is that time flies and suffering continues. It is time for her to proceed.”