Israel is arming another repressive regime in the Global South, in Honduras, but Israeli activists are protesting. And Honduras is one of 9 countries to vote in the UN General Assembly against a resolution condemning efforts to name Jerusalem Israel’s capital.
The logic of so-called unification of Jerusalem is one of increasing maximum mobility rights to Israeli Jews in the occupied Palestinian populated areas while providing minimum resident rights to Palestinians in turn. Jerusalem is a city that emblematizes partition as such. Divided, it divides. And the more it is said to be unified, the more divided it is. For the unification is not about unity but about militarized colonial control. A city that is colonized and occupied cannot be unified but by force.
After young ‘Ahed Tamimi humiliated Israeli soldiers in occupied Nabi Saleh, the Israeli army needed to release a video of the 16-year-old girl’s arrest in the middle of the night. The incident shows that hasbara is directed mostly at Israelis and Jews to convince them of Israel’s rightness and strength, even if that means exposing the hateful practice of detaining children.
The President of the United States on Wednesday confirmed that countries voting in favor of a United Nations draft resolution condemning the U.S.’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel could lose U.S. aid money. “They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care,” Reuters quoted Trump as saying during a White House press conference.
“Youthquake” has been selected by Oxford Dictionaries as the 2017 word of the year. It is defined as “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people,” we are told. Hatim Kanaaneh says they should have chosen, “intifada.”
LA Jews for Peace’s Jeff Warner and Dick Platkin make the case that now is the time to advocate for U.S. sanctions on Israel: “a December 2016 Brookings public opinion poll reveals that nearly half of the U.S. public supports sanctions on Israel – including a majority of self-identifying Democrats. This increased support for U.S. government sanctions indicates that now is the time for political groups committed to a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict to lead public opinion, not follow or ignore it.”
Today the arrest of Ahed Tamimi, 16, in occupied Nabi Saleh early Tuesday morning, after a video surfaced showing her slapping an Israeli soldier, is gaining global attention, including from the Washington Post. The malignant piece in the Post quotes Israelis calling her “Shirley Temper,” as if Ahed chose to be in an occupied besieged village as a career move at age 10.
Israeli soldiers forced their way into the Nariman and Bassem Tamimi’s home before dawn on Tuesday, the way they have done dozens of times before — only this time instead of leaving with Nariman or Bassem, they arrested the couple’s 16-year-old daughter, Ahed Tamimi. It is alleged that Ahed was arrested for slapping a soldier during a demonstration the day before. The demonstration was organized to protest Israel’s use of force during a protest on Friday, when Ahed’s 14-year-old cousin Mohammed was shot in the face by an Israeli soldier, leaving him in critical condition. After a six-hour surgery the boy was put into a medically induced coma for at least 72 hours.
The Israeli paper Maariv has reported that President Reuven Rivlin might grant a pardon to Elor Azarya, the soldier-medic who shot and killed an incapacitated Palestinian at point-blank range in March 2016, despite having refused to do so last month.
Three years after Michael Oren said that the deaths of two Palestinian teens shot dead by Israeli snipers were staged, he says that the Tamimi family of occupied Nabi Saleh “may not exist” and that the arrest of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi was paid for so as to provoke Israeli soldiers.