An Israeli district court sentenced Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, 36, to five months in prison and a six-month suspended sentence on Tuesday for posting a poem she wrote to social media in 2015.
Salim Joubran, the first Palestinian justice on the Israeli Supreme Court (2004-2017), earlier this year derided the law the Israeli parliament passed this month declaring Israel the nation state of the Jewish people.
“This law is a very, very, very bad law for the state of Israel… The only thing is to cause damages to the Arab population.”
A bad disease requires a strong cure, Hatim Kanaaneh writes. Israel’s nation state of the Jewish people law is legal apartheid, and it requires Palestinian politicians and civil society to rise up and say, We seek a democratic binational state between the river and the sea.
From U.S. President Donald Trump to Hungary’s blatantly anti-semitic Viktor Orban, Israel’s growing relationship with the right internationally has presented a serious challenge for its claim to represent Jewish self-determination, even as it slanders the BDS movement as anti-Semitic.
The Israeli authorities have cancelled all family visits for Palestinian prisoners from Gaza held in Israeli jails until further notice. The move comes as the latest measure to sanction the Strip, following a ban on commercial trade and limits in exit permits.
Two seemingly unconnected events in Israel in the last week reveal a nose dive to the right: passing the Nation-State Law and Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban making a two-day visit. Israel is now both a far right country and allied with the far right in Europe.
Yesterday afternoon Israel stopped the “Al Awda,” the lead of two boats of the Freedom Flotilla in international waters as it sailed toward Gaza and forced it to the Israeli port of Ashdod and arrested 22 people comprising crew and passengers, some of them journalists. The Al Awda is a Norwegian flagged fishing boat.
Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, today published an editorial titled “The apartheid prime minister” that states flatly that thanks to the new “nation state of the Jewish people” law that Netanyahu spearheaded, Israel under Netanyahu is an apartheid regime. Would that US media would follow the newspaper’s lead.
“Today I carry a not real coffin for one who was killed by the Israelis. Maybe these scouts will carry my real coffin or I will carry a real coffin one day,” 13-year-old Marah Al-Abadseh says during a children’s memorial to slain Gaza children at the Gaza border, July 27, 2019.
Ahed and Nariman Tamimi may now be free from prison, but they are in no way free from Israel’s colonialist occupation. There are nearly 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons (which is in contravention of international law). Nearly 300 of them are children.