Israeli leaders suggest that the UNESCO resolution to include Palestinian sites as world heritage sites is ‘anti-Semitic’ and that it denies Jewish connection. But UNESCO says the cave of the Patriarchs has Jewish significance, just that it’s in Palestine! That’s the problem.
Israel adds a new measure of collective punishment on top of house demolition and deportation – and sues a Palestinian family for its expenses of tombstones and grants to slain soldiers’ families. But when the Abu Khdeir family seeks to punish the families of Jewish terrorists who killed him– nothing doing.
Over 2,000 Israeli Yemenite Jews and supporting activists gathered in Jerusalem last Wednesday to mark an annual day of awareness for what families say was a state-sponsored program to abduct Yemenite Jewish infants and other Israeli children born to parents who were recent immigrants from Arab countries. Known as the Yemenite Children Affair, in the first decade after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, there was a systematic kidnapping of newborn Yemenite children, carried out by Israeli hospitals and government institutions.
In an interview with the “burning Zionist” Jonathan Møller Sousa on Danish media, non-Zionist Jonathan Ofir shows that the two-state solution has been made impossible by Israeli colonization of occupied territories, and that occupation is actually manageable. All because the international community does nothing to enforce its demands.
Nora Lester Murad and her friends organize an Iftar dinner next to the rubble of a demolished Palestinian house in East Jerusalem, “We planned the Iftar to show solidarity with Ashraf and Islam, and the tens of thousands of Palestinian families whose homes have been demolished, partially demolished, or sealed, and who live every day under the imminent threat of demolitions by the Israel authorities. Home demolition is not merely an Israeli administrative policy, as it is often presented in the western media. Home demolition is part of Israel’s political strategy to expel Palestinians from any place they want control, often through the establishment of Jewish settlements. My friends and I felt that the least we could do to show these families–families who are on the frontline of the continuing Nakba–that they have real allies, that they are not alone.”
Israeli authorities on Friday rescinded 250,000 Israel entry permits from Palestinians hours after a deadly…
According to Israeli lawmakers, Palestinian prisoners shouldn’t demand more than dry bread and a glass of water. A bullet to the head could be humane too, says member of Knesset Oren Hazan, who took a selfie with Trump,
Charlie Zimmerman recaps his trip to the West Bank with a delegation of 130 from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, “If you spend a few hours in H2, you don’t need any guides or speeches to tell you that it is a tense and surreal place where violence can break out at any moment. Issa calls Hebron a “ghost town” and YAS has published a pamphlet about the city with that title. But “ghost town” is an understatement and a misnomer, since people do live there—it’s just that everyday life activity is actively and brutally suppressed. I and another delegation member agree that a more accurate characterization would be “The Most Fucked Up Place on Earth.”
Read an excerpt from Gershon Shafir’s latest book, “A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict,” which investigates the strategies, policies, and historical continuities that promoted Israel’s colonization of Palestinian territory. In this excerpt Shafir seeks to answer the question, why has the occupation lasted 50 years? “Israeli colonization, to paraphrase William Faulkner, is not dead; it isn’t even past. The tools of colonization, honed before 1948 to a sharp edge, and subsequently deployed within Israel’s new boundaries, were available and ready to be pressed into service in the territories newly occupied in 1967,” Shafir writes.
Howard Cohen returns to the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran where he meets more members of his student’s, Noor Abu al-Qia’an, family, and finds a cousin who was nearly lynched by a mob of Israelis, “Noor’s expression grew animated with tension and excitement as he related the story, as if he himself was reliving it. His cousin was working in a supermarket in Tel Aviv and had stepped outside into the street to smoke a cigarette. A young man came up to him and demanded aggressively that he show his ID. The Bedouin youth was indignant at this unwarranted intrusion into his life and replied that he was not a police officer and had no right to demand from him anything. ‘Show me proof that you are a police officer otherwise just leave me alone,’ said the youth proudly. The man refused to show any ID and also refused to accept that the Bedouin Arab could defend his rights according to the law like any other citizen and set upon him brutally. His friends who were nearby came to the scene and joined in the lynching. Noor’s cousin was beaten to a pulp and hospitalized as result. ‘I think I remember hearing about this on the news at the time,’ I said. Noor nodded, confirming that the event indeed reached the mainstream news outlets. ‘A campaign was set up for him and he received 80,000 shekels which was paid into his account.'”