Last night, Israeli soldiers entered the West Bank city of Ramallah and raided a municipal library as nearly 100 Palestinian youth clashed with soldiers setting on fire tires and trash cans. Palestinians view Israeli army activities inside of the de facto capital as an escalation to an already tense few months.
Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Israeli leader in the Knesset, made a pilgrimage to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s congregation. “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s approach is to create hate. But we don’t want Jews against Arabs, Arabs against Jews. We want another approach: Arabs and Jews against racism and segregation,” Odeh explains.
Yesterday in major operation more than 1,000 Israeli forces entered Shuafat Refugee camp and demolished by explosion the family home of a Palestinian who killed three and wounded 14 in a car ramming attack in November 2014, causing clashes between residents and Israeli police.
An Israeli court today convicted two Jewish minors who abducted and burned Mohammed Abu Khdeir alive in July 2014. The court delayed ruling on the alleged ringleader, 29-year old settler Yosef Haim Ben-David pending an additional psychiatric evaluation. “Frankly I was shocked. I hoped they all would get a punishment,” said the mother of the victim, Suha Abu Khdeir, 45, from her living room hours after the trial ended. “It’s like they burned him again.”
The Palestinian National Theatre “Al Hakawati” published today an appeal to Jerusalem institutions and businessmen in the city to save the theatre from closure during the next 48 hours.
Israeli police shot two Palestinian teenage girls, killing one and injuring the other, after they used scissors to attack a 70-year old Palestinian man from the West Bank in a crowded Jerusalem shopping district. The girls mistook the man for an Israeli, according to Israeli police.
The most dangerous threat Palestinians face in their struggle for freedom and human rights, besides the Israeli war machine, is the absence of historical context. Political Zionism is an ideology that is inherently racist, supremacist, and exclusivist. If you seek to understand the conflict, if you believe in and strive for a just peace in Israel-Palestine, this is where your fight starts.
On Monday, Israel’s security cabinet outlawed the Islamic Movement of Northern Israel, arrested a senior officer and shut down 17 affiliated charities claiming the organizations sought “to subvert the state in order to establish an Islamic caliphate in its place.” Head of the Joint Arab List Ayman Odeh asserted the move was politically motivated and strategically timed after the Paris attacks on Friday to suggest a link between the Israel-based group and ISIS. “The decision was made for strategic purposes, and its timing indicates that Netanyahu wishes to position the conflict as a religious conflict,” Odeh said.
After the tragic events in Paris on Friday where gunmen affiliated with the Islamic State or ISIS killed at least 140 in separate and coordinated attacks, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on world leaders to condemn acts of “terrorism” and “radical Islam” perpetrated by Palestinians, claiming “the terrorists who attack us have the same murderous intent as those in Paris.”
Early Wednesday morning, an undercover Israeli special forces unit disguised as Palestinian civilians accompanying a pregnant woman inside a Hebron hospital killed one man and arrested another while holding doctors at gunpoint.