On Wednesday, Israel issued tenders for more than 2,500 new settlement housing units in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem a mere hours before US President Joe Biden was sworn into office. The Israeli government has now approved and promoted thousands of new settlement housing units in the first few weeks of 2021, while also continuing to deny Palestinians the right to build on their land in Area C — the more than 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control.
Israel’s Education Minister announced a ban this week on human rights groups from entering Israeli public schools, a move seen by many as a response to a bombshell report from B’Tselem calling Israel an “apartheid state”. But it didn’t stop the organization from speaking to 12th grade students at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa this past Sunday. “The Israeli government will have to contend with us until the apartheid regime ends,” B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad tweeted.
Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq is calling on the Pfizer pharmaceutical company to ensure that its COVID-19 vaccine is being used and distributed without discrimination, expressing concerns that Israel is using the company’s vaccine “to further entrench” injustices against Palestinians living under occupation.
Margaret Olin and David Shulman remember Ezra Nawi who died on January 9 at the age of 69. “During the eighteen years I knew him, he was usually under arrest, or on the verge of being arrested, or just released from jail,” Shulman writes. “Unknowingly, he embodied the Gandhian principle, or rather its negation: the best way to maintain an unjust system, Gandhi said, is to obey its laws.”
In 1991, Israel was forced to provide gas masks to Palestinians during the Gulf War. Some are saying this is a precedent for distributing COVID-19 vaccines today.
Israeli authorities are failing to provide essential information on the vaccine in Arabic, to establish vaccine centers in Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and to provide sufficient vaccines in Bedouin clinics in the Negev. These failures are “not a coincidence”, rights groups say.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has labeled Israel as an ‘apartheid regime’ for the first time in the group’s 30 year history of documenting human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. “What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control,” B’Tselem says. “The terms we have used in recent years to describe the situation – such as “prolonged occupation” or a “one-state reality” – are no longer adequate.”
Just days before US President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office, the Israeli government approved the construction of 800 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank — a move critics have deemed as an effort to take advantage of the final days of the pro-settlement Trump administration.
An Israeli judge at the Ofer military court — a court that boasts a 99 percent conviction rate against Palestinians — convicted Palestinian peace activist Issa Amro on three counts of protesting without a permit, two counts of “obstructing” an Israeli soldier, and one count of assaulting an Israeli settler in Hebron.
Below the headlines celebrating Israel’s vaccination rates lies a far darker story about health inequality.