While electrical blackouts are common across the West Bank, scheduled outages are due to continue as the Palestinian power distributor has not paid overdue bills from the Israeli energy provider since 2014.
The United States has given a pass on corruption to the presidents of Honduras and Guatemala in part because they have played the Jerusalem card: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and opening offices there.
Israeli security forces today arrested a Palestinian mother from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of al-‘Issawiya, reportedly to pressure her son, Mahmoud Ebeid, to hand himself over to the police, according to the Jerusalem-based Wadi Hileh Information Center (WHIC).
A plan to build a cable car for tourists in Jerusalem’s occupied Old City has largely been a local issue so far. That changed on on Thursday, when Palestinian concerns about the new transit route were raised to the international level at a United Nations debate on the fragile peace process.
South Bend Mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg said he’d keep the US embassy in Jerusalem if he was elected. The comments came just one week after Buttigieg publicly denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to annex sections of the West Bank and said there were signs that Israel’s government was “turning away from peace.”
When J Street advocates for “Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish homeland,” it is supporting a concept that has been a contradiction-in-terms since Israel’s establishment. Abba Solomon argues that J Street and Bernie Sanders too cannot face the fact that political Zionism means perpetual Jewish domination, or at best custody, of Palestinian lives.
Every year during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Israeli authorities approve a package to “relax” the restrictions on movement for West Bank Palestinians to facilitate worshippers’ trips to Jerusalem. As a result, tens of thousands of Palestinians headed to Qalandiya checkpoint, Bethlehem 300 checkpoint, and Zaytoun checkpoint early on Friday mornings to take advantage of the unusual regulations. Ahmad Al-Bazz reports from Qalandiya and Bethlehem to show what life under Israel control looks like.
After an emergency summit in Saudi Arabia, the 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation called for a boycott of nations that move their embassies to Jerusalem. Saudi King Salman said, “The Palestinian cause is the cornerstone” of the organization, in a statement that appeared to be a setback to Jared Kushner’s peace plan that is said to skip over the question of Palestinian sovereignty.
Ambassador David Friedman’s religious remarks in Jerusalem Tuesday went well beyond his comment that Israel is “on the side of God.” Friedman likened the US-Israel relationship to the “altar” in the original Jewish temple in Jerusalem and called the embassy a “shrine” that people pray to and thank God for, and said the U.S. and Israel need to advance the relationship toward greater “holiness.”
Whether in the occupied West Bank, or illegally annexed East Jerusalem, the message coming from the Israel’s so-called liberal judiciary is the same: do not expect it to stand in the way of the Israeli expansion objectives.