Hamas slams Israel over plans to restrict access of Palestinian worshipers to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem during the holy month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, more Palestinians die from preventable causes as Israel besieges hospitals in Gaza.
Israeli settlers, escorted by the Israeli army, invaded a neighborhood in Ramallah last week, further dispelling the illusion of PA sovereignty.
The new settlements would effectively cut East Jerusalem off from the southern West Bank. “Politically, this is a strategic plan that will strike a blow at the possibility of a Palestinian urban continuum in East Jerusalem,” settlement watchdog Peace Now said in a report.
Netanyahu easily moved U.S. policy for over a decade, due to the force of his will and the use of the powerful Israel lobby in U.S. politics, especially on the Democratic side. Today one force is gone– Netanyahu is an opposition politician to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — and the other is in disarray.
Maragret Cassar writes, “The state where I live, South Australia, has a long and proud history of firsts especially in the area of social justice. In 1856 South Australia was the first state to introduce universal male suffrage. In an Australian first, women were admitted to degree courses at universities in 1882. It was a world first in 1895 when women were able to vote and permitted to stand for Parliament in South Australia.
This proud history gained a new entry on June 22, 2017, when the South Australian Parliament passed a landmark motion calling on the Australian government to recognize the State of Palestine just as it recognizes the State of Israel.”
A Palestinian state is anathema to Zionism – and must therefore be kept in the realms of fiction. The Palestinian state does not arrive, because Israel doesn’t intend, and never has intended, for the Palestinian dream to come true. After Palestinians accepted a partition of the land and initiated the peace process, Israel came up with a charade to convince the world it meant business– what Yitzhak Shamir called the “teaspoon” process.
The question of Palestine, or rather the question of Palestinian statehood is plaguing the Israeli government and now the pages of the New York Times. In a round table of op-eds Nadia Hijab, Avital Leibovich, Efraim Halevy, Nathan Thrall, Caroline B. Glick, Richard Ottaway, and Omar Barghouti, weigh in on the domino effect of declarations of sovereignty over the occupied territories from the past month.
Former U.S. ambassador Charles O. Cecil’s letter to President Obama warns that a U.S. veto of Palestine’s…