OMNI
ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS NEWSLETTER#15, May 17, 2021.
Compiled by Dick Bennett FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, and ECOLOGY
(#1 Feb. 22, 2011; #2 Feb. 16, 2012; #3 March 1, 2012; #4 May 18, 2012; #5 August 13, 2012; #6 October 29, 2012; #7 Dec. 17, 2012; #8 March 29, 2013; #9 Oct. 21, 2013; #10 April 28, 2014; #11, July 1, 2015; #12, June 21, 2016; #13, August 13, 2016)).
What’s at Stake: Can’t we just get along? the two Parties are asked, as though that would necessarily be a good thing. Well, in two important ways they agree, with infinite harm. They assert neo-liberal capitalism around the world. They constitute the US War Party of unceasing expansion and expenditure and resume a New Cold War to control the world for capitalism.
CONTENTS: ISRAEL-PALESTINE NEWSLETTER #15, 5-17-21
MAY 18 GLOBAL PROTEST
US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
ANSWER Coalition
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION MAY 2021
Weapons to Israel
Chris Hedges, Israel’s War Crimes and US and Israel’s Lies
Mairead Maguire v. Israel Killings and US Compliance
Philip Weiss v. Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken on Israel
Lana Tatour, Not Only Apartheid but Israel Enforces Settler-Colonialism
Norm Finkelstein Interview
2016-17 CONTINUITY, PRESENT FROM THE PAST
Jonathan Cook, New Land Law for Annexation Dooms 2- State Solution
Stephen Zunes, Israeli War Crimes Permitted by Bipartisan US Congress
RESISTANCE
sraeli Teens Refuse to Serve in Israeli Army
Medea Benjamin, BDS Movement
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Jewish Social Justice Tradition
Newsletter #13
TEXTS
MAY 18 GLOBAL PROTEST
TOMORROW, May 18: Rising up with Palestine
US CAMPAIGN FOR PALESTINIAN RIGHTS
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Dear Dick, Over the weekend, people faced off Israel’s ongoing and escalating brutality against the Palestinian people by flooding the world’s streets. Hundreds of thousands marched for justice, from DC, to Amman, to Cape Town. People power has generated a turning point. This is an unprecedented moment of popular resistance and solidarity. Together, we will continue to resist and uplift Palestinian demands until justice and liberation are reached. I believe Palestinians will defeat Israel’s apartheid regime in my lifetime—just as South Africa’s apartheid regime was defeated by ordinary people of my parent’s generation and America’s own apartheid system of Jim Crow segregation was defeated by their parents. We have inherited ongoing struggles that can build safety and freedom. We need you with us. Move to action today: Over the past five days, nearly 39,000 people have sent 100,000+ messages to Congress to demand an end to U.S. military funding for Israel, support sanctions on Israel, and elevate the Palestinian call for freedom and safety.
“We will continue to strike, organize, and protest for as long as the occupation exists. Liberation is within our reach.” Join Palestinians in this global day of action by planning an action at an Israeli consulate or embassy near you, holding a protest or vigil for Palestinians killed by Israeli terror, publicly committing to Palestinian liberation and BDS, and calling on your government to place sanctions on Israel. What does Palestine mean for Black America? Over the last several weeks, our timelines have been filled with pictures and videos of the violence in Sheikh Jarrah and the Gaza strip. Celebrities who are often silent on issues have been posting #FreePalestine. Why now? What's it got to do with our struggles at home? Featured speakers include: Aja Monet, Angela Davis, Vic Mensa, Janaya “Future” Khan, Mohammed El Kurd, Fayrouz Sharqawi, Anwar Hadid, and Ahmad Abuznaid. Every year, the U.S. government sends an astounding $3,800,000,000 in unconditional military assistance to Israel, diverting our taxpayer dollars to fund the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people through ongoing violence, forced displacements, home demolitions, checkpoints, travel restrictions, and a 14-year-long air, land, and sea blockade on Gaza. Together, we can transform policy to prioritize the safety and well-being of our communities. Thank you for all you are doing right now to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people during this critical moment. We are growing the movement for freedom and justice for the Palestinian people, together. In solidarity, LEAH MUSKIN-PIERRET Manager of Congressional & Grassroots Advocacy | ||||||
PALESTINE CALLS FOR DAY OF ACTION MAY 18: Massive solidarity protests for Palestine continue worldwide. ANSWER Coalition. https://www.answercoalition.org/tags/palestine?page=3 Join or organize a protest in your area in the coming days Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, on Nakba Day. Organized by the the ANSWER Coalition and Muslims for Social Justice, attended by thousands. The Palestinian people have called for Tuesday, May 18, to be a day of action. Protests are being organized in front of Israeli consulates and embassies, and elsewhere. As the Israeli state and Zionist mobs continues to terrorize the Palestinian people and bomb Gaza, solidarity protests demanding justice for Palestine continue to be organized in cities across the U.S. and the world. This past week has made one thing clear: the world stands with Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world demand an indictment of the Israeli state for its murderous crimes against Palestinians and demand an end to Israeli apartheid. Over 80 cities in the United States protested in solidarity with Palestine this past week, demanding an immediate end to all U.S. funding to Israel. From Kenya to Iraq to Japan to U.K., “free Palestine” resounded in the streets. Protests continue. For May 18, DAY OF ACTION, actions have already been called in California, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and more. For updates on current or new actions in U.S. cities, please check this page. If you have information about an action in your area not already listed here, or if you are planning an action, please let us know by clicking here. Free Palestine! Please make an urgently needed donation to the antiwar and anti-racism movement today. We can only carry on this crucial work with contributions from supporters like you. Some photos of solidarity protests in U.S. cities: https://www.answercoalition.org/tags/palestine?page=3 |
MAY 2021, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION
“Biden administration approves sale of $735 mln in weapons to Israel.” Al Arabiya English (17 May, 2021).
The United States President Joe Biden’s administration has approved the sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel, the Washington Post reported.
US lawmakers were informed of the sale in early May, nearly a week before violence erupted between Israeli forces and Hamas militants erupted, a senior congressional source confirmed to Al Arabiya English.
The Washington Post said the latest decision comes amid rising concerns by some House Democrats about the current administration’s support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The US lawmakers have reportedly questioned the new proposed sale, its timing, and suggested it may be used as leverage, the Washington Post added.
An unnamed lawmaker told the newspaper that allowing the arms sale to go through without pressuring Israel to agree to a ceasefire would further increase tensions.
At least 200 Palestinians have already been killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, and over 1,000 people were injured, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Once Congress is officially notified of the sale, lawmakers will have 20 days to object to the sale with nonbinding resolution of disapproval, according to the Washington Post.
Chris Hedges: Israel, the Big Lie
May 14, 2021
https://scheerpost.com/2021/05/14/chris-hedges-israel-the-big-lie/ (Also republished in Transcend Media)
Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.
The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.
The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie. MORE https://scheerpost.com/2021/05/14/chris-hedges-israel-the-big-lie/
There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society. We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.
[Chris Hedges writes a regular original column for ScheerPost. Click here to sign up for email alerts.]
“Gaza: IDF Kills Palestinians, Countless Children, by Air Bombardments.”
NOBEL LAUREATES, Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate – TRANSCEND Media Service. 17 May 2021.
15 May 2021 – In Belfast, N Ireland, this afternoon hundreds of young people walked to support the people of Gaza and protest the barbaric actions of the Israeli military that continue with air strikes, bombing and killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The youngsters also condemned the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli occupation forces wounding hundreds of Muslim worshipers. These violations add to the myriad Israeli crimes against the Palestinians over decades.
Israel is an Apartheid State that continues with a policy of Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinian people. These latest barbaric cruel actions by the Israeli Defense Forces are another breach of international law that must be condemned and stopped immediately. Such State violence must not be accepted by the peoples of the world. We cannot stand by allowing such Israeli inhumanity against Palestinians. Our silence will be shameful in the face of their illegal and brutal murder of Gaza’s children.
We had hoped that when President Biden took office, he would act against the Israeli governments’ continued destruction of Palestine; instead, the USA continues its unabated compliance with Israeli military ventures.
The European Union must retaliate financially against Israel. For too long the Israeli government has been playing victim as they carry out Ethnic Cleaning of Palestinians by increasing military occupation of their ancestral lands—which they renamed Real State.
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Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com.
BIDEN’S SECRETARY OF STATE PRAISES TRUMP’S ACHIEVEMENTS ON ISRAEL
By Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss.. https://mondoweiss.net/2021/01/bidens-secretary-of-state-praises-trumps-achievements-on-israel-2/The Biden Administration May Be Looking To Overturn Many Of The Trump Administration’s Policies — But Not When It Comes To Israel.
A new administration has taken over Washington with talk of justice, respect and diversity. However, when it comes to Israel-the news isn’t so encouraging.
Joe Biden’s foreign policy team says it wants to return to the Iran deal, but reassures the Israel lobby that that won’t happen any time soon, and when it comes to actual Palestinian rights or freedom (the “peace process”), it clearly wants as little friction with the Israeli government and Israel’s friends in Washington as possible. I watched all 4-1/2 hours of Tony Blinken’s testimony to Senate Foreign Relations (help!), and he never mentioned occupation, Palestinian human rights, or even settlements.
And Blinken spent a lot of time affirming Donald Trump’s policies in Israel! Notably in his very respectful exchanges with Senator Ted Cruz, who you’d think Blinken might treat with some crust because he tried to deny Biden’s victory.
Cruz: A final question because my time has expired, Do you agree that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and do you commit that the United States will keep our embassy there?
Blinken: Yes and Yes.
Normalization And The Peace Process
Blinken repeatedly praised Trump policy on normalizing relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and the Sudan as opening a pathway to Palestinian peace.
“I think there are a number of things from where I sat that the Trump administration did beyond our borders that I would applaud…. The Abraham Accords, absolutely… [T]he work that was done to push forward on normalization with Israel, I applaud. It makes Israel safer, it makes the region safer, it’s a good thing. I would hope we can build on that.“
No wonder South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called Blinken an “outstanding choice.” No wonder Blinken played ball with Graham:
Graham: Do you still consider Iran the largest state sponsor of terrorism?
Blinken: I do.
Graham: Do you consider Israel a racist nation?
Blinken: I do not.
Graham: Good start!
The two men were responding indirectly to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who said that morning on Democracy Now! that Israel is an “apartheid state” and a “racist state” because it had refused to give coronavirus vaccine to occupied Palestinians even as it inoculated the largely-Jewish population in Israel.
Tlaib is of course echoing a couple of new human rights reports labeling Israel an apartheid nation, but Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and the rest of the Israel lobby are in denial:
describing Israel as “apartheid” is false and hateful, and shuts down constructive engagement. One can be critical of Israel without attacking the Jewish State with incendiary accusations.
Jeremy Slevin of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s staff had a pointed response.
Human rights advocates—from B’Tselem to the UN Human Rights Council to Jimmy fucking Carter—have all used the term apartheid to describe the illegal occupation of Palestinian land. Yet somehow the ADL only calls it “incendiary” when it comes from a Muslim woman.
Again, Blinken had nothing to say about Palestinian human rights. He used questions about the peace process to gush about the Jewish democratic state, and say two states is a pipe dream– “however distant it may appear” — but it’s our pipe dream.
Our commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct, and this is something that the President elect feels very strongly…
The president-elect believes and I share this conviction, that the best way, and maybe the only way, to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish democratic state and to give the Palestinians the state to which they are entitled is through the so-called two-state solution, obviously a solution that is very challenged at this moment. I think realistically its hard to see near term prospects for moving forward on that.
Blinken said that it was “important to make sure that neither party takes steps” or “unilateral actions” that make the prospect of two states even “more challenging.”
But bear in mind that Israel has announced even more illegal settlements in recent days, and Blinken was careful not to say a word about that. Though he went on and on about Biden’s “resolute” opposition to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. “It unfairly and inappropriately singles out Israel, it creates a double standard, and a standard that we don’t apply to other countries.” (As if the U.S. accords other countries the “special relationship” it has with Israel.)
I continue to hope that Biden is going to take Netanyahu on. The fact that Biden has named three Israel-supporting Jews to top positions at State (Blinken, Wendy Sherman, Victoria Nuland) indicates to me that he wants the liberal Zionist lobby on his side in doing so.
All the same, Blinken’s rhetoric seems a step back from the last Democratic secretary of state, John Kerry, who blamed Israel for making the peace process vanish in 2014 — “Poof” — and in 2016 warned that the U.S. couldn’t continue to give Israel diplomatic cover if it destroyed the prospect of a Palestinian state and blocked a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem. Well Tony Blinken is prepared to give Israel that cover. The clear signal from his hearing is that Biden doesn’t want to tangle with Netanyahu. MORE https://mondoweiss.net/2021/01/bidens-secretary-of-state-praises-trumps-achievements-on-israel
WHY CALLING ISRAEL AN APARTHEID STATE IS NOT ENOUGH
By Lana Tatour, Middle East Eye. January 24, 2021 . https://popularresistance.org/why-calling-israel-an-apartheid-state-is-not-enough/
Above photo: A Palestinian woman stands by a protest sign reading ‘Arabs are prohibited, this is Apartheid St’ in Hebron on 28 January 2020. AFP.
Report From B’Tselem Highlighting Israel’s Apartheid Character Is A Welcome Development, But This Finding Cannot Be Divorced From The State’s Oppressive Settler-Colonialism.
B’Tselem, a leading human rights group in Israel, recently released a report concluding that Israel is an apartheid state, with a regime of Jewish supremacy stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
The report found that Israel meets the definition of apartheid under international law, which defines apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.
The report received widespread international media attention and was described as a “watershed” moment. But it was only a watershed moment for B’Tselem, which was using the term “apartheid” for the first time in its three-decade history, and for an international community that is so infatuated with Israeli voices. For Palestinians, none of this is new.
Dominating Palestinians
B’Tselem is not the first human rights group to call Israel an apartheid regime. In 2009, Palestinian and South African scholars published a comprehensive report that determined Israel was committing the crime of apartheid. Two Palestinian human rights organisations, Adalah and Al-Haq, were part of this initiative.
Two former UN special rapporteurs on human rights in Palestine reached a similar conclusion. In 2007, John Dugard determined that “elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid”. And, a few years ago, Richard Falk co-authored a report finding that Israel has established “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”. The UN secretary-general was quick to distance himself from the report, ordering its removal from the UN website.
Typical of western racism, Israelis are deemed more reliable and esteemed, and their contributions more valid than those of Palestinians who experience apartheid, colonisation and occupation every day.
Still, the B’Tselem report is a welcome development. As academic Rafeef Ziadah points out, it comes “in the face of an orchestrated silencing campaign, which attempts to foreclose debate before it even begins. In this sense, it is relevant that an Israeli human rights organisation has stated what Palestinians have been arguing for years”.
While the use of the apartheid framework in relation to Israel is not new, it is gaining momentum amid the one-state reality. While the occupation paradigm is built on the false assumption of temporariness and sustains a distinction between 1948 and 1967 territories, the apartheid framework recognises that Israel is the effective governing power between the river and the sea, where it enacts a racialised regime.
Crime Against Humanity
Under international law, apartheid is a crime against humanity – and the evidence clearly shows that Israel is an apartheid state. Throughout the territory between the river and the sea, its political and legal systems are all geared towards ensuring Jewish racial supremacy and domination. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel refused to vaccinate the millions of Palestinians who live under its control, while vaccinating Israelis, including Jewish settlers, in the occupied West Bank.
But Palestine cannot be understood merely in terms of apartheid, as this offers only a limited and partial understanding of the situation. Israel is a settler-colonial state that is practising both apartheid and permanent occupation.
The conversation emerging in liberal circuits around apartheid and Palestine fails to recognise settler-colonialism as the overarching structure of the Israeli state. We have seen such dynamics in Peter Beinart’s recent call for one binational state, in which apartheid is acknowledged, but not Zionist/Israeli settler-colonialism.
Racial domination is treated as a standalone feature of the Israeli state, disconnected from the settler-colonial enterprise in Palestine. Even when apartheid is acknowledged, there is no reckoning with Zionism as a racial ideology and movement. https://popularresistance.org/why-calling-israel-an-apartheid-state-is-not-enough/
Lana Tatour is a lecturer/assistant professor in global development at the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia).
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Hi guys, another must listen-to interview. . . worth every minute. Norm Finkelstein, you probably are familiar with him, child of Holocaust survivors, excellent explanation of the situation in Israel-Palestine. This is one of the most informative interviews I have ever heard in my life on this subject. I guarantee you’ll hear things you may not have considered before. Finkelstein thinks change is underway.
George
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=HLVJYmRvvKQ
Attachments area
Preview YouTube video Norman Finkelstein on Israel & What's happening Here
Norman Finkelstein on Israel & What's happen
WHERE WE’VE COME FROM 2016-17
ONE STATE OR TWO? WILL IT MATTER?
US/ISRAEL JUGGERNAUT OF INJUSTICE
Annexation Will End Justice
Land law is final nail in the two-state solution coffin
Jonathan Cook (Also published in Washington Report on ME Affairs)
February 7, 2017 Updated: February 8, 2017 08:19 AM
http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/land-law-is-final-nail-in-the-two-state-solution-coffin
The Israeli parliament passed the legalisation law on Monday night – a piece of legislation every bit as suspect as its title suggests. The law widens the powers of Israeli officials to seize the last fragments of Palestinian land in the West Bank that were supposed to be off-limits. Now, almost nowhere will be out of the settlers’ reach.
Palestinian leaders warned that the law hammered the last nail in the coffin of a two-state solution. Government ministers gleefully agreed. For them, this is the extension of Israeli law into the West Bank and the first step towards its formal annexation.
The legalisation law – also commonly translated from Hebrew as the regulation or validation law – was the right’s forceful response to the eviction last week of a few dozen families from a settlement "outpost" called Amona. It was a rare and brief setback for the settlers, provoked by a court ruling that took three years to enforce.
The evacuation of 40 families was transformed into an expensive piece of political theatre, costing $40 million (Dh147m). It was choreographed as a national trauma to ensure such an event is never repeated.
The uniforms worn by police at demolitions of Palestinian homes – guns, batons, black body armour and visors – were stored away. Instead officers, in friendly blue sweatshirts and baseball caps, handled the Jewish lawbreakers with kid gloves, even as they faced a hail of stones, bleach and bottles. By the end, dozens of officers needed hospital treatment.
As the clashes unfolded, Naftali Bennett, the education minister and leader of the settler party Jewish Home, called Amona’s families "heroes". Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu empathised: "We all understand the extent of their pain."
The settlers have been promised an enlarged replacement settlement, and will be richly compensated. In a more general reparation, plans have been unveiled for thousands of extra settler homes in the West Bank.
But the main prize for Mr Bennett and the far right was the legalisation law itself. It reverses a restriction imposed in the 1970s – and later violated by dozens of settlements like Amona – designed to prevent a free-for-all by the settlers.
International law is clear that an occupying power can take land only for military needs. Israel committed a war crime in transferring more than 600,000 Jewish civilians into the occupied territories. MORE http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/land-law-is-final-nail-in-the-two-state-solution-coffin
Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist in Nazareth
US SITUATION IN 2016: ISRAELI CRIMES ARE BIPARTISAN
Trump’s FAr-Right Israel Stance Creates an Opening for the Left
But congressional Democrats won’t act without a push.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19912/trump-democrats-netanyahu-israel-palestine-bds
Democrats who support Israel uncritically must either be convinced to change or be replaced.
It was a surreal scene: On February 15, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Washington, D.C. and spoke of their “shared values” which have “advanced the cause of human freedom, dignity and peace,” while at the same time retreating from the longstanding call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Trump’s appointee for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman has also insisted the United States should end the “two-state narrative” and claims that even moderate Zionist groups like J Street, which support an end to the occupation, are “far worse than kapos—Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps.”
Many progressives believe—as a result of ongoing Israeli colonization of land that Palestinians would need to have a viable state of their own—that a single shared state may be the best and most realistic solution. But the “one-state” solution Trump and Netanyahu now speak of is unlikely to be a democratic bi-national state where Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have equal rights. Instead, Trump and Netanyahu’s solution would effectively be an apartheid state, where Israel would maintain its control over the Palestinian population indefinitely.
While the Obama administration refused to take any concrete actions, such as targeted sanctions, to stop the expansion of settlements, its public criticisms of Israel may have had at least some impact in curbing the extent of their expansion in the occupied territories. But the new administration is abandoning even those criticisms. Trump appears to be rejecting the long-held international consensus that Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem is both illegal and an obstacle to peace, and pledged to block any international action to prevent it.
This gives particular urgency for peace and human rights activists to challenge U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine—and given Trump’s unpopularity and the far-right extremism of his stances, it creates an opening to shift the terms of debate.
A Bipartisan Consensus
For years, the United States has been in the contradictory role of being the sole mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the primary military, financial and diplomatic supporter of the more powerful of the two parties. At this point, with the Trump administration effectively endorsing a permanent Israeli occupation, there should no longer even be the pretense that the United States is an “honest broker.”
The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization have long recognized Israel within its internationally accepted borders, which encompass 78% of historic Palestine, and agreed to a mini-state comprising only the territories seized by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. However, as the remaining Palestinian population centers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank have become surrounded by large Israeli settlement blocs, the creation of a viable contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel is becoming increasingly problematic.
If changing demographics makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel impossible, Palestinians would have no choice but to demand equal rights within a greater Israel. Israelis would then have to decide whether to remain a Jewish state, in which non-Jewish Palestinians are second-class citizens, or become a truly democratic state, in which both peoples participate in governance on equal footing. They could no longer claim to be both. This reality was recognized by then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s address on Dec. 28, 2016— an address that was strongly denounced by the Israeli government, the Republicans and many congressional Democrats.
That even Kerry’s relatively moderate observation was opposed by members of both major U.S. party establishments shouldn’t be surprising.
The Republican Party’s 2016 platform not only fails to support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel, as it had in previous years, it puts the party in opposition to virtually the entire international community by proclaiming Republicans “reject the false notion that Israel is an occupier.” It also insists that Israel “stands out among the nations as a beacon of democracy and humanity,” that “support for Israel is an expression of Americanism,” and that there should be “no daylight between America and Israel.”
The platform also declares that the United States should withhold funding from the United Nations, the World Court or any other international authority that attempts to pressure Israel to withdraw or impose any kind of peace settlement.
The Trump administration has already put this extreme anti-Palestinian position into action. In early February, the United States blocked the appointment of former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a pro-Western moderate, to become the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy to help resolve the conflict in Libya—simply because he was Palestinian.
Ironically, this rightward shift in U.S. policy comes at a time when public opinion has never been more moderate. This is an area where the Democratic Party could take some leadership in distinguishing itself from Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress on a key foreign policy issue. However, it appears unlikely that this will happen any time soon.
For example, the 2016 Democratic Party platform—while supporting the concept of a two-state solution in theory—insists it could only come on Israeli terms through direct negotiations, ignoring how the gross asymmetry in power between the occupying power and those under occupation provides little incentive for Israel’s rightwing government to compromise. Not only did the platform refuse to oppose or even acknowledge the occupation and settlements, it criticized the United Nations and civil society movements for their efforts to stop them, while praising Israel’s supposed commitment to “equality, tolerance and pluralism.”
There is probably no issue where elected Democratic Party officials take positions so far to the right of their constituents. Polls show most Democrats believe the United States should impose sanctions or even more strenuous measures against Israel to stop the expansion of illegal settlements. Yet when Obama refused to veto a mildly worded and largely symbolic UN Security Council resolution critical of Israel’s colonization drive, most congressional Democrats voted for a resolution criticizing the president. A majority of rank-and-file Democrats believe the United States should support the United Nations formally recognizing the State of Palestine, but the overwhelming majority of Congressional Democrats have gone on record insisting the United States should veto such a measure.
In fact, Democrats in Congress have joined bipartisan majorities this past year passing a series of bills and resolutions defining “Israel” as including “territories controlled by Israel.” Such a legal redefinition of what constitutes “Israel” has in large part been designed to make it more difficult to oppose the Israeli occupation or colonization of the West Bank, such as through boycotting or even simply labeling products produced in illegal settlements.
The list goes on: Eighty percent of Democratic voters believe the United States should at least be neutral (some even said the U.S. should favor Palestinians) in the peace process, yet the voting records and statements of congressional Democrats near-universally favor Israel. Less than one-third of registered Democrats believed that Israel’s actions during the 2014 war on Gaza were justified, yet congressional Democrats joined Republicans in backing a series of resolutions by unanimous consent giving unconditional support for the Israeli offensive.
This disconnect between the Democratic rank-and-file and their elected leadership is growing, particularly given that younger Americans take a far more critical, or at least more balanced, view of Israel than older Americans. The movement on college campuses in support for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation has support comparable to similar campaigns on South Africa thirty years ago, yet Democrats in both Washington and in state capitols have joined Republicans in denouncing BDS as “anti-Semitic,” alienating many up-and-coming activists whose support they will need in future campaigns. MOREhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/19912/trump-democrats-netanyahu-israel-palestine-bds
RESISTANCE
‘We’re taking responsibility’: Sixty teens announce refusal to serve in Israeli army. Mronline.org (1-26-21). Dozens of Israeli teens sign public letter objecting to military service over Israel’s policies of apartheid, neoliberalism, and denial of the Nakba. | more… 
THE BDS MOVEMENT
BY
http://thehumanist.com/magazine/november-december-2016/features/active-duty-dedication-liberty-justice-end-wars
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Photo by Lexey Swall
Medea Benjamin has been an advocate for social justice for more than forty years. As an economist and nutritionist with the United Nations and World Health Organization in the 1970s and early ’80s, she brought attention to overseas sweatshops, Nestlé’s anti-breastfeeding campaign, and poor labor practices at Dole and Nike. In 1988 she cofounded the human rights group Global Exchange and in 2002 she cofounded the women-led peace group CODEPINK.
Benjamin’s work for justice in Israel-Palestine includes taking numerous delegations to Gaza after the 2008 Israeli invasion, organizing the Gaza Freedom March in 2010, participating in the Freedom Flotillas, and opposing the policies of the Israel lobby group AIPAC. In 2011 she was in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising and in 2012 she was part of a human rights delegation to Bahrain in support of democracy activists.
Benjamin is the author or coauthor of nine books, including Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (2012) and her latest, Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection. She is the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation; the Peace Prize from the US Peace Memorial; the Gandhi Peace Award; and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Award. This year Benjamin was named the Humanist Heroine by the Feminist Caucus of the American Humanist Association. The following is adapted from her May 28, 2016, speech in acceptance of the award at the AHA’s annual conference in Chicago.
. . . .
Another issue that humanists should address is the issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I’ve heard it’s a difficult subject for some of you in this group. Believe me, it’s been a difficult subject for me as a secular Jew who had close ties to Israel from the time I was sixteen working in a kibbutz. But I forced myself to learn more. I forced myself to read. I forced myself to travel to the region under the most difficult of times, like right after the 2008 twenty-two-day military assault on Gaza that killed over 1,400 Palestinians; many of them civilians and many of them children. I was shocked and horrified by what I saw and was determined to get more involved in protesting the US support for the Israeli military by joining the nonviolent movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, also known as BDS. I, and the others I know, don’t do this out of any hatred for Israel. In fact, I do it out of love for Israel. Thanks to Bernie Sanders, it’s now okay for a mainstream politician to express sympathy for Palestinians. The BDS movement is growing within faith-based communities, including the Jewish community, and on college campuses around the country. It should be supported by the American Humanist Association. . . .http://thehumanist.com/magazine/november-december-2016/features/active-duty-dedication-liberty-justice-end-wars
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS, January/February 2017
This pro-Palestinian monthly magazine is the best general peace and justice news magazine on the Middle East I know of. Only $29 for dozens of well-written articles and reports. Every month there’s a section on “The U.S. role in the Middle East and the Israeli Occupation of Palestine”: eleven articles in this no.; for example: “The Trump Era Begins—Five Views”; “Israel Moves to Legalize Settlements and Further Its Crackdown on BDS”; “The Senate Passes a Dumb and Dangerous Bill” (to censor criticism of Israel). And every month “Special Reports,” six this month, for example, “Hands Off the Iran Deal.” And then regular “Departments”: Cartoons, Israel and Judaism: “Is It Fair to Use the Term ‘Apartheid’ to Characterize Israel’s Occupation?”; Waging Peace: “Conference Examines Future of Palestinian Christians”; Human Rights, Diplomatic Doings, Arab American Activism, Music and Arts, Books, and more. --Dick
Jewish social justice tradition a voice of hope
We wish you could have felt it
Dear Dick, Wow. JVP’s National Member Meeting concluded Sunday night with one of the most moving political experiences of either of our lives. Forget about wishing you had seen it (which you'll be able to as soon as we get recordings up online). We wish you could have felt it. "This conference has been about much more than naming oppressions. We danced (some of us), sang, laughed, wept, mourned, strategized, debated and disagreed and most importantly we dreamed. We dreamed of a beloved community" - Nyle Fort At our closing plenary, Rev. Nyle Fort, Linda Sarsour, and Rasmea Odeh delivered more than just three inspiring speeches. More than inspiration and hope. More than a multi-racial, multi-faith, intergenerational barnburner. In that room, the future of the Jewish community burst to life. And that was just one hour of an unbelievably intense 3-day sprint. The NMM kicked off with a historic day-long convening for Jews of Color and Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in solidarity with Palestine. Then more than 40 workshops expanded our understanding of Jewish histories of resistance, tactical skills for taking on Congress and state legislatures, report backs from cutting edge campaigns fighting Islamophobia, militarism, and the alt-right’s melding of anti-semitism and extreme Zionism from the White House on down. Together, we proved that radical inclusivity builds genuine Jewish community. It’s time to get back to work now. We are ready. We are all in. And so as we finish cleaning up, we have three asks of you today (depending on your role and work already in JVP, they might not all apply exactly to you - but you could definitely consider sharing them all with friends!): 1. Our May Member Drive is around the corner - and we need to get 4,000 new and renewed members in the door by the end of the month. What we experienced together in Chicago needs to used a launching pad to build the organization and movement. We are an organization of organizers - so please click here to lend your hand to this mass outreach effort. . . . By the time we reconvene for the 2019 NMM, our entire movement will be even more loving, intentional and connected. We will have more power to demand a just US and foreign policy - not just to endure during the Trump era, but to make sure those who sooner or later will replace him understand why Palestinian freedom is integral not just to the progressive agenda - but to any and every moral vision of what the world should be. See you soon at the 2019 NMM - and hopefully much, much sooner! Stefanie Fox & Rabbi Alissa Wise Jewish Voice for Peace is a national membership organization inspired by Jewish tradition to work for the freedom, equality, and dignity of all the people of Israel and Palestine. Become a JVP Member today. | ||||||||
Contents Israel-Palestinian Newsletter #13, August 13, 2016
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/08/israeli-palestinian-newsletter-13.html
Nuclear Armed Israel: Vanunu Jailed Again
Occupation Conflict Today
Documentary on Israeli Media Control: The Occupation of the American Mind,
How Israel Occupies the US: Mnar Muhawesh meets Sut Jhally
DovWaxman,The American Jewish Conflict over Israel, why Israel has
become such a divisive issue
Resistance
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Divestment
WRL supports Black & Palestinian solidarity
Congressional Supporters of Palestinians
Americans for Peace Now, “Do This Not That”
Bernie Sanders’ Critique of Israel
CodePink BDS Movement:
Codepink: RE/MAX stop selling properties in Israeli settlements built on
occupied Palestinian land
Codepink: Letter to John Kerry on Human Rights in Israel and Palestine
Illegal settlements acquired illegally, and Ban Ki-Moon
“Despair Is Not an Option”: Mustegrantees speak out
Sloan, “The Olive Grove”
END ISRAEL-PALESTINE NEWSLETTER #15