Category: Israel, Palestine & Zionism

Israeli Soldiers Arrest 230 Palestinian Children in the West Bank During the First Three Months of 2021

Imagine that one of these children is your son or daughter.

Imagine that you live under military law.

You have no civil rights; no freedom of speech; no freedom of movement or right to assemble; no right to protest or object to your mistreatment.

Imagine that you can be arrested without charge for anything at any time, based solely on the whim of the soldier who grabs you and throws you into the back of his truck.

Imagine that your child will be forcefully “interrogated” as he/she sits alone in a concrete cell surrounded by hostile, aggressive soldiers.

Imagine that these soldiers will hit, kick, slap, punch, ridicule, and humiliate your child with impunity. And you alone will be left to treat his/her injuries.

Imagine that you have no recourse for complaint. No one listens to your demands for an explanation. They may not even tell you where your child was taken.

Imagine that your complaints can only be heard by a military judge in a military court where Palestinians effectively never win a case.

This is Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

Patrick Lawrence Explains Biden’s Inhumanity in Syria

Yesterday’s Consortium News had an illuminating article by Patrick Lawrence warning about the danger signs embedded in president Biden’s recent actions in Syria.

The US began to destroy Syria during the Obama administration as yet

Syrian school children meeting in front of their bombed out school building

another Democratic president initiated another attempted coup followed by incessant “regime change” operations in the Middle East.

It didn’t take long for American forces to ally themselves with al-Qaeda troops (yes, THAT al-Qaeda) in our imperial attempts to “rebuild” a “democratic” Syria. (You can’t make this stuff up…)

Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad is no saint. But America’s reckless,

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad

shortsighted, selfish interference makes Assad’s authoritarian nationalism look like an oasis of tranquility in the midst of Dante’s inferno.

Things have only gotten worse for the Syrian people since US interference in the country’s internal affairs. The Biden administration shows no sign of working to repair the damage we have done.

Below is an excerpt of this article. Read it and weep, oh ye citizens. For these are your tax dollars at work:

For a time after Joe Biden took office not quite three months ago, among the questions raised was how the new administration would address the Syria question.

I do not think we will have to wonder about this much longer. It is early days yet, but one now detects the Biden’s administration’s Syria policy in faint outline. From what one can make out, it is bleak, it is vicious, it is unconscionably cruel to the Syrian people. 

And it may prove yet worse than anything the Trump administration came up with, the Bible-banging Mike Pompeo in the lead as secretary of state.

Will Biden’s national security people drop the covert coup operation Barack Obama set it in motion nine years ago, its failure long evident? Or will they reinvigorate American support for savage jihadists in the name of “regime changing” the secular government in Damascus? What about the American troops still operating illegally on Syrian soil? What about the oilfields the Trump administration took to “protecting” from the nation that owns them? What about the brazen theft of crude from those fields?

And what, of course, about the murderous sanctions that various executive orders have escalated on numerous occasions since the Bush II administration imposed the first of them 17 long years ago?  

Business as Usual: Israeli Soldiers Arrest Palestinian Children for Picking Wild Vegetables on Their Own Land

Below is a video of Israeli soldiers arresting 5 Palestinian children, ages 8 through 13. Their “crime” was picking wild herbs and vegetables near an illegal Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank.

It is another example of the way Israel criminalizes Palestinians for merely existing in their own land.

The video was released by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Below is an excerpt from Aljazeera describing the arrest.

Israeli forces detained five Palestinian children for several hours after they were confronted by Jewish settlers while gathering wild vegetables near a settlement outpost in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli human rights group said on Thursday.

B’Tselem released video of the arrest in the southern Hebron Hills, in which heavily armed Israeli soldiers can be seen dragging the children away.

Footage shot earlier shows the children gathering akoub, a plant similar to artichoke, when two masked settlers emerge from a grove of trees near the illegal settler outpost of Havat Maon.

The outpost is located near Masafer Yatta, a collection of about 19 Palestinian hamlets. The area is a frequent target of assaults by the Israeli military and settlers.

“This is another example of the absolute disregard on the part of Israeli authorities and forces on the ground to the wellbeing and rights of Palestinians, no matter how young or vulnerable,” B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz said.

“The youngest boy from yesterday’s incident is eight years old,” he added.

The children, whose ages range from eight to 13, were held for about five hours

An Israeli soldier detains a Palestinian boy during a protest against Jewish settlements in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah August 28, 2015. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

at a police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, according to Gaby Lasky, a human rights lawyer who is representing them. The two eldest, who are 12 and 13, were ordered to return next week for more questioning as, under Israeli military law, they are deemed old enough to face charges. . . 

. . . According to Defense for Children International, Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year. Prisoners’ rights group Addameer has said 140 Palestinian children are currently imprisoned by Israel.

Click here to read the entire article.

 

 

Why is Facebook Censoring My Wife’s Comments About Israel?

Recently, one of Terry’s (my wife) Facebook posts was flagged and deleted for violating Facebook’s content policies.

Her censored comment advocated for Palestinian human rights in the Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She noted that it was the Israeli government, not the occupied Palestinians, who were regularly  committing acts of terrorism.

That particular political observation is no longer permitted by the Facebook censorship policies — which we all know are expanding rapidly.

It’s more evidence of the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country which would love to censor ALL criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people living under its control.

Fortunately, the Jewish-led, Palestinian rights organization called Jewish Voice for Peace has begun a campaign on Facebook aimed at combating the Israel Lobby’s dangerous, anti-first amendment influence online.

They call it, “Facebook We Have to Talk: On Distinguishing Anti-Semitism from Anti-Zionism in Public Spaces.” Below is an excerpt:

In January 2021, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced a global campaign “Facebook, we need to talk” about the social media giant’s inquiry into whether criticism of the movement Zionism “falls within the rubric of hate speech as per Facebook’s Community Standards.”

In its current form, the controversy centers around forcing universities, social media platforms, and other public spaces to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) standard which defines current anti-Semitism to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel, overall a definition that would essentially shut down any criticism of the Zionist state.

According to Lara Friedman, the goal of Zionist groups who are pushing for this action “isn’t to get Facebook to deplatform antisemitism, but to get Facebook to deplatform criticism of Israel.”

In response, hundreds of activists, intellectuals and artists from around the world have launched a petition to ensure that Facebook does not include “Zionist” as a protected category in its hate speech policy—“that is, to treat ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for “Jew or “Jewish.” In its first 24 hours, the open letter gathered over 14,500 signatures, including such figures as Hanan Ashrawi, Norita Cortiñas, Wallace Shawn and Peter Gabriel.

“Cooperating with the Israeli government’s request,” the petition notes, “would undermine efforts to dismantle antisemitism, deprive Palestinians of a crucial venue for expressing their political viewpoints to the world, and help the Israeli government avoid accountability for its violations of Palestinian rights.”

The ICC Opens Investigation into Israeli War Crimes

Juan Cole has a new article at his news site, Informed Comment, discussing

Professor Juan Cole

the recent decision by the International Criminal Court to investigate numerous charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity made against Israel.

I examine these issues in my new book, tentatively titled, Like Birds in a Cage: How Bad Bible-Reading Leads Christian Zionists to Collaborate in Israeli War Crimes and Palestinian Suffering (Cascade, forthcoming).

Israel’s defensive public relations campaign is already in full swing, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others unleashing the now standard canard of accusing such investigations as expressions of antisemitic hatred.

This action by the ICC is an important first step that needed to happen years ago. What will come of it is anyone’s guess.

But I know this: Christians must stand on the side of justice and oppose all oppressors. That means that God’s people must stand with the Palestinian people while condemning Israeli racism and apartheid.

Here is professor Cole’s article:

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of Apartheid in the Palestinian territories.

Israeli politician Abba Eban once quipped that Palestinians never lost the opportunity to lose an opportunity. But Palestinians have carefully, methodically created this opportunity to be heard in an international tribunal. It is the ruling Israeli right wing about which one can now quip about missing opportunities.

Israel has egregiously violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of people in Occupied territories by flooding its own citizens into the Palestinian Territories, by stealing Palestinian land from its owners and building squatter settlements on it, and by using disproportional force against Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border.

The court will also look into war crimes by Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip.

It has been impossible for anyone to stop Israel’s repeated and serious crimes against the Palestinians because the United States backs them to the hilt and is deeply implicated itself in keeping Palestinians stateless. (The “two-state solution” long since became geographically impossible, and invoking it and an alleged “peace process,” as the Biden administration does, is just a way of keeping the Palestinians from enjoying any human rights).

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cynically called the ruling “anti-Semitic,” in the ultimate debasement of a term that has otherwise been central to human rights struggles.

Filistin al-Yawm (Palestine Today) quotes Rami Abdu, head of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor as saying that the International Criminal Court announcement that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian Territories represents a victory, won by many sacrifices, for justice, freedom and ethical values in the world. It is, he said, the fruit of a Palestinian struggle that has lasted decades to win recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

As a result, he said, Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes from various generations will gain the right to seek justice after decades of occupation and to see the perpetrators tried in the Hague. He cautioned, however, that “The decision does not mean the end of the road, and the task will not be easy. The hope is that the Biden administration will adopt a different course from its predecessor, and will refrain from putting any pressure on the court.”

In spring of 2020, Trump declared a national emergency as a pretext for being able to target justices and staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions because they were looking into alleged crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan. These outrageous and ineffectual sanctions have been lifted by the Biden administration.

The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute circulated to UN member states in the late 1990s and finalized in 2002. The United States and Israel refused to sign or to recognize the court’s jurisdiction. Some 123 countries have, however, ratified the treaty and so incorporated it into their national law.

The court can take up cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and Apartheid committed by officials in the signatory states. It can apply sanctions to individuals in those governments after trying them. It does not sanction states but individuals. So far its cases have been entirely from Africa.

But the court’s hands are usually tied with regard to non-signatory governments. It cannot move against their officials unless the United Nations Security Council forwards a case to them. Thus, when the murderous regime of Muammar Gaddafi attacked civilians in winter-spring of 2011 during the Arab Spring youth revolt, the Security Council referred the case to the ICC. Its justices considered evidence against Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif Gaddafi, as well as interior minister Abdullah Sanusi. Arrest warrants were issued by the court for these individuals on June 27, 2011.

The State of Palestine led by Mahmoud Abbas had little hope of the US Security Council asking the ICC to look into Israeli war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, since the United States almost always uses its veto to protect Israeli officials from sanctions for their illegal occupation policies in the Palestinian Territories that they grabbed beginning in 1967.

The Palestinian David very carefully and with foresight therefore moved to join the International Criminal Court. The first obstacle they faced is that court members have to be members of the United Nations. Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the eclipse of Labor in favor of the far, far right Likud and its offshoots, Israel’s policy against the Palestinian people has been predicated on preventing Palestinians from ever having a state. They are to be kept stateless and deprived of the basic human rights that come with citizenship in a state.

So, Palestine sought the same status at the U.N. as is enjoyed by the Vatican, of
permanent observer state. The General Assembly can grant this status, and did so for Palestine in 2012. Permanent observer states cannot vote, but they are not voiceless and can attend sessions. Palestine’s prerogatives were expanded in 2019 when the Group of 77 at the UN elected it their chairman that year.

In 2015, the state of Palestine (as the UN calls it) acceded to the International Criminal Court and recognized its jurisdiction in the Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem.

This is like three dimensional chess on the part of the Palestinians. Because they now have what is called in the law “standing.” They are a permanent observer state at the UN and they are signatories to the Rome Statute.

Now just one step was left, which was to take to the ICC those Israeli officials operating in the Palestinian Territories in such a way as to violate the Rome Statute. Palestine did not hurry to do so, hoping that the government of Binyamin Netanyahu would see the legal peril and become more reasonable. But Netanyahu kept stealing their land and urging Trump to cut their funding (which he did), and by 2019 the Palestinians concluded that they had nothing left to lose by filing a claim.

The ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, declared a delay while she sought reassurances that the court had jurisdiction over Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

A little over a year later, she has been assured that it does, given the recognition of the Palestine Authority as the government of those region in the Oslo Accords.

As Mr. Abdu said, this step is more the beginning of something rather than its end. Netanyahu will attempt to obstruct the workings of the court. But this is a great day for the international rule of law, and all believers in human rights should rejoice.

 

Israel and Sheldon Adelson: Another Example of How Money Influences US Foreign Policy

The Las Vegas casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, died on January 11, 2021.

Donald Trump with Sheldon Adelson. Adelson reportedly contributed $75 million to Trump’s 2019 reelection campaign.

Adelson (and his Israeli born wife) was a fanatical political Zionist who, sadly, was the living embodiment of the old antisemitic slander that Jews all secretly loved Israel more than their country of residence.

Occasionally, caricatures — even slanderous caricatures — can be true.

The day after Adelson’s death Alex Kane of The Intercept published an article entitled, “Sheldon Adelson’s Fortune Helped Turn the GOP Into the Party of Israeli Apartheid.”

YES. Israel is an apartheid state.

Israeli apartheid is not limited to the Occupied Territories.

Apartheid reigns within Israel’s recognized borders as well.

Israel is NOT “the only democracy in the Middle East” because Israel is not a democracy.

As I show in my forthcoming book exposing the many errors of Christian Zionism, Israel is actually an extremely rigid ethnocracy. That is, a hierarchical state where one ethnic group (Jews) exercises the legal privilege of systematically discriminating against everyone else in the state (primarily Palestinians).

This is much more than a story about Adelson’s control over the Republican party. It is an expose in how big money donors, CEOs, and corporations are able to control American politics, including our foreign policy.

Below is an excerpt from Kane’s article, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:

WITH THE death of 87-year-old billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party has lost its biggest benefactor.

A Palestinian girl sits inside a room of her family’s building which was damaged by Israel’s bombing attack in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, Feb. 23, 2015. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Adelson’s legacy, however, will live on for generations, not only in his Israeli-born wife Miriam, who is expected to continue giving millions of dollars to the Republican Party, but in the shape of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Adelson’s top concern. “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel,” Adelson said in 2017.

More than anyone else, Adelson can claim credit for transforming the GOP into a party devoted to bolstering Israel’s military occupation and its expansion of West Bank settlements. And the Israeli

Israeli settlers regularly harass and attack Palestinians. They are typically protected by Israeli soldiers.

right, also bankrolled by Adelson, saw many of its political aspirations realized under Donald Trump’s presidency, a political turn that has fractured the long-standing bipartisan consensus on the Jewish state.

Adelson’s most important political conviction was that the Israeli right must be supported. The 19th-richest American used his $35 billion fortune to ensure that the GOP’s policy goals united with the Israeli right’s. In a 2010 speech, Adelson, a U.S. Army veteran, lamented that “the uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform.” He added: “All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli-born, Israel is in my heart.”

As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” he said in remarks made in 2014 at an Israeli-American Council conference. During that same appearance, Adelson dismissed concerns about whether Israeli democracy can coexist while Israel rules millions of Palestinians who have no voting rights. So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?” he said. . . 

. . . FROM 2008 TO 2016, Adelson opposed President Barack Obama at every turn, backing John McCain and Mitt Romney’s failed attempts at defeating him and bankrolling the groups that fiercely wanted to defeat Obama’s Iran policies. In 2013, Adelson suggested that Obama launch a nuclear strike on Iran. Obama instead pursued his landmark nuclear deal with Iran, which he sealed in 2015.

But Adelson’s crowning achievements were yet to come. During the 2016

Israel’s Apartheid/ Annexation wall. As you see, the wall did not stop suicide bombers from entering Israel.

presidential primary, after all the GOP candidates traipsed to Las Vegas to meet with the casino magnate as part of what’s known as the “Adelson primary,” Adelson appeared to back Sen. Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk thought to be a top contender for winning the nomination. The casino magnate was said to be wary of Trump, who had demurred on whether he backed Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital in a speech to the Adelson-backed Republican Jewish Coalition. For his part, Trump, in October 2015, mocked Rubio for being Adelson’s “perfect little puppet.”

. . . Adelson wanted Trump to torpedo diplomacy with Iran; Trump backed out of the Iran deal in May 2018. Adelson believed the U.S. Embassy should move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; Trump did so, also in May 2018. (In September 2020, Adelson bought the U.S ambassador’s beach-view residence in the affluent Israeli city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv for $67 million, ensuring that the next U.S. ambassador won’t have a place to live near the old location of the U.S. Embassy.)  Adelson wanted the U.S. to legitimize Israel’s policy of building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; Trump did so in January 2019, reversing long-standing bipartisan U.S. policy that saw settlements as illegitimate obstacles to peace because they make a geographically viable Palestinian state impossible.

 

ScheerPost: “Israel’s Latest War Crime: Medical Apartheid”

Professor Juan Cole, who manages one of my favorite news blogs, Informed Comment, has written an article exposing apartheid Israel’s refusal to

Professor Juan Cole

distribute the covid vaccines to Palestinians in Israel or the Occupied Territories.

Yes, as I demonstrate in my forthcoming book on Christian Zionism, Israel is an ethnocratic state that prioritizes Jewish lives above all others.

Several of my friends in the West Bank have already contracted covid. Thankfully, none of

Journalist Robert Scheer

them have died, and all seem to have recovered fully.

Due to the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, and its perennial lack of funds (largely due to American and Israeli economic restrictions), the rate of infection is much higher than officially reported.

People are afraid to tell their bosses and supervisors when they do become sick, because they fear losing their jobs and being ostracized.

Cole’s article can be found at Robert Scheer’s new journalism site, Scheerpost.

The piece is entitled, “Israel’s Latest War Crime: Medical Apartheid.”

I have excerpted the article below, or you can read the entire piece here:

Some ten percent of Israelis have already been given the coronavirus shot, showing what an efficient government can do for its citizens with the right medical and administrative infrastructure. The Trump administration has not been able to ramp up the actual shots in arms, despite shipping millions of doses of vaccine to states and localities.

There’s just one problem with Israel’s success. It is only within Israel proper.

Israeli medical teams in Israel welcome the vaccine’s arrival…for them

Israel militarily occupies the Palestinian West Bank and keeps the little Palestinian Gaza Strip under blockade. In international law, Israel is responsible for the health and well-being of the people it militarily occupies. Not vaccinating them against a pandemic is a war crime.

You know how many shots Israeli physicians have given the Palestinians under their rule? None.

This, even though Israeli squatters who have stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank are being given the shot.

There has been a dangerous spike in cases and deaths during the past two months in the Palestinian Territories.

The ministry of health of Occupied Palestine announced on Friday that 18 people died of COVID-19 that day, and 1,450 new cases were recorded, this for a population of 5 million.

These statistics are almost certainly missing many cases and deaths, since Palestinians living under the Israeli boot have lost tens of billions of dollars in potential income and their medical infrastructure is ramshackle. There is a severe shortage, for instance, of intensive care units. On top of all that, the Trump administration has cruelly and ruthlessly slashed aid to the Palestinians and has knee-capped the UN Relief and Works Agency that used to help out Palestinian refugees. These are families ethnically cleansed by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967.

As far as the health ministry can tell, 13% of the Palestinian population tests positive for the virus and about 1% of those stricken end up dying. That would be 650,000 people stricken, of whom 6,500 will die. They wouldn’t die at that rate if they were getting the vaccine.

Gideon Levy: “Israel’s War on Palestinian Children”

Gideon Levy, intrepid Israeli journalist for Haaretz newspaper

Gideon Levy is one of the bravest and most honest journalists in Israel. He writes for the daily newspaper Haaretz. Here is his most recent article on the Israeli army and its brutal treatment of Palestinian children.

I have visited the Al-Arroub refugee camp and spent a pleasant afternoon with a family there. All three sons had been arrested, beaten by Israeli soldiers. One had been shot. All for no particular reason:

Last week, we were in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, searching for an open area in which to sit, for fear of the coronavirus. There wasn’t one. In a camp in which house touches house, whose alleys are the width of a man and strewn with garbage, there’s nowhere to sit outside. One can only dream of a garden or a bench; there isn’t even a sidewalk. This is where Basel al-Badawi lives. A year ago, soldiers shot his brother dead, before his eyes, for no reason. Two weeks ago, Basel was snatched from his bed on a cold night and taken, barefoot, for questioning. We sat in his family’s cramped home and realized there was no “out” to go to. While we were there, Israeli soldiers blocked the entrance to the camp, as they occasionally do, arbitrarily, and the sense of suffocation only grew.

Basel Al Badawi in his home, with photo of Omar hanging on the wall, in Al Arroub refugee camp, November 2020. Credit: Alex Levac

This is Basel’s world and this is his reality. He is 16, a bereaved brother, who was abducted from his bed in the dark of night by soldiers. He has nowhere to go to except for school, which is closed for part of the week due to COVID-19. Basel is free now, more fortunate than certain other children and teenagers. Around 170 of them are currently detained in Israel. Other children are shot by soldiers, wounded and sometimes killed, with no distinction made between children and adults – a Palestinian is a Palestinian – or between a life-threatening situation and a “public disturbance.”

On Friday they killed Ali Abu Alia, a 13-year-old boy. It was a lethal shot to the abdomen. No one could remain indifferent to the sight of his innocent face in photographs, and his last picture – in a shroud, his face exposed, his eyes closed, as he was carried to burial in his village. Ali, as he did every week, went with his friends to demonstrate against the wild and violent outposts that sprouted out of the settlement of Kokhav Hashahar, taking over the remaining land of his village, al-Mughayir. There is nothing more just than the struggle of this village, there is nothing more heinous than the use of lethal force against protesters and there is no possibility that shooting Ali in the abdomen could have been justifiable. In Israel, of course, no one showed any interest over the weekend in the death of a child, one more child.

Mourners carry the body of Palestinian teenager Ali Abu Alia during his funeral in the village of Mughayir near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on December 5, 2020. Credit: ABBAS MOMANI/AFP

Up until the current school year, around 50 children from the shepherding community of Ras a-Tin studied at the school in al-Mughayir, the village of the deceased boy. They had to walk about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) each day, round trip, to attend. This year their parents, with the help of a European Commission aid organization based in Italy, built them a modest, charming school in the village. Israel’s Civil Administration is threatening to demolish it, and in the meantime it is harassing the pupils and teachers with surprise visits to check whether the toilets had been, God forbid, connected to a water pipe – in a village that was never connected to the power grid or the water supply. The children of Ras a-Tin must have known Ali, their former classmate, now dead.

The children did not know Malek Issa, of Isawiyah, in East Jerusalem. The 9-year-old boy lost an eye after it was hit by a sponge-tipped bullet fired by an Israeli police officer. On Thursday the Justice Ministry department that examines allegations of police misconduct announced that no one would be charged in the shooting, after 10 months of intensive investigation. It was enough for the policemen involved to claim that stones had been thrown at them, perhaps one of them hit the boy. But no video shows stones being thrown, nor is there any other evidence of this. Ali’s killers can also sleep in peace: No one will prosecute them. All they did was to kill a Palestinian child.

The 9-year-old Palestinian boy who was wounded in Isawiyah at Hadassah Ein-Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem, on February 18, 2020.Credit: Ohad Ziegenberg

These and many other incidents are taking place during a period that is among the quietest in the West Bank. This is the terror taking place, committed by the state. When we hear of such incidents in vicious dictatorships – children who are snatched from their beds in the middle of the night, one boy who was shot in the eye, another who was shot and killed – it sends shivers down our spine. Shooting at demonstrators? At children? Where do such things happen? Not in some faraway land, but rather just an hour’s drive from your home; not in some dark regime, but in the only democracy.

What would you think of a regime that allows the shooting of children, that abducts them in their sleep and razes their schools? That’s exactly what you must think of the regime here in our country [Israel].

A Glimpse of Daily Life in the West Bank

Below is a 2 minute video showing Israeli soldiers randomly firing tear gas and rubber bullets in a West Bank Palestinian neighborhood.

I have witnessed and photographed identical behavior many times. I have also watched a video filmed by one of my friends showing Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas onto a neighborhood playground, causing little children, mothers, and grandmothers to flee.

The soldiers do not need “a reason” for doing these things. Their only reason is the fact that Palestinians are not Jews (even though there are Arab Jews in Israel called Mizrahis).

The fact that Palestinians dare to live on land that the Zionists want for themselves is all the reason Israel needs for making Palestinian life as unbearable as possible.

The Israeli army calls it “the searing of consciousness.” It’s similar to the torture techniques used by the CIA to reduce detainees to a state of “learned helplessness.”

Israel’s theory is that, eventually, the entire Palestinian population will learn that resistance is futile. They will learn to always do exactly as they are told; or, better yet, move somewhere else so that Israel can take all of their property without a struggle.

Ilhan Omar Continues to Speak Truth to Power

Rep. Ilhan Omar is someone I deeply admire. She is a woman of principle who does not hesitate (as far as I can tell) to speak out on behalf of the

Rep. Ilhan Omar

oppressed, whether in this country or abroad.

Rep. Omar is up for reelection in November. But as someone who defends the rights of the Palestinian people to live freely as equal citizens in the land of Palestine; as someone who condemns Zionist Israel’s continuous oppression of the Palestinians, she is coming under heavy attack from pro-Zionist, pro-Israel lobbying organizations in this country.

This opposition includes a growing number of death threats.

The online journal Mondoweiss has a recent article entitled “The Israel lobby has spent $2 million to defeat Ilhan Omar.”

With all the baseless hysteria in the media nowadays worrying about Russian election interference, the continuing Big-Money election influencing efforts on behalf of Israel make other complaints pale in comparison.

But don’t say that out loud in public. You will be attacked as an antisemite by someone connected to AIPAC.

Here is an excerpt:

But the reaction to Omar has been especially hostile. Many charged that the furious response to her comments quickly devolved into Islamophobic attacks on one of the nation’s first Muslim Congresswomen. Trump capitalized on last year’s uproar, leading chants of “send them back” at his rallies, fanning phony outrage and prompting serious death threats.

The lobby and its allies have zeroed in on Omar for several reasons, said Zaha Hassan, a human rights attorney and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Omar “unabashedly” has called out the lobby, supports BDS, has taken up Israeli human rights abuses, “and hasn’t backed down regardless of how many times folks have come at her with charges of antisemitism.”

“She has come out strongly in support of Palestinian human rights and she has not been afraid of calling what Israel is doing in terms of its control over Palestinian lives ‘apartheid’ — that’s what sets her apart,” Hassan said.

Still, other lawmakers and progressives are increasingly vocal in their criticism of Israel, and they haven’t faced an onslaught of attacks from the president, his supporters, Israel and centrist Democrats.

Hassan pointed to Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum, a white woman who represents a district next to Omar’s, who has similarly denounced Israel as an “apartheid” state but doesn’t face the same criticism.

That’s likely because Omar is an African-American, Muslim woman, Hassan said.

“She presents an easier target for some folks who want to delegitimize that kind of speech about Israel in terms of accountability and conditioning aid and those kinds of issues,” Hassan added.

Beyond that, Omar has become a leader of the pro-Palestine progressive movement, and knocking her out of office in August would represent a major win for Israel. The lobby’s willingness to spend over $2 million on that objective highlights its importance.

You can read the entire article here.