Category: Israel

Israel’s New Legal Changes Removes the Last Obstacle to Limitless Settler Expansion

Massive protests continue in Israel even though the series of judicial review laws being protested have successfully begun to be passed.

Here is the best overview I have seen of the different issues involved, produced by VPRO, the Dutch Public Broadcasting Service.

It is fairly well rounded and allows the viewer to hear voices that are typically left out of the American conversation. It offers a good perspective on what all the anger and uproar has been about, and why it will not end anytime soon.

My only complaint, which is actually a major flaw, is that no Palestinian Israelis are allowed to speak for themselves.

Here are my suggestions of what to look for:

Notice the arrogance and entitlement of the Jewish settlers-colonizers. Like early American pioneers, they are blind to the legitimate claims of the native people, the Palestinians. They simply presume to have a divine right to take as much land as they want, wherever, whenever, from whomever they wish. What in the world do biblical stories about Abrahamic land purchases have to do with Israeli land theft today????

Notice the legal benefits that the current judicial reforms will offer to these settlers-colonists. This point is highlighted towards the end of the 30-minute documentary. I suspect that THIS is the primary, driving force behind the push for this new legislation. The Supreme Court can no longer impede settler expansion in the Occupied Territory.

Notice the stratification of Israeli society. Not only is there a wide divide between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. There is also a considerable divide between Ashkenazi Jews of European descent and Mizrahi Jews of Arab descent. This discussion begins at the 17:00 minute mark. Even though they are often treated as second-class citizens by the Ashkenazi, the Mizrahi tend to be among the most vehement Zionists. Note how they refer to Ashkenazis as a “white elite.”

Notice the hero of the piece Netta Amar-Schiff. She appears at the 25:45 mark. She is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer who defends the rights of embattled Palestinians in the face of ever-expanding Israeli encroachment. Netta says it plainly, “Occupation and democracy do not go together.” One of the great failures of the current protest movement is its the omission of this key perspective from their demonstrations.

You will never hear about any of these issues or perspectives on a Christian news network. You’re unlike to hear it on the mainstream networks, for that matter.

Palestinian Journalist Suspended from Twitter without Explanation

Twitter suspensions have been in the news lately. But I am sure that most people have never heard about the suspension of Said Arikat, a reporter for the Palestinian publication, Al-Quds newspaper.

Journalist Said Arikat

Arikat is a veteran journalist who has covered the US State Department for the past 20-years.

He was suspended without explanation, but his removal is very much in keeping with the anti-Palestinian bias of US mainstream media.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that he is the latest victim of the pro-Zionist, Israel lobby in this country —  a collection of organizations that work hard to hide Israel’s human rights abuses and silence Palestinian voices.

The story is by Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss. It’s titled “Twitter Suspends Palestinian Journalist Arikat, and media response — silence.”

Below is an excerpt:

In yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there is no outcry over Twitter’s arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, longtime D.C. correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper.

It was big news when Elon Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of at least nine tech journalists last week (over alleged dox-ing) and then reinstated them this week after Twitter users demanded as much.

But in yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there has been scarcely any attention given to the arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, a fixture at the State Department briefings as the longtime Washington correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper, a Palestinian publication.

Arikat said he woke up on December 3 to read a notice from Twitter that his account had been “permanently suspended after careful review”. No reason was given; and despite the assurance that he could appeal the suspension if he thought the decision was wrong, Twitter has not responded to numerous letters Arikat has sent the media giant.

The only reason for Arikat’s suspension would seem to be that he is Palestinian and speaks up for Palestinians. His case has elicited no concern in the press. Let alone efforts to discover the pretext for the action.

Al-Quds is clearly being targeted as a Palestinian source. Today there is news that Facebook has shut down the official page of the Al-Quds newspaper.

Read the entire article here.

Telling the Truth About Israel Can Get You Fired. Just Ask Katie Halper.

Katie Halper is an independent journalist and political commentator. Until last week, Ms. Halper was a visiting host on the news program The Hill.

That is, she WAS a regular guest on the show until she was summarily fired for reading her editorial spot explaining the details of Israeli apartheid.

Yes, Israel IS an apartheid state. It has always been an apartheid state, since day one. There is NO non-apartheid phase in Israel’s history because Israel was founded as a Jewish supremacist state.

If this is new information to you, then I encourage you to read my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).

But the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist public relations machine works very hard to hide this fact from the rest of the world.

They have been working particularly hard in recent years since Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all published their own reports extensively cataloguing the ins-and-outs of Israel’s comprehensive, systemic, apartheid regime.

I will let Ms. Halper explain it all for you:

Lessons from “One of the Most Brutal Military Tyrannies in the World” — Israel

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

titled “Israel’s Stasi Preaches Morality.”

Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:

. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.

In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.

The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.

Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.

Click here to read the entire article.

Listen to Sensible Voices Address the Israel-Palestine Bloodshed

I just finished participating in another political action campaign with Jewish Voice for Peace focused on the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza.

Below is a collection of reasonable testimonies from both Jewish and Palestinian young people addressing this tragedy of non-stop violence.

Please check it out:

 

 

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi, born in Tunis in 1920, was a Tunisian intellectual who grew

FRANCE – JULY 02: Albert Memmi, author, at home in Paris, France on July 02, 2004. (Photo by Marc GANTIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

up in his native land under French colonialism. He would eventually become a philosophy professor in Paris and write a best-selling autobiographical novel, The Pillar of Salt.

In 1956, he wrote a fascinating book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, in which he insightfully describes the lasting effects of colonization on both those who conquer a foreign land, as well as those who are conquered.

The folks who study the history of colonization sometimes say that colonization is not an event but a structure. In other words, the people with the power build a social system intended to protect their power.

That colonial system does not come down until everyone, both the colonizers and the colonized together, decide that the old power structure must end.

Both Israel and the United States are colonial powers. Memmi’s analysis offers a penetrating description of both societies.

Memmi describes modern Israeli society to a T.

I believe he also sheds light on the inner resources of those Americans who embrace the ideologies of White Supremacy, American Exceptionalism and Nationalism, particularly Christian Nationalism.

And what about the American urge to control foreign governments and their economies around the world?

Below is a short excerpt for your consideration:

Accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a nonlegitimate privileged person, that is, a usurper. To be sure, a usurper claims his place and, if need be, will defend it by every means at his disposal. This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he admits that what triumphs in him is an image which he condemns…to possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the conditions under which it was attained…He endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories – anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.

How? How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve such compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurpers to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time…

With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great…

He cannot help but approve discrimination and the codification of injustice, he will be delighted at police tortures, if the necessity arises, will become convinced of the necessity of massacres…The mechanism is practically constant. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized…

Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom.

What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?…The human relationships have arisen from the severest exploitation, founded on inequality and contempt, guaranteed by police authoritarianism. There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism…

It is no more surprising that colonial fascism is not easily limited to the colony. Cancer wants only to spread. The colonialist can only support oppressive and reactionary or, at least, conservative governments. He tends towards that which will maintain the current status of his homeland, or rather that which will more positively assure the framework of oppression.

Israel Mows Gaza’s Grass, Again

The Jerusalem Post reported in 2014 on the Israeli military policy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza.

Of course, no one living in Gaza has an actual lawn. Instead, this is Israel’s not-so-clever euphemism for its periodic military attacks against the human beings living in Gaza.

Yes, the Israeli military actually thinks it’s clever to describe the way they periodically mow down innocent Palestinian civilians as a public service in lawn care.

Ha ha…

Mowing Gaza’s grass accomplishes several goals for Israel.

First, as I explain in my book Like Birds in a Cage, regular Israeli airstrikes and bombings, causing mayhem, death, and destruction is intended to remind the Palestinian people of who their Master is.

Thus, mowing the grass gives Israel yet another opportunity to sear the Palestinian conscience, to quote the military’s own description of this policy goal.

Like random electrical shocks administered to a caged dog, the Palestinians are supposed to surrender their will, abandon all resistance, and lapse into a state of learned helplessness.

Fortunately, however, the Palestinian people are refusing to learn Israel’s intended lesson.

Here is the sequence of events for the most recent exercise in Israel’s deadly conscience searing:

It began on August 1st when Israeli commandos captured a leader of the rebel organization called Islamic Jihad (IJ) who was living in the West Bank.

Several days later Israel followed up on that raid by launching an airstrike on Gaza in order to assassinate another IJ leader in his home. He was killed with several others.

Then Israel announced that it was launching a “preemptive strike” against Gaza in response to intelligence reports detailing IJ’s plans to use heavy artillery against Israel. Of course, as usual, Israel never provided any details about this supposed intelligence. The world is expected to simply take Israel’s word at face value.

What followed was another merciless blood-letting.

At last count, as best I can discover, hundreds of Gazans have been injured, approximately 65 people were killed, 15 of them being children. The total damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure has yet to be determined.

The IJ forces launched almost 1,000 rockets against Israel. Yet, Israel did not suffer a single casualty. Some of these rockets did not even make it outside of Gaza, landing short and killing Palestinians instead.

These statistics tell us everything we need to know about the grotesque asymmetry characteristic of this “conflict.” A nuclear power is using state-of-the-art weaponry to mow down people living under military occupation whose weapons are like children’s toys in comparison.

I can’t help but wonder what happened to the (imaginary) heavy artillery that IJ was supposedly preparing to fire against Israel. Such rockets never made an appearance among the 1,000-or-so homemade IJ missiles that traced their wobbly, white streaks erratically across the Gazan sky this past week.

So, there you have it. The entire Israel-Palestine situation in a nut shell.

Israel continues its military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank, and they continue to get away with it.

Israel mows down hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, and gets away with it. Again, Israel will not suffer a single negative consequence from the outside world.

Palestinians make a feeble attempt to defend themselves against Israeli aggression, and they are vilified by Israel and its allies.

Which all raises a vital question: Whose conscience is being seared by this perpetual savagery?

 

Israel’s Settler Colonialism Continues at a Steady Pace

(I will write a post about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza later today.)

Israel is a settler-colonial state, much like the USA, Australia, Canada, and South Africa.

One of the defining goals of every settler-colonial state is the elimination of the native. Israel has created a massive state apparatus that works to accomplish this goal, whether through annexing Palestinian territory, building separation walls, home demolitions, zoning restrictions, or travel restrictions, to name only a few.

Continuing efforts to erase both the history and the contemporary existence of the Palestinian people appears, again, in the videos below.

I could post multiple videos like these every week, but I choose to limit them in order to cover a wider range of topics. However, the historical erasure of any group of human beings is always a story deserving of our attention.

Gideon Levy: “Hey, Israel. Let’s Become a Normal Country”

As Israeli citizens are suffering voting burn-out due to their fractious, unstable parliamentary system of government, the journalist Gideon Levy urges his nation to become “a normal country.”

In light of Russia’s recent threats to evict the Jewish Agency from Russian society, many are wondering, “What’s so bad about the Jewish Agency? Is this more antisemitism from Putin?”

Good questions. Why is Putin doing this? And what would it mean for Israel to become “normal”?

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

Check out Levy’s editorial below. It may surprise you (all emphasis is mine):

To be a normal country – that, too, is an option. We could start, for example, with a normal immigration policy, as is customary in any normal country. Railing against Russian President Vladimir Putin over his intention to put a stop to Israel’s subversive activities against his country – intentions that are immeasurably justified – demonstrate that the path toward normality is still long and arduous. As long as Israel continues to hold the mentality that “we are allowed to do anything” and that “we’re not like other countries,” the path toward normality will be endlessly longer.

And here’s more proof that there’s no difference between one Israeli government and the next: An issue that is untouchable no matter what government is in power is the sanctity of Israel’s immigration policy. And if the Law of Return [a law granting all Jews everywhere in the world automatic citizenship] is accorded primacy among laws, immigration policy is the last of the issues that would be debated.

In seeking to shut down the operations of the Jewish Agency for Israel in his country, Putin has sought to put an end to a foreign country’s intervention in Russia’s domestic affairs. It’s not difficult to guess what would have happened if Warsaw had openly attempted to have emissaries from the Polish establishment stationed in Israel to encourage former Polish Jews and their descendants to return to Poland. But when it comes to Israel’s efforts, it’s all right.

Putin will clearly have to back down on his demand, because the Jewish establishment is stronger, but we don’t need Putin to ask not only by what right but for what purpose Israel is pursuing its activities there. Why does Israel have to meddle in other countries in an attempt to recruit, to coax, bribe or convince Jews, half-Jews or quarter-Jews to immigrate here?

What is the purpose of this entire bloated network of emissaries around the world? What’s the purpose of all those ridiculous Birthright and Masa programs when it’s clear that there’s no more room here?

Israel is a country bursting at the seams, but it still wants more and more immigrants. Its passion for aliyah is insatiable – in a country that already has a population of 9.5 million living on an extremely narrow strip of land. The Jews of the world should therefore have been told: Come here only if you have no alternative. It’s crowded here, even in the sea, and there’s not a parking spot to be had.

Jews are secure and prospering almost everywhere in the world. Israel is less secure than anywhere else, but Jews are being called upon to come and save themselves here of all places, in this crowded and troubled land. And the problem isn’t only that it’s out of space, since Israel can always conquer additional land. The problem is also in the justification for its immigration policy.
It is necessarily based on a racist outlook. It was right in its time. One could understand and even admire the unceasing efforts to bring large numbers of Jews here to build a country here – and to rescue them from the horrors in their countries of origin. But both of these efforts have long been completed.

The country was established and has become a world power and at the present, Jews aren’t facing horrors anywhere in the world. The flags should have been folded up and the second phase of Zionism – which never happened – should have been initiated. And that involves making Israel a normal country.

A normal country has an immigration policy based on its needs and principles. Israel’s immigration policy needs to take the needs and rights of all of its citizens into account. For example, saving relatives in distress – in Ethiopia and Ukraine, as well as in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.

Consider the name Birthright. Israel is encouraging young Americans to visit the country on a propaganda trip, in the company of armed guards to demonstrate the dangers, to coax them to immigrate here solely based on their origin. And sometimes they’ve even been required to undergo DNA testing to verify that they’re Jewish.

But what about the natives of the country who have no birthright? Why wasn’t an elderly Palestinian woman from Haifa living in exile in Syria not permitted to return to the city of her birth in her old age when a civil war was raging in Syria? Find one convincing reason. And why doesn’t her brother, an Israeli citizen, have the standing to save her? Jeremy from New York and Leonid from Kyiv can come here to live but not Sa’adia from Yarmouk.

It’s a Jewish state. So be it, but why entirely Jewish? Why only Jewish? And why Jewish by force? How is it Jewish if half of its subjects, those under Israel’s authority, aren’t Jewish? And what would happen if we would dismantle all the moldy and fossilized aliyah institutions?

Israel would begin turning into a normal country. That’s all.

“The United States and Europe are Lost as Far as the Palestinians are Concerned”

It is mind-numbingly absurd to hear the president of the United States seriously referring to “the two state solution” as the best hope for the Palestinian people.

The supposed “two state solution” died years ago, asphyxiated beneath the weight of 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers occupying hundreds of illegal,  Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank; buried beneath the unending

U.S. President Joe Biden signs the visitors book as Israeli President Isaac Herzog looks on at his residence in Jerusalem, July 14, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Israeli land grabs, government annexations of “military zones,” illegal home demolitions, unremitting crop destruction, orchards butchered, olive trees and vineyards uprooted, not to mention the brutal, suffocating military occupation now entering its 75th year.

As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy explains, Biden’s appeal to the future prospects of a two-state solution, one for Israel and one for Palestinians, expresses America’s surrender to Israel’s stone-cold hard-heartedness, inflexibility, and Zionism’s blinding belief in Jewish, ethnic entitlement.

Posing as a neutral mediator, while never — no never — acting as anything of the sort, the US has encouraged decades of false hope and wasted effort in supposed “Peace Talks” between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

Granted, Yasser Arafat was a foolish negotiator — but never the intransigent deceiver that Israel and the USA always made him out to be — and the PLO made plenty of irresponsible mistakes while betraying their own people.

But as Israel’s greatest political supporter, financier, and supplier of military hardware and technology, the US never intended to assist the Palestinians in their efforts to escape Israeli’s colonial domination.

For instance, when dealing with the Likud negotiators under Begin and Netanyahu, the US never — never — challenged the Likud party platform proclaiming that Israel would never permit the creation of a Palestinian state.

If that’s not reprehensible collusion, I don’t know what is.

After all, what are 4.5 million Palestinian refugees when compared to two colonial, nuclear armed super-powers pledged to watch each other’s backs? The strategic interests of neither America nor Israel has ever included the moral imperative of justice for oppressed, brown-skinned, Arab human beings.

Why has anyone ever been foolish enough to imagine otherwise?

Mr. Levy’s latest article in Haaretz newspaper is titled “Biden Signs the Palestinians’ Death Certificate.”

Read Levy’s analysis below (all emphasis mine):

At Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, of all places, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a death certificate. The two-state solution died a long time ago, and now so has the Palestinians’ strategic choice of relying on the West in their struggle for their national rights.

This hope drew its last breath at Augusta Victoria. In his speech Biden mused at great length about his and his family’s time in the hospital; he remembered the intensive care ward. A flat line on the monitor meant death, he learned there. About an hour later, in Bethlehem, the monitor flatlined. The path the Palestinians embarked on 50 years ago has come to an end. They have reached a dead end.
At the beginning of the ‘70s, a new star appeared in the political skies: the cardiologist Issam Sartawi, a refugee from Acre, a student in Iraq, an exile in Paris and an architect of the plane hijackings. He underwent a complete change. He became the Palestinians’ trailblazer to the West’s heart; until then they had relied on nonaligned countries. Sartawi led the Palestinians to Bonn, Vienna, Paris and Stockholm instead of Moscow, Jakarta, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur.

This was depicted as an excellent choice. The protégé and even the darling of Western Europe’s social democratic stars of those days – Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme and François Mitterrand – continued on to the Israelis’ hearts. Sartawi began with meetings with representatives of the Israeli left. Yasser Arafat enthusiastically joined the path his adviser had blazed. It seemed much more promising than winning support from Karachi.

Fifty years later this road has reached its end, with the Palestinians bleeding on the ground. An American president only gives them a few hours – on a visit that gives new meaning to the terms doing the minimum and lip service. So the time has come to awaken from the dream that Europe and America will ever do something for the Palestinians that won’t be to the satisfaction of their unassailable cherished one, Israel.

It’s a president who doesn’t bother to correctly pronounce the name of Shireen Abu Akleh, [Biden mispronounced her name as Abu Al-Qaeda!] the journalist killed almost certainly by Israel, becoming a national and international symbol. Jamal Khashoggi he knows how to pronounce. The Palestinians no longer have anything to look for in this arena. When Biden quoted from a poem that says how “hope and history rhyme” and threw them $100 million for Augusta Victoria, it was clear that it’s lost with the United States.

With an American president who promises them a two-state solution, but “not in the near term,” you get to the end of the story. You feel like asking Biden: “What will happen ‘not in the long term’ that will achieve this solution? Will the Israelis decide on their own? Will the settlers return on their own? When there are a million of them instead of 700,000, will that satisfy them?

Will America ever think differently? Why should this happen? With the laws against BDS and the new and distorted definitions of antisemitism, the United States and Europe are lost as far as the Palestinians are concerned. The battle has been decided, Israel has all but beaten them, and their fate might be the same as that of the indigenous peoples in the United States.

It’s enough to look at the picture of the meeting in Bethlehem: Twelve grim Palestinian men in ties around the two leaders in a group photo of despair. It’s enough to recall Biden’s words in 1986 to the secretary of state at the time, George Shultz: “I hate to hear an administration … refusing to act on a morally important point. … I’m ashamed that this country puts out a policy like this, that says nothing, nothing.”

Biden was referring to U.S. policy on the previous apartheid country, South Africa. Amazingly similar remarks can be hurled now at Biden because of his approach to the second apartheid country. But there’s no Biden to hurl them.