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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Below is an excerpt, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above.
In case anyone was worried about the new Democratic administration getting serious about peace and fair-mindedness in the Middle East, have no fear. Biden is here!
The Biden administration continues the good old fashioned saber rattling and bullying tactics that have made US gunboat diplomacy famous around the world.
Although all US intelligence agencies confirm that Iran was always in full compliance with the terms of the (JCPOA) nuclear treaty, president Trump unilaterally torpedoed the treaty anyway.
Trump then imposed additional economic sanctions on Iran. Why? Because Trump’s evangelical base believes anything and everything the Israeli government says about its neighbor-states.
Israel hates Iran. So, evangelicals hate Iran. Thus, Trump black-balled Iran, despite its innocence.
After WE withdrew unilaterally for no good reason, any reasonable person could be forgiven for assuming that the US should apologize for its petulance, reenter the treaty, and THEN talk with Iran about how we will move forward.
But, no. The USA never apologizes and must always be the dominant, authoritative player.
Thus, America’s bipartisan instincts for war-mongering and gunboat diplomacy are just too strong for this Democratic administration to resist. So, once again, Israeli demands for regional hegemony dictate Biden’s strategy for Iran.
And don’t forget: Israel has a large nuclear arsenal with warheads targeted on major Iranian cities. Israel also assassinates Iranian scientists willy nilly, bombs Iranian facilities inside the country, and kills Iranian soldiers in Syria (who are there at Syrian invitation).
Have no fear, Biden will remain as irrational as Trump. Here is the promised excerpt:
A close analysis of recent statements by members of President Joseph Biden’s foreign policy team indicates his administration has already signaled its intention to treat negotiations with Iran as an exercise in diplomatic coercion aimed at forcing major new concessions extending well beyond the 2015 nuclear agreement. The policy could trigger a renewed US-Iran crisis as serious as any provocation engineered by the Trump administration.
Although the Biden team is claiming that it is ready to bring the United States back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if Iran comes into full compliance first, it is actually planning to demand that Iran give up its main source of political leverage. Thus, it will require Iran to cease its uranium enrichment to 20 percent and give up its accumulated stockpile of uranium already enriched to that level before the United States has withdrawn the economic sanctions that are now illegal under the JCPOA deal.
Meanwhile, the Biden team is planning to hold on to what it apparently sees as its “Trump card”— the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran oil exports that have gutted the Iranian economy.
But the Biden strategy faces a serious problem: Iran has already demanded all sanctions imposed after the JCPOA took effect must be ended before Iran would return to compliance. Iran expects the United States, as the party which initially broke the agreement, to come into compliance first.
The Biden administration is banking on a scenario in which Iran agrees to cease its enrichment to 20% and reverse other major concessions Iran made as part of the 2015 agreement.
The Biden team then states it would start a new set of negotiations with Iran, in which the United States would use its leverage to pressure Iran into extending the timeline of its major commitments under the deal. Further, Tehran will be required to accept a modification in its missile program, as European allies have urged.
The Biden team’s Iran strategy was not hastily cobbled together just before inauguration. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan outlined it in an interview last June with Jon Alterman, the Middle East program direct at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “You can get some early wins on the nuclear program but tie long-term sanctions relief to progress on both [nuclear and other issues] files,” Sullivan explained.
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.
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, 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].
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.
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.
Here is an excerpt from today’s editorial by Gideon Levy at the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. It is entitled, “The Israeli Army Doesn’t Have Snipers
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
on the Gaza Border. It Has Hunters.”
He is addressing the ongoing, daily slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children at the Gaza prison fence.
To date, 8,000 young men have been permanently disabled. The number of deaths is in the hundreds (approximately, 500 I believe) and the serious injuries in the tens of thousands.
And still, the United States and the rest of the world do nothing:
“They’re the best of our boys. One is a “musician from a good high school,” another a “boy scout” who majored in theater.” They’re the snipers who have shot thousands of unarmed protesters along the Gaza border fence.
“In the Gaza Strip there are 8,000 permanently disabled young men as a result of the snipers’ actions. Some are leg amputees, and the shooters are very proud of that. None of the snipers interviewed for Hilo Glazer’s frightening story in Haaretz (March 6) has any regrets. If they are feeling at all apologetic it’s because they didn’t spill more blood. One was mocked in his battalion with “here comes the killer.” They all act like murderers. If their actions don’t show it – more than 200 dead as a result of them – then their statements prove that these young men have lost their moral compass. They are lost. They will go on to study, to have careers and to raise families – and will never recover from their blindness. They disabled their victims physically, but their own disabilities are more severe. Their souls were completely twisted. They will never again be moral individuals. They are a danger to society. They lost their humanity, if they ever had it, on the shooting berms facing the Gaza Strip. They are the sons of our friends and the friends of our sons, the young people from the apartment across the hall. Look how they talk.
“…but it’s hard not to be shocked at the depths to which we have sunk. They recalled the number of knees they shot. ‘I brought in seven-eight knees in one
Israeli soldiers patrol the Gaza fence looking for people to shoot
day. Within a few hours, I almost broke his record.’ ‘He got around 28 knees.’ They shot at unarmed young men and women who were trying in vain to struggle for their freedom, an issue that couldn’t be more just. ‘The regular scenario is supposed to be that you hit, break a bone – in the best case, break the kneecap – within a minute an ambulance comes to evacuate him, and after a week he gets a disability pension.’…
“They chose their victims by their charisma, with a sniper’s precision. Their ‘leadership aura’ has destined young men to a life of disability in the cage that is Gaza. But that was not enough. They become bloodthirsty as only young incited people can be. They wanted more blood, not just blood, a child’s blood. Not just a child’s blood, but in front of his family.
“‘Let me just once take down a kid of 16, even 14, but not with a bullet in the leg – let me blow his head open in front of his whole family and his whole village. Let him spurt blood. And then maybe for a month I won’t have to take off another 20 knees.’
“They wanted blood from a boy’s head only to spare themselves the need to take down 20 more knees. They identified their victims’ age by their shirts: Dress shirts for the older ones, T-shirts for the youngest.
“None was court-martialed. Correction: One got seven days in military jail for shooting a sheep. Soldiers in the world’s most moral army don’t shoot sheep. With 200 dead and 8,000 wounded, they think ‘the restraints on us are shameful.’ That is their shame. They are our shame. They, and their commanders. They and the army that orders them to shoot at protesters as if they were ‘ducks who chose to cross the line.’
“People who shoot ducks aren’t snipers. They’re hunters.”
Those of you who follow Israeli politics know that they recently held their third national election in less than a year. And once again Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the numerous legal indictments against him, is again in the top position to form the new government.
Despite its frequent claims to being the only democracy in the Middle East,
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
Israeli-Palestinians still confront an all pervasive Zionist system of Jim Crow laws that suppress Palestinian involvement in government.
Twenty-first century Israel is the Middle Eastern equivalent of Louisiana, Alabama,Georgia, and Mississippi in the early nineteen-hundreds. Palestinians are Israel’s “Negroes.”
Israeli Zionism is the ideological equivalent of the white supremacy, baptized with Christian lingo and accouterments, so idolized by the southern Klansmen who burned crosses to terrorize anyone who forgot “their place.”
Gideon Levy is an opinion writer for the Israeli, daily newspaper, Haaretz. His is a rare voice speaking the truth about anti-Palestinian racism in his homeland. Levy’s recent analysis of the Israeli elections is entitled, “In Israel, Zionism is a Religion, And It’s Mandatory.” (Note: the joint list is an alliance of the majority-Palestinian parties in Israel.)
Here is an excerpt:
“Voting for a party that doesn’t have the Zionist banner flying over it is a painful, almost impossible step. That’s the result of 100 years of indoctrination that is practically unmatched. With the exception of North Korea, no other country has such a ruling ideology that is not to be doubted or deviated from. Aside from Iran, no other country has a mandatory religion. In Israel, Zionism is a religion, and it is mandatory.
“A Jew who votes for the Joint List is still considered a traitor, or at least a person who has some kind of screw loose. In our childhood, this is how we viewed activists from Rakah and Matzpen, and we shunned them like lepers. The Rakah office on Maza Street in Tel Aviv was like a mysterious, menacing headquarters of an enemy army. You didn’t want to be seen anywhere near it. I remember the first time I went there: I was terrified.
“These were the adolescent growing pains of a young country. But when a strong, thriving country disqualifies a legal ideology and makes it illegitimate, something has gone wrong with its democracy.
“Zionism is a worldview like any other. One can see its attractive and unattractive sides. It is not a religion in which doubters are denounced as heretics – yet it is forbidden to reject Zionism. Why? Because Zionism is not sure of itself. It knows that it brought a catastrophe upon another people and it knows that the fire of evil and injustice is burning beneath the carpet upon which it treads. If Zionism were certain of its righteousness, it would put itself to the test like any other worldview and it would be permissible to doubt it. Israel in 2020 is not yet ready for that. A true left will only arise here when we wean ourselves of the addiction to Zionism and free ourselves from its chains.”
I won’t go into the various ways in which Israel has taken over (“expropriated”) privately owned Palestinian land in the West Bank (and even within Israel itself). But they do it on a regular basis.
In this post I will focus on the provisions of International Law being violated by Israel’s steady encroachment into the Occupied Territory/West
Israel’s Annexation/ Separation Barrier separating Palestinians from Israel. Observe that it’s not hard to climb. It was not built to stop terrorism, but to steal more land.
Bank.
The Geneva Convention declares that land conquered through war (1) cannot be kept by the conquering power. (2) Neither can it be incorporation as a part of the victorious country. (3) Nor can the conquering country move its own citizens into the occupied region for colonization.
Israel is violating all of these legal requirements.
Here is what International Law says:
Article 49, paragraph 6 of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV says, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Article 85(4)(a) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I adds that “the transfer by
Palestinians live under military occupation. Trump’s plan will expand and deepen its oppression
the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is a serious breach of the protocol.
Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Courtstates that “[t]he transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is a war crime.
Why were these restrictions on the ancient attitude of “to the victor goes the spoils” put in place?
The answer is simple. And you’d think Israel might be especially sensitive to this part of the story.
Adolf Hitler.
As I will explain in my next book, during the Second World War, Adolf Hitler
Hitler’s plans for population transfers throughout Eastern Europe — remove the natives and replace them with ethnic Germans
undertook ethnic cleansing in parts of eastern Europe. He then resettled these areas with ethnic Germans, planning to incorporate the newly settled territories into an expanded German state.
For only one example, the Nazis expelled nearly 122,000 Poles from German occupied Pomerania in 1939-40. They were replaced by 130,000 ethnic Germans who were resettled in place of the former Pomerania population.
German settlement expansion in eastern Europe was a part of Hitler’s “Germanization” program, referred to as Generalplan Ost (the GPO).
The Geneva Convention, at the instigation of the United States, hoped to prevent (or, at least, to outlaw) similar population transfers via warfare in the future.
Israel first violated this part of international law in 1948-49 when it conquered 50% of the territory allotted by the United Nations for a Palestinian state.
Israel continues its violation of international law in the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan during the 1967 war. The West Bank has remained under military occupation ever since, hence its identification as Occupied Territory.
Now it becomes United States policy to endorse the violation of international law. Only a few weeks ago Trump announced that the US considers all Israeli settlements in the West Bank as “legal.”
This week’s Apartheid Plan endorses the illegal annexation and Jewish settlement of the entire Jordan Valley, displacing the many Palestinians farmers from their own property.
All of the Palestinian lands stolen by Israeli fiat, and built up by illegal
Illegal Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley. They have been breaking the law for a long time. Trump now says it’s OK
Israeli settlers, throughout the West Bank will be officially annexed as a part of Israel.
I know this will offend some and appear an exaggeration by many, but facts are facts. They don’t change because some folks are offended.
Israel is a rogue nation. The international community must condemn its avaricious, illegal, inhumane behavior now.
The United States is the world’s most far-reaching enabler of such rogue behavior, not just in the Middle East, but around the globe.
Sadly, nobly intentioned international law has failed to stop the ghost of racist, ethnic nationalism from stealing from and oppressing other human beings.
The ghost of Hitler hangs heavy over the United States, Israel, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu.
illegal Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank.
artichoke, when two masked settlers emerge from a grove of trees near the illegal settler outpost of Havat Maon.
prevent (or, at least, to outlaw) similar population transfers via warfare in the future.