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Little wonder the Palestinians sounded sorely disappointed: Netanyahu gave no commitment to end the occupation, reiterated Israel’s determination to retain the whole of Jerusalem as its “united capital”, rejected any possibility of a compromise on Palestinian refugees, and even had fulsome praise for the Jewish settlers in the West Bank whom he called “Israeli pioneers”. (more…)

But this morning there’s no relief on the horizon for Palestinians hoping to ease their desperate housing shortage. Only a day earlier, employees of Jerusalem’s Israeli-run municipality handed house demolition orders to three more families in the Al-Bustan area of Silwan, which lies alongside Wadi Qadoum and abuts the walls of the Old City. All of the homes in Al-Bustan – 90 in total – are slated for demolition, despite ongoing negotiations between residents and City Hall. (more…)

Israeli authorities ordered a Palestinian to demolish his own home in the Old City of Jerusalem on Tuesday. (more…)

The Israeli ministry of Interior gave its approval to plans that want to demolish a kindergarten and wholesale market in East Jerusalem to construct a new hotel. (more…)

To visit their hundreds of relatives and friends living just a few hundred meters away in Hizma, located on the northern outskirts of the capital, members of the Khatib family must pass through a nearby checkpoint, thus crossing from area C (under full Israeli control) to the Palestinian Authority. However, family members are forbidden from moving freely within Pisgat Ze’ev, and are in essence “prisoners inside their own home.” According to them, any family member found outside the family compound will be sent to jail by Israeli authorities. (more…)

Hatim Abdul-Qader, Jerusalem Affairs advisor to the Palestinian Prime Minister, stated that the Ateret Cohanim Zionist group is planning, in collaboration with the Jerusalem Municipality, to build homes for Jewish settlers on top of Palestinians homes demolished by the municipality. (more…)

The Israeli government is quietly implementing a development plan that aims at transforming the area known as the “Holy Basin” – land both inside and just outside the walled Old City – into a major “Biblical Kingdom”, the aim of which is to strengthen Israel’s hold over the whole of the city. (more…)

“However many flags” the Israelis put up around East Jerusalem, that “does not give Israel any sovereignty over it,” Mr. Husseini said. He was referring to the Israeli flags flying with Vatican flags along the routes the pope was expected to travel, including in East Jerusalem. (more…)

The government and settler organizations are working to surround the Old City of Jerusalem with nine national parks, pathways and sites, drastically altering the status quo in the city. The secret plan was assigned to the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA). (more…)

Under an eight-year plan, worth 75m shekels a year (£12m), a series of nine national parks, trails and tourist sites based on apparent Jewish historical spots would be established, most under the control of settler groups working together with the Israeli government. The sites would also create a link to Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The parks would be a “biblical playground” built on public and private land and would be fenced in, the group said. (more…)

In Nu’man, one of the villages the UN says is “living in limbo”, the situation is particularly dire. The village is surrounded on three sides by Israel’s West Bank barrier and on another by the Israeli settlement of Har Homa. The village entrance is blocked by an Israeli checkpoint to anyone other than Nu’man residents. Permits are not given for new homes in the village, and the younger generation is being forced out. Israel annexed Nu’man to Jerusalem after the 1967 war, but never gave its people Jerusalem residency. (more…)

Israel ranked 53rd out of 115 countries surveyed in the 2009 Gender Equality in Property Rights index, which was published by the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (JIMS) Tuesday. (more…)

At least 60,000 out of the estimated 225,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem are at risk of having their homes obliterated because they have been deemed illegal by Israeli officialdom, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated. Some 90 Palestinian buildings were demolished in 2008 alone, uprooting about 400 people.

All this destruction is being wrought as part of a systematic policy of ensuring that the entire city of Jerusalem falls into Israeli hands, even though a raft of UN resolutions have insisted there is no legal validity to building settlements in East Jerusalem. To date one-third of East Jerusalem has been expropriated by Israel and almost 200,000 settlers housed. (more…)

The UN said it was particularly concerned about areas facing mass demolition, including Bustan in Silwan, just south of the old city, where the threatened destruction of 90 houses would lead to the displacement of 1,000 Palestinians. (more…)

Israel has taken a step towards expanding the largest settlement in the West Bank, a move Palestinians warn will leave their future state unviable and further isolate its future capital, East Jerusalem. (more…)

Brushing aside international criticism, Israel demolished a Palestinian house in East Jerusalem in the latest in a series of actions that critics say is racheting up tensions in the city, harming chances for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ammar Hudidon, a resident of the Jebel Mukaber neighbourhood and a father of seven children, said a bulldozer flattened his home yesterday after the Jerusalem municipality said he lacked building permits. Palestinians complain that the permits are virtually impossible to obtain. (more…)

What is significant about the Jaber family’s battle for their home is the way this fight is emblematic of the twin processes Israel has been using to Judaize the land: creeping annexation and delaying negotiations. Since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip (as well as other Arab territories), the ethnic cleansing has been steady but slow, unlike the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in both 1948 and 1967. One house or neighborhood at a time, Palestinians are removed from their land. And just as the Jaber family finds the court continually delaying its decision about their home, for the last 16 years Palestinians have experienced the realities of the Oslo process as a delay process. (more…)

[L]eft unattended, Jewish settlement expansion within the eastern part of the city will reach a critical mass that will create a Balkanised stalemate, geographically and demographically, that would make the two- state solution impossible. (more…)

The people living in these housing units, belonging to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, are due to be forcibly removed from their homes this week, as the papers from the Israeli court they were served with are valid between 15 and 22 March. The courts have justified these evictions by saying that the land that the houses are built on is disputed. Yet, the houses were built under a joint construction project by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956, 11 years before Israel occupied East Jerusalem. (more…)

Nevertheless, Israel is not innocent of serious mistakes in its attitude toward the population of East Jerusalem in general, and regarding the issue of illegal construction in particular. The gaps in services and infrastructure between the Jewish and Arab parts of the city – sometimes by thousands of percentage points – cry out to the heavens. Israel is not really making any effort to change this. (more…)

Two Palestinian students claimed that they were severely beaten on Saturday by Border Guard officers manning a checkpoint situated between the West Bank city of Jericho and Jerusalem. (more…)

Under international law the whole area of East Jerusalem seized by the IDF in 1967 is still–like the rest of the West Bank–judged to be “occupied territory.” Under the Fourth Geneva Convention Israel is therefore prohibited from either implanting its own population as settlers into East Jerusalem or in any other way materially changing the lives of the city’s indigenous Palestinian residents.

Successive Israeli governments flouted these prohibitions from the beginning. In 1967 Israel unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries and then annexed the whole of the expanded city. That act of Anschluss has never been judged legal by the United States or any other significant government. Since 1967 Israel has implanted nearly 200,000 Jewish-Israeli citizens into settlements in East Jerusalem. (more…)

The Israeli police were following the orders of Israel’s Public Security Minister Avi Dichter to use whatever force was necessary to prevent the Palestinian Authority (PA) from celebrating “Jerusalem as the capital of Arabic culture for 2009.”

The tough crackdown, on what on the surface appeared to be a harmless and fun cultural event, underlines the growing conflict between the Israel government and the PA over the division of the city between Israeli West Jerusalem and Palestinian East Jerusalem. (more…)

This short documentary by CBS is by far, one of the most honest and brave television broadcasts to come out of the United States about the conflict.

In February 2005, Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz and Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon adopted the recommendation of a team appointed to analyze the matter, headed by Major General Udi Shani, that the policy should be terminated. The team found that house demolition does not serve to deter and causes greater damage than benefit. The team’s findings undermined the claim of deterrence that Israel had argued for many years.

Despite this, yesterday Israel sealed parts of the Abu Dahim house, as stated above, which is home to the parents, brothers and sisters of ‘Alaa Abu Dahim. The floors that were sealed were a residential floor, on which the perpetrator, his parents and one of his brothers lived, and the basement floor, which has apartments for rent. (more…)

Addressing Israeli college students in a Tel Aviv suburb Tuesday, Livni bragged that European leaders came to Jerusalem to work with Israeli leaders despite the international uproar over the Palestinian civilian toll during fighting. (more…)

The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. (more…)

President-and vice president-elect Barak Obama and Joe Biden will be there – and so will Ariel Lang, a 22-year-old resident of a small settlement near Jerusalem, who has been officially invited to attend the presidential inauguration in Washington on January 20. (more…)

Israel proposed to annex 6.8 percent of the West Bank and take in 5,000 Palestinian refugees, the chief Palestinian negotiator said Friday, speaking for the first time in detail about the yearlong U.S.-backed negotiations that failed to produce an agreement. (more…)

This is how Israel negotiates—by announcing which of their illegal settlements they plan on keeping. The current peace process is directed not according to Israel’s obligations under international law but by how much land the Palestinians are willing to give up. 5,000 refugees is nothing compared to the Israeli Arabs Livni has said will be expelled from parts of Jerusalem. But I’m sure this hypocritical gesture will be depicted as a “generous offer” as it always is.

Two documents appeared side by side in Haaretz last week, on November 21: a giant advertisement from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the results of a public opinion poll.The proximity was accidental, but to the point. The PLO ad sets out the details of the 2002 Saudi peace offer, decorated with the colorful flags of the 22 Arab and the 35 other Muslim countries which have endorsed the offer.

The public opinion poll predicts a landslide victory for Likud, which opposes every single word of the Saudi proposal.

The PLO ad is a first of its kind. At long last, the PLO leaders have decided to address the Israeli people directly.

The ad discloses to the Israeli population the exact terms of the all-Arab peace offer: full recognition of the State of Israel by all Arab and Muslim countries, full normalization of relations – in return for Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and the establishment of the Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The refugee problem would be solved by mutual agreement – meaning that Israel could veto any solution it considered unacceptable.
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U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton’s White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama’s team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."
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In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza. The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity. The siege violates the most fundamental principle of international law: the inadmissibility of harming civilian populations. Our voyage also exposes Israel’s attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. Israel’s claim that there is no Occupation, or that the Occupation ended with “disengagement,” is patently false. Occupation is defined in international law as having effective control over a territory. If Israel intercepts our boats, it is clear that it is the Occupying Power exercising effective control over Gaza. Nor has the siege anything to do with “security.” Like other elements of the Occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israel has also besieged cities, towns, villages and whole regions, the siege on Gaza is fundamentally political. It is intended to isolate the democratically-elected government of Palestine and break its power to resist Israeli attempts to impose an apartheid regime over the entire country. Read more

In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel’s founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine’s Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.

Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people’s history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians’ renunciation of their rights. As Israel’s foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word “nakba” from their lexicon.

Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people’s mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people’s right can be secured at the cost of another’s. Read more

Like a Moslem undertaking the Hajj, the once in a lifetime trip to Mecca, or a Catholic chancing to see the Pope speak from his Vatican window, presidential candidates seemingly long to trudge to the annual AIPAC conference to pay fealty to Israel and its Lobby.

This year we were fortunate enough to witness John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton taking turns losing their dignity before the AIPAC crowd. At one point in his parody on The Daily Show , Jon Stewart spoke of John McCain taking with him Senator Joe Lieberman on a visit to Israel, advising McCain that when you visit Israel “you don’t need to bring your own Jew.”

Hillary’s declaration of support for Israel was merely icing on the cake that she earlier baked during the campaign by promising to “obliterate” Iran if it ever attacked Israel. That, without even a declaration of war called for by the U.S. Constitution should we attack another nation. (But see George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq without such a declaration as precedent). Read more

Two evenings ago, speaking before the American-Israeli Pubic Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Barack Obama desperately attempted to win back his floundering support among the American Jewish community by demonstrating his hawkish, pro-Israel stance. This is neither unusual nor suspect—especially in the United States where the Jewish demographic tends to be more fundamentally Zionist than the Israelis themselves and aspiring candidates are almost required to recite Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat by heart.

Naturally, Obama made the typical platitudes: “Israel has the right to defend itself”, “I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend … Israel”, ad nauseam. But then he said something that could have caused Ariel Sharon to crack a smile through his coma:

“Any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognised, defensible borders. And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and must remain undivided,” he said to rapturous clapping and cheering.

What? East Jerusalem will remain part of Israel? Have U.S. politicians finally ceased pretending they support a negotiated settlement? Read more