Israel-Arab claims she was humiliated by two security guards who ordered her off bus after hearing her speak Arabic on cell phone. College: First such incident in 15 years (full article…)

President Shimon Peres tells Washington Post prime minister’s agreement to two-state solution, freezing of settlements connotes shift from right-wing ideology; adds that Netanyahu is unfairly portrayed as an extremist in US (full article…)

PA source: US to press Israel on settlements (full article…)

The administration also concluded, wrongly, that obtaining an unconditional Israeli settlement freeze was an essential first step. In fact settlements are no longer a strategic obstacle to peace; as a practical matter, most of the construction is in areas that will not be part of a Palestinian state. (full article…)

This is the kind of absurd editorial that can only appear in the U.S. media. Who says that the illegally settled West Bank enclaves will remain in Israel’s hands? Who but the Israeli government? I suppose the Washington Post doesn’t mind that East Jerusalem is being depopulated of its Palestinian population as families are thrown out of houses they have lived in for fifty years. No that’s the kinds of ethnic cleansing they like.

Every single settlement is illegal, including all the building in East Jerusalem. Every new housing unit is a slap in the face of international law and to initiate peace talks while this continues is to repeat the conditions of every single episode of bilateral talks for the past 40+ years. The only way the settlements can be ignored is if the talks address borders immediately. Once the prospect of remaining under Palestinian rule dawns on the settlers, they will stop of their own accord.

Israel has reportedly agreed to freeze West Bank settlement activity for up to 9 months in exchange for normalizing relations with some North African and Gulf Arab states, according to a Washington Times exclusive published on Tuesday. (full article…)

Spain boycotts Ariel college for being on ‘occupied territory’ (full article…)

During Monday’s discussion, Education Ministry representative, Shai Rimsky, said, “Because the Defense Ministry does not recognize certain settlements, the Education Ministry cannot allocate funds for the building of educational institutions. Ultimately, the children suffer.” (more…)

Three days after the U.S. administration criticized the decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to authorize the construction of hundreds of new housing units in settlements, the Israel Lands Administration published tenders for the construction of 486 apartments in the neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev in East Jerusalem. (more…)

The basic difference between the two undertakings is that the settlement project that preceded Israel’s establishment was intended to create the territorial basis for the future Jewish state. It wasn’t intended to deprive the Arabs of everything that was left or, for that matter, their right to a state of their own alongside the Jewish state. (more…)

The state of Israel was predicated on ethnic cleansing and brutality… These illegal settlements (or “outposts” if you prefer to distinguish between degrees of illegality) are founded on the same ideology of exclusion and oppression. I have to agree with the settlers on this point: their behavior is no different than the behavior that accompanied the creation of Israel…

Maher Hanoun, a resident of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in east Jerusalem, has been ordered by court to vacate his home. Dozens of the neighborhood’s residents, as well as Jewish and Arab politicians and human rights activists arrived at Hanoun’s house on Sunday to protest the court’s decision. (more…)

Israel’s defence ministry has proposed legalising 60 existing homes at a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, and building another 240 homes at the site, despite US calls for a halt to settlement growth. (more…)

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi raised the settlement issue in a meeting with Netanyahu in Rome yesterday, telling him that settlement construction may become an obstacle for peace, and must be stopped. (more…)

Who cares what this clown has to say about the settlements? The guy has the moral integrity of Tony Soprano… In fact, I prefer the neo-fascists in the Israeli government.

The poll also found that 58% of Israeli Jews back the continued expansion of West Bank settlements. (more…)

What exactly was U.S.-Israel agreement on settlements?

Israeli Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a leading “three-state” advocate who was also featured at the Jerusalem conference in May, claimed that “the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is too small to create two viable states”. (more…)

On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel “cannot freeze life in the settlements,” calling the American demand “unreasonable.” (more…)

He added, “But we sure as hell will continue freezing life in Gaza!”

“Israel must seriously address the issue of settlements,” agreed Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Florida) in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. But he stressed that Israel was not being asked to act unilaterally, saying that freezing settlements must be accompanied by “significant, concrete steps in the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel.” (more…)

Obama has told Netanyahu firmly that Israel must stop building settlements on expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, but such words have been uttered by the president’s predecessors. Unless these statements are followed by decisive action–perhaps to limit American subsidies to Israel–there’s no reason to believe the lip service that failed in the past will suddenly be more effective. (more…)

From the detailed description provided by Dayton, it’s clear that the Palestinian forces he’s enabling could certainly be accused of carrying out the self-policing of the West Bank for the Israelis. Because the West Bank is, after all, occupied by Israel and riddled with illegal settlements besides — plus beset by a surrounding wall, 600-plus intrusive checkpoints, and a network of Jews-only highways — the Palestinian troops are utterly at the mercy of the Israelis. Each recruit is vetted by US security forces (i.e, the CIA), then vetted by Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence arm of Israel, and then by Jordan’s super-efficient intelligence service, before they begin their training in Jordan. Dayton made it quite clear that the Palestinian units thus trained are primarily deployed against two targets in the West Bank: against criminal gangs, and against Hamas. So far, they’ve received $161 million is US funding. (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…)

[T]he US could bring Israel to its knees rather quickly if it chose: without US aid, the Zionist settler colony would have disappeared long ago. (more…)

“It’s a lot more complicated.” He added that the real reason for the deadlock “is not occupation, not settlements and not settlers.” Nor, he said, is it the Palestinians. The biggest obstacle, he said, is “the Iranians.” (more…)

A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll finds that three-quarters of Americans think that Israel should not build settlements in the Palestinian territories. This is up 23 points from when this question was last asked in 2002. (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…)

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…)

“Sooner or later, the world will realize that Iran wishes to take over the Middle East, and that it has colonial ambitions,” Peres said. (more…)

For some reason, Peres’s talk of “colonial ambitions” strikes me as either facetious or deeply cynical. Can anyone tell me why?

[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…)

Residents of a Palestinian Christian housing project in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour say Israel is encircling their community with a security road to separate them from a nearby Jewish settlement. “With this situation they will put us in a cage, a zoo,” said William Sahouri, 42, a resident and member of the project’s housing committee. “We will not be able to expand.” (more…)

Hebron is another controversial area where settlements have received substantial tax-exempt gifts from America. According to IRS records, the Hebron Fund donated $860,637 in 2005 and $967,954 in 2006 for “social and educational well-being”; the fund’s online mission statement makes clear this is for Israeli settlers inside the city. The Hebron settlement of Kiryat Arba received $730,000 in 2006 from a group called American Friends of Yeshiva High School of Kiryat Arba. (more…)

A Jewish outpost in the West Bank, illegal under Israeli law, appears to benefiting from state funding, the BBC has uncovered. (more…)

I don’t know if anyone caught this, but even as Benjamin Netanyahu was pledging his support for the continuation of peace talks and declaring Israel a “partner for peace”, he reached a secret agreement with neo-fascist Avigdor Lieberman to expand the Israeli super-settlement of Ma’ale Adumim by 3,000 housing units.

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…)