A senior American diplomat recently told representatives of the Israeli Defense and Foreign ministries, “I don’t want your security officers to check our cars. What if there are settlers among them? I will not have my people end up like (slain Prime Minister Yitzhak) Rabin.” (full article…)

Such a remarkable story could only happen in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A young gay Palestinian man, who is in grave, life-threatening danger and cannot return to his home with his Israeli partner, was saved by a stranger who came to his aid – a religious West Bank settler. (full article…)

Look at this morally narcissistic story. Does the Israeli media also report that their noble military uses sexual identity as blackmail against Palestinians they hope to use as collaborators? Do they report that Palestinian/Israeli couples (of any sexual orientation) are barred from residence in that racist state?

During a previous harvest she had to be taken to hospital after she was hit over the head with an iron bar by an Israeli security guard from one of the nearby settlements. On another occasion settlers threw stones and human excreta at her and other volunteers, while shooting into the air. (full article…)

The vandals came at night from Adei Ad, a Jewish settlers’ outpost deemed “illegal” even by the Israeli government, near Shvut Rachel, an established West Bank settlement that is judged illegal in international but not Israeli law. Working fast, unnoticed by Palestinian landowners in the nearby Arab village of al-Mughayir, the settlers cut down nearly 200 olive trees, of which 70 belonged to Mr Abu Awad. As a result, he reckons to have lost income worth around $3,400 that he would have earned from this year’s harvest. But that is not all. “I planted these trees with my own hands 35 years ago”, he says, wistfully touching the stumps, now wrapped in sackcloth to protect them from the sun. Mr Abu Awad hopes his trees will recover and one day bear fruit again. . . . Mr Abu Awad says he is determined to fight to keep his land. “I’ll sleep on my land to protect it,” he says. “I tell my children: if I die, they should bury me where my blood was spilled. I’m in love with my land.” (full article…)

According to Israeli press reports, Israel is planning a massive new settlement in the vicinity of Jerusalem, on land owned by Palestinians of al-Walajah. The project, expected to be approved by the Israeli ministry of the Interior, could become the single most populous settlement built in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967 according to the Israeli daily Maariv. The project plans prepared by the ministry of the Interior and the Jerusalem municipality call for 14,000 housing units for 40,000 settlers on 3,000 dunums of land which would require the demolition of al-Walajah residents’ homes, according to the paper. (full article…)

Jewish settlers on Tuesday cut off 250 Palestinian fruitful olive trees in Deir Ammar village, west of Ramallah city, local sources reported. (full article…)

“We want to create facts on the ground,” he said. (full article…)

Why is Netanyahu defying Obama so openly? Because he has long been committed to the dream of a “greater Israel,” and the only Palestinian state he might accept would be an archipelago of disconnected enclaves under de facto Israeli control. (full article…)

“He sees the settlements in Judea and Samaria as a Zionist enterprise and the settlers in Judea and Samaria as his – our – brothers.” (full article…)

A settler tosses wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron. The approach of some settlers towards neighboring Palestinians, especially around Nablus in the north and Hebron in the south, has often been one of contempt and violence. (more…)

The message to President Obama, he said, is that this is Jewish land. He did not use the president’s name, but an insulting Hebrew slang for a black man and the phrase “that Arab they call a president.” (more…)

Settlers threatened on Friday to set the West Bank city of Hebron on fire if Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak carries out a recent decision to open a street into the Jabber neighborhood. (more…)

First of all, we really don’t have any intention to change the demographic balance in Judea and Samaria. (more…)

In his speech last Sunday, the prime minister failed to address the continual growth of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, where close to 300,000 Israeli settlers live. (more…)

East Jerusalem is on the Palestinian side of the Green Line (notwithstanding Israel’s illegal annexation of it) and the number of settlers expands to approximately 500,000 when you account for that. I’ve noticed recently that the media (on both sides) consistently ignores this fact.

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…)

“This particular settlement is not one that I envision ever being abandoned, or changed over into a Palestinian territory,” Carter said. “This is part of the close settlements to the 1967 line that I think will be here forever.” (more…)

The Land of Israel Faithful group said Monday it has a plan to construct 30 new outposts in the West Bank over the summer, in response to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech a day earlier in which he said that no new settlements would be built and no additional land would be expropriated for settlement development. (more…)

This speech was nothing new or interesting on Netanyahu’s behalf. The man is a racist and his speech reflected this very clearly. It was aimed simply at reassuring his fellow extremists in Israel (and in the settlements) that he is not about to “sell-out” to Washington. I won’t go into his ridiculous distortions of history because the are easily refuted by anyone with the most basic appreciation for the facts.

The thrust of his speech had to do with the Palestinians recognizing Israel—not merely as a state with an inherent right to exist (as Israel had previously demanded), but as a specifically Jewish state with a right to exist. The second point of his speech had to do with his vision for a Palestinian state, namely a demilitarized enclave subordinate to Israeli security needs.

To the first point, this is fluff. Israel is unprepared to recognized the West Bank as a specifically Muslim or Palestinian entity (and it shouldn’t in any case). But Israel cannot bring itself to recognize the basic right to Palestinian existence even without silly ethnic or religious predicates. So demanding the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel as a specifically Jewish state is intended simply to undermine peace negotiations by precluding discussion over the right to return for the 1948 refugees. After all, why should Israel negotiate over refugees if the Palestinians have themselves granted legitimacy to Jewish apartheid? So on the issue of recognition, Netanyahu has only further radicalized Israel’s position. (more…)

[M]any settlers say the West Bank is Jewish land and if Palestinians want to live there they must abide by Israeli law. (more…)

Fine, then annex the West bank once and for all and give the Palestinians full rights as Israeli citizens. Oh, but this would end the Jewish demographic balance… Ok, then you have another choice: get out now.

Palestinians families who suffered property damage during riots that followed 2008 evacuation of ‘disputed house’ to receive total of $63,000 restitution payments. (more…)

“During April four Palestinians, including two boys, were killed by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and another 145 were injured by Israeli soldiers and settlers. The number of Palestinians injured rose by 40 percent compared with the 2008 monthly average,” the report says. “We have noticed a significant increase in the incidents of both settler and soldier violence against Palestinian civilians since the new Israeli government took power at the beginning of the year,” says Ronen Shimoni from B’Tselem. “This is probably related to an increase in settlement activity in the West Bank as the rightist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to establish facts on the ground,” Shimoni told IPS. (more…)

The settlers were unmoved by the evacuation, saying that the situation would be reversed in no time. “We’ll return to Mitzpe Avihai today,” a youth from Kiryat Arba promised. (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…)

The Palestinian farmers said that after repeated requests filed with the Civil Administration and the IDF’s Coordination and Liaison Office, they were finally given authorization to cultivate their lands. However, they said, when they arrived at the fields Tuesday morning they were stormed by the settlers, who appeared to be unfazed by the army’s presence in the area. (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…)

Lack of new housing is causing “a silent evacuation of hundreds of young couples from Judea and Samaria,” settler leader Dani Dayan told reporters on Monday. …
In the past year, some 2,100 newly married couples registered in Judea and Samaria, but there were only about 400 open housing units that could house
them, he said. (more…)

I saw a child, who looked about twelve years old, and was dressed in white, was wearing a skullcap and had long, curly hair. He opened the door on the driver’s side and slammed it shut. Then he bent over and picked up a big rock. I was afraid he would throw it at us, and my daughter began to shout and asked the driver to get going quickly, before the child throws the rock at us. The soldier was still standing on the side of the ambulance, and put his hand on the window. Then the child threw the rock at the rear door of the ambulance, breaking the window, and it fell on the bed inside the ambulance. It weighed about three kilograms. Luckily, Hanaa and I were sitting on the seat and were not injured, but small pieces of glass scattered on my clothes. I began to shake in fear and to cry. I shouted and then I was just too overwhelmed to speak. My daughter and the paramedic tried to calm me. As they did that, another rock, a small one, flew into the ambulance, landing near the big rock. This one, too, didn’t hit me. The soldier standing next to us did not stop the child from throwing the stones, and let him run away. He didn’t do anything. (more…)

I watched them returning and saw a young settler stop and look around. I was afraid that he intended to do something, and right then, while I was thinking that, he picked up a stone and threw it at the car of my uncle Muhammad Nabih D’ana, who lives next-door. His car, a 1981 Subaru, was parked opposite his house. I saw and heard the rear window of the car shatter. I shouted, in Hebrew, to the settler, “What are you doing here?” Then, the soldiers aimed their rifles at my house, and one of them ordered me to shut up and stay inside. Other settlers began to throw stones at parked cars. I heard the stones strike the cars. I watched the settlers as they passed by my house, and then I went to the front door and continued to shout at them. I heard my uncle Muhammad D’ana and other neighbors shouting from their houses, but nobody went outside. (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…)

Palestinians from the West Bank village of Sinjil, near Ramallah, claimed Wednesday that settlers from the Givat Haroeh outpost have cut 45 olive trees belonging to the village.

The Palestinians also claimed that the settlers tried to stop them from farming their land. (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…)

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…)

Being pregnant, I couldn’t run fast. After about one hundred meters, the settlers caught me. One of them hit me in my right arm and left leg with his stick. The other settler threw a stone at me, which hit me in the left leg. Then one of them pushed me, and I fell onto some thorns. My arm and leg hurt a lot. When I fell, the two settlers left me and ran toward the farmers and other shepherds. I remained there, crying. I was in terrible pain. (more…)

At approximately 08:00 a.m., the settlers – armed with pistols and machine guns – opened fired directly at Palestinian civilians and houses. The settlers and soldiers then advanced towards the houses, firing their weapons and tear gas. The Palestinian civilians responded with stones, in an attempt to prevent the attackers from entering the houses. Soldiers and settlers shot directly at Palestinian civilians, at distances ranging from 2 to 20 metres. The attack lasted for approximately 90 minutes, without interruption. (more…)

Although the Labor Party seeks to give up most of the West Bank to the Palestinians, more settlement homes were begun and completed per year under Barak than under either Sharon, Olmert or during Netanyahu’s first term. (more…)

A group of extremist settlers attacked on Tuesday a number of Palestinian homes in the southern West Bank city of Hebron causing excessive damage and terrifying the residents, especially the children. (more…)

Israeli police dressed in Palestinian garb who have gone under cover to catch violent Jewish settlers got a taste of what Palestinians routinely confront as Jewish settlers attacked undercover officers thinking they were Arabs, Israeli press reported. Six Jewish settlers who mistook under cover Israeli cops for Palestinians attacked them Thursday, throwing stones and damaging a police under cover vehicle, Haaretz reported Saturday after a court ruling on the incident came out Friday. The settlers also tried to run the disguised police over near an illegal Jewish outpost in the West Bank. (more…)

The ultra-nationalist Jewish marchers had two immediate purposes: to commemorate 20 years since their late leader Rabbi Meir Kahane raised a flag on the same spot (a year later Kahane was shot and killed in New York by an Islamic activist), and to demonstrate support for practical policies espoused by his heirs. One of them has just been elected to the Knesset on the ticket of the National Union, which won four seats and was even considered by Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu for inclusion in his coalition. They belong to the fascist branch of the Israeli Right but today their ideas are mainstream right and have gained an aura of respectability among Jewish Israelis. (more…)

Israel will not demolish nine houses in a West Bank settlement in spite of a court order to do so, because they were inhabited months ago and are within the confines of the Ofra settlement. (more…)

“The goal of the march is to make it clear to a group of unrulies in the Arab sector who is the owner of State of Israel,” said Itamar Ben Gvir, a former Kach Party activist and one of the organizers of the demonstration. (more…)

Ben Gvir, an aid to radical MK Baruch Marzel, is the same nutcase that heckled us in Hebron recently and who shouted at Barack Obama when he toured Israel during the election campaign.

An officer who fought in the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza and was slated to receive a citation for his performance was arrested recently on suspicion of assaulting a Palestinian girl in the Hebron area, Ynet has learned. (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.

“I have no intention of building new settlements in the West Bank,” Netanyahu told Blair in a meeting Sunday. “But like all the governments there have been until now, I will have to meet the needs of natural growth in the population. I will not be able to choke the settlements.” (more…)

To that end, Mr Obama needs to make it clear, preferably before Israel’s election next month, that America will no longer countenance Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank. The Jewish settlements there should never have been built, and Israel has promised to freeze them. This has become a test. If Mr Obama cannot hold Israel to its promise, his chances of restoring America’s standing as the indispensable mediator in this conflict are nil. (more…)

The Israeli army is to investigate claims it used white phosphorus illegally during its three-week offensive in Gaza. (more…)

Coming from a state that justifies both the siege of the civilian population in Gaza and the expansion of colonies in the West Bank, I have very high hopes…

A settler shot and killed a Palestinian rock-thrower after his vehicle was pelted with stones on Tuesday evening. (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…)

Documents signed in strange places – and crooked deals – are not unusual in the lucrative and clandestine trade in Palestinian-owned land. Another recent challenge to a settler land deal in the town of Hebron involved forged documents, and a third revolved around Israeli businessmen who set up a notary with a prostitute, filmed their encounter, and then blackmailed the man into signing a sales document in Cyprus. (more…)

Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.

“This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality,” I was told by Richard N. Veits, the former U.S. ambassador to Jordan who led a delegation from the Council on Foreign Relations to Gaza to meet Hamas leaders this past summer. “I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago.”

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.” (more…)

The settler population in the West Bank is growing three times as fast as the population in the rest of the country and has doubled over the past 12 years, according to an extensive demographic study published Monday by the Ariel University Center in Samaria (the College of Judea and Samaria). (more…)

Dozens of Beduin citizens were made homeless on Monday after an unrecognized village was razed by the Israel Land Administration, days after a state-appointed commission recommended that many unrecognized villages be accepted as legal. (more…)

To the Jewish West Bank settlers who attacked Palestinian people and property in Hebron this month, it was Operation Price Tag — an attempt to increase the price to the Israeli government of evacuating them from ground they view as sacred.

To the prime minister of Israel, it was a “pogrom.” (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.

The settlers call this the post-Gaza “price-tag policy”, whereby any attempt by the Israeli authorities to evacuate any settlement is resisted not only by confrontation with the evacuators but also by violent attacks elsewhere against Palestinians and the army. Such tactics have recently led to injury and extensive damage to Palestinian property. Two Israeli army officers were also hurt by settler militants.(more…)

The settlers continued their attack for about two hours. My children and I stayed in one room. They children were terrified and we were all crying. We heard the sound of the windows breaking and of the water tanks being punctured. Flames spread into the house and we had to put them out with blankets, because the settlers had damaged our water system. (more…)

A Jerusalem court on Wednesday freed a Jewish settler suspected of firing on Palestinians at point blank range in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron. (more…)

Extremist settler groups currently involved in violent confrontations with Palestinians in the centre of Hebron have chosen their next battleground, this time outside the West Bank.

A far-right group know as the Jewish National Front, closely associated with the Hebron settlers, is preparing to march through one of the main Arab towns in northern Israel. The march, approved by the Supreme Court back in October, is scheduled to take place on December 15, the group announced this week.

The police are expecting to deploy thousands of officers to prevent trouble, and have limited the number of Front members participating to 100. The march will not enter the heart of the city, say police, though it is not yet clear whether Front members will be allowed to carry the guns most have been issued as settlers.

The Front says it will wave Israeli flags in what the group has dubbed a demonstration of “Jewish Pride” through Umm al-Fahm, home to nearly 45,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel. (more…)

Palestinians are being regularly and illegally barred from reaching Dead Sea beaches in the occupied West Bank, according to a Supreme Court petition filed by Israel’s leading civil rights organisation.

The Association of Civil Rights (Acri) in Israel is challenging what it says is the frequently imposed ban by the military on Palestinians seeking to swim or relax at beaches in the northern Dead Sea. The salt-saturated sea is the only open water accessible to Palestinians from the otherwise landlocked West Bank.

The petition says that the Israeli military is using the Beit Ha’arava checkpoint on Route 90 – the only open access route in the occupied West Bank for travel to the Dead Sea – to turn back Palestinians, mainly but not exclusively on weekends and Jewish holidays.

Acri says that the ban is to appease Israeli settlers operating concessions along the Dead Sea’s northern shore. They fear losing Jewish customers if there are large numbers of Arabs using the beaches in territory seized by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967. (more…)

In the Gaza Strip, there are a vast number of inspiring individuals prepared to put their personal reputation (and even their own physical well-being) on the line for matters of conviction. Dr. Eyad Sarraj is one of the more prominent of these figures and I was fortunate enough to speak with him on several occasions during my time in the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Sarraj, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, is the founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme—a groundbreaking NGO in Gaza catering to the masses of Palestinians suffering from emotional trauma, especially victims of torture. Sarraj is well known for his outspoken criticism of the Israeli occupation and of corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

In the excerpts that follow, I discuss the state of Palestinian democracy with Dr. Sarraj. (more…)

The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten “to a pulp” when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty. (more…)

Two years ago, Israel completed a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. We all remember the intense media campaign shamelessly portraying the settlers as dispossessed victims of a bold move for peace. Among others, Harvard economist Sara Roy argued that Israel’s version of disengagement would bring disaster to an already desperate Gaza. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of an unparalleled economic catastrophe in the Gaza Strip and with it, the evaporation of the last remaining hopes for a Palestinian state. (more…)