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Housing Minister Ariel Atias on Thursday warned against the spread of Arab population into various parts of Israel, saying that preventing this phenomenon was no less than a national responsibility. (more…)

The aim of these laws is to impose the Israeli nationalist creed by coercion. It’s really that simple. Over the last decade, the Knesset has experienced several bursts of legislative activity seeking to restrict freedom of opinion and expression on the questions of the Jewishness of the state and the right to resist occupation. The advocates of these laws are indefatigable. If the proposals fail to pass through any of the necessary stages, they are resubmitted over and over again in the hope of wearing out their opponents. (more…)

“Two Years of Gaza Closure by the Numbers.” (more…)

In letter to defense administration heads Yesh Din reports of alarming increase in number of attempts to uproot or damage Palestinian farmers’ trees as part of settlers’ efforts to ‘achieve political goals through terrorists acts’ (more…)

A community in northern Israel has changed its bylaws to demand that new residents pledge support for “Zionism, Jewish heritage and settlement of the land” in a thinly-veiled attempt to block Arab applicants from gaining admission. (more…)

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle),” Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its “Ask the Rabbis” feature. Friedman argued that if Israel followed this wisdom, there would be “no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.” (more…)

I don’t know what is more disturbing: the guy’s rhetoric or the “Ask the Rabbis” feature.

According to Oren, “if this trend continues, [Israeli founding father David] Ben Gurion’s nightmare will materialize and Israel will be rendered soulless, a country in which a great many Jews may not want to live or for which they may not be willing to give their lives.” (more…)

Tzipi Livni, another so-called centrist, holds similar discriminatory views. On January 23, 2002, she urged members of the Knesset to reject an equal-protection clause according to which equality is the right of every citizen in the state regardless of his or her nationality, religion, or views. The proposed bill was rejected, and formal equality remains outside the Israeli book of laws. Livni also supported bills in the Knesset that would grant settlement and allocation of land for Jews only, such as the one submitted by MK Rabbi Haim Druckman on February 18, 2002. Finally, she repeatedly argued that Israel will never be the national home for its Palestinian citizens and averred that, if they have a collective aspiration, they should look for it elsewhere.

In a letter to Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon, two ADL officials wrote that Tutu, whose opposition to apartheid in the 1980s won him the Nobel Peace Prize, had made statements about Israel that “conveyed outright bigotry against … the Jewish people.” (more…)

The White House offered no further details. But last week a bipartisan group of House members sent a letter to Obama congratulating him for deciding to boycott the meeting, which is scheduled to begin Monday. (more…)

The truth about our foreign minister – and this is no scoop, it’s old news everywhere, but a lot of people have conveniently forgotten it – is that he used to belong to Kach. He is a one-time member of a murderous anti-Arab movement, one whose ideology is summed up in the chant “death to the Arabs,” one that was banned here and is listed by the US and EU as a terrorist organization. (more…)

The fire spread throughout the house. I was holding my daughter Farah and we were both burned too. My clothes went up in flames, and some of my skin and Farah’s skin was scorched. Luckily, my baby daughter Aya wasn’t hurt. I ripped the clothes off my body and cried out that I was burning. I was naked in front of everybody in the house. My body was burning and the pain was excruciating. I could smell my flesh burning. (more…)

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. (more…)

“Palestinian laborers are forbidden to walk around the community of Har Adar in the Jerusalem corridor. They are allowed to work, but cannot simply roam the area. This is the local council’s policy.” (more…)

There are two toilets on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building, in several rooms of which they had lived for about a month. They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks.

They defecated into plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places. Some of them had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into a photocopier. (more…)

“We all put our hands up and yelled, ‘We’re women and children. We’re not the resistance,’ ” recalled Sherine Helw, Fuad’s daughter-in-law.

The soldiers opened fire on Fuad, said Sherine, and he died in front of his family. (more…)

“[There is] a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it.” (more…)

Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.

In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala’a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour’s abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday. (more…)

Well, it took two longs days before Obama dispelled any notions of a change in US Middle East policy. For some reasons, many Arabs and many American leftists I know (you know yourselves) have wanted to believe so bad that Obama will deviate from the Zionist path of US foreign policy. I knew that it would be a matter of weeks that he would prove me right, but I did not know that he would prove me right in a matter of hours.

His speech on the Middle East today could have easily been written by Benjamin Netanyahu. Only this morning, my mother was quizzing me again about Obama, which has been doing regularly in every conversation. She–like many Arabs and Muslims–wants to believe that he would be different than Bush. The fact that he is–unlike Bush–intelligent, competent, and articulate is irrelevant. The set of Zionist–in fact, we should say Revisionist Zionism because American establishment Zionism has been Revisionist Zionism since the Reagan administration (there was a slight deviation from Revisionist Zionism during the Bush-Baker administration, but Clinton quickly “corrected” that) dogmas that guide US foreign policy will remain in place, even if a potato or Sarah Palin is president of the US. Richard Holbrooks is his special envoy to Pakistan-Afghanistan and the man did not waste time before establishing his foreign policy credentials when he said that Afghanistan and Pakistan are “distinct” countries (that reminds me of the wisdom of Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings who yesterday told CNN–you have to monitor the insights of this dude–that we learned from our experience in Iraq that we can’t predict the future exactly in Iraq–I kid you not, he said that).

But Obama’s speech was quite something. It was like sprinkling sulfuric acid on the wounds of the children in Gaza–those who survived the Israeli terrorist festival of butchery and massacres. His remarks leave you with the impression that there are two sets of problems in the holy land: that there was terrorism against civilians in “southern Israel” and then there is some undefined civilian suffering in Gaza from some undefined natural disaster–an earthquake or hurricane. He specifically mentioned the violence against “southern Israel” left it unclear as to what happened in Gaza. He then did the typical dance: of saluting Mubarak for not only oppressing his own population but for oppressing the Palestinians and imposing the siege on them. He then followed the Zionist line that all aid should pass through the transparent gangs in Ramallah–but that is important because Fatah has a very long record of integrity, transparency, merit, and high ethical standards–along with collaboration with Israel. He also defined the requirements for implementing the “Arab peace plan”: Arab governments have to normalize relations with Israel.

All Arabs are now asked by Obama to hug the nearest Israeli: and no, shoes are not accepted as tools of affection–not in the Western culture. But you may tell me, optimistically, that he did not mention Dahlan. I say: oh, no: he did mention Dahlan, I kid you not. He made reference to the Jordanian oppressive state’s training of “Palestinian security forces.” Palestinian security forces is a mere fancy name for the Dahlan gangs (seen above). But I also noticed when he left the podium he went down to shake hands, and the first head I saw was none other than Martin Indyk. If Obama would now appoint Steven Emerson at his ambassador-at-large to the Muslims world, I would expect the Arab-Israeli conflict to end, as well as US problems with the Muslim world. (more…)

For three weeks barbarism has been on show before a universal public, which has watched, judged and with few exceptions rejected Israel’s use of armed terror against the one and a half million inhabitants blockaded since 2006 in the Gaza Strip. Never have the official justifications for invasion been more patently refuted by the combination of camera and arithmetic; or the newspeak of ‘military targets’ by the images of bloodstained children and burning schools. Thirteen dead on one side, 1360 on the other: it isn’t hard to work out which side is the victim. There is not much more to be said about Israel’s appalling operation in Gaza. (more…)

The Israeli army prevented paramedics from entering the area where the family was sheltering for several days, according to the Samouni family.

Send us your views and eyewitness videos When they finally escaped, Israeli soldiers shot at them, Nawal’s other children told Al Jazeera, saying that the soldiers had looked on them and laughed. (more…)

A pillow, a belt, a child’s school bag and pages of a torn copy of the Quran lie in the wreckage of the Al-Da’aa family home in Zeitoun, a neighbourhood of Gaza City. Twenty-four members of the family were killed when an F-16 fighter jet dropped a bomb on their house. Nine bodies still lie under what is now just a massive pancake of concrete, metal wires and death. (more…)

“Two soldiers were on the tank eating chips, then one man came out of the tank with a rifle and started shooting the kids,” Mr Abed Rabbo, who receives a salary as a policeman from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in Ramallah said. (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…)

He described one patient, a three-year-old girl, who was sent for a scan because of a head wound: “After about two hours she came back, we opened the wound, and smoke came out from the wound,” he said. Surgeons used forceps to pull out a substance from the wound that was “like dense cotton and it started to burn,” he said. “The piece continued to burn until it disappeared.” The child, who was from Atatra, in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, died. (more…)

“They were so badly decomposed that we couldn’t distinguish boys from girls. Some had been there for 15 days,” he said. (more…)

A few minutes later, soldiers arrived at the house and called on the father of the family to step out. As ‘Attiyah a-Samuni approached the door, one of the soldiers ordered him to raise his hands and then, without warning, the soldiers opened fire and killed him, in front of his family. They then continued to shoot into the room in which the family was gathered, injuring several members. (more…)

Nearby was another home that had evidently been used as a base by Israeli troops. Inside it was littered with bullet casings and ration packs, and walls were daubed with slogans including “Arabs need to die” and “Arabs: 1948 to 2009″. (more…)

‘ At least 55 Palestinians were killed on Friday, including at least 10 people who died when a tank shell slammed into their house in Gaza City during a funeral wake, according to Palestinian medics . . . In the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the territory, three daughters and a niece of a Palestinian doctor working in Israel were killed in an Israeli air strike. “They were girls, only girls. I want to know why they have they killed them. Who gave the order to fire?” the children’s sobbing father Ezzedine Abu Eish said on Israeli television. Palestinian militants meanwhile fired over 20 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel on Friday, wounding five people, the Israeli military said. Over 700 such projectiles have been fired since the start of the war.’ (more…)

I am not sure whether the top Israeli propaganda award should go to Steven Elranger or Ethan Bronner or Isabel Kershner of the Times. I mean all three did their best to explain and justifiy Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians. Look at this article by Erlanger: “Whatever the military and political results of Israel’s 21-day war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel is again facing serious accusations and anguished questioning over the legality of its military conduct.” I always wait for the word “anguish” which is often used in Zionist propaganda to refer to “the suffering” of…the Israeli killers. So if the massacres of butchery by Israel reaches a certain point, some “liberal” Zionists express concern for the “anguish” of the Israeli killers. (more…)

Desperate patients tried to flee a hospital in Gaza City this morning as it became engulfed in flames after being earlier set on fire by an Israeli tank shell, medics and witnesses said. (more…)

Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides… against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank. (more…)

If I lived in Europe–to say nothing of an Arab or Islamic nation–where the Palestinians are held to be innocent victims of Israeli aggression, my strong personal identification with, and intellectual belief in, the historic Zionist project would no doubt lead me to spend most of my time defending Israel’s legitimacy, if not its every action. (more…)

No doubt you would Mr. Alterman, because at heart you also espouse the racist beliefs shared by Zionists everywhere.

Chris Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said that the building had been used to shelter hundreds of people fleeing Israel’s 20-day offensive in Gaza. He said that pallets with supplies desperately needed by Palestinians in Gaza were on fire.

“What more stark symbolism do you need?” he said. “You can’t put out white phosphorus with traditional methods such as fire extinguishers. You need sand, we don’t have sand.” (more…)

And, unlike Hamas, it is not deliberately targeting civilians (as evidenced by their dropping of leaflets telling civilians to evacuate certain buildings). (more…)

Is it not deliberate if I warn you that I intend to kill you before actually pulling the trigger? I’m sorry, but these leaflets are a ridiculous argument Israel is using to justify their appalling actions. I am now convinced that their ongoing massacre in Gaza will go down as one of the most abhorrent crimes in the long history of Zionist crimes.

A Palestinian besieged in the Khuza’a area, in south-eastern Gaza, reported today that Israeli soldiers shot a woman waving a white flag and civilians who were fleeing a bombed house on army orders, killing at least three and wounding others. (more…)

But each time a Palestinian ambulance does make it across the no man’s land between Gaza and Egypt, the hospital erupts into activity. “Which body part haven’t I seen missing?” says one paramedic when asked what type of shrapnel injuries he had witnessed in victims being transported to al-Arish. According to hospital records, one in six of those victims have been children.

Outside the ER, her face illuminated by flickering blue ambulance beacons, Nawal Wasa prays for the life of her daughter Hanin, as doctors fight to save her. “She’s only 16 years old,” Nawal says fiercely. “She wanted to finish high school and go to university. That’s all she ever wanted.” (more…)

Human Rights Watch said Sunday that Israel’s military has fired artillery shells with the incendiary agent white phosphorus into Gaza and a doctor there said the chemical was suspected in the case of 10 burn victims who had skin peeling off their faces and bodies. (more…)

Israel’s offensive in Gaza can be compared to the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israeli-backed Lebanese militiamen in 1982, two medics said Monday as they returned to Norway after working 10 days at a Gaza hospital. “Gaza in 2009 is becoming a new bloody chapter in Palestinian and Middle Eastern history that is, unfortunately, comparable to Sabra and Shatila,” Mads Gilbert told reporters at Oslo’s Gardermoen airport, referring to a three-day massacre at two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut 27 years ago. (more…)

Leaving your home like this is pitiful; you feel almost ashamed. But there’s no mercy with the Israelis in this operation. Previously, they weren’t so harsh on civilians. But now, although they say they target Hamas, it seems they target anyone. (more…)

Pro-Zionist demonstrators in San Francisco…

Abraham Greenburg, 30, originally from Haifa but living in London for five years, burnt his passport as part of the protest. He said: “What the Zionists are doing is against God and against the Palestinian people. As an Israeli citizen I feel ashamed of what is happening.” (more…)

A tank shell landed outside the home of a family in Jabaliya, northeast of the city, killing eight members of the same family who were sitting outside, hospital officials said, bringing the death toll to more than 820. Nearly half of the dead were reported to be civilians. (more…)

The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as “exercising caution”: the frightening balance of blood – about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn’t raising any questions, as if we’ve decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism. (more…)

State to help fund treatment of pets hurt by rockets

“I want her leg now!” Fida screamed at her mother, blaming her for moving them to the concrete house. “God has no mercy! You get me her leg now!” (more…)

Observers worldwide have been expressing great pity for the people of Gaza, many of whom have been killed, injured, or forced to flee their homes during the ongoing IDF operation. This pity may be a natural emotional reaction, yet it is unethical and immoral. (more…)

Israeli warplanes bombed targets in Gaza for a seventh day on Friday and allowed foreigners, many of them married to Palestinians, to leave the beleaguered enclave, raising fears of a pending broader attack, including a possible ground offensive. (more…)

Of course, those without such privileges will be left to endure Israeli bombs. Zionism feels good!

Jewish intellectuals oppose racism, repression, and injustice almost everywhere in the world and yet it is still unacceptable – indeed, for some, it’s an act of heresy – to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor. This double standard must end. (more…)

Since Arafat’s death and the disengagement from Gaza, Israel has sought to consolidate the physical separation of the Strip from the much-coveted West Bank. Even if not originally desired by Israel, Hamas’s takeover of Gaza has contributed significantly to that goal. (more…)

Israel prevents toddler in need of surgery from returning home from Gaza to West Bank (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…)

The United Nations has halted the distribution of food aid in the Gaza Strip after its stocks of wheat flour ran out.

The UN Relief and Works Agency said on Thursday that “irregular border access” meant deliveries had been unable to reach the improverished territory, where about 750,000 people depend on food assistance. (more…)

An Israeli court has acquitted Julian Soufir despite confessing to the murder of the Arab Jerusalemite Tayseer Karki, 35, with a knife almost a year and a half ago. (more…)

“The whole mall is full of Arabs, and I find it disgusting,” said a woman browsing in a bookstore who would not give her name. “We live in the state of Israel, a Jewish state, and I don’t want to see them here. (more…)

Reading Eric Alterman’s recent article in The Nation magazine recently (Israel at 60: The State of the State), I began to consider the significant gulf that exists between ideology and practice among those on the American “left”. I have been an avid reader of Alterman’s for some time, regularly visiting his website (Alternet.org), following his contributions in The Nation magazine, and reading a few of his books (What Liberal Media?; The Book on Bush; etc.). Of course, Eric and I have had our differences in the past – instead of blaming the inadequacies of the American political system for Bush’s “election” in 2000, he chose to blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s loss – but I am especially disappointed in his most recent article.

Referring to the 60th anniversary of Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians and subsequent founding of the Zionist state, Alterman writes of the “successful prosecution of the War of Independence”. When discussing this state that regularly discriminates against 20% of its own population in its lawas and institutions. and which pursues policies of colonization and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories, Alterman waxes romantic about a “democratic society in the midst of countless hardships in a hostile corner of the world that had known only autocracy”.

Does this sound familiar?

Read more

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

Is it possible for someone who matter-of-factly supports crimes against humanity to be a good historian? A startling and provocative question, no doubt, but one that inevitably arises upon consideration of the remarkable career of Israeli scholar Benny Morris. A professor in the Middle East Studies department at Ben-Gurion University, Morris is well-known as one of the most important of the “New Historians,” a group that upended traditional Zionist historiography of the Israeli-Arab conflict. In the first edition of his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988), Morris conclusively demonstrated, through the mining of newly released Israeli government archives, that the refugees from the 1948 war had, overwhelmingly, fled or been expelled by Israeli forces rather than left as a result of encouragement by Arab leaders, as a previous generation of Israeli propagandists had claimed.

After the release of that book and in subsequent years, with the publication of Israel’s Border Wars (1997) followed by a general history of the conflict, Righteous Victims (1999), Morris was generally lauded by liberals as a historian willing to expose uncomfortable truths about the Israeli past. This Morris, the seemingly liberal Morris, rose to fame at the time of the first Palestinian intifada and the Oslo period that followed, when both support for Palestinian resistance to occupation and new hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict gained traction around the world. 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

May 15, 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, when Palestinians were forced from their homes and ethnically cleansed en masse in a premeditated and organized campaign carried out by armed Zionist militia. Historical accounts indicate that the forced migration of Palestinians from their homeland had been planned well in advance. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was built on the violations of the rights of the Palestinian people. After widespread massacres and killings, more than 700,000 Palestinian civilians were brutally uprooted from their homes, villages and towns, and forced to become refugees in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and surrounding Arab countries. In addition, thousands of other Palestinians were internally displaced within the land subsequently occupied by Israel.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, and after its expansion in 1967 when it forcibly occupied the remainder of Palestinian West Bank land (including occupied East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, Israel has relentlessly confiscated Palestinian land in order to build illegal Jewish settlements, erasing the history of Palestine in the process. Israel’s campaign of “Establishing facts on the ground” has consistently forced more Palestinians into exile, and the Israeli authorities continue to seek to rid the land of its original inhabitants. Read more

This week, Israel turned 60 and with it came the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba—the destruction and systemic expulsion of the Palestinian community. No other event has so drastically altered the course of events in the Middle-East and the scars of Palestinian dispossession continue to be the cause of great consternation across the region and the world today.

I have always found that while most people possess only a very basic understanding of the conflict, it is a subject for which they hold firm and emotionally stubborn opinions. Very few topics change a conversation into an argument so efficiently—even among those with no ethnic, religious or otherwise personal connection to the conflict. Read more

“Archaeology has become a weapon of dispossession,” Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist, said in a recent telephone interview with us. He was referring to the way archaeology is being used in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the oldest part of Jerusalem, where, we believe, archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their ancestral home.

That effort is orchestrated by an Israeli settler organization called Elad, a name formed from Hebrew letters that stand for “to the City of David.” For several years, Elad has used a variety of means to evict East Jerusalem Palestinians from their homes and replace them with Jewish settlers. Today Silwan is dotted with about a dozen such outposts. Moreover, practically all the green areas in the densely populated neighborhood have been transformed into new archaeological sites, which have then been fenced and posted with armed guards. On two of these new archaeological sites, Jewish homes have already been built. Read more

As a 10-year-old growing up in Johannesburg, I celebrated Israel’s birth, 60 years ago. I unquestionably accepted the dramatic accounts of so-called self-defensive actions against Arab violence, to secure the Jewish state. The type of indoctrination South African cartoonist Zapiro so bitingly exposes in his work, raising the hackles of scribes such as David Saks of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. When I became involved in our liberation struggle, I became aware of the similarities with the Palestinian cause in the dispossession of land and birthright by expansionist settler occupation. I came to see that the racial and colonial character of the two conflicts provided greater comparisons than with any other struggle. When Nelson Mandela stated that we know as South Africans “that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” [1] he was not simply talking to our Muslim community, who can be expected to directly empathize, but to all South Africans precisely because of our experience of racial and colonial subjugation, and because we well understand the value of international solidarity.

When I came to learn of the fate that befell the Palestinians, I was shaken to the core and most particularly when I read eye-witness accounts of a massacre of Palestinian villagers that occurred a month before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence. This was at Deir Yassin, a quiet village just outside Jerusalem, which had the misfortune to lie by the road from Tel Aviv. On 9 April 1948, 254 men, women and children were butchered there by Zionist forces to secure the road. Because this was one of the few such episodes that received media attention in the West, the Zionist leadership did not deny it, but sought to label it an aberration by extremists. In fact, however, the atrocity was part of a broader plan designed by the Zionist High Command, led by Ben Gurion himself, which was aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the British mandate territory and the seizure of as much land as possible for the intended Jewish state. Read more

Now this is the kind of heartwarming story I just love to hear about: Israel has granted a residency permit to a homosexual Palestinian man who said that his sexuality placed his life at risk.

Ah yes, remind us again how tolerant and civilized Israeli society is!

“In this case the man’s lawyer said his life was in danger because of his sexual preference,” said Peter Lerner, spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, whose office comes under the defense establishment.

“On this basis we issued the temporary permit,” he said.

Of course, the article fails to mention the 2006 ruling by the High Court of Israel, effectively banning heterosexual marriages between Israeli and Palestinian couples by forbidding their right to live in Israel. Moreover, such couples are also unable to live in the occupied West Bank, from which Israeli citizens are forbidden under military dictates. Read more

I was so eager to read the memoirs of this great Marxist historian that I could not wait to read it. Finished it on the plane last night. What a big disappointment. You can be a great historian and write a lousy memoirs. You don’t even learn much about who he is from reading it. You learn some about the times but I would rather read his The Age of Extremes (a history of the 20th century). Now that is a fine piece of work.

I think that the problems with this memoirs is this: to write a good memoirs 1) you need to think that you are somewhat interesting; 2) you need to be a good story teller; 3) you need to be comfortable talking about yourself. That does not apply here. Read more

I received this message from Professor Noam Chomsky this summer in response to my article Security or Demography: The West Bank Barrier as a Demographic Tool.

From: chomsky[at]MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: West Bank Barrier
Date: June 16, 2007 19:27:29  IDT
To: kris[at]harmonicminor.com

Interesting, and well done, but I’m quite skeptical about the value of such inquiries, for a number of reasons.  Here’s a few.
 
You say it is a “highly contentious point” whether a barrier on the Israeli side of the Green Line would have achieved whatever security effects the Separation Wall does.  I don’t agree with that at all.  It’s an obvious point.  In fact it could have achieved far better results, since it could be impregnable, patrolled heavily on both sides of the fence, etc. Furthermore, even accepting (for argument’s sake)  the idea that for security Israel somehow needs intrusion into the West Bank, then why not just build a wall a fixed distance from the Green line, say 5 km (or whatever number one wants), thereby excluding the Maaleh Adumim salient and the Ariel salient, and the many other illegal communities?  Plainly, that would be at least as effective for self-defense.  The whole discussion seems absurd.  I’ve followed the arguments, and they don’t stand up to a moment’s inspection.  About as clear an evasion of the obvious as can be imagined.  We should also be more than a little disturbed, I think, by the universal acceptance in the West that the question of “security” reduces to the security of Israelis, that is, to the rich and powerful state closely linked to the US and EU, while there is no security problem for those under the jackboot.  The racism is stunning, even given the ineradicable imperial mentality. Read more