Palestine

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 01, 2022 3:44 pm

Masar Badil Calls for Support for the Palestinian Resistance and the Intifada
NOVEMBER 28, 2022

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People marching with banners, one reads: "Globalize the Intifada." Photo: Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement.

The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, called upon its organizations and supporters to organize mass actions in support of the growing Intifada in occupied Palestine, under the slogan: “With the Palestinian Resistance: Support the Intifada!”

“Our people in exile and diaspora, the supporters of Palestine and the free people of the world will together express their position, as they have always done, in support of the growing uprising in Palestine. The youth of Palestine everywhere will not stand by amid the Zionist crimes against our people in Jenin, Nablus, Gaza, Jerusalem and throughout Palestine, from the river to the sea,” affirmed the movement.

The Masar Badil confirmed its clear and firm position of support for Palestinian resistance until return and liberation, embracing all of its currents and forces of the armed resistance confronting the Zionist enemy, and upholding the sacred right of our Palestinian people to defend their existence and national rights, urging unity in all areas and further initiatives and revolutionary actions, on the road to building a unified national front that enjoys the credibility and support of the people.

Progress towards a new state of struggle is the decisive, optimal popular response to the racist Zionist entity and the policies of its “new” fascit government. The creation of a qualitative revolutionary situation would secure the transfer of the initiative to one of popular power, led by the resistance forces, weakening the so-called “Palestinian Authority” and the Oslo project, and isolating it on popular and political levels, the Masar emphasized, further expressing its support for the popular demand to recover the imprisoned, stolen bodies of the captive martyrs and free them from the grip of the enemy.

The movement saluted those members of the Palestinian security forces who exited the ranks of the PA’s security services to return to their natural position of struggle and their revolutionary role in protecting their people and confronting the occupation forces. The correct national compass for any honourable Palestinian gun lies in defending the Palestinian people and their land, not in providing protection for Zionist colonizers.

The Masar saluted the Palestinian resistance organizations and brigades in the Gaza Strip, the fighters and cells that shook the edifices of the enemy in occupied Jerusalem, and all of the strugglers in the camps, cities, and villages of the occupied West Bank and throughout occupied Palestine.

https://orinocotribune.com/masar-badil- ... -intifada/

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Israeli troops kill three Palestinians in the West Bank

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There have been 153 Palestinians killed by the occupying forces in the course of this year. | Photo: EFE
Published 29 November 2022

Two brothers, Dhafer Rimawi, 21, and Jawad Rimawi, 22, were shot in the town of Kfar Ein.

Israeli occupation forces assassinated three young Palestinians on Tuesday in two events that occurred in different parts of the West Bank as part of the war crimes perpetrated by Zionist troops.

The Palestinian National Authority Ministry of Health said two brothers, Dhafer Rimawi, 21, and Jawad Rimawi, 22, were shot by Tel Aviv troops in the town of Kfar Ein, near Ramallah.

Similarly, the Palestinian ministry detailed that Jawad, who was a recent graduate in Business Administration from Birzeit University, was hit in the pelvis while his brother, a fourth-year technology student from the same university, was shot in the chest.


Similarly, the health authorities confirmed the death of Mufeed Mohammad Ikhlil, 44, after receiving a bullet to the head in the community of Beit Ummar, near the city of Hebron.

In this latest event, around 20 injuries were reported while the Israeli Army claimed that its troops were attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails.


In this regard, the authorities specified that two military vehicles that were damaged due to technical difficulties were attacked by Palestinians who even allegedly fired shots.

However, local sources assure that the statements of the Zionist Army have not yet been verified, meanwhile, 153 Palestinians have been recorded as murdered by the occupation forces in the course of this year.

This triple murder occurs when this Tuesday the United Nations Organization (UN) commemorates this Tuesday the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People and calls on the Governments and civil society to the urgent need to resolve the cause of Palestine as one of the pending issues on the international agenda.

"This day provides an opportunity for the international community to focus its attention on the fact that the question of Palestine is still unresolved," says a UN statement published on its online platform.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/israel-p ... -0003.html

Two other Palestinian youths die under Israeli fire

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So far in 2022, the Israeli occupying forces have killed 210 Palestinians and imprisoned hundreds. | Photo: Latin Press
Published December 1, 2022

The most recent Israeli attack on Jenin, perpetrated on Thursday, caused two deaths, one wounded and four Palestinians arrested.

Members of the Israeli security forces killed two members of the Palestinian resistance on Thursday during a raid in the city of Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank, for a total of ten victims in a week.

"Two young men, Muhamad Ayman Al Sadi, 26, and Naim Jamal Zubaidi, 27, were killed by Israeli occupation bullets early today during their attack on the Jenin camp," said a statement from the Ministry of Health. Palestinian.

In the same operation, a third Palestinian was wounded and four ended up in detention.


For its part, the Israeli army stated that Saadi was a high-ranking agent of an armed group that "has carried out several shooting attacks against Israeli forces and has armed his organization's militiamen."

Zubaidi was allegedly some kind of lieutenant "a terrorist agent who participated in several shooting attacks against Israeli forces", belonging to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah movement.


Two days ago, Zionist raids on the West Bank killed five Palestinians, in what is considered one of the bloodiest days so far this year.

According to figures from humanitarian organizations, between January and November the occupation forces killed 210 Palestinians, 158 of them in the West Bank and the rest in the Gaza Strip.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/palestin ... -0007.html

UN rejects Israeli occupation of Syrian Golan Heights

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With 92 votes in favor, nine against and 65 abstentions, the UN declared the Israeli annexation null and void. | Photo: UN
Published December 1, 2022

The UN bosom ratified that Israel's occupation of these territories constitutes an obstacle to regional stability.

The General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) approved this Wednesday a resolution that manifests Israel's non-compliance with Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981, which prohibits the establishment of legal norms on the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. .

With 92 votes in favor, nine against and 65 abstentions, the UN bosom declared the Israeli annexation of the territories of the Golan Heights null and void while urging the Zionist authorities to desist from that purpose.

In this sense, the Assembly ratified that Israel's occupation of these territories constitutes an obstacle to regional stability, meanwhile, called for respecting the limits established on June 4, 1967 by the Security Council.


Likewise, the approved resolution calls for dialogue between the parties and for the international community to support attempts to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region.

Israeli forces occupied Syrian territory in the 1967 Six-Day War, which caused the displacement of its inhabitants and a series of wars such as the Yom Kippur War.


For its part, the United States considers the occupation of the Golan Heights of great importance to Zionist security, which was exacerbated in the administration of far-right former President Donald Trump.

With the outbreak of the conflict in Syria in 2011, the West, which supported the destabilizing forces with the supply of weapons, has found a justification for not giving up the internationally recognized Arab territories.

In total, the United Nations General Assembly approved during this day five resolutions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In addition to the aforementioned on the Israeli claim to annex the Golan Heights, with 90 votes in favor, 30 against and 47 abstentions, another resolution was approved to commemorate in 2023, with a special event, the 75th anniversary of the "Nakba" (catastrophe, in Arabic), term to refer to the Palestinian exodus caused by the creation of Israel in 1948.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/asamblea ... -0009.html

Google Translator

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ISRAELI JOURNALISTS SUFFER "HUMILIATION" AT THE WORLD CUP IN QATAR
30 Nov 2022 , 1:42 pm .

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Tunisian fans unfurl a large Palestinian flag on November 26, 2022 during a World Cup match in Qatar (Photo: AFP)

Israeli reporters covering the FIFA World Cup in Qatar have complained of facing "humiliation" and "hate" when soccer fans around the world refuse to speak to them.

In dozens of videos shared on social media, soccer fans are seen turning their backs on Israeli reporters once they find out their country of origin.

Arab fanatics, in particular, often take the opportunity to call for the liberation of Palestine and an end to Israeli apartheid.

The situation has even forced Israeli reporters to awkwardly pretend they are from a different country.

"We feel hated, surrounded by hostility and unwanted," wrote Raz Shechnik, music and media correspondent for Israeli news outlet Yedioth Ahronoth , in an opinion piece published on November 27.

"After a while, we decided to claim that we were Ecuadorian when someone asked us where we were from," Shechnik continues, stating that the experience has definitely not been "fun."

It also alleges that its crew is "followed at all times by Palestinians, Iranians, Qataris, Moroccans, Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians and Lebanese, all giving us hateful looks."

All of this is happening, according to Shechnik, despite his explanation to fans that the Israelis "come in peace."

"They would really like to see us wiped off the face of the earth, and any notion of Israel evokes their utter disgust," the reporter concludes.

Fan reactions caused shock in Tel Aviv, as Israelis apparently expected a warm welcome to Qatar two years after signing normalization agreements with a handful of Arab nations, and despite countless human rights abuses committed. against the Palestinians on a daily basis.

"There are many attempts by many people here, from all over the Arab world, to come out against us because we stand for normalization," Channel 12 reporter Ohad Hemo said during a televised report over the weekend.

Similarly, a Sunday article published in Israel's largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom , denounces that "the World Cup in Qatar has brought 'Israel' face to face with an unpleasant truth and a harsh reality that is extremely painful. for the Israelis, as for the first time all those Israelis who to date have been so enthusiastic about the Persian or Arab Gulf have now tasted for the first time rejection, contempt and refusal to accept Israelis in an Arab state Muslim".

While Qatar does not officially recognize Israel, Doha has allowed direct flights from Tel Aviv as part of a deal brokered by FIFA. This raised hopes in the West that Qatar would join the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco in signing the Abraham Accords.

However, days before the start of the World Cup, Tel Aviv urged citizens traveling to Qatar to be "less visibly Israeli" and to keep a low profile by hiding Israeli flags and Stars of David.

https://misionverdad.com/periodistas-is ... l-de-catar

Google Translator

Given the apparent nature of the Israeli voters these practices should be encouraged generally. Let'em know we care...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 13, 2023 2:45 pm

sraeli forces kill three Palestinians in under 24 hours in occupied West Bank

Israeli forces also arrested nearly three dozen Palestinians in early morning raids on Wednesday and Thursday across the occupied West Bank

January 12, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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Ahmed Abu Jneid. (Photo: Wafa)

Three Palestinians, Ahmed Abu Jneid (21), Sanad Mohammad Samasra (19), and Samir Harbi Aslan (41), were killed by Israeli occupation forces in separate incidents in the occupied West Bank within 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday.

Abu Jneid was shot in the head on Wednesday when Israeli forces opened fire at a group of Palestinians opposing an early morning raid on the Balata refugee camp in Nablus. He was taken to a hospital where he later died.

According to a statement issued by the armed group Lion’s Den, Abu Jneid was its member and was part of the armed resistance against Israeli aggression when he was shot, Middle East Eye reported. According to Wafa, armed resistance by the Palestinians forced the Israeli forces to end the raid without any arrest.


However, around 23 Palestinians were arrested in similar early morning raids in other parts of the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, Wafa reported. The largest number of arrests, at least 10, were made in Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.

On Thursday, Samir Aslan was shot in his chest and killed during a raid on the Qalandiya refugee camp as he was trying to prevent the Israeli forces from arresting his son. Wafa reported that the Israeli forces had prevented people from providing Aslan medical care. Israeli forces also arrested 15 Palestinians from the Qalandiya camp during the raid.

Samasra was shot and killed by the occupation forces in Dhariyeh in Hebron. The Israeli forces alleged that Samasra had tried to stab an Israeli settler near the illegal settlement of Havat Yahua. Wafa reported that Israeli forces did not allow Palestinian ambulances to reach Samasra when he was wounded and delayed him being taken to the hospital, where he eventually died.

Daily deadly raids against Palestinian residents
Israeli forces have been conducting nearly daily raids in different Palestinian localities across the occupied territories since early last year. Local Palestinians often resist such raids leading to clashes. Israeli forces have often opened fire on the Palestinians resisting the raids with stones and slogans. According to the UN, Israel has carried out over 3,437 such raids so far.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in these raids, which is the main reason that 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank. According to the UN, at least 167 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2022, the highest figure reported since 2005. Some sources have quoted a higher number of deaths. Most of these deaths were attributed to Israeli raids in refugee camps in Jenin and Nablus.

With the killing of Abu Jneid, Samasra, and Aslan, the total number of Palestinians already killed in the first two weeks of 2023 has reached seven, with at least two among them being children.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/01/12/ ... west-bank/

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Criticizing or Whitewashing Israel: Netanyahu’s New Government Accentuates West’s Hypocrisy
JANUARY 12, 2023

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Israel's 37th government. Photo: via Benjamin Netabyahu TW Page.

By Ramzy Baroud – Jan 4, 2023

Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West.

As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.

In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own court in 2007 for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly “hinted” that the US government would also boycott “other right-wing extremists” in Netanyahu’s government.

However, these strong concerns seemed absent from the congratulatory statement by the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, on the following day. Nides relayed that he had “congratulated (Netanyahu) on his victory and told him that I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond” between the two countries.

In other words, this ‘unbreakable bond’ is stronger than any public US concern regarding terrorism, extremism, fascism, and criminal activities.

Ben-Gvir is not the only convicted criminal in Netanyahu’s government. Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was convicted of tax fraud in early 2022 and, in 2000, he served a prison sentence for accepting bribes when he held the position of interior minister.

Bezalel Smotrich is another controversial character, whose anti-Palestinian racism has dominated his political persona for many years.

While Ben-Gvir has been assigned the post of national security minister, Deri has been entrusted with the ministry of interior and Smotrich with the ministry of finance.

Palestinians and Arab countries are rightly angry, because they understand that the new government is likely to sow more violence and chaos.

With many of IsraeL’s sinister politicians in one place, Arabs know that Israel’s illegal annexation of parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories is back on the agenda; and that incitement against Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem, coupled with raids of Al-Aqsa Mosque will exponentially increase in the coming weeks and months. And, expectedly, the push for the construction and expansion of illegal settlements is likely to grow, as well.

These are not unfounded fears. Aside from the very racist and violent statements and actions by Netanyahu and his allies in recent years, the new government has already declared that the Jewish people have “exclusive and inalienable rights to all parts of the Land of Israel”, promising to expand settlements, while distancing itself from any commitments to establishing a Palestinian State, or even engaging in any ‘peace process’.

But while Palestinians and their Arab allies have been largely consistent in recognizing extremism in the various Israeli governments, what excuse do the US and the West have in failing to recognize that the latest Netanyahu-led government is the most rational outcome of blindly supporting Israel throughout the years?

In March 2019, Politico branded Netanyahu as the creator of “the most right-wing government in Israeli history,” a sentiment that was repeated countless times in other western media outlets.

This ideological shift was, in fact, recognized by Israel’s own media, years earlier. In May 2016, the popular Israeli newspaper Maariv described the Israeli government at the time as the “most right-wing and extremist” in the country’s history. This was, in part, due to the fact that far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman was assigned the role of the defense minister.

The West, then, too, showed concern, warned against the demise of Israel’s supposed liberal democracy, and demanded that Israel must remain committed to the peace process and the two-state solution. None of that actualized. Instead, the terrifying figures of that government were rebranded as merely conservatives, centrists or even liberals in the following years.

The same is likely to happen now. In fact, signs of the US’s willingness to accommodate whatever extremist politics Israel produces are already on display. In his statement, on December 30, welcoming the new Israeli government, Biden said nothing about the threat of Tel Aviv’s far-right politics to the Middle East region but, rather, the “challenges and threats” posed by the region to Israel. In other words, Ben-Gvir or no Ben-Gvir, unconditional support for Israel by the US will remain intact.

If history is a lesson, future violence and incitement in Palestine will also be blamed mostly, if not squarely, on Palestinians. This knee-jerk, pro-Israeli attitude has defined Israel’s relationship with the US, regardless of whether Israeli governments are led by extremists or supposed liberals. No matter, Israel somehow maintained its false status as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

But if we are to believe that Israel’s exclusivist and racially based ‘democracy’ is a democracy at all, then we are justified to also believe that Israel’s new government is neither less nor more democratic than the previous governments.

Yet, western officials, commentators and even pro-Israel Jewish leaders and organizations in the US are now warning against the supposed danger facing Israel’s liberal democracy in the run-up to the formation of Netanyahu’s new government.

This is an indirect, if not clever form of whitewashing, as these views accept that what Israel has practiced since its founding in 1948, until today, was a form of real democracy; and that Israel remained a democracy even after the passing of the controversial Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as a Jewish state, completely disregarding the rights of the country’s non-Jewish citizens.

It is only a matter of time before Israel’s new extremist government is also whitewashed as another working proof that Israel can strike a balance between being Jewish and also democratic at the same time.

The same story was repeated in 2016, when warnings over the rise of far-right extremism in Israel – following the Netanyahu-Lieberman pact – quickly disappeared, and eventually vanished. Instead of boycotting the new unity government, the US government finalized, in September 2016, its largest military aid package to Israel, amounting to $38 billion.

In truth, Israel has not changed much, either in its own self-definition or in its treatment of Palestinians. Failing to understand this is tantamount to tacit approval of Israel’s racist, violent and colonial policies in Occupied Palestine over the course of 75 years.



(The Palestine Chronicle)

https://orinocotribune.com/criticizing- ... hypocrisy/
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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 17, 2023 3:07 pm

Itamar Ben Gvir Just Banned the Palestinian Flag
JANUARY 16, 2023

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Right-wing politician Itamar Ben Gvir at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s old city, June 2021. Photo: Yonatan Sindel/FLASH90.

The new Israeli Minister of National Security banned the display of the colors of the Palestinian flag in public spaces. It is the latest Israeli attempt to erase Palestinian identity.

On Monday, January 9, the Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, banned the display of the Palestinian flag in all public spaces.

This order is one in a recent string of escalating attacks on Palestinians by the newly formed ultra-rightwing Israeli government.

The Israeli minister wrote on his personal Twitter account that he “directed the Israel Police to enforce the prohibition of flying any PLO flag that shows identification with a terrorist organization from the public sphere and to stop any incitement against the State of Israel. We will fight terrorism and the encouragement of terrorism with all our might!”

For Palestinians, this is only the latest step in Israel’s execution of its Jewish nation-state law, which creates a legal framework for cementing Jewish supremacism in Palestine.

A policy of erasure
In June of last year, the Knesset successfully passed a new bill that would ban the Palestinian flag in Israeli-funded institutions. The rightwing Israeli MK, Eli Cohen, justified the move by labeling the Palestinian flag as an “enemy flag.”

Although the banning of the Palestinian flag is not a recent endeavor, the ushering of an entire police force to intervene against an act involving the display of a piece of cloth is unprecedented.

Ben Gvir’s latest move is a severe escalation in the use of Israeli impunity to erase Palestinian visibility, especially following the Unity Uprising of 2021, which witnessed the collective mobilization of Palestinians across geographical and socio-cultural barriers imposed by Israeli apartheid practices.

“It’s a form of trying to negate Palestinian life, they’re suffocating us.”

Dr. Linda Tabar

In March 2022, Israeli authorities officially launched Operation Break the Wave, which included the allocation of 180 million NIS ($52,256,340) to the Israeli Police. 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank and featured the most extensive armed and unarmed resistance against Israeli colonialism since the Second Intifada.

The recent criminalization of the colors of the Palestinian flag is a continuation of this recent Israeli onslaught. And it is a form of erasure against the Palestinian people.

“It’s erasure and a form of criminalizing every act of Palestinian resistance and identity,” Linda Tabar, a Palestinian professor of international relations at the University of Sussex told Mondoweiss.

From Nazareth, Tabar reflected on the recent escalation in light of what it means for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship within the Israeli state. “It’s a form of trying to negate Palestinian life,” Tabar said, “they’re suffocating us.”

A settler state
“There is a fascist state in power,” Jerusalem-based activist Jalal Abu Khater told Mondoweiss, reflecting on the recent act of blatant assault on Palestinians by the new Israeli government “And it is symbolized with Ben-Gvir’s coming in as minister.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, 46, has risen into power in the past two years after intensified attacks on Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, back in May of 2021, during the police and settler assault on Palestinians dubbed Operation Guardian of Walls.

Prior to that, he was not a significant figure within the settler movement but rather was a familiar face within the Israeli criminal system. When the current Minister was 18, the Israeli military refused his draft, considering him too dangerous.

What was telling in Ben-Gvir’s statements is also highlighted in the reference to the Palestinian flag as a “PLO flag,” which associates the Palestinian national banner with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, founded in 1964 and currently chaired by Mahmoud Abbas, the de facto president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) regime, and one of the original co-founders of the Fatah political party.

The PLO is also the institutional partner in the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993-1994 by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Ben-Gvir had stolen the Cadillac emblem off of Rabin’s car weeks before the Prime Minister was assassinated while at a rally supporting the Oslo Accords.

“Calling it a PLO flag is also an attempt to destroy anything Oslo. In the first Intifada, you weren’t allowed to carry a flag,” Professor Tabar told Mondoweiss. In this sense, Ben-Gvir foreshadows an Israeli state governed by settler rule.

“The law is such a coercive instrument in their hands that they use to legalize repression and violence, and settler colonial repression,” Tabar explained to Mondoweiss. “The law is only a tool to help them in that process.”

https://orinocotribune.com/itamar-ben-g ... nian-flag/

The genocide by a thousand cuts continues. How long before the Israelis announce that there is no such thing as a Palestinian? How long until they make that a fact?

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Israeli forces arrest 20 Palestinians in West Bank

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17 January، 2023

Occupied Jerusalem, SANA- The Israeli occupation forces arrested on Tuesday 20 Palestinians in the West Bank.

Palestinian news agency Wafa, said that the occupation forces stormed a number of neighborhoods in the cities of Jerusalem and Hebron and the towns of Silwad in Ramallah, Qabatiya and Barqin in Jenin and Um Salmoneh and Aida Camp in Bethlehem and arrested 20 Palestinians.

The Israeli forces set up a number of checkpoints in the entrances of north Hebron and the towns of Sa’ir, Yatta, Halhul, and hindered the traffic of the Palestinian.

Bushra / Hala

https://www.sana.sy/en/?p=297059
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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 20, 2023 3:43 pm

Over 100 countries condemn Israel’s punitive measures against Palestinians following UNGA vote
Following the UNGA resolution, Israel announced withholding of USD 39 million of Palestinian money, which is likely to cause further suffering and impact basic services delivery in the occupied territories

January 19, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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Palestinian envoy to the UN Riyad Mansour. (Photo: UN Photo/Manuel Elías)

More than 100 UN member states have signed a joint statement condemning Israel’s punitive measures against Palestine following the adoption of a resolution at the UN General Assembly last month. The resolution asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for a legal opinion on the status of Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The signatories of the statement, as shared by the Palestinian Authority (PA) on Monday, expressed “deep concerns regarding the Israeli government’s decision to impose punitive measures against the Palestinian people, leadership, and civil society.” They said they “reject” these punitive measures and “call for their immediate reversal.”

The number of signatories to the statement surpasses the total number of ‘yes’ votes in the UNGA. On December 30, 87 countries had voted in favor of the resolution and 26 had voted against, with 53 abstentions. Germany, Italy, France, and Japan are among the signatories of the statement condemning the Israeli move. These countries had either voted against the resolution or had abstained during the vote in the UNGA.

Though Israel had rejected the vote, calling it “illegitimate” and “absurd,” the new ultra-right government led by Benjamin Netanyahu announced a series of punitive measures against the Palestinians within hours of its passing.

Among them was the diversion of USD 39 million from the taxes collected from the occupied territories for Israel’s so-called “victims of terrorism” fund.

It also revoked the travel permits provided to Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Maliki and some other Fatah officials, which had allowed them free travel without having to seek permission each time from the Israeli authorities.

Newly appointed extremist Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir also revoked permissions for Israeli lawmakers to visit Palestinian prisoners and made the waving of the Palestinian flag illegal.

Israel also issued freeze notices against all Palestinian construction inside the occupied West Bank.

On Wednesday, Israel claimed that the resolution adopted in the UNGA was “poisonous and destructive.” Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erden called the resolution “a knife in the heart of any chances of dialogue or reconciliation.”

Palestinian ambassador Riyad Mansour questioned Israel’s condemnation of the resolution, claiming that it seemed as though “Israeli representatives live in a parallel dimension where the entire world is wrong and they are right.”

He rejected Israeli claims, saying that “we face an absurd situation where impunity is enjoyed by those who violate the law and collective punishment is endured by those entitled to its protection.”

“Diverting Palestinian funds is piracy”
Palestinians have criticized Israel’s repeated practice of withholding or deducting from Palestinian funds, particularly at a time when the occupied territories are facing an unprecedented economic crisis, and have called this move “piracy.”

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Israel, as an occupying power, controls close to two-thirds of all Palestinian revenue generated through taxation, customs fees, and other sources. As per the agreements reached during the Oslo accords in the 1990s and afterwards, Israel is supposed to transfer the revenue it collects from Palestine to the PA so that the latter is able to fulfill its administrative and political responsibilities.

However, as the UNCTAD report claims, Israel has a habit of making “unilateral deductions,” which makes the finances of the PA vulnerable and its capacity to deliver basic services in the occupied territories unstable.

When, earlier this month, Israel announced that it would be withholding the USD 39 million from the PA fund, it attempted to justify this by saying that the money would have been used by the PA to “incentivize terrorism.” Instead, Netanyahu’s government claims that it will divert the money to “victims of Palestinian terrorism,” mostly Israeli forces and settlers killed or wounded during their aggression against Palestinians.

The PA has been using a part of its revenues to help the victims of Israeli aggression in the occupied territories. Every year, hundreds of Palestinians are killed or maimed by the occupation forces. For Israel, this support is apparently akin to “incentivizing terrorism.”

The PA is already struggling with a severe economic crisis, as noted in the UNCTAD report and other studies. This diversion of revenue would make it impossible for the Palestinians to establish any kind of autonomous economic existence, or to pursue the policies necessary to tackle the growing poverty and unemployment in the occupied territories.

The confiscation of the USD 39 million by Israel, along with several other restrictions, is more than just a show of the occupation’s economic control over the PA. It is a form of punishment not limited to those directly harmed by violence, but Palestinians as a whole, as it impacts their capability to fund even basic social services such as healthcare and education.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/01/19/ ... unga-vote/

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Israel’s Hard-Right Turn Fails to Raise Alarm in US Media
ARI PAUL

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Tens of thousands marched to denounce the new Israeli government for perpetrating a “coup d’etat” (Jerusalem Post, 1/7/23).
There is a political crisis in Israel—particularly for Palestinians, minorities and anyone who believes in secular democracy. But US press coverage has had trouble recognizing that the new government of Benjamin Netanyahu is anything other than business as usual.

The recent Israeli elections thrust Netanyahu back into power and the prime ministry (Reuters, 12/28/22), prompting major protests that called his new government a “coup d’etat” and urged a “preventative strike against dictatorship” (Jerusalem Post, 1/7/23; i24, 1/8/23). Middle East observers are alarmed, not just at Netanyahu’s own military hawkishness, but the fact that his ruling coalition includes religious and nationalist fringe elements, including followers of the late Meir Kahane, who advocated for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel (New York Times, 11/6/90). While Israeli politics have been on a rightward trajectory for two decades, the most recent election has put the country into a dark zone of outright illiberalism that almost seems irreversible.

Americans for Peace Now president Hadar Susskind summarized the new coalition:

It includes racists, theocrats, homophobes and ultra-nationalist zealots. It may have been democratically elected, but many of its senior members are deeply anti-democracy. We are horrified by the incoming government’s stated plans to intensify the process of de facto annexation and further entrench the Occupation. In the past, we congratulated incoming Israeli governments and wished them success. This time, given the makeup of the government, the dangerous views and background of its members and their stated goals, we cannot but sound our alarm.

The election results were also a near-total electoral vanquishing of what remained of the Israeli left. The once mighty Labor Party finished in last place among the parliamentary parties with four seats, and the Hadash and Ta’al coalition got only one more, despite the fact that Hadash’s charismatic leader was once thought to be the Arab minority’s political hope (New Yorker, 1/17/16). Meretz, Israel’s social democratic party, now has zero seats. Israel’s government isn’t just far right, it’s serving without any meaningful political counterbalance.

Palpable alarm

Times of Israel: 78 retired judges warn against incoming government’s judicial reforms
An Israeli former judge (Times of Israel, 12/28/22) said he signed a protest letter because never before “could we imagine, in the foreseeable future, the destruction of Israeli democracy.”

There is a palpable sense of alarm in Israeli media—Ha’aretz has called the election results “fascist” (1/13/23) and referenced a government of “thugs” (1/12/23). The paper (12/28/22) has reported that the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, has passed a “bill that would give more authority over police to the far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir.” The paper (12/27/22) also reported on “legislation [that] paves the way for Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich to appoint a minister in the Defense Ministry who will oversee the West Bank, including responsibility over the civil administration.”

An incoming minister has suggested “that Israeli doctors should be allowed to refuse treatment to LGBTQ patients on religious grounds” (Guardian, 12/26/22). “Israel will not ratify the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women” (Ha’aretz, 12/26/22), thanks to the new government.

Jurists and legal scholars (Times of Israel, 12/28/22) have warned against the “destruction of Israeli democracy,” citing the new government’s mission to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court, including “passing a so-called override clause that would let the Knesset reinstate laws invalidated by the court.” They have also introduced “plans to revamp the panel that selects judges, giving a majority to the government’s representatives and its appointees,” and moved to “weaken anti-discrimination laws.”

One former Supreme Court chief judge, Aharon Barak (Financial Times, 1/8/23), “likened the plans to the attacks on judicial independence carried out by authoritarian governments in Poland, Hungary and Turkey.”

The Times of Israel (12/27/22) noted that

executives from mainstream American Jewish organizations warned a visiting senior Israeli diplomat…that the policies being promoted by incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners risk seriously damaging the Jewish state’s ties with the Diaspora.

Israelis are already feeling the impact. A left-wing Israeli journalist was detained by police on suspicions that his pro-Palestine tweets could incite terrorism (Middle East Eye, 12/27/22). One law professor (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1/8/23), when asked what countries he’d compare Israeli to right now, said, “The two most prominent recently are Hungary and Poland, which are not necessarily countries that you want to compare yourself to.” Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai (Times of Israel, 12/2/22) declared, “Israel is being transformed from a democracy to a theocracy.”

For Palestinians, the new government means heightened tension. Netanyahu has vowed the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories (Deutsche Welle, 12/28/22) and the government is now banning public displays of Palestinian flags (Sky News, 1/9/23). The new government is already retaliating against recent Palestinian efforts to push the International Court of Justice to move against the decades-old Israeli occupation, including “imposing a moratorium on Palestinian construction in some areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank” (Al Jazeera, 1/6/23).

‘No longer a bedrock of stability’
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The New York Times (12/17/22) fails to question whether a state that defines itself as being a state for only some of its citizens can be a democracy.
But the alarm felt by those close to the situation is not reflected much in the US press. The New York Times editorial board (12/17/22) lamented the move to the right, and called for US pressure on the Jewish state, but as Jewish Currents editor Arielle Angel said in a letter to the editor (12/23/22), the editorial “doesn’t urge any specific actions.” Instead, it “echoes the president in emphasizing the inviolability of the US/Israel alliance—a bromide that assures Israel that its blank check is guaranteed.”

Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/15/22) fretted about the future of Israel, noting that the new government is creating a “total mess that will leave Israel no longer being a bedrock of stability for the region”—a point of view completely divorced from the experience of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, who have never known “stability” from Israel.

The Washington Post (12/21/22) said the “new government has already sparked concern among Israelis and members of the international community over bills that seek to prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one.” This echoes the Times editorial’s headline, “The Ideal of Democracy in a Jewish State Is in Jeopardy.”

This impossible wish for a country that is both an ethno-state and a democracy is at the heart of the problem with the mainstream US press’s view of Israel/Palestine.

The historic extremism of the new government has certainly been documented in the United States, as the AP has covered the response to Israel’s right-wing government in straight reporting, including a report (12/26/22) on Israeli Air Force veterans who worry about the coalition’s impact.

But the Wall Street Journal (12/27/22) ran an editorial by Religious Zionism’s Smotrich that defied criticism, insisting that the government he belongs to will “strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions, bringing Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.” He added, “Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and will remain so.”

‘Radicals’ on both sides
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A New York Post op-ed (12/21/22) equates the far-right takeover in Israel with the Biden administration being “influenced by the Democrats’ increasingly radical left-wing elements.”
Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard University law professor and outspoken Israel supporter, and Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president, wrote an op-ed in the New York Post (12/21/22) that painted President Joe Biden and Netanyahu as two sides of the same coin. Biden, they said, was “influenced by the Democrats’ increasingly radical left-wing elements,” while Netanyahu had a coalition with the far right. Their solution, then, was for the two leaders to embrace their essential centrism and work together—not to protect democracy in either country, but to gang up on Iran.

Of course, this “both sides” logic is all too common in US media. Netanyahu’s extremists include followers of a racist ideology that was once considered toxic even on the right. Biden’s “extremists” say they want universal healthcare. These things are just not the same.

US press coverage of Israel’s political situation ranges from support to muted concern, as opposed to an existential crisis for a place that calls itself a democracy. It is slowly dawn on US media that political affairs in Israeli have deteriorated, even though it’s been plenty of time to digest this since two of the most prominent human rights organizations—Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—have labeled Israel’s ethnic segregation a form of apartheid (FAIR.org, 2/3/22).

Israel’s political turn should be treated with the same urgency as Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his desire to remake the US government into an autocracy. The problem may be that Netanyahu is a more talented politician than Trump, and his coalition has little opposition in its path. Given Israel’s importance in US foreign policy, the nation’s spiral into extremism is cause for dismay, not just among observers with an interest in the country, but for news outlets that claim to defend the global democratic order.

https://fair.org/home/israels-hard-righ ... -us-media/

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New Report Charges Major Corporations as Complicit in Israel’s Water Apartheid
JANUARY 19, 2023

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Photo composition showing a bulldozer holding an Israel flag and a falling water tank with a Palestinian flag. File photo.

By Jessica Buxbaum – Jan 16, 2023

In December, the Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, released a report accusing major corporations of maintaining Israel’s water apartheid on Palestinians living in the occupied territories.

According to Al-Haq, businesses are instrumental in helping Israel restrict water access to Palestinians and destroy Palestinian water infrastructure. Additionally, foreign companies profit from Israel’s system of water discrimination.

Al-Haq’s paper named both Israeli and international companies as:

Complicit in the violation of the Palestinian right to self-determination and permanent sovereignty over natural resources, as well as the war crime of pillage and inhumane acts of expropriation of natural resources amounting to the crime of apartheid.”

The report detailed the actions of Israeli water companies Mekorot and Hagihon but also included outside firms TAHAL Group International B.V., Hyundai, Caterpillar Inc., JC Bamford Excavators Ltd. (JCB), and Volvo Car Group.

International companies complicit in apartheid

Generally, international companies’ involvement in Israel’s water apartheid is through demolitions of water infrastructure such as cisterns, pipelines, and wells. According to Al-Haq’s research, from 2017-August 2021, Hyundai carried out 24 demolitions of Palestinian water equipment, JCB is responsible for 16, Volvo demolished 14 structures, and Caterpillar executed seven demolitions.

Hyundai is a South Korean multinational manufacturer. Its excavators are often used in home demolitions in addition to razing water equipment. Caterpillar is an American manufacturer heavily involved in Israel’s occupation through demolitions, military agreements, and construction of the settlements and the apartheid wall. The company’s major shareholders include BlackRock, an investment company criticized for fueling climate change, State Farm’s investment group, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust.

Volvo is a Swedish multinational company with major shareholders also, including BlackRock and Norges Bank Investment Management, which is owned by the state of Norway. JCB is a British construction equipment manufacturer which helped finance ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s campaign. In return, Johnson promoted the company’s products on the campaign trail.

Israel water theft

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Machinery used for water infrastructure demolitions documented by Al-Haq field workers between January 2017-August 2021. Source | Al-Haq

Other companies involved in the destruction of water infrastructure include Turkish company Hidromek, Japanese engineering firm Daio, and Chinese construction company LiuGong.

Kardan N.V. is a Dutch company specializing in real estate and water infrastructure. It owns more than 98% of Tahal International Group, which has been involved in water development projects in Israeli settlements, over-extraction efforts limiting the availability of water to Palestinians, and has helped enforce the permit system for the development of wells on Palestinian communities.

Al-Haq reached out to these companies but did not receive a response. Daio was the only company that responded to MintPress News’ requests for comment, stating, ​​”We have not been able to confirm the facts as you have inquired about our group company, Daio Engineering Co., Ltd.”

Al-Haq noted that most of these demolitions are done because the structures lack permits or are located on Israeli state land, meaning Palestinian land confiscated by Israel for allegedly not being cultivated after a number of years. Most Palestinian buildings in Area C of the occupied West Bank, which is under the full control of the Israeli military, often lack the proper licenses because Israeli authorities deny Palestinians permits on the grounds these areas have not been zoned for construction. Yet zoning plans in Area C are also often rejected by Israeli officials.

“This is part of a broader strategy of harassment against Palestinian farmers to stop their agricultural activities,” Al-Haq wrote, describing these demolitions’ effect on Palestinian farming and their overall economy. Without the proper equipment, Palestinian farmers cannot irrigate their land and, thereby are unable to grow produce.

“The World Bank has estimated that out of a total of [about 175,000 acres] of irrigable land in the West Bank and Gaza, only [about 61,000 acres] are irrigated, costing the Palestinian economy as much as $410.70 million…in irrigated agriculture opportunities and 96,000 agricultural jobs,” Al-Haq wrote.

Al-Haq argues that several Israeli and transnational companies are in violation of international law. The authors wrote:

Since the unlimited water supply to Israeli settlements contributes to their expansion (and prolonged occupation), corporate actors, such as Mekorot, Gihon and Tahal Group International, Middle East Tubes Company (B Gaon Holdings), Mehadrin, Minrav Projects, David Ackerstein Ltd., Einav Ahets are complicit in the transfer of Israel’s civilian population into the OPT and East Jerusalem thus acting in blatant violation of Article 43 and 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Palestine water

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A girl fills a bottle from a tap delivering drinking water to the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza, November 28, 2022. Majdi Fathi | NurPhoto via AP

It also accused corporations Mekorot, Volvo, Caterpillar Inc, Daio, JCB, LiuGong, Hyundai, and Hidromek of carrying out a war crime for assisting in the destruction and confiscation of Palestinian water infrastructure.

Many of the international companies involved in Israel’s water apartheid have human rights policies on their website, including Volvo, Caterpillar, Daio, and Hyundai.

Kathryn Ravey, a business and human rights legal researcher for Al-Haq and one of the report’s authors told MintPress News that Al-Haq highlighted how these companies are going against their human rights guidelines in their letters to the corporations.

“A lot of them even have it in their core principles that they’re going to do due diligence, not be contributing to unequal situations or situations in which human rights are at fault or liable of being violated,” Ravey said. “And they basically ignore them and act against them. And this is the frustrating aspect of business and human rights.”

A climate change issue

Despite Israel touting itself as environmentally conscious, the water apartheid it imposes on Palestinians is actually contributing to climate change.

“The thing with water is it’s linked to so many other things, like the environment and the economy,” Ravey said. Israel controls 85% of water resources in the West Bank. As previously reported by MintPress News, Israel dominating the West Bank’s water sector diminishes Palestinians’ capability to adapt to climate change. Damage to water infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank — whether through war or direct demolition — reduces its ability to handle heavy rainfall or prepare for droughts and heat waves.

Ravey explained that the diversity of the ecosystem also becomes disrupted when Palestinians are prevented from harvesting various fruits and vegetables because of the lack of water. And soil erosion problems occur when Palestinians are denied permits to fix leaky water pipelines.

Ultimately, these issues lead to a land uncultivated and without the necessary resources for communities to thrive. And with that, it strips Palestinians of their sovereignty.

“A lot of Palestinian communities aren’t able to grow the agriculture that they used to grow. And that also prevents them from profiting off of a lot of agricultural pursuits that they used to live off of,” Ravey said. “And not just profit, but also use from their own land.”

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 26, 2023 3:15 pm

Palestine: Al-Nakba, Al-Naksa and Oslo
JANUARY 25, 2023

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A David star with “colonial” written all over it along Al Nakba (above) and Palestine (below). File photo.

By Susana Khalil – Jan 18, 2023

Facing this inhuman colonial attempt to make the native Semitic Palestinian people disappear, there are three aspects that must be rescued for the liberation of the native Palestinian people: to put an end to the Israeli colonial anachronism, re-incorporate the armed struggle and give birth to our own lexicon and agenda.

These are the three great tragedies that mark the struggle of the native Arab-Semitic Palestinian people in the face of Euro-Zionist colonialism.

Al-Nakba 1948. A European movement, Zionism, succeeds in imposing a colonial regime on 71% of the territory of historical Palestine, on the basis of falsification of history and ethnic cleansing against the native Palestinian people, calling it “Israel.”

Al Naksa 1967. The colonial and expansionist regime of “Israel” colonizes the rest of historical Palestine, launching a war against five Arab armies who strived to liberate Palestine. Palestine “disappears from the map,” according to the West, but remains alive in the memory and present of the young Palestinian generation.

Oslo, 1993: A glorious native popular uprising, the Intifada, was stopped by putting in place a Palestinian political bunch that recognizes the colonial regime of “Israel” as a state on its homeland in exchange for 22% of the territory of the native Palestinian people. Today Palestine “has” only 7%, and colonial settlements have increased fivefold. The Wall of Shame has been built, separating not only Palestinians from colonials, but Palestinians from Palestinians as a method of extermination. The Wall is drawn inside the native Palestinian territory so that “Israel” can seize all the water sources. The Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees was not included in these agreements, as proof of the extermination equation. In Oslo, the Palestinian leadership signed its death warrant by renouncing armed struggle. Today, the Palestinian Authority is a traitorous instrument of colonization.

But beyond the condemnation of the Oslo Accords, we condemn ourselves, because after Oslo we have become the spokesmen for this colonial obscurantism. We have become Zionists, progressives and the left wing. Fear has achieved a subjugation in the sacred mantle of intellectuals, academics and activists. The intelligentsia shouldn’t be the neo-religion, the opium of the people.

Many talk of decolonizing minds but they contradict themselves, there is a useful and operative sanctuary of intellectual demagogy.

After that mockery and humiliation known as the Oslo Accords, Palestinians and pro-Palestinians stopped talking about the liberation of Palestine. They put us in a dark room and we believe that we are enlightened to talk about one-state or two-state solution. We are being led to the slaughterhouse and we’re the gravediggers of our own corpses.

They demand a peaceful struggle from us, which does not exist, and is not allowed either because repressive measures forbid resistance. The Western agenda is imposed, and our minds are colonized. For example, we cannot argue in favor of the end of the colonial regime of “Israel”. It is not just a question of raising the issue of the end of the Israeli Apartheid, because apartheid is already one of many instruments of colonialism. Therefore, it is rather an attempt to put an end to this genocidal colonial anachronism. This is a taboo subject, much feared, and in that fear, there is an impostor and lugubrious talent.

As a native Palestinian of the Diaspora, I must not accept any colonial anachronism today in the 21st century.

Moreover, the Arab-Persian-Kurdish world and culture is in danger because of this expansionist colonialism that invents historical rights, in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and more. It is about creating “Greater Israel”. The Arab-Persian world is obliged to liberate itself. The world per se must fight this colonial obscenity.

Facing this inhuman colonial attempt to make the native Semitic Palestinian people disappear, there are three aspects that – I believe – must be rescued for the liberation of the native Palestinian people: to put an end to the Israeli colonial anachronism, re-incorporate the armed struggle and give birth to our own lexicon and agenda.

End of Israeli colonial anachronism
Before Oslo, there was honesty, spontaneity and sincerity in the struggle. Native people and pro-Palestine activists were able to express their wish to put an end to “Israel’s” colonial regime. Let’s be honest, and courageous and get back to the roots of our Palestinian Cause. Colonialism is not a guarantee of peace. Peace is based on justice. The end of “Israel’s” colonial anachronism is a contribution to human rights, a blow to the most powerful fascism of our time.

Armed struggle. By renouncing the armed struggle, part of an imaginary, Il Fidaí (Freedom fighter), was lost. The raison d’être of the Palestinian Liberation Cause was disfigured. It disfigured this sacred feeling, extinguished the burning fire of resistance, spoiled the sweetness of dignity, and erased poetry and memory. We have become objective, yet objectivity does not really exist, and we have become marketing, elegant submissives. We have lost our rebelliousness. Armed struggle is no guarantee of liberation, but neither is peaceful struggle. The two must operate as a weave, one and the other is one and the same. no one has the right to impose on the native Palestinian their way of struggle.

Give birth to our own lexicon and agenda. Rather than talking about Palestinian society, our lexicon should talk about the Palestinian cause, there is a lot of distraction in that sophisticated repression. There is self-censorship wrapped in the “you have to be objective;” strategy and things end up in a vacuum by not positioning our raison d’être: The struggle of a native people against a colonial anachronism called “Israel.” Within the debate of human rights, racism, feminism (these three, sadly, are addressed without the notion of class struggle), apartheid, imperialism, fascism (terrorism), Islam, etc., the struggle is to point out that classic colonialism today is anchored in our 21st century.

The “right” of “Israel” to exist must be included in the debate and there are honest pro-Palestinian figures in the West like Chris Hedges, who support the right of “Israel” to exist. All these people should be given that right in their own country. But beyond this, it is unacceptable and unworthy to impose their opinions on the struggle of the native Palestinians to accept the existence of “Israel’s” colonialism in the Palestinians’ homeland. This is not a debate, this is despotism.

There are those who express solidarity with the Palestinian people, and at the same time express the right of Israeli colonialism to exist. This is naïve and comforting. This position softens or disguises the colonial and genocidal reality, thus benefiting Zionist fascism.

To clarify one point, I deeply and vehemently believe that in the liberation of Palestine, the so-called Israeli population should get the Palestinian demonym. Never be expelled, racism will make many of them return to their Aryan Europe, and the Zionist ideologues know this.

… For those Arabs who have not been born yet, may they live in a world without Zionism, and that future depends on us. May they live and/or die in the struggle of their times inspired by the anti-Zionist struggle.

… And to protect myself from colonial atrophy and/or the western agenda, I take refuge in history and memory. Honour and glory to my brothers in Algeria. Five million martyrs, blood shed against colonialism that we Palestinians must not let down.

https://orinocotribune.com/palestine-al ... -and-oslo/

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The Israeli Army Has Killed 12 Palestinians in the First Two Weeks of 2023
JANUARY 25, 2023

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Mourners carry the bodies of two Palestinian resistance fighters who were killed in Jenin, January 14, 2023. Photo: APA Images.

Israel has killed 12 Palestinians since the start of the year.

The most recent were three martyrs from Jenin on January 14. The first two were Izz Eldin Basem Hamamra, 24, and Amjad Adnan Khaliliyeh, 23, who were killed by Israeli forces as they retreated after conducting a resistance operation against Israeli military targets. They were followed by another Palestinian martyr, 19-year-old Yazan Samer al-Ja’abari, who succumbed to injuries he sustained two weeks ago during an Israeli military assault on the village of Kufr Dan in Jenin.

Seven of the 12 slain Palestinians in 2023 are from Jenin. Five of the martyrs from this week were killed within the same two-day period. Most of the killings were the result of targeted Israeli gunfire to the chest, abdomen, and head.

The martyr of Kufr Dan

From the neighboring town of Yamoun, Al-Ja’abari had been in the neighboring town of Kufr Dan, approximately 5 km northwest of Jenin city.

Kufr Dan has faced relentless settler attacks and assaults by the Israeli military for years. On January 2, Israeli forces invaded the town with the purpose of punitively demolishing two Palestinian homes belonging to the families of two killed Palestinian resistance fighters. Armed and unarmed confrontations with the invading Israeli military ensued.

Two Palestinian men were killed by the Israeli army, Foad Mahmoud Abed, 18, and Mohammad Samer Hosheyeh, 22, while three others were injured.

Almost ten days later, on Saturday, January 12, one of those critically injured, Yazan Samer al-Ja’abari, 19, succumbed to his wounds at the Ibn Sina hospital in Jenin.

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Yazan Samer Al-Ja’abari, 19, from the village of Al-Yamoun west of Jenin, succumbed to injuries he had sustained two weeks ago during an Israeli military assault on the village of Kufr Dan in Jenin. Photo: WAFA News Agency.

Although not from Kufr Dan, the context of al-Ja’abari’s fatal injury further emphasizes the growth of solidarity and unity amongst Palestinian youth facing Israeli incursions.

In November of last year, two young brothers—Thafer and Jawwad Rimawi, 19 and 22 respectively—were shot and killed by retreating Israeli forces during an invasion of the village of Kufr Ein near Ramallah. Although the two men are originally from the neighboring village of Beit Rima, they had still joined to protect against the invasion of the town neighboring their own.

The two martyrs that followed
“He is so compassionate,” Hamamra’s mother said to local journalists as she cried over the killing of her son. “He would never leave the house if I am upset,” she said in a pained voice.

The trail of blood outside the car remained hours after the killing of Izz Eldin Hamamra and Amjad Khaliliyeh.

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The site of the assassination of Izz Eldin Basem Hamamra and Amjad Adnan Khaliliyeh, who were gunned down by the Israeli army escaping in their white Toyota after conducting a resistance operation against an Israeli military target. Photo: Telegram.

According to local reports, as well as statements from the Israeli military, the two men had been driving in a white Toyota when Israeli forces opened fire on their car on the Jaba’ route, approximately 8 km southwest of Jenin.

According to reports by the Israeli military, later confirmed by Palestinian political groups, the two men carried out an armed operation against Israeli military targets near Jaba’. After one of the men sustained injuries, they withdrew from the scene, only to be chased by Israeli forces, who riddled their car with bullets.

According to local reports, Israeli forces had erected a checkpoint near the town’s entrance in the early morning hours while confrontations persisted with townspeople. Last year, every one in five Palestinians killed was a Palestinian from Jenin. In 2022, Israel’s military campaign against Palestinian armed resistance groups, dubbed Operation Break the Wave, claimed the lives of 59 Palestinian martyrs in Jenin alone.

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The site of the assassination of Izz Eldin Basem Hamamra and Amjad Adnan Khaliliyeh. Photo: Telegram.

The Al-Quds Brigades (Saraya Al-Quds in Arabic, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) hailed the two slain resistance fighters, noting in a statement that the 23-year-old Khaliliyeh had been in charge of their engineering unit, while Hamamra had been a militant in the armed resistance group.

Hamamra and Khaliliyeh’s funeral procession was held in the late afternoon. The slain resistance fighters were carried by their community members and fellow resistance fighters.

(Mondoweiss) by Mariam Barghouti

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 28, 2023 2:50 pm

2023’s Deadliest Day: Israeli Forces Gun Down 10th Palestinian
JANUARY 27, 2023

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Israeli regime forces aiming their weapons at Palestinians. File photo.

Fresh from butchering nine Palestinians following a raid in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces gun down a 10th Palestinian during clashes in the holy occupied city of al-Quds.

Yusuf Muheisin succumbed to the serious injuries he had sustained during clashes that had erupted in the town of al-Ram in al-Quds on Thursday, the Palestinian Information Center news agency reported, citing the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority’s health ministry.

The 22-year-old’s martyrdom turned Thursday into the deadliest single day so far for Palestinians in the current year.

The nine others were martyred earlier in the day after scores of Israeli armored vehicles, which were packed with the regime’s forces, raided the city of Jenin and the neighboring refugee camp.

Throughout the deadly raid, Israeli snipers also positioned themselves on the overlooking rooftops and heavily-armed troops began opening fire on the Palestinian youths, who were trying to block the invading forces’ way.

Later during the day, thousands of mourners flooded Jenin’s streets carrying the bodies of the martyrs overhead, and chanting slogans against the occupying regime.

Also on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas said it had decided to suspend security coordination with the Israeli regime in the West Bank in reaction to the Jenin massacre.

“In light of the repeated aggression against our people, and the undermining of signed agreements, including security, we consider that security coordination with the Israeli occupation no longer exists as of now,” read a statement issued after a PA meeting.

Massive solidarity rallies were also held in the Tel Aviv-blockaded Gaza Strip, where Palestinian resistance movements vowed to avenge the martyrs.

https://orinocotribune.com/2023s-deadli ... lestinian/

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Elderly Woman Among at Least 9 Palestinians Killed During Raid on Jenin
By Mohamed Ahmed, Contributor January 26, 2023

Jenin Refugee Camp, Occupied West Bank, Palestine – At least 9 Palestinians, including an elderly woman were killed by Israeli forces during a raid on the Jenin Refugee Camp this morning. At least 20 were injured, with four in critical condition.

Thursday morning’s raid was the deadliest in decades. Israel has killed at least 29 Palestinians in the first 27 days of the new calendar year. Many are expecting things to get worse with the new far-right Israeli government.


Israeli media claimed that the operation in Jenin targeted three wanted persons from the Islamic Jihad Movement who had planned a major operation against Israeli targets. The official Israeli radio “Kan” stated that “forces from Yamam and border guards stormed the Jenin camp this morning on a mission to arrest wanted Palestinians, during which there was an exchange of heavy fire.”

Israeli media reported that “the main wanted person in the operation was arrested.” Without revealing his identity and details, the Army Radio reported that the aim of the operation was to arrest a senior wanted man from the Islamic Jihad Movement. Meanwhile another of the three wanted militants was killed while the other escaped.

The nine Palestinians killed during the raid on Jenin were: Abdullah Marwan Al-Ghoul (18), Moatasem Mahmoud Abu Al-Hassan (40), Wasim Amjad Aref Al-Jaas (22), Nour Al-Din Sami Ghoneim (25), Muhammad Sami Ghoneim (28), Muhammad Mahmoud Sobh (30), Saeb Essam Zreiki (24), Izz al-Din Yassin Salahat (22), and the elderly woman Magda Obaid (61) whom her family says simply looked out her window when she was killed by an Israeli sniper.

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Three of the nine Palestinians killed in Jenin during an Israeli raid on January 26, 2023 are pictured at their funeral

Of the injuries, the Palestinian Ministry of Health stated that “most of the injuries that arrived at hospitals today from Jenin camp were in the head and chest, which means that the shooting at citizens was intended to kill, and the occupation’s aggression resulted in the death of 9 martyrs, and dozens of injuries, including 4 in a state of danger.”

According to reports, the first Israeli forces that stormed the area arrived disguised in a dairy truck. Israel used heavy artillery, anti-tank missiles, and bulldozers.

An Israeli military reconnaissance drone was reported shot down during the fighting. The Army confirmed, quoting a security source, that a reconnaissance drone had fallen in the Jenin camp and claimed that there was no fear of information leakage.


Due to intensity of the gunfighting around the Jenin Camp Club, Israeli forces destroyed the club’s exterior, whose courtyards held the mourning houses of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. Israeli bulldozers and artillery destroyed at least a dozen vehicles, many in the parking lot of the club.

After witnessing the fighting, Abu Muhammad told Unicorn Riot that droves of youth were resisting the raid and shooting bullets and throwing firebombs at the Israeli soldiers. He said that after a wall of the club was destroyed, it allowed Israeli forces a path to reach the youth fighters. On top of that, Muhammad said Israeli snipers were shooting everyone who tried to help the wounded.

A military correspondent of Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth (ynetnews) said, “The operation in broad daylight in Jenin and this size indicates its importance and urgency. In the security establishment, they are talking about thwarting a major attack that was planned for the first time in years.”

The Palestinian Authority, who are tasked with running security in the occupied West Bank and have intricate partnered relations with the Israelis, have now severed their ties with Israel over the deadly raid.

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 30, 2023 2:32 pm

Report: Israel Plans to Build 18,000 More Settlement Units in Occupied West Bank
JANUARY 29, 2023

Image
A view of an illegal Israeli settlement. Photo: PressTV.

Israeli media sources say the current far-right administration in Tel Aviv is planning to take unprecedented steps to pave the way for further expansion of unlawful settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.

According to Israeli Hayom, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has begun discussing measures to speed up and increase the construction of settlements in the West Bank, in defiance of international law.

Netanyahu, War Minister Yoav Galant, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich met earlier this week to finalize the process.

During the meeting, some of the components of the plans were revealed, said the Israeli newspaper.

These steps include approving the establishment of some 18,000 new settlement units in the coming months and creating a separate body that would approve the construction of non-residential buildings, such as industrial companies, among other things.

The approval of such steps could result in a massive increase in the population of Israeli settler communities in the occupied West Bank over the coming years, Israel Hayom said.

In December, Netanyahu issued a policy statement on the part of his incoming cabinet, calling expansion of the regime’s illegal settlements across the occupied Palestinian territories and elsewhere a top priority.

The cabinet, he announced, “will advance and develop” the illegal settlements throughout the occupied territories, including “in the Galilee, the Negev Desert, the Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).”

The Israeli regime proclaimed existence in 1948 after occupying huge swathes of regional territories during a Western-backed war.

It occupied more land, namely the West Bank, which includes East al-Quds, the Gaza Strip, and Syria’s Golan Heights in another such war in 1967.

Ever since, Tel Aviv has built more than 250 settlements upon the occupied lands and deployed the most aggressive restraints on Palestinian freedoms there. Between 600,000 and 750,000 Israelis occupy the settlements.

All Israeli settlements are illegal under the international law due to their construction upon occupied territory. The United Nations Security Council has condemned the regime’s settlement activities through several resolutions.

https://orinocotribune.com/report-israe ... west-bank/

*****************

Israeli Soldiers Continue Terror Campaign in Southern West Bank

Image
Israeli occupation forces, Jan. 30, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @theanotherpost

Published 30 January 2023

Since Jan. 1, the Israeli army has killed 34 Palestinians, including children and women, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.


On Monday morning, a Palestinian was killed by Israeli soldiers in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, Palestinian medics and eyewitnesses said.

In a statement, the Palestinian Health Ministry said that Nsim Abu Fouda, 24, died after he was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers.

However, Palestinian eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers stationed at one of the Israeli army checkpoints in the city center opened fire at a Palestinian car and seriously wounded Abu Fouda. He died from his wounds in hospital.

This is the third killing of Palestinians in the West Bank in the last 24 hours. Since Jan. 1, the Israeli army has killed 34 Palestinians, including children and women, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.


On Sunday, the Palestine Foreign Affairs Ministry strongly condemned the actions that the Israeli government and its armed forces carry out against the population living in East Jerusalem, where Israeli settlers frequently shoot at defenseless Palestinians.

"Israel’s criminal assault against Jenin is the latest in this extremist government’s heinous onslaught against the Palestinian people, which resulted in the willful killing of eleven Palestinians," the Foreign Affairs Ministry said.

"This Israeli assault against the Jenin refugee camp is an extension of Israel’s deliberate pattern of conduct that publicly commits to carry out international crimes to advance its annexationists policies and practices," it added.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Isr ... -0004.html
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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 01, 2023 4:29 pm

Israeli Government Calls for Retribution and Collective Punishment in Wake of Jerusalem Shooting
JANUARY 31, 2023

Palestinians clash with Israeli security forces during a protest against the siege of the village of Beita by the Israeli army, near the West Bank city of

Image
Palestinians clash with Israeli security forces during a protest against the siege of the village of Beita by the Israeli army, near the West Bank city of Nablus, on January 28, 2023. Photo: Mohammed Nasser/APA images.

In the aftermath of the Jenin massacre and the shooting operations in Jerusalem, Israeli government officials call for retribution and collective punishment, as tensions on the ground show no signs of subsiding.

The past 72 hours have been some of the deadliest recorded in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem in years.

Since Thursday, January 26, 14 Palestinians have been killed, and dozens of others have been wounded by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied territory — 10 of whom were killed in Jenin during a deadly army raid on the Jenin refugee camp.

During the same time period, six Israeli settlers and one Ukrainian woman were killed, and several others were injured in two shooting operations in Jerusalem.

The situation on the ground has continued to develop rapidly, with rockets fired out of Gaza in response to the massacre in Jenin, and a number of Israeli airstrikes carried out on the besieged strip.

Several other shooting operations have been carried out by Palestinian armed resistance groups in the West Bank, while Palestinians across the West Bank and Jerusalem have taken to the streets in protest.

Meanwhile, as Israeli forces stepped up arrests and raids, Israeli settlers waged attacks on Palestinians and their property across the West Bank, with 144 incidents of settler violence recorded in a single night on Saturday, according to Palestinian officials.

In the aftermath of the Jenin raid and the shooting operations in Jerusalem, Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have called for swift and sweeping policies of retribution across the occupied Palestinian territory – promising increased punitive home demolitions and other measures meant to target the families of Palestinians who carry out attacks against Israelis.

But despite the government’s moves towards more collective punishment, the tension on the ground continues to swell and shows no signs of stopping.

A breakdown of events

On Thursday January 26, Israeli forces shot and killed 9 Palestinians in a single raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank. That same evening, another Palestinian was killed by Israeli forces in the town of Al-Ram, northeast of Jerusalem.

On Friday, January 27, as the residents of the camp reeled from the violent raid, which they say was the worst raid they’d experienced since the Second Intifada, news broke that a shooting operation had been carried out in occupied East Jerusalem.

A young Palestinian man, 21-year-old Khairi Alqam, had gone into the illegal Israeli settlement of Neve Yaakov and shot several people in the area. Seven people were killed, including six Israeli settlers, and one Ukrainian national.

Alqam, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of al-Tur, was shot and killed on the scene. It was later revealed that Alqam’s grandfather, after whom he was named, was stabbed to death by an Israeli settler in 1998. The settler who killed his grandfather was released from prison in 2010.

On the same night that Alqam was killed, another Palestinian boy was pronounced dead in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan . Defense for Children International – Palestine said that 17-year-old Wadee Abu Ramouz sustained a gunshot wound below his heart on Wednesday, January 25, and succumbed to his wounds Friday night at 11 p.m.

The next morning, on Saturday, January 28 in Abu Ramouz’s neighborhood of Silwan, it was reported that a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was shot and injured after he allegedly carried out a shooting that left two Israeli settlers injured. The shooting occurred near the Israeli “City of David” tourism park, which over the course of several years has displaced dozens of Palestinians in Silwan.

On Saturday night, a Palestinian from the village of Qusin in the Nablus district was shot and killed by a settlement security guard near the illegal Israeli settlement of Kedumim. He was identified as 18-year-old Karam Ali Salman.

On the morning of Sunday, January 29, Omar Saadi, 24, succumbed to wounds he sustained during Thursday’s army raid on the Jenin refugee camp. Saadi’s death brought the total death toll of the Jenin raid, which Palestinians are now referring to as the “Jenin massacre,” to 10 people. Saadi was one of the founders of the Jenin Brigade.

Image
Palestinians inspect damaged cars in Aqraba village east of the West Bank city of Nablus on January 29, 2023. A total of 144 attacks were carried out last night by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank province of Nablus, today said Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in charge of the settlement file in the province. (Photo: Mohammed Nasser/APA Images)

Palestinians inspect damaged cars in Aqraba village east of the West Bank city of Nablus on January 29, 2023. A total of 144 attacks were carried out last night by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank province of Nablus, today said Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in charge of the settlement file in the province. (Photo: Mohammed Nasser/APA images)
Settlers launch “revenge” attacks
While the Israeli government announced plans to make it easier for Israeli citizens to carry firearms, Israeli settlers were wreaking havoc across the West Bank, conducting a series of attacks on Palestinians and their property.

Palestinian officials reported that 144 settler attacks were carried out in a single night on Saturday in the Nablus area alone. This included hurling rocks at Palestinian vehicles, setting Palestinian cars on fire, ransacking and damaging Palestinian shops, and uprooting around 200 trees.

While the Israeli government announced plans to make it easier for Israeli citizens to carry firearms, Israeli settlers were wreaking havoc across the West Bank.

In at least one incident, just hours after the shooting operation in Jerusalem on Friday, several Palestinians were injured when an Israeli settler reportedly open fire on them near the entrance to the Nablus-area town of Beita.

In the town of Majdal Bani Fadel, settlers attacked homes, vehicles, and a Palestinian ambulance with rocks.

In other areas of the West Bank, settlers set fire to Palestinian homes and vehicles, including in the Ramallah-area village of Turmus Ayya. According to Israeli media, despite three suspects being captured on CCTV footage, Israeli forces had yet to make any arrests.


In the South Hebron Hills, Israeli settlers assaulted and beat a Palestinian man, while reports of settlers hurling rocks at Palestinian cars were reported in Jericho, the Jordan Valley and Ramallah.

Settlers were also documented attacking a group of Palestinian Armenians in the Old City of Jerusalem with sticks and pepper spray as the settlers attempted to take down the Armenian flag off of a church in the Armenian quarter of the Old City.

As the Israeli government calls for arming more Israeli citizens, Palestinians fear that the settler violence witnessed over the weekend will only continue to escalate.
(Mondoweiss)

https://orinocotribune.com/israeli-gove ... -shooting/


Sippenhaft

This article is about the German tradition and practice. For similar practices in other countries or cultures, see Kin punishment.
Sippenhaft or Sippenhaftung (German: [ˈzɪpənˌhaft(ʊŋ)], kin liability) is a German term for the idea that a family or clan shares the responsibility for a crime or act committed by one of its members,[1][2] justifying collective punishment. As a legal principle, it was derived from Germanic law in the Middle Ages, usually in the form of fines and compensations. It was adopted by Nazi Germany to justify the punishment of kin (relatives, spouse) for the offence of a family member. Punishment often involved imprisonment and execution, and was applied to relatives of the conspirators of the failed 1944 bomb plot to assassinate Hitler.

<snip>

In Nazi Germany, the term was revived to justify the punishment of kin (relatives, spouse) for the offence of a family member. In that form of Sippenhaft, the relatives of persons accused of crimes against the state were held to share the responsibility for those crimes and subject to arrest and sometimes execution.


Heinrich Himmler in 1945

Claus von Stauffenberg

Erwin Rommel in 1942
Examples of Sippenhaft being used as a threat exist within the Wehrmacht from around 1943. Soldiers accused of having "blood impurities" or soldiers conscripted from outside of Germany also began to have their families threatened and punished with Sippenhaft. An example is the case of Panzergrenadier Wenzeslaus Leiss, who was accused of desertion on the Eastern Front in December 1942. After the Düsseldorf Gestapo discovered supposed Polish links in the Leiss family, in February 1943 his wife, two-year-old daughter, two brothers, sister and brother-in-law were arrested and executed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By 1944, several general and individual directives were ordered within divisions and corps, threatening troops with consequences against their families.

Many people who had committed no crimes were arrested and punished under Sippenhaft decrees introduced after the failed 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944.[7]: 121–166 After the failure of the 20 July plot, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of Gauleiters in Posen that he would "introduce absolute responsibility of kin ... a very old custom practiced among our forefathers". According to Himmler, this practice had existed among the ancient Teutons. "When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed or when there was a blood feud in the family, they were utterly consistent. ... This man has committed treason; his blood is bad; there is traitor's blood in him; that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. And so, too, will Count Stauffenberg's family be wiped out down to the last member."[8] Accordingly, the members of the family of von Stauffenberg (the officer who had planted the bomb that failed to kill Hitler) were all under suspicion. His wife, Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg, was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp (she survived and lived until 2006). His brother Alexander, who knew nothing of the plot and was serving with the Wehrmacht in Greece, was also sent to a concentration camp. Similar punishments were meted out to the relatives of Carl Goerdeler, Henning von Tresckow, Adam von Trott zu Solz and many other conspirators. Erwin Rommel opted to commit suicide, rather than being tried for his suspected role in the plot, in part because he knew that his wife and children would suffer well before his own all-but-certain conviction and execution.

After the 20 July plot, numerous families connected to the Soviet-sponsored League of German Officers made up of German prisoners of war, such as those of Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach and Friedrich Paulus, were also arrested. Unlike a number of the 20 July conspirators families, those arrested for connection to the League were not released after a few months but remained in prison until the end of the war. Younger children of arrested plotters were not jailed but sent to orphanages under new names. Stauffenberg's children were renamed "Meister".[9]

After 20 July 1944 these threats were extended to include all German troops, in particular, German commanders. A decree of February 1945 threatened death to the relatives of military commanders who showed what Hitler regarded as cowardice or defeatism in the face of the enemy. After the surrender of Königsberg to the Soviets in April 1945, the family of the German commander General Otto Lasch were arrested. These arrests were publicized in the Völkischer Beobachter.[7]: 53–88 

(more...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sippenhaft

**************

HOSTAGES OR PRISONERS OF WAR:
WAR CRIMES AT DINNER

H. WAYNE ELLIOTT, LIEUTENANT COLONEL,
JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL'S CORPS, U.S. ARMY (RETIRED)*

The taking of hostages is prohibited. 1

Measures of reprisal against prisoners of war are prohibited.2

I. Introduction
The images filled the world's television screens. Depicted were
dejected, scared soldiers chained to obvious military targets. The
nightly newscasts revealed new levels of depravity, and contempt for
law, in the war in Bosnia. It was war crimes at dinner. In response
to NATO air attacks, the Bosnian Serb leadership directed the
seizure of hundreds of United Nations "peacekeepers" as hostages.
The Serbian leadership made it plain that these United Nations
peacekeepers would be held until the United Nations agreed to stop
any future NATO air strikes. To protect military targets from future
attacks some of the captives were chained to likely targets. When
criticism of the chaining began to mount, the Serbs declared that the
captives were prisoners of war. (As if that change in designation
made a difference!) The United Nations responded that they could
not be prisoners of war because no war existed.3 Therefore, they
*B.A. 1968, The Citadel; J.D. 1971, University of South Carolina; LL.M. 1982,
University of Virginia. Currently an S.J.D. Candidate at the University of Virginia
School of Law. Member of the Bars of South Carolina, United States Court of Military
Criminal Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. The author's last assignment with the Army was as the Chief, International Law Division, The Judge
Advocate General's School, Charlottesville, Virginia.
'Article 34, Geneva Convention of August 12, 1949 Relative to the Protection of
Civilian Persons in Time of War, 6 U.S.T. 3516, 75 U.N.T.S 287 [hereinafter GC].
2Article 13, Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,
6 U.S.T. 3316, 75 U.N.T.S. 135 [hereinafter GPW].
3Red Cross Says UN Peacekeepers Are Not Hostages, REUTERS, June 2, 1995,
available in LEXIS, News Library, Current News File. See also JEAN S. PICTET,
COMMENTARY IV 51 (1958) (Pictet wrote a commentary on each of the four
Conventions) [hereinafter Pictet IV], which states the following:.
Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war, and as such, covered by the Third
Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, or again, a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by
the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy
hands can be outside the law.
19951
MILITARY LA

(more, 34pp)

https://www.corteidh.or.cr/tablas/r38492.pdf
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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 03, 2023 3:27 pm

Writing About a Joy That Invades Jenin: The Fifth Newsletter (2023)

FEBRUARY 2, 2023
Español Português


Image
Abdel Rahmen al-Mozayen (Palestine), Jenin, 2002.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Israel calls its latest military campaign Operation Break the Wave, a lyrical description of a brutal reality. This year, 2023, will be the seventy-fifth year after the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948 when Israeli troops illegally removed Palestinians from their homes and tried to erase Palestine from the map. Since then, Palestinians have resisted against all odds, despite Israel’s formidable backing by the most powerful countries in the world, led by the United States.

Operation Break the Wave started in February 2022 with the assassination of three Palestinians in Nablus (Adham Mabrouka, Ashraf Mubaslat, and Mohammad Dakhil) and continued with terrible violence along the spine of the West Bank, spreading into brutalised Gaza. On 26 January 2023, Israeli forces killed ten Palestinians – including an elderly woman – in Jenin and in al-Ram, north of Jerusalem, and then shot at an ambulance to prevent it from assisting the injured – a clear war crime. The Jenin massacre provoked rocket fire from Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza, to which the Israeli Air Force responded disproportionately, shooting at the densely populated al-Maghazi refugee camp in the centre of Gaza. The cycle of violence continued with a lone Palestinian gunman killing seven Israelis in the illegal settlement of Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem. In reaction to that, the Israeli government has put in place ‘collective punishment’ systems – a violation of the Geneva Conventions – which allows the state to target the gunman’s family members, and the Israeli government will make it easier for Israelis to carry firearms.

The Israeli government launched Operation Break the Wave in response to habbat sha’biyya (‘popular uprisings’) that have begun again across Palestine and express the frustration generated by Israeli pressure campaigns and the near collapse of economic life. Some of these uprisings took place not only in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza where they are more common, but amongst Palestinians living inside the 1948 Green Line of Israel. In May 2021, these protestors gathered under The Dignity and Hope Manifesto and called for new agitations, a ‘united Intifada’ which unites Palestinians in exile, inside Israel, and in the Occupied Territories. These moves and the gains of Palestinians in the United Nations system indicate a new dynamism within Palestinian politics. Most recently, on 31 December 2022, the UN General Assembly voted 87 to 26 to ask the International Court of Justice to provide an opinion on Israel’s ‘prolonged occupation, settlement, and annexation of Palestinian territory’. The new phase of Israeli violence against Palestinians is a reaction to their achievements.

Image
Rachid Koraïchi (Algeria) and Hassan Massoudy (Iraq), A Nation in Exile, 1981.

In the midst of all this, the Israeli people voted Benjamin Netanyahu into office to form his sixth government since 1996. Already, Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister for over fifteen of the past twenty-seven years, as he heads into another seven-year term. His government is fiercely far-right, although from the standpoint of the Palestinians there is steady continuity in Zionist state policy, whether the government is led by the far-right or by less right-wing sections. On 28 December 2022, Netanyahu defined his government’s mission with clarity: ‘The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea, and Samaria’.

Netanyahu’s maximalist standard – that the Jewish people, not just the Zionist state, have the right to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – is not something that has appeared precipitously in this government’s statements. It is rooted in Israel’s Basic Law (2018), which says, ‘The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established’. This legal manoeuvre established Israel as the land of Jewish people, not a multinational or multi-ethnic territory. Furthermore, every administrative definition of the ‘State of Israel’ asserts its control over the entire territory. For example, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics has, since at least 1967, inaccurately counted any Israeli living to the west of the Jordan River, even in the West Bank, as an Israeli, and official Israeli maps show none of the internal divisions produced by the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Image
Mustafa al-Hallaj (Palestine), The Battle of Al-Karameh, 1969.

Israeli state policy, rooted in a settler-colonial mentality, leaves no room for a Palestinian state. Gaza is throttled, the Bedouins in an-Naqab are being displaced, Palestinians in East Jerusalem are being evicted, and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank are growing like a plague of locusts. Netanyahu’s governmental partner Otzma Yehudit (‘Jewish Strength’) is willing to conduct Palestinicide in order to create a Jewish-only society in the Levant. The promise of Oslo, a two-state solution, is simply no longer factually possible as the Palestinian state is eroded and contained. The idealistic possibility of a binational state – made up of Israel and Palestine with Palestinians given full citizenship rights – is foreclosed by the Zionist insistence that Israel be a Jewish state, an ethnocentric and anti-democratic option that already treats Palestinians as second-class residents in an apartheid society. Instead, Zionism is in favour of a ‘three-state solution’, namely expelling Palestinians to Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon.

In 2016, the United States and Israel signed their third ten-year Memorandum of Understanding on military aid, which runs from 2019 to 2028, and under which the US promises to provide Israel with $38 billion for military equipment. This aid is unconditional: nothing in the agreement prevents Israel from using the equipment to violate international law, kill US citizens (as it killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a reporter), or destroy humanitarian projects funded by the US government. Rather than mildly rebuke Israel for its ethnocidal policies, US President Joe Biden welcomed Benjamin Netanyahu, his ‘friend for decades’, to assist the US in confronting illusionary ‘threats from Iran’. Furthermore, just after Netanyahu’s government deepened Operation Break the Wave, the US military arrived in Israel in force to conduct a joint military exercise called Juniper Oak, the ‘largest and most significant exercise we have engaged in’, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder. Backed to the hilt by the US and nonchalant about condemnation from international bodies, the Israeli state continues its fatal project to erase Palestine.

Image
Malak Mattar (Palestine), You and I, 2021.

Maya Abu al-Hayyat, a Palestinian poet living in Jerusalem, wrote a beautiful poem called ‘Daydream’, which settles into a rhythm of Palestinian life and geography defined by little towns in the West Bank. There are children playing, women dancing, life where life is denied by an occupation that has lasted for generations and generations, where the screams of the occupied mimic the loud alarm of the Palestine Sunbird, the national bird.

I’ll write about a joy that invades Jenin from six directions,
about children running while holding balloons in Am’ari Camp,
about a fullness that quiets breastfeeding babies all night in Askar,
about a little sea we can stroll up and down in Tulkarem,
about eyes that stare in people’s faces in Balata,
about a woman dancing
for people in line at the checkpoint in Qalandia,
about stitches in the sides of laughing men in Azzoun,
about you and me
stuffing our pockets with seashells and madness
and building a city.


My pockets are filled with rage and hope, an expectation that our struggles of solidarity alongside the Palestinian people will prevail, because the ‘process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible’.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... palestine/

************

Palestinians Are Not Liars: Confronting the Violence of Media Delegitimization
FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Image
A Palestinian protester, at left, throws a tear gas canister fired by Israeli soldiers away from him as a cameraman records nearby, during a demonstration against Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin, near Ramallah, Friday, Sept. 11, 2009. Israel says the barrier is necessary for security while Palestinians call it a land grab. Photo: Nasser Ishtayeh/Associated Press.

By Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo – Jan 30, 2023

On January 19, during one of its raids in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli military arrested a Palestinian journalist, Abdul Muhsen Shalaldeh, near Al-Khalil (Hebron). This is just the latest of a staggering number of violations against Palestinian journalists and freedom of expression.

A few days earlier, the head of the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), Naser Abu Baker, shared some tragic numbers during a press conference in Ramallah. “Fifty-five reporters have been killed, either by Israeli fire or bombardment since 2000,” he said. Hundreds more were wounded, arrested or detained. Although shocking, much of this reality is censored in mainstream media.

The murder by Israeli occupation soldiers of veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11 was an exception, partly due to the global influence of her employer, Al Jazeera Network. Still, Israel and its allies labored to hide the news, resorting to the usual tactic of smearing those who defy the Israeli narrative.

Palestinian journalists pay a heavy price for carrying out their mission of spreading the truth about the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Their work is critical not only to good and balanced media coverage but to the very cause of justice and freedom in Palestine.

In a recent report on January 17, PJS detailed some of the harrowing experiences of Palestinian journalists. “Dozens of journalists were targeted by the occupation forces and settlers during the last year, which (recorded) the highest number of serious attacks against Palestinian journalists.”

However, the harm inflicted on Palestinian journalists is not only physical and material. They are also constantly exposed to a very subtle but equally dangerous threat: the constant delegitimization of their work.

The violence of delegitimization

One of the writers of this piece, Romana Rubeo, attended a close meeting involving over 100 Italian journalists on January 18, which aimed at advising them on how to report accurately on Palestine. Rubeo did her best to convey some of the facts discussed in this article, which she practices daily as the Managing Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.

However, a veteran Israeli journalist, often touted for her courageous reporting on Palestine, dropped a bombshell when she suggested that Palestinians cannot always be trusted with the little details. She communicated something to this effect: Though the truth is on the Palestinian side, they cannot be totally trusted about the little details, while the Israelis are more reliable on the little things, but they lie about the big picture.

As outrageous – let alone Orientalist – such thinking may appear, it dwarfs in comparison to the state-operated hasbara machine of the Israeli government.

But is it true that Palestinians cannot be trusted with the little details?

When Abu Akleh was killed, she was not the only journalist targeted in Jenin. Her companion, another Palestinian journalist, Ali al-Samoudi, was present and was also shot and wounded by an Israeli bullet in the back.

Naturally, al-Samoudi was the primary eyewitness to what had occurred that day. He told journalists from his hospital bed that there was no fighting in that area; that he and Shireen were wearing clearly marked press vests; that Israeli soldiers intentionally targeted them, and that Palestinian fighters were not anywhere close to the range from which they were shot.

All of this was dismissed by Israel and, in turn, by western mainstream media since supposedly ‘Palestinians could not be trusted with the little details.’

However, investigations by international human rights groups and, eventually, a bashful Israeli admission of possible guilt proved that al-Samoudi’s account was the most honest detailing of the truth. This episode has been repeated hundreds of times throughout the years where, from the outset, Palestinian views are dismissed as untrue or exaggerated, and the Israeli narrative is embraced as the only possible truth, only for the truth to be eventually revealed, authenticating the Palestinian side every time. Quite often, facts are revealed too little too late.

The tragic murder of 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durrah remains the most shameful episode of western media bias. The death of the boy, who was killed by Israeli occupation troops in Gaza in 2000 while sheltered by his father’s side, was essentially blamed on Palestinians before the narrative of his murder was rewritten, suggesting that he was killed in the ‘crossfire.’ That version of the story eventually changed to the reluctant acceptance of the Palestinian reporting on the event. Unfortunately, the story didn’t end here, as Zionist hasbara continued to push its narrative, smearing those who adopt the Palestinian version as being anti-Israel or even ‘antisemitic.’

(No) Permission to narrate
Though Palestinian journalism has proved its effectiveness in recent years – with the Gaza wars being a prime example – thanks to the power of social media and its ability to disseminate information directly to news consumers, the challenges remain great.

Nearly four decades after the publishing of Edward Said’s essay “Permission to Narrate” and over ten years after Rafeef Ziadah’s seminal poem “We Teach Life, Sir,” it seems that, in some media platforms and political environments, Palestinians still need to acquire permission to narrate, partly because of the anti-Palestinian racism that continues to prevail, but also because, per the judgment of a supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist, Palestinians cannot be entrusted with the little details.

However, there is much hope in this story. There is a new, empowered, and courageous generation of Palestinian activists – authors, writers, journalists, bloggers, filmmakers and artists – that is more than qualified to represent Palestinians and to present a cohesive, non-factional, and universal political discourse on Palestine.

A new generation’s search for the truth
Indeed, times have changed, and Palestinians no longer require filters – as in those speaking on their behalf since Palestinians are supposedly inherently incapable of doing so.

The authors of this article have recently interviewed two representatives of this new generation of Palestinian journalists, two strong voices that advocate authentic Palestinian presence in international media: journalists and editors Ahmed Alnaouq and Fahya Shalash.

Shalash is a West Bank-based reporter who discussed media coverage based on Palestinian priorities, counting many examples of important stories that go unreported. “As Palestinian women, we have a lot of obstacles in our life, and they are (all) related to the Israeli Occupation because it’s very dangerous to work as a journalist. All the world saw what happened to Shireen Abu Akleh for reporting the truth on Palestine,” she said.

Shalash understands that being a Palestinian, reporting on Palestine is not just a professional but an emotional and personal experience, as well. “When I work, and I am on the phone with the families of Palestinian prisoners or martyrs, sometimes I break into tears.”

Indeed, stories about the abuse and targeting of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers are hardly a media topic. “Israel puts on the democracy mask; they pretend that they care for women’s rights, but this is not at all what happens here,” the Palestinian journalist said.

“They hit Palestinian female journalists because they are physically weaker; they curse them with very inappropriate language. I was personally detained for interrogation by Israeli forces. This affected my work. They threatened me, saying that if I continued to depict them as criminals in my work, they would have stopped me from being a journalist.”

“In Western media, they keep talking about women’s rights and gender equality, but we don’t have rights at all. We do not live like any other country,” she added.

For his part, Alnaouq, the head of the Palestine-based organization ‘We Are Not Numbers,’ explained how mainstream media never allow Palestinian voices to be present in their coverage. Even pieces written by Palestinians are “heavily edited.”

“It is also the editors’ fault,” he said. “Sometimes they make big mistakes. When a Palestinian is killed in Gaza or the West Bank, the editors should say who the perpetrator is, but these publications often omit this information. They do not mention Israel as the perpetrator. They have some kind of agenda that they want to impose.”

When asked how he would change the coverage of Palestine if he worked as an editor in a mainstream Western publication, Alnaouq said:

“I would just tell the truth. And this is what we want as Palestinians. We want the truth. We don’t want Western media to be biased toward us and attack Israel; we just want them to tell the truth as it should be.”


Prioritizing Palestine

Only Palestinian voices can convey the emotions of highly charged stories about Palestine, stories that never make it to mainstream media coverage. When they do, these stories are often missing context, prioritize Israeli views – if not outright lies – and sometimes omit Palestinians altogether. But as the work of Abu Akleh, al-Samoudi, Alnaouq and Shalash, and hundreds more, continues to demonstrate, Palestinians are qualified to produce high-quality journalism with integrity and professionalism.

Palestinians must be the core of the Palestinian narrative in all of its manifestations. It is time to break away from the old way of thinking that saw the Palestinian as incapable of narrating or of being a liability on his/her own story, of being secondary characters that can be replaced or substituted by those deemed more credible and truthful. Anything less than this can be rightfully mistaken for Orientalist thinking of a bygone era; or worse.

https://orinocotribune.com/palestinians ... imization/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 06, 2023 2:58 pm

Israeli forces kill five Palestinians in the West Bank

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Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian during the siege of the West Bank city of Jericho. | Photo: @SBPal_Eng
Published 6 February 2023

The Palestinian government called on the international community to put pressure on Israel to force it to lift the military siege against the city of Jericho.

In a new aggression by Israel against Palestinian territory, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians on Monday during an armed raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jericho.

According to Israeli military sources, a group of soldiers carried out an alleged action in the Aqabat Jabr camp, during which they were attacked by alleged attackers.

Faced with the alleged aggression, the military responded by killing several of the attackers.


The Palestinian resistance group Hamas said in a statement that it was mourning members of its armed wing killed by Israeli soldiers.

The Palestinian government called on the international community to put pressure on Israel to force it to lift the siege it has imposed on the city of Jericho for nine days.


The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates also condemned the military action, stating that it is a collective punishment against all Palestinian civilians, especially children, women and the elderly.

On Saturday night, numerous Israeli military troops stormed the Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, in an operation that injured 13 people and arrested at least 15.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/israel-a ... -0006.html

Google Translator

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Palestinians in Gaza gathered in large numbers to watch the Morocco-Portugal game at World Cup’s quarterfinals. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

Palestine is my cause: Arabs reaffirm support for Palestinians, rejection of the occupation
By Ramzy Baroud (Posted Feb 03, 2023)

Originally published: Politics for the People on February 1, 2023 (more by Politics for the People)

The latest Arab Opinion Index 2022 is yet more proof that Arab societies are diverse in every possible way, from their assessment of their economic situation and living conditions to their take on immigration, state institutions and democracy. With one single exception: Palestine.

76 percent of all respondents to the poll, which is carried out annually by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, said that Palestine is a cause for all Arabs, not Palestinians alone.

Three important points must be kept in mind when trying to understand this number:

*First, Arabs are not merely expressing sympathy or solidarity with Palestinians. They are irrevocably stating that the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli Occupation is a collective Arab struggle.
*Second, these views are the same across all sections of society throughout the entire geographic expanse of the Arab world, from the Gulf to the Maghreb regions.
*Third, equally important is that the public opinions that have been examined in the poll come from countries whose governments have either full diplomatic ties with Israel or vehemently reject normalization.
The study is quite extensive, as it included 33,000 individual respondents and was carried out in the period between June to December 2022.

Once again, the Arab people collectively reject normalization with Israel, with Algeria and Mauritania topping the list at 99 percent each.

Though some might discount the detailed study by claiming that Arabs inherently hate Israel due to their deep-seated aversion to the Jews, the study breaks down the reason why Arab masses have such a low opinion of Israel.

When they were asked as to why they reject diplomatic ties between their countries and Israel, the respondents mostly “cited Israel’s colonial and expansionist policies, as well as its racism toward the Palestinians and its persistence in expropriating Palestinian land.”

Only five percent cited religious reasons behind their position and that too cannot be dismissed as mere religious zealotry, as indeed many Arabs formulate their views based on the moral values enshrined in their religions; for example, the need to oppose and speak out against injustice.

It must be stated that this is hardly new. Arabs have exhibited these views with an unmistakable consistency, since the start of the Arab Opinion Index in 2011 and one would dare argue, since the establishment of Israel atop the ruins of Palestine in 1948.

But if that is the case, why are the latest poll results deserving of a discussion?

While examining the American public view of Russia, the state of democracy in the U.S., or the greatest threat to national security, opinion polls often fluctuate from one year to the other. For example, 70 percent of all Americans considered Russia an ‘enemy’ to the U.S. in March, compared to only 41 percent in January.

The massive jump in two months is not directly related to the Russian war in Ukraine, since Ukraine is not a U.S. territory, but because of the anti-Russia media frenzy that has not ceased for a moment since the beginning of the war.

However, for Arabs, neither media shift in priorities, internal politics, class orientation or any other factor seem to alter the status of Palestine as the leading Arab priority.

In 2017 and 2022 respectively, two American presidents visited the Arab region. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden labored to execute a major shift in the region’s political priorities.

Biden summed up his agenda in a meeting with six Arab leaders in Jeddah in July by stating,

This trip is about once again positioning America in this region for the future. We are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia or China to fill.

None of these self-serving priorities seem to be paying any real dividends.

That said, the pressure to dismiss the centrality of Palestine as an Arab cause does not only come from the outside. It is also guided by the internal dynamics of the region itself. For example, some pan-Arab news networks, which put much focus on Palestine in previous years, have been relentlessly and, sometimes, purposely, ignoring Palestine as an urgent daily reality in favor of other topics that are consistent with the regional policies of host countries.

Yet, despite all of this, Palestine remains the core of Arab values, struggles and aspirations. How is this possible?

Unlike most Americans, Arabs do not necessarily formulate their views of the world based on the media agenda of the day, nor do they alter their behavior based on presidential speeches or political debates. To the contrary, their collective experiences made them particularly cynical of propaganda and fiery speeches. They formulate their views based on numerous grassroots channels of communication, whether using social media tools or listening to the Friday sermon in their local mosque.

The struggle for Palestine has been internalized in the everyday acts of the average Arab woman or man; from the names they choose for their newborn, to the quiet muttering of prayers before falling asleep. No amount of propaganda can possibly reverse this.

Arab public opinion obviously matters, even though most Arab countries do not have functioning democratic systems. In fact, they matter most because of the lack of democracy.

Every society must have a system of political legitimacy, however nominal, for it to maintain relative stability. It means that the collective Arab view in support of Palestinians and rejection of normalization without an end to Israeli Occupation would have to be taken seriously.

Though some Arab governments are listening to their people and thus condition normalization on Palestinian freedom and sovereignty, the U.S. and Israel insist on ignoring the Arab masses, as they have done for many years. However, if Washington believes that it can simply compel the Arabs to hate Russia and China and love Israel, while the latter continues to kill Palestinians and occupy their land, it will be sorely disappointed, not only today, but for many years to come.

https://mronline.org/2023/02/03/palesti ... ccupation/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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