Author: KPSC

The Citizenship and Entry Into Israel law impacts thousands of families.

By Alex Kane | Jewish Currents Tuesday News Bulletin | Mar 15, 2022

“We’re talking about a law that basically tells Palestinians, ‘You are not equal.’ It tells them, ‘You cannot gain citizenship. You don’t have the privilege that we grant Jews coming from abroad.’”
— Adi Mansour, an attorney for Adalah- The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

On Friday, Israel’s Knesset approved a law reauthorizing a ban on giving Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens permanent residency status. Passed with 45 Knesset members in favor and 15 opposed, the Citizenship and Entry Into Israel law impacts thousands of families, though the exact number is unclear. It bars Palestinians living in the West Bank or Gaza who are married to Israeli citizens from gaining the legal benefits foreign spouses typically receive in liberal democracies. (The law also applies to citizens of so-called “enemy states”—Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—but in practice it mostly impacts Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza.)

Continue reading “Knesset Renews Ban on Permanent Residency for Palestinian Spouses of Israeli Citizens”

The arguments Russia’s government deploys to dehumanize Ukrainians are strikingly similar to the ones Israel’s government uses to dehumanize Palestinians.

By Peter Beinart | Jewish Currents | Mar 8, 2022

Official Russian and Israeli discourse differs in at least one important way. Putin argues that Ukrainians are really Russians, who must be dominated and absorbed. Meir and Netanyahu never argued that Palestinians are really Israelis or Jews.

In the days since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukrainians and their supporters have been lionized for the same forms of resistance to oppression for which Palestinians are routinely condemned. Western television networks have approvingly broadcast video of Ukrainians assembling Molotov cocktails. Governors who signed legislation penalizing boycotts of Israel have promoted boycotts of Russia. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced last month that he would join a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council because “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscores the Council’s mission to promote human rights and respond when they are violated or abused,” the Palestinian American writer Yousef Munayyer noted that the US had left the Council because it “didn’t want to see accountability for human rights abuses and violations of law committed by Israel.”

Continue reading “Justifications for destroying a people”

Donor-advised funds have legal discretion to deny gifts to groups that criticize Israel.

By Alex Kane | Jewish Currents | Feb 23, 2022

“I’m not asking the Federation to debate apartheid…I’m only asking them not to defund the organizations that want to.”
— Alan Sussman

On July 26th, 2021, Alan Sussman did what he does every year: He asked the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, which manages his family’s donor-advised fund, to send grants to nonprofit groups of his choosing. The 78-year-old civil liberties lawyer wanted to donate to six organizations that do work involving Israel/Palestine: T’ruah, Rabbis for Human Rights, Breaking the Silence, +972 Magazine, B’Tselem, and, full disclosure, Jewish Currents. The Jewish Federation agreed to his funding requests, with one exception: They denied Sussman’s request to donate $1,000 to B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights group.

Continue reading “How the Seattle Jewish Federation blocked a donation to B’Tselem”

Visiting US lawmakers raise concern with PM about move slated to clear preliminary hurdle next month; church leaders blast plan to ‘nationalize one of Christianity’s holiest sites’

By Jacob Magid | The Times of Israel | Feb 20, 2022

“This is a brutal measure that constitutes a direct and premeditated attack on the Christians in the Holy Land, on the churches and their ancient, internationally guaranteed rights in the Holy City.”
— letter from Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theopolis III, Catholic Church Custos of the Holy Land Francesco Patton and Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem Nourhan Manougian 

Israeli officials are preparing to advance an unprecedented project to expand a national park onto church-owned lands and Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem, sparking fierce opposition from local Christian leaders, The Times of Israel has learned.

The move would not strip the landholders of their ownership, but it would give the government some authority over Palestinian and church properties and religious sites, leading church officials and rights groups to characterize the measure as a power grab and a threat to Christian presence in the Holy Land.

Continue reading “In 1st, Israel advancing plan to expand national park onto E. Jerusalem church lands”

Palestinian Christians paid tribute to Archbishop Desmond Tutu in a prayer service that was held where Tutu prayed when he visited Beit Sahour in 1989.

By Jeff Wright | Mondoweiss | Feb 15, 2022

It’s not surprising, then, that three decades before the recent reports of B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Tutu had identified the situation in Palestine/Israel as apartheid.

Last week, Palestinian Christians gathered in Beit Sahour, a community adjacent to Bethlehem, to pay tribute to Nobel Peace Prize winner Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu who died in December last year. The prayer service was held at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church, where Tutu prayed when he visited the town in 1989.

Tutu had come to Beit Sahour during the first Palestinian Intifada. He spoke at Shepherds’ Fields in Beit Sahour, where he was welcomed by thousands of Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim. That visit wasn’t his first. As a young priest, Tutu had come to Jerusalem in 1966 to study Arabic and Greek. It’s not surprising, then, that three decades before the recent reports of B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Tutu had identified the situation in Palestine/Israel as apartheid.

Continue reading “Palestinian Christians memorialize Archbishop Desmond Tutu”

Inside the intensifying Israeli crackdown on Palestinian protest.

By Mohammed El-Kurd | The Nation | Feb 11, 2022

“The level of violence used to repress protests [in the Naqab] proved in practice, that regardless of their citizenry status, Palestinians everywhere face the raft of Israel’s security forces,”
— activist Riya Al’Sanah

The sun had not yet risen on January 21 when 30 Israeli soldiers arrested 12-year-old Ammar at his home in the Naqab. His alleged crime: protesting against the most recent push in a government-backed forestation plan—or “greenwashing,” as many put it—that would uproot thousands of Palestinian Bedouins and replace them with pine trees. Ammar was released after a few hours of detention and put under house arrest—even though, his parents said, he was at home during the protest. Al Jazeera reported that he had not spoken a word since he returned home.

Ammar’s story is but one of many like it in recent weeks. According to Adalah, a Haifa-based legal center working to protect the rights of Palestinians, 150 Palestinian Bedouins (some 40 percent of whom are minors) have been arrested and accused of “rioting” during protests against their expulsion from the area. The push is being led by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a para-public organization, and is the latest chapter in the decades-old colonial effort to “make the desert bloom.” One Israeli lawmaker vowed that the Israelis would “exert [their] sovereignty in the Negev.”

Continue reading “Israeli Law & Torture: From detained minors to a prison “Torture Room””

Washington DC Episcopalians’ condemnation of Israeli “apartheid” confirms an awakening to Israel’s long-festering human rights problem within the liberal U.S. “elite,” and growing immunity to smears leveled by Israel’s advocates.

By Steve France | Mondoweiss | Feb 2, 2022

The awakening must spread up to the top leadership of the denominations (in the case of Episcopalians that means the bishops of the Church), and reach down to the millions of regular members.

Episcopalians of the nation’s Capital voted big against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on January 29, adopting resolutions to “oppose Israel’s apartheid” (by 73%), to “confront Christian Zionism” (by 76%), and to “defend the right to boycott” (by 80%). The right to boycott is under assault from anti-BDS laws enacted in dozens of states and championed in Congress.

The latest church action followed similar emphatic statements by Episcopalians in Chicago, Rochester, Vermont, and Olympia, all aimed at the Christian denomination’s General Convention in Baltimore in June-July, which will be asked to back Palestinian rights with the same force as it did the cause of Black South Africans in the 1970s and 80s. (Full disclosure: I helped urge the Washington diocese to act.)

Continue reading “Rejection of ‘Israel’s apartheid’ grows as D.C. Episcopalians affirm their opposition, 3 to 1”

A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.

By Ronen Bergman & Mark Mazzetti | The New York Times Magazine | Jan 28, 2022

It was a very public rebuke of a company that had in many ways become the crown jewel of the Israeli defense industry.

In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. As they set up the equipment, the engineers made a series of calls to their bosses in Herzliya, a Tel Aviv suburb, at the headquarters for NSO Group, the world’s most notorious maker of spyware. Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing.

The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.

Continue reading “The battle for the world’s most powerful cyberweapon”

Palestinian American filed the lawsuit after city of Houston required his company to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel.

By Middle East Eye staff | Jan 29, 2022

‘The Court does find that Hassouna authentically holds a pro-Palestinian point of view that is protected by the First Amendment’
— US District Judge, Andrew S Hanen

A United States federal court has blocked the state of Texas from enforcing its anti-boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) law against a Palestinian-American contractor who refused to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel.

Rasmy Hassouna, an engineer and executive vice president of the Palestinian-owned A&R Engineering and Testing Inc, filed the lawsuit in November challenging a Texas law that bars the state from doing business with companies participating in the BDS movement against Israel.

The firm said in its complaint filed in a Houston federal court that the law violates its First Amendment right to participate in economic boycotts as a form of protest.

Continue reading “US federal court blocks Texas from enforcing anti-BDS law on contractor”

A review of work using graphic representations as applied to Israel/Palestine environmental issues.

By Jim Miles | The Palestine Chronicle | Jan 23, 2022

The most compelling statement made during the discussion on cartography was “…the settler-colonial imperative is to create private land…for profit” – a strong summation.

A recent seminar from the group “Visualizing Palestine” served to present four graphic representations of environmental problems within Israel/Palestine.

The graphics are self-explanatory and need no review here – they are after all graphic, and speak well for themselves. The discussion talked around the graphics, what they emphasized and how they are necessary for a clear understanding of environmental issues in Palestine.

Continue reading “Between a rising tide and apartheid: Environmental justice in Palestine”