Author: HolyLandJustice.org

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Fauda: An Israeli Netflix series that makes oppression sexy

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An Israeli policeman from a Mista’arvim unit disguised as a Palestinian protester raises a pistol in air as he arrests a Palestinian demonstrator in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Dec 13, 2017. (photo: Nasser Shiyoukhi / AP)

We would all do well to remember that Fauda is part of Israel’s well-oiled public-relations machine, which knows how to transform Israeli brutality into sexy, heroic images.

By Miko Peled | Mint Press News | Jan 12, 2018

Palestinians often identify [Mista’arvim] when they show up, even though dressed like locals. At some point, they will pull down their ski masks, pull out their guns and arrest young Palestinians who participate in the demonstrations. They are also known to provoke violence, which is then used to justify the violence perpetrated by the Israeli forces against Palestinian protesters.

Palestinian resistance is legitimate and sanctioned by the inalienable right that all oppressed people have to resist their oppressors and occupiers, even with the use of arms. Israeli violence is raw and unchecked brutality intended to keep Palestinians from raising their heads. But the conventional wisdom is that Palestinian resistance is terrorism and Israeli violence is counterterrorism.

From time to time equivalency is drawn between the two, pointing out that both sides are “human.” While this can be misconstrued as “progress,” it is actually an insult to the cause of justice because there is no equivalency to be drawn between oppressor/occupier and the those fighting for their freedom.

In early 2017 a friend asked me whether I had watched the Netflix series “Fauda.” I said no, and this was the beginning of several weeks of persuasion, at the end of which I succumbed. “Fauda” is an Israeli-produced series about an Israeli paramilitary unit that is called in Hebrew “Mista’arvim.” The word “Mista’arvim” is a cross between the Hebrew word for camouflage and the word for Arabs.

While regular soldiers in the field wear uniforms and camouflage so that they will not be spotted by enemy forces, these are armed, undercover units that wear civilian clothes but dress and talk like Arabs.

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Israel, don’t shut the door in the faces of asylum seekers like me

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African migrants protesting in Tel Aviv, Jun 10, 2017. (photo: Tomer Neuberg / Flash90)

Only Israel can protect us now that we have lost every other hope. Please don’t shut the door in our faces.

By Monim Harun | Jewish Telegraphic Agency | Mar 27, 2018

A person who suffered force labor, violence, rape and torture in his own country — is he not a refugee?
Someone who was persecuted only because of her religion and ethnic background — is she not a refugee?
A person forced to flee his home only because of his skin color — is he not a refugee?
Someone whose village was burned and her family members killed in front of her eyes — is she not a refugee?
And he who survived a genocide — is he not a refugee?
If these people are not considered refugees in Israel, than who is?

My name is Monim Harun, an asylum seeker from Sudan. I was born in a small village nested between mountains and forests, where we lived together as one big family. At a young age I was separated from my family and the people I loved most in the world when the militia forces attacked our village. They went through the village killing every man and boy in sight, but by a miracle I survived. My mother wanted me to live in a safer place and have the opportunity to study, so in 2001, at the age of 12, she sent me to the other side of the country, to the Blue Nile region of the Republic of Sudan.

When I left the village it felt bittersweet — leaving behind my mother and sisters, and the people I loved. But I knew that in doing so, I would be able to acquire new skills that would help me rebuild my community on my return. In the Blue Nile region I completed elementary through high school, and was accepted to Blue Nile University. I spent three years there studying toward a degree in electrical engineering — five years are required for the program. During those years I joined a student organization that fights against the rule of radical Islam in Sudan, and calls for a democratic, secular and liberal system of government. My involvement in social and political advocacy wound up placing my life in great danger, all the more so because my Fur ethnicity is one against which the Sudanese government has been perpetrating genocide.

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If Israel were not an ally, the US would be working to overthrow its government

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Teargas canisters fired from Israeli drones fall on Palestinians during a demonstration near the Gaza Strip border with Israel, Mar 30, 2018. (photo: Hatem Moussa / AP)

The “humanitarian” concern of the US is all too often a cover for regime change ambitions. It seems to disappear when the victims in need are without strategic geopolitical value to Washington.

By Whitney Webb | Mint Press News | Apr 3, 2018

There are no efforts to hold Israel to account for its recent massacre of civilians. Instead, Israel has rejected UN and EU calls for an inquiry into the killings and a UN Security Council resolution on the matter was blocked by the United States.

Over the weekend, outrage took hold as the state of Israel authorized more than 100 snipers to fire upon the demonstrations of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. The Palestinians, participating in the “March of Great Return” to demand the right for exiled Palestinians to return to their ancestral lands, were fired upon while fleeing and even praying. 17 Palestinians were killed and over 1,400 were injured. The Gaza Health Ministry stated that most of the reported injuries were bullet wounds to the legs and feet. The Israeli Defense Forces stated on Twitter that they were fully aware of where “every bullet landed” and Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the snipers “did what had to be done” and “deserve a commendation.”

The outrage, however, was confined to only a few countries as, throughout the West, the horrific event was the subject of slanted reports — such as those that portrayed the Israeli military firing on unarmed demonstrators as “clashes” — or was not even covered at all. Despite the number of people killed and the flagrant violation of international law, the story didn’t even make the Sunday edition of The New York Times, the US “paper of record.”

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BDS calls for boycott of Netflix over Israel “propaganda” series, “Fauda”

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A screenshot from Episode 1 of Fauda. (photo: Netflix)

BDS says that “Fauda” celebrates secret Israeli military units which carried out numerous assassinations and extrajudicial executions.

By Middle East Monitor | Mint Press News | Mar 29, 2018

“Fauda reveals the contribution made by the series to Israeli propaganda efforts in concealing Israeli crimes, including ethnic cleansing, particularly in Jerusalem, the Negev and the Jordan Valley, the demolition of houses and the bulldozing of agricultural land and the siege of two million Palestinians in Gaza and the establishment of colonies.”
— BDS

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is leading a campaign against the hit Israeli series, “Fauda.” Denouncing the widely acclaimed series as “racist propaganda for the Israeli occupation army”, BDS called on Netflix, which bought the rights to “Fauda,” to remove the show or face legal action.

In its statement announcing the campaign to boycott “Fauda,” BDS claims that the series serves as propaganda for Israel’s political and security establishment. It notes that the “Fauda” cast, including the production team, were hosted by the Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, last month along with Israeli soldiers. The crew expressed gratitude to the Israeli soldiers and were described as a “source of inspiration” for the series while Rivlin expressed “gratitude” to the series’ producers.

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Should Israeli settlers be considered civilians?

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An Israeli Jewish settler shoots in the air as Palestinians protest against a plan to resettle Israel’s Palestinian Bedouin minority from their villages in the Negev Desert, near the Israeli settlement of Bet El, north of the West Bank city of Ramallah. (photo: Majdi Mohammed / AP)

About 50% of the West Bank has been annexed by settlements, and 90% of the West Bank’s water is stolen from underneath the Palestinians.

By Robert Inlakesh | Mint Press News | Mar 29, 2018

“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
— Article 49, Fourth Geneva Convention

It is time to pose a question: Are Israeli settlers civilians? Or are they illegal occupiers? A group of Israeli settlers made the move to seize land in East Hebron (al-Khalil) last Monday (Mar 6, 2018), setting up camp — adjacent to the “Kharsina settlement” — backed by an entourage of heavily armed soldiers.

This move threatens three Palestinian families, with fears that they will soon be dispossessed of their land and homes. Those at risk of being cleansed and their property stolen, are the Eida, Jwihan and the al-Halawa families. The initiative to take this land came from the settlers themselves, who now occupy the 70-dunums. The settlers are living in four newly purchased caravans.

The above example clearly illustrates the way in which illegally established settlements, in the West Bank, come to their fruition.

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How do you make a TV show set in the West Bank?

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“Fauda” follows an undercover Israeli unit trying to ensnare a terrorist mastermind. (illustration: R. Kikuo Johnson / The New Yorker)

What the thriller “Fauda” reveals about what Israelis will watch — and what they won’t.

By David Remnick | The New Yorker | Sep 4, 2018

“Today, a film like ‘Khirbet Khizeh’ would be impossible. You won’t be jailed for it, but the subject of the Nakba” — the Arabic term for the “catastrophe” of Palestinian expulsion and exile, in 1948 — “cannot be mentioned unless you want to be branded a ‘leftist.’ ”
— Rogel Alpher, television critic for Haaretz

In 1949, Yizhar Smilansky, a young Israeli veteran, national legislator, and novelist writing under the pen name S. Yizhar, published “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella about the destruction of a lightly fictionalized Palestinian village near Ashkelon, some thirty miles south of Tel Aviv.

Writing from the point of view of a disillusioned Israeli soldier, Yizhar describes the Army’s capture of the village and the expulsion of its remaining inhabitants. The time is 1948, the moment of Israel’s independence and its subsequent victory over five invading Arab armies that had hoped to erase the fledgling Jewish state from the map.

It would be forty years before the New Historians — Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Simha Flapan among them — marshalled the nerve and the documentary evidence required to shatter the myth that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had all voluntarily “abandoned” their cities and villages.

Yizhar was there to bear witness in real time. Continue reading “How do you make a TV show set in the West Bank?”

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Hopeless in Gaza

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Palestinian medical personnel treat a wounded girl at the emergency room of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli bombing campaign, Jul 18, 2014. (photo: Khalil Hamra / AP)

A conversation with controversial scholar Norman Finkelstein.

By Eric Gordon | Mint Press News | Mar 30, 2018

When we think “refugees” from war, disaster or oppression, images of large numbers of people come to mind, crossing borders, departing on the last flights out, fording streams, boarding leaky transport ships, washing ashore. That what’s completely different about Gaza: The borders are sealed and there is no place to flee. The population is trapped in a tiny sliver of land equal in size to twice the District of Columbia. Some have named it “the largest open-air prison in the world,” but others claim that implies guilt on the part of the inmates, preferring bluntly to call it a “concentration camp.”

“The nadir of the Palestinian struggle is now,” says distinguished but controversial scholar Norman G. Finkelstein. He spoke on March 26 at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “Nothing is happening there in Palestine. There is no mass resistance.”

That explains why worldwide the pro-Palestinian cause is not drawing the crowds it once did. It also explains why the USC auditorium was at most half full. As Finkelstein surveyed the audience, he pointed to one college-age man in the front row, observing that he was by far the youngest person in the room. In Gaza today, 51 percent of the population is under 18 years of age. Half of Gaza’s people would be younger than this young man.

However, if the martyrdom of Gaza seems right now to be sealed in the pages of history, “We don’t know what will come tomorrow,” says the author, on a tour to promote his newest book, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. “So we must keep preparing the ground.”

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“He had no gun, no Molotov” — he was just running away with a tire

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Abdul Fattah Abdul Nabi, a 19-year-old Palestinian, moments before he was killed during Friday’s protests in the Gaza Strip. (photo: Mahmoud Abu Salama / The Washington Post)

An unarmed civilian was shot in the back of the head by an Israeli sniper while running away from the border fence.

By Loveday Morris and Hazem Balousha | The Washington Post | Mar 31, 2018

“These are the predictable outcomes of a manifestly illegal command: Israeli soldiers shooting live ammunition at unarmed Palestinian protesters. What is predictable, too, is that no one — from the snipers on the ground to top officials whose policies have turned Gaza into a giant prison — is likely to be ever held accountable.”
— Amit Gilutz, spokesman for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem

The morning after burying 19-year-old Abdul Fattah Abdul Nabi, his family gathered in a tent set up to receive mourners, watching and re-watching a video of the moment they say Israeli soldiers shot him in the back of the head.

The video appears to show the teenager, dressed in black, running away from Gaza’s border fence with Israel carrying a tire. Just before reaching a crowd, he crumples under gunfire.

“He had no gun, no molotov, a tire. Does that harm the Israelis, a tire?” asked his brother Mohamed Abdul Nabi, 22. “He wasn’t going toward the Israeli side. He was running away.”

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To the settler chief who insists Jews must rule Israel even if Arabs become the majority

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A Palestinian man walks past Israeli settlers standing outside a Palestinian house after it was occupied by settlers, Hebron, West Bank, Mar 27, 2018. (photo: Hazem Bader / AFP)

If nothing else, the right has persuaded me of this: We need to offer every West Bank Palestinian the option of voting in Israeli elections. If you refuse to allow them a country, for God’s sake, allow them the vote.

By Bradley Burston | Haaretz | Mar 27, 2018

“I truly believe that our right to the Land of Israel holds true whether or not [there is a majority]. It is just as when Ben-Gurion established the state and there were 600,000 [Jewish] people facing one and a half to two million Arabs. Our right to the land of Israel was strong and present then. And it exists now as well. Therefore, the majority is not meant to be the deciding factor in our decision making.”
— Yigal Dilmoni, deputy CEO of the settlement movement’s Yesha Council

A senior Israeli settlement movement official, responding to statistics cited by the Israeli military indicating that Jews are now a minority in the Holy Land, stated this week that Jews have the right to rule Israel even if Arabs become a majority within the country.

The statement came hours after a furor erupted Monday in the Knesset, where figures cited by an army colonel showed that some three million Palestinians now live in the West Bank and another two million in the Gaza Strip.

Combined with the 1.8 million Arab citizens of Israel and the 300,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, the statistics meant that from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, Arabs may outnumber Israel’s 6.6 million Jews by as many as 600,000 people. . . .

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Trinity College Dublin students overwhelmingly back BDS

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Trinity College Dublin student come together to support the Palestinian-led BDS campaign. (photo: Palestinians abroad / Facebook)

The referendum saw the highest turnout in recent years.

By Middle East Monitor | Mar 23, 2018

“If we can help make a difference by boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning those organizations complicit the oppression of the Palestinian people, then I think it worthwhile to do so.”
— TCDSU President Shane De Rís

Students at Trinity College Dublin have overwhelmingly voted to support the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign, with the referendum result announced to cheers and chants.

Asked whether Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) should “accept a long-term policy on Palestine and in support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS),” 64.5 per cent of students voted in favor (1,287 students of a total of 2,050). . . .

As BDS is a “long-term policy,” it required that 60 per cent or above of the students balloted voted in its favor. The referendum was held after students gathered the necessary 500 signatures to put the vote to the student body.

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