Author: HolyLandJustice.org

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The problem with international aid to Palestine

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Palestinians take part in a protest against aid cuts, outside the UN offices in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Jan 28, 2018. (photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90)

The Palestinian people have become dependent on foreign humanitarian aid to survive, but its adverse effects are strangling their economy.

By Liora Sion | +972 Magazine | Mar 20, 2018

Since the end of the Cold War, states have preferred humanitarian aid over development funds as a means of influencing international politics. Humanitarian aid is not an end in and of itself, but a tool to solve conflicts and promote state building. As such, it is dependent on the interests of the donor countries.

International aid to the Palestinians is very generous. The United Nations is aiming to raise approximately $540 million per year for the five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. That’s a lot of money when compared to sums raised for other countries in crisis. For example, take Afghanistan, where the UN hopes to raise $437 million for the 34 million citizens of the country, despite the enormous difficulties it faces. In Iraq, a country in desperate need of rehabilitation, the UN seeks to raise $550 million for a population of 37 million. When compared to African countries such as Burundi ($113 million in aid for 10 million people) or Cameroon ($304.5 million for 23 million people), the gap is even more alarming.

Ironically, despite the vast sums, humanitarian aid doesn’t just help the Palestinians — it also harms them. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the occupied territories have seen a steady economic decline and a rise in unemployment. These phenomena are tied, of course, largely due to the IDF’s closures and checkpoints, which have dismembered the West Bank and prevent both people and goods from moving about freely. Humanitarian organizations, however, also play a role.

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Open Shahuda Street: Show the world the horrifying reality in Hebron

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Israeli soldiers arrest a Youth Against Settlements protester demanding the reopening of Shuhada Street in the West Bank city of Hebron, Feb 27, 2015. (photo: Nasser Shiyoukhi / AP)

The Open Shuhada Street Campaign takes place annually during the last week of February to commemorate the massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque and raise international awareness of the horrifying reality in Hebron.

By Miko Peled | MPN News | Mar 21, 2018

The creation of settlements in Hebron included three stages:

  • Stage One, expropriate land from Palestinians claiming it is for military use;
  • Stage Two, build civilian housing on the military base and then allow Jewish settlers to move in; and
  • Stage Three, recognize it as a legitimate Jewish settlement.

This sets a precedent for the creation of facts on the ground that would become the model for the expansion of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

In order to fully understand the reality in Palestine, one must come to terms with the idea that the conquest of Palestine by the Zionists was done with the intent of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the native inhabitants of Palestine. This was true when, in 1948, 78 percent of Palestine was conquered and renamed Israel and it was also true when, in 1967, the conquest was completed and Israel took the remaining 22 percent of the country.

The intention was and remains taking over the land and populating it with Jews at the expense of Palestinians. It is true in the villages and in the towns, in the cities and in the countryside. It is crucial to examine how the Zionist regime accomplishes its goals on a case by case basis, and how local Palestinian leaders and grassroots groups resist. One particularly troubling example is the Zionist takeover of the old city of El-Khalil, Hebron, and the actions taken by Youth Against Settlements (YAS), and its leader and cofounder Issa Amro, to resist this takeover.

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Palestinian clubs to Adidas: Drop Israel Football Association

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Adidas is targeted for complicity with illegal Israeli settlements. (photo: BDS Movement)

More than 130 Palestinian football clubs warned Adidas it could be targeted by consumer-led boycott campaigns.

By Telesur | Mar 20, 2018

“Adidas is lending its brand to cover up and whitewash Israel’s human rights abuses [giving] international cover to Israel’s illegal settlements.”
— letter to Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted

Over 130 Palestinian football clubs urged Adidas to end its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA) over its inclusion of teams based in illegal Israeli settlements across Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Currently there are at least 250 Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They are normally accompanied by the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, increased restrictions on Palestinians’ right to movement due to roadblocks and checkpoints, resource grabbing, increased presence of Israeli occupation forces to provide security, and settler-related violence.

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Historically anti-apartheid New Zealand confronts risks of standing up to Israel

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A police officer talks to protesters in Auckland, New Zealand, following Israel’s bombing of a UN school in a Gaza, Jan 8, 2008. (photo: Greg Bowker / AP / New Zealand Herald)

Progress on the Israel question is slowly but surely being made, owing to the strong commitment of places like New Zealand, who continue to move forward unafraid of the consequences.

By Darius Shahtahmasebi | MPN News | Mar 20, 2018

“New Zealand has and has always had an independent foreign policy — we base our decisions on principle, not being bullied. We will always take a principled foreign policy.”
— Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister

If we were to truly honor the late, great Stephen Hawking, perhaps it would pay to remind ourselves of the principles the acclaimed physicist really stood for. One of those principles was Hawking’s commitment to the boycott of Israel in response to Israel’s longstanding policy of egregiously violating the rights of millions of ordinary Palestinians.

In 2013, Hawking publicly withdrew himself from a conference in Jerusalem on the future of Israel — stating that he had decided to “respect the boycott,” having received advice from Palestinian academics.

“A people under occupation will continue to resist in any way it can. If Israel wants peace it will have to talk to Hamas like Britain did with the IRA [Irish Republican Army],” Hawking said in 2009, speaking in regard to Israel’s brutal assault of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. “Hamas are the democratically elected leaders of the Palestinian people and cannot be ignored.” . . .

However, boycotting Israel is nowhere near as risk-free as boycotting and sanctioning states such as Syria, North Korea or Iran. Boycotting Israel comes with unforeseen consequences that shed light not only on the power and reach of the Zionist lobby and to adherents of the Zionist agenda, but also on how weak the argument in favor of promoting Israel’s human rights-abusing agenda is. If their argument were strong, would they need to actively and forcibly silence those who dissent?

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Push for divestment from Israel met with resistance at Columbia University

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Members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) speak on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest on Mar 19, 2018. (photo: Columbia Spectator)

The presenters invoked Barnard and Columbia’s history of being the first colleges to divest from South African apartheid and more recently from private prison systems in the United States.

By Valentina Rojas-Posada | Columbia Spectator | Mar 20, 2018

“I believe that racism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism are evils upon this world. . . . It shouldn’t be how our college is investing it’s money — our money should be reflecting the values of Barnard students.”
— Caroline Oliver, Barnard College sophomore

Columbia-Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine urged Barnard’s Student Government Association to encourage the Barnard administration to boycott, divest, and sanction companies that profit from or contribute to the subjugation of Palestinian people at an SGA meeting on Monday night.

The groups that collectively launched the Columbia University Apartheid Divest campaign in 2016 requested to meet with SGA several weeks ago and were offered a time to speak. After the release of the SGA meeting’s agenda on Sunday, the executive board of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, a Jewish students group, encouraged its members to attend the meeting to ensure their viewpoint was also represented.

Over 150 students attended, both in support and in contention of the presentation for the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement. . . .

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Ahed Tamimi sentenced to 8 months in prison

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Ahed Tamimi is seen before her hearing at Ofer Military Court near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Jan 17, 2018. (photo: Oren Ziv / Activestills.org)

The 17-year-old was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier on her patio shortly after her cousin was shot by Israeli soldiers. She has already spent three months in prison.

By +972 Magazine | Mar 21, 2018

In late February, the army arrested Ahed’s cousin Mohammed Tamimi — still awaiting surgery to reconstruct the part of his skull that was removed—in a pre-dawn raid. He was interrogated without a lawyer or a parent present, and released a few hours later after being pressured to confess that his head injury was caused by falling off a bicycle — and not by an Israeli rubber-bullet, fragments of which were extracted from his skull.

Ahed Tamimi, the teenager from Nabi Saleh arrested after a video of her attempting to push two armed Israeli soldiers off of her family’s porch went viral, signed a plea deal in Israeli military court on Wednesday, and will serve eight months in prison including three months time served.

Her mother, Nariman, and cousin, Nur, also signed plea deals. Nariman will serve eight months, and Nur was sentenced to time served.

The now-famous video of Ahed was filmed shortly after Israeli soldiers shot her cousin, Mohammed, in the head with a rubber-coated bullet and fractured his skull. An Israeli military court denied bail to Ahed and her mother, Nariman — the latter charged with incitement for live-streaming the video of Ahed and the soldiers — in January.

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BDS event at Arizona State University to move forward

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Hatem Bazian giving introductory remarks at the Zaytuna College commencement, 2014. (photo: YouTube)

The University has revised its contract for speakers removing anti-BDS language.

By Nora Barrows-Friedman | Electronic Intifada | Mar 20, 2018

[The court-ordered agreement with the university allowing Bazian to speak] “is a reflection of the strength of our legal position. We look forward to seeking a declaration that the law, in all of its applications, is unconstitutional.”
— Gadeir Abbas, attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

A university lecturer and Palestine rights activist will be allowed to speak at Arizona State University next month, after initially being barred due to a state law blacklisting advocates of an Israel boycott.

A court-approved agreement with the university allowing the event with Hatem Bazian to go forward is “a welcome development,” Gadeir Abbas, attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told The Electronic Intifada.

In February, the Muslim Students Association at Arizona State University had invited Bazian, University of California at Berkeley lecturer and chair of American Muslims for Palestine, to speak about the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign in support of Palestinian rights during an event on campus in April.

Bazian was asked to sign an agreement that included a clause certifying that he is not engaged with a boycott of Israel.

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Dear Senator Harris, You have been drinking the pro-Israel Kool-Aid

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Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Nov 20, 2017. (photo: Twitter)

An open letter to Senator Kamala Harris of California.

By Alice Diane Kisch | Mondoweiss | Mar 20, 2018

Senator Harris, not only have I lived in Israel, I have hundreds of family members there, most of them descended from German-Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the early 1930’s. I am in touch with many of them, and I am also in touch with many Jewish-Israeli friends who still live in Israel. I know whereof I speak.

I should also mention that three of my Jewish-Israeli family members (including a 9-year-old boy) were killed in the West Bank in July 2002; they were shot at point-blank range by, presumably, Palestinian snipers while they were traveling by automobile to a friend’s home for Shabbat. So I am not untouched by the violence afflicting Israel-Palestine.

I am an 81-year old resident of Alameda County and I have lived here for 19 years.  I grew up in the U.S. northeast and in France, and I have also lived in Scotland and Israel.  I am Jewish and I am a committed Palestinian solidarity activist.

It therefore pains me to know that you have been drinking the pro-Israel Kool-Aid.  With your international background — not to mention your law degree (I come from a family of lawyers) — I would have thought that you might have understood the brutal reality that is today’s Israel.  Your pandering March 28, 2017 speech in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was a disgrace which only reflected and highlighted your ignorance and your willful blindness to the brutal and grotesque reality that is today’s State of Israel.  Unfortunately, your recent 2018 remarks to AIPAC have not yet been made public.

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Mike Pompeo is an anti-Muslim bigot. Shouldn’t Jewish leaders condemn him, too?

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Mike Pompeo. (photo: Forward / Getty Images)

Let’s not fall into the trap of condemning bigotry when it comes toward people who look like us, but tolerating it when it comes from people who look like us. We are required to be better than that.

By Jane Eisner | Forward | Mar 20, 2018

Mike Pompeo’s own statements and record of close associations with organizations that have frequently expressed hostility to Muslims and have trafficked in anti-Muslim conspiracy theories raise serious concerns about his fitness to serve as Secretary of State.
— Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO, Anti-Defamation League

Consistency in public life is often honored in the breach. But when it crosses that thin line into hypocrisy, there ought to be consequences.

We are at that moment with Mike Pompeo, the former Congressman and current CIA director who is President Trump’s choice to be the next Secretary of State.

And whereas many self-appointed leaders of the Jewish community raised holy hell when a couple of Congressmen and one of the leaders of the Women’s March refused to denounce the anti-Semitism of the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, we’ve heard precious little from those same critics about Pompeo’s well-documented anti-Muslim bigotry and his close ties with Islamophobic extremists.

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Take a side — the side of justice

Listen to Anne Baltzer’s inspiring TEDx on having the courage to take a side and take a stand.

By Anne Baltzer | TEDxOcala | Dec 8, 2017

“Equality is about treating everyone the same. Equity is about leveling the playing field.”

“I found a system of segregated roads, with nice roads for Jewish Israeli settlers and separate roads for Palestinians. And all around me I saw inspiring Palestinian popular resistance and its violent suppression by Israel, a military superpower armed by my own country, the United States.

“And I knew that Israel would pay me to move on to that Palestinian land, simply because I’m Jewish. I did not know at the time that Israel’s Jewish majority could only exist through the removal of Palestinians. . . .

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