Author: Kairos Puget Sound Coalition

Salah Hammouri’s deportation highlights the longstanding Israeli policy of revoking the residency rights of Palestinians in Jerusalem. Rights groups say it is a tool of forcible transfer.

By Ibrahim Husseini  | The New Arab | Dec 28, 2022

“Israel is working to undermine and reduce the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem,”
— Jessica Montell, the director of the Israeli Center for the Defence of the Individual, HaMoked

If you are Palestinian and a resident of East Jerusalem, then beware. Israel’s interior ministry could be watching, waiting for an opportune moment to remove you from the city or the country altogether.

The criteria are fluid, and often trivial, with working or studying abroad sufficient justification to remove your residency rights. It can also include holding a foreign passport or expressing political views not aligned with the state.

Since 2018, Israeli authorities have legally been able to accuse Palestinians of ‘breached allegiance’ and revoke their permanent residency, without ever providing evidence or offering a chance to fight it in court.

Continue reading “The quiet expulsion of Palestinians from Jerusalem”

Outgoing IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi hands over to his successor a ‘policing army’ that is more autonomous, settler-led, and lethal than ever.

By Yagil Levy | +972 Magazine | Dec 26 ,2022

Indeed, the cumulative record in the occupied territories irrefutably shows that the Israeli army is not just an enabler, but in many ways a sponsor, of settler violence.

Next month, IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi is set to hand over the reins of Israel’s military forces to his successor, Major General Herzi Halevi. Among the many matters Halevi will be taking up — including questions around the future of Israel’s conscription model — perhaps his biggest challenge will be how the army tackles its main arena of operations, which is subject to deep disputes among Israel’s political and military echelons: the policing warfare against Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This is assuming that the signing of a maritime border deal with Lebanon holds off a potential third Israel-Lebanon war, while an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is also not expected imminently. Kochavi has not often been involved in the policing missions in the West Bank, but it seems that what happens there is liable to cast a shadow over his tenure — as shown by the furor when an Israeli soldier assaulted a left-wing activist in Hebron last month.

Continue reading “The rebellion of Israel’s second army”

The incoming government has prompted a new crop of teens to question their upcoming role in one of Israel society’s central tenets.

By Oren Ziv | +972 Magazine | Dec 11, 2022

There is already evidence that the army fears a wave of refusals, as recently demonstrated by the unusually severe punishment handed down to four conscientious objectors.

It didn’t take long for the incoming far-right government to announce its racist, anti-democratic plans, particularly for Palestinians and the Israeli Jewish liberal-secular public. What many are calling a “nightmare government” has prompted senior politicians from the opposing camp to call for mass “civil disobedience” in the form of protests and the refusal to cooperate with the religious fundamentalists who are about to run the country.

On the grassroots level, it seems refusal to enlist in the Israeli army, or at least to serve in the occupied territories — which has long been a marginal but high-profile form of civil disobedience in Israel — may very soon start to become more widespread. The fact that leader of Otzma Yehudit leader and presumed Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, and Religious Zionism head Bezalel Smotrich, who is about to acquire broad powers in the West Bank, will be leading political figures in Israel’s security and military establishment, crosses a red line for many Israeli Jews. Some, it seems, are beginning to second-guess their instinctive resistance to refusing the draft.

Continue reading “Israel is on the cusp of a wave of army refusal under far right rule”

How has support for the Palestinian cause of BDS – for boycotts of those directly involved in Israel’s decades-long oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians – come to be reinterpreted as racism against Jews?

By Jonathan Cook | Middle East Eye | Nov 23, 2022

Caryl Churchill has been stripped of her award because state-sponsored racism still lies at the heart of the European project.

There are troubling insights to be gained into modern European racism from the German arts community’s decision to revoke a lifetime achievement award to the respected British playwright Caryl Churchill over her trenchant support for the Palestinians.

On 31 October, Churchill was stripped of the European Drama Prize she had been given in April in recognition of her life’s work. The decision was backed by Petra Olschowski, the arts minister of the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, who said: “We as a country take a clear and non-negotiable stance against any form of antisemitism. This is all the more reason why a prize funded by the state cannot be awarded under the given circumstances.”

Continue reading “Why German state racism is now directed at the Palestinians”

Netanyahu’s elevation of the racist messianic politicians Ben-Gvir and Smotrich despite calls by Israel’s friends in the U.S. to ostracize them has caused an earthquake in the Israel lobby.

By Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss | Nov 21, 2022

The FBI is reportedly starting an investigation into Israel’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh way back on May 11…

The shocking success of the racist-fascist party Religious Zionism in the Israel election three weeks ago has caused an earthquake inside the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. And that earthquake has allowed Joe Biden to take unprecedented –for him– baby-steps to confront the Israeli government.

In fact, the Biden administration appears to be scripted by J Street, which is trying to replace AIPAC in the Israel lobby as the true representative of American Jews.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s review the sequence.

Continue reading “Israel lobby’s realignment over Ben-Gvir is giving Biden room to criticize”

Israel’s victims are required to defend their oppressors as well as themselves, or be accused of “anti-Semitism.”

By Joseph Massad | The Electronic Intifada | Nov 9, 2022

No other colonized people has been forced to carry such a double burden.

Since the beginning of Zionist Jewish colonization of their country in the 1880s, Palestinians have faced demands that they carry a double burden: to fight off the Jewish racist colonists while having to defend their colonizers against anti-Jewish European Christian racism.

No other colonized people has been forced to carry such a double burden. Not even the Indigenous African peoples of Liberia were asked to defend their own Black American racist colonizers who despised them against European and US anti-Black racism that targeted the Black colonists.

Neither were Black South Africans ever asked to defend their Afrikaner oppressors against the British who oppressed the Afrikaners, even placing them in concentration camps.

Continue reading “The burden Western liberals impose only on Palestinians”

The re-fragmentation of Palestinian parties in Israel exemplifies the lack of a political compass to guide their struggle, with the public divided on how to confront both a far-right government and a broken liberation movement.

By Amjad Iraqi | +972 Magazine | Nov 7, 2022

The total disintegration of the Joint List, by cruel historical timing, is a critical piece of the far right’s momentous victory.

The triumph of Kahanism and the impending return of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister have, quite rightly, dominated headlines in the wake of Israel’s dramatic general election last Tuesday. With a solid majority of 64 Knesset seats, Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc, which includes the extremist Religious Zionism slate led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, is preparing to embark on an aggressive and radical program of action on both sides of the Green Line, with the incoming premier already receiving warm words of welcome from far-right and authoritarian leaders from India to Hungary to the United States.

On the other side of the political spectrum, an opposing development may prove to be just as pivotal — and no less dangerous. A few weeks before voters headed to the polls, the four Palestinian-led parties in Israel, which had been united under the “Joint List” just two years ago, affirmed that they would be running as three competing slates in this year’s election. Although they attained a combined total of 10 seats — the same as in the previous Knesset — with a 53 percent Arab voter turnout, these figures conceal a deep rupture that now exists between the parties and within the wider Palestinian community in Israel, the effects of which have destroyed a contentious yet vital engine of their politics.

Continue reading “The Joint List is dead. Who will lead the fight for Palestinian citizens?”

There is ‘unity of purpose’ among Palestinians, says scholar Ilan Pappe

By Riyaz ul Khaliq | Anadolu Agency | Nov 6 2022

“The occupier, Israel, is every day occupying more and more lands of Palestinians but powerful (nations) who could deliver justice to Palestinians, are not paying attention,”
— Hasan Turan, a lawmaker and chairman of the Palestine Committee at the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye

A three-day conference discussing “Our vision for liberation in Palestine” began Saturday in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul.

Palestine is a “fundamental problem in the world,” said Hasan Turan, a lawmaker and chairman of the Palestine Committee at the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye.

“The occupier, Israel, is every day occupying more and more lands of Palestinians but powerful (nations) who could deliver justice to Palestinians, are not paying attention,” he said, addressing the conference that is hosted by the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University (IZU).

Continue reading “Istanbul hosts ‘Our vision for liberation in Palestine’ conference”

Israel’s boosters across the political spectrum are panicking over the far-right’s victory in Israel’s election, and the reactions are telling.

By Mitchell Plitnick | Mondoweiss | Nov 3, 2022

“Ben-Gvir & fellow ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich raise the specter of a gov’t willing to strip Israel’s Palestinian-Arab citizens of rights, weaken the judiciary, short-circuit Netanyahu’s legal charges & ratchet up intercommunal tensions and violations of Palestinian rights…”
— Jeremy Ben-Ami, leader of the liberal Zionist J Street

As the results of the election in Israel are being finalized – an election wherein millions of Palestinians living under Israeli dominance have no say—consternation outside of Israel among its supporters is ballooning. The reactions from Israel’s boosters are telling.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, a man almost as slavishly devoted to Israel as his predecessor, David Friedman, said, “It’s too early to predict the precise makeup of the coalition until all votes are counted.” But he “intends to keep working with Israel’s government on the two countries’ shared interests and values.”

Continue reading “Biden administration and Israel lobby in a panic following Netanyahu’s far-right election sweep”

Embracing a radical critique of Israeli apartheid is a precondition for bringing it to a just end.

By Noura Erakat and John Reynolds | Jewish Currents | Nov 1, 2022

In January 2021, the leading Israeli watchdog group, B’Tselem, deemed Israel a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

AT THE HEIGHT of the Unity Intifada in May 2021, as Palestinians demonstrated from Gaza City to Haifa to Ramallah, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, demanded an end to Israel’s “apartheid government.” Two days later, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush joined her in tweeting, in reference to Israel: “Apartheid states aren’t democracies.” The use of the “apartheid” label—and the rejection, from even a small minority of legislators, of the claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”—signaled a break with US political orthodoxy.

These interventions were not only buoyed by the landmark Palestinian uprising but enabled by a series of recent, high-profile reports from major human rights organizations. In January 2021, the leading Israeli watchdog group, B’Tselem, deemed Israel a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” A few months later, in April, the global advocacy organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) described a reality of “apartheid and persecution” maintained for the purpose of “privileging Jews over Palestinians” and involving “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination.” These organizations aimed to consolidate an anti-apartheid analysis as common sense; their work seemed to give many people permission to speak. Throughout the spring and summer of 2021, solidarity statements and open letters referencing the reports flowed from scholarly and cultural organizations around the world. (Tlaib, too, cited both B’Tselem and HRW.) The momentum continued into 2022: In February, Amnesty International published its own extensive study of Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, calling it a “cruel system of domination.”

Read the full article here →