Category: News

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””

The death of an elderly Palestinian-American on the West Bank last month highlights the worst aspects of Israeli policy.

By Melvin Goodman | CounterPunch | Feb 9, 2022

The Israeli investigation of this particular incident was far worse than a whitewash; it was unconscionable.

Israel dismisses charges of “apartheid against Palestinians” as anti-Semitic propaganda, and the United States has been an enabler of Israeli racism over the years with its hands-off attitudes toward the inhumanity of Israeli actions on the West Bank and Gaza. But the tragic death of an elderly Palestinian-American on the West Bank last month highlights the worst aspects of Israeli policy. The nature of the death, directly due to Israeli brutality and negligence, amounts to manslaughter. The outrageously tepid response from the Israeli military’s central command tells us everything we need to know about Israel’s unconscionable occupation policy.

Continue reading “Israel, an Apartheid Nation? Of Course!”

The PA’s duty own entanglement is enabling apartheid.

By Ramona Wadi | Middle East Monitor | Feb 8, 2022

If the deterioration of Palestinians’ political rights has been evident to anyone with or without a shard of humanity, why does the Palestinian Authority have to cling to such reports rather than set the alarm bells ringing itself?

Palestine is always defined by an indefinite present dissociated from its past, a bludgeoning lie against which Palestinians are always struggling. Ever since the UN recognised Israel’s colonial project as a state and projected the humanitarian paradigm onto the Palestinians driven out of their homes and land, it has become convenient for world leaders and diplomats to remain within those parameters.

It has also become incumbent upon human rights organizations to raise awareness of the ramifications of political issues that the international community prefers to ignore. Israeli apartheid is now a mainstream concept, yet Palestinians have been warning about violent, racist segregation and discrimination for years. “Zionism is apartheid,” declared the PLO in 1985, decades before the human rights organization B’Tselem declared Israel to be an apartheid state last year, followed by Human Rights Watch and, more recently, Amnesty International.

Continue reading “The PA shouldn’t need an Amnesty report to prove Israeli apartheid”

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 recent physical attack on the Nassar family highlight the never ending struggle for Palestinian existence on their own land.

By Jonathan Kuttab | Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA) | Feb 2, 2022

The family’s persistence in remaining on the land has been one of the most remarkable examples of Palestinian sumud (or steadfastness) I have seen.

I have been associated with Tent of Nations and the Nassar family for many years. In fact, my law office in Jerusalem has been and continues to represent them in their ongoing legal battles to save their land from the Israeli government and the Jewish settlers who have been trying for years to steal it from them. I myself have participated in activities on their land. One time, I even found myself alongside Rev. Alex Awad and a Lutheran German minister alone with Daoud in confronting the settlers who were bulldozing into their land.

While the 100-acre farm has been in their family since their grandfather bought it over a century ago—and they have the documents to prove this!—the Nassar family’s attempts to hold onto their land and prevent the settlers from taking it over has been an ongoing battle. Every time we win a battle in the courts, new obstacles are created and new challenges arise. Because their title to the land is confirmed by law, Israel has been using new tactics, including claims for public expropriation and declarations that the entire area is “state land” and subject to confiscation.

Continue reading “Tent of Nations”

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”

In Palestine, climate change is compounded by political and economic decisions.

By Muna Dajani | Al-Shabaka | Jan 30, 2022

In the case of Palestine, the effects of climate change are influenced and exacerbated by Israeli settler colonialism and theft of natural resources.

Overview

Through its participation in the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) and other international forums, the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to promote a state-centric approach to climate change that ultimately blocks legitimate climate and environmental justice in Palestine. In effect, Palestinian leadership has reduced the Palestinian liberation struggle – inherently a struggle for climate and environmental justice – to a failed state-building project since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Justice is rarely addressed in these international conventions and forums, leaving Palestinians confined to the logic of international donors who seek to manage the occupation instead of pressuring Israel to end it. The normalization and depoliticization of Israel’s climate apartheid characterize the existing approach to addressing Palestine’s climatic and environmental issues, and they must be countered by Palestinians and international climate justice advocates alike.

Continue reading “Challenging Israel’s climate apartheid in Palestine”

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”

By forcing Elbit Systems to close one of its factories, we showed what direct action can achieve when governments remain indifferent to Israeli apartheid.

By Huda Ammori | +972 Magazine  | Jan 23, 2022

When every attempt to campaign through traditional methods is dismissed, and people’s lives are at stake, it is our duty to take direct action.

Earlier this month, we at Palestine Action received thrilling news: Israel’s largest arms company, Elbit Systems, announced that it had decided to sell its weapons factory in Oldham, a town in the north of England, and leave the area for good.

Through 18 months of sustained direct action, and with the unwavering support of the local community, our #ShutElbitDown campaign made it intolerable for the Israeli arms factory to continue operating on our doorstep. This is a welcome victory for all those who have worked tirelessly to campaign for the rights of Palestinians, and, crucially, for the Palestinian people themselves.

The case against Elbit is clear: its weapons — drones, tanks, bullets and more — are developed and marketed through being “tested” on the captive population of the Gaza Strip, which is besieged under an illegal military blockade. These products are then sold on to other brutal regimes, further violating human rights around the globe — for example, in occupied Kashmir. Yet despite Elbit’s immorality, the British government has been more than happy to assist the company in facilitating such crimes against humanity.

Read the full article here →

A complaint arguing that a Reform synagogue violated New York labor law could point toward a new strategy for Palestinian rights advocates.

By Isaac Scher | Jewish Currents | Jan 25, 2022

The facts of the case show a notable synagogue struggling with whether to recognize anti-Zionism as a legitimate mode of Jewish life.

On July 22nd, Jessie Sander was fired from her job as a Hebrew teacher in the education program of the Westchester Reform Temple, a high-profile congregation in Scarsdale, New York. According to a legal complaint obtained by Jewish Currents, the dismissal—which occurred before Sander, 26, had even met her students—came in response to a blog post Sander co-wrote criticizing Israel.

Sander had been offered the job on May 10th, the same day that Israel initiated an aerial bombardment of Gaza that killed, according to the most recent count, 260 Palestinians over the course of 10 days. On May 20th, the day Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire, Sander and a friend published the blog post, in which they condemned Israeli “settler-colonial violence” and referred to themselves as anti-Zionists. “Being anti-Zionist has made us even more invested in building Jewish community and fighting for justice for all Jews,” they wrote. “Jews in the United States must speak out against genocide in our name and state-sponsored murder disguised as support for Jewish people.”

Continue reading “A Hebrew teacher called herself an Anti-Zionist. She was fired.”