Category: News

NSO Group, the Israeli firm that sells its spyware to authoritarian regimes around the world, emerged from a military unit that perfected its surveillance techniques on Palestinians.

By Yousef Munayyer | Jewish Currents  | July 26, 2021

With an occupied and stateless population of Palestinians under its rule, to which it has granted no citizenship rights or civil liberties, Israel is free to develop, test, and perfect its surveillance technology on millions of unwilling subjects.

Last week, a joint investigation by 17 media outlets—including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Haaretz—revealed that Israeli intelligence firm NSO Group had licensed military-grade spyware known as Pegasus to a long list of authoritarian regimes. The report drew on a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers; a close forensic analysis of some of the phones confirmed that they had been hacked by surveillance software capable of monitoring the targets’ movements, listening to their conversations, and accessing their private data.

The list included the phones of several people close to murdered journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi: His wife’s phone was targeted in the months before his gruesome murder, while his fiancée’s phone was hacked in the days after his death. The phone number of Princess Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum was added to the list shortly after her escape from the United Arab Emirates and just days before she was captured on her way to Sri Lanka by Indian commandos, who returned her to Dubai. Numbers belonging to some 14 current or former heads of state were found on the list as well.

Continue reading “Exporting the tools of apartheid”

Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian communities looked past each other until violence and bloodshed forced a reckoning.

By Roger Cohen | The New York Times | Aug 1, 2021

“I was targeted as a Jew by radicalized thugs… But many more Arabs came to help me put out the fires than came to burn my places down. We cannot allow a violent minority to win.”
— Uri Jeremias, a celebrated Israeli chef

ACRE, Israel — Uri Jeremias, a celebrated Israeli chef, saw himself as a benefactor. By bringing jobs, tourists and investment to the mainly Arab heart of the coastal town of Acre, he believed he was seen as nurturing coexistence between Jews and Arabs.

Until an Arab mob torched his Uri Buri restaurant in May and a Jewish guest at his luxury hotel was asphyxiated in the worst inter-community riots in decades.

“I was targeted as a Jew by radicalized thugs,” Mr. Jeremias, 76, said at his airy house in Nahariya, a few miles north of Acre. “But many more Arabs came to help me put out the fires than came to burn my places down. We cannot allow a violent minority to win.”

Continue reading “Riots shatter veneer of coexistence in Israel’s mixed towns”

This increasingly emboldened military intimidation by Israeli forces aims to criminalize legitimate human rights and humanitarian work.

By Defence for Children International | July 30, 2021

“This latest act by Israeli authorities pushes forward an ongoing campaign to silence and eliminate Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations like DCIP”
—Khaled Quzmar, general director at DCIP

Ramallah, July 29, 2021—Israeli forces raided Defence for Children International – Palestine’s headquarters in the central occupied West Bank, confiscating computers and client files, early Thursday morning.

Israeli paramilitary border police forces raided DCIP’s headquarters located in Al-Bireh’s Sateh Marhaba neighborhood, located just south of Ramallah around 5:15 a.m. on July 29. More than a dozen Israeli soldiers forced open the office’s locked front door and confiscated six desktop computers, two laptops, hard drives, and client files related to Palestinian child detainees represented by DCIP’s lawyers in Israel’s military courts. No documents were left in the office to give any indication of the reason for the raid, and they did not leave behind any receipt of materials seized.

Continue reading “Israeli forces raid DCIP office, confiscate computers and client files”

What does it mean to pursue regime change as a path for transformation in Israel-Palestine — and is it enough to bring about justice?

By Diana B. Greenwald | +972 Magazine | July 28, 2021

The state-first approach has, so far, failed to prevent, and, if anything, has enabled the continued abuses of the occupation, asymmetric warfare, authoritarianism within Palestinian institutions, and forcible dispossession and displacement.

As Palestinian demonstrators assembled in the streets of Ramallah, Hebron, and other West Bank cities last month, a familiar, but perhaps unexpected, rallying cry rose from the crowds: “The people want the fall of the regime.” The trigger for the protests was the June 24 killing of Nizar Banat, a prominent activist and frequent critic of the Palestinian Authority, while in the custody of Palestinian security forces. While Banat’s funeral attracted thousands in Hebron, protesters in Ramallah chanted “fall, fall, military regime.” It was PA police officers who shoved fellow Palestinians in the streets, struck protestors with batons, attacked journalists, and harassed female demonstrators and observers.

But regimes are systems, not individuals, and many have argued that the system that enabled agents of the PA to carry out these violations is the same one that targets Palestinians confined in the blockaded Gaza Strip with devastating aerial bombardment; threatens thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem with expulsion; repeatedly demolishes the homes, classrooms, and critical facilities of Palestinian Bedouins in the Jordan Valley; and confronts Palestinian citizens of Israel with, alternatively, state neglect or mass arrests. It is one of racial discrimination and gradual ethnic cleansing that has been a dominant feature of Israeli politics since the birth of the state.

Continue reading “Does Israel-Palestine need any ‘state’ solution?”

A global alliance of academic health and humanitarian advocates call out the power imbalance between the settler colonial state and the colonized in Palestine.

By Alice Rothchild | Health and Human Rights Journal | July 26, 2021

Since the founding of Israel, efforts to document Palestinian history and rights has consistently been met by well-organized protests that include a large number of letters to journals and media outlets and hostile personal attacks on authors and editors.

Journals in the medical, social, and political sciences have begun to highlight an appreciation of structural racism, and the personal and public health costs of bigotry and chronic stress. For oppressed populations, understanding these forces is critical to the establishment of basic human rights, including the right to health in its broadest sense: access to health services, clean water, sanitation, nutrition, housing, education, employment, and freedom of movement. International human rights law requires states to support these rights and calls out governments, groups, or individuals who violate these principles. However, there is one area of scholarship where these insights often do not apply, and that is Palestine.

The recent retraction of the article in Scientific American, “As Health Care Workers, We Stand in Support of Palestine,” is the latest example. The COVID-19 pandemic and repeated Israeli assaults have made it clear that the health of Palestinians is dependent on their liberation and the end of the Israeli occupation and siege

Continue reading “Ghosting Palestine: Hiding health and human rights violations”

Young Palestinians firmly believe that the only way out is to take things into their own hands.

By Yousef Aljamal |  Politics Today | July 26, 2021

Many Palestinians today feel that the PA falls short of adopting a discourse that reflects their visions under Israeli military occupation and apartheid.

Most young Palestinians were born after the signing between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel of the Oslo Accords in the White House in 1993. The agreement was based on the two-state solution paradigm and promised Palestinians peace and a sovereign state; however, the agreement has never materialized. Palestinian intellectuals such as Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, and Walid Khalidi, foresaw that the Oslo Accords were a trap for the PLO, with Said calling it a “second Nakba.”

Long ago young Palestinians lost any hope in the so-called peace process, which served only to marginalize the PLO’s role by creating a Palestinian Authority (PA) that has a limited sovereignty and power, and that would serve as a barrier between them and the Israeli occupation. The Oslo Accords have turned the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from occupied territories to disputed territories. Israel has not stopped building new settlements in the Palestinian territories and the land of the future Palestinian state has shrunk over time, while the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has jumped to over half a million.

Continue reading “Watching their land shrinking and their freedoms restricted, Palestinians take initiative”

Disenchanted with corrupt Palestinian self-governance and Israeli apathy, Issa Amro looks to American Jews for change.

By Elhanan Miller | Tablet | July 20, 2021

“I knew that participating in a public meeting with Blinken would have a political cost for me, because there are Palestinians who don’t like the U.S., and they’re right.”
— Issa Amro, Palestinian political activist

When Issa Amro was invited to an intimate meeting with Antony Blinken in Ramallah in May, he decided to aim straight for the heart. “As a Jew, is this your dream?” Amro rhetorically asked him. “Did you dream of seeing an apartheid state?”

A native of Hebron, Amro warned the American secretary of state of the “Hebronization” of East Jerusalem and the entire West Bank. By “Hebronization” he means the extension of a dual legal system for Israelis and Palestinians, the closing of main roads to Palestinian pedestrians and shop owners, and social segregation.
Continue reading “A Palestinian activist fights the IDF and the Palestinian Authority”

Data leaked to a consortium of news organizations suggests that several countries use Pegasus, a powerful cyberespionage tool, to spy on rights activists, dissidents and journalists.

By Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley | The New York Times | July 20, 2021

The allegations may escalate concerns that the Israeli government has abetted government abuses by granting NSO an export license to sell software to countries that use it to suppress dissent.

TEL AVIV — A major Israeli cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group, came under heightened scrutiny Sunday after an international alliance of news outlets reported that governments used its software to target journalists, dissidents and opposition politicians.

The Israeli government also faced renewed international pressure for allowing the company to do business with authoritarian regimes that use the spyware for purposes that go far afield of the company’s stated aim: targeting terrorists and criminals.

NSO strongly denied the claims.

Continue reading “Israeli spyware maker is in spotlight amid reports of wide abuses”

On Monday Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements. Israel has promised to fight the move “with all our might,” while activists say it is yet another sign of how BDS is entering the mainstream.

By Michael Arria  | Mondoweiss  | July 19, 2021

“We hope Ben & Jerry’s has understood that, in harmony with its social justice commitments, there can be no business as usual with apartheid Israel.”
— The Palestinian BDS National Committee

On Monday Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory. The move comes after years of pressure from activists in the company’s home state of Vermont.

“We believe it is inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT),” reads a statement on the company’s website. “We also hear and recognize the concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners.”

Continue reading ““This BDS win is because of our people power”: Ben & Jerry’s vows to stop sales in Israeli West Bank settlements”

Joe Biden promised to make democracy and human rights central to US foreign policy. But that means not insisting on Israel’s right to defend itself without mentioning its expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, its policy of discrimination, and its denial of the Palestinians’ right to an independent state.

By Mohamed Elbaradei | Project Syndicate | July 16, 2021

Over five decades, I have seen how the US approach to upholding Palestinians’ rights has become almost apologetic.

Vienna – For many generations of Arab youth, mine included, studying and working in the United States was a coveted opportunity to experience freedoms, possibilities, and the sense of egalitarianism that the American way of life embodied. It was a doubly enriching experience for those of us raised in authoritarian or conservative societies. It was thrilling to be able to think and act independently, without societal pressure. I was excited to take home some of the lessons I learned from a functioning democracy, not least the vital role of freedom of expression, the importance of civil society, and the exceptional benefits of empowering people.

Of course, I was also aware of the US system’s failings, and in particular the perpetuation of racism and inequality. I remember the Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation in the former Confederate states, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who articulated African-Americans’ dreams of equality and human decency. But I was hopeful that America’s democratic system had the tools it needs for self-correction. I remain so, based on the major transformations in values, laws, and mindsets that I witnessed.

Continue reading “The America that Israel and Palestine need”