Mark LeVine writes: “The Jewish majority is history.”

So declared Haaretz columnist Akiva Eldar in the space of Palestine/Israel in his most recent column, published on October 16. Eldar learned the news not from a public pronouncement to that effect by the Israeli government, which naturally has little interest to disseminate information of such “unparalleled importance”.

Rather, the new data, revealing that Jews now account for approximately 5.9 million out of the 12 million residents of Israel and the Occupied Territories was published in Haaretz’s economic magazine, The Marker, in an article dealing with government attempts to raise the bar for obtaining tax benefits.

A Ministry of Finance memorandum on the proposed changes to the law revealed the population figures without comment. But the implications are crucial. Not merely because of the demographic ceiling that has now been broken, but also because of what the structure of the tax law in question tells us about how Israelis have long considered the territory of Israel/Palestine – as one unit.

The Ministry of Finance wants to increase the threshold for companies to obtain tax breaks based on the number of consumers they sell to. The existing minimum market is 12 million people, and now that the population of Israel/Palestine as a whole has reached that level, any company that serves the Israeli/Palestinian market would be eligible for the tax break, when the law was intended to encourage exports outside the home market.

Fair enough. But what’s not fair is the fact that Israel and the Occupied Territories are considered as a single market from the perspective of Israeli enterprises, which have long had the West Bank and Gaza as a captive market, while Palestinian industries and agriculture have been severely restricted by Israel for decades in order to prevent them from competing with Israel.

The process of de-development and de-industrialisation has been a marked feature of Israeli rule over the Occupied Territories. Thanks to the weakness of Palestinian negotiators, the incompetence and corruption of the political leadership, and the connivance of the American and EU as “honest brokers”, it was institutionalised into the Oslo-era economic relationship through various agreements, most notably the Paris Protocol of 1994, which severely restricted the ability of Palestinians to develop any new industries which might challenge existing Israeli industries. [Continue reading…]

Max Blumenthal writes: In a small courtroom on the sixth floor of Haifa’s District Court, a colonel in the Israeli engineering corps who wrote a manual for the bulldozer units that razed the Rafah Refugee Camp in 2003 offered his opinion on the killing of the American activist Rachel Corrie.

“There are no civilians during wartime,” Yossi declared under oath.

Yossi made his remarkable statement under withering cross-examination by Hussein Abu Hussein, the lawyer for Corrie’s family, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah on 17 March 2003. Rachel’s parents, Craig and Cindy, and her sister, Sarah, stood in the back of the courtroom to witness the 2010 proceedings. This marked their second visit for the second round of hearings in their civil suit against the state of Israel. Yesterday, an Israeli court issued its final judgment and exculpated the Israeli soldier who drove the bulldozer, the Army, and the State for all blame. Instead, the court held that Rachel bore responsibility for her own death for failing to move out of the bulldozer’s way.

In the immediate wake of Corrie’s killing, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, then the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, instructed Corrie’s parents to demand a “thorough, fair and transparent investigation” from the Israeli government. Since then, the Israelis have stonewalled them, refusing to provide key details of their investigation, which was corrupted from the start by the investigators’ apparent attempts to find evidence that a bulldozer did not in fact kill Rachel. [Continue reading…]

Chris McGreal writes: Reporters covering Israel are routinely confronted with the question: why not call Hamas a terrorist organisation? It’s a fair point. How else to describe blowing up families on buses but terrorism?

But the difficulty lies in what then to call the Israeli army when it, too, at particular times and places, has used indiscriminate killing and terror as a means of breaking Palestinian civilians. One of those places was Rafah, in the southern tip of the Gaza strip, where Rachel Corrie was crushed by a military bulldozer nine years ago as she tried to stop the Israeli army going about its routine destruction of Palestinian homes.

An Israeli judge on Tuesday perpetuated the fiction that Corrie’s death was a terrible accident and upheld the results of the military’s own investigation, widely regarded as such a whitewash that even the US ambassador to Israel described it as neither thorough nor credible. Corrie’s parents may have failed in their attempt to see some justice for their daughter, but in their struggle they forced a court case that established that her death was not arbitrary but one of a pattern of killings as the Israeli army pursued a daily routine of attacks intended to terrorise the Palestinian population of southern Gaza into submission.

The case laid bare the state of the collective Israeli military mind, which cast the definition of enemies so widely that children walking down the street were legitimate targets if they crossed a red line that was invisible to everyone but the soldiers looking at it on their maps. The military gave itself a blanket protection by declaring southern Gaza a war zone, even though it was heavily populated by ordinary Palestinians, and set rules of engagement so broad that just about anyone was a target.

With that went virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances – an impunity reinforced by Tuesday’s verdict in Haifa. [Continue reading…]

Donald Macintyre reports: Hafez Rajabi was marked for life by his encounter with the men of the Israeli army’s Kfir Brigade five years ago this week. Sitting beneath the photograph of his late father, the slightly built 21-year-old in jeans and trainers points to the scar above his right eye where he was hit with the magazine of a soldier’s assault rifle after the patrol came for him at his grandmother’s house before 6am on 28 August 2007.

He lifts his black Boss T-shirt to show another scar running some three inches down his back from the left shoulder when he says he was violently pushed – twice – against a sharp point of the cast-iron balustrade beside the steps leading up to the front door. And all that before he says he was dragged 300m to another house by a unit commander who threatened to kill him if he did not confess to throwing stones at troops, had started to beat him again, and at one point held a gun to his head. “He was so angry,” says Hafez. “I was certain that he was going to kill me.”

This is just one young man’s story, of course. Except that – remarkably – it is corroborated by one of the soldiers who came looking for him that morning. One of 50 testimonies on the military’s treatment of children – published today by the veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence – describes the same episode, if anything more luridly than Hafez does. “We had a commander, never mind his name, who was a bit on the edge,” the soldier, a first sergeant, testifies. “He beat the boy to a pulp, really knocked him around. He said: ‘Just wait, now we’re taking you.’ Showed him all kinds of potholes on the way, asked him: ‘Want to die? Want to die right here?’ and the kid goes: ‘No, no…’ He was taken into a building under construction. The commander took a stick, broke it on him, boom boom. That commander had no mercy. Anyway the kid could no longer stand on his feet and was already crying. He couldn’t take it any more. He cried. The commander shouted: ‘Stand up!’ Tried to make him stand, but from so much beating he just couldn’t. The commander goes: ‘Don’t put on a show,’ and kicks him some more.”

Two months ago, a report from a team of British lawyers, headed by Sir Stephen Sedley and funded by the UK Foreign Office, accused Israel of serial breaches of international law in its military’s handling of children in custody. The report focused on the interrogation and formal detention of children brought before military courts – mainly for allegedly throwing stones.

For the past eight years, Breaking the Silence has been taking testimonies from former soldiers who witnessed or participated in human rights abuses in the occupied territories. Most of these accounts deal with “rough justice” administered to minors by soldiers on the ground, often without specific authorisation and without recourse to the military courts. Reading them, however, it’s hard not to recall the Sedley report’s shocked reference to the “belief, which was advanced to us by a military prosecutor, that every Palestinian child is a ‘potential terrorist'”.

The soldier puts it differently: “We were sort of indifferent. It becomes a kind of habit. Patrols with beatings happened on a daily basis. We were really going at it. It was enough for you to give us a look that we didn’t like, straight in the eye, and you’d be hit on the spot. We got to such a state and were so sick of being there.”

Some time ago, after he had testified to Breaking the Silence, we had interviewed this soldier. As he sat nervously one morning in a quiet Israeli beauty spot, an incongruous location he had chosen to ensure no one knew he was talking, he went through his recollections about the incident – and several others – once again. His account does not match the Palestinian’s in every detail. (Hafez remembers a gun being pressed to his temple, for example, while the soldier recalls that the commander “actually stuck the gun barrel in the kid’s mouth. Literally”.) [Continue reading…]

Haaretz reports: A report by the U.S. State Department defines, for the first time, violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank as acts of terrorism.

The Country Reports on Terrorism, which under U.S. law is produced annually by the State Department and presented to the U.S. Congress, was published two weeks ago. It contained a chapter on Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

A section of the report entitled “Countering Radicalization and Violent Extremism” addressed so-called “price-tag” attacks, which are committed primarily against Palestinians and their property by West Bank settlers.

The report mentions an attack carried out by a group of Israeli settlers against the IDF’s Efraim Regional Brigade headquarters in the West Bank.

That attack “sparked a public debate in Israel on the phenomenon of settler violence; political and security officials pledged to implement several steps to curb and punish these violent attacks,” according to the report.

The report also notes that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak labeled such attacks as having the characteristics of terrorist acts. Former IDF Head of Central Command Avi Mizrahi is also mentioned describing attacks against Palestinians and against their property as “terror.”

During 2011, the report says, ten mosques in the West Bank and in Jerusalem were set on fire – a dramatic increase compared to past years, following “six such incidents in 2010 and one in 2009.” The report also states that Israeli authorities believe that the attacks were “perpetrated by settlers.”

The Associated Press reports: Six Palestinians have been wounded in a suspected firebomb attack by Jewish extremists in the West Bank, the Israeli military said.

The six were traveling in a taxi Thursday night when the firebomb was allegedly thrown into the car. The military suspects Jewish extremists to be behind the attack.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the firebombing, saying Israel “will do everything to catch those responsible and bring them to justice.”

Haaretz reports: Dozens of Jewish youths attacked three young Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Zion Square early on Friday morning, in what one witness described as “a lynch” on Facebook.

One of the Palestinians was seriously wounded and hospitalized in intensive care in Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem. Acting Jerusalem police chief General Menachem Yitzhaki has set up a special team to investigate the incident and detain the suspects.

The three were allegedly attacked by youths shouting “Death to the Arabs” at them, as well as other racial slurs. One of them fell on the floor, and his attackers continued to beat him until he lost consciousness. They subsequently fled from the scene.

An infographic produced by Michal Vexler that shows the administrative barriers that Israel maintains preventing Palestinians in the West Bank from access to the Mediterranean, which, absent all the obstacles would be less than an hour’s drive away: Continue reading →

Israel controls the access to water from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its disproportionate allocation of water, the settlements’ takeover of natural springs, and the prohibition against maintaining and constructing water cisterns in the West Bank without Israeli permits make water a sparse commodity for Palestinians. The image below is a detail from an illustration in a series of infographics on Palestinian civilian life under occupation. See the complete infographic: Visualizing Occupation — Distribution of Water.

Jonathan Cook writes: Violent, so-called “price tag” attacks by Jewish settlers have become a staple of life for Palestinian communities over the past few months. The latest is the torching this week of a mosque in the village of Jaba, close to the city of Ramallah.

Palestinians in areas of the West Bank under Israeli control live with settler neighbours who beat and shoot them, set alight fields, poison wells, kill livestock and steal crops. These acts of terror have begun to spread elsewhere: homes, cars, cemeteries, mosques and churches are now targets in East Jerusalem and Israel too. Earlier this month a school and several cars were vandalised in Neve Shalom, the only genuinely mixed Jewish-Arab community in Israel.

Invariably the “price” invoked by the settlers is unrelated to any Palestinian action. Instead Palestinians are punished indiscriminately for the smallest concession the settlers fear Israel might make in the diplomatic arena.

Superficially, the settlers’ behaviour looks like a particularly vicious form of tantrum-throwing, but there are tangible benefits to be gained from the trail of destruction they leave behind.

They provided a clue to their reasoning, as they always do in “price-tag” attacks, on the walls of Jaba’s mosque. In black spray-paint, they spelt out their grievance: “Ulpana”.

Ulpana, also near Ramallah and home to 30 Jewish families, is a settler “outpost” – one of more than 100 such settlements-in-the-making that are scattered across the West Bank. Unlike a similar number of much larger and more established settlements, which are illegal under international law, the outposts violate Israeli law too.

After years of petitions from human-rights groups, Israel’s Supreme Court has reluctantly ruled recently that Ulpana must be removed. D-Day for the settlers, July 1, is rapidly approaching.

The torching of the mosque – the settlers’ trump card – was intended chiefly as a reminder to Israel’s right-wing government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, that any move against them risks triggering a round of intensified violence that will further damage Israel’s image with the international community.

But it was also designed to dampen the enthusiasm of the courts for further costly run-ins with settlers. The Supreme Court, settlers hope, will be in no hurry to enforce the destruction of future Ulpanas. [Continue reading…]

Yousef Munayyer writes: The recent drama in Israeli politics surrounding the fate of the Ulpana neighbourhood of the illegal Beit El settlement in the occupied West Bank includes a great degree of political theatre, but the climax of this particular play is yet to be seen.

Yes, a decision has been made to remove a very small number of houses from one settlement (and build 850 more in other areas), and the “evacuation” that will take place will likely be a contentious event. Still, it is the theatrics that follow the evacuation that I will be focused on – which might tell us everything we need to know about the Israeli government. At that moment, it will be Israeli settler violence that is at centre stage, along with the Israeli government’s non-response.

For several years I have been studying Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and their property throughout the occupied territories. The upcoming moment of evacuation from Ulpana sets an all-too-familiar sequence of events into motion. Israeli settlers who sought to deter government actions that limit settler objectives, such as demolitions or evacuations, have maintained a “price tag” policy. This is the use of violence, overwhelmingly against Palestinians, to “exact a price” for any settlement homes from which occupants have been removed.

Over the course of studying settler violence and amassing a database of violent settler incidents, my colleagues and I have been able to study several trends and factors which lead to settler violence, including the nature of “price tag” attacks. We parsed Israeli government announcements from Israeli government actions; the former being announcements by state organs of decisions to evacuate settlement homes, for example, and the latter being the actual carrying out of those orders. It is important to note that actual dismantlement of settlements by the Israeli state are extremely rare, but nonetheless what we found was that Israeli government actions were the single positively correlated factor leading to settler violence.

In short, this means that the evacuation of homes in Ulpana is more or less guaranteed to trigger settler violence. So this then begs the question: what is the Israeli government going to do to protect Palestinian civilians, whom we know will be in harm’s way? In the past, the Israeli government has done next to nothing and, more often than not, looked the other way as settlers attacked Palestinian civilians. [Continue reading…]

Geoffrey Aronson writes: Many years ago I visited the West Bank settlement of Ofra, just east of Ramallah. Ofra, established in 1976 as a “work camp” by Shimon Peres, then minister of defense, is the jewel in the crown of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) settlement movement.

Soon after taking office in 1977, newly elected Likud prime minister Menachem Begin recognized the outpost for what it was always meant to be — a new, permanent settlement.

The entry of settlers into this region proved to be the vanguard of a settlement blitzkrieg that opened up the West Bank heartland to two generations of tens of thousands of settlers. Their successes set the stage for Ariel Sharon’s 1996 exhortation to “grab the hilltops,” in and around Ofra and throughout the West Bank as a whole, inaugurating the creation of about a hundred new settlement “outposts.”

My host that day was Israel Harel, a founder of Ofra and key player in Gush Emunim. His son Etai is one of the founders of Migron, the oldest and best-established outpost sparked into existence by Sharon, sited on a hilltop a few kilometers south of Ofra adjacent to the new road built to connect the new settlements established along the central mountain spine of the West Bank.

Harel and I climbed the gently ascending route next to his house to a nearby hilltop where the settlement of Amona sits, commanding a glorious view east into Jordan. The hilltop abuts the village of Silwad and has been the site of contentious settlement efforts since Amona’s dwellings were put in place in 1997. After Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that the nine permanent houses there had been illegally constructed on private Palestinian land, Ehud Olmert’s government demolished the permanent dwellings in 2006, but the caravans and the settlers remained. Khaled Mishal, the Hamas leader and native son of the village, once told me that he used to do his physics homework atop the then-pristine summit.

On another occasion, during the second intifada, Harel invited me to a Sabbath prayer service at an impromptu site overlooking Road 60, a short walk through the newly fenced off lands belonging to the village of Ein Yabrud, where Benjamin Kahane, son of Meir Kahane, and his wife had been shot and killed in 2000 by Palestinian gunmen. A military watchtower and a prayer tent had been erected at the site, a practical expression of the symbiotic relationship between settlers and the army. The prime agricultural land was now off limits to villagers. Today, a new neighborhood of red-tiled houses, inhabited in defiance of a court order, has been constructed on it.

Settlers like Harel, his son, and their supporters have always insisted that private Palestinian land has never been taken for settlement unless duly paid for. A long and sordid trail of forged bills of sale and powers of attorney suggests otherwise. When I asked Harel if he could accept the theft of private Palestinian property, he said he could not.

The example of Ofra has been repeated throughout the West Bank during what will soon be a half century of settlement beyond Israel’s June 1967 border. According to some objective measures, the settlement enterprise has been extraordinarily successful: Israel has transferred in defiance of unanimous international sentiment more than half a million of its citizens, almost 7 per cent of the state’s total population, to almost 300 distinct locations outside its borders — a feat unmatched in recent history. [Continue reading…]

Haaretz reports: Mideast experts warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that construction policies in the settlements or the burning of a major mosque by extremists could help trigger a violent uprising in the West Bank.

The meeting with Netanyahu, which lasted about 90 minutes, took place Tuesday evening.

The burning of a major mosque by Jewish extremists was the greatest risk, the experts said. Violence could also be sparked, they said, if Netanyahu’s plan goes through to build 850 new housing units in the West Bank, especially if the diplomatic stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians continues.

The implementation of construction plans without diplomatic progress could undermine the Palestinian people’s support of President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the experts said. It could also weaken the Palestinian security forces that are keeping a lid on violence.

The experts included professors Shimon Shamir, Emmanuel Sivan, Meir Litvak, Eyal Zisser and Anat Lapidot. Also present was Brig. Gen. (res. ) Shalom Harari – a former Arab affairs adviser to IDF Central Command, the Defense Ministry and the Israeli delegation to the Madrid and Oslo peace talks.

(Click the image to see a larger version.)

Philip Farah writes: In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren claimed that Christians in Israel are better off than their brethren anywhere else in the Middle East. Two Sundays ago, “60 Minutes” made clear he attempted to intimidate Bob Simon by going over Simon’s head to speak to Jeff Fager, the head of CBS News and executive producer of “60 Minutes,” to complain that Simon’s story on Christian Palestinians was “a hatchet job” against Israel. In fact, it was a hard-hitting, but honest piece in which Simon helped to expose the terrible harm the Israeli occupation — not Muslim Palestinians as the ambassador claimed — is doing to Christian Palestinians in the Holy Land.

I am a Palestinian Christian, now a U.S. citizen, and my own experience and that of my family attest to the falsity of Ambassador Oren’s assertion. I was born in East Jerusalem, Jordan in 1952, only a few years after my family and the majority of Palestinians fled from their homes when the newly established Jewish state took over three-quarters of historical Palestine. My family, like almost all the other Palestinians who fled — Christians and Muslims alike — became refugees, losing their fields, orchards, homes and practically everything else, to Israel. Israel defied the international consensus and a U.N. resolution calling on it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return.

Had Israel allowed the Palestinians to return, it would not have become a majority Jewish state. Israel’s fear of a Palestinian presence within its borders continues to drive its brutal policies of occupation, which victimize Palestinian Christians as well as Muslims. Israel occupied the rest of historical Palestine in 1967, gaining control over a large Palestinian Arab population which many Israelis view as a threat to the “Jewish character” of their country.

There is a simple test of Ambassador Oren’s claims: I say to him, “Mr. Ambassador: If your country is so good to Christians, why don’t you allow me, my family and thousands of Palestinian Christians to return to our homes in the part of Jerusalem which Israel occupied in 1967 or the western part of the city from which Palestinians were forced out in 1948? Why is it that any Jew from any country in the world can claim full rights of citizenship as soon as he or she sets foot in Jerusalem, while I, whose family roots in Jerusalem go back many centuries, am barred from living with full human rights in my hometown?” [Continue reading…]

Raja Shehadeh writes: Earlier this month, I finally watched “The Law in These Parts,” a documentary by the Israeli film director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, at the 7th International Conference for Popular Resistance. The film describes the legal system that Israel has applied in the Palestinian Occupied Territories since 1967, and it does so exclusively through interviews with members of the Israeli military legal corps who wrote and implemented the system.

I saw the film in the Palestinian village of Bilin, just west of Ramallah. This was a fitting setting for the occasion. In 2007, a local councilor secured a rare judgment from Israel’s highest court that ordered the army to reroute the separation wall and return to the villagers hectares of land that had been taken away from them. The wall was moved only last year, and the residents of Bilin continue their struggle to reclaim more land they say is theirs and was allocated to the Jewish settlement of Modiin Illit, on the other side of the rerouted wall. Alexandrowicz’s film was screened in an open area of Bilin only recently returned.

According to the film, one of the first decisions Israel made in the aftermath of 1967 was to declare the territories under its control to be ones it “held” or “administered” rather than “occupied.” This allowed it to claim that it was not bound by the Fourth Geneva Convention — a determination with far-reaching implications. [Continue reading…]