Category Archives: Israeli occupation

Israeli forces demolish mosque in a wave of West Bank demolitions

Joseph Dana reports:

Israeli forces demolished Palestinian homes in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills today in what seems as a wave of demolitions following yesterday’s demolitions all across the West Bank. Non-violent leaders from Beit Ummar have also been arrested in night raids. Grassroots organizers Mousa and Yousef Abu Maria were arrested from their homes as harassment continues in Beit Ummar

After carrying demolitions in the villages of Qarawat Bani Hassan near Salfeet, al-Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley and Hizma near Jerusalem yesterday, Israeli bulldozers returned to the Jordan Valley today. At 6:30 this morning, Israeli Civil Administration bulldozers accompanied by soldiers and armored military jeeps entered the Jordan Valley village of Khirbet Yarza, east of Tubas, and demolished the village’s mosque, a houses and four animal shelters. The demolitions rendered eleven people homeless.

Demolitions continued later in the morning in the South Hebron Hills village of al-Rifayaia, east of Yatta, where at 8:15 AM Israeli forces demolished a 250 meter house. The house was home to two families of twenty people, 16 of them minors.

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Leasehold settlements?

Haaretz reports:

Israel is conducting secret negotiations with the U.S. on establishing the future borders of a Palestinian state, the London-based Arabic language daily Asharq al-Awsat reported on Friday.

According to the report, Palestinian sources confirmed that the two sides discussed an option wherein Israel may lease lands in East Jerusalem from the Palestinians in exchange for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Israel would lease the territories from the Palestinian state for a period of 40 to 99 years.

The Palestinian sources said that the talks are an American initiative that has been going on for some time in order to obtain an understanding with Israel regarding the terms surrounding a future Palestinian state.

The Palestinian Authority apparently has only recently been made aware of the talks and hasn’t been given the details of the proposal.

An Egyptian source told the newspaper that the negotiations are “more quiet than secret, and are meant to try to save the peace process.”

Neither the Prime Minister’s Office nor the U.S. government agreed to comment on the report.

Israel in secret negotiations with the US? I guess this confirms what has long appeared to be the case: that the Palestinians are regarded as being peripheral to the conflict. But I really don’t know what to make of this lease proposal. Britain held Hong Kong on a lease, but once the lease expired Hong Kong went back to China. Somehow I don’t see a Palestinian state ever having quite as much leverage as China. Neither, given its disregard for UN resolutions, do I see Israel feeling a heavy obligation to honor a legal contract limiting its occupation of East Jerusalem. The Israelis’ interests have always seemed to be focused on the so-called facts no the ground rather than legal issues of ownership.

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Not getting to the promised land

“I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968

“[T]oday, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime.” President Obama speaking in Prague, April 5, 2009

“I do know also that the future holds the possibility of progress, if not in our lifetimes then certainly in our children’s.” Hillary Clinton addressing the American Task Force for Peace in Washington DC, October 20, 2010

Is this the star by which President Obama plots his course: the promise of destinations that others must reach? Realism that just looks like cynicism, or cynicism dressed up as realism?

Just over a year ago, he sounded quite emphatic on the issue of the Middle East conflict — the issue on which Clinton now hints that progress may have to wait a generation.

Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

I say sounded emphatic, but here’s the clue revealing Obama’s own lack of commitment: he leaves himself out. He is the observer rather than the agent. He doesn’t make demands.

What’s the use of an American president who can see the promised land but has no idea how to get there?

Less than two years after making Middle East peace central to his foreign policy agenda, Obama’s efforts have come to nothing.

The Washington Post reports:

In perhaps the shortest round of peace negotiations in the history of their conflict, talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have ground to a halt and show little sign of resuming.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas haven’t met since Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton brought the two together on Sept. 15 in Jerusalem, two weeks after President Obama launched the resumption of negotiations on Palestinian statehood in Washington with much fanfare, including the presence of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Now, the nearly six-week pause threatens to become permanent.

Pressure to restart the talks eased after the Arab League said it would wait a month – until Nov. 8 – before ending Abbas’s mandate for negotiations, thus pushing the issue beyond the U.S. midterm elections. But if Republicans score big gains, some Israelis argue, that could limit Obama’s ability to pressure Israel to make concessions. U.S. peace envoy George J. Mitchell is supposed to return to the region, but no date has been set.

In a speech Wednesday to Palestinian peace activists, Clinton acknowledged that “I cannot stand here tonight and tell you there is some magic formula that I have discovered that will break through the current impasse.”

While the administration has set a goal of achieving an agreement less than 11 months from now, Clinton at one point suggested a much longer time frame: “The future holds the possibility of progress, if not in our lifetimes, then certainly in our children’s.”

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Archbishop: Palestine is not Israel’s ‘promised land’

Sapa/AFP report:

Israel cannot claim Palestinian territory as its promised land citing the Bible to justify its occupation and the expulsion of Palestinians, a Catholic archbishop said.

Cyril Salim Bustros, head of the Greek Melkite Church in the United States, made his comments after the Middle East synod of Catholic bishops called on the United Nations to implement its resolutions and end Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

The synod’s final statement, drawn up by a commission headed by Bustros, also said that “recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.

“On the contrary, recourse to religion must lead every person to see the face of God in others and to treat them according to their God-given prerogatives and God’s commandments, namely, according to God’s bountiful goodness, mercy, justice and love for us.”

Speaking at press conference, Butros said: “The theme of the promised land cannot be used as a basis to justify the return of the Jews to Israel and the expatriation of the Palestinians.”

“For Christians one can no longer talk of the land promised to the Jewish people,” he said, because the “promise” was “abolished by the presence of Christ.”

In the kingdom of God, which covers the whole world, “there is no longer a favoured people, a chosen people, all men and women of every country have become the chosen people,” the Lebanese-born Butros said.

Lebanon’s Daily Star adds:

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri hailed Sunday a call by Catholic bishops for the international community to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, while Israeli officials reacted angrily to the appeal.

The “participation [of Christian thinkers] in challenging the Zionist project is a necessity for Muslims not to be left alone in this confrontation, and for Arabism not to be restricted to Islam,” the Lebanese premier said in Beirut Sunday.

The bishops and patriarchs of the Middle East’s Catholic churches said at a Vatican synod on the Middle East over the weekend that Israel cannot use the biblical concept of a promised land or a chosen people to justify new settlements in Jerusalem or territorial claims.

“Recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable,” said a final statement issued after a two-week synod chaired by Pope Benedict XVI.

The bishops’ statement also called on the international community to take “the necessary legal steps to put an end to the occupation of the different Arab territories.”

Palestinians welcomed a call from the synod’s conclusions and highlighted the role of Christians in confronting the threat posed by Israel.

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Israel’s coma

While most Israelis can’t visit Ariel Sharon in hospital, they can now do the closest thing: go stand next to a life-size model of the former prime minister, propped up in bed, attached to a drip and steadily breathing in an otherwise empty room in a Tel Aviv art gallery.

“Sharon’s still breathing and beating body is an allegory for the Israeli political body — a dependent and mediated existence, self-perpetuated artificially and out of inertia, with open eyes that cannot see,” the gallery’s curator Joshua Simon writes in an introduction to the exhibit, the creation of Israeli artist Noam Braslavsky.

Sharon’s coma mirrors the effect that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was intended to have: that it would suspend any real movement towards the creation of a Palestinian state.

But as Henry Siegman made clear, three years ago, the fiction that Israel was responsive to external stimuli began over 40 years ago:

Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but “How do we live without a solution?”’ Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

In an interview in Ha’aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon’s diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in ‘formaldehyde’. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israel’s unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is what they achieved.

Do we really have to wait until Sharon stops breathing before the peace process can officially be declared dead?

Whatever political differences there have been between Barak, Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu, each Israeli prime minister has shown himself equally adept in the art of living without a solution, “with eyes open that cannot see.”

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Zionism and the war on terrorism both rest on the same hollow foundation

Distilling some of his findings from extensive research conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, Robert Pape writes:

For nearly a decade, Americans have been waging a long war against terrorism without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill them. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, this was perfectly explicable — the need to destroy al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan was too urgent to await sober analyses of root causes.

But, the absence of public debate did not stop the great need to know or, perhaps better to say, to “understand” the events of that terrible day. In the years before 9/11, few Americans gave much thought to what drives terrorism — a subject long relegated to the fringes of the media, government, and universities. And few were willing to wait for new studies, the collection of facts, and the dispassionate assessment of alternative causes. Terrorism produces fear and anger, and these emotions are not patient.

A simple narrative was readily available, and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Because the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill Americans. Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, “Why do they hate us?” and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of “who we are, not what we do.” As President George W. Bush said in his first address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Thus was unleashed the “war on terror.”

The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked and encourage war against Iraq. It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies — with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.

This narrative had a powerful effect on support for the invasion of Iraq. Opinion polls show that for years before the invasion, more than 90 percent of the U.S. public believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But this belief alone was not enough to push significant numbers to support war.

What really changed after 9/11 was the fear that anti-American Muslims desperately wanted to kill Americans and so any risk that such extremists would get weapons of mass destruction suddenly seemed too great. Although few Americans feared Islam before 9/11, by the spring of 2003, a near majority — 49 percent — strongly perceived that half or more of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims were deeply anti-American, and a similar fraction also believed that Islam itself promoted violence.

The narrative — “it’s not what we do but who we are” — that Americans swallowed after 9/11, came ready-made. It is the narrative that provides the bedrock of Zionism by characterizing opposition to Israel’s creation and expansion as being an expression of anti-Semitism rather than a reaction to colonialism and dispossession.

Palestinians don’t attack Jews because their homes are being destroyed and their land is being taken away; Palestinians attack Jews because Palestinians hate Jews.

Al Qaeda didn’t attack Americans because American governments for many decades have propped up oppressive regimes across the Middle East and supported Zionism; al Qaeda attacked America because al Qaeda hates Americans.

In both Zionism and the war on terrorism, the refusal to deal with political injustice expresses itself through an ideological fixation on security and military solutions.

As Ariel Sharon focused on “dismantling the terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza and the West Bank, George Bush pursued a parallel course across the whole region. Americans and Israelis united in the belief that they were all innocent targets of the same implacable enemy: Islamic extremism.

Our war on terrorism was simply an extension of Israel’s war on terrorism — simply on a much larger scale. Naturally, we would borrow most of Israel’s techniques for tackling “the terrorists” — targeted killing, torture, extrajudicial detention, remote warfare and so forth.

And the underlying imperative was identical: that our righteous victimhood could not be questioned, our innocence was unassailable. Indeed it was our virtue that made us targets for attack.

If we were successful in dismantling the terrorist infrastructure or draining the swamp in which evil festered, we would save the world. We would engage in war without choice, knowing that we did so in the name of peace.

No wonder that on September 11, Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to contain his satisfaction about the way the attacks would help solidify the bond between Americans and Israelis. “It’s very good,” he said and then, quickly realizing his candor might not be well-received, added: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” The attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

Lies breed unconsciousness because they deprive intelligence of the invigorating effect of experience, thus, as we near the end of a decade of a war on terrorism we now inquire even less as shock has been given way to indifference.

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Israel’s human shields and live bait

Sharmine Narwani writes:

Logic dictates that the physical presence of half a million Jews in illegal settlements and outposts – connected through a maze of Jewish-only roads – has stealthily destroyed the possibility of a land-for-peace compromise. And Israel’s government has spent $17 billion on settlements since occupation began.

But here’s something we don’t talk about readily. Why would consecutive Israeli governments heavily subsidize and incentivize the relocation of young families – women and children – into hostile environments? Why would Israel – which claims security dangers wherever there are Palestinian populations – deliberately and systematically place its Jewish civilian population in “harm’s way?”

The settlers are Israel’s human shields and live bait.

“Naatzi! Naaaatzi!” This word, amazingly enough, is a settler favorite. “Nazis!” they screech at foreign TV crews, while waving their infants around. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,” they chant as they provocatively try to stop Palestinians from harvesting their olive crops. And the IDF soldiers wait and watch – occasionally intervening to push a frustrated and humiliated Palestinian objector away from a taunting, threatening Jewish settler.

Eventually, a half-crazed Palestinian will fight back, even kill some settlers. Israeli authorities immediately step in and claim the “Security Risk” has increased and more Palestinian land has to be confiscated to ensure Israel’s security. More Palestinians are detained, harassed, punished. More Palestinian homes are occupied or demolished. See how that works? Unleash your craziest Jews onto a Palestinian civilian population until someone blows a fuse and hits back. Then use that as the pretext to encroach further into the lives and onto the land of Palestinians.

Jewish settlers. Half a million of them in 121 illegal settlements and 102 illegal outposts. Human shields and live bait for Israel. The Jewish state’s frontline army for depopulating Palestinian land.

International law recognizes the right of a person living under occupation to resist or retaliate against occupying forces – nobody would question a Palestinian lashing out at an Israeli soldier. But kill a Jewish settler, and the lines get blurred fast. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the “occupier” (Israel) may not settle its populations (Jewish settlers) in occupied areas (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem), but these laws also do not permit the harming of civilians except in the case of self-defence during an act of violence. In other words, although Israel flagrantly violates the former law by incentivizing Israeli citizens to move into occupied Palestinian territory, these same international conventions do not allow Palestinians to willy-nilly defend their lives and property from Jewish settlers – except during actual hostilities, when they are usually at a considerable disadvantage.

But are settlers really “civilians” as intended by the protective language of the Fourth Geneva Convention? This is debatable on at least one score, as the language dealing with “protected persons” is often prefaced with “civilian persons who take no part in hostilities…”

“The Hilltop Youth consist of hundreds of young settler boys and girls who have become protectors of the illegal outposts pitched on Palestinian-owned land throughout the West Bank. Traumatized by Israel’s desettlement of Gaza, they have vowed to resist a similar fate, and heeding only the “law of God” and the religious-nationalist action calls from the likes of Judeo-fascist high-priestesses Daniella Weiss and Nadia Mattar, these kids have unleashed the newest waves of settler vigilantism: “Price-Tagging.”

Every time authorities act against the perceived interests of the settlers, the latter will exact a “price tag” by carrying out reprisals against nearby Palestinians and their property.

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Israel adopts non-violence with tasers and insults to a Holocaust survivor

If many Israelis thought the approach of the Mavi Marmara flotilla looked like an imminent attack by a Turkish armada, a British-flagged catamaran carrying nine Jewish activists on their way to Gaza surely posed no threat to the Jewish state — or did it?

The IDF couldn’t take any chances and so as the Irene approached Gaza early today, Israeli commandos intercepted the latest waterborne menace and took over the boat, thankfully without killing anyone.

“The boarding of the yacht was without incident, and no violence of any kind was used by neither the passengers on board nor the Israel naval forces,” the IDF Spokesperson blog declared.

Haaretz told a somewhat different story:

Israeli activist and former Israel Air Force pilot Yonatan Shapira saying that there were “no words to describe what we went through during the takeover.”

Shapira said the activists, who he said displayed no violence, were met with extreme IDF brutality, adding that the soldiers “just jumped us, and hit us. I was hit with a taser gun.”

“Some of the soldiers treated us atrociously,” Shapira said, adding that he felt there was a “huge gap between what the IDF spokesman is saying happened and what really happened.”

Meanwhile, Yossi Levy, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman who has been carefully trained in the Avigdor Lieberman school of diplomacy encapsulated the government’s position in a string of insults.

The Foreign Ministry expressed its anger against the Israelis and Jews who took part in the sail. According to a ministry official, “They poured fuel into the bonfire of hatred against Israel worldwide. We don’t expect Israelis to be patriotic, but they should definitely not act as Hamas followers.”

The official criticized former pilot Yonatan Shapira and the Holocaust survivor who took part in the flotilla.

“This former pilot, who has joined the ranks of Hamas and sprays hateful graffiti [“Free Palestine“] on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, is not a pilot but an astronaut. A Holocaust survivor who sanctifies the name of the Jews’ murderers and takes time to justify those who don’t accept Israel’s right for sovereignty has probably not learned anything from the terrible past.”

Reuben Moscowitz begged to differ as he expressed disbelief that “Israeli soldiers would treat nine Jews this way. They just hit people.”

“I as a Holocaust survivor cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is imprisoning an entire people behind fences,” Moscowitz said, adding that “it’s just immoral.”

“What happened to me in the Holocaust wakes me up every night and I hope we don’t do the same thing to our neighbors,” Moscowitz said, adding that he was comparing “what I went through during the Holocaust to what the besieged Palestinian children are going through.”

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Israel now in proximity talks with the US

Ever since — with much fanfare in Washington — Israel entered into direct talks with the Palestinian team led by acting president Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinians have insisted that the continuation of the talks would hinge on a continuation of a nominal settlement freeze due to expire on Sunday. Thus far, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has yet to agree to extend the so-called freeze. (With East Jerusalem excluded and work continuing on 3,000 housing units, it was never an actual freeze.)

The New York Times now reports that the Israelis want to cut a deal: that the US should release the infamous Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in exchange for a three-month extension of the freeze. An Israel Army Radio report is cited which “said a private individual had been asked to try to gauge the potential of such an offer ‘discreetly and informally’ with American officials.”

Why are the Israelis being so coy as to require the use of an intermediary at a time when Israeli and US officials are in constant direct communication?

Since 1987, Pollard, a US citizen who became an Israeli citizen in 1995, has been serving life in prison for spying on behalf of Israel. Israeli leaders and the Israel lobby in the US have subsequently engaged in a long-running campaign for his release. In 2007 Benjamin Netanyahu made a campaign pledge that if he became prime minister he would seek Pollard’s release.

At the end of the nineties there were hints, Israelis claimed, that Bill Clinton, at a critical juncture during Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, might be willing to yield to their requests. The US intelligence community immediately voiced strong objections.

As Seymour Hersh reported in 1999:

The President’s willingness to consider clemency for Pollard so upset the intelligence community that its leaders took an unusual step: they began to go public. In early December, four retired admirals who had served as director of Naval Intelligence circulated an article, eventually published in the Washington Post, in which they argued that Pollard’s release would be “irresponsible” and a victory for what they depicted as a “clever public relations campaign.” Since then, sensitive details about the secrets Pollard gave away have been made public by CBS and NBC.

In the course of my own interviews for this account, the officials who knew the most about Jonathan Pollard made it clear that they were talking because they no longer had confidence that President Clinton would do what they believed was the right thing — keep Pollard locked up. Pollard, these officials told me, had done far more damage to American national security than was ever made known to the public; for example, he betrayed elements of four major American intelligence systems. In their eyes, there is no distinction between betraying secrets to an enemy, such as the Soviet Union, and betraying secrets to an ally.

Officials are loath to talk publicly about it, but spying on allies is a fact of life: the United States invests billions annually to monitor the communications of its friends. Many American embassies around the world contain a clandestine intercept facility that targets diplomatic communications. The goal is not only to know the military and diplomatic plans of our friends but also to learn what intelligence they may be receiving and with whom they share information. “If a friendly state has friends that we don’t see as friends,” one senior official explained, sensitive intelligence that it should not possess — such as that supplied by Pollard — “can spread to others.” Many officials said they were convinced that information Pollard sold to the Israelis had ultimately wound up in the hands of the Soviet Union.

Pollard has now served 23 years in jail. Let’s suppose President Flexibility likes the chiropractic manipulation the Israelis now want to give him. What does the US get in return?

The charade of Israeli-Palestinian talks gets dragged on until after the mid-term elections. Maybe during that time the administration can get a marginally useful story about how it’s advancing the peace process.

But let’s be even sunnier in our outlook. Let’s suppose that after an extension, the US then wins an unimaginable victory: an Israeli agreement to a permanent settlement freeze.

Big deal.

As a new map produced by Americans For Peace Now makes clear, Israelis already have their feet firmly planted throughout the occupied West Bank. Freezing settlement growth really does nothing to end the occupation.

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Anti-Israel economic boycotts are gaining speed

In Haaretz, Nehemia Shtrasler writes:

The world is changing before our eyes. Five years ago the anti-Israel movement may have been marginal. Now it is growing into an economic problem.

Until now boycott organizers had been on the far left. They have a new ally: Islamic organizations that have strengthened greatly throughout Europe in the past two decades. The upshot is a red and green alliance with a significant power base. The red side has a name for championing human rights, while the green side has money. Their union is what led to the success of the Turkish flotilla.

They note that boycott is an especially effective weapon against Israel because Israel is a small country, dependent on exports and imports. They also point to the success of the economic boycott against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The anti-Israel tide rose right after Operation Cast Lead, as the world watched Israel pound Gaza with bombs on live television. No public-relations machine in the world could explain the deaths of hundreds of children, the destruction of neighborhoods and the grinding poverty afflicting a people under curfew for years. They weren’t even allowed to bring in screws to build school desks. Then came the flotilla, complete with prominent peace activists, which ended in nine deaths, adding fuel to the fire.

But underlying the anger against Israel lies disappointment. Since the establishment of the state, and before, we demanded special terms of the world. We played on their feelings of guilt, for standing idle while six million Jews were murdered.

David Ben-Gurion called us a light unto the nations and we stood tall and said, we, little David, would stand strong and righteous against the great evil Goliath.

The world appreciated that message and even, according to the foreign press, enabled us to develop the atom bomb in order to prevent a second Holocaust.

But then came the occupation, which turned us into the evil Goliath, the cruel oppressor, a darkness on the nations. And now we are paying the price of presenting ourselves as righteous and causing disappointment: boycott.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday fiercely attacked the diplomatic process with the Palestinians that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu began in Washington last week, telling Israel Beiteinu activists in the capital that a peace deal is “unachievable.”

In a lengthy address to more than a thousand supporters at the Rimonim (formerly Shalom) Hotel, Lieberman criticized previous governments and his own for not learning the lessons of 17 years of failed diplomatic negotiations.

He said he gets asked all the time why he is against hope, and he responds that he is for hope but against illusions.

“It must be understood that signing a comprehensive agreement in which both sides agree to end the conflict and end all of their claims and recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is a goal that is not achievable in the next year or in the next generation, so any historic compromises or painful concessions won’t help,” he said.

The best that could come out of the talks was a long-term interim agreement with the Palestinians, Lieberman said.

He promised that his party would fight against further construction freezes and unilateral concessions.

“Seventeen years should be enough time to realize what is and is not possible. I know there is pressure to continue the freeze, but I don’t know a single reason to do so.

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Hamas official: Israeli settlers are a legitimate military target

Haaretz reports:

Israeli settlers in the West Bank are legitimate targets since they are an army in every sense of the word, a senior Hamas official told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper on Saturday, adding that Palestinians were still committed to an armed struggle against Israel.

The comment by Ezzat al-Rashk, a member of Hamas’s political office, came in the wake of recent attacks against Israeli citizens in the West Bank.

On Tuesday, four Israelis were killed when unknown assailants opened fire at a vehicle they were traveling in near the West Bank city of Hebron. The following night, two Israelis were wounded in a similar shooting attack at the Rimonim Junction near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
[…]
“Attacking settlers is a natural thing,” al-Rashk told Al-Hayat on Saturday, saying the “Zionist settlers are the occupation’s first reserve military force.”

“They are now a real army in every sense of the word, with more than 500,000 automatic weapons at their disposal, on top of the basic protection by the [Israel Defense Forces],” the Hamas official said.

Al-Rashk also referred to the ongoing attempt to relaunch talks between Israel and the PA, saying they were noting more “than a media circus through which the U.S. administration wants to market its policy.”

Another Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, the organization’s Lebanon spokesperson, told the London-based newspaper that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was willing to forfeit “99 percent of the Palestinians’ rights, saying negotiations were over before they even began.

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The Israeli consensus: Palestinians are inferior

Update below

Israelis might argue about whether the settlements are going to destroy Zionism or help it survive; they differ much less when it comes to their views about Palestinians.

Gadi Taub is ringing the now familiar alarm bell that without a swift end to the occupation, Zionism itself will be in jeopardy. Salvation depends on partition.

The most pressing problem with the settlements is not that they are obstacles to a final peace accord, which is how settlement critics have often framed the issue. The danger is that they will doom Zionism itself.

If the road to partition is blocked, Israel will be forced to choose between two terrible options: Jewish-dominated apartheid or non-Jewish democracy. If Israel opts for apartheid, as the settlers wish, Israel will betray the beliefs it was founded on, become a pariah state and provoke the Arab population to an understandable rebellion. If a non-Jewish democracy is formally established, it is sure to be dysfunctional. Fatah and Hamas haven’t been able to reconcile their differences peacefully and rule the territories — throwing a large Jewish population into the mix is surely not going to produce a healthy liberal democracy. Think Lebanon, not Switzerland.

In truth, both options — and indeed all “one-state solutions” — lead to the same end: civil war. That is why the settlement problem should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, beginning with Israel’s. The religious settlement movement is not just secular Zionism’s ideological adversary, it is a danger to its very existence. Terrorism is a hazard, but it cannot destroy Herzl’s Zionist vision. More settlements and continued occupation can.

On the other side of the debate are Israelis such as Naftali Bennett, Benjamin Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and the recently named director-general of the settler advocacy group the Yesha Council.

When it comes to assessing the prospects for anything to be accomplished in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian talks, Bennett succinctly describes the power equation and thus the reason the talks will go nowhere: “It’s in their interest more than ours. We’re doing just fine.”

Bennett challenges much of the conventional wisdom about settlements and settlers — not surprising perhaps because he lives inside Israel and was a high-tech millionaire before entering politics.

He says: “My vision is 1 million Jews living in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], putting an end to the notion that we can have a Palestinian state in the heart of Israel.”

With over half a million Jews already planted inside the occupied territories, that vision is more than half way towards being realized. “Anyone considering the notion of expelling 80,000 or 150,000 Jews (from the West Bank) today should know that it’s simply impossible,” Bennett declares.

“We view Judea and Samaria as the bulwark of Israel, and Israel as the bulwark for the West against Islamic terrorism. We are the security shield of Israel. That’s fundamentally how people in Judea and Samaria see it. People see it as a mission to maintain and protect this area for the Jewish people.”

Since he rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, the Los Angeles Times asks Bennett what alternative he envisions:

The alternative is peaceful coexistence on the ground and simply strengthening the current, very positive trends with the economy and security. Removing the roadblocks. Giving Palestinians political rights to vote for themselves. If they want to reach an agreement with Jordan to give them citizenship, so be it. If we need to make adjustments to make life better, we can.

Many Palestinians say the status quo is unfair and not acceptable.

There wouldn’t be apartheid. They’d rule themselves and we’d rule ourselves. We’d drive on the same roads. Arabs have fairly good lives. The overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people want peaceful coexistence. It’s just their leaders who are not OK with it.

It’s not perfect. They want a full-blown state. But it’s a zero-sum game. If they have a state, we’ll cease to exist. That’s the best we can do.

What’s interesting in looking at these contrasting Israeli views of the settlements is that beneath the divergence in analysis, there is an Israeli consensus: they see no real basis for Palestinian self determination. Palestinians would undermine the effective functioning of any democracy other than a Jewish-controlled “democracy,” but they can rule themselves so long as they don’t imagine they can have their own fully sovereign state.

Whether viewed from the left or the right, the one thing most Jewish Israelis seem to agree on (even if they differ in how bluntly they will state this) is that they regard Palestinians as their inferiors.

Update: Following a shooting attack in which Palestinian gunmen killed four Israelis outside the Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron on Tuesday, settlement leaders were quick to call for talks due to start in Washington on Wednesday, to be cancelled.

The Jerusalem Post reported:

The head of the Mount Hebron Regional Council, Tzvika Bar-Hai, called on Netanyahu to cancel the Washington talks.

“There is no place for negotiations with those who respond with deadly fire to our hand outstretched for peace,” he said.

“It is time for the leaders of Israel to wake up from the illusion of false peace,” Bar-Hai added.

“We’re talking about one of the worst terrorist attacks in the past few years,” said Naftali Bennet, director-general of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

“We’re asking that the prime minister immediately turn the plane around and come back to Israel. It’s not possible, while we’re holding funerals, that he can stay there. And we’re calling on him, tomorrow morning, to renew the building in Judea and Samaria,” he said.

The council announced Tuesday night that it would respond to the attack by unilaterally ending the construction freeze and starting to build on Wednesday.

A Yesha Council statement said: “The Zionist answer is to build and support. They shoot and we build. Each does as he believes.”

Although a spokesman for Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack, Ynet reported:

Earlier on Tuesday, Hamas Spokesman Fawzi Barhum addressed the attack but did not claim responsibility for it.

“The attack was not meant to impede direct negotiations which failed prior to even starting. This is a natural response by the Palestinian resistance to the enemy’s crimes, and is proof that despite the resistance’s persecution by the security services and despite Israel’s crimes, the Palestinians are capable of responding to these crimes,” he said.

Barhum stressed that the attack was the type of response “which the enemy and occupation should expect. The Palestinian resistance is alive, well and kicking.”

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What happens when a country has no borders?

In the hours leading up to the Mavi Marmara massacre, Israel extended like a cloud whose shadow spread deep into the Mediterranean. The Turkish ship’s captain took evasive action but it’s hard to escape the reach of a nation whose borders are so elastic.

Anyone who reads the Israeli press will sooner or later notice one of the curious features about Israel’s geographic identity. Politicians talk about threats from the north and the south in such a way that Israel sounds like a legendary kingdom on whose periphery are regions of darkness. It doesn’t have borders as such but instead margins of indeterminate depth where it is dangerous to venture.

This might explain in part the mythopoetic imagination through which Israelis see themselves heroically standing up against the forces of evil. It also suggests why it is that a very modern state has a medieval view of the world.

Benjamin Netanyahu warned his cabinet this weekend: “Dark forces from the Middle Ages are raging against us. I have received calls from concerned officials in the Balkans and Eastern Europe who are very worried about these developments.”

The mission of the Mavi Marmara, Netanyahu seems to hint, signaled the beginning of an attempt to re-establish an Ottoman Caliphate that once again threatens to take control of the Holy Land. Nevertheless, at such a historic juncture, it’s perhaps surprising that the commander of Israel’s military forces was apparently asleep.

Was this an expression of the unshakable confidence IDF’s commander in chief has in his soldiers, or (more likely) the blasé attitude with which Israel operates in the international arena?

Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi was not present in the IDF’s Tel Aviv command center during the first part of the maritime takeover of the Gaza-bound Turkish ship Mavi Marmara on May 31, Haaretz learned Sunday.

Instead, the most senior officer supervising the raid was Major General Tal Russo, IDF Chief of Operations, with Ashkenazi arriving only after the takeover had taken a turn for the worse.

The absence of both Ashkenazi and his second in command, Major General Benny Ganz, will be one of the issues to be reviewed by the specialist panel named by the IDF chief to probe the raid, headed by retired major general Giora Eiland.

No wonder Israel has been dragging its feet in responding to calls for an international investigation. But now, thanks to the Obama administration, it looks like Israel may once again avoid being held accountable for its actions.

Israel last night flouted pressure for an independent international inquiry into the lethal assault two weeks ago on a flotilla of ships attempting to break the blockade on Gaza, announcing an internal investigation with two foreign observers.

The White House gave its approval for the Israeli formula, which will be confirmed by the Israeli cabinet today.

The inquiry into the raid, in which nine Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara were killed, will be headed by a former Israeli supreme court judge, Yaakov Tirkel. The foreign observers are the former Northern Ireland first minister David Trimble and a Canadian judge, Ken Watkin. They will have no voting rights.

The inquiry falls short of a UN proposal for an international investigation, but was agreed after consultation with the US. The White House said last night that the Israeli inquiry meets the standard of “prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation”.

The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, told Fox News on Sunday:

“We think that an international component would strengthen the investigation and certainly buttress its credibility in the eyes of the international community, and we’ve had discussions with Israel as to how and whether they might go about doing that,” Rice said.

But she added it’s “obviously ultimately the Israelis’ choice” whether to participate in such a group evaluation.

“Our view is that Israel, as a democracy, as a country with a tradition of strong military justice, can conduct an investigation of this sort however it chooses to constitute it,” she said, adding, “We are not pressuring Israel to participate in anything that it chooses not to participate in.”

In effect, what the United States is saying is that unlike any other country on the planet, Israel has the right construct its own definition of the term “international.” Israel when operating outside even its own self-determined boundaries of sovereignty, when conducting an assault on a ship operating under a Turkish flag and killing Turkish citizens, nevertheless has the “right” to say, “this is our business” — and Washington agrees.

Sefi Rachlevsky describes what happens when a nation refuses to set its own limits.

Israel gave itself a nice present to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of losing its borders. The raid on the Gaza flotilla in international waters is like the first Lebanon War – as if in a nightmarish experiment, we seem to be examining the question: What happens when a country has no borders?

Israel’s maritime attack did not happen by chance. A border is one of the fundamental factors that defines a country. Decades without one have distorted Israel’s thinking.

It is self-evident that, just as a person cannot build in an area that he does not own, a country cannot build settlements outside of its borders. And yet Israel has settled hundreds of thousands of its citizens in areas that, according to its laws, are not part of the State of Israel.

It is self-evident that any couple can marry “without regard to religion, race or gender.” And yet in Israel a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman cannot legally marry. It’s self-evident that there is no arbitrary discrimination, and yet it’s enough to use the magic words “I’m a religious woman” or “I’m an ultra-Orthodox man” and the obligation to serve in the military evaporates.

It’s self-evident that the education provided to children be based on democracy and equality. And yet in Israel, 52 percent of first-graders defined as Jews study in various religious school systems that teach students things like “You are considered a human being and the other nations of the world are not considered human beings.”

They are taught that a non-Jew is not a human being, and that anyone who kills a non-Jew is not supposed to be killed by human hands; that women are inferior, and it is an obligation that males and females be separated; and that secular people, or anyone with secular family members, cannot enter these schools.

It is self-evident that racist education cannot be funded by the government and is illegal. And yet most of the country’s first-graders receive such “compulsory education” from their government.

The results of this nightmarish experiment are self-evident. In the most recent elections, 35 percent of voters defined as Jews cast their ballots for avowedly racist parties – Yisrael Beitenu, Shas, National Union and their friends.

Critics in the Israeli media wake up only when mistakes are made. That is why – after initially cheering the declaration that “the flotilla will not pass” – they changed their tune following the imbroglio, turning into advocates of the twisted logic “be smart, not right.” But what justice is there in an attack on civilians by soldiers on the open seas?

Like the territories, international waters are not Israel; they are outside its borders. A Turkish ship on the open sea is, in effect, a floating Turkish island. An Israeli attack on such an island is not all that different from sending the Israel Defense Forces to take on demonstrators at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. There, too, unpleasant people who are not friends of Israel can sometimes be found.

Turkey, which is a member of NATO, was not in a state of war with Israel before the attack. Attacking its citizens on territory that is by definition Turkish is another expression of the Israeli lunacy that lacks any kind of boundaries.

An attack beyond the border must be reserved for extreme cases involving a military target that represents an entity fighting against the country and when citizens are in danger. But civilian ships, that are not carrying weapons, but are bringing civilian aid to a population that is denied chocolate, toys and notebooks, are not nuclear reactors in Iraq, Syria or Iran.

A person who grows up without external borders tends to create distorted internal borders. That is the reason for the attack on Arab MK Hanin Zuabi and her colleagues. While there were certain Arab public figures who went too far in their statements, joining a civilian aid flotilla is one of those legitimate acts which are supposed to be self-evident.

And yet, what was self-evident became betrayal. And citizenship, one of the unconditional foundations of existence, has turned into something that can be revoked – in this case on the basis of ethnicity, a tactic used in fascist regimes. The street has returned to the atmosphere that prevailed under “responsible” opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and led to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – and the next murder is in the air.

The Israeli deed at sea is liable to reach The Hague. The problem is that Israel has genuine enemies who want to destroy it. A country that does not do everything in its power to accumulate legitimacy, along with turning Iran into an entity that is losing legitimacy and can therefore become a target of activities to undermine it, is a country losing its basic survival instinct. Without borders, it turns out, you lose even that.

Young Israelis who have grown up without borders are now dancing and singing “In blood and fire we will expel Turkey” and “Mohammed is dead.” If this keeps up, Israel will not make it to The Hague. The entity gradually replacing the State of Israel is liable not to exist long enough to get there.

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Democrats afraid of Jewish revenge in midterms

The niceties of America’s often straight-laced political discourse generally preclude the use of a phrase as provocative as this: Jewish revenge. One of the virtues of the Israeli press, however, is that it can be refreshingly blunt.

“Officials in the Democratic Party are afraid that the Jews will take revenge in the midterm elections, which is the reason for the vigorous courting of Israel,” reports Yedioth Ahronoth today. Some of the courting the paper refers to just came from White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose recent trip to Israel was ostensibly a family affair — he was there to attend his son’s Bar Mitzvah — but it turned out that he also had important and very public business to take care of: a kiss-and-make-up session with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Didi Remez provides an English translation of the Hebrew report:

According to reports that reached Jerusalem, it is no coincidence that Obama and his staff have suddenly begun to speak warmly about Israel, to compliment it for the good will gestures it extended to the Palestinians and mainly to admit that they had erred by treating Israel unfairly in Obama’s first year. It appears that the Obama administration’s attack on Netanyahu after the publication of the tender to build 1,6000 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo backfired.

Information that was received by Israeli sources would seem to indicate that the principal reason for the change in approach to Israel is pressure from Democrat lawmakers who are running for election and are finding themselves hard put to enlist Jewish donors to their campaigns. There is a great deal of anger at Obama within the Jewish community and disappointment over his policy toward Israel. Officials in the Democratic Party are afraid that the Jews will take revenge in the midterm elections, which is the reason for the vigorous courting of Israel. In other words, the fear is that the Jewish vote will gravitate away from Democratic candidates to Republicans.

The report concludes by saying that the Obama administration is afraid of another clash with Netanyahu when the settlement “freeze” expires in September. “The hope is that Obama will be able to persuade Netanyahu to extend the construction freeze by means of a friendly request and thereby avoid a damaging confrontation.” Right!

The brief lull in West Bank colonization construction operations was surely timed to expire exactly when Obama could effectively be bound and gagged by the Israel lobby, right before the elections.

When ministers in the Israeli government triumphantly break ground on new settlement projects this fall, we shouldn’t expect to hear even a squeak of disapproval come out of Washington.

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To See If I Am Smiling

In the documentary, To See If I Am Smiling (released in 2007), six young Israeli women recount their experiences of military service in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The title comes from a story told by Meytal, a medic and medical officer. Having described how cleaning the corpses of Palestinians after they had been brutalized by Israeli soldiers had become a routine part of her job, she goes on to recount a particular moment that still haunts her: when she posed for a photograph next to a corpse.

I’m not sure when it was, but at some point I became very ashamed of that picture. And I didn’t tell anyone about it, that it existed. I forgot about it a little. But I would like to see it. To see if I look different. I want to see if I’m still smiling.

The photograph is not shown in the documentary, but in the mind’s eye of most Americans it probably evokes memories of Abu Ghraib.

Such images are iconic because they capture the moment in which a soldier discovers that he or she has become the very thing they fear. The dehumanized other is a vortex from which there is no escape.

If a nation can have such a thing as a soul, To See If I Am Smiling, reveals how profoundly Israel’s soul has been scarred by 43 years of occupation. A fully militarized society has shackled itself to a conviction — we have no choice — whereby each individual can then bury their own awareness of complicity and moral responsibility under a collective weight of irresistible necessity.

But even among Israelis who are comfortably indifferent to the plight of Palestinians, one has to wonder: how do they account for what they have done to their own sons and daughters?

As a nation struggles to avoid looking at itself, no wonder the fury and passion with which it attacks those who hold up a mirror.

Watch this 60-minute documentary.

Tamar Yarom, the film’s director, gave the following interview in 2008 at the ZagrebDox international documentary film festival:

(H/t to Marsha Cohen.)

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Palestinian roads: cementing statehood, or Israeli annexation?

At The Nation, Nadia Hijab and Jesse Rosenfeld write:

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has staked his political credibility on securing a Palestinian state by 2011 in the entire West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, a program enthusiastically embraced by the international community. Ambitious PA plans include roads and other infrastructure across the West Bank, with funds provided by the United States, Europe and other donors.

Fayyad has argued that development will make the reality of a Palestinian state impossible to ignore. However, many of the new roads facilitate Israeli settlement expansion and pave the way for the seizure of main West Bank highways for exclusive Israeli use.

For decades Israel has carried out its own infrastructure projects in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. These include a segregated road network that, together with the separation wall Israel began building in 2002, divides Palestinian areas from each other while bringing the settlements–all of which are illegal under international law–closer to Israel.

Now, armed with information from United Nations sources and their own research, Palestinian nongovernmental organizations are raising the alarm. Their evidence spotlights the extent to which PA road-building is facilitating the Israeli goal of annexing vast areas of the West Bank–making a viable Palestinian state impossible.

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Israeli military order will enable mass deportation from West Bank

For those of us who in a practical sense really don’t know what it means to be living under a military occupation, “the occupation” — as Israel’s military control of the West Bank has come to be known — has after 43 years acquired an ambiance of normality. Yet as an Israeli such as Michel Warschawski understands, to be living under occupation, resonates for many Jews with their own experience of living in German-occupied Europe.

Amira Hass now reports on the latest move to impose punitive regulations on the Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years.

When the order comes into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.

Given the security authorities’ actions over the past decade, the first Palestinians likely to be targeted under the new rules will be those whose ID cards bear home addresses in the Gaza Strip – people born in Gaza and their West Bank-born children – or those born in the West Bank or abroad who for various reasons lost their residency status. Also likely to be targeted are foreign-born spouses of Palestinians.

Until now, Israeli civil courts have occasionally prevented the expulsion of these three groups from the West Bank. The new order, however, puts them under the sole jurisdiction of Israeli military courts.

The new order defines anyone who enters the West Bank illegally as an infiltrator, as well as “a person who is present in the area and does not lawfully hold a permit.” The order takes the original 1969 definition of infiltrator to the extreme, as the term originally applied only to those illegally staying in Israel after having passed through countries then classified as enemy states – Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.

The order’s language is both general and ambiguous, stipulating that the term infiltrator will also be applied to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, citizens of countries with which Israel has friendly ties (such as the United States) and Israeli citizens, whether Arab or Jewish. All this depends on the judgment of Israel Defense Forces commanders in the field.

The Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual was the first Israeli human rights to issue warnings against the order, signed six months ago by then-commander of IDF forces in Judea and Samaria Area Gadi Shamni.

Two weeks ago, Hamoked director Dalia Kerstein sent GOC Central Command Avi Mizrahi a request to delay the order, given “the dramatic change it causes in relation to the human rights of a tremendous number of people.”

According to the provisions, “a person is presumed to be an infiltrator if he is present in the area without a document or permit which attest to his lawful presence in the area without reasonable justification.” Such documentation, it says, must be “issued by the commander of IDF forces in the Judea and Samaria area or someone acting on his behalf.”

The instructions, however, are unclear over whether the permits referred to are those currently in force, or also refer to new permits that military commanders might issue in the future. The provision are also unclear about the status of bearers of West Bank residency cards, and disregards the existence of the Palestinian Authority and the agreements Israel signed with it and the PLO.

The order stipulates that if a commander discovers that an infiltrator has recently entered a given area, he “may order his deportation before 72 hours elapse from the time he is served the written deportation order, provided the infiltrator is deported to the country or area from whence he infiltrated.”

The order also allows for criminal proceedings against suspected infiltrators that could produce sentences of up to seven years. Individuals able to prove that they entered the West Bank legally but without permission to remain there will also be tried, on charges carrying a maximum sentence of three years. (According to current Israeli law, illegal residents typically receive one-year sentences.)

The new provision also allow the IDF commander in the area to require that the infiltrator pay for the cost of his own detention, custody and expulsion, up to a total of NIS 7,500.

The fear that Palestinians with Gaza addresses will be the first to be targeted by this order is based on measures that Israel has taken in recent years to curtail their right to live, work, study or even visit the West Bank. These measures violated the Oslo Accords.

According to a decision by the West Bank commander that was not backed by military legislation, since 2007, Palestinians with Gaza addresses must request a permit to stay in the West Bank. Since 2000, they have been defined as illegal sojourners if they have Gaza addresses, as if they were citizens of a foreign state. Many of them have been deported to Gaza, including those born in the West Bank.

Currently, Palestinians need special permits to enter areas near the separation fence, even if their homes are there, and Palestinians have long been barred from the Jordan Valley without special authorization. Until 2009, East Jerusalemites needed permission to enter Area A, territory under full PA control.

Another group expected to be particularly harmed by the new rules are Palestinians who moved to the West Bank under family reunification provisions, which Israel stopped granting for several years.

In 2007, amid a number of Hamoked petitions and as a goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, tens of thousands of people received Palestinian residency cards. The PA distributed the cards, but Israel had exclusive control over who could receive them. Thousands of Palestinians, however, remained classified as “illegal sojourners,” including many who are not citizens of any other country.

The new order is the latest step by the Israeli government in recent years to require permits that limit the freedom of movement and residency previously conferred by Palestinian ID cards. The new regulations are particularly sweeping, allowing for criminal measures and the mass expulsion of people from their homes.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office said in response, “The amendments to the order on preventing infiltration, signed by GOC Central Command, were issued as part of a series of manifests, orders and appointments in Judea and Samaria, in Hebrew and Arabic as required, and will be posted in the offices of the Civil Administration and military courts’ defense attorneys in Judea and Samaria. The IDF is ready to implement the order, which is not intended to apply to Israelis, but to illegal sojourners in Judea and Samaria.”

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