The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing - Opinion. Israelis Who Don't Know Occupation Can't Preach to Palestinian Stone-Throwers. Only Those Who Have Seen Occupation Can Understand getty images Fighting Back: Most Israelis have no idea what it’s like to live under occupation. So they shouldn’t judge how Palestinians fight back against the occupiers. By Mairav Zonszein Published April 15, 2013. Last week, veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass stirred up a controversy in the media here with an op-ed in Haaretz that opens: “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” Hass, who has been living and reporting from the occupied Palestinian territories for 20 years, goes on to suggest that Palestinians should develop an educational curriculum on resistance to Israeli occupation that, for example, teaches to distinguish between soldiers as legitimate targets vs. civilians. Most Jewish Israelis will admit the “occupation” is bad, but few have ever gotten a taste of what it feels like to be anywhere near the receiving end of it.
These are incidents I had to see to believe. Peace Process Pulls at Germany-Israel Ties. Israelis Who Don't Know Occupation Can't Preach to Palestinian Stone-Throwers. Life Under Lockdown by Jamal Mahjoub. Residents of the Gaza Strip are restricted in their movements, in what they can bring into and send out of their land, even how far off their shores they can fish. Words, though, know no borders. Image courtesy Yossi Gurvitz As we pass under the “Welcome to Gaza” sign, a ripple of excitement goes through the bus and everyone grabs their telephones to record the moment. After three hours spent killing time at the Rafah Border Crossing while the Egyptian officials decided whether they would allow us through (the Egyptian Ministry of Interior didn’t grant us permission to travel to Gaza until the day before our scheduled departure) and eight hours of driving from Cairo, it feels like a victory to have made it through at all.
Two writers from our group were refused entry and have had to drive back to Cairo to find the necessary papers. As we travel on towards Gaza City, night falls over a landscape that appears eerily normal. This is valuable land, rich and fertile. Renegade Jewish Settlers Part 1/5. Jewish settlers and Palestinians: Little by little. Life Under Lockdown by Jamal Mahjoub. Resistance in the West Bank. Renegade Jewish Settlers Part 1/5. Conflict Zone, Part 1: Uneasy Coexistence. The Tunnels of Gaza. Editor’s note: As this issue went to press, the conflict in Gaza escalated.
Hamas and other groups stepped up rocket fire on Israel, and the Israel Defense Forces launched an air and sea assault on Gaza, targeting the Hamas leadership and sites containing rockets and other weapons, along with civil government and media offices. Israel also extensively bombed the smuggling tunnels in Rafah. For as long as they worked in the smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip, Samir and his brother Yussef suspected they might one day die in them.
When Yussef did die, on a cold night in 2011, his end came much as they’d imagined it might, under a crushing hail of earth. It was about 9 p.m., and the brothers were on a night shift doing maintenance on the tunnel, which, like many of its kind—and there are hundreds stretching between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—was lethally shoddy in its construction. Then the tunnel gave way again, and Yussef disappeared. “Everybody loved him,” Samir said. A ‘no-strategy’ strategy: The Gatekeepers and soldier testimonies. Do not be misled by the paranoid helplessness of the six powerful men in Dror Moreh’s film – t he end goal of Israel’s military rule is the complete demise of the dream of Palestinian independence. By Oded Na’aman A Palestinian woman shows her ID to an Israeli border policeman, while Palestinian security forces stand in the background, as she crosses from the Qalandiya checkpoint on the first Friday of Ramadan, July 20, 2012. (photo: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org) Ami Ayalon, former head of the Israeli Shin Bet, grew up on a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee.
“I had a wonderful childhood,” he says toward the end of Dror Moreh’s Oscar nominated documentary, “The Gatekeepers” : I knew that there’s a house in Jerusalem, and on the second floor there’s a long corridor. Ami Ayalon is one of six former heads of the Shin Bet who are the protagonists of Moreh’s highly praised documentary. But it is a mistake to conclude from this that Israel is in fact a slave to threats against its security. Israeli corporal Ari Ben Reuven says: “break every bone” of crying Palestinian boy seized on way to school. The Electronic Intifada has captured even more horrifyingly racist and violent statements by Israeli soldiers on Facebook targeting Palestinian children as part of our effort to document this widespread phenomenon. On the day US President Barack Obama arrived for his Israel visit last week, Israeli occupation forces in Hebron violently seized and detained dozens of Palestinian children, some aged as young as eight, on their way to school.
The harrowing video, above, of the Israeli army attack on the children went viral on YouTube. B’Tselem, the Israeli organization that documents and criticizes some of Israel’s human rights abuses and which posted the video, condemned the mass arrest of the children as “unlawful” and said that some of the children had been taken to interrogation centers where severe and systematic abuses, including holding children in solitary confinement and harsh interrogation without parents or lawyers present, is the norm. “A bullet in his mouth” Occupation 101 part 01 of 10. Obama slights Palestinians, who stage Tent Protests. Aljazeera English reports on Obama’s opening remarks on arrival in Israel, and how he called Palestine the historic homeland of the Jews but neglected to mention the Palestinians. Non-Jewish Palestinians have lived in geographical Palestine for nearly 2000 years, first as Christians and after the Muslim conquest gradually becoming majority Muslim (and they been the vast majority of inhabitants for much of that time).
Since Judaism probably did not emerge from the Canaanite people/religion until the 1000s BC or later, and since by 1000 AD most Jews in Palestine had converted to other religions and the Jewish presence there was thereafter slight until the late 19th century, the non-Jewish presence in that land has arguably been as or more significant than the Jewish-majority period. Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan very nearly equal the number of Jews in Israel and the West Bank, and the two populations will likely be equal by 2020.
How Obama's Jerusalem Visit Undermines Peace (Rashid Khalidi Video. A Pillar Built on Sand. In response to a recent upsurge in tit for tat strikes between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel decided to ratchet up the violence even further by assassinating Hamas’s military chief, Ahmad Jabari. Hamas, which had been playing a minor role in these exchanges and even appears to have been interested in working out a long-term ceasefire, predictably responded by launching hundreds of rockets into Israel, a few even landing near Tel Aviv. Not surprisingly, the Israelis have threatened a wider conflict, to include a possible invasion of Gaza to topple Hamas and eliminate the rocket threat. There is some chance that Operation ‘Pillar of Defence’, as the Israelis are calling their current campaign, might become a full-scale war. But even if it does, it will not put an end to Israel’s troubles in Gaza.
Israel can use force against Hamas in three distinct ways. Second, the Israelis can invade Gaza and take it over. So what is going on here? The demographic success of Israel's settlement project - Opinion. The United Nations General Assembly recognised Palestine as a "non-member state". But it may very well be that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has already missed the boat.
With the help of graphic designer, Michal Vexler, we have created an infogram to illustrate and explain how demographic changes within the West Bank obstruct the possibility of the two-state solution. The numbers suggest that Abbas' bid to the United Nations was too little, too late. Source for the infogram: Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, International Data Base, US Census, and Israeli Statistical Abstract, 2009, 2010, 2011. Neve Gordon is the author of Israel's Occupation and can be reached through his website.
Yinon Cohen is Yerushalmi Professor of Israel and Jewish Studies, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York, and can be reached through his website. The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. Yitzhak Laor reviews ‘1967’ by Tom Segev, translated by Jessica Cohen · LRB 1 November 2007. 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev, translated by Jessica Cohen Little, Brown, 673 pp, £25.00, May 2007, ISBN 978 0 316 72478 4 The 1967 war changed the lives of Israelis and made Palestinian lives hell. Shortly after it, Israel’s Labour prime minister, Levi Eshkol, a relative moderate, approved the colonisation of the West Bank.
The Labour Party never really opposed the process, though for years it seemed to have its doubts. That way of carrying on – appearing indecisive, sounding hesitant, while acting decisively, even aggressively – is a key component of Israeli politics. Since 1967 Labour men and women in various parts of the state apparatus, from the military to the Jewish Agency, have done everything in their power to tighten Israel’s hold over the Occupied Territories, even when it meant creating a golem in the new guise of the settler.
There were times when the politicians even outdid the generals. You are not logged in. Witness - Beirut Photographer. Henry Siegman reviews ‘The Accidental Empire’ by Gershom Gorenberg and ‘Lords of the Land’ by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar · LRB 10 April 2008. The title of Gershom Gorenberg’s book is somewhat misleading in its suggestion that the establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was ‘accidental’. While Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist, notes that no Israeli government ever made a formal decision about the future of the West Bank, his account of the first decade of Israel’s occupation leaves no doubt that the settlements were deliberately founded, and were intended to create a permanent Israeli presence in as much of the Occupied Territories as possible (indeed, the hope was for them to cover all of the Occupied Territories, if the international community would allow it).
No Israeli government has ever supported the establishment of a Palestinian state east of the 1949 armistice line that constituted the pre-1967 border. At the very least, the settlements were designed to make a return to that border impossible. The story is a lie. Has violent sociopathic elements. The Roots of Israeli Attack on Gaza.
Sherine Tadros: Covering This Gaza War. It's incredible to watch this war being covered on the inside, as it should have been during the previous war, by hundreds of foreign as well as local journalists. In 2008 Israel and Egypt sealed their borders confining the journalists to the outskirts of the war inside the Strip. Myself and Ayman Mohyeldin (now NBC Foreign Affairs Correspondent) were left to describe what was happening to the outside world. We couldn't cover every strike, every tragedy, we couldn't be everywhere and we weren't awake 24 hours a day. Now, Gaza is under the microscope, whether via social media, print, radio, TV -- there is no ignoring what is raging within.
I have my own theories as to why Israel decided not to lock out the journalists this time around, but that is for another post. Gaza is not a particularly hard story to cover; it's happening all around you. But it's precisely that which journalists struggle with. There is a general problem with media when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Al Jazeera World Going Against The Grain... Israel's censorship laws shine a spotlight instead of hushing up the blunder Israel News.