VIDEO: Israel Opens ‘Valley of Gaza’ Dam Gates and Flood Gaza

Gaza is declared a humanitarian disaster and in a state of emergency after Israel opens flood gates to an Israeli dam which then flooded eastern parts of Gaza, forcing hundreds of people to flee their homes.

GAZA: ONE YEAR ON: ‘Israel resembles a failed state’

One year has passed since the savage Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, but for the people there time might as well have stood still.

Since Palestinians in Gaza buried their loved ones – more than 1,400 people, almost 400 of them children – there has been little healing and virtually no reconstruction.

According to international aid agencies, only 41 trucks of building supplies have been allowed into Gaza during the year.

Promises of billions made at a donors’ conference in Egypt last March attended by luminaries of the so-called “international community” and the Middle East peace process industry are unfulfilled, and the Israeli siege, supported by the US, the European Union, Arab states, and tacitly by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, continues.

Policy of destruction

Amid the endless, horrifying statistics a few stand out: Of Gaza’s 640 schools, 18 were completely destroyed and 280 damaged in Israeli attacks. Two-hundred-and-fifty students and 15 teachers were killed.

Of 122 health facilities assessed by the World Health Organization, 48 per cent were damaged or destroyed.

in depth

Ninety per cent of households in Gaza still experience power cuts for 4 to 8 hours per day due to Israeli attacks on the power grid and degradation caused by the blockade.

Forty-six per cent of Gaza’s once productive agricultural land is out of use due to Israeli damage to farms and Israeli-declared free fire zones. Gaza’s exports of more than 130,000 tonnes per year of tomatoes, flowers, strawberries and other fruit have fallen to zero.

That “much of Gaza still lies in ruins,” a coalition of international aid agencies stated recently, “is not an accident; it is a matter of policy”.

This policy has been clear all along and it has nothing to do with Israeli “security”.

Destroying resistance

From June 19, 2008, to November 4, 2008, calm prevailed between Israel and Gaza, as Hamas adhered strictly – as even Israel has acknowledged – to a negotiated ceasefire.

That ceasefire collapsed when Israel launched a surprise attack on Gaza killing six people, after which Hamas and other resistance factions retaliated.

Even so, Palestinian factions were still willing to renew the ceasefire, but it was Israel that refused, choosing instead to launch a premeditated, systematic attack on the foundations of civilised life in the Gaza Strip.

Author says the war aimed to erode support for Hamas but failed to do so [GALLO/GETTY]

Operation Cast Lead, as Israel dubbed it, was an attempt to destroy once and for all Palestinian resistance in general, and Hamas in particular, which had won the 2006 election and survived the blockade and numerous US-sponsored attempts to undermine and overthrow it in cooperation with US-backed Palestinian militias.

Like the murderous sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s, the blockade of Gaza was calculated to deprive civilians of basic necessities, rights and dignity in the hope that their suffering might force their leadership to surrender or collapse.

In many respects things may seem more dire than a year ago.

Barack Obama, the US president, whom many hoped would change the vicious anti-Palestinian policies of his predecessor, George Bush, has instead entrenched them as even the pretense of a serious peace effort has vanished.

According to media reports, the US Army Corps of Engineers is assisting Egypt in building an underground wall on its border with Gaza to block the tunnels which act as a lifeline for the besieged territory [resources and efforts that ought to go into rebuilding still hurricane-devastated New Orleans], and American weapons continue to flow to West Bank militias engaged in a US- and Israeli-sponsored civil war against Hamas and anyone else who might resist Israeli occupation and colonisation.

Shifting public opinion

These facts are inescapable and bleak.

However, to focus on them alone would be to miss a much more dynamic situation that suggests Israel’s power and impunity are not as invulnerable as they appear from this snapshot.

A year after Israel’s attack and after more than two-and-a-half years of blockade, the Palestinian people in Gaza have not surrendered. Instead they have offered the world lessons in steadfastness and dignity, even at an appalling, unimaginable cost.

It is true that the European Union leaders who came to occupied Jerusalem last January to publicly embrace Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, – while white phosphorus seared the flesh of Gazan children and bodies lay under the rubble – still cower before their respective Israel lobbies, as do American and Canadian politicians.
But the shift in public opinion is palpable as Israel’s own actions transform it into a pariah whose driving forces are not the liberal democratic values with which it claims to identify, but ultra-nationalism, racism, religious fanaticism, settler-colonialism and a Jewish supremacist order maintained by frequent massacres.

The universalist cause of justice and liberation for Palestinians is gaining adherents and momentum especially among the young.

I witnessed it, for example, among Malaysian students I met at a Palestine solidarity conference held by the Union of NGOs of The Islamic World in Istanbul last May.

And again in November, as hundreds of student organisers from across the US and Canada converged to plan their participation in the global Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions modeled on the successful struggle against South African apartheid in the 1980s.

‘Bankrupt’ state

This week, thousands of people from dozens of countries are attempting to reach Gaza to break the siege and march alongside Palestinians who have been organising inside the territory.

Each of the individuals traveling with the Gaza Freedom March, Viva Palestina, or other delegations represents perhaps hundreds of others who could not make the journey in person, and who are marking the event with demonstrations and commemorations, visits to their elected officials, and media campaigns.

Against this flowering of activism, Zionism is struggling to rejuvenate its dwindling base of support.

Multi-million dollar programmes aimed at recruiting and Zionising young American Jews are struggling to compete against organisations like the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which run not on money but principled commitment to human equality.

Increasingly, we see that Israel’s hasbara [propaganda] efforts have no positive message, offer no plausible case for maintaining a status quo of unspeakable repression and violence, and rely instead on racist demonisation and dehumanisation of Arabs and Muslims to justify Israel’s actions and even its very existence.

Faced with growing global recognition and support for the courageous non-violent struggle against continued land theft in the West Bank, Israel is escalating its violence and kidnapping of leaders of the movement in Bil’in and other villages [Muhammad Othman, Jamal Juma and Abdallah Abu Rahmeh are among the leaders of this movement recently arrested].

Travel fears

In acting this way, Israel increasingly resembles a bankrupt failed state, not a regime confident about its legitimacy and longevity.

And despite the failed peace process industry’s efforts to ridicule, suppress and marginalise it, there is a growing debate among Palestinians and even among Israelis about a shared future in Palestine/Israel based on equality and decolonisation, rather than ethno-national segregation and forced repartition.

Last, but certainly not least, in the shadow of the Goldstone report, Israeli leaders travel around the world fearing arrest for their crimes.

For now, they can rely on the impunity that high-level international complicity and their inertial power and influence still afford them.

But the question for the real international community – made up of people and movements – is whether we want to continue to see the still very incomplete system of international law and justice painstakingly built since the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi holocaust dismantled and corrupted all for the sake of one rogue state.

What we have done in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza and the rest of Palestine is not yet enough. But our movement is growing, it cannot be stopped, and we will reach our destination.

Ref: Al jazeera

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He will be among more than 1,300 people from 42 countries traveling to Gaza with the Gaza Freedom March this week.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

VIDEO: Ayrilik – a realistic show of the Palestinian condition under Israeli shoah

Read the Israeli reports to know how true this show is!!!

“Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Wednesday complained to Turkey over a new television drama airing there that depicts Israel Defense Forces soldiers as brutal murderers.

Lieberman instructed staff at the Foreign Ministry to protest in the face of their Turkish counterparts. He stressed that airing this type of show reflects a grave level of incitement against Israel – and with government approval.”

Israel rebukes Turkey over brutish TV portrayal of IDF

Settlement data ‘implicates Israel’ + Secret Israeli database reveals full extent of illegal settlement (this is OLD news!!!)

A leaked report on Jewish settlements in the West Bank shows that the Israeli government was complicit in illegal construction on land owned by Palestinians, an Israeli human rights group says.

Yesh Din said on Friday that the classsified information, compiled by the Israeli defence ministry, would allow it to help Palestinians sue the Israeli government for damages.

Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s legal counsel, said the information was a “severe indictment” of Israel’s military and government.

Israeli authorities are “systematically violating international law and the property rights of Palestinian residents,” he said in a statement.

The information leaked to the group shows that in three out of every four settlements in the West Bank at least some of the construction was completed without proper permits, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported.

The daily said the database showed that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure like roads, schools, synagogues, and even police stations was carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinians.

In one settlement, Elon Moreh, 18 houses were built on private land, the reports says. In another, Efrat, a park and a synagogue were built on privateland, and in a third, Ariel, a college was built without legal approval.

Yesh Din said it would begin running advertisments in Palestinian newspapers to encourage people to take legal action, and will also offer legal counsel, the statement from the group said.

The database focuses on the 120 West bank settlements that have been authorised by the Israeli government since it occupied the territory in 1967. About 100 other unauthorised outposts have also been established by settlers.

The settlements are illegal under international law and the so-called “road map” setting the course for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations calls for a halt to their expansion.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli government on the conclusions of the report.

Ref: Al Jazeera

Read more here “Secret Israeli database reveals full extent of illegal settlement”

ESSAY: European trade and Israeli occupation

The scope of this study is far too broad to be thoroughly examined by means of this
thesis. My aim however has been to present to the reader an outlook of the Human
Rights and Intellectual Property Rights of the Palestinian people, of how they can be
combined, and of how they sometimes interact. Since the violations inflicted upon the
Palestinians discussed in this study often have elements of both, it is however easy to
end up with a Human Rights perspective even though it has been my intention to shed
some light on both areas. For the future my hopes for peace and prosperity goes out to
the peoples in question – but how this will be achieved is truly another question.

DOWNLOAD THE ESSAY

ESSAY: European trade and Israeli occupation

The scope of this study is far too broad to be thoroughly examined by means of this
thesis. My aim however has been to present to the reader an outlook of the Human
Rights and Intellectual Property Rights of the Palestinian people, of how they can be
combined, and of how they sometimes interact. Since the violations inflicted upon the
Palestinians discussed in this study often have elements of both, it is however easy to
end up with a Human Rights perspective even though it has been my intention to shed
some light on both areas. For the future my hopes for peace and prosperity goes out to
the peoples in question – but how this will be achieved is truly another question.

DOWNLOAD THE ESSAY

A Pro-Israel Approach that Delivers on Palestine

Ref: New American Foundation

…
Listen to the dude that askes what´s the problem with Apartheid? Why can´t it be good? And uses the old old pro-israeli rethoric of “continues” jewish statehood in Palestine and in the same breth implies that the Palestines are “recent” in the region. This is a hoax argument that surfaces so often by the Pro-Israelis…

They are incredible these right-wing Pro_israeli americans. Ignorant, hateful and so fucking single minded.

: a

ISRAEL’S ILLEGAL OCCUPATION

Bringing an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is as much a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East as is the Palestinian recognition of Israel. The Israeli occupation is not only inhuman and the cause of extreme suffering for the 3.5 million Palestinians living under its subjugation, but it is also illegal under international law. Attempts to claim otherwise have no legal validity and are morally bankrupt and politically dangerous since they basically preclude the achievement of peace.

 

While it is true that victorious powers can legally occupy hostile territories seized in the course of conflict – an example of which is the Allies’ occupation of the territory of Nazi Germany during World War II, foreign occupation should nevertheless be a temporary situation, pending a political settlement or solution. During the interim, the occupying Power must comply with relevant instruments of international humanitarian law with regard to its conduct in the territory it has occupied.

International law is very clear on two basic principles: the inadmissibility of the acquisition of  territory  by  war  and  the  prohibition  of  the  transfer  of  civilians of  the occupying Power to the occupied territory. Both are intended to prevent expansionism and the colonisation of occupied territories. Both complement another explicit principle of international law, namely the right of peoples to self-determination, a right that a colonial or occupying Power is obliged to respect.

The Israeli occupation has clearly violated all three of these principles of international law. In fact, throughout its prolonged occupation, Israel has persistently and aggressively breached international law.

Thus, what makes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land illegal is not the fact that it occurred during the war of 1967 (regardless of the narrative concerning the causes of the war). What makes the Israeli occupation illegal is that it has existed for 35 years, during which time it transformed into a form of colonialism and suppressed and oppressed an entire people for decades, preventing them from the exercise of their right to self-determination and the establishment of their State, Palestine.

Israel, as an occupying Power, has undertaken countless measures attempting to change the legal status, demographic composition and character of the territory by confiscating land, exploiting natural resources, building more than 250 settlements, transferring more than 400,000 Israelis to the occupied territories, establishing a dual system of law and even annexing part of the territory.

These actions have been carried out in direct contravention of the Fourt Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, which, among other things, defines the rules of conduct and the obligations of the occupying Power. Clearly then, the active intent of the Israeli occupation has been to negate Palestinian rights, to create new facts on the ground and to illegally expand Israel’s borders.

Security Council resolution 242 (1967), which is the bedrock of the peace process and of any future peace settlement, is anchored in the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. The old and deceptive argument that the resolution calls for withdrawal from ‘territories’ and not ‘the territories’ not withstanding (in fact, the French text of the resolution does contain the article ‘the’). The call in the resolution for the withdrawal of Israel can only be read within the context of the above-mentioned principle.

Since the onset of the Israeli occupation in 1967, and in response to established, illegal policies and practices of the occupying Power, the Security Council has adopted 26 resolutions that affirmed the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the territories occupied by Israel. Of those resolutions, several deal directly with the issue of Israeli settlements and several also specifically deal with Israeli violations in Occupied East Jerusalem.

The resolutions clearly address the illegality of Israel’s policies and practices with regard to both issues. For example, some of the resolutions affirm that the Israeli settlements ‘have no legal validity‘; call upon the government and people of Israel ‘to dismantle the existing settlements’; and call upon ‘all States not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically in connection with settlements in the occupied territories’.

 
As for Occupied East Jerusalem, which the Israeli government illegally annexed in 1980, the Security Council, in resolution 478 (1980), determined ‘that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which have altered or purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and, in particular, the recent “basic law” on Jerusalem are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith’.

Similar affirmations were made by the Council in several other resolutions. Moreover, the General Assembly and other UN organs have adopted scores of resolutions on the illegal policies and practices of the Israeli occupation and on the legitimacy of, and the necessity for, the exercise of the right to self-determination by the Palestinian people.

There has therefore been absolutely no impropriety on the part of the UN Secretary-General concerning his recent statements with regard to the Israeli occupation. Kofi Annan’s call for an end to ‘the illegal occupation’ was not only legally correct but was also not a concept invented by the Secretary-General, as reflected in the numerous resolutions of the United Nations. It was, however, important for Mr Annan to add his moral authority to the urgent need for an end to that illegal occupation, particularly during this late stage in the perilous deterioration of the situation.

 
In that statement on 12 March 2002, the Secretary-General addressed both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. The Palestinian side probably did not like everything it heard. But, taken in its entirety, the statement was widely viewed as a necessary and responsible call that intended to, and should, help the parties to move forward towards a peaceful settlement. For this to happen, the Israeli people and the Israeli government must indeed come to terms, for once and for all, with the illegality of their occupation and the need for its termination. 

 

 Third World Network Features
About the writer: Dr Nasser Al-Kidwa is Ambassador and Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations.

 

The above article first appeared in Palestine & the UN (Vol. 7 Issue 8, mid-September 2002).

Israeli Soldier Toturing Bound Palestinian

Israeli Channel 10 on Thursday released footage taken by Israeli occupation soldiers of themselves humiliating a bound and blindfolded Palestinian man at a West Bank checkpoint.

The footage shows the Palestinian kneeling and repeating humiliating sentences given to him to say by the occupation soldiers, who belong to the Golani infantry brigade.

As the detainee repeats the words, the occupation soldiers are heard laughing raucously in the background.

Later Thursday, the Israeli army issued a harsh condemnation of the troops’ actions.

The occupation army claimed it was unaware of the incident until it received the clip from Channel 10, after which it immediately began an investigation.

“With the emergence of all of the details, it will be decided whether to take steps and which [to take]. The IDF denunciates this behavior,” the statement said.

However, many humiliating and illegal incidents against Palestinians were recognized earlier and there were lawsuits concerning them but the Israeli occupation dismissed most of them and hasn’t done

REF. AL – Manar

Hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jews pray at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem

Bethlehem – Ma’an – Dozens of armored buses brought hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jewish worshippers to pray at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem on Saturday and Sunday evenings.

Tour buses lined the streets on the western side of the seperation wall, and roads were blocked off from Tantur to the Beit Jala (Gilo) checkpoint as hundreds of worshipers in black coats and hats gathered in the area.

The mass prayer gatherings were organized by the Mosdos Kever Rachel (Rachel’s Tomb Institute) around the date believed to be the anniversary of Rachel’s death. The official date set by the group is 9 November, but worshipers overwhelmed the area on Saturday evening as well.

The Institute runs a Jewish religious school at the tomb, and funds a daily bullet-proof bus service that brings Jewish worshippers from Jerusalem to the tomb.

In 2003 the group lobbied the Israeli Supreme Court to have the route of the separation wall altered so that the site of Rachel’s Tomb was annexed to the western side of the wall. The petition was successful and the new route of the separation wall cut large swaths out of the Bethlehem municipal lands, ensuring Israelis access to the Tomb.

The biblical Rachel is revered as one of the four matriarchs of the Jewish people, and Jewish tradition holds that she was buried by her husband Jacob in Bethlehem. The tomb is also a holy site for Muslims and Christians, and the location of the Bilal Ibn Rabah mosque, which is now inaccessible to West Bank Palestinians.

Many of the area’s residents have moved to other parts of Bethlehem since Israel’s construction of the wall, and many buildings in the once vibrant neighborhood at the entrance to Bethlehem now stand empty.

Ten meter concrete walls surround Rachel’s Tomb on three sides. The walls are part of the separation wall constructed by Israel after the start of the second Indifadah. There are also sniper towers built into the wall at short intervals.

Groups such as the Rachel’s Tomb Institute and the Committee for Rachel’s Tomb, which do not recognize Palestinian claims to the site or the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a legitimate government, aim to establish a permanent, round-the-clock Jewish presence at the site to ensure that it remains under Israeli control in any future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

As the website of the Committee for Rachel’s Tomb explains, by maintaining a Jewish presence at the site, they aim to “put pressure on the Israeli government to maintain Jewish control over Rachel’s Tomb.”

Ref: Maan