A far-right extremist, Smotrich has used his new platform to incite violence. Just days after Israeli settlers carried out a pogrom in Huwwara – killing one Palestinian and inflicting huge destruction on homes, businesses and vehicles – Smotrich called for that West Bank village to be “wiped out” by the Israeli state.
Source: Face the facts: Israel relies on settler violence | The Electronic Intifada
it isn’t easy for Palestinians to watch what appears like a nationalist Flag March washing over the country. True, this movement is not the same as the vulgar and violent march that takes place annually on Jerusalem Day, and thankfully, no one at the current protests is dancing and singing “may your village burn” or “death to Arabs.” And yet, the Zionist tsunami that longs for the Israeli days of yore makes it exceedingly difficult for Palestinian citizens to join. Difficult, but not impossible.
Source: Do Palestinian citizens want a place in Israel’s anti-gov’t protests?
The CNN reporters estimate that as much as 5% of Israel’s population may have come out into the streets.
Source: As Half a Million Israelis Protest Netanyahu Regime, it Faces setbacks in Arab World
Far from being a “Jewish democratic state,” Israel has evolved into a Jewish supremacist state. In the real world, “Israeli democracy” is an oxymoron. Denial does not make that any less true.
Source: Israel’s Liberal Supporters Take Denial to New Level
3D Analysis Shows How Israeli Troops Fired Into Group of Civilians According to The Washington Post’s reconstruction of the raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli military fired repeatedly into a group of civilians taking shelter between a mosque and a clinic, killing two and wounding three others.
“Israeli forces fired at least 14 times from inside their armored vehicle as it moved down a street and then came to a halt next to a short wall behind which the civilians huddled. The Israelis continued firing even after those people would have been visible from the vehicle’s windows…”
Source: 3D Analysis Shows How Israeli Troops Fired Into Group of Civilians – scheerpost.com
This week, when the New York Times featured an opinion piece by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, it harmonized with a crescendo of other recent pleas from prominent American supporters of Israel. Bloomberg warned that Israel’s new governing coalition is trying to give parliament the power to “overrule the nation’s Supreme Court and run roughshod over individual rights, including on matters such as speech and press freedoms, equal rights for minorities and voting rights.” Such a change would, Bloomberg added, undermine Israel’s “strong commitment to freedom.”
Strong commitment to freedom? That would sure be news to the more than 5 million Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.
Far from being a “Jewish democratic state,” Israel has evolved into a Jewish supremacist state. In the real world, “Israeli democracy” is an oxymoron. Denial does not make that any less true.
Source: Opinion | Israel’s Liberal Supporters Are Taking Their Denial to a New Level | Common Dreams
The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that protests against the government of Binyamin Netanyahu’s plans to gut the Israeli judiciary are now spreading in elite military reserve units. A petition circulated in their ranks saying,
“As long as these dictatorial and methodical pieces of legislation continue, with the aim of rescuing a criminal from prison [i.e. Netanyahu], we will not serve, or carry out the orders of crooks, corrupt criminals and parasites, who stand behind this coup against the very nature of our system.”
“As a country that has experienced the devastating effects of Apartheid, we cannot turn a blind eye to the gross human rights violations being committed against Palestinians. It is imperative for South Africa to take a stand and speak out against these atrocities. We therefore, call upon all political parties to support this resolution to downgrade South Africa’s embassy in Israel.”
Source: South Africa downgrades Israeli Embassy over Ongoing Apartheid (and they should know)
Meanwhile, some 3.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, mostly in segregated cantons behind Israel’s “Apartheid Wall” and the newly constructed “Apartheid Road,” and in towns and cities penned between Jewish settlement blocks and behind a network of segregated roads, security barriers, and military installations. For Palestinians who live there, apartheid signals not merely segregation, but the inhumanity of life under occupation: the beatings, shootings, killings, assassinations, lynchings, curfews, military checkpoints, house demolitions, forced evictions and deportations, forceful separations, forced disappearances, uprooting of trees, mass arrests, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial.
“There’s a great danger that Israel will turn into a dictatorship,” warned one protester.
Source: Israeli Anti-Government Protests Hit New Heights as 200,000 March in Tel Aviv
Capital is beginning to flee Israel in the wake of the prime minister’s judicial overhaul.
Source: Netanyahu Could Become the BDS Movement’s Greatest Ally
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new book, Bibi: My Story, is an interesting and entertaining read for anyone who is comfortable with his or her own racism and with demonizing subject populations as inferior people.
If you don’t care about human rights violations and if you are a champion of war crimes, this book is for you.
Here is an Israeli leader who is proud of his violations of the laws of war (like blowing up Lebanese civilian planes in 1968) and he’s also proud of his racist restrictions against African immigrants because they are more prone to crime than other peoples, according to his ac
Source: AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Netanyahu’s Anthology of Errors, Fabrications & Falsehoods
Perhaps the most powerful objection against Israel’s demand on others to recognise its “right to exist” are claims it had made about itself during the country’s founding. Israel’s declaration of independence was based on the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate of the League of Nations and the General Assembly’s Partition Resolution. Every one of those claims have been challenged on legal grounds since 1948. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 for example did not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state in Palestine. It simply stated that the British government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a home for the Jewish people” but that this was to be without prejudice to the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The clear and obvious goal of the declaration was to create a “home” for the Jewish people “In Palestine“, not erase Palestine as Israel has done to supplant a new state on top of it.
Source: No, Discussing Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’ is not Antisemitic; States don’t have Rights, People Do
The vicious statement by Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister in Netanyahu’s ultra-right government, comes days after the town of Huwara was attacked by hundreds of settlers. By Peoples Dispatch Days after it came under attack from illegal Israeli settlers, the Palestinian town of Huwara, near
Days after it came under attack from illegal Israeli settlers, the Palestinian town of Huwara, near Nablus, was targeted by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Wednesday.
In a TV interview, Smotrich claimed that calls made by some of the extremist settlers to raze the town were just, and that instead of leaving the task to private individuals, “the state [of Israel] should be the one to do that.”
Huwara was attacked by hundreds of Israeli settlers on Sunday. At least one Palestinian was killed and close to 400 were injured. The attacking settlers torched scores of Palestinian homes and burnt their property under the full protection of Israeli security forces.
Source: Israeli Official Calls for Razing Palestinian Town of Huwara
Some might think that state genocide is a new phenomenon in Israeli occupied Palestine. I can assure you that this is the very essence of Zionism. The point was, and still is, to occupy the land, get rid of the people by any and every means, and change the topography and the demography of Palestine to favour Jewish supremacy.
Source: An open call for genocide in Palestine – Pearls and Irritations
Israel’s world support is distinctly dead and dependent on a minority of shamed nations like the US, UK, and Australia
“The village of Huwwara needs to be wiped out. I think that the State of Israel needs to do that – not, God forbid, private individuals,” Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Wednesday.
This genocidal call came just days after hordes of Israeli settlers, protected by the army, attacked the occupied West Bank village, burning Palestinian homes and cars and ransacking businesses.
Source: Israeli calls for genocide met with shrugs in Washington and Brussels | The Electronic Intifada
While we often rage against statements made by U.S. politicians who, like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, refuse to even acknowledge that Israel is occupying Palestine in the first place, we tend to forget that many of us are, somehow, involved in the watering down of the Palestinian reality, as well.
Taking the West Bank
( Middle East Monitor ) – Israel has erected “a formal, full-fledged apartheid regime,” the editorial of Haaretz newspaper said yesterday, in a stark warning about the direction of the occupation state. Drawing attention to measures introduced by the far-right government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Haaretz’s editorial said that they include the contentious decision to grant Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, control over the occupied West Bank.
For decades, Israel has governed the occupied Palestinian territories beyond the 1949 Green (Armistice) Line through a military administration. Indeed, that is a “principle of international law”. An agreement was reached during January’s coalition talks, however, to place the occupied territories under civilian rule.
“Once the agreement is implemented, Smotrich will in effect become the governor of the West Bank, holding powers that will allow him to control nearly almost all areas of life there, including planning, building and infrastructure, which he intends to use to expand the settlement enterprise and stop all Palestinian development,” said Haaretz.
Source: Haaretz: Israel has erected ‘a formal, full-fledged apartheid regime’
The terrorist mob was from the “illegal” squatter-settlement of Evyatar. All squatting by Israelis on Palestinian land is illegal by the 4th Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute. But even the Israeli government frowns on Israelis just going off and building homes on Palestinian farms owned by local families. The Israeli government prefers to take away the Palestinians’ land itself, exercising a sort of eminent domain, and then sending in squatters. Under international law, it is a war crime for Israel to usurp the land of the Palestinians it occupies.
While we often rage against statements made by US politicians who, like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, refuse to even acknowledge that Israel is occupying Palestine in the first place, we tend to forget that many of us are, somehow, involved in the watering down of the Palestinian reality, as well.
Settlers are the only means in not watching Israel depopulate. Give away free land to people with nothing first steal the land.
a new study led by Assaf Hochmann at Hebrew University, finding that extreme heat waves in Israel will increase 600% over the next 80 years. Not only will this change strike Israel but also Egypt, Syria, Jordan and southern Turkiye, with the potential for thousands of deaths annually from heat stroke among those countries. Heat waves have already become seven times more frequent and are now longer, since 1960. Schuster notes that the Levant basically had no winter season this year.
Informed Comment
Former American envoy to Tel Aviv Daniel Kurtzer also called Israel’s move to legalize settler outposts a “significant violation of a commitment that the Israeli government made in writing” to dismantle “illegal settlements.”
Source: Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community | Common Dreams
The lies told proved
( Middle East Monitor) – Israeli occupation authorities have submitted plans to build 7,157 new settlement units in the E1 area that would bisect Palestinian contiguity in the occupied West Bank, Israeli media reported on Thursday. This is part of the annexation pledges made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his far-right partners in the government coalition. Israel demolishes Palestinian homes and approves new Israeli settlement homes – Cartoon According to The Times of Israel, the Civil Administration High Planning Subcommittee convened for the first time on Wednesday and Thursday since the establishment of the new government, advancing the
Source: Israel submits Plans for 7,000 new Squatter-Settlement Units in Palestinian West Bank
People across the world have watched the thousands of Israelis demonstrating against their government with at least some bemusement. After 75 years of Israel denying its own agency in the terrible catastrophe it has inflicted on the Palestinians, its new government is now blamed for doing something most Israeli governments have never done – openly discussing the aim of controlling the whole of Palestine through an exclusive Jewish apartheid state.
Source: The illusion of Israeli democracy has been shattered | The Electronic Intifada
Tens of thousands of Israelis have filled the streets of major cities in recent weeks to protest significant judicial reforms that the new far-right Israeli government, elected late last year, is seeking to ram through the Knesset with a narrow majority. These developments have been framed as a major constitutional crisis and have brought on talk of an Israeli “civil war” and drawn the intervention of concerned outsiders. This crisis, however, is not about diverging from the essence of the Israeli political system, but rather about continuing it. To understand why, one must look at the origins of Israel’s constitutional crisis, which was and continues to be shaped by the state’s desire to prioritize settler colonialism over liberal governance.
Source: The settler-colonial origins of Israel’s constitutional crisis
From his bed in the Hospice Jimmy Carter has grown and stands taller than Presidents who followed him
Carter’s prescient 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid elicited a storm of criticism from many Jewish organizations and leaders. It prompted condemnation from the powerful lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC), and leaders such as Alan Dershowitz, who outrageously branded Carter’s judicious book “a foray into bigotry.” Carter has been the only American president with the candor to call out Israel for mirroring apartheid policies of South Africa. So it’s timely to revisit the message, consequences and reactions to that book, as his passing approaches. Since AIPAC and Dershowitz have lost the credibility they once had, their branding and character assassination of Carter doesn’t reflect so badly on him, when you consider the source.
Israeli notion of Collateral Damage 11 dead 100 some critically wounded. All for the sake of three alleged now-dead suspects. State-sponsored vigilante mayhem the equivalent of a Nazi or KKK raid condemned by 140 nations and only supported by 25% the likes of Nth Korea, Hungary, the Congo, Australia and the USA among others. Israel hypocritically voted against Russia this week having abstained for the past year. According to Netanyahu there simply is and never was a Palestine so there is no “illegal occupation”. The global Jewish community increasingly disagrees.
A daytime Israeli military raid on Wednesday on an apartment in the Palestinian city of Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank spiraled out of control, with the Israeli troops killing 11 persons and wounding over one hundred civilians with gunshots. Some of the injured are in critical condition. The Israelis say that they were after three young men, two members of the “Lion’s Den” resistance group, and the other a member of “Islamic Jihad.” The three were accused of having carried out attacks against Jewish squatters on Palestinian land. The troops killed all three, apparently by blowing up a building in which they were making a last stand.
As the new right-wing Israeli regime ramps up its oppression of Palestinians, the Biden administration has taken its capitulation to Israel to a new and absurd level. After nominating an independent expert to serve on a human rights commission, the U.S. State Department withdrew the nomination because the expert accurately called Israel an apartheid state. A week later, the United States prevented the United Nations Security Council from voting to condemn Israel’s illegal settlements in Palestinian territory.
Source: Biden Administration Takes Its Capitulation to Israel to an Absurd New Level – scheerpost.com
This is an act of piracy colonisation and plain and simple invasion of the lands of other people. It’s a government-sponsored act of rape by Israel
Every time we Palestinians, despite all the compromises we offer, try to gain a modicum of justice we find not only is it denied to us, but that we are the ones to blame for this lack of progress for a peaceful co-existence with our occupiers.
Members of the UN Security Council issued a rare joint statement on Monday condemning a series of recent Israeli settlement expansion announcements, after the US managed to convince members to withdraw a more forceful resolution on the matter.
In his first major international interview since returning to power, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to CNN earlier this month. He demonstrated that he is still a prolific liar misleading the public very deliberately about various policy issues.
Billionaires prefer to lurk in the shadows
Pennsylvania billionaire and Republican megadonor Jeffrey Yass is a key benefactor behind both the Moderate PAC, which fights progressive primary challengers in the United States, and the Kohelet Policy Forum, which is working to reshape the political system in Israel.
Source: GOP Megadonor Is Funding Far-Right Israeli Think Tank — and Democrats
Israel is being pressed from within by
It is home to almost one million Russian-speaking citizens, one-third of whom arrived from Ukraine shortly before and immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The Russian attack on Ukraine is a serious violation of the international order,” said Lapid. “Israel condemns this attack.”
The future will reveal even more about Israel’s role in the Russia-Ukraine war. However, what is quite clear for now is that it is no longer a neutral party, even if the government in Tel Aviv continues to repeat such claims.
You barely see Palestinians in these protests. It must be quite an experience for them, hearing Israel described so passionately as a democracy when they don’t have democratic rights.
Israel is building and Autocratic system of government and still calling it Democracy?? It’s coupled with Collective Punishment Jews excluded.
FILE – A masked Palestinian sits during a support rally for the Palestinian prisoners, outside Ofer, an Israeli military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Friday, March 1, 2013. Israel’s parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a law to strip Arabs convicted in nationalistic attacks of their Israeli citizenship or residency and deport them if they have accepted stipends from the Palestinian Authority. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, File) FILE – A masked Palestinian sits during a support rally for the Palestinian prisoners, outside Ofer, an Israeli military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Friday, March 1, 2013. Israel’s parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a law to strip Arabs convicted in nationalistic attacks of their Israeli citizenship or residency and deport them if they have accepted stipends from the Palestinian Authority. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, File) JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a law to strip Arabs convicted in nationalistic attacks of their Israeli citizenship or residency and deport them if they have accepted stipends from the Palestinian Authority.
Source: Israel approves law to strip Arab attackers of citizenship | AP News
Israel’s new extremist regime — the most anti-Palestinian in history — seems to be aiming at incorporating all of the occupied Palestinian territories into Israel, writes Marjorie Cohn.
( Middle East Monitors ) – Israel has ‘legalised’ nine colonial outposts in the occupied West Bank, turning them into official settlements. The decision, which is said to be the first legalisation of such outposts by the Israeli government since 2012, has caused further irritation in Washington. According to Axios, in addition to the legalisation of the nine outposts, the Israeli government has decided to connect dozens of other illegal outposts to state infrastructure like water and electricity, and approve the planning and building of thousands of new housing units in the settlements. The newly-legalised settlements: Avigail Asael Shacharit Givat Arnon
Source: Israel ‘legalises’ Colonial Outposts, causing further Irritation in Washington
“Make no mistake; this isn’t about retaliation for the recent terror attacks,” said one Palestinian critic. “This is nothing else than colonialism, and the U.S. and E.U. won’t do anything about it; instead, they say that they are ‘deeply concerned.'”
Source: Israel ‘Legalizes’ 9 Apartheid Settler Colonies in Occupied Palestine
Shortly before agreeing to take the role of UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese received a piece of advice from an Israeli friend: go to Israel-Palestine now, because soon you will not be allowed to enter. Albanese, who knew the country well after living in Jerusalem and working for the Palestinian refugee aid organization UNRWA for three years, heeded his advice and went. This was indeed her last trip, at least for now; since her appointment in April 2022, Israel has barred her from entering.
Source: UN expert: ‘Apartheid is in front of your eyes everywhere you go’
A former member speaks out about the unit responsible for the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian American.
Just over a year ago, soldiers belonging to a controversial, ultra-Orthodox unit of the Israel Defense Forces stopped a 78-year-old Palestinian American man on his way home from visiting a relative in the occupied West Bank. When the man refused to cooperate with an identification check — insisting on his right to go home — soldiers forced him out of his car, blindfolded him, and zip-tied his hands behind his back. They then dragged him to a nearby yard, where they left him lying face down on the ground, according to witnesses.
Omar Assad had already stopped breathing when the soldiers left him, a man detained alongside him told reporters. When a doctor finally arrived, he found that Assad had been dead “for 15 or 20 minutes.” An autopsy found that he had suffered a fatal, stress-induced heart attack.
Source: Israeli Battalion Puts U.S. Ban on Funding Abusive Units to Test
“A country where the prime minister appoints all the judges and is responsible for promoting and firing them has a name, it’s called a dictatorship. When this prime minister is also a defendant who the state of Israel is accusing of serious crimes, it has a name, it’s called a dictatorship of criminals.”
Source: Israel has Always Been a Dictatorship of Criminals – CounterPunch.org
If Australia’s referendum fails will she stand up and cut ties with Australia? Will Israel tell Australia’s Jews to vote “No”?
“We cannot be silent,” said Colau.
Source: Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau Cuts City’s Ties With Israel Over ‘Crime of Apartheid’
Israel routinely refuses to extradite its own citizens — including people who’ve flown there purely to escape justice. Its Law of Return rewards criminals who can claim a vague connection to Israel, even as it denies innocent Palestinians their homeland.
Source: Israel’s Law of Return Lets Criminals Abroad Run From the Law
Political Zionists believed, and continue to believe, that force and violence will lead to security and stability. History is littered with the remains of kingdoms, empires, and rogue states which shared that belief. The truth is that true peace, the peace that repeatedly eludes political Zionists, can only be found through justice. Moreover, it is only through justice and equality that the Jewish homeland can become what so many hoped and dreamed it would become: a center of culture and spiritual revival, a model of coexistence and democracy, and a safe-haven for the oppressed.
Source: The Promise and Failure of Zionism | The Smirking Chimp
This should have been a legitimate question for a politician to ask the British prime minister in the House of Commons. But no sooner had Labour’s Kim Johnson asked it of Rishi Sunak last Wednesday afternoon, during an edition of Prime Minister’s Questions, than she was summoned to the office of her party’s chief whip and ordered to apologize.
Source: Israelis are calling their leaders fascists. Why can’t British politicians?
Israel calls its latest military campaign Operation Break the Wave, a lyrical description of a brutal reality. This year, 2023, will be the 75th year after the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948 when Israeli troops illegally removed Palestinians from their homes and tried to erase Palestine from the map. Since then, Palestinians have resisted against all odds, despite Israel’s formidable backing by the most powerful countries in the world, led by the United States.
Source: Zionism’s ‘Three State Solution’
“SETTLERS” ARE ISRAEL-SUPPORTED “ILLEGAL OCCUPIERS”. THAT REMAINS UNSTATED.
AP is reporting that what it calls the Israeli “settler” population in the Palestinian West Bank has now exceeded 500,000, quoting an Israeli squatter organization. Later in the article AP admits that about 200,000 Israelis also live in East Jerusalem, but does not specify that their presence there is illegal, just as is that of the 500,000 in the rest of the Palestinian West Bank.
Source: No, Militant Israeli Squatters haven’t Exceeded 500K in Occupied Palestine: It is more Like 733,000
There are currently only two Jewish heads of state in the world. The first, not surprisingly, leads Israel. The second is Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
So much for conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world.
We can’t even get together to control the outcome of the war in Ukraine. They don’t get along.
Source: Why Isn’t Israel Helping the only other Jewish Head of State, in Ukraine?
Meanwhile Netanyahu will continue to take like Kim Jong-Un in the knowledge that America will do nothing
Blinken did not, however, offer any practical steps for changing the shrinking horizon of Palestinian hope. Nothing any U.S. administration has done since 1967 has halted the Israeli colonization of Palestinian privately owned land for Israeli squatters who are illegally sent over the border and now are being heavily armed by the Netanyahu government.
why on earth has the world’s only Jewish state failed to support the only other country with a Jewish leader? So much for conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world. We can’t even get together to control the outcome of the war in Ukraine.
When Israel refused to provide Ukraine with its Iron Dome air defense system, in the face of Russia’s brutal aerial assault on Ukrainian infrastructure, Zelensky couldn’t contain his frustration in an interview with French TV: “You know there are many people in Ukraine of Jewish origin, and there are a lot of Ukrainians in Israel. How is it possible to have this attitude? I was shocked.”
Zelensky and Netanyahu may share the distinction of being Jewish leaders. But the Ukrainian should not expect much in the way of military help from Israel. Frankly, the latter is too busy heading in the direction of fascism to be much help in defending a democratic state from Putinism.
Source: Israel’s Strange Ambivalence on Ukraine – CounterPunch.org
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