The Palestine thread

[seafoid]

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325916/Ultra-Orthodox-Jews-protest-army-draft-destroy-way-life.html#ixzz2TXz6Pk00
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I am surprised they didn't use depleted uranium on them, Beaver. Or white phosphorous

[Ball DeBeaver]

The minute they start firing rockets into Israel, I will demand they do. But until that day, a good crack across the nut with a baton will suffice.

[seafoid]

The minute they start firing rockets into Israel, I will demand they do. But until that day, a good crack across the nut with a baton will suffice.

Have they opened a camp in the desert for the kids to be detained indefinitely without charge?
How many of the Haredim are likely to be tortured this afternoon ? 

[Ball DeBeaver]

Not enough of them. Bunch of work shy freaks.




Worse than bloody students. 

[Ball DeBeaver]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=9347

Apartheid?

'I guess the Galilee is not for Jews'

The government is building in Sakhnin and selling apartments in Umm el-Fahm, but there are almost no land allocations for construction in the Jewish sector. In the farming community of Migdal, only 30 housing units for young couples have been allocated in the last few years.

Emily Amrousi


Only 30 housing units for young couples have been approved in the community of Migdal (shown), but more than 150 lots have been approved in the Arab village across the road |Photo credit: Wikipedia

Only 30 housing units for young couples have been approved in the community of Migdal (shown), but more than 150 lots have been approved in the Arab village across the road |Photo credit: Wikipedia


Not long ago, a police car stood at Migdal Junction near the Sea of Galilee and lay in wait for serious tax defaulters. The offenders were identified by their license plates. A police truck towed away cars that had been confiscated.


The surprise roadblock led to traffic jams and disrupted the lives of area residents, so we need to ask why the tax authorities didn't just knock on debtors' doors, as is usually done. Why were they forced to block a distant intersection with the help of police? The defaulters, in this case, were members of the Arab sector. Their villages are a no-go area for government employees.


We are on the verge of losing the Galilee. The Jewish minority there feels that the state has given up on them. It's not just a question of demography, but rather a total abdication of the symbols and attributes of sovereignty. There is selective law enforcement due to fear, due to a surge in the number of nationalist and criminal offenses, as well as due to accelerated Islamization. The Zionist dream ends at Route 6.


Yulia and Eran from the Har Yona neighborhood of Nazareth Illit are in despair. Only two Jewish families remain in their building. The harassment and threats have finally driven them to leave. Entire neighborhoods are being emptied of Jews. Shimon and Anat are another couple who have their suitcases packed. They are looking for an apartment in Rehovot. The park under their house in Carmiel is mainly populated by our Arab "cousins."


"So what?" I say, "Arabs have a right to live there." Their daughters are afraid to leave the house, they explain. There is crime, sexual harassment, jeeps tearing by at 140 kilometers an hour in residential neighborhoods. Life has become unbearable. You feel like an outsider in your own city.


"I guess the Galilee is not for Jews," Eran Rosenblit from Nazareth Illit says, nodding in agreement. He tried to organize a conference to save the Galilee, but gave up: "Even Knesset members won't come here."


He sees the government building in Sakhnin and selling apartments in Umm el-Fahm. Meanwhile, there are almost zero land allocations for construction in the Jewish sector. In the farming community of Migdal, only 30 housing units for young couples have been allocated in the last few years.


On the other side of the road, in the Arab village of Wadi Hamam, 150 lots for single-family dwellings have been approved in the same time span. These are just the numbers of official authorizations, on paper. In fact, illegal building dots the Galilee map like dense freckles. Thousands of single-family homes are being built outside the jurisdictional lines of Arab municipalities.


Law enforcement is heavy-handed. An unauthorized room in a Jewish community will lead to huge fines, demolition orders and trips to court. In the Arab sector, nada.


A young couple wanting to realize their dream of a house with a garden, as advertised in the Galilee Development Authority brochures, will encounter bureaucratic obstacles and out-of-touch planning bodies. On the other side of the road, one can see deluxe palaces. If and when a demolition order is issued for a structure in the Arab village, police cancel it for fear of riots. "Riots" is a code word. It is the reason why the Electric Company, the public works department and local councils pay random sums in compensation for land appropriations for public infrastructure and road expansion. Often the government will compensate "landowners" even though there is no proof that the land belongs to them, just to keep the peace.


Arab citizens are generally good and honest people. The problem is not the Arab population, but the State of Israel. It's not the people, it's the system. The Galilee is increasingly escaping our hold. It is getting further away. Intelligence coordinators in the police and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) are aware of potential terrorism bubbling under the surface. Weapons are being stored for criminal and nationalist purposes.


In the mosques, you can hear and see the growing religious extremism. Residential break-ins are on a steep increase. Sophisticated gangs are carrying out cattle theft on a massive scale. Farmers wake up in the morning to find their orchards stripped bare of fruit. Is this sovereignty? The police claim they do not have enough manpower, so volunteers from the New Israeli Guardians organization lie in ambush throughout the night to guard Farmer Yossi's lychees and grapefruits.

[seafoid]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=9347

Apartheid?

'I guess the Galilee is not for Jews'

The government is building in Sakhnin and selling apartments in Umm el-Fahm, but there are almost no land allocations for construction in the Jewish sector. In the farming community of Migdal, only 30 housing units for young couples have been allocated in the last few years.

Emily Amrousi


Only 30 housing units for young couples have been approved in the community of Migdal (shown), but more than 150 lots have been approved in the Arab village across the road |Photo credit: Wikipedia

Only 30 housing units for young couples have been approved in the community of Migdal (shown), but more than 150 lots have been approved in the Arab village across the road |Photo credit: Wikipedia


Not long ago, a police car stood at Migdal Junction near the Sea of Galilee and lay in wait for serious tax defaulters. The offenders were identified by their license plates. A police truck towed away cars that had been confiscated.


The surprise roadblock led to traffic jams and disrupted the lives of area residents, so we need to ask why the tax authorities didn't just knock on debtors' doors, as is usually done. Why were they forced to block a distant intersection with the help of police? The defaulters, in this case, were members of the Arab sector. Their villages are a no-go area for government employees.


We are on the verge of losing the Galilee. The Jewish minority there feels that the state has given up on them. It's not just a question of demography, but rather a total abdication of the symbols and attributes of sovereignty. There is selective law enforcement due to fear, due to a surge in the number of nationalist and criminal offenses, as well as due to accelerated Islamization. The Zionist dream ends at Route 6.


Yulia and Eran from the Har Yona neighborhood of Nazareth Illit are in despair. Only two Jewish families remain in their building. The harassment and threats have finally driven them to leave. Entire neighborhoods are being emptied of Jews. Shimon and Anat are another couple who have their suitcases packed. They are looking for an apartment in Rehovot. The park under their house in Carmiel is mainly populated by our Arab "cousins."


"So what?" I say, "Arabs have a right to live there." Their daughters are afraid to leave the house, they explain. There is crime, sexual harassment, jeeps tearing by at 140 kilometers an hour in residential neighborhoods. Life has become unbearable. You feel like an outsider in your own city.


"I guess the Galilee is not for Jews," Eran Rosenblit from Nazareth Illit says, nodding in agreement. He tried to organize a conference to save the Galilee, but gave up: "Even Knesset members won't come here."


He sees the government building in Sakhnin and selling apartments in Umm el-Fahm. Meanwhile, there are almost zero land allocations for construction in the Jewish sector. In the farming community of Migdal, only 30 housing units for young couples have been allocated in the last few years.


On the other side of the road, in the Arab village of Wadi Hamam, 150 lots for single-family dwellings have been approved in the same time span. These are just the numbers of official authorizations, on paper. In fact, illegal building dots the Galilee map like dense freckles. Thousands of single-family homes are being built outside the jurisdictional lines of Arab municipalities.


Law enforcement is heavy-handed. An unauthorized room in a Jewish community will lead to huge fines, demolition orders and trips to court. In the Arab sector, nada.


A young couple wanting to realize their dream of a house with a garden, as advertised in the Galilee Development Authority brochures, will encounter bureaucratic obstacles and out-of-touch planning bodies. On the other side of the road, one can see deluxe palaces. If and when a demolition order is issued for a structure in the Arab village, police cancel it for fear of riots. "Riots" is a code word. It is the reason why the Electric Company, the public works department and local councils pay random sums in compensation for land appropriations for public infrastructure and road expansion. Often the government will compensate "landowners" even though there is no proof that the land belongs to them, just to keep the peace.


Arab citizens are generally good and honest people. The problem is not the Arab population, but the State of Israel. It's not the people, it's the system. The Galilee is increasingly escaping our hold. It is getting further away. Intelligence coordinators in the police and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) are aware of potential terrorism bubbling under the surface. Weapons are being stored for criminal and nationalist purposes.


In the mosques, you can hear and see the growing religious extremism. Residential break-ins are on a steep increase. Sophisticated gangs are carrying out cattle theft on a massive scale. Farmers wake up in the morning to find their orchards stripped bare of fruit. Is this sovereignty? The police claim they do not have enough manpower, so volunteers from the New Israeli Guardians organization lie in ambush throughout the night to guard Farmer Yossi's lychees and grapefruits.

Emily Amrousi is fruitcake.


Farmers wake up in the morning to find their orchards stripped bare of fruit. Is this sovereignty? The police claim they do not have enough manpower, so volunteers from the New Israeli Guardians organization lie in ambush throughout the night to guard Farmer Yossi's lychees and grapefruits.

How did "farmer Yossi" get the land anyway?
And stripping orchards of fruit is a Jewish speciality in the West Bank where it's legal. 

The reason why they aren't building homes for freeloader Jews in Migdal is because the Israeli govt spends all the money and then some on the settlers. the deficit is 5% of GDP .
Maybe you could send them some spondulicks, Beaver. Your stipend from hasbara central, for example.

Yulia and Eran from the Har Yona neighborhood of Nazareth Illit are in despair. Only two Jewish families remain in their building.

Imagine the uproar if some French journo reported " Francine and Joel are in despair. There are 23 Jewish families in their building and only 2 Christian couples"
That would correctly be called antisemitism.

[Ball DeBeaver]

If you think for one second that I get paid or I am involved in anyway or connected to any hasbara group, then you are a bigger fool than I gave you credit for, or you are a massive conspiracy theory nut.





Now where did I leave my kippa? 

[seafoid]

If you think for one second that I get paid or I am involved in anyway or connected to any hasbara group, then you are a bigger fool than I gave you credit for, or you are a massive conspiracy theory nut.





Now where did I leave my kippa? 

Maybe you are on work experience.

[seafoid]

. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/aa37238e-9255-11e2-851f-00144feabdc0.html


A road trip around an isolated nation

Review by John Reed


A historian's travels in the Holy Land find a nation unable to connect with its neighbours and shifting into cyberspace


Israel Has Moved, by Diana Pinto, (Harvard University Press, RRP£18.95, RRP$24.95)



One of the things that most conventional journalistic ac­counts of Israel fail to convey is the sheer physical strangeness of the place.

There are the settler highways that wend through the West Bank, sheltered by concrete lips designed to deflect rocks hurled by the Palestinians who live there. At the western approach to Jerusalem, there is a new, harp-like bridge designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava that spans a massive traffic intersection – the city has no river – leading essentially nowhere. At the border with Gaza, there is a hulking terminal funnelling arrivals into Israel through a set of pens and scanners aimed at preventing them from blowing themselves up – or, if they do, containing the damage.

This book takes Israel's built environment as a departure point to offer broader reflections on shifts in the nation's psyche, sometimes to brilliant and startling effect.

Diana Pinto delineates the physical landscape of present-day Israel – its highways, restaurants and shopping malls – using it to describe the country as it is, not as the rest of the world would like it to be.

Israel, she says, has transcended its narrow geographical confines and abstract hopes for peace, bound for the limitless opportunities of cyberspace and a global economy where it can excel. Even as it erects ever-higher security fences on its increasingly lawless frontiers with Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, it is undergoing an economic and technological miracle, with more Nasdaq-listed companies, Pinto writes, than all of Europe put together. "The country," she states, "has chosen to go forth alone."

From the high rises of Tel Aviv, with apartments as pricey as any in Hong Kong and London, to the high-tech companies that cluster in the north around Haifa, Israel now locates itself "in its own cyberspace at the heart of a globalised world with increasingly Asian connotations".

Even the Holocaust, a fundamental reason for the founding of the Jewish state, is fading into memory: say "Berlin" to a young, cosmopolitan Israeli, and their first association will be the vibrant club and artistic scene.

Pinto's acute – and, in my view, apt – diagnosis of Israel's defining ailment is that it is "autistic": trapped inside its own increasingly comfortable, security-defended bubble, unable to connect with – much less identify with – its neighbours, starting with the Palestinians.

She expands on her thesis in a series of vignettes, beginning with the heterodox groups of people – the Russians, the ultra-Orthodox, foreign economic migrants – arriving at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv.

Pinto takes readers to Jerusalem down Route 443, which follows an old Ottoman road through occupied Palestinian lands. When she asks her driver for the name of the Arab villages that skirt the highway, "he gives them to me in a distracted manner, as if I were asking a boring question, such as the full geological name of nearby rocks".

She also goes to secular, wealthy, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, to which she and most Israelis these days refer to as "the bubble" – a world unto itself although it is just a few kilometres away from the conflict.

This book is no primer for restarting the peace process with the Palestinians – as US President Barack Obama urged the Israeli leadership to do on last week's visit – and does not pretend to be. Nor will it take you into the West Bank which – for better or worse – forms an increasingly integral part of what, in the absence of peace, is becoming a single Israeli-Palestinian state.

Israel Has Moved is more travelogue and philosophical musing than reportage. Pinto is a French intellectual historian and policy analyst who is married to Dominique Moïsi, the foreign affairs analyst. She based her research on two academic trips to Israel.

In the afterword, the author invokes André Gide's Return from the USSR, his reckoning with Stalinism. Pinto describes her work as a "non-linear postmodern reading" of Israel, and at its worst the writing degenerates into academese. Furthermore, she leaves her Israeli sources – described in rich psychological detail – unnamed. She says this is because she initially did not intend to write a book but, for this reader, the anonymity detracts from the book's considerable rigour.

But, overall, the effect is of enjoying an engaging and trenchant dinner party conversation with an intelligent traveller brimming with impressions from a trip. After dwelling in the book mostly on the victors of Israel's economic miracle, she closes with a thought for the less-privileged citizens, who she hopes will "bring Israel back to its earlier modesty and its humanistic values, before it is too late".

The writer is the FT's Jerusalem bureau chief

[give her dixie]

Please take a few minutes and watch this video footage taken by my friend in the occupied West Bank.
Tommy Donnelan who is from Roscommon has been spending a lot of time there documenting the brutal
occupation and oppression. Tommy is a fearless cameraman, and to date, has been shot 6 times by Israeli forces.

Watch the opening few seconds as an illegal occupation soldier takes aim and shoots Tommy in the leg
with a steel rubber coated bullet. Tommy is wearing a Press vest, and is operating a video camera, posing
no threat to no one.

However, a camera is the most dangerous weapon anyone can carry in Palestine.

Tommy's footage is over dubbed with a recent interview he did with Galway Bay FM. Needless to say, the interviewer
didn't really understand Tommy and his work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xCkm1HqeIwE

[give her dixie]

Egypt has detained and deported Northern Irish Nobel Laureate and peace activist Mairead Maguire today after she tried to enter the country.

She had intended to join a delegation of activists going to the neighbouring Palestinian Gaza Strip on Thursday.

Yesterday, airport police had detained and deported American anti-war activist Medea Benjamin, also part of the delegation. She told AFP her arm was broken by the policemen.

Maguire said she arrived at Cairo airport with fellow activist Ann Patterson on Tuesday night.

"We were taken to the detention centre and questioned and held for eight hours, and were told we would not be allowed entry into Cairo and would be put on a plane," Maguire told AFP by telephone from London afterwards.

The police were "polite" but offered her no reason for barring her, she said. An airport official told AFP she had been blacklisted.

Maguire, born in 1944, won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize with Betty Williams for founding a peace group to resolve the conflict between North Ireland's Catholics and Protestants.

She had become a vocal supporter of Palestinians and was expelled from Israel in 2010, after she tried to enter the blockaded Gaza Strip aboard a ship with other activists.

http://www.thejournal.ie/mairead-maguire-deported-egypt-1346508-Mar2014/

[give her dixie]

After Latest Incident, Israel's Future in FIFA Is Uncertain

Their names are Jawhar Nasser Jawhar, 19, and Adam Abd al-Raouf Halabiya, 17. They were once soccer players in the West Bank. Now they are never going to play sports again. Jawhar and Adam were on their way home from a training session in the Faisal al-Husseini Stadium on January 31 when Israeli forces fired upon them as they approached a checkpoint. After being shot repeatedly, they were mauled by checkpoint dogs and then beaten. Ten bullets were put into Jawhar's feet. Adam took one bullet in each foot. After being transferred from a hospital in Ramallah to King Hussein Medical Center in Amman, they received the news that soccer would no longer be a part of their futures. (Israel's border patrol maintains that the two young men were about to throw a bomb.)

This is only the latest instance of the targeting of Palestinian soccer players by the Israeli army and security forces. Death, injury or imprisonment has been a reality for several members of the Palestinian national team over the last five years. Just imagine if members of Spain's top-flight World Cup team had been jailed, shot or killed by another country and imagine the international media outrage that would ensue. Imagine if prospective youth players for Brazil were shot in the feet by the military of another nation. But, tragically, these events along the checkpoints have received little attention on the sports page or beyond.

Much has been written about the psychological effect this kind of targeting has on the occupied territories. Sports represent escape, joy and community, and the Palestinian national soccer team, for a people without a recognized nation, is a source of tremendous pride. To attack the players is to attack the hope that the national team will ever truly have a home.

The Palestinian national football team, which formed in 1998, is currently ranked 144th in the world by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). They have never been higher than 115th. As Chairman of the Palestinian Football Association Jibril al-Rajoub commented bluntly, the problems are rooted in "the occupation's insistence on destroying Palestinian sport."

Over the last year, in response to this systematic targeting of Palestinian soccer, al-Rajoub has attempted to assemble forces to give Israel the ultimate sanction and, as he said, "demand the expulsion of Israel from FIFA and the International Olympic Committee." Al-Rajoub claims the support of Jordan, Qatar, Iran, Oman, Algiers and Tunisia in favor of this move, and promises more countries, with an opportunity at a regional March 14 meeting of Arab states, to organize more support. He has also pledged to make the resolution formal when all the member nations of FIFA meet in Brazil.

Qatar's place in this, as host of the 2022 World Cup, deserves particular scrutiny. As the first Arab state to host the tournament, they are under fire for the hundreds of construction deaths of Nepalese workers occurring on their watch. As the volume on these concerns rises, Qatar needs all the support in FIFA that they can assemble. Whether they eventually see the path to that support as one that involves confronting or accommodating Israel, will be fascinating to see.


As for Sepp Blatter, he clearly recognizes that there is a problem in the treatment of Palestinian athletes by the Israeli state. Over the last year, he has sought to mediate this issue by convening a committee of Israeli and Palestinian authorities to see if they can come to some kind of agreement about easing the checkpoints and restrictions that keep Palestinian athletes from leaving (and trainers, consultants and coaches from entering) the West Bank and Gaza. Yet al-Rajoub sees no progress. As he said, "This is the way the Israelis are behaving and I see no sign that they have recharged their mental batteries. There is no change on the ground. We are a full FIFA member and have the same rights as all other members."

The shooting into the feet of Jawhar and Adam has taken a delicate situation and made it an impossible one. Sporting institutions like FIFA and the IOC are always wary about drawing lines in the sand when it comes to the conduct of member nations. But the deliberate targeting of players is seen, even in the corridors of power, as impossible to ignore. As long as Israel subjects Palestinian athletes to detention and violence, their seat at the table of international sports will be never be short of precarious.



http://www.thenation.com/blog/178642/after-latest-incident-israels-future-fifa-uncertain

[Rossfan]

Time some organisation gave the lead in pulling the plug on this rogue State.
It worked eventually on apartheid White South Africa.

[AZOffaly]

I think if we are letting FIFA set the moral tone, we are completely fucked.

[seafoid]

Obama told Netanyahu last week that Israel has lost Europe and that if he doesn't get the finger out it'll lose the Yanks
Israel is running on fumes at this stage.