Report on Settler Land Takeover in the West Bank
Posted by Joseph Dana in West Bank on January 14th, 2010
Excellent report on how settlers are taking over agricultural land with the help of the IDF in the West Bank. For those that understand Hebrew…
Shocking Video Aired on Israeli Channel 10 now with Subtitles
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, West Bank on January 14th, 2010
A couple of days ago, I posted a video clip from Channel 10 news here in Israel about a recent protest in Nebi Salah, West Bank. I have been trying to hard code the video with English subtitles that Didi Remez graciously provided to no avail. So I am posting Didi’s subtitles below the video. By the way, if you have not been to Didi’s site, you are missing out on one of the best sites on Israel available in English.
Transcript:
Channel 10 news, 10 January 2010 (20:04)
Or Heller: Pictures taken from a new center of violence: the Village of Nabi Salah. Protest of land seizures. Police officers react with full force; a group of settlers hurling rocks; IDF Spokesman reaction
Narrator Yaakov Eilon: Footage taken during a violent clash outside Ramallah last weekend shows settlers hurling rocks at Palestinians and army soldiers standing around, doing nothing. Furthermore, an IDF officer was filmed threatening left-wing activists who were there. Our military affairs correspondent Or Heller has the report.
Heller: A new center of violence was added last week to the regular violent spots in the Palestinian villages of Bil’in and Ni’ilin: the Village of Nabi Salah in the Ramallah area. On Friday afternoon, several dozen Palestinian demonstrators arrived there to protest the fact that lands were seized here by the nearby settlement of Neve Tzuf Halamish.
Unidentified speaker: This is my land! Why? Why can’t I? This is my land!
Heller: IDF and Border Police soldiers are seen trying to disperse this nonviolent demonstration with full force, using tear gas, stun grenade, rubber bullets fired point blank, and sometimes they even use the handle of their gun. Then, a group of settlers from Neve Tzuf Halamish joined in.
Unidentified speaker: You see? Did you see that?
Heller: They climbed on an overlooking hill and started throwing rocks at the Palestinians below. Some of them have their faces veiled for fear of cameras.
Unidentified speaker: Ohad, come here, come to me.
Heller: Rocks kept flying and the soldiers and Border Police officers — that is right — did nothing. So many committees have addressed the discrimination exercised in law enforcement in the territories. Nothing helped. The soldiers did not stop the settlers from throwing rocks and none of them was arrested when the violent events ended.
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Difficult Times in Nil’in
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, West Bank on January 13th, 2010
From the Anarchists Against the Wall
Tear Gas in Nil'in
Nil’in Activist, Mohammad Amerra’s House Raided Wednesday Morning
The Israeli military invaded Nil’in village at approximately 1am on Wednedsay the 13th. Three jeeps and approximately 15 soldiers came from the check point via road 446 to the house of activist Mohammad Ameera. According to Ameera, two commanders and a group of soldiers entered his home, checked out his house and asked him general questions about his family and work for an hour. His children were awoken and frightened when the soldiers invaded their home. After questioning him they went below Ameera’s house to investigate the residence of a worker that Ameera rests to. This is the first time the military has come to Ameera’s home. This house raid happened just one day after the arrest of three members of the Nilin Popular Committee Against the Wall.
Recount of Friday’s Demonstration in Nil’in
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How Much More Do People Need To See?
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, West Bank on January 12th, 2010
This past Friday, Israeli Channel Ten aired shocking footage from the West Bank. Channel Ten is one of the most widely watched Israeli nightly news channels and so it is clear that many families across the country saw this report. The footage aired was from a non violent protest near Nebi Salah. At this protest, like others, settlers joined the army and attacked the protesters while the army protected them. Included in the report was footage of an Army captain talking about his ideas on protecting people and intentions in his position of power. The reality of the situation becomes totally clear in his cold words. The opinions expressed are shocking and the footage is upsetting. What more will it take to create a groundswell of change?
I will be working on a translated version of the video in the coming days but in the meantime.
Can Tax-Free Donations Fund Settlements?
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel on January 7th, 2010
Readers of this website know that we have been covering the actions of the American based group Nefesh bNefesh. Our argument is that Nefesh bNefesh is encouraging settlement activity through financial incentives while enjoying the benefits of nonprofit status in the United States. Nefesh bNefesh and other organizations have been gaining political clout in Israel over the past years. Nefesh now controls North American immigration to Israel and their funding is growing despite the sour economic climate in the United States. Other organizations such as the Hebron Fund or Ir David are busy changing political facts on the ground in Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. The United States government could easily send a message to Israel and these organizations by removing their nonprofit status. They could conduct business in the United States but not with the extra tax benefits that nonprofit status provides. Yet, this is has not happened.
Josh Nathan-Kazis covers this issue in today’s Forward:
Can Tax-Free Donations Fund Settlements?
An early January announcement that Israeli authorities had approved a new Jewish settlement on the campus of an American-funded yeshiva in East Jerusalem came just weeks after President Obama issued a statement condemning new Israeli construction in the area.
The yeshiva, called Beit Orot, received nearly half a million tax-free dollars in donations from an American affiliate in 2007. And according to one expert, the group constructing the new housing is a subsidiary of Elad, a settlement organization that received $2.7 million in 2007 from its tax-exempt American affiliate.
This has raised the question: Can tax-exempt American donations be used to fund activities that are explicitly opposed to American foreign policy?
Not according to some critics, including one Arab-American advocacy organization that has undertaken a legal effort to strip the not-for-profit status of American groups that fund settlements. But legal experts question the validity of such claims, and even some American Jewish opponents of the settlement movement worry that the effort will be counterproductive.
“I don’t think this is a winning argument,” said Pamela Mann, a former chief of the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, of the claim by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (also known as the ADC) that organizations opposing the public policy of the United States should not be eligible for tax exemptions.
The notion that tax-exempt groups cannot oppose American policy is based on a 1983 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving Bob Jones University, an evangelical Christian school in Greenville, S.C. The university’s not-for-profit status had been revoked by the Internal Revenue Service over a school ban of interracial relationships, and the university had sued. In its decision, the Supreme Court upheld the IRS’s finding, stating that “an institution seeking tax-exempt status must… not be contrary to established public policy.”
Video from recent Nefesh BNefesh rally welcoming new immigrants at Ben Gurion International Airport
Noam Sheizaf on American Jews
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel on January 6th, 2010
From Noam Shiezaf come some very important points about the American Jewish community and their relationship to Israel.
Liberal Jews and Israel / a case of split personality disorder
Last Saturday I met an Israeli-American friend who came for a short visit from his studies in Europe. We talked some politics, and finally came to an issue which always puzzles me: the fact that American Jews are unwilling – almost unable – to criticize Israel, both in public and in private, and even when Israeli policies contradict their own believes. My friend noted that if some of the articles on the Israeli media – and not even the most radical ones – were to be printed in the US and signed by none-Jews, they would be considered by most Jewish readers like an example of dangerous Israel-bashing, sometimes even anti-Semitism.
I’ve became more aware of this issue myself since I started writing this blog. Things I say or write which are well within the public debate in Israel are sometimes viewed as outrageous by American Jewish readers; at the same time, events which would make the same readers furious if they happened in the US – for example, the Israeli municipality which tried to prevent Arabs from dating Jewish girls – are met with indifference.
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David Shulman on Sheikh Jarrah, Gaza and in the Israeli Peace Movement in the NYRB
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel on January 4th, 2010
Writing in the New York Review of Books Blog:
The legal situation in Sheikh Jarrah is ambiguous: Israeli courts have recently ruled that Jewish claims to ownership of land and houses in the neighborhood, from long before 1948, are valid and constitute a basis for evicting the Palestinian residents, all of whom received these lands from the Jordanian government in the 1950s in exchange for their UNRWA cards (thus relinquishing their status as refugees). But the issue is not really a legal one. The government, the municipality, and the settlers want to take over yet another Palestinian neighborhood—another 26 homes are scheduled for eviction, in addition to the three that have already been evacuated—and, of course, to prevent any future compromise in Jerusalem.
As a result, hundreds of Israelis, many of them young people joining the struggle for the first time, take off Friday afternoons to march through town and then demonstrate, courting arrest and harassment, in Sheikh Jarrah; the clumsy attempts by the Jerusalem police to suppress the protest violently have only added to our numbers. The demonstrations have a festive character, with drummers, acrobats, and clowns (the police arrested the clowns). Rumors about the demise of the Israeli peace movement are, it seems, premature.
Gaza Protest March in Tel Aviv
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel on January 3rd, 2010
A large portion of the Israeli left marked the Gaza war with a protest in the heart of Tel Aviv last night. The march began in Rabin Square and ended across the street from the Defense Ministry. Here is Phil Weiss’s take on the march.
Ta’ayush has a new website
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel on December 30th, 2009
Please have a look and bookmark the new site
follow ibnezra
David Shulman on Walaja and Sheikh Jarrah
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, Jerusalem, West Bank on January 10th, 2010
Sheikh Jarrah by David Shulman
January 8, 2010 Walaja and Sheikh Jarrah
by David Shulman
I should know better by now, but still I’m often surprised. Or perhaps naked malevolence always comes as something of a surprise (here’s an optimistic thought about human beings). We had a few moments like that this week. The Jerusalem municipality has announced that it is planting another hornet’s nest in yet another Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This time it is Et-Tur, on the top of the Mount of Olives; twenty-four housing units are scheduled to be built there for fanatical settlers, in addition to the several hundred recently announced for Shu’afat, the creeping annexations in Silwan and Ras al-’Amud, the plans for a huge housing complex at Jabal Mukabbar, and the wave of evictions we have been witnessing in Sheikh Jarrah. At this rate we’ll be marching from protest to protest around the clock (to what effect?). Then there’s Bir al-’Id in south Hebron, where the Palestinian shepherds were recently allowed to return home after ten years of exile (supposedly because the army wanted their territory as a firing range; in fact because of the continuous work of dispossession and Israeli settlement). We’ve worked happily beside the returning families in recent weeks, rebuilding the shattered stone terraces and goat-pens, cleaning out the wells. The original cave-homes are no longer livable, so the shepherds put up some simple tents; and then, inevitably, around the middle of the week they received demolition orders from the Civil Administration (the Occupation authority) for all of the above, tents, goat-pens, terraces, everything that comprises the simple foundation for renewing life in this tiny spot on a rocky hill overlooking the desert.
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David Shulman, sheikh jarrah
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