This is a roundup of news related to Palestine with a particular focus on grassroots action and peaceful civil disobedience in the Occupied Territories and within the borders of Israel proper.
We use the name Filasṭīn, since that is the pronunciation preferred by Arabic speakers (irrespective of faith) for their homeland.
+972mag - The Month in Photos: Gaza, elections, and Land Day
Thousands of people participated in a march commemorating Land Day in the village of Deir Hana in northern Israel, March 30, 2015.
Land Day is held every year to mark the deaths of six Palestinians protesters at the hands of Israeli police and troops during mass demonstrations on March 30, 1976, against plans to confiscate Arab land in Galilee.
B'Tselem - Military renews segregation on main street: wide part – for Jews, narrow, rough side passage – for Palestinians
Israeli soldiers demolish home in East Jerusalem of two brothers, both are blind
Nureddin Amro and his brother Sharif Amro and their families were awakened at 5:30 am by over a hundred Israeli soldiers who came to demolish their home in the Wadi Al-Joz neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem on Tuesday, March 31, 2015. Both men are blind. The brothers live with their ill 79-year-old mother, their spouses and children. Nureddin has three young children, Sharif has four; all are under 14. Israeli soldiers pointed their guns in through the windows of the house while the children were still asleep and cut the electricity and phone lines to the house.
“We were asleep. They banged on the doors and shouted. Soldiers completely surrounded the neighborhood. There were dogs and aircraft. It was frightening,” said Nureddin. “There was no advanced notice. No reason given. They announced that they came to demolish the house and they started doing it while we were still inside.”
Haaretz - Israeli city with 19% Arab population has no Arabic library books
Although 19 percent of the residents of Upper Nazareth are Arab, municipal libraries in the northern Israeli town don’t have a single volume in Arabic. On Monday, two local residents filed a formal administrative complaint in the hope of changing the situation.
Nazareth (an-Nasira in Arabic) is Jesus' home-town. It's home to 80,000 people, 30% of whom are Arabic-speaking Christians, the rest are Arabic-speaking Muslims. Prior to 1947/48, this ratio was inverted (70% Christian). Nazareth absorbed large numbers of Palestinian refugees during the Nakba which changed its demographics. It is the largest predominantly Palestinian town within Israel
Upper Nazareth is a newer planned Jewish town built on land overlooking Nazareth and appropriated by Israel for this purpose. The land was acquired under eminent domain, supposedly to build government facilities, but eventually 90% of the land was used to build housing for Jewish residents. The town was in the news a couple of years ago when the mayor declared there would be No Arab school here as long as I am in charge
Four people shot in the first 5 minutes at Nabi Saleh protest
The weekly Friday protest in Nabi Saleh was met with extreme violence by Israeli Occupation Forces. Four people were shot in the first five minutes of the protest. One man and one woman were shot and wounded by snipers using .22 caliber live ammunition. Both were shot in the leg. Two others, including a 14 year old girl, were later hit with rubber bullets. 6 more hours of protest saw two more injured protesters, private homes attacked with stun grenades, and live fire from M16 assault rifles during the army’s invasion of the Nabi Saleh village.
+972mag - Israeli fakes own kidnapping, Palestinians pay the price
Thursday night, reports came out about the suspected kidnapping of an Israeli in the West Bank. Irregular details about the case immediately raised the suspicions of the security establishment, and when Israelis woke up Friday morning it turned out that 22-year-old Niv Asraf had not been kidnapped as feared. The whole thing was a prank of sorts, meant to impress a special someone.
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Israelis were enraged by the ‘prank’ yet somehow managed to ignore the army’s violent response of house-to-house searches, closures and arrests.
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Imagine if Israel had implemented the same standard practices it uses in the occupied territories to catch the the Bar-Noar murderers. Tel Aviv would have been put under closure and special forces would have combed the streets, going door to door with their guns drawn, arresting people left and right. But that didn’t happen. No one thought to collectively punish all the residents of Tel Aviv and its suburbs. And rightly so.
Haaretz reports on the continuing expulsion of villagers in the West Bank from land coveted by settlers: Israel seeks to demolish Palestinian village on ‘archaeological’ grounds
Residents of Sussia granted temporary injunction against demolition in 2014, but state wants to move them to nearby Yatta.
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The state opposed the court’s temporary injunction against demolition, despite the fact it often supports such temporary injunctions when they are made against illegal Jewish outposts.
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Attorney Kamar Mishraki-Asad, representing the Sussia residents, told Haaretz, “It’s incredible, but with the settlements, it was already ruled that Sussia land is privately owned and thousands of dunams of land in the area are privately owned by Palestinians. Despite this, for many years the army has prohibited residents from setting up their homes in the area, and has rejected any request for construction or planning permits, in order to keep them away from the Sussia settlement and to allow the settlers to continue seizing the agricultural lands, and expel the residents to Areas A and B."
“Now, after residents made great efforts and prepared plans for their village, the army continues its policy while cynically relying on planning concerns,” Mishraki-Asad added. “For years, the army has forbidden water, electricity and drainage infrastructure to be built, and now claims that expelling the residents is for their own good.”
Haaretz - March for Bedouin rights ends at President’s Residence in Jerusalem
A four-day, 130-kilometer march from the Negev to Jerusalem that was organized to draw attention to the unrecognized Bedouin communities in southern Israel yesterday reached its destination, the President’s Residence in the capital.
Around 100 marchers arrived at the official residence of President Reuven Rivlin yesterday afternoon, after staying overnight in the village of Abu Ghosh, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. They were joined by Knesset members from the Joint List, whose leader Ayman Odeh was one of the march’s organizers.
The military occupation of the West Bank impacts runners and hikers as +972mag reports:
Running between the walls in the Palestine Marathon
Some 3,200 Palestinian and international runners participated in 10K, half marathon and full marathon races under the title “Right to Movement”. Full marathon runners had to complete two laps of the same route, as organizers were unable to find a single course of 42 uninterrupted kilometers under Palestinian Authority control in the area.
In the occupied West Bank, even hiking is political
For many Palestinians, recreational hiking is an odd thing to do. The political geography makes it complicated and Israelis and Palestinians fight over the right to mark trails. And yet, a hike through Wadi Qelt is still worth it.
Haaretz reports on Temple Mount activists slaughter lamb in public 'rehearsal' of Passover sacrifice
Several hundred people on Monday attended a “rehearsal” for the Passover sacrifice, held in a schoolyard in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem. The lamb was slaughtered by kohanim (members of the priestly class) who performed the various stages of the sacrifice through the roasting of the lamb and eating it.
It was a show of strength by Temple Mount activists – and this year they had additional reasons to celebrate, including the recovery of senior activist Yehuda Glick from an assassination attempt and the possibility that the next cabinet will include three ministers (Habayit Hayehudi’s Uri Ariel, and Likud’s Miri Regev and Tzipi Hotoveli) who enthusiastically support changing the Temple Mount’s status quo to allow Jewish prayer.
Netanyahu wants Jewish state just like ISIS wants Islamic State says a senior Palestinian official.
A senior Palestinian official compared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Islamic State's leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, in an interview on Saturday.
"Al-Baghdadi wants an Islamic State and Netanyahu wants a Jewish state, and his policy led to the immolation of the boy, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, same as they burn people in Daesh," PLO executive committee member Saeb Erekat said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.
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Erekat said that the Palestinian Authority has already opened proceedings at the ICC, which will focus on the first stage on the settlements and on incidents that occurred during the summer war between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
"We're now a country under an occupation, like Denmark or Belgium during the Second World War," Erekat said.
+972mag: Masked settlers throw stones at Israeli activists
Settlers from the illegal outpost Havat Maon in the southern West Bank hurled rocks at a group of Israeli activists on Saturday, just one week after a six-year old Palestinian girl was attacked and wounded in her head in the exact same place.
Three settlers, who appear to be quite young, used slingshots to hurl stones at the group of activists. No one was hurt in the incident.
In the video, you can hear Guy, a documentarian of the occupation and veteran activist from Ta’ayush, a Jewish-Palestinian activist group that hold weekly nonviolent activists in the occupied West Bank, calling the police to come quickly. They arrived within 10 minutes, he told +972, but didn’t make a genuine effort to find the assailants.
A debate about the treatment of people seeking political-asylum is roiling Israel. An editorial in Haaretz discusses some of the issues: Israel's new inhuman measures against asylum-seekers stain its moral image
If it wasn’t enough that the Israeli government had violated its obligations to African asylum seekers by setting up the Saharonim and Holot facilities and by pressuring them to leave the country under threat of detention, the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority is taking the undermining of human and legal norms relating to this population to a new level.
Until now, the authorities tried to at least make it seem as if the asylum seekers leaving the country were doing so of their free will, although it was clear that a choice made under the threat of detention could hardly be one made freely; those who refused were generally sent to Holot, where their movements are restricted, though they are not incarcerated in the usual sense. But now the authorities are doing away with even that illusion; now Eritrean and Sudanese citizens who come to renew their visas will be given a choice: leave or be sent to Saharonim Prison for an indefinite period.
B'Tselem - Bassem Abu Rahmeh’s mother demands decision in appeal on closing case of her son’s killing
The mother of Bassem Abu Rahmeh, a resident of the West Bank village of Bil’in killed when a soldier fired a tear-gas canister at him, petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice yesterday demanding that the Court compel the Military Advocate General (MAG) and the Attorney General to reach a decision concerning the appeal over the closing of the investigation file, and to indict the soldier who fired the canister along with any others bearing military command responsibility for the killing of her son. In the petition, filed jointly with Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Yesh Din, Subhiya Abu Rahmeh demanded that the Court put an end to the foot-dragging and the avoidance of conducting even the most basic investigative acts that could shed light on the identity of the persons responsible for killing her son.
Salman Masalha writes in Haaretz about the complex identity crisis Mizrahi Jews face in Israel: If Sephardic Jews want to end their discrimination, they must become proud Arabs
Ashkenazi Zionism, which established the country in an ongoing confrontation with the Arab world, created a serious emotional crisis for Jews from Arab countries.
There was an uproar over remarks made by Prof. Amir Hetsroni against those who voted for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, including Hetsroni’s suggestion that it would not have been so awful if Moroccan Jews had been “left to rot” in North Africa rather than coming to Israel. But if we translate his statement into the more nuanced official language of the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem, it sounds very familiar.
“We are Europeans. We are refined [and] don’t eat as much as you Moroccans do.” This comment was reportedly directed by First Lady Sara Netanyahu at one particular Moroccan, Meni Naftali, former chief caretaker of the Prime Minister’s Residence, who is suing the Netanyahus.
This is a roundup of news related to Palestine with a particular focus on grassroots action and peaceful civil disobedience in the Occupied Territories and within the borders of Israel proper. The goal is to provide a bi-weekly update on the non-violent resistance movement.
Diplomatic negotiations and actions by armed resistance groups are covered quite widely by the mainstream press and in other diaries on DKos so they will rarely be included.
We use the name Filasṭīn, since this is the pronunciation used by Arabic speakers (irrespective of faith) for their homeland. The more familiar Palestine is the Hellenic or Roman variant. Filasṭīn refers to the geographic entity roughly encompassing Israel and Palestine. It is a likely cognate of "Philistine", the name used in the Hebrew bible to describe a rival of the Jewish kingdom of that era.
Prior diaries:
