In 2011, in a sign of the mounting mood of intolerance, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu passed the Nakba Law to penalise public institutions, including schools, universities and libraries, that marked the Nakba. But in practice the law has backfired, with greater attention on the Nakba than ever before. The March of Return – to one of the more than 500 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during the Nakba – is now the largest annual event for Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
Independence Day celebrations should be a moment for Israelis – and the many Jews who identify with Israel – to reflect on what kind of state it has become after seven decades. The vast majority, however, are too busy flying blue-and-white flags from their cars, venerating their army as the “most moral in the world” and poring over the latest official statistics in the hope that more Israeli Jews than Palestinians were born over the past year.
Israel benefits from a strong military and even stronger allies, but analysts warn the state faces major challenges Al Jazeera – 17 April 2018 It appears Israelis have every reason to be in festive mood this week as they celebrate the 70th anniversary of their state’s founding. This “Independence Day”, which Israel marks according to Read More
The Israeli military made an unexpected admission last week. It warned a parliamentary committee that Jews are for the first time outnumbered by the Palestinians living under Israeli rule, both those inside Israel and in the occupied territories. Israeli officials’ ultimate fear is that the world will judge a minority of Israelis ruling over a majority of Palestinians as a new form of apartheid.
How would you describe a white town in the United States that froze the tender for plots of land in a new neighbourhood because it risked allowing blacks to move in? As racist? And yet, replace the word “white” with “Jewish” and this describes what has just happened in Kfar Vradim, a small town in the Galilee. Vradim’s policy cannot be judged in isolation. It reflects how Israeli society has been intentionally structured for decades.
More than a decade ago, US President Jimmy Carter warned that Israel was practising apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. But in truth, it would be more accurate to say Israel itself is an apartheid state.
US officials have warned the Palestinian leadership that a final peace deal will be settled over their heads if necessary. This time the US plan is not up for negotiation; it is primed for implementation. What Donald Trump needs now is someone like Mike Pompeo to bulldoze the Palestinians into submission.
In Umm al-Fahm, more than a third of letters never reach their destination. Identity cards, passports and drivers’ licences go missing, welfare cheques are lost, appointments expire, and penalties mount up over unpaid fines. For decades the town’s 301 streets have lacked any names or house numbers. And five years after the municipality submitted a list of names, Israeli officials are still dragging their feet.
After seven years of delays, Israel’s governing parties agreed the final terms of controversial new legislation that would define Israel exclusively as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”. It effectively blocks any chance for Israel’s large Palestinian minority – one in five of the population – to reform Israel in the future into a normal, Western-style democracy.
In the early 2000s, at the dawn of the social media revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence of brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they called “Pallywood” – a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood. In truth, however, it was the Israeli military, not the Palestinians, that needed to manufacture a more convenient version of reality.
For the first time in living memory, Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre slammed shut its doors to worshippers and tourists. But the protest was only tangentially concerned with the fate of Palestinian Christians. It was really about protecting the churches’ profits from real-estate and investment deals.
The legal noose has tightened sharply around the neck of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as dramatic developments on two fronts last week left him more exposed than ever. He is due to be questioned by police in two new corruption probes before he leaves for the United States on Thursday.
The recommendation by police to charge Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with two counts of bribery – there are more cases looming – marks a dangerous moment for Israel and the region. To bolster his position, Netanyahu is already provoking a damaging confrontation at home with legal authorities and might yet engineer a regional crisis.
Thousands of Israeli families who have been searching in vain for answers since their babies mysteriously disappeared in the early 1950s have been thrown a lifeline. The mystery of the missing children has plagued Israel for decades, with evidence mounting that at least some of the babies were trafficked by hospitals and orphanages – possibly with the connivance of Israeli officials.
How did a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who has never set foot in the open-air prison of Gaza find herself being dumped there by Israeli officials – alone, at night and without her parents being informed? The terrifying ordeal – a child realising she had not been taken home but discarded in a place where she knew no one – is hard to contemplate for any parent.
For the first time in its history, an interrogator from Israel’s secret police agency, the Shin Bet, is to face a criminal investigation over allegations of torture. It will be the first probe of the Shin Bet since Israel’s supreme court issued a landmark ruling nearly two decades ago prohibiting, except in extraordinary circumstances, the use of what it termed “special methods” of interrogation.
In the current outpouring of moral concern for the welfare of 40,000 African asylum seekers, it looks suspiciously like liberal Israelis are prepared to stand in solidarity with refugees from Sudan and Eritrea only because it is a relatively easy generosity. It is an act of humanitarianism they dare not extend to Palestinians.
For the first time last week Israeli military officials echoed what the United Nations has been saying for some time: that Gaza’s economy and infrastructure stand on the brink of collapse. After a decade of this horrifying experiment in human endurance, the Israeli army finally appears to be concerned about whether Gaza can cope much longer.
Ahed Tamimi, 16, may not be what Israelis had in mind when, over many years, they criticised Palestinians for not producing a Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. Eventually, colonised peoples bring to the fore a figure best suited to challenge the rotten values at the core of the society oppressing them. Ahed is well qualified for the task.
In Bethlehem, there may soon be few Palestinian Christians left to protect its holy sites, preserve its rituals and liturgy or conduct the nativity celebration itself. And irony of ironies, it will have been fellow Christians who helped to harry this community to extinction.
