Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
Do you not find it grotesque that Israelis celebrate “Independence Day” in artificial parks built by the Jewish National Fund on the ruins of Palestinian villages? For example, Canada Park (cited in the link), was built on the depopulated and destroyed villages of Dayr Ayyub, Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nuba. The Biriya National Forest on [...]
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Israel is “vindicated”, claims FM Lieberman about Richard Goldstone’s latest op-ed in the Washington Post, adding that “we knew the truth and we had no doubt it would eventually come out.” Netanyahu has gone so far as to demand the Goldstone report be retracted from the UN. Among all the celebrations and self-congratulatory pats on [...]
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A routine rebuttal to the argument that Israel is an apartheid state is to focus on the conditions of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Israel’s defenders allege, for example, that Palestinians within its borders (whatever those are taken to be) live better than other Palestinians, or even other Arabs. Others like to point out that [...]
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Not only do Israelis hold intensely hypocritical attitudes toward Palestinian nonviolence, as I highlighted in my last post, but they also hold opinions about violent Palestinian resistance that are characterized by a kind of phony piousness. Israelis simply disallow Palestinians the same right to struggle for a national home that they afforded themselves. Here is [...]
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The massive, organized, hysterical opposition by Israelis and their lobbyists to the UN Security Council Resolution today, which aimed to condemn settlements (with Hillary Clinton’s own recent language about them) makes the whole game crystal clear. The real issue Israelis have is not that some Palestinian resistance fighters use violence (and often illegal, terrorizing violence [...]
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Last October, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a report indicating that Israel murdered, on average, one Palestinian every other day between 2006 and 2009, excluding the attack on Gaza known as Cast Lead that killed an additional 1,400 people (note that including Cast Lead brings the total to an average of around 1.5 [...]
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A recently released Wikileaks cable confirmed something the world already knew: Israel’s policy of de-developing Gaza is deliberate and not based on any possible security rationale. Israeli officials have confirmed to Embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian [...]
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Watch this video and weep. . . . literally. The Israeli attacks on Gaza in winter ’08/09 unleashed such massive death and destruction that we far too frequently discuss the damage in terms of statistics, of large numbers alone. But put all of that aside and watch this short profile on the experience of just [...]
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Elsewhere, I have argued that Israel’s policy of siege against the people of Gaza brings up all-too-familiar, yet still wretchedly uncomfortable, connotations for anyone familiar with Nazi practices toward those they imprisoned in ghettos and concentration camps. Since then, of course, even more dramatic evidence of Israeli planning over the caloric consumption and development of [...]
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Defense Minister Ehud Barak described it as “false, distorted, and irresponsible“. Information Minister Yuli Edelstein called it “anti-Semitic“. Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren said it “insidiously… portrayed the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents“. Foreign Minister Lieberman argued that its true purpose “was to destroy Israel’s image, in service of countries where [...]
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